The Courage Of My Convictions

This is the sight of me walking down 7th Avenue after a midnight show, semi-successfully executed, in the post 1am hours, going down past the bar from 57th St.

I had been flirty at the bar, an easy enough affair. I had tried it on like a coat, or like the clothes at that American Apparel warehouse sale I go to, seeing if things make me look good.

An apt analogy actually. I have commented to people that never before when I weighed much more did I ever comment on or want to shop for clothing. It was outside the realm of my expectations as I knew I didn’t look good, so my defenses shut me off to the possibility of shopping, of having to see myself, or accept the way I was.

Now, I shop endlessly on the cheap, mismatched racks of the American Apparel Warehouse Sale on 26th St, looking for things that make me feel good, asking for opinions on what works and what doesn’t, what colors, what styles, looking for shirts that fit me tight, that show me off.

That’s how I try flirting on in that bar after the Gethard show, my friend Andrew Parrish (who met his current girlfriend this way) had recommended it to me previously, actually, but I’m usually too tired after the show, too wanting to do Yoga the next morning, too scared to put myself out there and fail or, worse, fuck up a good situation for me.

So in that mix of defensiveness, self-doubt and common sense, I usually end up walking home down that 7th Avenue, either all the way down or far enough to pick up my locked-out couch-crasher Teddy, who is at a different bar, before completing my 3 miles and being home.

But I try on flirting that night. Complimenting, finding ways to be assertive without being intrusive, seeing opportunities to connect, making sure, as I try to with all people now, that I am looking them in the eyes confidently, with a smile or the receptiveness of listening.

Like clothes, it’s not a natural fit for me, a thing out of the past. Like clothes, I still don’t really know what I am doing, throwing on a slapdash approach, sometimes not seeing how silly I look.

But Michael Delaney pointed out to us in a class that the difference between writing a sketch and doing improvisational work (being in the moment), is that a sketch is like working with clay where it can be formed and reformed, changed and shifted before being presented. With improv though, he said, we are working in marble and every move we make, mistake or not, is visible.

I don’t know what I am doing in marble right now.

Flirting or performing, though I’ve gotten better about being okay about life.

Christina Gausas (an amazing performer and improviser who I am lucky enough to get to work with) noted me a few weeks ago that when I made moves in my scenes it was like I was moving through water, making half-moves, unconfident. A non-improviser or even one might be confused by the terminology, I’ll explain. Instead of grabbing someone by the hand and giving a firm handshake, you reach out in slow motion waiting for their acceptance. Instead of brushing a girl’s hair back, you touch her lightly on the arm, uncertainly. When my old friend Jonny-Jon-Jon told me I needed to “take more leaps, not just from sinking in the mud to a rescue helicopter, more uncertain ones”, he was right too.

And life, improv, writing everything, they all tie together and seem to intermesh, though my life is full of them, so that may just be it.

Another moment learning from Christina was an exercise she does where we draw a trait from a piece of paper in her hand and have to play it subtly, or to put it differently, like a real, normal person. I nailed “gay” apparently (I talked about taking some time off from work to explore the world and a collection of Portuguese spun-glass), but when I drew “sexually aggressive”, I stumbled into creepy or timid, struggling like balance in yoga, to find a middle ground.

“When I think about being flirty or aggressive, ” she told me. “I think about a male improviser who would always be at the bar, just making super sexual jokes and it was always cool because that was just who he was, but if you ever took it seriously, he’d be down in an instant.”

I think my version of that was someone telling me my voice was hoarse it was and saying it sounded super-masculine.

“Yeah, I have huge balls.” I replied.

I think that got a laugh.

But in the end I walked home by myself again. I didn’t want to stay out late (I did), didn’t want to feel like shit again (did), wanted to get up in time for yoga, which I did.

But what am I looking for?

Playing my gameboy (a term, Nintendo DSi is the more accurate one) is often a troubling sign, something of a detachment from reality for me. Playing it while walking, an even greater one, especially now that I am aware of the work I do on my posture in yoga and how I fuck that up looking at my screen.

In improv and in life, the work I do is essentially to listen better, which is what I’ve told my friends, listen to myself (which I have gotten better at), but listen to others, be vulnerable, be in the moment and be confident not knowing ever what you are going to do.

Think about it, the amount of times in life we pre-plan what we are going to say, the times we judge a conversation or muscle past it just to make our point. If our points are so great, let’s make them, but as a talker I am almost exclusively defined by my propensity to talk about myself to the exclusion of others. Thus the blog you are reading right now.

So to listen, to not pre-plan, to be in the moment and vulnerable is practice in life as well as an improv. It makes you into a better, more responsive person. Know what you want in life and have that somewhere and how you feel, but I think that’s all you get to take for things.

When I go into a bar, or a classroom, when I hang around the Gethard show, or the different comedy theaters, who knows what will happen? It’s painful to be there, frightening to be confident.

So the “safe choices” are either detachment or self-abuse, detachment by not trying to connect with other/yourself (video games) or just judging yourself for your inadequacies as a way of not absorbing them, by viewing your perceived weakness as an external force, itself a kind of detachment as well.

All of this seems rambling and it is late. No apologies.

On Tuesday I had a great show and a great class and felt on top of the world. I got asked to be in a sketch group the next day out of the blue with people I respect, again people much more talented than me.

And yet, for all my practice not judging, for all my work, I still find myself slipping into judgement after a bad class, beating myself up over not being good enough or confident enough to really connect or hook up, wondering what I am doing or who am I, looking for external approval, because somewhere within me still lives vivid my own sense of worthlessness birthed from years of insecurity.

I’ve said here many times on this blog, I’m happy to return to yoga as much as I do because it reminds me when I am exerting myself that staying calm in the moment is how I stay calm in the face of adversity of life, that when I am not good at a pose it only means that I have self-awareness and I am doing the work, that when the teacher comes over to adjust me (which is very frequently, even now), it is a help because it means I am learning and getting closer to my own self-sufficiency, put succinctly by my friend Amy Hellman: “Think of everything as practice and you’ll get a lot more of a kick out of it.”

I spent time with my friend Frank today, a new big brother to his 62 year-old father’s son with his wife, Karen, a sort of slightly removed half-brother for Frank as he’s adopted. I knew though talking to him, as I went to Park Slope and to New York Methodist Hospital to see little Charlie in the NICU and saw Frank’s pride and wonder at his little brother’s cuteness, at his little brother’s being.

Well, some shit’s real.

And sometimes it’s good to remind one’s self of that.

And have more fun, if you can, and be more “practical” with the stuff that’s not.

And maybe that’s called “being a man” which is a note I got once, and maybe that’s called being confident.

Or maybe, it’s just something I’ll just have to be okay not knowing how it looks on me, until I do.

***

I am addicted to Mediterranean food.

It’s just delicious and healthy and flavorful. It’s adjustably spicy. It has great textures and vegetables. Hummus and falafel are so good that it’s just silly that they even exist.

So I apologize for how much I cover them, it’s just that I love to eat them and so I write what I eat.

In this case, it was The Hummus and Pita Co., a new joint over on 6th Avenue that, like Meze Grill before it, attempts to be a sort of Chipotle for mediterannian food.

Unlike Meze though, which I have not been to in a long time (I’m not often in the 50s during dining hours), THPC seems to be put on a little fanciness with a wider range of stuffings (fried eggplant, shawarma or a sort of tandoori chicken/steak as well as falafel) and different kinds of hummus.

All of it of course seems a little strange when you can get a 4 buck chicken kabab sandwich on many street corners.

But everything was really fresh and delicious. The salad bar of toppings (the mark of any great Mediterranean take out place) was ample with different kinds of cabbage and pickles and the shawarma I got was greasy and great and I even found some whole wheat.

The result was a yummy journey from crunch of cabbage to soft plyant chicken thighs rounding through to savory hummus and tahini, with dabs of hot sauce flecking in a mess that fell apart only to be scooped up, finger food, the dirty work covered up with napkins.

Maybe not for every day with the amount of good halal carts, but if I need some primo-shit, I know just where to look.

***

THE HUMMUS AND PITA CO.

Chicken Shawarma Whole Wheat Pita w/Fried Eggplant, Pickles, Red+White Cabbage, Hummus, Tahini, Hot Sauce- $8.11

6th Ave. bet 16th and 17th Sts

1 to 18th St. FLM-PATH to 14th St-6th Ave.

Neil Casey Advanced Study Harold Notes Day Three

Whoo.

I killed it in this class.

What a day.

I got up and did improv at 2:30-5:30, learned the opening for the show during that time, had a really fun set of the Bat (a harold done in the dark) and did an Invocation (Neil’s favorite opening and mine) in the dark too and then had a show for that class at 6:30 which, while I always feel like I could be better, felt great about. Then I had rehearsal afterwards. Now, soon, sleep.

Most of the notes from today are about Neil’s take on openings including his version of the invocation as well as some stuff about playing it real and not being “cute” or jokey which those of you who followed my 401 notes will remember as his pet peeves.

Neil had no negative notes for me after the show even called one of my moves “a stroke of brilliance”.

I feel exhausted and like a million fuckin’ bucks.

So here as always are my hastily written, definitely incomplete, probably somewhat inaccurate notes taken from class with Neil Casey.

Enjoy and take his invocation workshop if he ever teaches it again. I’ve learned it four different ways and any way I’ve done it, it’s always been fun.

***

Any opening has a lot of pros and cons, but if you’re not using it what it’s good for it’s worthless.

I think “the interview” opening has a lot of cons, but it’s the best way to get an audience on board with a long-form.

Will Hines’s Philosophy- In our upper levels when we have so much of a handle with our technique, how do we foster a sense of cooperation without singling people out?

Neil- Im going to make my case that the Invocation is best opening, lots of pros, negligible cons. Shows you how good the show is.

Interview- cons, the person can be a dud, can bullshit, be boring.

Good thing is that it is a good training wheels for an unsophisticated audience. It works as a way to show how you got your info and how were being funny of it.

You heard the story. Now here it is funnier, same as an Armando. Not reenact ing, not noble but not bad.

Pattern Game(three loop)-

Pros- group mind, a million suggestions, shows your work to the audience.

