Dick Night

It’s been an interesting week.

Perhaps I should give some explanation to the poster above.

Or maybe it should just come later.

Let’s start here: I’ve been dieting.

For those of you who follow the blog, or at least read the last post, you know that I tried doing a carb reductive diet and, mostly, I’ve stuck to it.

I haven’t eaten a significant portion of bread or potatoes or rice in about a week and a half. I’ve stayed away from anything with added sugar.

My only times breaking were drinks, with no mixers, once to celebrate the launch of “Skinnygirl Sangria”, which I think would have been disrespectful if I wasn’t drinking it at the party, and once to commemorate good-man Chadd Harbold’s first week down on his first feature film.

Both times, I tried to keep it to a limit. I break rules sometimes about fried things, because they are delicious and their restriction seems less based on the science of my diet and more on heart concerns for people who are not 24 (I said “23″ out loud when I typed that).

But mostly I’ve been good, which has changed me, how?

Well, I’ve been cycling through rapid mood swings in the mornings even for me, veering between sadness and anger and a nervous energy, the last of which is at least applicable to some improv. My book calls this “sugar withdrawal” and it’s the first real withdrawal of any kind I’ve gone through, at least in my memory.

Sometimes this means I just need to drink a coffee (sugar-free vanilla, 1-percent milk, not allowed Soy, too much sugar) or a swig of the Diet Coke in my refrigerator. Sometimes it means I need to eat a salad somewhere and wait.

Or sometimes, like Thursday, it means I get anxious and upset and my eyes see red and I tell most of my friends to go fuck themselves to their faces and storm out, catch a cab and retreat to an improv show, wondering why, as soon as I’ve extricated myself, I was just such a douchebag.

It’s the diet, but is it the diet? I counseled a friend who recently went through a bipolar break that they didn’t have to own their behavior, this was something they couldn’t control, the first time it had manifested. But they told me, laughingly, in the psych ward that was the only thing they kept telling them: that it was their behavior, their thoughts, their ability to control.

Maybe I should tell the story:

It was a Thursday night and I’d spent most of the day whittling down a 2-minute monologue about my blog that I had to perform for an audition I’d been asked to. It was the story of getting over a girl and how writing about it had helped and it was raunchy and weird and funny-ish. I rehearsed it over and over in my head, in the mirror, in the hallway of Shetler Studios, waiting to be called. I headed in and gave my monologue, thinking I had confidence in it, that it would kill, I had been asked to audition, after all, I could use this story, go to Moth or RISK story-slams and tell it, my pseudo-celebrity would help, this was one of the nice things, I bombed.

Or I don’t know if I bombed, I was fine, they didn’t laugh. But they called me in to read a bunch of other stuff, lines tweets, other people’s blog posts. I kept doing three or four callbacks into the room until they let the person next to me stay and told me to go.

And I hadn’t auditioned in a while. And I just felt silly in my expectations. And an hour earlier I had dropped my halal chicken platter into the cart-man’s metal bucket of lettuce, to much Arabic cursing.

Basically, I felt like a fuck-up.

I went to the end of my improv class that I’d missed, was told a rare “good work today” on my way out, but literally didn’t hear it with my headphones in and then when I took them out, still didn’t hear it either. It was another situation that was the bane of me, commitments to two different groups of friends I’d made, to see my friend’s show at the Magnet, or to go out karaoke-ing with Rob and Blake and Andrew Parrish (who had gamely come with to the Skinnygirl party earlier). I chose Karaoke but didn’t tell them I was definitely coming, thinking I just needed the catharsis, to yell, to croon, even if I couldn’t get drunk, I felt it, it’d be enough. Shaun Farrugia would understand if I missed his show, as long as I could tell myself and him that I was doing what I needed to to let off steam.

When I got to Planet Rose, the screens were all funked-up and Rob and crew were nowhere to be found. I discovered via texting and calling that too many of the machines were broken and the only ones working were in the back where people were concentrated and that they had all gone to play billiards and I should come.

Billiards? Billiards! I thought. This is what I would ditch my friend Shaun for? This is what I would not do unto others as I would have them do unto me for? I would violate my ethical code to go stand around and watch people play pool while I couldn’t drink because of my diet and just feel like crap and continue to feel like crap.

And of course what made me angriest of all is that I let myself be talked into this, I made decisions I shouldn’t have.

And when I walked into Amsterdam Billiards I was angry already and started yelling at them and being sarcastic as they obvious were just standing around playing pool. Where was my catharsis?

When Dan Pleck came in, who I had invited off his late-night work to tell me that we had to pay-up or leave even if weren’t playing pool, I told my friends to go fuck themselves and got in a cab.

The show at the Magnet was good and I even made it in time. It felt good to support my friends there and to see people I knew. But it just kept nagging at me after.

As I made that lade night walk, as I do so many nights now, to that 23rd St CE train station, I saw a post-dated poster for Mike Birbiglia’s “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend”, a storytelling show my mom had seen and thought was good.

And as you can see, someone had visually told him to go suck a dick.

I wish I had a better reason than that to through that in there, but I don’t. I guess just looking at that at 20 past midnight made me just think or surrender a little bit. Or back down.

When I got home, I texted my friends apologies and they all accepted.

I don’t own a scale, but I tried stepping on a novelty “Weight/Horoscope” machine in Penn Station about a week ago.

It told me I was about as heavy as I thought I was. So I’ll step on it again when I’m done with this.

And try to tell how crazy at least a few things are.

***

So in case you guys were wondering what I ate during all this dieting, it sometimes looked like this, though actually, this was a night that I was treating myself.

I had just helped my boss Jason move into his new apartment, shipped a bunch of things and schlepped around the city with my laptop in my backpack, weighing me down and causing me to sweat clean through the back of my shirt, which I wish I could say does not happen often.

Anyway, he lives near Tamarind Tribeca so that’s where I went afterwards to recuperate.

I ate a bowl of Chicken Tikka Masala, no flour or sugar in it, they assured me, with no rice and no naan, eating less of the sauce than I normally would.

With this diet, it seems like the way to survive is to find ways to treat yourself, to find things that would seem bad but are permitted, to find ways to indulge other pathways, thus super-ceding the need for potatoes and stuff.

Chicken Tikka Masala from Tamarind Tribeca is perhaps the best example of such a thing, creamy, with saffron and fenugreek, brought steaming to you sitting over at the hyper-modern bar.

The attendent outside recognized me and invited me in. I even met up with a girl I knew from college.

But, in both cases, I didn’t get anything special because of who I am.

I guess I’ll have to find a way to treat myself emotionally, someday.

***

TAMARIND TRIBECA

Chicken Tikka Masala- $21.50 (!) *Not my normal expenditure.

SW Corner of Hudson and Franklin Sts.

1 to Franklin St.

 

Periods of Frustration

What are you supposed to do when you no longer know why you’re at a place?

Me, I go try to find food.

I’ve been at this “internship” for quite a few months now, hooked up by my mom, as a bulwark I guess, to doing nothing.

My dad keeps on insisting it’s for the best, that these people are “connected” and that somehow, they’ll find some way to “hook you up”.

My experience has been though, that internships never “hook you up”, they use all they can out of you until they use no more, or failing that, hire you out of desperation for everyone else quitting.

One might call this cynical, but considering that a woman I worked a year for, for free, didn’t cast me as “Sleeping Roommate”, a part which would have gotten me signed to my agency, you’ll forgive me for having a dim view of internships.

At this current one, I don’t even know what I’m doing or why I’m there, failing even the pretense of “advancement in my industry” which appeals to so many people who seek these things out.

At some point, I just wanted to get away.

So I went to Buffalo Wild Wings.

It’s true, I didn’t mean to. I wanted to go to the Empanada cart, staged over by Atlantic Terminal, that gives good-fried-packets for just around 2 dollars, but they were gone, maybe driven away by whatever frost there was that day and so I tried the place I’d heard about, thinking that if they advertised Chicken, they might not be so objectionable.

I was pretty wrong.

The nuggets I brought back (“boneless wings”) to the office, were crispy, sickly-sweet and over-spiced. Frank, my best friend, a Brooklynite, had tried them before and mocked me for thinking they’d be anything else.

“McDonalds is better.” Frank tossed around harshly.

I told him I thought they were better than the McDonald Chicken Nuggets (which now contain no chicken), but not by much.

I was excited for some celery that came with it, which I dipped a little in the bleu cheese dressing.

I did some research that day at the internship.

But I don’t know what for.

***

When I went to Union Hall last night to meet Eva to see a comedy show, she sent me a text message that I got when I was two blocks away and I sent one back in reply.

Just checking in with each other, seeing where we were.

The comedy was good, some funny people. Eugene Mirman, A.D. Miles and Mike DeStefano, whose fame from his recent “WTF with Marc Maron” podcast seems to have given him a worthy boost in a career that seemed doomed to pigeon-holing, playing wise-guys.

