Not dead

Just busy. Well, unemployed-busy, which—aside from copying and pasting bits of my résumé into all the different fields in all the different job-search sites and going on endless interviews and remembering which companies have seen me in which ties so I don’t accidentally commit a tie repeat on a second interview—hardly qualifies as busy busy. But I’ve been too busy to do things like write blog posts. Which is why your life has felt so aimless and out of tune these last few days. Kind of like a Madonna movie.

And what’s been keeping me so darn busy? It’s all the boyfriend’s fault. He’s had some down time after his freakishly long business trip, see, and I had yet to “take time to enjoy being unemployed” as so many people have recommended I do, so for the last few days, he and I have enjoyed what my family has always called kitty days—the kinds of days where all you really do is follow sun spots around the house in search of a warm place to nap. In between all that lounging and not showering, though, we have accomplished a few things: We’ve watched quite a few episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (including—finally!—the Veal Prince Orloff episode every gay man I know has gushed about for years), we’ve moved a few plants, we’ve had some cake, I helped a friend spell Auld Lang Syne and I opened an HSBC online savings account that will earn the proceeds from my condo sale a whopping 5.05% in interest until I need the money for the closing on my fabulous new Two-Bathroomed Barbie Dream Condo. (A helpful financial hint from Uncle Jake: 5.05%, for those of you who don’t pay attention to these things, is some seriously good interest. Unparalleled, actually—especially for a savings account with no minimum deposit or balance requirements. Open an account today. Dump all you can in it. Make your regular bank choke on the measly half-percent interest rate it wants to sell you.)

And while I’m on the topic of financial management. I also used a part of the proceeds from my condo to pay off my car. Because car interest—while not as hateful as credit-card interest—is still a pretty unproductive use of your money. So until my condo closes, I am now completely debt-free, aside from insurance and rent and COBRA and Botox and the storage of all my stuff until my fabulous new Two-Bathroomed Barbie Dream Condo is ready, of course.

Amid all this excitement, though, I’ve managed to cough up a few blogworthy accomplishments. For instance, the boyfriend and I have squeezed in two cultural events since Thursday: Camille Saint-Saëns’ mighty Organ Symphony (the dominant theme of which I believe was the inspiration for the opening chord progressions of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast score) at the CSO and the Steppenwolf’s disturbing The Pillowman, a Grand Guignol mixing dark, dark, dark, dark comedy with shocking plot twists reminiscent of The Sixth Sense.

I also attended the boyfriend’s niece’s christening on Sunday, which consisted of: wearing yet another suit and tie, charming his family, not talking with my mouth full, dancing skillfully around any discussion of whether I may or may not have a prison record, and posing for family pictures. And if that isn’t a testament to our long-term plans together, I don’t know what is. Except for maybe yesterday when he tentatively (because he very decidedly doesn’t like mine) showed me his china and stemware, which I ended up loving, so he and I are all clear to get married now. And you-all are going to have to scramble to find suitable gifts now since we won’t be registering for fancy dishes.

Otherwise, it’s been a low-key week. Except for that little part on Saturday morning where I ran a marathon. Saturday was the high (depending on how you look at it) point in our AIDS Marathon training: the full 26-mile training run. The day started out cold and rainy, but by the time we’d hit our first mile marker, it was sunny and lovely, and we had a great time—except for the part where we lost half our runners to injuries or fear of injuries. As always, Fearless Leader Matthew took some pix to share.

It’s now dark at 6:30 in the morning in Chicago. Which means summer is sadly over:


At mile 6, we were all smiley and happy, though not completely centered:


Ten miles later, still relatively smiley and happy, we posed for a semi-formal shot:


And two miles after that we took our last formal shot at a water station, where we ended up leaving two people so their aches and pains wouldn’t become injuries and debilitations:


The three remaining runners became pretty separated, but we all managed to cross the finish line. And since I came in dead last, my big finish got captured for posterity:


The AIDS Marathon organization gave us all medals on bright red ribbons, which clashed mightily with my deathly pallor:


Our group stretch was the least coordinated of the summer, as we all focused on our own personal aches and pains:


I was so weak after the run, the medal practically toppled me over. Or else maybe I felt the need to take a bow. In any case, I survived my run. And now all that’s left are a few 10-mile training runs and then the big day on October 22. And then next year’s goal: the Chicago and New York marathons back to back. Woo-hoo!

When you just know

So I’ve started meeting the boyfriend’s family … only two months after we met each other. Which isn’t terribly remarkable, I guess—except I’ve started meeting his nieces. Adults can meet love interests and understand when relationships don’t work out. Children—who I believe are a lot more perceptive about meeting Uncle Jake’s or Uncle Boyfriend’s “friends” than we give them credit for—don’t need to watch adult relationships start and fail. At least in my opinion. And the last thing I want to do is drag Uncle Boyfriend into my nephew and niece’s world or have him drag me into his nieces' world and then have us mysteriously disappear from each other’s lives. Kids can learn about heartbreak and uncertainty when they’re eight. Until then, their lives should be focused on pancakes and kittens and poop jokes and a growing awareness that they aren’t as popular or cool or attractive as the other kids.

So the point of that long, convoluted paragraph—which I’m writing when I should be in bed because in five hours I’m getting up and running a whopping 26-mile training run but I’m so thrilled with where our relationship is going that I’m forgoing sleep to write about it—is that the boyfriend and I are so sure of our future together that we’re involving the children in our lives. And that state of certainty is a pretty spectacular place to be.

Two months ago I had a job and a condo and a steadfast belief that the LAST thing I needed in my life was a man. Then I went to a delightful little brunch at some friends’ house. Two months later I’m unemployed and homeless and living with those friends and so madly and surely in love with the man I met at that delightful little brunch that I just had dinner with his brother’s family (it went smashingly well, but then again his family is delightful and I’d been on eight interviews in the two weeks before the dinner so I was fully programmed to be charming and witty and adorable) and I’m going to his niece’s christening tomorrow and in a month we’re driving five hours to his cousin’s wedding, where I’ll be under no pressure whatsoever to be even more charming and witty and adorable and to remember people’s names. Good thing we have five hours in the car beforehand. I’m bringing flash cards.

And since I’m unemployed and his work schedule leaves him time for mid-week getaways, we’re talking about road-tripping to Iowa sometime soon so he can meet my family—including my uncommonly photogenic niece and nephew, about whom I now entertain domestic fantasies about being best friends with his uncommonly photogenic nieces when we get together for our extended families’ weekly croquet matches. And the sooner we get to Iowa the better—I just got him tickets with my family and some family friends to see the chorus holiday show together, and it would probably be a teensy bit awkward for him to meet my parents for the first time in a theater lobby while I was backstage putting on my reindeer antlers. It’s better to do it on a beautiful Iowa afternoon where I can be there to make sure he and his many charms don’t snow everyone to the extent that they forget they ever knew me. Then again, if he becomes the favorite uncle, I can get away with buying the kids cheap socks for their birthdays since their expectations will be so low.

Soon after the boyfriend and I met and bonded over our passion for the show-tune sciences, we began joking about which songs we wanted sung at our wedding. (Not a Day Goes By (the happy version), Our Time, You Walk with Me, Unexpected Song and maybe You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow / Love Will See Us Through as a lighthearted recessional were the first titles on the list, which continues to grow by the day.) Before he left on his freakishy long business trip—when we hadn’t even known each other for a month—I told him (coyly) that I hadn’t been entirely joking about the whole wedding thing. He told me hadn’t been either. Except for the part about Unexpected Song, of course. Ain’t nobody singing Webber at OUR wedding.

Sometimes you just know.