Cons- boring, fails theatrically, trained audiences deal with it

Sound/Movement-

P- perspective, getting into physicality, interesting to watch, getting on the same page as humans

C- no ideas or repetitive ideas, vague or no labels, lot of time not a lot of ideas

Organic opening could be anything

(pattern, movement, could do anything)

Scene Painting

P- gets you ideas, entertaining, not as many ideas

C- people don’t like when we don’t use scenes we’ve created

Documentary

P- like pattern game but locked in to character

C- slightly more interesting but not constricting

Armando

P- entertaining, theatrical, variable rate of return

C- pressure on one person, no group mind

Scene Deconstruction

P- scenic so helpful

C- if the scene is bad its bad

Openings are overrated, people look for perfect ones when they should just do better scenes, gel better as players and you’ll be be better as a team.

Invocation

Fun to watch, we’re speaking in a weird way, more intense.

Second, commitment. Youve got to be committed, if you’re teamwork is bad or trying to be funny it comes out there

Third, come up with great ideas, not as many as PG, but we’re talking about an object, human reactions, behaviors, when we get up higher we talk about philosophies at its height. Quality ideas, demonstrates your commitment to the show, pure group mind were all getting on the same page AND it’s literal witchcraft.

Here’s my skeleton of invocation-

You are creating object on ground or in air

One specific thing, yes and every choice, building on top of each others ideas. Can’t be purple if its already red. You can dive into details like scene painting. You talk about the history and then we heighten it. One thing right in front of us, right here.

Id rather you heighten someone else’s idea than you’re own, just like a pattern game. Build on other people’s ideas rather than push your own, unless something really resonates with you.

tennis ball to truth warmup- big idea based on true sounding story

When our conclusions come close to self-help maxima, we’re hitting high, but we’re not getting real enough

What is it to be punctual, for instance? The idea that you don’t want to hurt other people? That if people are late then society ends? Not eat right, “why eat right”. To not support agribusiness? What are we really talking about? When you are reducing to a cliche or platitude think about what you are talking about instead of the shorthand

Take something tangible as a suggestion (can’t invoke courage or friendship)

It is- description of particular object, physical object, don’t get carried away with scene paint. Only things immediately touching it. Close shot photo of it as guideline. Make it “the kind of thing”

You are- based on what bike it is, assuming persona of person/character, the relation to you. The more you can make it matter/give a shit, the better. Don’t be someone not intimate to it. Everyone be different characters. Don’t worry about consistently of stories, objects have long lives.

Thou art- summarize those stories, the big ways those things relate to people, a big thing (passion, lost innocence, pure pleasure).

I am- one word, biggest things

You can build the object or not if you want to do something physical

Don’t try to speak above your intelligence, speak naturally. Lose the flowery voice people sometimes do in Thou Art.

Thou-art stage could be seen as titles of scenes.

The same thing as pattern game, it’s not bad to talk about pop culture but it shouldn’t be the whole thing. Pop culture references are not three dimensional

With the It Is stage or at any point, of you stumble on something dark or terrible, explore it. It’s going to be funnier to see you sad later than if you’re not being true. Allow yourself to get in to a funny second beat of it in the actual Harold. It’s not funny unless you have the same emotional commitment as something found that’s dark and awful.

Be careful for being too funny. You can know its funny, but we can’t know it. Try for dark or emotional or what it’s really like.

The invocation gives you an opportunity for heavy commitment at the top of the show that you can maintain throughout the show.

No one wants to watch the people on stage be funny or think they are funny.

Don’t make the invocation be jokes, make things that actually matter.

The worst thing that has infected our scene here are people who think that they are funny taking this stage.

Let’s get laughs from being truthful as opposed to mastering the sitcom cadence of when to laugh, a silly voice or demeanor. You coming in as officer shit pants isn’t going to be why you devoted your life to this. You can get so far being funny, but you can’t do the stuff that makes your jaw drop if you’re not playing the characters and just puppeteering thing.

Nobody thinks you’re cute on stage. College improv yes. But you’re not cute and funny because you’re grown ups on stage. You can get laughs by being silly, but let it not be the trend.

I don’t think any audience wants to see you be cute or precious but they want to see you be good

The sad thing is it does fly, because people get laughs get on teams but then that becomes the paradigm. Meaning someone gets on a team who is “funny” and then we laugh at them because they are on a team and then they are considered funny and then they are. Which’ll kill us.

I’d rather you err on the side of melodrama, playing the characters who care too much about scenes, rather than characters who are aware of how funny they are.

This is everybody right now, the whole scene, you’re all funny enough that you could get on a team right now and students would laugh but that doesn’t matter because you saw something great which is why you got into improv but you will not create something great if you can’t play truthfully.

Commit and be more vulnerable or be such a great puppet master that you can’t see the strings, which may end up being the same thing.

The point of the invocation is not necessarily to grab game but also tone, people want to see things that hit from the opening hit in the piece.

Walk-ons are great when helping a game but not as a left turn.

You can get away with a goofball group game if you’re doing good grounded scenes, in fact it can be a nice break.

e.g.: You can have the coke if you ran a mile today.

What we hear in our openings should resonate into our shows.

You can take from “it is” as well. You can do a shitty invocation and have a fine pattern game out of it.

The point of the invocation is to find strong character choices, play the sort of person who believes the things they say about that object.

Pre-packaged justifications based on strong things we’ve built off the opening.

Me doing something weird is ok but only becomes funny once we justify.

When you say “I’m not letting go” be the person who is not letting go. Infuse as much emotion as you can.

Initiate what was fun in the second beat at the expense of every thing else. Some parts of a scene will be better than others, initiate what was fun, what people laughed at, what you enjoyed.

The whole trick is playing grounded while an exemplifying a crazy characteristic, without us all seeing its really funny, betraying that you know what you are doing.

I know that you’re funny enough to make these moves but don’t make them do broadly that I see the man behind the curtain and I see him congratulate himself.

Compliment yourself and others offstage.

My overall note, play good games, get there faster. But you did find funny things organically so that’s great.

Find commitment in the invocation, bring emotional commitment to your scenes from that and find games quickly and you’ll be doing the best improv out there, guys.

Neil Casey Advanced Study Harold Notes Day Two (w/guest teacher Will Hines)

This was a challenging day for me and for most of the class I think.

I have my said my statements about Will Hines here on this blog frequently and made my opinion known: in short, I have a lot of respect for him as a performer and a teacher and he’s one of the bigger influences on my style of play.

But when Will came to sub for our intensive, I still put on myself that onus of “I’m performing in front of Will” (which was less serious in front of Neil, because I felt like/was such a better improviser when I took his class as opposed to when I took Will’s).

Also, we were doing a difficult thing for me: playing realistic scenes.

It seems like for me and for most of the class when you hear: play realistically at the top of the scene, don’t try to be funny, you forget you are an improviser and forget all of your skills there.

I felt like there was a lot of this in this class, a lot of the pain that comes of exercising like your trapezoidal muscles or getting your balance right.

Maybe that second analogy is right: as people, we can walk around unbalanced for most of our lives. Our legs still work and we walk pretty well. But later in life, as we mature, we find ourselves more and more unbalanced because of the lack of work we did in our youth, having problems all through our bodies or just hobbling.

As improvisers, we can improvise without playing truthfully necessarily at the top of the scene or without focussing on that muscle, because a lot of what we do as performers is based on ourselves, because we’re not smart enough to think of a lot of random stuff instantly for every situation. But by isolating that “truthful” muscle and making it stronger, we help make our scenes more real and powerful.

But that’s a hard day at the gym as everyone knows, working on balance, working small muscles. It tends to make you very sore and you fall a lot.

So that’s what I did in class, this class.

And then the next day, had a great practice using exactly the muscles I’d worked on here.

Thanks, Will.

Without further ado, the hastily scrawled, incomplete, inaccurate notes of my 501 class, subbed by Will Hines.

***

Your first mission as an improviser is to make realistic scenes, truthful

Don’t make problems where they don’t exist, like passing a fork or opening a refrigerator. Those wouldn’t be a problem in real life so not here either.

Ok to be boring at the top of scenes.

Basic scenework:

Truthful scenes that move forward are key.

Those things are hard because they can oppose each other

A confession is an active choice to make

A want is active, care about something, even if you don’t in real life

Doing something/object work is often helpful. It almost never hurts. Being active is almost always good.

Making the people on stage the center of the action.

Make a decision that the naturalistic conversation you were having actually was much more serious, justify/contextualizing a naturalistic scene five lines in

Not talking about future/past too much

With The Stepfathers, when I come out with an opening line, I’m just trying to be truthful, not funny, just make the audience believe it make sense and hopefully make it involve someone else.

Example, suggestion “Bakery”: “Yeah I’m glad you got me a cupcake, but I’m worried about how I’m going to look.”

Any first line can work but better hit percentage with truth.

Truthful scenes should be what we aim for, looking for more opportunities to make stuff active.

We need an opportunity in our scenes for people to care.

A problem many improvisers run into: You get a game, you play it, but that second game move can seem false or forced.

So to be the best improviser you can be, how can you find something active that is also truthful for that second move.

The move to make something more active will be the same as a second game move

So that way you’ll have something true when playing less real or grounded

Not every scene needs to be like a great play, but you need to have those moves in your satchel, a confession, making something theatrical and important.

We tell level 1 students not to ask questions. Questions are ok, but being surprised is a passive choice. It just makes the people restate their choice. Always better to remember, to contextualize.

Giving a shit, knowing about it, having an opinion, being affected those are all active choices.

You don’t always need to do that but you need to be sensitive about it, those forks in the roads when you come across them.

If you mess up a second-beat, acknowledge it, clean sweep, contain it and do a clean second beat. Don’t let every scene bleed into each other, maintain poise.

Kitchen rules of good improvisers from del close: good improviser accepts offers, makes active choices, good improviser justifies

Doesn’t have to be the whole point of the scene just an aside or one line.

If you do everything right and it doesn’t work, what do you do? Nothing. That’s why we have openings. If you accept every offer, make active choices and justify it will be funny most of the time.

Often the justification is the game, a little piece of dream logic that doesn’t necessarily make sense.