I kept looking over at Eva though, checking to see that she found the same things funny as me, seeing that she liked her drink, or the atmosphere.

Wanting to know that she liked being with me.

“Sure, I saw my ex plenty of times after we broke up.” Andy told me, changing in the locker room. He had gotten off to a bad start that day, combating the hangover he seemed ever-locked in struggle with.

“It’s the same sort of thing every time. They dance around the decision they made. ‘Did I do the right thing? Was I right? Is this better?’ Until they realize: ‘Oh wait, I guess I did make the right decision. Cool then.”

“I’m worried.” I told Andy, “I’m worried I’m not ready for this.”

“Well, you already said you do it.” said Andy, straightening his shirt. “Just be aware of it. See if you’re getting in to the same routine. Realize she’s not that for you anymore. She’s just an acquaintance.”

I wanted to say when Andy said this that I couldn’t do that, but he was out, gone to fresh air, to feel better, away from work.

And of course I couldn’t feel like Eva was acquaintance, just another friend. How do you look at someone who you shared so much of your life with, taste and trust, someone who accepted you fully and you helped them– how do you look at that person and see them as anything else?

In the end I couldn’t. I made jokes and enjoyed the comedy and drank too much and bought her a few.

I told A.D. Miles “a toast to red-heads”, when Eva told me he was pretty sure his hair was blond, a testament to my color-blindness.

We talked and took the same train and played the same games as she kept trying to pay me for drinks and I kept trying to hide the money in her bag and down her dress.

Yeah, she wore a nice dress and looked very pretty.

We talked for a bit about the dating websites we were on and looking for other people and she told me her “headless body” had gotten a lot of messages, while I told her I hadn’t been too happy with what I’d found.

I gave her my stand-up set, I laughed at her jokes, I admonished her when she self-deprecated, or said people didn’t think she was pretty.

“Well, they’re going to see your face eventually.” I told her. And she agreed.

We sat together on the train and talked some more and right before her stop, I had already started crying, though I don’t think she noticed.

The whole night had gone through and there I was with her about to leave, still not loving me.

It’s hard to see someone’s face, their same face, their same expressions and know that their happiness is no longer for you.

I cried home, on the subway and in bed. To the public, I blame the whiskey.

In bed, Dan Pleck got on the phone with me, texting fast, telling me that trying to recapture first love is like “chasing the dragon”, a high that never comes again.

Mostly, I just felt like a junkie.

I woke up and watched the second-to-last episode of Deadwood and was fine.

***

When I introduced myself in my Writing for SNL class, I blew myself up a little bit.

“Well, I’ve interned for The Colbert Report, pitched some web videos and acted in one, have done some web comedy, was on Letterman, made a short film, that kind of stuff.”

I then followed that up with: “All of this might sound like I’m a pretty good sketch writer, which unfortunately is not the case.”

In fact, I’m a terrible sketch writer, much worse at it than I am even at improv, which I once also felt terrible at.

In my Writing for SNL class, people have started to come around to me, but in my arguably more important Sketch Level 2 class at The Magnet, where some of our sketches will end up in a show, I’ve written something new every week and brought it in, only for it to die.

In some ways, I’m grateful for this. I understand the necessity of learning a craft and, particularly, learning from failures, as early successes can bolster you towards levels of confidence unearned.

It also afforded me chances to run away from class during breaks, where I found a nice Italian deli for a low-cost Chicken Parm, some consolation.

When I went out this past week, with some co-workers after a long shift, I told a beautiful young lady I work with, still in college, not to be so hard on herself, as she told me of her depression and her art.

“What’s there to feel sorry about?” I asked her. “What you do now might not be what you do later, might not even be what you want. As you change, so do your desires, naturally. And there is no shame in that. So for now, take the gift that’s offered you and experiment and try and work hard, as you can and enjoy yourself. The stakes are low, or only as high as you set them, so live with the passion you have.”

Or at least what I hope I said. I had drunk a couple beers at that point.

Anyway, I was ok with dying in that class every week, though I felt like I let my teacher down, Armando, who said he saw in potential in me: “the funny midi-chlorians”, as he put it.

So I wrote him an email, which I got a reply to last night on my… I don’t want to call it a “not-date”, with Eva.

I had acknowledged that I had much to learn about writing sketches and that it was frustrating, given that I felt more confident about my other forms of writing. I told him I knew I had to learn, but that I was worried about the upcoming show and writing something that was good enough.

“Isn’t there anything I can do,” I asked him. “To learn this faster, to be better at this, in time?”

“Nicholas,” He replied. “There is a time in any learning process where there is a period of frustration. The key is to keep plugging away. Eventually comes the day when you wake up and it comes together. But all you can do is keep at it and have faith. There is no special step, just persistence.”

Not to make a metaphor out of a molehill, but I think you see what I mean.

***

SALUMERIA BIELESE

“Small” Chicken Parm- $6.50

SE Corner of 29th St and 8th Ave. (near The Magnet Theater)

ACE to 34th St- Penn Station. 1 to 28th St.

How I Got Addicted to Bubble Tea (and back again…)

It started with a gap in time between work and class.

I had gotten off another shift making popcorn and needed somewhere to go in the time between, so I wandered down St. Marks, aiming for “Cheep’s”, an inexpensive falafel/shawarma joint that had popped up overo n 2nd Ave and promised at least the homonym of it’s title, as well as some saucy satisfaction.

I ended up sucked in to Spot by a sign on the sidewalk, near my walk back to the subway, with an offer of Bubble Tea and a cupcake for 5 dollars.

I came for cupcake, but it was the Bubble Tea that took me.

Bubble Tea, for the uninitiated, is something like a milkshake or a “frappucino”: a milk-heavy beverage made with tea and other flavors, with small balls of tapioca floating around its base, lingering there to be sucked up and chewed upon while one drinks their tea.

When Asian nerd-friend Matt Chao (who else?) first introduced me to this product, I was unsure how to drink it an tentative about its uses. If I wanted a milkshake, wasn’t I better off getting one of those? Did those “bubbles” even taste good? How would I avoid not just swallowing them?

So I didn’t drink it for a long time, but then, on the off time I went to Spot, I became enchanted.

Spot, it turned out, was a venture undertaken by a former favorite of mine, a man named Pichet Ong, who used to own the gayest bakery in the West Village, a place called “Batch”, that my mom and I would go to sometimes for “stir-in” chocolate-spoon hot chocolates. It was an inventive place, part of the dessert bar craze that petered about a year ago and closed right when its sit-down attached restaurant “P*ong” closed with it. Thus, I was happy to find Spot, even though it didn’t have Mr. Ong and his charming mother there, who used to minister to me and mine.

I sat down for my special, a “Thai Iced Bubble Tea” and a lemon-yuzu vanilla cupcake and suddenly it clicked in me.

I already loved Thai Iced Teas, with their condensed milk sweetness, but Bubble Tea was the drink of the bored, the loungers, the in-betweens. It was not cloying sweet, but tastefully so. The bubbles were there for consideration; something to ruminate on, literally, during breaks in conversation, or while listening. It was something to do, a combination drink/activity. Something to take your mind off, with sweetness, to relax.

I left Spot happy that day and returned other days, with cravings.

I went to St. Alp’s Teahouse in the East Village and a place named Crazy Bananas in Koreatown. I frequented these places a few times, soliciting advice from the aforementioned Matt for the best places to get it, the best flavors, et cetera.

After an improv class, or a sketch class, before, as a reward, or an incentive.

I became an addict, for a couple days, I admitted to Matt.

And then I got a cold.

***

I haven’t talked here for a while, save for a top 10 list, which was understandably attacked by my friends, but at least a read a few times.

One girl even subscribed to my blog and it notified me. That made me feel good.

When I wrote my first episode of the web-series adaptation of this blog, the running theme was the cathartic experience of writing it; the idea that I was somehow redeemed by clicks or views, by having “peeps out on the internet”. I remember when my friend Chadd Harbold read that one, it was soundly criticized, not just for the idea of that character having that experience be unrealistic, but as a critique potentially of my own life. It’s hard to tell when you blur the line between yourself and your art-work so much.

I went in this past week to a show called “Watch What Happens: Live” with a fellow I’d never met named Andy Cohen, who I later found out had a NYTimes feature article written about him, who nonetheless knew me and introduced himself as though I was the part of the media empire he oversees, which of course, to some degree, I am. Regardless of whether the stuff I shot for one of his shows ends up on the air, there’s bound to more representations, more versions of me out there than I know how to handle.