NoFo No Mo’

As of about 3:30 today, I am no longer a taxpaying resident of the NoFo corridor. (I don’t know exactly where the NoFo corridor is either; I made up the NoFo name when I found out all the other blog names I wanted to use were taken, and I added “corridor” for the sake of this post because it sounded kind of official. In any case, I am now living in temporary digs south of Foster until my Two-Bathroomed Barbie Dream Condo—which is also south of Foster—is ready for me to move in.) I will not be changing the NoFo name, though, because 1) I like it, 2) it sounds kind of naughty, 3) which means I like it even more, 4) changing a blog name is more trouble than it’s worth, and 5) the fall TV season is upon us, so I have more important things to do.

But the closing on my condo today went off without a hitch (except for the part where the buyer’s very hunky Realtor didn’t show up in a Speedo and a cowboy hat), and I am officially now in a weird limbo between homes. All of which means, of course, that I am unemployed AND homeless. Chicks dig that.

I do want to get one thing off my chest here: I sold my house on the first showing. In case you missed that, let me say it again: I sold my house on the first showing. In a buyers’ market, no less. And I got damn near my asking price. I didn’t want to write about it here until the deal was closed, though, for fear of jinxing everything. But now that I have the check safely in my bank account, I want to mention once again that I sold my house on the first showing.

That weird limbo between homes
I have some wonderful friends. And some wonderful luck … unemployment notwithstanding. This weekend, amid tornadoes and drenching rain, my friends and I loaded damn near everything I own into a POD, which was soon trucked away for safekeeping. In exchange for their backbreaking labor, I fed my friends brownies and sodas and promised them pizza, which they all refused, saving me a good thirty bucks. And then I moved into the lovely and spacious home of two other friends, who have promised me their guest room and their cooking and their company for as long as I need until my Two-Bathroomed Barbie Dream Condo is ready. If I time the offer right—like maybe right after a huge meal—maybe I can get them to refuse my pizza as well, and I’ll be a whopping sixty bucks ahead. And through this whole adventure, every weird scheduling glitch ended up becoming a stroke of good timing, and every unexpected expense turned out to be pretty nominal. (For instance, did you know you can rent dollies from U-Haul for a mere seven dollars a day? SEVEN DOLLARS for an afternoon of back-friendly labor. The only way it could be easier is if you were watching a movie about movers—though you’d actually end up paying more.)

Romantic Date Guy No Mo’
Amid all this chaos and change, Romantic Date Guy sadly stopped being my Romantic Date Guy. Because somewhere along the way, he officially became my BOYFRIEND. (Sorry for toying with your emotions there—unemployment sometimes makes me sadistic.) And if I didn’t love him more than shoes and ice cream before he came home from his freakishly long business trip, the way he so cheerfully commandeered my weekend packing and storing and moving adventure from the moment he got off the plane pushed me way over the edge. So pardon me while I get all fizzy and funny and fine here just by blogging about him. And pardon me while I quote someone other than Sondheim when I declare what a catch I have caught. You haven’t heard the last of Jake and The Boyfriend. And you haven’t even begun to retch in nausea over our preternatural happiness.

In other news,
I realized as I was unpacking my power bars and energy gels at my temporary digs this weekend that oh yeah, I’m training for a marathon. It’s been two weeks since my last run, and this weekend we’re pounding out a whopping 26 miles. I grabbed five miles today and felt fine, so I think I’ll be OK.

Which means all the pieces are falling into place: The closing happened right on schedule. I just got a signed contract for my new Two-Bathroomed Barbie Dream Condo, complete with all the changes I’d requested. My interim housing is lovely and wonderful and, quite frankly, more than a fellow could ask for. Marathon training is going well. And the boyfriend makes my heart flutter and jump and leap damn near out my chest every time I see his smile or feel his hand in mine or even see his name in my inbox. All that’s missing is the damn job. And I have a very good feeling about my prospects. Stay tuned.

So start saving up for: housewarming gifts, new-job gifts, marathon-completion gifts and gay-wedding gifts. The reader who gives me the most loot gets the nicest thank-you card.

Romantic Date Guy

He's back. After his freakishly long business trip.

Let the little happy dance commence.

It! Finally! Happened!

I've lived in Chicago for more than six years. I ride the bus and take the train and work (well, at the moment, worked) downtown and run along the lakefront and go to big splashy events and eat at restaurants and in general am quite the man about town. By some definitions.

And yet I have never run into a famous person here. Or anywhere, for that matter. Co-workers will tell stories of running into Bill Murray on Michigan Avenue over their lunch hour. Friends will recount breathlessly how they saw Jennifer Aniston at the Holiday Club over the weekend. But not me. I keep thinking I'm going to look up from my Show Tune Weekly (which I keep hidden in a copy of Tap and Clog World so nobody thinks I'm some kind of queer) one day and discover I'm sitting next to Oprah on the 147 bus, but it never happens. (She must be a 151 gal. Or maybe she's one of those snooty 136ers. They're so smug with their even numbers and their I-don't-have-to-take-the-inner-Drive-to-get-to-work attitude. Let's make fun of their shoes.)

But that all changed tonight! My friend Rich (who is not the famous person) is here on business from San Francisco, see, and I met him at his hotel at an hour that could be considered "after work" if I actually had any work to go to, and we grabbed a late-night snack (raspberry tea and caramel brownies!) and took a little walking tour of downtown Chicago together. We meandered as far north as Oak Street and as far south as the river, where we descended those lovely terraced steps at Wacker and Wabash to explore the new war memorial. Which is pretty impressive. And the space down there with the fountains and the landscaping and the out-of-the-way places you can sit and watch the river go by is so gorgeous it makes me wish Romantic Date Guy would come back from his freakishly long four-week business trip sometime soon. (Wish granted! He comes back tomorrow! And I'm so excited I could seriously exhaust my lifetime allotment of exclamation points in this single paragraph!)

Where was I? Oh, yes: I heard a rumor that Mary Cheney is a lesbian.

Oops. I backed up too far. I was talking about that lovely new area on lower Wacker where I was about to run into my very first famous person. And it wasn't Mary Cheney. Thank goodness. Anyway, as Rich and I climbed back up the steps at State Street, I heard a familiar voice. I looked up, and standing right there at the end of the State Street bridge talking to some blond woman about her camera as though doing something that pedestrian were acceptable behavior for a person of such fame and stature was ...

Did I mention that I think Mary Cheney is a lesbian? And don't you think that lesbian is a funny word anyway? Say it with me: LEZZZZBEEEEEEUUUUUNNNNN. See? Funny!

Anyway, as Rich (who was not impressed) and I were walking back to his hotel, I kept harping on the fact that I had finally seen my very first famous person. Rich was all "I have to get home and call my husband" and I was all "I have first dibs on your bathroom" and he was all "OK" and I was all "cool, because I really have to pee" and he was all "I said it was OK" and I was all "are you sure? because it's your bathroom" and he was all "seriously--you can use it first" and I was all "cool, thanks" because I've always maintained when I finally ran into Fred Willard on the street, the first thing I was probably going to do is pee.

Unemployment: Why I don’t recommend it

1) It’s exhausting. Finding a new job is a full-time job, with all those emails and phone calls and more emails and more phone calls and even more phone calls and adding all those damn accents to résumé and going on interviews and dressing for interviews, which is the most stressful part as far as I’m concerned because it’s advertising and nobody wears a suit in advertising so if you show up in a suit it might look like you’re totally out of touch with advertising but if you show up in something other than a suit you might look like you need to show some damn respect which is the wrong impression to give for a first impression, at least at a job interview.

