[note location change for tomorrow at end]

The Obamacare website stinks. For five hours at a House committee hearing yesterday, private contractors paid big bucks to develop different parts of the website traded blows and blame with the government agency in charge of coordinating those parts. The different parts behind the website apparently work fine on their own, but when it came time to weld them together on HealthCare.gov, it was total bedlam.

We wouldn’t be in this mess – and I would be able to get my Obamacare – if the government and its contractors had spent the last year doing awesome overhead squats instead of stupid crunches.

Here’s what I mean. HealthCare.gov is the federal government’s site where those of us who are uninsured (or who just want a better plan) can buy health insurance. The good news is that the plans offered on HealthCare.gov are cheaper, better, and easier to understand than what I can find on my own. The bad news is that if I don’t have insurance by January 1, I’ll be fined. I’m OK with that arrangement.

To make HealthCare.gov work, though, the builders of the website had to be able to Read more…

When I was a young swimmer, back when humans and Neanderthals were chucking stones at each other in a battle for hominid supremacy, everyone knew that swimmers peaked at age 17.  That’s how old Janet Evans was when she won three gold medals in the 1988 Seoul Olympics.  That’s how old I was when I swam the fastest I would ever swim my favorite event, the 100 yd. butterfly. Janet and I, we each hung on for a bit longer – her going to another two Olympics, me becoming a big fish in a small swimming program where anyone who could finish 100 yards of butterfly without getting out for a drink was considered a star.

Later this month, I turn 44. Forty-four is an unexpected number at the end of that last sentence. It’s just so…large. When I was swimming my fastest 100 butterfly, I couldn’t imagine life past graduation. 44 and 84 were pretty much the same age, located at that smudgy far end of the human lifespan.

Still, when people tell me that I look younger than my age, I bristle. “Oh no,” they say, “you can’t be that old.” Or, “No waaaaay you’re in your forties!”   They’re trying to reassure me that I’m not this awful thing, which is, to be anything older than 28.

Given our culture’s obsession with youth, it’s hardly surprising that people are as quick to say stupid shit about age as they are about weight. You look so young! is second only to You’ve lost weight! in the list of Nicest Things You Can Say About Someone.

Well, fuck that.

I have all sorts of beef with Read more…

….and it’s unbelievably GORGEOUS in Atlanta today. So…

If your paycheck usually comes from Uncle Sam and it’s not coming this week because the Republicans running the House of Turds are being numbnuts, queerfit is free today (like it is every day).  

Queerfit is also free today if you’re uninsured and, cruising through the newly opened Health Insurance Marketplace, you realized that even though it’s awesome you can now get health insurance with a decent premium, you still better do everything you can to keep yourself healthy because that bronze level deductible is a doozy.

Finally, queerfit is free today to everyone who, like me, deactivated their facebook account today in response to confirmation that the NSA is vacuuming up our friend lists under the theory that everyone with a foreign sounding name is an enemy of the state.

6:15 at our usual spot. Look outside – that’s where you want to be, friend.