At work today, I was threatened with firing for a customer complaint of rudeness to someone trying to exchange a ticket. I remember in that moment sympathizing with my boss, who was trying to handle it gracefully, not just firing me but continuing to tell me to “change”. But when I sit in that box office and greet those customers, it’s hard for me to tell which me to give, which me I am, which me they’re seeing. I try to be polite to people, but it weighs on me in a way that recalls my mother’s self -proclamation of “thin-skinnedness”, in describing her depression, without her indefatigable resilience or grace. As people are mean to me, or callous, or just wave their Prada bags or Lacoste items, it’s hard to judge them, or more accurately, feel like you’re being judged. It’s difficult to interact, to know what to give them. You could call it me being a method actor, or just not knowing how to fake it: there’s only a limited amount of “nice” I can be, without anything to play on. It’s scary though to see the disconnection between this realization and the ability to figure out how change it.

I went on a date, this past weekend, while I was getting my cold, with a girl I met online. It went pretty well, I thought just then, but I haven’t heard from her since. We sang karaoke songs at Planet Rose (she was pretty good) and got kinda drunk and walked to the train and ate tacos. My “game” as it is, online, (spoiler alert) isn’t much game at all, but  just trying to offer some questions and accept some and to see if I could “swap truths” with someone and see if I like what I get, or if they do mine. When we talked online, this online girl and I, there was a lot of talk of back-sliding, in this time after college, feeling like you weren’t making progress, feeling like you were going to become someone you didn’t want or someone you used to be. It’s the same thing I talked about, if they use it, on the TV show I shot.

I also talked to Eva, sometime and worked some things out, without closing things. I’m left feeling better, that some part of her is still interested in me, if not in the way I need, but it’s painful too to revisit what you tried to move on from.

I hung out with Dan Pleck last night, who gave me some good advice about my meeting with Eva and seems, scarily enough, in a better place than me nowadays, emotions-wise. Dan used to be a parable for what I might become in my post-break-up situation, a fellow off-the-rails, and our interactions would be fraught with fear on my part along with frustration, in a way I now know also echoes my lack of control over other downward spirals in my life (including my sister’s, who is once again on the lam). Yesterday he came out with me to School Night, one of the several free shows at UCB that no one goes too, but that anybody interested in a career in comedy should, since they’re free showcases of good performances testing their limits and trying new material. Last night, Louis C.K. materialized at the show I was at to do a set, like something out of his own T.V. show, trolling open-mics late night, to just do it.

Dan got to shake his hand after his set, though he was eviscerated by the comedian on stage (who later said he wish he could have snuck out on his own set to do the same) and was ecstatic, wanting to celebrate after the luck of our free discovery.

“The thing is, I just got into him recently.” Dan said. “The stuff he talks about, feeling old and divorced and needing to feel manly: well, that’s pretty much how I feel nowadays.”

I was happy too, happy more that I could make Dan happy, but the problem was is that the person who introduced me to Louis C.K., as well as many of the cool things in my life, was Eva Dougherty.

The way we left things, when we talked, well, it meant we could talk, I guess.

So I told her she wouldn’t believe who I saw and sent her the picture I took from the theater.

She thanked me for telling her, in a text with many exclamation points and told me she was jealous.

The text I didn’t send said “Wish you were there.”

***

I woke up this morning sicker than I’d been.

Since it was cold I just kept expecting to get better and it got worse, I made a doctor’s appointment to be safe.

I didn’t get bubble tea much, recently, though I’ve craved it on occasion.

Like video games, it’s a distraction and a comfort; a sweet place to be.

I took some Zyrtec-D and some Motrin I had in my over-sized wallet to deal with the headache that didn’t go away when my nose cleared up, from my sinuses.

I felt floaty, sitting their in the box-office, like everything going on with me was still there, but I was just shifted, three inches above it.

The email and the firing stuff came at the end of the day and unsettled me, as they would most people I guess.

When I went to go change, a coworker of mine sat in the changing room staring at his phone, getting ready to get out.

For all intents and purposes, I should be friends with this man, who owns the same gaming systems as me, enjoys the same nerdy humor, has the same blaze attitude and occasional self-seriousness that I have.

But as I stand there, changing my clothes, I say nothing to him and he says nothing back.

I heard sometime that I offended him, that he thought I was talking shit about him (which I wasn’t), that I did slight to him that I didn’t know how to undo.

I offered to lend him I game I had he’d be interested in, but by that point he was wary of greeks bearing gifts.

Standing their in the locker room, changing, I didn’t know how to be or who.

So I said nothing and he said “later” and I said, “good night”.

And we all went on awkwardly, a little floaty, but still there.

Now I’m at home here sitting, on the end of pills and comfort.

Not knowing how to be, or who.

***

SPOT

Lemon-Yuzu Vanilla Cupcake with Thai Iced Bubble Tea- $5 (available 11-6 only)

St. Mark’s Place between 3rd and 2nd Avenues.

NR to 8th St-NYU. 6 to Astor Pl.

Role-Playing Games

After spending most of the afternoon in some combination of trying to write spec commercials, download a PSP game from a defunct network and sending frantic text messages about my writing group, I figured out what I was going to do to calm me down:

I was going to write right here.

Stupid, right? I mean, this was not actually the solution to any of my problems. The three inept spec treatments I had pathetically scrawled were sure to get torn up at my writing group, which I didn’t know if anyone would attend and which I fretted that was symptomatic of me failing myself after I came to it with nothing last week.

And then there was the PSP game.

And for that one, we should go back a sec.

***

“So what did you do over July 4th weekend?”

A typical question.

Answer: Pretty much nothing.

It’s true, kind of. When I went into my therapist’s office to talk, I didn’t even have much to say.

She even suggested I leave early to take care of some of my other work.

Which made me feel trenchant even though I knew I wasn’t trying “not to share”, but just frustrated that I didn’t know what to say.

“Didn’t know what to say.” I guess that’s sort of how I have been feeling.

July 3rd was my birthday, which was great. Good food, good friends, good karaoke time.

My best friend Frank cowered in the corner unable to pick a song to sing, but Dan did some good Teddy Pendergrass (which got him ass-grabbed by some bachelorette partiers) and Eva got everyone in on Jay-Z’s “On To The Next One.”

I got a shot of Patron by someone who thought I was Seth Rogen and a shot and a beer from Colin Lime, Karaoke Bar-Host extraordinaire of Planet Rose and all-around good-guy.

I end up drunk and happy, even though many of my friends couldn’t come.

I even avoided the most part of a hangover through a somnambulistic combination of urinating and drinking water ever hour-and-a-half, interrupting my sleeping pattern.

But on July 4th, I just walked around a bit with Eva.

On July 5th, I saw a comedy show at 9pm with her, but that was it.

And then my weekend was over and people were asking me that question.

What’s stranger than not doing anything perhaps, was not needing to do anything.

I read the New Yorker. I finished a short story. I caught up on some Netflix on-demand.

The only thing of substance I felt like I did do was finish a video game I had been ignoring for a while.

It would be easy to say that beating a video-game would take up most of my attention/divert my need to work.

But I feel like that’s too easy.

After all the videogame I beat (Final Fantasy XIII) wasn’t even one I particularly cared about.

And these were days that people were usually out and about, the iconic days even, to do so.

But I just stayed in.

And “beat the heat”.

When I finished the game and was watching the end credits, I didn’t feel the usual sense of dread I feel sometimes either at the end of the game, the feeling of a reader or a junkie, not knowing where their next fix would come from.

I thought to myself, calmly, well maybe now I’ll read more. Maybe I’ll take more walks.

I even bought a new book for my Kindle, optimisitcally.

But come Tuesday night, as I returned to my life and my work, I found myself awake at 12:30am trying to figure out what to do.

I felt wired, without a plug.

I felt loose.

I tried to download a new video game, seeing if it was available, but my account didn’t work.

I tried calling tech support, but it was after midnight.

I tried calling my bank to see if it was a problem on their end, but they were gone too.

I even tried calling the credit card company whose imprint my bank card carries, who were open, but just transferred me back to my closed bank.

I woke up early the next day, but even as I resolved one problem, getting through on a 9:00am phone call, the PlayStation network’s system went down and I was locked out for the rest of the day.

Which I only found out through more phone calls, more wait times, more idling.

I spent some of that time on hold writing treatments for new OtterBox specs, all of which I hated and I didn’t feel much better bringing to my writing group that day than if I had brought nothing at all.

And then, well, then it was time to leave.

***

Last week I couldn’t talk about my movie.

It was actually done (or a rough cut was anyway) about the time I posted my last post.

I guess I was too tired. Or too sad.

You see, I had done something which I thought I should try when making the movie I made a couple weeks ago now, “TONIGHT”.

It was the first project to come out of my writing group and the first project I had done (not including my OtterBox commercial) that I had tried to do without, well, caring.

It sounds stupid, even as I describe it, especially coming from me.

You see, when I made “LOSER”, my thesis film, I invested so much of myself into it. The film was semi-autobiographical, I pulled together a large crew, worked on my directing, made all these preparations.

It was kind of a multi-month affair.

I mean, jeez, I even took a two-semester class in college where I developed it, sorta.