2) It’s exhausting part two. You spend half your energy convincing people you’re not going to need therapy and a 24-hour suicide watch. Really, people. I lost a job. Not a limb. Not a relative. Not a supermodel’s phone number. Yes, it sucks. But no, it’s not the end of the world. Yes, the timing is bad. But there rarely is a perfect time to be laid off. No, it didn’t happen on my terms and I didn’t get a goodbye party and a card signed by everyone the routing folder managed to make it to on my last day. But I had a good six-year run and I’m actually excited about what adventures the future holds. And I got severance, so I have a little time to explore options I never even considered. I’m a smart boy with lots of friends and more connections than I even realized I had. And I can be so charming at an interview you wouldn’t even recognize me. I’ll find another job. Thank you very much for your concern, but you can save your tears for Suri Cruise. That poor thing has problems.

3) It’s complicated. I went to the unemployment office the day after the layoffs. I filled out the paperwork. I listened as the guy explained what I needed to do. I took notes. I assume the whole process was designed to be so easy that even uneducated laborers with language barriers can figure it out. Yet I still don’t get it. And, quite frankly, I’m a little freaked out at the prospect of calling the system to check in on my first designated call day. Maybe I should revise that “smart boy” statement from section 2 …

4) There’s no structure. I like structure. I’m used to structure. (Hell, I even shopped at Structure before it turned into Express Men. But let’s just keep that as our little secret, shall we?) My day used to play out thusly: Alarm. NPR. Breakfast. Shower. Bus. (Or train if I was feeling like mixing it up.) Work. Work out. Lunch at desk. Work. Bus. (Or train if I was feeling like mixing it up.) Home. Evening activities. Sleep. Rinse and repeat. Now that I’m unemployed, my days play out like the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury where poor little Benjy tries to explain what happened but he just fords aimlessly through every stream of consciousness he can find. And where there’s no structure, I can lose entire days in a fog of cereal and CSI reruns.

5) There’s no structure part two. How much free time have I had since the layoffs? How many blog posts have I made? I rest my case.

6) You start to think poor. I sang at a conference Saturday afternoon. There was an hour-and-a-half break between sets. I was hungry. I bought a muffin at the little muffin vendor to help me kill time. It was $3. I spent waaaaay too much time thinking about how the unemployed really shouldn’t spend $3 on a muffin.

7) You become a food hoarder. I also ran in the AIDS Run/Walk 5K Saturday morning. There were free bananas and oranges and breakfast bars and energy drinks after the run. I filled my backpack. If there had been free soup, I would have lined my backpack with tin foil to try to get it home as well.

8) You have to write thank-you notes. People have been crawling out of the crawl space where I thought I’d buried them woodwork to give me job leads and referrals and words of encouragements and offers of help and actual interviews since mere moments after the layoffs. I’m gonna have to write so many thank-you notes when this is over, my hand is already starting to cramp.

10) Your professional skills atrophy. For instance, I have forgotten how to count to 10.

OK. Seriously.

If I were the type to get all weepy in the face of kindness—and if I were the type to wear mascara in a non-football-photo kind of setting—I’d have some serious smeary-face issues today.

The fact that my friends and colleagues started networking for me mere moments after I got laid off is pretty amazing. It’s a professional courtesy that happens pretty regularly in the face of layoffs—and I’ve done the same thing for other people on many occasions—but when people do it for you it takes on a whole new significance … and it takes a HUGE ugly weight off your shoulders. And it makes you feel loved, albeit in a non-sexual, office-appropriate, highly professional, no-need-to-involve-HR kind of way. Except for the part where we touch tummies.

This networking (and follow-uping and put-in-a-good-wording) has generated about five serious job leads including interviews. (Dress shoes! Matching up ties and shirts and suits! ACK! I’m so not gay that way!) All within 48 hours of the layoffs. I’m not out of the unemployment woods yet, but I have every reason to believe I’m gonna make it after all. And sooner than later.

And then there are your comments on my post about the layoff. I mean really. All I’ve ever done for you people is tell poop jokes and make fun of Ann Coulter. And maybe once in a while ask for money. Or a kidney. And your outpouring of support and good wishes and even legitimate job leads is nothing short of beautiful. I’m talking Nick Lachey beautiful. Sibelius’ Second Symphony beautiful. Cookie dough ice cream beautiful. Romantic Date Guy beautiful.

(And have you seen the comments count? 35 at this posting! I don’t think I normally get 35 comments in a week. I feel so Joe.My.God right now!)

So thank you. And when I get my new job and get my ass moved (there is moving drama I haven’t even BEGUN to cover here) and RDG gets back from his ridiculously long business trip and back in my arms where he belongs, we can all sit down and have a good laugh over the events of late 2006.

But in the mean time, I have to go touch up my mascara.

Welfare Queen!

I’ve been in advertising since … well never you mind the fact that I started in advertising the year Head of the Class went off the air.

In that time, I’ve survived more than 15 rounds of layoffs—both big and small—at two different companies.

And on Monday it was my turn.

And you know what? Being unemployed is not all naps and marshmallows. It’s exhausting. At least on the first day. My damn phone—actually, my damn phones—have been ringing off the hook since I crawled home drunk and smelling mysteriously of jasmine and motor oil late last night. And it hasn’t been just friends and family members desperate for a vicarious glimpse of the abject horrors of living on the public dole (and what color shoes are you supposed to wear with torn sackcloth?)—it’s actually been recruiters and HR people and creative directors asking for my résumé. Because the moment I got laid off, my friends and colleagues apparently all started networking for me. Which is so George Bailey I can hardly stand it.

But I’m not leaving my professional future solely in the hands of the people I know and love and trust. No! That would be silly! I’m also going to whore myself out to the strangers who read my blog! So dear blog-reading strangers: If you know of a fabulous Chicago job in the fields of advertising or the show-tune sciences—particularly one in an ultra-plush, space-needle-like office with a view of Nick Lachey’s tanning chaise—please let me know! Here are my skills:
• Marketing, branding, advertising, complaining how Madonna always sings flat
• Direct mail, Web, print, POP, DRTV, radio, rhythmic clapping
• Blogging, checking my hotmail, stealing company pens
• Writing! I almost forgot! I can also do lots of writing!

Email your leads, job offers, bequests and pictures of your neighbors naked—soon!—to dax18@hotmail.com. Because we all know: The sooner Jake gets a job, the sooner we can all get back to poop jokes and Ann Coulter/Mel Gibson eviscerations and shirtless pictures of me posted under the pretense that I’m not, in fact, fishing for compliments.

But before we go, I want to share a few things about the process of being laid off:

What are the first two things that go through your mind when you realize your job is about to crash and burn?
1) Maybe this isn’t a layoff. Maybe all the HR people called me into a remote conference room to promote me! (They didn’t.)
2) But my friend and coworker Jennifer and I are going to have dinner tonight! Do you think they’ll let me … you know … hang out in my old office all afternoon so she and I can still go out? (Turns out it took me all afternoon to pack, so Jennifer and I did indeed get to have dinner—and we saw Little Miss Sunshine, which is AWESOME.)

The worst part about getting laid off: Realizing you don’t know how to assemble the boxes they give you to pack up your stuff. Seriously. It took me 20 minutes to figure out how to assemble a box. I’m too stupid to be unemployed. We need to get me a job!

Wow.

So I write a long, heartfelt post on gay assimilation and almost all the feedback I get is about … my mugshot. Which I guess is better than no feedback at all, but still.

For the record, the face I was making in that mugshot reflected nothing more untoward than the act of tying my shoes while wearing running shorts that are so short they look like underwear. But somehow when I cropped the shoe-tying and the shorty-short short shorts out of the picture you-all saw something base and vulgar. Shame on you. Shame!