Be funnier, look for places for things to be funny, use your sense.

I have had a boring first beat in a Monkeydick show, but it was real and we ended up blowing it out to be huge. You don’t always want that, but trust your team to make it work.

You’re at the stage now where the rules contradict. Salt is delicious but too much is bad. Use your judgement as to your own ingredients. I can tell you what the ingredients are but we’ll all still have wrong amounts.

A team that knows each other may not use an opening because their months of knowing each other is their opening, knowing that they trust each other to discover the scene.

But even the Stepfathers might at some point. If we could ever agree on one.

***

P.S.- See Will Hines teach people improv on TV right here (pretty cool)!

Status Update

Why am I so resentful of other peoples’ happiness?

This is a question that used to have an easy answer, but now it seems more difficult to examine as I go on.

Looking back at myself and how I have changed in the last two, four, six years, the easy answer to why I resented other people for their happiness was that I was miserable.

Even more than being miserable though, I was in denial of being miserable.

Going back to high school, the experience of opening up to people, of sitting in stupid cinder-block dorm-rooms discussing stupid political things and not getting booed out, of sitting in quad-like courtyards, of making movies and writing things and just beginning to find my voice and gain some respect–it was all such a rush.

I have gabbed and bloviated on here many times about how miserable my high school experience was, a sentiment that almost seems cliche to express nowadays (for me or otherwise), but also just how enclosed.

I was an introvert, a person who kept to myself, I’d wear my same leather jacket every day, my same crappy polo. I’d take tentative, painful steps outside of myself calling up friends, maybe trying to have a conversation with someone and the negative outcome of all the already self-worthlessness (and, by compliment, defensive hatred of others) and my inability to connect would others would only reinforce the notion that I was unlikeable, unloveable, that only I could exist with me in a cloistered setting, talking to myself, patting myself on the back.

“It’s alright.” I would tell myself dissociatively, a voice in my head, stepping outside my emotion. “I am here for you, Nick. I love you. I think you’re good and cool.”

And then that voice would pat me on the back as I’d reach my arm over on the long walk uphill toward the 95th St R train onto my black leather jacket and pat myself literally. At least there was that something in me, taking care of me.

It’s sad to admit looking back at it because it was a sad time. That dissociative voice, something I am sure other people have but which people are loathe to admit (schizophrenia, might be the stigma or diagnosis) followed me for a long time as some sort of way of containing myself or handling my depression. The idea that one is so isolated, so unwilling to lean on others or ask for help, or even able to necessarily, that they have to invent something outside themselves to even exist, to deserve to exist. Rough.

But it’s a good context to look at college in, a place where I still was very unhappy in large parts of my life, even while I was opening up, discovering and experiencing greater happiness than I had ever felt, or what felt like it.

After all, how could I be miserable sitting in a dorm room at 19 with a 40 of Colt 45 (It seemed cooler than the ubiquitous Olde English forties everyone was drinking) in my hands getting drunk in a room full of people who found me interesting and engaging, when 2 years earlier I had only myself for consolation/conversation.

I would cry going home to my dorm freshman year when I realized people were happy to see me, when people wanted to hang out, cry on my pillow at night that I had friends, I would ask people if they were “sure that they wanted to hang out with me” trying to make sure that I wasn’t imposing, taking tentative steps into the social world, beating myself up terribly, hating myself when I made a social mistake when I alienated someone, a bad cue or social move, alienating someone or losing a friend was like losing a toe, I’d never be the same again because I’d probably never have another one.

It was the same philosophy I had about growing my hair, fearing that if I cut my hair from it’s then super-long state, I might never have it again.

Looking at that progression to now, the amazing thing wasn’t my transformation into a fuller, realler more socially able person, a more realized person, but that for the time of that transformation, from coming out into the world of the living, through that pain and self-hatred and intense judgement, I culled small successes and called myself happy.

At the camp I taught at in rural Vermont, there was a blind woman who was also an assistant counselor (whom I would later try to hit on, unsuccessfully) who told me that when she opened her eyes in front a bright light source, especially if she was a little tipsy, she could see light: spots, floating in front of her face. She wasn’t born without vision but it had degraded rapidly as a very young child and she thought she might one day get her sight back, she was intent on it. To her, the small campfire we sat in front of on the camping trip where we were supposed to learn how to lead a camping trip (I later ordered pizza on the camping trip I led), was magic because it was light, something she could see. It was a transcendent experience for her but one she recognized as fleeting.

For me, I looked at those fleeting moments of happiness between the poor dating choices, intense internal/external creative pressure and incredible social adjustment and labeled myself as the happiest I’d ever been in my life, because that is what I knew my life to be.

But somewhere in me, that voice knew otherwise and I knew that because it continued to exist all throughout those college days and afterwards, walking me home on drunk sad nights where I never found the opportunity to make out with that girl in the back of Larry Lawrence, through around 50 film festival rejections including my own school’s, through realizing I now hated the place, the film school, which I had so immersed myself in, which I had so loved, in the wake of a terrible accident. Through uncontrollable rage at issues famlial and personal. Through all of that anger and sadness at others, myself.

I called myself happy throughout those times and projected my hatred at the falsehood of that, the denial of my suffering on to others.

My popular poem at the summer arts camp I attended: “I hate couples”.

There’s a reason, I’ve been attracted to some of my friend’s girlfriends throughout college, stupidly (other than their attractiveness) and it’s that somewhere I wanted their happiness, I resented them for it, I wanted whatever it seemed like they had for myself.

And even when I had a solid relationship and romantic fulfillment (still astonishing to me based on who I was), I was working at a movie theater dealing with the fallout of my film school dreams, clinging desperately to that happiness while utterly miserable, replying to questions like how are you with a smile, but a litany of complaints ending in that I still loved my girlfriend, so things were ok.

That struggle to be okay! To be not a burden! To continue one’s tenuous acceptance into the world!

As I’ve said many times before, I’m happier now (isn’t that crazy to say?) With the help of years of therapy, some yoga, some improv, a vacation, loving parents, weight loss and a good, though somewhat rotating cast of friends, people come up to me and tell me how much I’ve changed. There are the obvious things, like frequenting the salad bar at Whole Foods that I used to rail against as satanic and against the spirit of New York, and the less obvious things like the way I saw a girl who turned me down to date me at a bar the other night and was just cool and flirty and not even self-conscious. I made that interaction easy because I didn’t take the sight of seeing her as some sort of reflection of the inadequacy of myself. In the small things like that, I see improvement.

But in other parts of my world, when I see a couple I know talking in that unironic but very nerdy way about each other, when I feel like I’ve disappointed my friends or teachers or people who believe in me, when I see guys I don’t like get opportunities or ladies I don’t like (probably because they’ve rejected me) popping up as “in a relationship” or talking about how great their boyfriends are, something in me still pops up despite progress despite reason, despite, for spite of much of me, just to hate them, to feel resentful.

To just feel like well if I can’t be full and happy, then fuck you.

In this past week, I had a web series go online that I am proud of my performance in that people complimented me on that I didn’t even know, made by my good friend Charles Rogers. I had two shows and two rehearsals I felt great about and got great notes and great compliments, again unsolicited, even from people who weren’t my friends or close to me, telling me how much I’ve improved or changed, not to mention the “you’re so skinny” stuff. Just the fact that I have an ongoing bit with a friend of mine where I try to make out with her is good news.

The other night I tried dipping a friend out of the blue and she cried out happily grinning when only three or four years ago that same move would have elicited a “this is not funny, put me down” from almost anyone I tried that on (at least, in my mind). I’m becoming more of “a man”.

But well, I still get upset over that pop-up.

Which I guess just means, there’s still somewhere else for me to go.

***

One of the benefits of my essential unemployment and light schedule (other than the fact that I can do ANYTHING, or as my dad would put it “How much are you writing?”) is that I get to take long walks.

I’ll have parts of my day I won’t have a commitment for 6-9 hours in the middle of it.

To loop back to the previous segment, this might have paralyzed the old Nick since it would make him remember the feeling of being trapped, friendless inside his parents’ apartment, or make him confront his unhappiness about his life.

But now, I just fill it with blogging and walks to get food.

So, when I saw that Freddy “King of Falafel and Shawarma” was opening up a non-Queens-based cart for his 2010 double-Vendy award coup of a cart, I decided to just walk there all the way from my house.

My unemployment meant that I no longer had the monthly unlimited MetroCard I was used to, but it just was more of an excuse for me to be more of the walker I always was.

Up Thompson St, Through Washington Square Park, Up University Place and the shops, cut diagonal across Union Square Park past the new playground and then up, up, up the hill of Park Ave, down the cavern of Grand Central and back up through the escalators of the Metlife Building with their Snoopy mascot back through all the way to 53rd St.

Now, I will mention, I was heavily bribed.

While I am fairly sure Freddy, a big swarthy dude, does not watch Bravo or is aware of that world, he was very happy to see enthusiastic customers on his first day out in Manhattan and he kept giving me falafel balls as samples to eat. I think I had like three of them unsolicited before I even ate my meal.

The goal was to NOT have something fattening and terrible so I thought I would get a salad.

But instead what I received in addition to my falafel balls were 5 more spread out with a heaping of fresh chicken shawarma, lebanese pickles, pickled turnips, red onion, hot sauce and two different type of white sauces all over some iceberg lettuce and maybe some tomato.

They even gave me some pita chips which, god, dipping in to that mess, were so, frickin, delicious.

It’s a dangerous thing to put yourself on any part of 53rd St if you’re a halal cart owner as the legendary halal cart, The Halal Guys makes their home on 53rd and 6th (also 7th) and to sit yourself there is to invite comparison to the masters who attract block-long lines on a nightly basis.

But Freddy the King in a way is not trying to compete, offering more add ons, a greater emphasis on falafel (mostly neglected by THG which stick to pure Meat/Rice/Salad/Sauce mostly) and daytime clientele. This is a world, I think, where they can coexist and both be great.

I walked back the 3 miles to my house, making it 6 total for the day, but I knew I had still gone wrong when I ate that Turkey Burger later that night, with three kinds of fries.

Ah well, sometimes, you gotta live.