And I submitted it to 50 film festivals and got in… nowhere.

I got some nice accolades. Some friends liked it. Some directors I admired even saw it and liked it.

Hey, even my girlfriend told me when she saw it, when we had just started going out, it amazed her that someone “[she] knew had made something [she] liked so much.”

So, it got me a wonderful young lady.

So, not a total bust. :p

But, it did take its emotional toll on me, going through so much rejection with something so personal.

When you are a filmmaker, really just starting out, it’s hard to be told by so many people that you suck.

Kind of like a tornado hitting a chickadee.

Or a bunch of hipsters pissing on a tree, somewhere drunk in Brooklyn.

So when I set out to make “TONIGHT”, a short mixed-media piece on connection, disappointment and nerdy games, I decided to do something different: “radical detachment”.

This time, I’d let other people take care of everything. I’d delegate. I would think only about creative choices, if that. And see what I got.

We made the movie, with some snafus.

Some friends put in some good times.

General fun was had.

And it was interesting.

And I couldn’t bring myself to watch the rough cut my friend had put together before he went to Nashville.

I skimmed through parts. And I sent it to friends.

“At some point, not watching it,” Eva told me at my birthday dinner. “You just become an asshole.”

And as I sat in my office trying to repeatedly download a PSP game, I felt that’s sort of what I had become.

I got an email back from Chadd Harbold, who’d seen the rough TONIGHT and who I had collaborated on my last movie with, trying to be nice, but really telling me it was best seen as a “learning experience”.

And I knew as I showed it to more people, this is what they would say.

Radical detachment, I thought, bull-shit.

How do you make a movie without caring about it? How do you write and direct without putting yourself in it?

If you’re an actor, you’re vulnerable when you are in front of the camera. But if you’re a director, you’re vulnerable all the time. You can’t help it, it would seem.

And you can act tough or careless, but in the end you live with what you got.

I guess what I’ve realized maybe, is that I don’t know how to make a movie. That I’m sort of blindly reaching. That maybe I’m just wasting people’s time.

Even saying all of this feels self-serving to me, some way of justifying making people work for you for free, or donating things or doing you a favor.

But I don’t know.

I’m sure Chadd’s right when he’s telling me it’s “a learning experience”. I’m sure I learned things on set and will continue to learn things.

But maybe when I sit and home and do nothing for a while, maybe when I decide it might be smart to hold back on a movie, maybe when I talk almost-boastfully about how I “stupid” my way into things–

Maybe I don’t want to learn anything right now. Maybe I’m scared.

It’s juvenile and it’s a problem.

But I still haven’t sat down and watched my film.

Because I don’t know what I’d want to take away.

***

Maybe that nothing was an exaggeration this weekend.

I did join a social-networking circuit.

“Foursquare”, an iPhone application that turns NYC into a giant game of monopoly always seemed pointless to me. After all, you didn’t make money or get anything redeemable from it. You just got virtual badges to show off to your friends that you went to five bars in a night.

The way it works is you “check in” at somewhere when you go there, using your smartphone, and the app awards you points based on certain criteria (did you discover it? is it your first time there? is this the eighth place you’ve been today?”).

I admit, it is mostly stupid. But it does give you that small sense of satisfaction you get by “checking things off” (obviously a bullshit capitalist trick) but it also gives you a small incentive to find new places and champion them as you become “the mayor” of a certain location if you go there enough and while new players often cannot become the “mayor” of somewhere established like “Think Coffee”, I became the mayor of Curry Kitchen the other day when I discovered it.

Curry Kitchen is the new place inhabiting a cursed space on 8th St, which housed Planet Action! (previously featured in this blog) and an Indian sandwich place I thought was pretty cool when I went there freshman year (since closed and pre-blog). The new place is a rather standard Indian place, which actually makes it somewhat remarkable for the neighborhood, blighted by bad take-out. The owners were formerly of the recently closed West 4th St Baluchi’s (average) and the terrific Murray Hill take-out “Curry and Curry” over by NYU Medical Center.

Curry Kitchen is not Curry and Curry, a restaurant notable for it’s hotplates and authenticity, but it is certainly an above average Amero-Indian in a way that reminded me somewhat of Sam Sifton’s review of Wo-Hop. The Ka-Chori appetizer I got came with some notably spicy chutneys and were a good combination of texture and crunch. And the unadventurous Chicken Tikka Masala I found was voluminous without being overly thick or creamy.

A large Ka-Chori appetizer

The end of some CTM.

When I check out of there, I told the woman-manager of the understaffed restaurant about FourSquare, when she handed me a 10 percent off coupon.

“Do I need to do anything?” She asked me, looking anxiously at her computer.

“Don’t sweat, I took care of it.” I told her.

“After all, I am the mayor.”

***

CURRY KITCHEN

Chicken Tikka Masala and Ka-Chori Dinner- approx $20 dollars (8 or so bucks at lunch)

West 8th Street between 6th Avenue and MacDougal St.

ACEBDFM to West 4th St.

Sitting Alone In The Syringe Exchange at The Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center on a Saturday Morning

I wrote a script about here the other day.

It had been my first day, well, my second day unofficially and probably more than that, even more, if you counted the times I’d visited as a student, trying to talk to people there and convince them to let my friend Dan Pleck shoot his film there, or just to see what the people had to say, or to try to volunteer without ever having followed it up.

It was a Wednesday, a busy day and it was such a whirl between Dore, my supervisor, educating me, pointing round shelves of different cookers, different condoms, sterilized water and bleach. Dealing with the people who came into the exchange who were mostly nice and old and looking older. Enrolling new members with a code that corresponded to their names and their mother names and other obscure facts from their life and then asking them about their use and their treatment and their ethnicity.

In short, it was a lot for a fairly short amount of time, or a Wednesday.

But I still had my writing group that Wednesday, which had recently gone to every other week, but which I still had to write for. So, in the swirl down Canal St. walking past a newly-opened Popeye’s and a Bank of America, I didn’t know what to write, so I set myself on writing what was on my mind: the business of the day. When I saw my friend Andy Roehm later on in the day, I would recount how jealous I felt of him someways that he was always writing, that polished or not, he had the discipline to write and write and write. Over time, he had become the most reliable member of the writing group, coming each week with pages or a pitch and his psyched-out so-cal attitude.

As for my own discipline comparatively, I limited it to only a few minutes of making out with Eva despite my heart’s need to fall into her, because well, I had to write and if I didn’t then what was I playing at.

I came to the group with my script, my second in as many weeks, another short that was, per my writing, too opaque and suggestive, without the hints that allowed an audience or a reader into it enough, the details so clearly hammered out in my head that I felt, like a book, that it would be spoiling it to give everything without the room for some imagination.

Narcissism is what we call that, but it’s a heady side effect of the writing, the primary goal.

At the group, there were the usual drop-outs, the kids who called an hour or ten minutes or never and didn’t come. It’s always hard not to take it personal. But we ended up with 5 down at City Girl, which was a good number and 6 if you count either Eva or Matt Chao who both came in about half-way through. The place ended up being not too welcoming for the writing group, though at least they weren’t sold out of brownies when I got there.

Instead, they showed their dismay at us through passive-aggressive means, through playing lots of Dave Matthews and talking loud, though I’m sure someone less paranoid wouldn’t take it as an attack. (Eva commiserated later.) Still, we read some good things and it felt good to get stuff into the air. Nandan, Rob’s roommate who had made Bummer Summer with Zach, came with a long-form outline for a script that was an airy Euro-core taking place on some mountains, as its adolescent characters stood on precipices of their own. Andy, on the other hand, brought a mix between Deliverance and District 9, about college students in South Africa taking an ill-advised trip into a backwards desert enclave. Dan showed up blasted out of his mind, unable to even read the pages we put in front of him out-loud, but at least, when his mind-cleared a bit, he provided some lucid commentary.

It felt good writing, even if not everyone dug what I did. Just to get it out there. Just to remind yourself that you’re doing something. It’s easy to lose that sense, in a second.

***

On the end of the day Tuesday I had decided to give my internship that I had found my hours for three days a week, Monday and Tuesday and Thursday, so I could go on back to the LES two days a week, at least. On Thursday after work I had to go to the Lower East for another reason though, to see a friend’s band play down at Cakeshop in their under-the-bakery venue that I’d been to before to see Rob Malone’s amateur stand-up, which he claimed to me he’d only done once.

My friend Nick had told me that his band would be on at 10, but when I showed up at 9:40 to be there early, they were already at least one song deep. I knew my friend from my previous job and I recognized at least one other person from my old gig there, but I hadn’t talked much to him and given how that all had ended I was loathe to approach unannounced. I stood solitary near the bar as Nick’s band played, Eva was somewhere down the block but in the basement I got no reception. I clutched a can of Rolling Rock, which I had drank cheaply as a freshman but not since, as I tried to rock out, just a little, as the hipster 25 year-old-males in front of me nodded their heads or jogged in place.