But I was starting to get worried; I was running out of mugshot-worthy pics that were both recent and able to fit pleasingly within the technical specs of blogger’s mugshot window—and every new pic I did post generated tons of scathing mockery helpful feedback from you, my loyal reader(s). Fortunately, my friend Drew is a fledgling photographer who has a lot of equipment, a lot of free time, and the burning desire to practice with light and composition and all those other artsy things that photographers think about.

In addition to a photography series he’s working on for an exhibit, he has a few connections for some actual print work, and he asked me to model for him on Sunday in exchange for a bunch of free pics of myself that aren’t taken with my ghetto camera that was made during the Civil War.

The print job he specifically asked me to model for is the football-themed (don’t laugh!) cover of Boi magazine (stop laughing!), one of Chicago's trendy gay rags. It seems they needed someone who looked like a football player (seriously—I’m going to have to ask you to stop laughing now) to wear football gear (this is your fourth warning) and look all sexy and appealing and relevant to the young gay party crowd. (That’s it! You and your laughing have gone too far. You are no longer my friend. And you don't get to borrow my football.)

And this is one of the many bazillion shots he took of me. Notice the black smudgy stuff under my eyes. Can you smell the street cred? We weren’t sure what real football players use for black smudgy stuff, so we used mascara (on sale at Walgreens for only $4!). Also notice how limp and lifeless and mousy-blah my hair is. That's from wearing the helmet. Honestly, I don't know what they pay football players nowadays, but for the havoc those helmets wreak on their hair, it can't be enough:


We also took some interesting shots in other funny hats. I like this one because I didn’t have to hold my stomach in:


For headshot options, we took the basic Serious Face And Black Shirt shots, though this one seemed too serious for my blog:


And we did some Serious Face And Black Shirt shots with interesting poses, but if we cropped this one for a mugshot, it might look like I have a fleshy bow in my hair:


This one also seemed too serious for the blog, but I liked the way it made my eyes look Mel Gibson matinee-idol-who-is-NOT-batshit-crazy blue:


And this is the mugshot pic I settled on. I like the half-serious-half-smirk thing Drew captured that will float effortlessly between posts about poop, Ann Coulter, pooping on Ann Coulter and killing hookers in the basement. And marathon training. The shirt around my neck seemed like a fun idea at the time, but now it looks like maybe I dislocated my shoulder or I need to go back for remedial donning-a-wifebeater training:


In other weekend news, we ran a whopping 23 miles on Saturday—in blessedly cool, overcast, breezy weather. I felt fabulous when we got done, but I got home and crashed HARD for four hours. Then I talked to Romantic Date Guy (who is still on his long-ass business trip) for a couple hours. Then I had some dinner. Then I went back to bed. Which is exactly why I qualify to represent the young gay party crowd on the football-themed cover of Boi magazine:


(And stop laughing already!)

Thursday begets Sunday

She hasn’t been working for us very long. And I hadn’t worked directly with her until this week, so I have valid reasons for not knowing her very well. To me she’s just been this incredibly talented, widely respected, freakishly busy, hugely pregnant producer I’ve made small talk with in the elevator a couple times.

So she was in my office yesterday to discuss the project I’m doing with her, and after we finished talking business, she lowered her voice to a whisper and asked me if the woman in the office next to mine is … gay. I’m not in the habit of outing people just to make conversation, but the woman in the office next to mine is openly gay and she competed (and won!) in the Gay Games and her gold medal was announced at the last company meeting, so I wasn’t exactly violating confidences when I told my visitor that my office is indeed in the company’s gay ghetto. (It takes just two homos in adjacent offices to make a ghetto. Look it up.)

But curious why a straight woman would want to know something like that, I asked her—jokingly—“Why? Are you?”

She looked at me as though I had just asked if she were black—she is—and said: “Hard core!”

And once again I was faced with the reality that my gaydar is as reliable as Ralph “China” Reed’s Christian integrity. (Anyone up for some casino gambling?) Just because my co-worker is pregnant, I ignored all the signs that she might be gay because lesbians never get pregnant.

But seriously, when I look at her as a gay woman, I still don’t really see that many clues. Which is either a sign of my obliviousness or of her just-like-everyone-elseness.

My views on gay assimilation are all over the map. If homosexuality were instantly recognizable (like skin color) I bet we wouldn’t suffer such vitriolic hatred from people too stupid to realize gay people are all around them. (I’ve seen many racists look around to make sure the room is “clear” before they launch into a black joke, but the homophobes dive right in with their fag jokes since they have no way of knowing how many of us are in the room.)

At the same time, I’m not a fan of big ol’ screaming queens—an opinion that used to come from my (what some people would describe as self-loathing, and today I wouldn’t disagree) position in the why-can’t-you-queens-just-act-normal camp, but is now more a product of the fact that I’m old and tired and people who bounce around and make a lot of noise irritate me simply because they bounce around and make a lot of noise, whether they’re six-year-olds, sorority girls, drunken bar patrons, disruptive bus passengers or big ol’ screaming queens. (And really, how can you get through my 90-word sentences when you’re bouncing around and making a lot of noise?)

Then again, if gay people were just like everyone else, the world would lose a lot of its texture: our creativity colored by our unique brand of oppression, our growing fearlessness in the face of bigotry, and the delightfully dark sense of humor we develop to laugh off the 24/7 attacks on our character and our morality and our worthiness to be treated as equal citizens.

If we assimilate we could be forced to embrace the same failure-prone marriage paradigm that straight people live—and divorce—under. But if we don’t assimilate we may never get the same rights and protections that paradigm provides.

If we assimilate we could perhaps eradicate the one tool—us—the Christian Hate Industry uses to rally the sleeping troops and mislead them into voting for monkeys who ironically haven’t yet evolved. But if we don’t assimilate we could undermine the growing zeitgeist of awareness and compassion that our struggles have also focused on other victims of oppression.

Wow. I didn’t mean to get all philosophical here; I was just writing a blog post about how much I suck at identifying fellow ’mos. But somehow I went off on a tangent. Imagine that.

But since I’m wandering, I’ll close with something seriously—but not entirely—unrelated: the lyrics to one of my favorite songs by Stephen Sondheim:

Sunday, by the blue purple yellow red water
On the green purple yellow red grass.
Let us pass through our perfect park.
Pausing on a Sunday

By the cool blue triangular water
On the soft green elliptical grass
As we pass through arrangements of shadow
Toward the verticals of trees
Forever.

The signs we didn’t heed

Sign #1: On the crowded rooftop patio of Sidetrack on a beautiful Labor Day weekend afternoon, a huge group of guys suddenly got up from PRIME guy-watching seats and disappeared as fast as Tom Cruise’s fake baby.

Sign #2: The group of guys we walked past on the way to grab the good seats cryptically advised us not to make eye contact. But they didn’t say with whom.

Sign #3: A purse and a pair of tacky bejeweled flip-flops lay mysteriously abandoned in the spot the all-male Suri crowd had just fled.

But we sat there anyway. And within seconds it came at us us: Drunken Mess Woman, a besotted, barefoot little fireplug with a mane of overprocessed pre-Raphaelite tendrils and an apple-shaped midsection squeezed into tiny black stretch pants in a way that violated every decency and kindness-to-fabric code ever written.

She instantly declared herself our best friend, sipping our drinks, blathering on and on about her friend Shawn who would be perfect for us (all three of us, apparently), and moving from our arms to our shoulders to our laps with alarming speed.

I’m never comfortable around the chemically sloppy, so I clammed up faster than Tony Snow at an unscripted press conference. But my friends quietly tolerated her. For a bit. Then she got violent (well, as violent as a 120-lb lush can get). But she aimed her violence only at me (probably because at 6’1” and 195 lbs, I was the runt of our group), punching me in the shoulder for not listening to her unfocused ramblings and then trying to strangle me when I wouldn’t let her straddle me lapdance-style. I gently pushed her away the first two times, but when she lunged for the second strangle, I pushed her hard—just as the quieter of my two friends suddenly bellowed “That’s enough!”