***

KING OF FALAFEL AND SHAWARMA

Chicken Shawafel Platter w/lebanese pickles, pickled turnips, red onion, tahina and more: $7.00

NW Corner of 53rd St and Park Ave. (weekdays/daytime only)

EM6 to 53rd St/Lexington Ave, NQR45 to 59th St-Lexington Ave.

The Sweet Spot

I have to say, looking back on this moment this morning on my computer, the thing I was most impressed by was how red my hair looked on TV.

Now, I should point out, what was happening in this picture was that I was getting a move called “The Regal Stretch” performed on me by NWA champion pro-wrestler Colt Cabana, a move that involves being thrown on the ground, grabbed around the neck and stretched upwards while an NWA champion puts his knee into your back, thus causing intense pain.

But I am color-blind and people often tell me that my hair is no longer reddish as it was in my youth, a strange disjunction that I still see it that way, the way memory or nostalgia colors even the reality we perceive.

“Nope.” My couch-crasher Jeff told me, looking at the play-back clip. “It’s just a red light. Everyone’s hair looks that way on TV.”

Thanks.

If you want to know how I got into this situation, I am a strange and marginal character named “The Man Behind The Plant” (because I sit behind a plant) on a strange public-access/internet TV show called “The Chris Gethard Show”. The bit that night was that people could call in to see former NWA world champion Colt Cabana do wrestling moves on Chris or any of the other masochists on the show, but unfortunately for me, my improviser friend Shaun Farrugia is going through a bad breakup and too much free time and as a way “to kill the pain” decided to call in to ask Colt to do a move on me, by name and, well, improvisers don’t say no on stage.

After some intense back-pain and some grumpiness, I hobbled home, walking the 3 miles down 8th avenue to pick up my other couch-crasher Teddy from the improv mixer he was at, before walking and walking home.

In parts of my life, I find myself fearless, shameless and in others, paralyzed.

I speak of this abnormally, but it is normal, I’m sure.

I had my first Advanced Study Harold class with Neil Casey over at UCB and I came in to a class that some people freeze up in, a master class with a top performer and approached it fearlessly, a mile a minute, my heart pumping adrenaline off some sort of in-the-groove high causing me to talk a mile-a-minute after class getting food and in the break. People wanted to hang out with me, sent me messages on Facebook asking me advice, my only note I got was for breaking in my own scene because I was having too much fun. Something in me knew after I got in there, maybe after the initial fear, that there was nothing they could do to me now. I had taken so many level 4s at UCB, been rejected so many times. This class wasn’t an audition for anything, just an opportunity to learn. So I tried having fun and did great, I stunned myself in how great I did. I felt like a million bucks that day.

And then the next day I went to sign up for auditions for the UCB’s house teams and even just waiting in line looking around, confidence abandoned me. Here were all these people, nervous and experienced. I was just a number again and everyone seemed more together more belonging. Who was I? I wondered. What chance did I have in this wide sea?

I have had the honor for the past few weeks of being coached in a small team and a larger show by Christina Gausas, the best teacher and performer I’ve ever had the chance to study with (who is, incidentally, also beautiful), who somehow ended up taking me and my best buddy Sebastian under her wing in some miraculous confluence of events that I can’t even seem to recount now. In her workshops that I took, I did the best work of my life playing way outside my comfort zone, finding characters and confidence inside myself that I never knew I had. But in practice, something happened to me, these past few weeks, that was hard to overcome. I couldn’t say what it was? A fear? A pressure? A sense of not belonging or being unworthy? Or having to live up to something? Of being some sort of disappointment.

“It’s like you’re moving in slow-motion.” She told me. “There is a hesitancy. A half-move. And it’s something new.” She said.

“I don’t know, I feel afraid.” I told her.

“Don’t.” She replied, simply.

Christina is an amazing teacher, in that unlike some teachers giving a philosophy, like my other mentor Armando Diaz, she creates an atmosphere in which people can be true and honest, kind of like the way a catalyst works in chemistry: a catalyst doesn’t add some crazy energy to a reaction, it simply lowers the barrier that it would take for a reaction to happen otherwise.

That practice, I broke my boundaries and returned to that place of confidence and did, again, some of the best work of my life.

But I’m a big fan of believing that improv notes are often life notes.

Neil Casey told our class that improv “is not about not doing bad scenes, it’s about recognizing where you are and finding a way to navigate out of it”. That same not could apply for yoga, could apply for life. Noticing where you are, not judging yourself or giving up, finding a way to have fun even in an unexpected or unwelcome situation.

And Christina’s note to me (her notes that often seem like mind-reading) apply to my life as well.

Somehow, from all the confidence I’ve felt through the weight-loss and the way I’ve toned up my body, the way I’ve been continuing to perform well, the improvement I see in myself and the opportunities I get, there’s still that something inside me that isn’t confident, that feels small and unworthy. That thinks this current happiness a sham.

Sebastian (who often complains about not being represented positively enough on this blog) diagnoses it as my 8 years of high school introversion and also it should be noted, my markedly less-positive than remembered college experience, bubbling through, reminding me who it thinks I am.

Or maybe it’s just my singleness, that emptiness in me there.

A chauvinistic joke among my improv friends is that when a female student starts dating a good male improviser, they seem to improve rapidly as if succubus-like absorbing their power (I apologize for the offensiveness of this). But the truth is, just like my old sketch teacher Adam Conover used to say in his stand-up routine, there’s such a thing as “Girlfriend Confidence” or boyfriend confidence for that matter: the sensation of knowing someone loves you, that evolutionarily you are a winner for now, procreating, safe. I think the truth behind the joke for women in the improv community is that it is very, very difficult to be a woman in a small comedy community full of awkward men, especially when you might be interested in some of them, or even just unsure and that in finding a solid significant other, especially one whom you respect, you gain the confidence of not having to deal with being externally sexualized at the same time as being emotionally vulnerable in your practice. And it shows.

For guys though as well, it’s a difficult path, trying to find the right one, trying not to hang your hat on any failure or rejection. Trying to find grace in a small bar full of people after a show.

As I’ve said, dating in the community is kind of like shitting in a kiddy pool: everyone knows you’ve done it and they’ll probably remember even if some different people step into the pool.

So my therapist told me I should go back to online dating, which I’ve considered.

“How long has it been?” She asked.

“July or August. September?” I offered.

“You’re a much different person now then you were then.” She told me.

“It’s a place I went out of desperation and loneliness.” I told her.

“But it betters your odds.” She replied.

Looking back at my profile, at the questions I answered, how I’ve changed is evident, the intense criticism and self-doubt on display there is evident, so willing to beat myself up. I change answers, write new things as I realize the change in myself.

I worry as I look at my “quiver matches” about having to put myself out there again, talking to these people, taking a chance on something that could beat my confidence, that could make me feel terrible again.

But the note is that confidence breeds confidence. Life is unwritten and all we have is an initiation an attempt at connecting with someone.

No one knows where the scene will go.

So act confidently, knowing that no one has any more idea than you.

As Chris Gethard said:

“When you get up there, what you do could be the greatest thing that’s ever been done, or totally terrible. No one knows.”

Or as my sister said:

“You’re the dude. It’s up to you to initiate. So just be confident like the handsome cardigan-ed man you are.”

Life back into improv.

I did some good scenes yesterday.

Let’s see if I can do some good life.

***

It was a Sunday brunch, I was fighting a two-whiskey hangover (sorry for my pussi-tude) and I was look for something delicious for the day, a treat.

Faicco’s was the obvious choice, that magical oasis where a man can get a three-meal sandwich the size of a long forearm for 10 dollars, somehow located in the yuppified Greenwich Village/West Village boundary.

But Perilla just caught my eye, wandering down Jones St.

It was another morning where I had gotten up early and I had planned to read my backlog of New Yorkers and had yet again failed miserably to do so (I keep one in my mailbox for self-shaming purposes).

I saw the Spicy Duck Burger on the brunch menu, as it was my habit to check out the menus of restaurants I do not know as it is the habit of some people to stare up at blimps in the sky: admiring, with an eye to read their purpose.

As a non-carnivore, I am always interested in burger replacements, especially with alternative meats (most Veg-burgs I’ve had have been mealy or rubber-y) and this one came with fries, a forbidden and sometimes allowed treat for me.

So I waited out that extra time between 11:20 and 12, like I used to in my anti-breakfast days, until I sat at the bar, while a hipster emo-couple in their 30s came in with their hipster-emo baby.

My burger came shortly after the couple and was delicious.

Duck can be a little too fatty for me sometimes, difficult to eat in its dark, veiny-ness. But ground up and liberally spiced, the duck was perfect material for a burger replacement, with thick broadly-cut fries coming out fresh and a generous, sweet-seeded brioche, which I tore off much off, to preserve my weight-sensing sanity.

My only complaint (the price was high but reasonable for the atmosphere/quality) was that all of my burger toppings came on the side. For shame, restaurant. When I enter you I do not want a democracy. I want a tyranny of your choice as chef, deciding my experience.

If necessary, I can say the safe word of “allergies”, but other-wise, give me the stomach-pounding I paid for, no choice, just submission.

Rawr.

***

PERILLA

Spicy Duck Burger w/Pepper Jack Cheese and Spiced Fries- $16

Cornelia St bet. West 4th and Bleecker Sts.

1 to Christopher St. ACEBDFM to West 4th St.

Neil Casey Advanced Study Harold Notes Day One

Alright, so I have done this once before.

I was lucky twice: mostly to take level 4 at the UCB with Neil Casey and then to a lesser extent to pass the class (my 3rd attempt at passing that level at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and only successful one).

For those of you who don’t know, Neil Casey is a performer, director and writer at UCB who is generally considered to be at the top of those fields there. He rarely teaches classes nowadays and even more rarely full-length improv classes.

When I took his level 4, I made a decision I would write all the notes he gave down for posterity and then later to share with my friends who couldn’t take the class. This ended up being a popular idea both for my classmates and my improv friends and I received thanks even from performers I respect.

So, I now find myself incredibly luckily in Neil Casey’s Level 5 (Adv. Study Harold) class which sold out in 60 seconds. I am going to employ the same methodology, trying to write down and post my notes, for my own help and others.