I went up to Nick after the show and met his brother, who had been taping it all with a Canon 5D that I’d complimented him on. He seemed up-beat and excited to see me, though I could never tell through his enthusiasm if it was earned or a slight jab at me. After all, I’ve always been bad with reading sarcasm. Still though, he thanked for me to coming to his show and I greeted him with a whiskey-on-the-rocks in-hand as a mini-post-show bacchanal for his act.

He asked me what I was doing with my life and I told him not much. I told him about my internship and my work at the exchange.

“Volunteering!” He volunteered. “You’re inspiring, man! I want to do stuff like that, really.”

And then.

“Why are you doing it, if you don’t mind me asking?”

I jerked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I guess just to meet people and see the world and see life a little. I mean I just graduated from film school.”

I then bristled a little guilty.

“I mean, I need to live life a little. You know, to do what I do.”

“I’m so glad to hear that, man.” He told me. “Cause you know the cynical answer would be because you were trying to write or something.”

A pause.

“But you know, that’s not it.” He offered again.

And we said our goodbyes.

***

Friday at the exchange, more questions came.

Marking off needles in and-out, you always mark more out, like a losing battle. And even on my second or third day, you wonder where the needles our going that people aren’t returning: into trash cans or pavement or grass. You think of Reagan-era images of “dead soldiers” on playgrounds near swing sets and it gives you a shiver of thinking about what you do. When people come by, they come by for sugar for their coffee mostly, another former of drugs and the only food around is Popeye’s which you get and start to wonder how the chemicals there are affecting you as well.

And then there were the little things from my life, the moments of out-proportional sadness, like when you send a mass-text about Kurosawa films and no-one can make it tonight. Like when you wonder whether your boss will read that script you gave him or watch that movie, so you can take the next step of your life and make something. Like when you realize that you’re 22 and you’re making nothing and doing nothing and whatever path you’re supposed to be on you’re not on it and the patrons of the needle exchange you work at, casually observing your joblessness, ask about your feelings on employment in the military. When the most film work you’ve been offered in a while is a large stack of mini-VHS that you’re somehow supposed to sort through and make promotional materials out of. When you find out, that despite all hope, you’ve been rejected from Cannes, so you can’t say “fuck you” to all your rejections so easily.

It’s everything I guess that gets you down.

But today I feel better as I sit here writing this, here back in the Lower East side on a Saturday morning. Looking back on my sadness, it’s hard even to understand it or return myself to a place where I’m vulnerable to it, by choice. In part, it’s because when I left the exchange on Friday, sodden from a day of seeming worthlessness, I got to see Eva, as we ate middle-eastern food and gripped each others hands every few seconds across the restaurant formica table as if we were grabbing for the very last chocolate bar in the orignal Willy Wonka movie. Maybe it was that Blake, who I hadn’t seen in a bit, who at the last minute teased me about going to an NYU basketball game, but instead came out with me to see High and Low at Film Forum with Sapporos in his backpack and came back to my place to watch Netflix when it was sold out, sitting on my bed with a striped pillow behind his back. Maybe it was the stream of text messages I got from Dore, my boss, at 11:49, as I headed over to the Cowgirl for a frozen margarita at Eva’s request, telling me that my film was “a perfect 10 minutes of teenage devastation” and “no Mumblecore shit” as he informed me he was watching it for the third time.

Maybe it was just the free basket of chips and salsa the waiter at Cowgirl gave me, even though the kitchen was closed.

Maybe it’s everything that gets back you get up again.

As I drank my frozen margarita last night, trying to avoid brain freeze, I tried to think of some moral I could take from it all.

“Keep on keeping on”?

I wasn’t sure. That sounded too 70s to me anyway.

Maybe there was no moral.

But I was here, sitting at the exchange, handing out needles to users and diabetics and people I didn’t even know.

And I’d say “I’m Nicholas” as I’d extend my hand to them when they came.

And I’d listen to a book.

Or I’d write.

The Job Song

I came up with a song the other day.

It goes like this:

“All-I-Do-All-Day-And-Night/Is App-Ly-For-Jobs”

And then repeat.

I wish I could get the cadences down, but without knowing the musical notes it’s hard to get the real sentiment across.

Then again, when I was G-Chatting with my friend Jacob LaMendola the other day, I shared with him that I had created the song off-handedly, a tack which caused him to immediately start offering help to me in whatever way he could. I’m not sure if this is because Jake’s a nice guy, or the fact that I had created a song about my obsessive searching of job sites that consisted of one sing-song-y line caused him to recoil so much that he felt the need to restore some hope-slash-humanity to me.

Really, it’s probably both.

Either way, the search and struggle for jobs has been consuming my friends left and right, so I’m hardly the only casualty.

Take Dan, who last month was ecstatic when he found a census-taker’s test (only later to find out that the Census doesn’t hire till April. He’s been fretting about emails and recommendations, as we continue to duke it out for the same jobs that are often lo- or-no-paid. Or Zach, whose job working at an upscale hipster-clothing store seemed safe when they signed him past the holidays, only to find that they had engaged in hour-cutting everyone to try to thin down the employed so they didn’t have to pay firing bonuses. Eva even found out that from her co-workers that her bosses wanted to fire her, even as they prostrated themselves before her to come in and work the weekend shifts that interfered with their party schedules. But the worst thing, worse than the struggle, is the radio silence maintained around it. I could only discuss Eva’s case since she quit her job to go back to school. Another friend I can’t even name, since even though he’s being exploted working 13-hour days for a deferred 50 dollars per-diem, I’m scared to even name him since it’s a job he wants to keep.

Looking at this might seem absurd, since I see my friends for their worth and intelligence and as my dad once told me “the people in these jobs you’re looking at aren’t a race of superhumans”. But instead I see advice ignored and the tale of my friend and Armond White Love-Hater Jason Lee, whose struggles to find a job in Austin seemed entertaining and story-like at a distance but when I feel myself approaching his number of applications (though the hundreds which he reached is still in the distance), I begin to admire his sense of dry humor in dealing with those hundred-something rejections, scams and blighted-opportunities.

Even I’ve found myself scammed a few times or begin to wonder, other than the few places that I’m contacted for interviews, which places are just stealing my information, or getting my email to send me spam. It seems like such a pointless endeavor, until it nearly happened from a few phone calls I got asking if I wanted to do extra work. When I came in for a “casing session”, I saw what I like to call an “anti-lawsuit plaque” detailing that the place I was going to was in no way an agency, but a photography studio charging for headshots. I left with some dignity, but not as much as Rob who’d received the same girl and not even bothered to show up for his appointment. I guess that was the problem: that I feel like in my increasing desperation around work, I keep feeling like I’m setting aside judgment for naivety and self-worth for self-prostration. It’s a slippery slope.

And what I find to do in the meantime?

Movies mostly. Dates with friends and seeing Eva. My pops told me the other day that I’d want a job until I got one at which point I’d wish that I didn’t have a job. But even Dan who hated his holiday-time suit-selling at Macy’s was talking about working anywhere to get structure back in his life too.

I also started volunteering finally at the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center. On a trip last month to see my cousin/uncle, the Rabbi, he talked to me of his experience doing good sometime in his early 20s. His opinion mattered to me, as he remains the symbol of my tenuous connection to the religious parts of Judaism, which I felt like I would connect to if I volunteered somewhere. “Tikkun Olam,” I thought, looking back on words from my Hebrew school education. “It means, to repair the world.” Such thoughts were romantic, but such romanticism was needed along with something resembling a pragmatic order. I’d do good, I thought, I’d do good.

Or at least, maybe, it would give me an excuse, finally, to read.

***

The Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center was a place I had been before I decided to volunteer there, about one year ago, when I had been producing Dan’s movie. It was a site of some shame for me, as I had entered into the production with some cock-sure attitude about getting Dan’s film, an intermediate project, done, but hadn’t counted on his want for extras from the Center, who turned out to be the active users who patronize it. They were nice and courteous, but I always felt uncomfortable around them, because for the most part they seemed so normal, yet in my eyes, in what I could see of their presentation, something had been taken or robbed. When I would later meet Lou Reed, whose hand I shook too vigorously, I saw the same thing: Youth, taken prematurely. Not youth, like the state I was in or the vigor of a 15 year-old. But an energy or a chi or something stupid that I didn’t have answers to like that. A sense of a reserve of years, of something to take from within them; It had already been taken.

My only humiliation there came when I tried to cater for the crew and the extras from Tuck Shop, the Aussie joint I’d later use to cater for my job at Colbert, only to hear politely from one of the staff that the extras didn’t like food like this and could I get something else.

“Like Popeye’s?” I asked.

And he said that was fine and I took orders and went.

