Yeah, so it’s been a bit since I’ve felt the need to put fingers to keyboard and whip up some sort of mildly interesting or vaguely entertaining blog post. You know, not the greatest post you’ve ever seen in the history of bloggings, but not utter shit, either. One of those that elicits as “oh, it was fine” or “how nice” or “well, most of the words were spelled correctly.”
I was chewing recently on my relationship – it’s a long-distance relationship, like, LOOOOONG distance. We’re not talking I live in Illinois and he lives in Wisconsin, oh no, this is a distance that requires double-digit hours on an airplane long distance. The kind of distance that makes roll my eyes at a movie like “Going the Distance”, where Drew Barrymore and Justin Long are pinin’ for the fjords because she lives in San Francisco and he lives in New York City. Don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoyed the shit out of that movie because everyone cussed like sailors, they weren’t rolling in dough so flying to the coasts was not a no-big-deal proposition, and they captured some of the more agonizing bits of a long-distance relationship really nicely. All that being said...I’d sit through a Carrot Top show once a week if it meant my fellow was a mere five-hour flight away from me.
But what I was thinking about was my last visit to the land of Far, Far Away – I had a bit of a tizz about halfway through my two week stay because I got a sinus infection of some sort and wound up feeling like all kinds of shit and shinola for three days or so. Said tizz consisted of copious amounts of ridiculous tears while my erstwhile gentleman kind of stared at me, head tilted like Nipper, the RCA dog. At the time, I couldn’t quite express why I was so infuriated at my uncooperative nose/sinuses but then it clicked as I was idly musing while driving home from someplace recently. The thing is, when we’re actually in the same zip code, there’s no room for things like being sick or being otherwise incapacitated because there’s no time for a do-over. When the clock’s ticking on the amount of face time you have, being less than “perfect” isn’t acceptable because you have a finite amount of time in which to cram what would be, say, six months of regular dating time in a relationship that takes place in, well, the same place. So when you’re faced with only having 14 days with the person that you adore the most in the known universe, being dropped by a fucking sinus infection is going to cause you (okay, me) to throw a tizz.
Luckily, the fretting about having only a handful of days sharing the same airspace is finite, as machinations and plans and things are in the works, but goddammit, if our next rendezvous gets fucked up somehow because of my nose or my knees or my ass or whatever, something’s going to get kicked very hard.
Another thing I was thinking about recently was Hugh Jackman. Well, not so much thinking about as actually seeing him – last Wednesday, June 8, Hugh appeared on stage alongside 80s and a wee bit of the 90s star singer/songwriter/Chicago’s very own Richard Marx. Richard was taping a PBS special at the Arcada Theater in lovely downtown St. Charles and apparently, he and the Jackmeister General are BFFs. Who knew? I did not, but my sister, a Hughge (GEDDIT) Hugh Jackman fan, discovered that he would be appearing via some local gossip’s column. So we snatched up tickets to the show and found ourselves awash in...Richard Marx fandom.
Now, I was never a gigantic Marxist (GEDDIIIIIIIIIIIT???), but he had some tunes, you know. And I always like it when a dude that has some serious success decides to remain in the place he originated from – Richard and his wife Cynthia Rhodes and their three kids live in suburban Chicago and that is neat. So it’s not like we were going to suffer through two hours of absolute shite music just in order to catch a glimpse of Hugh. We learned many things that evening:
a. Richard Marx is a funny motherfucker – he is Mr. Wit and Charm onstage
b. The dude really has had a fuckton of popular songs! Seriously, we sat there and it’s like, “oh yeah, I know ‘Don’t Mean Nothing’ and ‘Right Here Waiting’” and then he’d bust out, like, 10 more songs that we found ourselves singing along with.
c. Richard Marx really does have a nice set of pipes. The man can belt.
d. Hugh Jackman is awwwwwwweeeeesssooooooooooooome. No, for real. My sister and I had boogied out to New York City when he was on Broadway with “The Boy From Oz” which, while being a fairly not good show, was elevated to KICKASS simply by the sheer force of Hugh’s Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent. He is a delight and the entire evening was worth not getting home until almost 12:30 a.m. and having to rise for work at 5:00 a.m. and grind through the Thursday with very narrowed, sleepy, angry eyes.
Other than that, things are rather mellow in the Fat Girl Fortress. Mellow is rarely conducive to writing blogs-o-rage or blogs-o-anything, but when one is a walking stressball 24/7, one welcomes those patches of mellow that do not produce blog posts that are essentially “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *punch punch*!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” After all, throwing a tizz without an audience to look at you like you’re suddenly speaking Esperanto just isn’t that entertaining.