I should note that I have other incredible improvisers that have taught me (Christina Gausas and Armando Diaz come to mind) but that their notes are highly personal, spectral, going like bullets past your consciousness into your acting in indelible magic.

These are not those notes because I cannot recreate magic. I can give a man’s philosophy though and here are those notes.

A final disclaimer: these are hastily scrawled notes, grammar is barely existent, there are misspellings, much may not make sense, or might be patently wrong. Use this for what it is and I apologize for what it’s not.

***

This class- How to figure out how to do no bs improv stuff and still make fun stuff happen.
Maintain emotional commitment while not a boring conversation
Invocation as opening
Pass an object, a story why its importaht then a philosophy based on
Character or truth
McManus Harold-
Playing you as yourself and you’re not at your house, but looking for game
Don’t deny but keep tone/personality
There’s plenty of time when it does serve the scene to play goofy characters but it’s never your best work so try not to do that
Let’s not be pissy to each other without a reason, only people who have slept with each other are that pissy
Improv monsters need to be shot like:
Raised voice above it all people criticizing are improv monsters
If we can keep tone realistic, play versions of ourselves and other people
Don’t let your silly goofballs out
Don’t treat your ideas at arms length, talk about what we want to hear you talk about, deal with ideas, as opposed to reestablishing
There are so many ways to play against our conceptions- the attitude of an actor vs. background actor
Keep pace slow and steady
The minute the characters are self-aware it loses hilarity.
Never tip your hand in a scene, it really takes the air out of the scene
If we have a three-dimensional game, choose it over a two-dimensional one, it’s richer/truer to play.
No take backs in improv, if I mishear you and do something different it’s a denial unless you are positive the audience has seen something
It brings the show to a full halt, we want to get through those moments without apologizing for them
Someone calls you the wrong name, “my friends call me ___”
Acknowledge that it happened and move past it
I want to be able to see you roll with problems without dwelling on them
I never like to see a scene go badly with 6 people on the back line especially in the group game slot
When I see a bad 2 person scene and everyone is on the back, all sink together with the shop, it keeps you honest.
At worst case you’ll all have a thing to laugh about at best you make it good
You guys should be in such a hurry to be in each others bad scenes, even to fail harder. I want to see you struggle like rats, it’s more fun to fail together then to let people hang.
Don’t be sensitive to side-coaching, being a good improviser isn’t about not doing bad scenes it’s about navigating out of them
Everyone does them even me
The trick is getting out of these traps
The best improvisers in the world regularly shit the bed on stage, you just don’t notice because they don’t betray it to the audience and their teammates help you the fuck out
It’s always better to remember than invent, play the person you remember rather than something random, remember knowing someone who was like something wacky, an analogue, it will make your reactions truer and vice versa, try to remember something real you can play even if it’s absurd, otherwise we’re in weird land and itll never be funny
The crazier it is the more I need you to play it real and that’s something you can always adjust during a scene.
If we don’t give a shit in a scene, the scene is meaningless until we justify that with a philosophy
Find a real analog for situations, i.e: Taking a first date to a hanging=analog, taking to a baskin Robbins, etc
Starting scenes with “well here we are at the ____” is fine, the audience is grateful, but as advanced improvisers we can be more elegant.
An over thought second beat happens, which is fine, but back line if you remember what is fun about the first beat I want to see you fail trying to bring back the magic
We see people all the time, pros, be like “well it will be my turn next to do good improv” so don’t be like that! Die fighting!
Even if the scene is never going to work, instead of having two half- laughs we’ll have 6 half-laughs and that’s better for our show.
If we’re in a bad scene and it’s not working you can end graciously. But you can also come in there and take some of the blows.
Maybe it’ll just look cool, who knows?
In these classes and in improv you are not expected to not get noted and do scenes that suck
You’re always going to get in the sand-trap so are you going to give up or get the wedge and try to get it out?
I don’t like to see people give up
I’m not side coaching to say this is terrible, just to help you get out of it.
It’s not that anything’s ruined when I say it’s not working, just let’s get in there helpful.
The difference between Good teams vs. bad teams is not not stepping in shit just how fast they get it off.

Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)

This was my morning, this morning.

I read an article recently on the eccentricities of those who live by themselves, how it’s freeing, but also promotes strange and/or anti-social habits in those who do so since, free from external judgement, they are both free to be themselves and free to indulge in the baser parts of their personalities.

I have many living quirks of my own, which is one reason living with equal-pay roommates has worked generally poorly for me, but among the less-gross ones is just listening to music every morning in the shower and, yes, sometimes singing along.

Now, that there are two other guys staying with me, crashing on my couch and in a little coffin-like structure carved out of my ceiling; doesn’t matter, fuck them.

This is my house, broski. I enjoy my music in the morning. It warms me up somehow, reminds me of words, clears my mind to a place where it’s not focussing on the dopamine still retreating from my skin or the last night’s dinner (or booze) in my mouth or any of those terrible things.

You move to it, you have your reaction. You rise from yourself.

And if my couch-crashers don’t like it, they can wake up earlier.

Which is of course, moot, because they don’t complain about it at all and it isn’t even that loud.

Maybe I just need to feel competitive with someone, early enough, or whenever. Maybe I need to gain a little status sometime, get a little edge.

My sophomore roommate and former best friend John Weeke, who was tall and beardy and contemplative and a total goddam mooch would tell me that he thought the universe would be organized like baseball eventually, wherein humanity bonds together around a common team, itself and its preservation and nationalities and squabbles are forgotten by the binding pressure of an external threat, like New Yorkers in the street after a World Series win,

He believed in the necessity of the adversary as a bonding force.

I don’t know what happened to him.

I believe in singing in the shower in the morning or, at least, letting Pandora take me where it does.

Today, it took me to the above-mentioned song, which was part of a funny sketch, my peer and funny lady Kelly Buttermore wrote as a satire of the esotericism of Time-Life song collections. It was a funny sketch and a funny moment, which leads me to mention two things in rapid succession:

1. As readers of this blog may know, I am frequently lost within the tangle of my own tangents, inspired at any moment to go off and wanting to talk about something else, delicious that is mention that I want to explore but at the same time wanting to cling or tether myself back to where I was to finish my thought–OH if I could ONLY finish my thought!–an arduous journey made even sillier by the fact that conversation is more about the connection between people than it is any one brilliant idea. So I’ll try to finish what I’m saying, but no promises.

2. This moment of seeing/hearing this song on my iPhone in the morning, the crux of Kelly’s funny sketch, brings to mind the idea of provenance, coincidence, a cosmic/divine realization or memory that may seem like a personal intervention by something greater than you. Coincidences do happen, frequently, and the math is always there, if unattractive, to look in to the chances of even the things we think unlikely. It is possible to believe in fate or lady luck or omnipresence or whatever force you want to see guided in the world. But it is also interesting and I think rarely discussed, to think about the kind of people we are, I am, that we/I allow things to bang up against our subconscious and stir something, engaging in a journey of reminiscence and thought. If you’re walking about to get a scoop of ice cream and the Beatles come on, telling you to “get back to where you once belonged”, do you take it as a sign? Are they reminding you to mind your diet through some omnipresence or is your subconscious trying to guide you, manifesting in your world like it would through a dream, in fragments of your experience? Or both provenance and consciousness, meeting somewhere in the middle like the Sistene Chapel?

Anyway.

In this moment, I was struck by the song, thought of Kelly’s sketch and flashed to my life and a show I had had on Sunday. Armando Diaz, my teacher and a man I greatly respect, says that every sketch show is a train wreck putting it together up until the last minute, from Saturday Night Live onward. My sketch group “Fish Reynolds” was no different, standing in the lobby of the Magnet Theater trying silently to rehearse our lines as another sketch group filmed bits inside the theater and all of us also tried to drink seltzer and do the sort of silly bits and in-jokes to each other that is the enjoyable-comedian version of procrastination. By the time we got in the theater it was 45 until our show, trying to run fully our frist rehearsal, few people were off book and we were figuring out tech, desperately-strung as we went along.

The show was silly. It was on Oscar night. There were 6 people in the audience and the biggest laugh I got in the show was in pointing out that most of those audience members were performing in the show after ours.

It was pretty unprofessional. But it was fun.

It seems strange to say over and over again, but there’s so much power in knowing that whatever happens, the people who get on stage won’t hate each other when they’re off it.

My team for it’s silly name and sillier people are a bunch of people who seem to like and respect each other. I feel happy and relaxed to be a part of them. Even though Armando directs us, which is a great honor in itself and should be pressure-filled, I feel loose and silly with my friends, capable of making bigger funnier choices, capable of bringing in sketches when I can and not feeling too hard on myself when I don’t. I think he’s a great teacher, a great director, for this reason. That he seems genial and relaxed about things, so everyone else tends to be too. He’s self-effacing and so you feel that need to be something gradually fall away.

As my very good yoga teacher mentioned today, even she checks, physically looks when she’s doing poses to see that she’s doing them right and my class is full of other teachers from the studio who just want to learn from her (I obviously am sweating to keep up).

Knowing that there’s humor there, that we’re having fun, that you’re reaching a place of balance or enjoyment. That’s easy to lose in the pressure to perform, to be immediately great, et cetera.

Knowing to ease up on yourself, to not seek perfection but to enjoy the work and treat yourself with some humor.

And know that you’re doing it.

Just like writing, performance, sex or art, it can easy to forget that: It’s supposed to be fun, so enjoy.

Which is to say I’m screwing all of my sketch group Fish Reynolds.

Or to say otherwise that a great teacher or director can remind you to relax, to be yourself, not to judge, or to bring you back to that place. But that’s always a gift I can give myself. Forgiveness, compassion, excitement.

These things sound so trite.

And inside me, a 17 year-old ponytailed high-school is kind of sneering about how lame it is.

But inside that, he’s kinda jealous.

Yeah.

***

I’ve grown as a performer.

I knew this when I went into an ADR session, which is something where you have to try to match your own dialogue because the sound people were not able to get a good enough quality on set, so you go back and try to speak the way you did in the best takes of something.