As I came back I felt wounded, somewhat because of a perceived slight to my sense of self-superiority, that I had guessed wrongor catered incorrectly, that I didn’t know the people and the situation well enough. But it was more thinking that I didn’t know these people who were in the film’s world at all, didn’t know what they liked, what their lives were. After years of film school and of characters and neurotics, I had gotten a sense of the world I was in. In some ways, this was my first experience out of it.

When I came in a year later and earlier this week for training, I learned I’d be the volunteer at the Syringe Exchange, dealing directly with users as they brought in used needles and I gave them new ones. Days later, when I saw Dan who had worked in a place like LESHRC in Worcester, Mass (the inspiration for his film), he picked at my unease, asking me if I had felt odd with the “moral ambiguity” of what I’d be doing.”In some way, you’d be in enabling them.” He told me cryptically. He meant that by giving them needles, I was putting myself as part of their using, but I never saw it that way. In a mix of pity and guilt, the only thing I could think that Friday I went in for training was how nice all the people were who came into the exchange and how I felt bad thinking about what they were going to do next. In my own life, in the people there, figuring with the commonality of drug use is something I can avoid easily, through video games or social interactions or anything else in my life. But sitting there watching a man pick used needles out of a shoebox as he tries to avoid touching blood–his or someone elses–well, it’s difficult to avoid thinking.

***

Sunday went on for me and got better and I didn’t apply to any jobs.

I saw a movie and I saw some friends and I saw Eva.

In short, it was good.

But on Monday, I’m sure of it.

I’ll be back to combing Craigslist and Mandy.

And singing the job song.

***

Finally my kudos to Jacob, who I mentioned here earlier. His film STONEY won an award at the Festivus Film Festival for Adam Newport-Berra’s cinematography. It’s a great film and Jacob’s a great guy and Adam, a talented DP.

When Jacob sent out a congratulations today to all the people involved with the film, I saw numerous congratulations as many people hit “Reply All”.

One of them was “Congrats everyone! -Tom N” from Tom Noonan, the star of Jacob’s film.

It gave me a laugh on a rainy day.

Downtimes, Pressure-Cuts, Virulence and Humps

I can rest in the fact that no matter how far I sink in my life or how much I accomplish, to someone, I will always be “that kid who writes for that gay magazine”.

It was the second time the filmmaker Harmony Korine had called me such an extremely public forum, the first having been an “Apple Store” reception for his previous film, Mister Lonely.

This time it was at a Q+A at the New York Film Festival, interrupting a question I had asked, rather stupidly, about the connection between Korine’s new film Trash Humpers and Waiting for Godot, the play by Samuel Beckett.

“Are you that kid who writes for that gay magazine?” Korine asked me.

“Dunno, you that guy who gave me that fake interview?” I replied.

Dennis Lim, a film critic for the Times and Voice who was also the interviewer, adjusted his glasses not knowing what to think.

For those of you who want some vintage Feitellian criticism, here is the original article, pulled from the artist’s website, which was just basically Harmony Korine feeding me a bunch of bullshit as I wrote about my personal connection to his work. It was a pretty good article for me, one of my last for the place I used to write.

And as a point of reference, it was a gay newspaper, not a magazine.

Still, it led to some funny jokes as Korine summarily dismissed my question, which seemed to puzzle Lim as well, after recognizing me and moving on.

Afterward he was nice enough to say hi to me though he never watched the DVD I’d given him over a year ago. Ah well. He asked if I had another one that he would take a look at it, but I was DVD-less and his BFF David Blaine was there to hang out with them.

Overall, that was a good night, as nights at the New York Film Festival Student Rush Line often are.

I managed to get tickets, showing up early enough, while observing the people around me.

Inspired by the crowd, I sent what was the first communication to Jonny-Jon-Jon I’d sent in a month which was something along the lines of:

“If you are looking for atttractive/willing hipster girls who might dig your aesthetic, might I suggest the Student Rush line for Trash Humpers?”

No reply, but later Chadd and Bryan of the Last Pictures crew showed up to pick up some Mexican food and wait in line with me.

By the end of the evening and the performances, as we headed out past obsessive Blaniacs, hording the magician for an autograph, the three of us had our own takes:

Chadd hated it for Korine’s bullshit, Bryan thought it complimented his mild buzz and I thought it was Korine’s best movie, a meditation on American/Midwestern pointlessness.

One thing was for sure, by the end of the evening, Chadd and Bryan weren’t too happy with me.

Since I was blowing nose near them, the entire evening.

***

Whenever I get sick, I try to write it off for a while.

“Allergies.” I think. “A sore throat.”

Whatever I had, it wasn’t swine flu, which I had had this summer and which was discernible via the achiness one experiences throughout their body.

No, the days just drag on as symptoms persist with mornings offering hope of recovery, stifled candle-like by evenings, thick with mucuousy goo.

I went to a seminar at my internship today only to have to get up every 10 minutes to run next door to the kitchen to grab a paper towel (with both hands, otherwise it won’t come down) to blow on vainly, to temporarily open my nasal passages and rid myself of anything egregious that will probably just regrow itself in minutes.

Not a good thing to do around a Co-Executive Producer.

But I came in sick a bunch of days to work this week, because I actually enjoy my work and I feel like I’m making enough of it, sitting down to talk with crew members, people nice enough and generous enough with their time to indulge a questioning dude such as myself.

Something I keep on hearing is something that still the most difficult thing for me to do, which is to take seriously the most menial of the tasks I am assigned.

Restocking a refrigerator or straightening up a kitchen might not seem difficult, but knowing what and what not to recycle can prevent embarrassment in front of your boss.

Sniffling all the way doesn’t help, but I’m motivated, thinking at least I’m doing something, at least, at least.

***

One thing my work and my outside life have in common though is the pressure to get a haircut.

Getting one is a process of pushing past procrastination for me, complicated by the fear that my hair will never grow back again.

I tend to find semi-legitimacy in excuses that I discover for not cutting my hair: I’m in a play, I’m in a web video, people find it funny or remarkable.

The last bit is important, because just like my demeanor and my attitude, my hair feels like a signifier to me, something that makes me uniquely me.

It’s how Dan Pleck found me on the subway the other day, how Harmony Korine recognized me, or Aviva, on the night I met my girlfriend.

That said, there’s such a thing as too much hair, that clouds my vision or obscures my face.

“Eyes.” a fellow said at my work the other day, as I showed him what I planned for the cut. “I just realized you have eyes. It was impossible for me to tell otherwise.”

But then again, growing my hair is an indulgence and cutting is giving something up, leaving something behind, growing up again, in a small and most insignificant way.

When I started my relationship with Eva, still nascent, I worried that the fulfillment inherent in that would turn off inside of me the basis of my writing: complaints stemming from my own ineptitude.

But mostly what I’ve discovered, is that in shelving that section of my creative inspiration (that is: single unhappiness), I’ve discovered all the other things in life I can still complain about.

(Like being sick.)

(Or getting your gay publication you used to work for mixed up.)

I guess the moral is to have confidence in myself, who I am and my character, that I’d be recognizable and still me without the ‘fro.

But it’s a leap of faith.

And as Jonny-Jon-Jon once told me, “you don’t do leaps of faith, you do rope ladders from the roofs of flooded houses onto rescue copters.”

Articulate, if nothing else, I suppose.

***

For the first time in a while, what with the heyday of my internship, I find myself with something unexpected: downtime.

Which, again was something else that used to motivate this blog.

With four days of work a week, plus a wonky compromise for the fifth, I thought my days of bored insanity behind me.

But with job interviews, festival applications, unanswered emails and video games yet to be completed, I should have known better.

There’s always a downtime-in-waiting.

And so, I return.

Slammed

“What are you doing here?”

Ah, the first day of Advanced Production Workshop, the summit of the classes of New York University Film School.

Beyond the introductory classes, which were offered on digital video or black+white reversal film, you could make a movie in Color Sync as a junior or a lower-scale one in the one-semester Narrative Workshop, but neither one of them was Advanced Production, the class I’d looked forward to since I was a freshman.

Back then, I’d heard tale from guest speakers, NYU Alums, coming in to our freshman colloquium, speaking of the ritualistic camp-outs that would happen between the top students at NYU, waiting in hiding in one of the rooms of Tisch to be the first to register in the pre-computerized registration line the next day, all for the best Advanced class, which would somehow assure them their best, final NYU-Film.

And now here I was, after it all, staring down from the back row, looking at all the fresh faces, the students who were ready to take that plunge in their lives, ready to compete and complete their films.

The teacher came in the room finally and looked at me and said:

“What are you doing here?”

“Shit,” I replied. “Blake, was that on my list?”

Blake LaRue, resident Tisch-y pseudo-17-year-old, and I had made a bet on what would happen when Ezra Sacks, my old professor for Advanced would notice that I was in the room upon entering.

“I dunno.” Blake replied, with apathy, as he returned to his discussion regarding basketball.