She landed, stunned, on her butt and stared up at us like a kitten being scolded for peeing on the baby. My heretofore quiet friend quickly launched into a stern lecture, telling her she was out of control and a mess and it was time for her to leave.

And then we left, which was totally unfair because she still got the good seats on the rooftop patio—all because she was a drunken lush in an unfortunate outfit.

But that was the only low point of my holiday weekend (other than the part where it ended, of course). My friends, who were in town from North Carolina for a weekend of Chicago adventure, took my offer to be their part-time tour guide and stretched it to a three-day stint as their Third Amigo—we hung out practically from the time I met them Friday after work until I took them to the airport on Monday afternoon. Which was an awesome—but not entirely successful—way to distract me from the loneliness of my first whole weekend away from Romantic Date Guy.

Speaking of RDG, we have only two more weeks to endure until he’s back in Chicago. But through the magic of text messaging, email and cell phones, we’re still as nauseating as ever. We just don’t get to be as obvious about it.

It has come to my attention

that my new profile pic is not so flattering. “Creepy,” some of you have said. “Child molester,” some of you have declared. Thankfully, none of you have compared it to Ann Coulter. I’d rather be a creepy child molester.

In my defense, the picture looks pretty good when it’s not shrunk to the size of Mel Gibson’s common sense. But I agree: When you cram all those pixels into that little window, my teeth somehow grow into piano keys, giving me an eat-an-apple-through-a-picket-fence overbite. And nobody likes a creepy child molester with an overbite. Well, maybe Ann Coulter. (Dear Ann Coulter’s lawyers: I’m KIDDING! Just like when she said that Clinton’s heterosexual promiscuity means that he’s gay! Or when she called Al Gore a fag on national television! It’s just like that! She and I are exactly the same! Except I’m not a scabby whore!)

WHEW. Where was I? Oh, yes: Even with a mouth full of piano keys, I’m still prettier than Ann.

And why do I think this picture looks pretty good in its larger state? Because the smile on my face is the smile of a man sitting next to Romantic Date Guy a few hours after they met. You just can’t get a smile more genuine than that. I’d love to show you the whole picture, which features his alarmingly handsome mug as well, but for various reasons (privacy, judiciousness, manufactured suspense), RDG is going to remain a faceless enigma in these parts for the time being.

In any case, until I find a less bucktoothed mugshot to post here, please scroll down to this image every time you visit. I just don’t have the insurance to cover fright-induced shock, piano-key blindness or derisive-laughter-induced pee-covered furniture.

Why I look so tired today

My marathon training group runs together on Saturday mornings, and I try to run by myself (or with unsuspecting friends I manage to drag along with me) on Monday and Wednesday nights. My mom was visiting on Monday this week—and it was cold and rainy and blah and we wanted to have dinner anyway—so I totally blew off that run.

Which meant I had to make up for two runs last night so I could be all recovered for this Saturday’s 10-miler. Which was fine; last night was beautiful and breezy and the perfect temperature to chug along for as long as I needed to.

But any good run requires a good pre-emptive poop. And I was just warming up to sing the take-a-poop song last night when the phone rang. It was Romantic Date Guy, who you recall is on a four-week business trip in a city that was the eponymous setting for a long-running TV drama in the 1970s and 1980s—a detail I’m including in this sentence only so I can use the word eponymous.

By the time RDG and I had discussed our days and declared how much we missed each other and swooned at the sound of each other’s voices (you could very accurately describe our saccharine romance as swoon-fed), a good hour had gone by, and suddenly I was faced with the prospect of doing a long run in the dark without even taking my pre-emptive poop—a detail I’m including in this sentence only so I can use the word pre-emptive again. And maybe poop too.

But I did my run and it felt awesome and I was hungry enough when I got home that I was ready to eat everything in the house—which, fortunately, is my goal anyway so I don’t have to pack hundreds of cans of diced tomatoes and water-packed chicken and boxes of pasta when I move into my Two-Bathroomed Barbie Dream Condo next month.

Speaking of cans of diced tomatoes and water-packed chicken and boxes of pasta, I whipped up a delicious tomato-chicken-pasta-various-spices-I-found-in-the-cupboard dish last night. I’m that innovative in the kitchen.

Speaking of domestic innovation, I also watched Project Runway for the first time last night. I’d seen about five minutes of the first season, where some mincy little blond had a five-alarm nervous breakdown about … um … zippers … or something equally important in the grand scheme of life. Since I don’t find zipper-induced nervous breakdowns particularly entertaining or compelling or even worth sacrificing my valuable Internet-surfing time for, I’d never watched the show again.

But RDG loves the show, so I made a TiVo Season Pass for it a few weeks ago, and—since at this point I'd probably give the man both my kidneys if he asked nicely and maybe rubbed my feet again—I decided the least I could do was give the show a try late last night over homemade (ahem) tomato chicken pasta with various spices I found in the cupboard.

And I have to admit it was pretty interesting. So interesting, in fact, that at 1:00 this morning I decided to watch just one more episode. And now I’ve seen enough of the show that I have the dubious talent of being able to name a handful of the people on it right off the top of my head:

Jeffrey, whose designs seem very cool to these untrained and only barely interested eyes, but whose neck tattoos make his chin recede in an alarming way.
Laura, the self-proclaimed Keeper Of All Empirical Truth who was obviously cast as the resident bitch.
Vincent, the resident Eeyore who needs to STAND UP STRAIGHT ALREADY.
Kayne, whose cock-eyed optimism and sunny disposition have to work overtime to compensate for his Liberace taste.
Judge Michael, whose pedestrian sense of humor probably really challenges the editors who try to make him come off as clever.
Matriarch Tim, whose unfailingly precise consonants and the dire way he whispers the word zaftig no doubt kept him off his high-school football team.

But suddenly it was 2:00 in the morning, and I had to summon every ounce of my strength and fortitude to drag my bleary-eyed, pasta-bloated, run-weary, sweat-crusted self (with a newfound flair for fashion!) to bed.

And that, my friends, is why I look so tired today.

A whole year of queer!

The Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus is about to kick off our gala 25th season, and you need to bet there! And if you order your season subscription before October 1, 2006, you’ll save 20% off the single-ticket prices for our first two shows. Just visit cgmc.org to place your order and lock in the performances you want for our whole season.

Here’s all the fabulousness (we gays are contractually obligated to describe things as “fabulous”) you’ll get with your subscription:

Favorite Things
December 8-9, 2006
The Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport
What was your favorite CGMC holiday moment? Our big-band “Man with the Bag”? Our transcendent “Ave Maria”? Our delicate “Waltz of the Flowers” featuring prima ballerinas struggling under ever-growing headpieces? And who can forget our Little Brothers of the Left Hind Leg of the Lamb of God leading the audience in a “Hallelujah” chorus sing-along? We’re bringing everyone’s favorite holiday moments back this year—and adding a few new ones—for an unforgettable kickoff to our gala 25th season.

Sidetrack V: Sidetrack with a Twist
April 20-21, 2007
The Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport
They had it comin’! We brought your favorite Sidetrack show tunes to life with the respect they’re entitled to in our first four Sidetrack productions. Now we’re pulling out all the stops to create a Sidetrack show-tune tribute that’s so over the top and down from the shelf that you just might never leave us. We can’t stop the beat!