I watched myself in a web series I acted in for my friend Charles Rogers and was really impressed. I was making fun, silly choices and branching outside my normal shell-shocked character to weird places of engagement with another actor. I felt free to make choices. A teacher told me that “acting is highly controlled improvisation” and it just clicked with me, along with remembering Jay O. Sanders when he acted in my thesis film and seeing him try to make a different choice for every take so that the director had a range of choices to work with.

It was nice and I was actually able to take Charles’s compliment when it was given to me. I’m still not my friend Sebastian’s idol Chris Farley (“Bro, I just watch the best-of DVD just to remember what I’m reaching for.” he has told me more than once, walking down the homeless-filled stretch of 8th Avenue by Penn Station), but I’m getting better.

ADR is still hard though, trying to recapture a performance while matching your mouth, sitting in a small square booth. In these moments, an actor-ish person gets to see their idiosyncrasies in full light, trying to match their “ums”, their pauses and the strange way they twisted the words in the nonsensical heat of that moment.

Before it happened though, I went to Chelsea Market to sit, buy a caramel brownie (imagine me saying that with the weight that a fat-kid character in my sketch show said the phrase “meat-ball meat-za” and you’ll get the longing, shame and desire in my voice for those things) and eat some delicious dinner. I went to Chelsea Thai Wholesale because, even though Chelsea Market has rapidly yuppified from its initial gentrified standpoint, Chelsea Thai Wholesale seems blessedly untouched with their racks of Sriracha, lack of lunch specials and actual Thai people hanging around making fun of your dithering.

When I kept trying to choose items, trying to shy away from the General Tso’s knockoff they had which I knew would hang badly with the broken-promise brownie I had promised myself I’d only eat half of (I failed), the woman behind the counter kept pointing out that if it was her she’d eat spicier and so I ordered the Pad Gra Prow with brown rice, which came, the sumptuous visual to my table.

“Your number is number one.” She told me as I placed my order, then a smile– “Yes, you can feel good about that.”

It was spicy indeed with basil and toothy jalapenos, fresh stir-fried red peppers and brown rice, oh the brown rice! Usually it’s the same anonymous small coffee+cream-colored beads that adorn my chinese food or my extra-dollar lunch specials, but here the brown rice is sticky, grain out, together in clumps, flavorful and real and unlike regular brown rice, which maintains its flavor inside of sauces, the brown rice let itself be seasoned by all the bold vegetables and mix and intermingle with them. In the end I was left with a small stack of jalapenos, along with a neat pile of some of my manhood, and a full and contented belly.

ADR happened. I had a show.

And then, full, home.

***

CHELSEA THAI WHOLESALE

Pad Gra Prow (w/Thai Brown Rice)- $8.95 (w/tax)

Inside Chelsea Market (9th Avenue bet. 15th and 16th Sts)

ACE to 14th St-8th Avenue

Tell Me Your Dreams

I found this in the waiting room of my therapist’s office perusing when my therapist was 1-2 minutes late for a session, coming down the hallway, a fact that is inconsequential (I have been late and I sometimes run-over), but a fact that I lord over her.

The book was there but the placement was my own.

I frequently noticed it, perusing the shelf of cast-offs and maybe strategically placed therapeutic books, it was hard to know: kismet or misplacement? A thoughtless collection of what people could find, or just a random selection of whatever anyone was too in distress, to distracted to remember to take with them after a 45-minute session of, perhaps, baring their souls.

Anyway, this book seems pretty tragically out of place in a therapist’s office, with all of its intimation of a concept of “womanliness” and strange pandering to a sub-sect of illusory middle-school girls that I imagine do not exist outside of television.

But who knows, maybe that’s what people want. A topic starter, a place of discussion.

I once saw a book in my therapist’s room that said “Lesbian Psychologies” and thought it said “Lesbian Pathologies”. What did that inspire in or say about me that I found that there, just a certainty of a point of view, a subconscious gesture, what? I think I had just been defensive or unsure about how I related to queer culture. What was that moment that happened that would not have otherwise?

Nowadays, when I go to my therapist, half of my time is spent talking about girls. Therapy can feel like some sort of wishful make-out session, some sort of pow-wow in a closet or sleep-over looking out to what might come of my love-life this new-found (somewhat) attractiveness and who’s a good idea or bad idea. These moments are like milk chocolates for me or the Sour Patch Kids that my best friend Frank kept offering me while we watched the Studio Ghibli adaptation of The Borrowers: sweet and quick and empty, fun but requiring self-control.

It is an illusion to think one’s problems are solved or that one cannot improve their psyche or to see progress as itself some sort of pedestal. Back in the depths of earlier depression, I would insist to my friends and others at my happiness and relative fine-ness when I was losing hair at how unhappy I was at my post-production job, when I was crushed after not getting a movie-theater promotion, when I wanted to be okay so desperately in the months following my break-up.

Now looking back at those moments, it’s easy to see how unhappy I was. I didn’t want to be a post-production coordinator but felt obligated to, didn’t want to work in a movie theater, but needed some sense of worth, I wasn’t ready to love someone else, but so desperately wanted the pain of a first love to go away.

My friend Sebastian often accuses me of being maudlin (he also frequently complains about how he is portrayed on this blog) and in this case he is correct, I am being maudlin.

But I am also letting myself experience those emotions from a distance with the fondness of some completion. Like the shows I can look back on, I can either smile or cringe. And if I’m lucky and I think of a moment, some real emotion might be released into me, a gift that no video-game or twitter-feed can bestow.

As I’ve said before here, the great gift I’ve found through therapy, yoga, improv, growing-up, life, what-have-you, were the lessening of expectations; to stop being so hard on myself and just notice where I am. To just treat the journey as the fun thing and to not worry about “the big picture”. Life, I seem to have decided, is pretty great for me right now (despite my relative lack of love or solid career), I guess, I have become a fuller, more self-confident person to the point where I believe that those things will come in time. That as long as I continue to have fun, wherein my fun is self-improvement in writing and comedy, everything else will come or not.

Already, I’ve gotten numerous performance opportunities on New York stages, I’ve gotten cast in my friends sketches and gotten to put up my own. I’ve even gotten to work with performers I idolize like Christina Gausas and learn from them, which was and still is unimaginably great for me, from starting out.

To be all buddhist-y about it, the journey is the goal.

But all my friends and parents say otherwise as they ask me to know what I want to do or be again. In film school, this question was answered for me, which is in one way a relief, but in another way led to a massive meltdown and certain unhappiness as I got rejected from 50 film festivals, the only recourse to which was: “Well if you really wanted to do this, it wouldn’t break you.” But then what if it did?

On his “WTF with Marc Maron” podcast, comedian Todd Glass comes out publicly and talks about the use of the word “gay” as derogatory and why people so cling to wanting to use it, despite the negative effects and connotations on others.

“I don’t think that those are very terrible people or even that they don’t realize it in some part of them.” Glass says. “I think it’s just that it makes them feel uncomfortable, because if they’re wrong, it means they have to change.”

Change is painful, it’s something we avoid. I’ve talked on this blog repeatedly about “homeostasis” the biological process through which our bodies try to preserve order and how this is the same things our minds and natures try to preserve as well. When I had to get out of film school and look at the world, when I had to get out of a relationship and do the same. Another thing I talk about is how the most painful moment for me is the schism in which I understand the reality I thought I perceived was not the one others’ perceive, which could be when a girl isn’t in to me, or when I get fired from a job, or when I realize in a certain situation I  am friend-less and alone and one way to look at these situations is the mental crux of “Am I going crazy?” but another is to look at these as moments where one is forced to confront the necessity of change and that is truly frightening.

So that’s what I worry about as my roommate Teddy hits up famous people on Twitter asking for jobs, because he tells me “[he] wants to make the whole world laugh.” That’s what I worry about when my friend Sebastian talks about Chris Farley, or my father or Frank asks me “what do you want out of this?” meaning comedy or writing or the rest.

I am afraid that the zen or calm that I have found, that I am comfortable in, is just another stalking-horse for a defensiveness, a clinging to the moment that has already past in the guise of a peace about the present.

That having no great dreams is a defense against having any at all.

And that is the difficult thing I suppose, to asses that moment, scary as it is.

Because how ever comfortable I am in my life, lady-less, in-therapy, without an even paycheck:

I like it.

***

I went down to North Carolina this past week to perform in a show that my only bit was standing behind a plant and clicking next on a projector and that too was cut for time.

But I still had a blast.

I was holed up with a bunch of comedians as a part of the North Carolina Comedy Arts Festival, sleeping 5-6 to a hotel suite, leaflet-ing downtown Chapel Hill, getting sized up amused-ly by the ladies used to frattier boys in a way that seemed to take some of the pep out of my step.

But I ate boneless wings, found an incredibly comprehensive (and expressly forbidden-by-my-lifestyle) beer store in a close-by strip-mall and shared stories with a bunch of groovy people, screwing around and making friends.

Even though France was amazing and liberating and somewhat lonely, I was doing a lot of work on myself out there, you know? Wandering the streets of Paris, thinking about improv (I am insane, right?) and my friends back home, trying to unpack every moment cross-wired with my old relationship, trying to forgive myself for things I had displaced on to the veneer of strength and confidence you get from co-dependency. I was largely successful at that and it was amazing, but it felt less like a wacky vacation than an immersive experience.

But this was a fun-fuck-around moment, the college trip to Vegas I’d never gotten, loaded with funny comedians who suddenly thought I was cool, whom suddenly I could talk to and hang out with and just shoot the shit.

We searched for BBQ places, I helped pick out a bunch of prizes for a rowdy North Carolinan crowd and I got to hear a really funny dude do a preview of his one-man show for us in the front row. Amazing, the 10-hour ride back may have been the best part of the trip, from something I was once terrified of.

It’s nice finding that dynamic of people, finding some mutual respect, but also just drinking and working and being exhausted and getting wild. It felt like a film set, without all the existential “will my life amount to anything” baggage.

I came back refreshed and ready and happier than ever that I had my life at home as 2 days felt like I had been gone for 2 weeks.

By the way, watch The Chris Gethard Show tonight at 11pm on MNN in Manhattan or at http://www.thechrisgethardshow.com or download the podcast on iTunes.

And look closely for that man behind the plant.