“I believe the top bets,” I announced. “Were ‘you don’t belong here’, ‘what the hell’ and ‘go home’”

“That one was next.” Ezra replied. “Go home.”

“C’mon,” I exhorted. “Other people have come back to their old Advanced classes before. I just wanna be a part of the new generation!”

“I don’t want them infected.” Ezra told me bluntly.

After which I gave him my puppy-dog eyes to which he answered back with a basset -hound stare.

I began packing my things.

“Don’t you have something to do in the real world?” He asked, as I packed up my things to go.

“Actually I was just kicked out of my internship for–”

“I don’t care.” Ezra said merrily, as he gave me a smiling one-hand wave, goodbye.

***

I actually just had been kicked out of my internship for the day when I headed to go see the first advanced class.

When I left the office, I realized that I could go home and play video games and try to make my bed or I could go see my friends Blake LaRue and the stolid J.D. Amato in their first day of Advanced.

As noted by my friends and office colleagues, the start of a new semester is a reminder that your life is leaving you behind.

And with my life so uncertain, with play-performance cancellations due to weather and still no source of discernible income, it made sense to cling to something certain and hopeful, the first day of Advanced, even if Ezra’s reaction was somewhat expected.

As to why I was kicked out of the office, the reason was debatable.

I had finally finished reading a terrible script for them that I had been reading for weeks, they had just added me on a new assignment and they had executives coming in to a small office. It was possible for me to work from home with my assignment, making them look better and leaving me just as productive.

These were all good reasons.

But the real reason was thi: I still hadn’t karaoked in weeks.

What I mean by this is that there was still that aching gap in my soul that yearned for a musical release, to pound one’s heart and soul out in musical fashion to the music of Al Green or Green Day or Daydream Believer.

There was that yearning, unexpressed even in shower-morning singalongs that desired to be free.

So when the morning radio that my bosses had on turned to “Thunder Road”, what can I say except this: I was helpless.

In the middle of script-reading, I began a full-fledged performance that started off soft but geared up, louder to a discernable level eventually moving downstairs to my bosses’ level as they noticed me, even as one of them began uncontrollably laughing during the performance.

“What can I say, Rob,” I would later explain to my Ro-Stubbled friend Rob Malone, in a lengthy voicemail. “You can hide beneath your covers and study your pain. Make crosses from your lovers or, well, throw roses on the rain.”

“Waste your summer, praying in vain, for like, a savior to rise from these streets.”

“Well, I’m no hero, that’s understood. All the redemption I can offer, Rob, is beneath this dirty hood. With a chance to make it good somehow, but say, what else can we do now?”

“Except I don’t know, that’s why I’m calling you so talk to you later, peace.”

(I later received a call back from Rob that simply started with the phrase: “I know the song.”)

But the fact was the same: that, despite amusement and my game explanation of karaoke deprivation (“It’s my song! I implored), I was asked not to come back for the rest of the day and work from home instead reading my new assignment.

Leaving, I wondered whether the fact that it took my boss coming in and telling me my shirt was probably inside out after I had been in the office for 2 hours might also have had something to do with it.

All I knew was that the same radio station played “Birdhouse in Your Soul” by They Might Be Giants as I was leaving, one of my favorite songs of all time.

And it almost, all started, all over, again.

***

That night, like the night after it and part of the night before, my performances were canceled because of rain and I had a free evening which I gave to my friend, the rascal-y Dan Pleck, since he had been planning to see the show with his father, who was in town for just the night, all the way from Illinois.

Dan wanted to go out to dinner and I suggested that we go out to a place that a good friend of mine and his larger-than-life Italian father had taken me, a place called Becco over in the theater district, which offers a delicious unlimited trio-of-pastas tasting menu for a relatively cheap price, something that had previously gotten me so full that I couldn’t even eat dessert.

But the reservation we could get there was too late and we ended up going to an Ethiopian place, Meskerem, which was my first experience with Ethiopian food, which I deemed OK but generally not as good as the Indian stuff I had had.

It was nice seeing Dan’s father, a college professor/intellectual teacher of History and talking politics at the table along with the friend of Dan’s father with whom he was staying. It was also nice to see Najia, Dan’s beleaguered girlfriend who had been bogged down in a well-paying but long-houred medical researcher job, as well as the countless medical school applications that she would later describe to us.

“What’s one word I can describe myself in?” She asked.

“What? Why?”

“No,” She said disappointedly. “Those don’t work.”

Then-

“I checked out medical school websites and they said that’s often a question they ask in the interviews: to describe yourself in one word.”

I found this rather ridiculous as I criterion for our nation’s health-care providers, but held my tongue. Najia would have to find her own word.

After dinner, we headed up to see Dan’s new apartment, a place he shared with other friends-of-mine who have appeared on this blog before, So-Cal Fresh-and-Clean Andy Roehm and my former erstwhile roommate Brennan McVicar.

Dan showed me his room as he and everyone else seemed to marvel at it, a small sized room with a large queen-sized bed taking up the whole of it.

“It looks nice. ” I told Najia and Brennan to their laughter.

“You know Najia, now that I have a girlfriend, I appreciate how you’ve been making fun of my small twin-bed I have at my apartment. This seems really nice, if you’re going to invest in room-space to invest in this. After all, I keep slamming my girlfriend against the wall in my bed as we’re sleeping whenever she comes over.”

What I didn’t know, saying that, was that Dan’s father and friend were in the other room and, like a stencil, their conversation had come to a halt directly before the phrase “slamming my girlfriend into a wall” came up.

For the rest of the night, I received confused, earnest looks from Dan’s father as well as a guido-voiceover from Dan as he walked me to the Times Square Coldstone for a craving.

“Yah, dude, I totally fucked the shit outta that girl last night, you seen her.” He ad-libbed. “Man, I slammed her against the wall!”

And they cracked up as I tried to divert the energy going to blushing to thoughts of Chocolate Jello Pudding ice cream with Caramel.

That and home.

***

BECCO

Trio of Pastas Unlimited Tasting Menu w/Salad or Antipasto included– $17.95 for lunch, $22.95 for dinner

46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues.

ACE7 to 42nd St-Port Authority

Un-for-bloggable…

I haven’t been able to karaoke lately.

I feel like this has been the subject, or at least the way, I’ve started several blog posts, but it really does take a toll on you.

I could find excuses, either in prior commitments, rehearsals for the play or my friend’s misdirections.

“BBQ in Long Island” J-Sam claimed, no doubt to hit up the prissy Long Island Jewish girls he hung out with who I so loathed for their unique mix of arrogance, ignorance and faux romanticism, uggh.

“Sick. Contagious. No one would want me.” Dan Pleck told me, which echoed his girlfriend Najia’s answer as well, though I knew hers was partly motivated by her lack of affection for Karaoke and his, probably in turn with hers.

“I’m at the beach.” Ro-Beardo claimed cryptically. I say cryptically because Rob had been absent from both his beard and New York for some time now, hiding out in PA, dog-sitting and threatening to erect barns.

“That’s kind of a douche thing to do,” I told him. “Choose the beach over your regular-status Karaoke requirements.”

“Bad timing.” He claimed and returned to his beard-line tan.

So, in absence of my regular friends to Karaoke with, I ended up at a barbeque held by members of the “Last Pictures” crew.

It was something of a housewarming, something of a get-together or shindig and something of an offshoot of that need for community unemployed art students feel in the days once the semester has started, leaving them behind.

It was also a Sundance submission party for the crew, who had sent in not only their film One Night Only, my friend Chadd’s big outing featuring Kristen Wiig and Garret Dillahunt, but also Bryan Gaynor’s Life Lessens, a comedy we had read in my writing group.

They celebrated in a group in a Bushwick backyard, with the head-card party game from Inglorious Basterds and burgers-slash-hot-dogs that no one was willing to cook.

In other circumstances, I might have been dismayed at the lack of “poultritarian” options to suit my pallet, but in this case I had, on one hand, a tall boy of Modelo Especial and in the other, my girlfriend, Eva.

***

I remember Eva telling me at one point that she was pleased to find, when she discovered my blog, that she was not too present on it, that there was not an ecstatic outpouring of emotions here, a denuding of our feelings for each other.

Having a girlfriend is a strange thing. I found a Battlestar Galactica DVD today, while looking around, and said to myself out loud:

“Now that I have a girlfriend, I could probably bring this home, since she’s already aware of how nerdy I actually am.”

Except that I haven’t seem to be too nerdy lately. On the contrary, I seem to attached to Eva at the mouth, the reason why I couldn’t pay much attention or play the party-head-game at the BBQ.

On subway cars, on the dock near my play-boat, in Brooklyn/Manahttan, in my home or hers, I can’t even look at her without kissing her, with privacy or no.

This is a real issue, because being with Eva has effectively eliminated some of the core principle of my identity: Jewish shame.