25th Anniversary Bash—Live!
One night only: June 16, 2007
The Park West, 322 W. Armitage
What does a gay chorus do when we turn 25? We throw a party! We’re capping off our gala 25th season with a massive one-night celebration featuring food, drinks and a series of live performances by CGMC. And we’re staging it at the fabulous Park West, where you can mingle and enjoy some of our favorite music with us. We can’t think of a better way to celebrate the end of 25 wonderful seasons than in the company of the friends who have helped us grow and flourish for so long.

Remember, order your season tickets at cgmc.org before October 1, 2006, and you’ll save 20% off single-ticket prices for our first two shows!

You can also save $15 per ticket when you reserve your place at Oscar and His Men, our annual Oscar-watching fund-raiser at Sidetrack. Order now and you won’t waste a minute worrying about not having a date for the Oscars.

So go on now! CLICK! Order! You’ll be glad you did!

More from the Archives of Humiliation

Longtime reader (and very first boyfriend) Jeff, inspired by my Friday romp through my junior-high photos, has dug up (and helpfully scanned) a picture he thinks should be added to the shrine:


Things to notice:
The hair. I loved it when my hair did that stick-up-and-floop-down-over-my-eyes thing. It was actually pretty long, and it gave me something to swoop my hand through in a dramatic front-to-back motion. Although I’m pretty sure this fancy little ’do came with a weight line across the back, which made every ’90s homosexual and pre-metrosexal look like Dorothy Hamill. Or at least Lauren Tewes in her pixie-cut period.

The ring. Those of you who read even one gay rag in the 1990s probably didn’t escape the cultural hiccup dramatically called the Band of Infinity, where every homo with 30 (or so) bucks and a marked lack of judgment got a dentable stainless-steel ring individually numbered in a valiant attempt to unite us through the power of counting. But it totally worked; I feel closer to all of you for having worn it.

The watch. In the years before our mass entitlement to cell phones, people kept track of the time through little clocks they wore on their wrists. Crazy!

The shirt. Maybe it was a ’90s thing. Maybe it was an Iowa thing. But boy, was that minty green County Seat piqué polo shirt boxy and shapeless. With the sleeves held out like that, it looks as wide as it was tall.

The décor. No, I have never been in the habit of living in a Monet painting. Nor have I been in the habit of coordinating my minty green County Seat piqué polo shirts with my watercolory wallpaper. This picture was NOT taken in my home; it was taken in a Minneapolis hotel room on Jeff’s and my first vacation together. If I remember correctly, the cultural high point of our trip (after the Mall of America, of course) was Tony ’n’ Tina’s Wedding, a goofy and altogether hysterical participatory musical at which I developed the mother of all migraines. Poor Jeff had to drive me back to the hotel the moment the show was over and sit quietly with me while I lay in the dark hoping for a swift death. Most. Romantic. Trip. Ever.

The face. Oh, yeah. This is a picture of my patented Monkey Face™, which I have used to amuse children and alienate adults for decades. But it has saved me millions on hostess gifts.


Romantic Date Guy: The Update

You won’t be hearing much about him for a while; he left me this weekend. But not left left me—he just took off for a four-week business trip.

Four. Weeks.

Before he left, we logged some quality ice-cream-and-hand-holding time on my couch (note to self: it’s hard to eat ice cream with one hand) and strolling-and-hand-holding time in Boystown and socializing-and-hand-holding time at Dance for Life followed immediately by tearing-up-(a-little)-and-hand-holding time on a bench in Millennium Park—all in an attempt to reassure ourselves that 1) we are, in fact, overdramatic 12-year-old girls and 2) we’ll have a nice reserve of great memories to hold us over until he gets back.

Four. Weeks.

Dance for Life, for the uninitiated, is a one-of-a-kind sampler of works by every major dance company in Chicago, staged each year to raise money for AIDS organizations from here to Africa.

This year’s program featured Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s heartbreaking “Kiss” by Susan Marshall. I had seen “Kiss” a couple years ago and was profoundly moved by its story of love and separation and passionate infinity—not to mention Arvo Pärt’s haunting “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten,” to which it is performed. The piece features a man and woman in jeans and white T-shirts, suspended on two ropes. They kiss, they push away, they orbit, they heave and collapse under the emotional weight of their symbiosis and whatever is driving them apart. And in the end, they embrace and spin as one into fading darkness:


The metaphor for me as I sat in the dark holding hands with RDG on Saturday night—only five weeks into whatever we have going but on the eve of him leaving for a month—was a little overwhelming. I cried. And I could hear him crying as well.

Which means … well, it means a lot of things. And all of them tell me that four weeks could very well end up being a tiny little blip in a very grand scheme.

Against my better judgment …

I’m gonna show you some pretty disturbing stuff. Before you move your eyes any farther down your screen, be aware that I’m not responsible for any waves of revulsion, pity or derisive laughter that may wash over you.

You’ve been warned.

And now you’re about to see what I looked like in junior-high school:



The Muppets called. They want their hair back. And their crooked-head smile. And their oversize nose and little stick arms. I’m pretty sure this shirt was 1) a hand-me-down from a cousin or neighbor and 2) a tiny little size that still hung on my bony shoulders the same way it hung on the hanger. The picture was taken in our IMC, which was eightiespeak for “library,” and it appeared in a yearbook collage that could arguably be called my first centerfold.



This picture was taken—if I remember correctly through the haze of cocaine and abortions that blurred my stint in junior high—at a holiday concert our orchestra performed at Westdale Mall. As the violins were sawing away at “Away in a Manger” or some related masterpiece, I was parked at the piano, emoting my way through the music with my eyes closed and my floofy hair swinging around and accenting every beat with the same raw, sweaty sexuality exuded by the hair bands I was too uncool to name when I saw them on television. Notice the coats piled in the corner between the wood paneling and the fake picket fence behind me—we were nothing if not showmen. And notice the Iowa Hawkeyes pin completely obliterating my left “pec.” I’d bet the Hawks were rehearsing (or whatever it is that football teams do) for the Rose Bowl at the time of our concert, and I was struggling under the weight of that button in an attempt to seem culturally aware.



I’m pretty sure I’ve posted this picture before, but it’s so hot it bears re-posting. And before you get all scandalized, I assure you it’s not a real Playgirl cover. You can tell because the freckles haven’t been airbrushed out. It is instead one of those fake covers (You hear that, DCFS? It’s fake!) you can have made at one of those clever theme-park kiosks. They take your picture, you pick among an endless selection of clever magazine cover art and presto! Something to carry around the rest of the day! The tacky shirt was from the wardrobe department, and the plastic leis—and let’s not think about where they’d been before they landed seductively in my mouth—came out of a well-pawed box of props. I supplied the poochy tummy and the clueless smoldering expression.

WHEW! That’s enough of that for one day, don’t you think? I’d better stop before you all come crashing through your screens in an attempt to mob me the way you all mob poor Lisa Whelchel at the Hasbro outlet.

Romantic Date Guy: The First Peek

I love this picture. It was taken mere hours after RDG and I had met. We were introduced at a pre-Gay Games closing ceremonies brunch. The sparks were copious and syrupy and nauseatingly obvious to everyone in the room. Within the first few minutes we’d bonded forever over our passion for Sondheim. And the way he laughed at every joke I told. Even the funny ones. I’ve had instant crushes before, but not like this. His reciprocal crush was just as strong—and even more obvious than mine.

We decided to walk to the closing ceremonies together—which was at least two miles, but we were in that giggly, heady, just-met-and-can’t-bear-to-leave-each-other place, so we welcomed the time away from all those prying brunch eyes. Plus, we had a lot of Sondheim stuff to discuss.

RDG had competed in the Gay Games, so he went to sit with the athletes. I sat with my brunch friends, and as soon as I got seated I texted him a Sondheim lyric. Smart boy that he is, he texted a Sondheim lyric right back. And before I knew it, he’d come through the massive crowd to find us. And to sit with me.