He’s pretty happy, just to be there.

***

Is there such a thing as a Soy Cappucino?

My server at  MUD Coffee seemed confused too.

You see, I am a fan of Cappuccinos over lattes (a trip to Italy in my adolescence solidified this as did my recent trip to France) but I am also, and let’s be honest here, one of the fartiest people in the world.

It’s true! I’m sorry ladies! I’m kind-of-sorry my friends! I cannot help it. I am slightly lactose-intolerant (I think?!) and I don’t really care.

So I do that d-baggy thing and order soy drinks sometimes and this time I did.

It was filled with that weird soy-y foam. But it was light and kind of nice.

I got weird looks from the servers, but no more than someone with half-a-pair-of-pants who might walk in to an east village coffee shop.

It lifted me up after a night of drinking and just getting back from a collective 3-days-12-hours-of-sleep and a big trip down the coast.

I was awake during brunch with my family.

And I didn’t fart…

Well, maybe a few times.

***

MUD COFFEE

Soy Cappucino- $4.00 (in a mug, to stay)

9th St bet. 1st and 2nd Aves.

6 to Astor Pl. R to 8th St-NYU. F to Lower East Side- 2nd Ave.

***

POST SCRIPT-

Oh yeah, I hear I’m back on TV. Here’s a deleted scene brought to my attention by someone, forget who.

I think it is unfortunately called “Nobody Likes A Unibrow”.

Yep.

Enjoy!

Shit Gets To You

This was taken from the window of Lafayette French Pastries over on Greenwich Avenue.

I almost passed it after noticing it, just deciding to go on with my day. After all, Greenwich Avenue is one I pass through often, a quirky diagonal that I use to walk home from the Magnet on late weeknights.

But it just stuck as I saw it, it looked to egregious.

And after all, I do have a blog I have to supply pictures for.

But what really got me was that this store that already was calling out the extremely questionable logo “Say No to Obamacare and YES to COOKIECARE!” in it’s window along with an article from what looks like Talking Points Memo was the same goddam bakery that almost got rioted for making “Drunken Negro” cookies 3 years ago in “honor” of Obama!

I have linked to the article right there but I will include the picture just for goddam effect.

So, after a giant stink about this whole thing, you think the guy would back down. You think after a boycott of his business along with the VERY few supporters of racism and/or hardcore republicans in the quaint corner of the West Village that Lafayette French Bakery is located in, this guy would back down and stop doing stupid shit?

But no, he puts that ridiculous goddam poster in his window and I have to stop and take a picture.

Even though it has nothing to do with me.

Even though I have practice now calming myself and trying to take in the world as I see it.

Even though it’s cold outside and I have places to go.

Sometimes, you just need to feel it and fucking get pissed. To be in your emotions and screw everything else.

And accept that it won’t always make sense.

Today, I woke up on Valentine’s Day, Valentine-less.

Now, I have only had a Valentine who was a person who I was “with” (one time a girl gave my flowers away, another time a girl called another guy up to literally take her home from my apartment) one time in my life.

But for once, I didn’t feel crappy.

I looked at myself in the mirror and could see the outline of my abs, for the first time in memory. I weighed fine despite the orgiastic amount of dark chocolate I had consumed the previous evening. I had recent memories of girls flirting with me or at least looking at me in a different, more considering type of way.

I also just felt happier about my life and where I was in it. I’d let go of (most of) the terrible expectations of myself. I had a good community full of friends and something of a loose schedule in which I could fill my life. I also, through Yoga as well as Improv, had learned to feel the change in my body and mind, checking in with myself, becoming more patient, but also allowing myself to have fun.

Even my family problems had more distance than they’d had before as I allowed myself to see them from a distance, accept them and know whatever was going on would happen without the violent helplessness I used to toss into the mix.

It was nirvana by no means, but it was something to wake up with on a date-less Valentine’s day.

Until I thought about 10pm and realized I’d probably be date-less at Mustang Sally’s, handing out chocolates to girls at the bar without dates trying to get them home with me (where my 40-ish couch crasher is, which would be a problem, if it ever even got to that, which it wouldn’t).

Or when I sat in the back of a show at the Magnet getting angry at student-performers for not giving a good show, since the fate of the theater depends on them, which is ridiculous, because it’s a make-em-up class-show in a 40-discarded-terrible-movie-seat improv comedy theater.

Or even when I sat in the back of my first ever Advanced Study event at UCB and saw someone who had gotten passed out of a class I hadn’t and was lit anew with the fire of anger at my teacher, I was better than this fuck!, I wanted to scream, you goddam fucking moron!

And there I was. I had passed. My teacher was not a moron, anyway; I learned a lot in his class and he made his decision. Everyone was friendly here. and it was a great time.

But sometimes, even when you get happy with yourself for those changes, those pounds, how less hard you are on yourself, it’s good to just remember that there’s always a lot of fucked-up inside of you to go around.

Or at least inside of me.

I used to be proud of this kind of thing, righteous anger, I’d own in the moment, defend it in the moment after, it still has that force of justice or some sense of a burden lifted or self-validation.

But really, what am I doing?

I told my therapist today (and a girl over the weekend) that the difference between me now and me a year ago is that I’m not in as emotionally compromised a position. When we are centered and something pushes us, we have our normal reaction–happy, sad, angry, whatever–and then we step back and make a rational call, to the best of our sense, as to what our action should be.

i.e: If someone pushes me in a bar, I will probably get scared and angry, but then rationality will set in and I know I don’t want to fight anyone so I will try to apologize and extricate myself from the situation as well as I can.

But, if someone pushes me in that same bar and I am emotionally compromised–maybe angry at my family, sad at my loneliness, afraid for my life–if I have big, unresolved things going on, maybe I’ll push the guy back. Maybe I’ll yell at him. Maybe I’ll cry. I don’t know. The point is my reaction would be immediate and irrational.

There are degrees of this too not just in the physical choices or active choices we make outwardly, but in the inward choices we make for ourselves.

If that guy pushes me in the bar and I’m fine and we apologize to each other and everything’s good then I go on with the rest of my night relatively unfazed, barring shenanigans.

But if I’m not in a good place and that happens, maybe I don’t fight, but maybe I just get really angry, get really sad, maybe I dwell on strong emotions unhealthily.

There was a good article I read on burn victims and virtual reality treatment, which is more effective than morphine. The thought is if you are “in” your pain and can’t escape it, you shine a spotlight on it that makes it more pronounced in your psyche. But if you can focus outwardly or on other things, despite its presence (like even virtual reality), you can learn to manage something backgrounded.

The point that I am trying to make is that I still do tons of stupid things and I also still feel lots of stupid ways, I hold grudges, get angry, give rants. Also being defensive is another way around that, literally, you are trying to ignore someone or something trying to help you because it is too painful to admit your own mistakes or perceived failures.

The only way it seems like for this is acceptance and just noticing everything, bit by bit, as you live your life.

And also being okay with how fucked up I am.

So, I’ll go see people on Valentine’s Day. I’ll probably sit in that bar with those chocolates. I’ll try not to be pissed off at my old teacher, or at least try to remember how pointless it is.

I might even try to forget that stupid racist republican fuck over at Lafayette French Pastry, since he probably can’t even help the way he is, if he’s that far gone.

All of that and try to have fun.

Which I seem to be doing a pretty god job of.

Most days, anyway.

***

This sandwich was good.

I’ve been going to Better Being Underground over in the West Village forever and have plugged it many times here, but it really is close to my heart.

It’s secret, it’s hidden, the sandwiches are really good and they always give me extra pickles.

Other than the Fu Man Chu (a Korean BBQ-chicken Sriracha-Kimchi-wich) and the Whole Wheat St. Luke’s (a big piece of fried chicken with Peppercorn mayo and pickles), I had been looking for a new sandwich to get from there to expand my sandwich-y horizons.

This one comes pretty close to those two all-stars.

I wandered in, as usual. they complimented me on how good I look, as usual. They gave me a ton of pickles, as usual. And I ordered this.

Macerated (Smashed?) Chickpeas, some lemon, dill, mint, garlic, tomato, red onion and Kashekeval cheese on pumperknickel bread.

A bizarre combo.

But an intensely delicious one, kind of like a Mediterranean sandwich explosion, greasy, bound by the dark Rye bread, full of crunch and juice from the pressed tomatoes.

Mix and match it half-and-half with the Fu Man Chew.

That’s what I do.

Blue.

***

BETTER BEING UNDERGROUND

The Kashekval (Chickpeas, Kashkeval Cheese, Tomato, Red Onion, Lemon, Dill, Harissa)- $10 bucks

St. Lukes Pl. bet. 7th Ave South and Hudson Sts in the basement of a brownstone.

1 to Houston St. ACEBDFM to West 4th Sts.

Notes

Why am I so obsessed with giving other people notes?

It comes out in obvious and less obvious ways.

In my improv classes or in film school or even high school, when I knew the answer to the question I would say it, I would raise my hand high up in high school, yearning, aching to answer the question, my one chance to talk and be right in a world where for all other intents and purposes I was wrong or othered. In improv classes and rehearsals I struggle not to note or give advice to my teammates, my classmates, others barreling past my own gentle reminders that not only is it a huge blow to one’s ego to receive an “I’m better than you”-style note from a peer, but that I also supremely do not know what I am doing.

In film school I had no such qualms, acting like an expert and even going to classes to give speeches on the silliest things: what to get out of film school, the importance of script supervisors, the screenwriting process and of course, snarkily talking about who was good or not.

Obviously, engaging in these stupid conversations in film school, I found myself barely involved with the film industry on my way out, because when I found myself rejected from 50 film festivals with my thesis, out of a job and working at a movie theater after a 300,000 dollar education, I realized that the confidence I had formed was some sort of monstrous inverted pyramid, based only on the spark of “voice” I had mistaken for virtuosity, destined unto its own collapse.

You’d think I had learned my lesson out of film school, going into the improv community that had taken me in, like it takes in so many other broken, insecure people. But of course, as humans, we are universally slow to see our own folly and slower still to change. Such is the stuff of Kurosawa and Shakespeare.