I should feel ashamed of myself making out with my girlfriend in public. I should feel embarrassed when we put on show for the home-going F train. I should feel warm-ears when I hold her downstairs from my apartment on the SoHo sidewalk, because the idea of kissing her upstairs makes me when I’m downstairs, deserves anticipatory action.

All of this swirls around in my head and I have many questions and many answers.

I have to go back to my shrink sometime soon and tell her about all this, since she’s been on hiatus, a point of irony, since I’m usually in her office complaining about girls.

On my blog, I’m used to discussing my feelings about the world and my tactile experience of it.

But maybe I’m attached to Eva at the mouth as we kiss each other, because what we feel then is unspoken.

There’s a privacy to a kiss, even done in public. There’s a transmission to it, a feeling passed or shared from one person to the next.

Maybe what I’ve learned or what I’m learning from all this, my first “girlfriend” experience, is that somethings can be left unspoken.

Un-blogged about.

Well, except for what I’ve already said.

***

Speaking of things, un-blogged about, I work somewhere I cannot blog about, so I won’t.

For the first time in my life, I have signed a confidentiality agreement. I will mention no one by name from my work nor the name of it on this page, since I enjoy my job and do not want to kill it in its infancy.

However, since I spent all day today at my job selling myself as a foodie, I will share a place I discovered through it.

***

I was warned about Azuri Cafe that the owner “might be grumpy”.

If anything, this only excited me more.

Considering the restaurant I have a love-hate relationship with, Shopsin’s (I love them, they hate me), I have found that often it is the “grumpiest” of restaurant owners who have the best food.

After all, if their food wasn’t excellent then how could they stay in business with that sort of ‘tude?

However, it turned out beyond my imagination, that the place’s grumpiness was not just a signifier of its quality, but also it’s prime virtue.

Azuri is a traditional-ish run-down falafel joint, like a Mamoun’s or (a better comparison) like Alfanoose downtown.

However, unlike those places, they don’t ask you any questions when you order your falafel.

They know that they know that they know what’s best.

No questions or requests needed.

When I observed them preparing my falafel, they put hummus, babaganough, hot sauce, peppers, pickles, regular salad, Israeli salad, onions and more things that I couldn’t even tell including a cilantro-y looking sauce they used a profusion of, which seemed to resemble pesto.

The result was unqualifi-ed-ly delicious. The falafel was crisp and broad and numerous within the pita. The sauces and textures blended so that, while individual influences could be noted, you could enjoy your sammy in ignorance as well.

“You know,” I told a co-worker on the walk to the subway. “If I had to choose what was on my falafel, I probably wouldn’t have made something this good.”

“Knowledge isn’t everything.” He told me, as we headed the long walk to the train.

***

AZURI CAFE

Falafel Sandwich (w/the works)- $6.50

51st bet 9th and 10th Ave, closer to 10th.

CE to 50th St.

Confidence Games

“It’s a confidence game.” He explained to me.

“You’re an art dealer, there’s a buyer; you’re selling fakes and he’s not rich. Everyone’s playing each other. Everyone’s in on it. A confidence game.”

“That’s the theme anyway.”

I found myself at the Public Theater, meeting a director who, after talking to me in line at a show called “Rambo Solo”, had decided that I might be right for a part in his next downtown-theater mash-up.

In truth, there was some vindication in it. I could be pissed off finally at the theater teachers of my youth, Ms. Baehr and Mr. Meacham who cast me in side-lined roles and drove me (mercifully) from a future as a “drama kid”.

But I also felt taken aback.

Why would somebody who met me in a line waiting for a show think to cast me in a play. What was it?

“Well,” he told me. “Honestly, you talked to me about theater in the line and how you love it and you had so much to say.”

“And I thought to myself, this guy’s got some confidence. He could sell it. And I thought, why not give it a try?”

I smiled.

“Now do you think you might have problems memorizing lines?” He asked.

“Well,” I told him. “I’m good at Karaoke.”

***

Is it wrong that I’m the kind of guy who needs to get a little confidence to have some?

Just a little confidence mind you, not a lot.

When my therapist asked me if I was the sort of person who depended on other people for my self-opinion, I told her “No, I don’t think so.”

And then after a moment:

“I mean, well kinda. But no.”

That might seem like a back-handed admission, but I think it’s probably more complicated than that.

For instance, the other day I found myself applying for a job (as I do so often nowadays), I sent in my cover letter and my resume and I got an email back.

The email was of a simple mass type, with a little bit of personalization (It included my name).

It simply told me that my application had been received, that qualified candidates would have two-to-three rounds of interviews and that they would keep me posted.

Stepping away from my computer, I felt it.

“Dan!” I announced as one might announce grandly over G-Chat to a friend.

“I have just received a letter telling me that I am in the running for the position. They have emailed me back! Ha-ha!”

Except I said “Ha-ha!” neither in a Nelson-from-The-Simpsons way (Haha!) nor in a casual laughing sense (ha,ha), but rather in the triumphant roar of one who was at least under consideration for a job, for in the land of the blind men, the man under consideration to receive an eye at least, well, he’s doing pretty good.

Except all of this was on G-chat so it probably lost its intended fervor.

“yeah” was Dan’s monosyllabic response, which came much later, probably not until after he’d taken a shower or something and when I asked him if he applied I met a blank screen staring back, wondering at the efficacy of G-Chat for immediate communication.

Still, I had gotten a confidence boost.

Similarly, when I go to my writing group every week, I make it a point always to bring in pages of my own. Something inside me tells me that if I want an environment of working writers, I have to hold myself to the standard I’d hold them to and come with pages every week.

But everytime I write my pages, a dread fills me of how they will be received. Will the 5-6 people who attend weekly find them wanting? Trite? Laughable (but in a bad way)?

Inarticulate horror mixed with vertiginous anticipation fills me, much as waiting for the results of AP scores once did.

But so far I’ve been coasting and every week I hear people tell me “good job”, “I really liked it” or “It’s great to hear your pages.”

When I hear things like that, a part of me blanches in embarassment or happiness, but another part of me grabs the comment and builds with i so the next time I say something douchebaggy or authoritative, I can mentally reference the praise or the happiness shown to me by someone and use it as a bulwark against uncertainty.

“Oh,” I’d think. “I can give suggestions to other people about their writing because I’ve had X,Y and Z tell me they like mine.”

Similar to this is how I functioned in film school, with what seems now like an upward build toward self-satisfaction. The same friend from G-Chat, Dan Pleck, would mock me on the set of my films and when I was talking with an ex-not-girlfriend of mine who was younger, on how I always seem to give advice, which is as much about my fond memories of earlier years in film school as any sense of expertise.

In other words, I can feel confident in certain situations by reliving good experiences from the past, no matter how minor they might be.

***

The inverse is also true.

When I feel I have no experience or only bad experiences in something, it’s hard for me to take a leap or act brave.

Contrasts of this are apparent, like on Karaoke Mondays where I belt out songs and always keep going even I mess up or make a “vocal miscalculation”.

When I went this Monday, sans a certain Beardo, my friend Andy Roehm stepped up to come with, making it a drunk-old-time, singing AC-DC and songs in falsetto.

When I trapsed around the bar, singing Nat King Cole’s “L-O-V-E”, I was congratulated about “my baritone” and given a thumbs up by the bartender Colin, the karaoke DJ we love and respect.

But when Andy started asking me about my love life, I didn’t know what to say. I had always felt like to get in the game you needed some experience and I felt that all my experiences were poor or sorely lacking if present at all.

“Don’t matter, dude.” Andy offered. “Best thing I ever learned was that most girls are just like guys: DTF. They’re looking to fuck just as much as us.”

In some ways, the thought of that was even scarier than the idea of persuading them.

And even my Karaoke skills were built up through Rob telling me after every number that he liked it “for it’s class”.

Another place I face this is in my improv class, which is all the harder considering how I expect myself to be at good at it and find myself instead falling flat at every exercise, seeing my classmates get better.

Every time I sit down from volunterring for a sketch or a scene, I sit down less willing to go back up again. After all, I’d just messed up the scene before and with enough consecutive chances to prove myself blown, I felt like I was on a downward hurl.

“You are the only one who can defeat yourself.” My dad told me. But the nerd in me thought, “Well a ninja or a samurai could defeat me too.”

My brain went haywire. I was terrible at improv. I was terrible at life. I smelled bad. I hadn’t taken a shower. I was gaining weight. Seth Rogen was losing weight.

This was not a cycle I wanted to continue.

But then a girl in class gave me her number and asked for mine.

And then we talked about in being in film school and PAing.

And then we did a sketch where we two hipsters in a record store where she mocked me for not liking Joy Division because it wasn’t obscure enough.

And then we made plans to go see a show later that night.

And then I went to the bathroom at the place my class is held and looked at myself in the mirror, looked at my hair and turned sideways and thought:

“You know my hair gets curlier when it ain’t washed. Maybe this night won’t be so bad.”