I tried to play it cool as we sat next to each other for the next couple hours, giggling and smiling and stealing glances like drunken schoolgirls with Fresca in their panties. But I needed to make sure he knew I was interested, so eventually I did the arm-around-the-back-of-the-chair-so-I-could-lean-in-and-hear-better fakeout move.

I don’t think he was faked out. And neither were our friends behind us. Jim, who looks better in a dress than most of the Golden Girls (hi, Jim!), snapped this picture to record my clumsy wooing our first moments together.

And now you, dear readers, can finally picture what we look like on every romantic date we go on.

First of all …

The Rug Doctor is magic. Bordering on witchcraft.

Actually, I should start with pre-first-of-all (or ante-first-of-all for those of you who are so inclined): My carpet had gotten pretty dingy in the five years I’ve lived in Shoebox Manor, and I decided I needed to spruce it up if I wanted to sell my place at a decent price.

So I rented the Rug Doctor on Friday afternoon, and I quickly discovered I had been living in squalor. Gay Gardens squalor, apparently. Even the “clean” sections of my carpet produced appallingly black sludge when I emptied the dirty-water container from the Rug Doctor.

The worst section of my carpet had been by the front door. But not for long! The first Rug Doctor swipe created a stripe of such pristine khaki beauty I almost wept. But then I remembered that weeping is not very manly, so I soldiered on in stoic masculinity until my carpets were as clean and fancy as the day they were installed.

Of course, I picked a rainy day at the dawn of a particularly humid weekend to do this, so the carpet took its sweet time drying. And I rented my Rug Doctor from the most ghetto Dominicks in Chicago, complete with rock-dwelling customers and a defiantly unhelpful store manager. But it’s done, and I’m once again living in oatmeal-colored splendor.

After the rug doctoring, I picked up Romantic Date Guy for a carbo-loading dinner. For our appetizer, we stopped by Fleet Feet so I could upgrade my running shoes by a half size; my 11-wides were starting to pinch, and I had to run 20 miles the next morning. (And yes, running 20 miles in brand-new shoes is the kind of stupid that brought us Mel Gibson and Ann Coulter. But 20 miles in too-tight shoes is also a big kind of stupid—though since they’re broken in, it’s more on the order of Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson. Of course, all four of these mouth-breathers are making more money than I am, so what the hell do I know? Besides the fact that I can sleep at night, I mean.)

So after 5 kinds of bread and pasta followed by cookie-dough ice cream—and then a lovely (albeit short) evening of laughing and talking and show-tuning together—I went to bed at 10 and got up at 5 to run 20 miles. (Look! A whole sentence rendered in multiples of 5!) And those 20 miles were pretty glorious, thanks mostly to the muggy, cool weather we had. And to my new shoes, which performed flawlessly.

The AIDS Marathon organizers asked us all to wear red so we’d create an endless AIDS ribbon up and down the lakefront on Saturday—which was a beautiful mental image, but since people didn’t all remember to wear red and since we aren’t in the habit of skipping hand-in-hand on our training runs, we didn’t really create much of a ribbon. But here’s how some of my team looked in the pre-red-dawn hours:


And here’s how I looked, but I’m showing you this picture mostly because it includes my favorite morning eye candy—the dude in the red shirt with the black circles is quite a physical specimen, albeit a quiet one; I’ve gotten only one smile-hello out of him since we started running in May:


True story:
Fearless Leader Matthew keeps Olay body wipes in his car. Which makes him kinda gay. But after a long run, we’re always very glad he has them so we can freshen up before our post-run brunch. So Saturday morning we were rounding the soccer fields somewhere in mile 9 and we were already feeling kind of ripe. Someone mentioned the Olay wipes, and—almost as though we were a bunch of homos who frequently break into song—we all started singing Buster Poindexter’s “Hot Hot Hot”: ¡Olé, olé! ¡Olé, olé! So we’re running along—five white people and one Asian person belting out Spanish words to a fake Mexican song—when we come upon a soccer team waiting to start early-morning practice. A Hispanic soccer team waiting to start early-morning practice. They look at us. We look at them, kind of stunned by their sudden presence. We stop singing (again, fabulously on cue—the Moron Tab-and-Apple Choir has nothing on us). They look at us even harder, as though they were deciding if we were trying to get all Jets on them at the dance at the gym. We run harder until they’re safely behind us. We laugh. Trust me: It was funny.

We finished our run with nothing more problematic than a few pee stops, and then we took our traditional post-run picture. Except I thought this pic was a frowny one and everyone else understood it to be a smiley one. So I look like Cap’n AngryPants while everyone else looks like a Wal-Mart greeter:


Then we all piled into Fearless Leader Matthew’s car (which he’ll probably have to sell to the zoo for hauling animals now that we’ve permanently sweated it up) to head to brunch. Here’s what a backseat full of stinky, half-crippled queers looks like (why am I always the pink one?) when all we can think about is eating. And, in a few cases, mugging for the camera:


And here’s what our famed brunches—my favorite part of marathon training!—look like. Outdoor seating + beautiful weather + mountains of diner food + a shared sense of accomplishment with a fun group of people = a pretty spectacular way to eat. Even if the left side of our table looks sort of iffy:


Wow. This post is getting long. Which never happens.

Here’s the rest of my weekend in a handy PowerPoint format:

Plant by front door
• Sad little thing.
• Nobody wants to buy a condo from someone who habitually kills plants.
• Or who at least doesn’t try to hide the bodies.
• Replaced it.
• Looks nice.
• Still alive.
• So far.

Romantic dinner Saturday night
• Commemorated Romantic Date Guy’s last day at his job.
• And the dawn of his jet-setting new career.
• I cooked.
• I also got him a thoughtful gift.
• Didn’t make him cry, though.
• Next time.
• Capped off the night with show tunes and ice cream.
• And appropriately dim lights.

My first showing
• Sunday morning.
• Got an almost immediate offer.
• Too low for my budget.
• Refused their counter to my counter.
• There’s another showing tonight anyway.
• HA!

Air and Water Show
• Sunday afternoon.
• Watched it from a fabulous rooftop deck on Lake Shore Drive.
• Not really into airplanes (or wasting fuel), but parts of it were pretty impressive.
• Endured some frighteningly vapid banter from the radio commentators.
• Especially when they got into warplanes-equals-god-bless-America territory.
• No shit.
• We were usually more fascinated by the LSD gridlock on the ground below us.
• And the bastard cops who ticketed everyone in sight.
• Discovered RDG has a fear of heights.
• And that I can use that to my advantage when I want more hugs and snuggles.
• We didn’t realize it would get so sunny.
• Very lobstery today.
• Or maybe it’s just a happy glow.
• You can commence barfing again.

13.1 miles of fun!

The times are in, the blisters are scabbing nicely and Sunday’s Chicago Distance Classic half marathon is but a memory. All that’s left is the posting of the pictures on the blogs. And fortunately, Fearless Leader Matthew carried his camera with him last weekend to record our fun.

First of all, here’s what our view looked like before the race. See that tiny little START banner off in the distance? It proved to be six minutes and 34 seconds away from us. We were so far away, in fact, that we didn’t hear the Star Spangled Banner or the starting gun. We just waited for the sea of people in front of us to start slowly oozing their way forward, and we slowly joined them on what ended up being a beautiful run on a beautiful day:


Running with a camera doesn’t always produce the best pictures. Just ask the producers of What Women Want. But it can produce some interesting effects:


We all took turns posing under the different mile signs because we were the annoying, perky runners who refused to act like a half marathon actually kind of hurts. Mine turned out pretty OK. For a dork.