But giving notes with conviction and some amount of eloquence (the fruit of my writing) is a powerful position to put yourself in and one that people respect especially if those notes are not delivered with the condescension or silliness of a taunt or even any heavy emotion and are placed instead into an article of faith. In fact, people sometimes desire that because they struggle and are insecure and desperately want help. After all, what they are doing is impossible and demanding and silly. It’s hard to be a clown.

When I have given notes to people either in improv or film school, it is with that scary conviction of that I know what’s right (even though I most certain do not) but also always as an article of faith. In the logic part of my mind, there is never any reason to give a note to someone about their performance or film or writing if they do not show obvious promise or talent. It is only when I think I see that splinter in their foot, that thorn in their side that they cannot see that I attempt to alert them, even if I don’t have the skill to remove it, even if I don’t even know I don’t know whether it actually is a thorn or splinter.

So why do I do this?

When I was a film student I was not an expert on making films. Now that I am an improviser, I am, as my friend Austin Kuras said, “in the high school part of improv, where your friends now might not be your friends later until things settle down”.

Two explanations are forthcoming, both rooted in my psychology.

The first would be the desire to change myself that I so desperately want, a vestigial notion left over from my youth. When I wanted to yell out the answer in high school, it is because I wanted to be acknowledged. I wanted in this one area to be cool, to be big, to make myself as such. When I gave notes to my classmates then or later or later, it could because I didn’t like who I was, where I was and so instead of changing or having the strength to address myself, it was easier to see your own faults projected in others, to see that hurdle you thought someone else could cross, et cetera and gain some comfort and strength that at least you could change them.

Similarly, this frequently leads to frustration when people don’t change or refuse to take notes, mine or others, because I see in their intransigence my own inability to conquer the flaws in myself.

Note: this is the same low-self-esteem/victimhood philosophy that lead me to date girls with low self-esteem, because I thought I would show them how great they were and they would in return love the un-loveable: me.

The other, more altruistic reason (if not similarly misguided) is the attempt to correct the past in myself.

The same reason I was once a summer camp councilor for adolescents (a mixed experience in its own right) was because I wanted to tell 14, 15, 16-year olds that life wasn’t so goddam terrible even if it seemed like it now. I remember so vividly in the terrible parts of high school or film school or now comedy the huge mistakes I made, the horrific lows that I could not (and maybe even should not) have avoided but which I wish someone with some sort of authority could have been there effectively to tell me: “I’ve been there, quite recently. And it’s alright.” This is a very juvenile philosophy, a sort of “Catcher in the Rye”-style notion, but that sort of thought process isn’t past me entirely yet.

Having lacked a superhero or a cool magic-user to pop out of my Young Adult Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels of my youth, I wanted to be the one that popped into these peoples’ lives.

Maybe that is part of the impulse still. Just wanting to be there to let them know that someone sees what they are going through and sympathises. To congratulate them earnestly, without the sugariness of sentimentality, at their successes in their failures. To remind them knowingly of the failures in success. When I do give notes well or am proud of myself, it is in these moments, where it looks like someone could use support, just like in an improv group scene, knowing when to make the move in life.

What do I make of all this?

As I said I know nothing, or know little. I am still vulnerable to those looooooo-ong conversations about comedy or film where I sound like an expert or argue like one. Often I enjoy them. But I am not a fool and in the moment I am trying to attune myself to when I have enough experience to talk about things and when I don’t, looking in to my nice coach Sean Taylor’s eyes and listening to his tone, trying to figure out when I’ve said too much, though I’m still not there yet (Sorry, Sean).

In a way, doing yoga has humbled me more than most things because I am so incredibly, intransigently untalented at it.

Knowing you can’t even do a halfway decent downward-dog is a good reminder of shutting up and just working hard.

Maybe I’ll thank myself for the shutting-up and enjoying myself, working and learning.

That’s good practice, too.

***

There’s something cathartic in being about the nerds.

It is important to define some levels here in what I am talking about before I continue.

Many things I do are defined as nerdy. Improv (as exemplified by this excellent video) is a pretty nerdy thing. Film nerdiness, like seeing a lot of indies and foreign films can be too (which I was reminded of when I met two Arizonans in France whose last movie they saw was The Notebook on DVD). Magic: The Gathering cards are still really nerdy in a way that is socially isolating and the subject of many jokes, but since I still sometimes find myself around them (like any addiction, you never really quit) I won’t cast judgement entirely right now.

But sometimes you head into a movie theater and see a combination of goth/punk overweight late-teenagers of all ethnic varieties at 3pm on a Wednesday and you know you’re going to see some Anime.

Anime was a phase I passed through (and am mostly out of) in the early parts of middle and high school exemplified by that weird gap in time where the internet existed but wasn’t fast enough that anyone could download things instantly. So, my best friend Frank and I would trudge down to Chinatown every weekend or every other weekend into the back of a knickknack store and buy VHS of anime episodes ripped off of non-region DVDs (which were expensive!) or subtitled amateur-ly by fans of the series we were trying to watch.

This was also a little after the time Pokemon (sort-of) and Dragon Ball Z (particularly) had gotten us into these Japanese animated shows with their promise of cool action, people always talking about the “awesome power of friendship” and often weird sexual undertones present in Japanese culture. Adult Swim on Cartoon Network had not yet turned totally into a bastian of college-age haute-comedy and still showed some cool anime shows as a stepping stone forward for us like Cowboy Bebop, which allowed us to continue growing on it as we began to realize how many episodes of our favorite shows were literally just people talking about the big fight that was going to happen stretched over a 9-26 episode arc.

When the internet sped up and Ricky somehow mysteriously disappeared, Frank and I would download the episodes off the internet of our favorite shows and go over to each others houses (mostly me to Frank’s) to watch them on our crappy monitors, hoping this wouldn’t be another episode where everyone was just intimidating each other and hopefully at least a couple people would throw a punch. But we were mostly disappointed, but somehow still hooked enough. We watched shows like Scryed, Yu Yu Hakusho, Bleach, Naruto, One Piece together while Frank delved even nerdier with the DSL connection at his house as we scoured the IRC (Internet Relay Chatrooms) for episodes in those early BitTorrent days, watching GTO (a show about a perv who becomes a teacher to sleep with 17 year-olds), Hajime No Ippo (an infinitely-long boxing anime) and Hikaru No Go (which is literally about people playing fucking checkers. No joke. Look it up.)

But a show we both watched was Fullmetal Alchemist, a silly steam-punk-style show about “alchemists” who have what is essentially a more science-y kind of magic powers. The show is about a big brother who always complains about being short and a little brother who is an animated suit of armor. Silliness ensues as well as some musing on life and death and humanity’s ability to affect those things.

Time has passed since those days.

First Frank became the skinny kid from his fat-bowl-cut-Korean-kid days, working out in college and then improbably becoming a personal trainer talking about being too shy to hit on his clients at the gym. I became chubby, got into movies and faded away from anime (though I still read some manga) since there were so many films to watch that didn’t involve waiting around 26 excruciating weeks to see what happens.

But now I do improv and work as an assistant and Frank trains people at the gym. I’m out late nights doing shows at weird places, Frank is training 6:30am clients. It’s hard to see each other.

So when I saw that the Cinema Village had, for some goddam reason, one of the several released-only-in-Japan Fullmetal Alchemist movies playing there, I knew to invite Frank.

We got some lunch. I joked about how I weigh less than him now (not at all salient, he is ONE-MILLION TIMES more fit than me), we walked around as I tried to decide on a dessert for an hour as I had to answer upset texts from a girl on my improv team. We talked about life and ended up splitting a cupcake.

We sat down in the aforementioned theater for the movie, which was silly with a Face-Off style-twist, though decently-animated. The last line of the film was: “Oh look, we’re leaving the valley.” which was really stupid and self-aware.

But we both for that time were back staring at a big suit of armor and a blond-short-guy fighting a wolf-man on top of a train.

And in the end, isn’t that what life’s all about?

Oh look, we’re leaving the blog post.

***

I had a freakout over squash. That is who I am now.

I haven’t been able to go to Birdbath Bakery around the corner from me for a while now, because the sandwich that I used to get from them, the Chicken Cilantro, was on a white bread that I had sworn off.

But one day, passing by, I decided to just investigate what they had I could eat and found that they had a smoked chicken sandwich on some sort of whole grain sourdough that seemed appetizing.

They had also seemed to have upped their lunch game, importing the famous Macaroni and Cheese from their parent store City Bakery in a hottray, along with another item I didn’t recognize.

“Spaghetti Squash cooked with homemade tomato sauce, parmesan cheese, a bit of cilantro, topped with toasted pumpkin seeds.”

“A taste.” I requested.

Yum.

I got the smoked chicken sandwich (which was yummy enough) with the squash that was like crack.

Now, I didn’t know if this was kosher for me to have (not in a kosher sense) in terms of keeping my weight, but when I got upstairs I just ate half of everything, felt great and took a walk with my new couch-crasher New Jersey-an/Southerner Teddy Shivers to show him places to eat in the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, when I got back upstairs from the hour-point-five -long tour, that delicious-ass food was still there and I took a bite of the squash.

And then another.

And then the barrier broke and I ate the whole thing.

Guilt flooded my squash-ridden body.

I ate something light later, but when I got home that night, my weight (on the scale my bos bought me for the new year) had gone up 5 pounds instead of the usual three (how much my weight fluctuates day-to-night).

I hyper-ventillated in my therapist’s office, I wondered if this grand ruse was coming to an end, if chubby Nick was returning, so soon.

She looked at me calmly and we continued our session.

“I figure if this has been working for you.” She said. “Trust it and it will.”

I did and I ate some salads the next day and was fine.

My freak-out, silly.

It was just squash.

And I haven’t had it since.

Because I’ll eat french fries, cupcakes, crepe nutellas, pain au chocolats, shots of Jameson and risotto balls.

But I’m scared as fuck of that yummy squash.

***

BIRDBATH BAKERY

Side of Spaghetti Squash w/Parmesan, Homemade Tomato Sauce and Toasted Pumpkin Seeds- $5.00

Prince St. bet. Thompson St. and W. Broadway.

CE to Spring St. NR to Prince St. BDFM to Broadway-Lafayette.