Sometimes I was so busy talking with other runners and taking in the scenery and lagging behind my team that I totally missed our team photo ops:


Sometimes we needed makeup and lighting people for our team photos:


There is a huge camaraderie in a crowd of runners. Thirteen miles that would suck if you were all alone are really quite enjoyable when you use that sucking action to pull energy off other runners. Just don’t grab their boobs when you do it, though; that sort of camaraderie is often frowned on. At least when there are homosexuals present.


Speaking of the scenery (three captions up), how beautiful is Chicago? And how awesome is it that the entire lakefront is public property so everyone can enjoy views like this:


Traditionally, when you run a race you get a bib with your number on it in huge black letters on a white background. On longer runs, the race organizers hire a photography company that takes billions of pictures of the runners at various places along the race route, matches each picture to the runners in it via the bib numbers, and makes it easy for the runners to order pictures of themselves online.

For this race, though, our bibs featured relatively small numbers on a two-tone green background. So the few pictures that were taken along the race route were impossible to identify, and when I searched for my number online, I got a page of pictures of random people crossing the finish line within a few minutes of my finish time.

There were only about six pictures of me in the bunch. And those were only parts of me; I somehow managed to keep another runner between me and every camera at the finish line, which is probably a defense mechanism I’ve built up from years of dodging the paparazzi.

In any case, here’s my triumphant finish. Remember those six minutes and 34 seconds from the start photo? That means the 2:15:15 you see here is not my finish time. My official time was 2:08:51, an important distinction that could mean the difference between a table by the window and a table by the kitchen at the Evanston Chili’s.


Here are some other interesting stats right off the Internet:
I finished 4,065th of 7,415 runners and 2,448th of 3,557 male runners. (Two! Four! Six! Eight! 4,065th is really … um … not terribly embarrassing!) And the average finish time was 2:09:26, which means I’m a whopping 35 seconds above average! In some circles, that makes me some sort of running GENIUS.

After each of our runs this summer, New Running Buddy, who is a hardcore yoga practitioner, has led us all in a lovely stretch. Here I am, pink as an Easter ham and alarmingly bloated for someone who just ran 13.1 miles, trying not to make whimpering sounds as I realign my IT bands and force dead grass in my crevices. Which is the way many ancient cultures punished the village idiots who spent two hours and nine-ish minutes running and running and running and never getting anywhere. Just like What Women Want.

How to have a quiet, relaxing weekend

Order in
I raced home from work on Friday night to whip up a dinner for six with a menu featuring macaroni and cheese out of a box spinach-raspberry salad; steamed carrots; garlic-feta-basil-stuffed chicken breasts; and my own take on peach melba with individual pudding-filled bundt cakes, fresh peaches and raspberries, vanilla-bean ice cream, and strawberry drizzle. And all I had to do was preheat the oven and peel back the foil to expose the tater tots!

Be a slug
I was up at the crack of dawn (or soon thereafter) on Saturday to begin Operation: Sell My Condo. In five years, I’ve managed to accumulate a lot of crap, which I neither want to haul to my new condo nor allow complete strangers to wander aimlessly through my house and see. So I instituted a strict Never Leave The House Without Something In My Hands To Throw In The Dumpster rule, and I started Saturday morning with a fingertips-to-armpits stack of old magazines—magazines I’d brought to Chicago from Iowa six years ago—that I used to think I’d get read. But they’re out of the house now, so I’ll thank you to keep your derisive laughter to yourselves.

Stay in bed all day
Then I ran a ton of errands. I got my every-three-week haircut. I took in my Sandals Of Pain to be resoled with something more cushy than the masonite they were made with. I picked up race packets for me and some friends for the half marathon the next day. I bought cool new sunglasses to replace the cool not-so-new ones I’d crushed to death in my backpack. And I returned a swimsuit. I had bought three saucy swimsuits last weekend for my January Atlantis cruise—I figured nobody would be selling them this winter so I should get them while they were actually available. The suits I already have are all $5 Target specials, which you do NOT want to wear on a gay cruise because everyone will talk. Besides, I wore them on the Atlantis cruise I took four years ago, and those bitchy queens keep track. Anyway, the clerk at the swimsuit emporium sold me one of my reject suits accidentally, so I had to take it back. And returning swimsuits is usually a no-no, but the clerk admitted screwing up, so the manager refunded my money, but only after quizzing me on whether I’d left any “funny business” in the suit. We looked in it together, and sure enough, I’d left Mary Cheney’s integrity in there. Which I see as more sad than funny, but this paragraph is getting long so I’m going to move on to the next topic.

Watch TV
A friend of mine from the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus has a daughter who got married on Saturday. He asked eight of us from the chorus to sing at her wedding on Saturday, and I’m so glad I agreed to do it. The wedding was on a huge boat docked permanently on the lakefront, and it provided a magical setting for what proved to be one of the most romantic, touching (and refreshingly casual) ceremonies I’ve ever attended. The groom was French, so the service was bilingual—so aside from a few French verbs I recognized here and there, I have no proof that the sisters and the cousins and the aunts who took to the microphone weren't reading the Antibes phone directory to us. But whatever they said was in French, so it was still delicious to listen to. And we got to sing some of our most beautiful songs for a very appreciative audience.

I met Romantic Date Guy for dinner afterward, and I told him the wedding had put me in an emotionally vulnerable state and he could probably take advantage of me and do something untoward like talking me into eloping that very night if he were of an unscrupulous nature. But he was a perfect gentleman, and the most decadent thing we did was share a slab of triple-chocolate cake for dessert. (OK, and we shared some impure thoughts involving our waiter’s very sexy tattoos. Which is one of the perks of being on a gay date: You can scope men together!) Then we took a walk in a nearby park and sat arm-in-arm on a bench where we enjoyed the evening with lots of smiles and contented sighing and other expressions of happiness. Please do not barf after reading this paragraph.

Sleep in
I got up at 5:00 to run the Chicago Distance Classic half marathon Sunday morning. Well, technically I set my alarm for 5:00. I was actually wide awake around 2:00 for no useful reason, and I lay there for three hours trying to fall back asleep. On the plus side, I wasn’t late for the race. On the minus side, I ran the damn thing on about four hours’ sleep.

But it was a glorious morning, and the half marathon was a breeze to run. I had my phone on me, so I called my folks in Iowa somewhere in mile 5 just to huff and puff and say hi, which gave them a thrill. RDG showed up to cheer us on, as did Fearless Leader Mattthew’s friend Todd, so the two of them didn’t have to cheer us on alone. Then we all went for a nice breakfast, and I headed home to crash HARD.

Interestingly, marathon training makes my feet a full size bigger every summer. Stupidly, I had worn my winter dress shoes—the ones that fit me from January until I start running in May—to the wedding. Painfully, they gave me blisters the size of quarters on the backs of my heels, which made their presence unquestionably clear for the whole two hours and nine minutes I ran the race. Blurilly, I took a picture of them for you:


Scratch your butt and go back to bed
After my nap, I picked up RDG and we headed out for our second romantic date in as many nights, this time at Ravinia where we had a sumptuous picnic on the lawn and then watched Patti LuPone (who didn’t chew on her vowels as much as she has in the past) in Gypsy (which hasn’t traditionally been one of my favorite musicals, but RDG loves it and I was thrilled to see it with him and he kept thanking me for coming as though spending a delightful evening with him and then watching a Broadway show filled with Broadway talent was some sort of horrible lap-dance-from-Karl-Rove nightmare, which was all really cute). I’d (gasp!) never been to Ravinia for a real summer picnic event, and I have to say a big part of me was really glad I’d saved it to experience for the first time with RDG. Seriously.

You may now commence barfing.