Summer is Near/Summer is Here

Summer is upon New York City, even though it’s only somewhere in May still, if only for a few fleeting hours.

With this realization, this acceptance comes the fact that when the heat comes up, it doesn’t go much down, that the paradigm has shifted, that when it’s 87 and humid in New York (pronounced “YOO-mid”), that this is the new reality, not a heat wave, but a fact of city life.

I, for one, never want to accept the onset of summer in New York City. It’s the city’s worst season in many ways, the one where the garbage and piss smells rise up from the sidewalk, burning and sizzling into all of our noses, leaving us standing in stifling subway stations, waiting for our cars to arrive, less for expedience than air conditioning.

Every time I meet a new group of people, I end up acting like a tour guide to them.

“This is what will happen,” I explain to them, summing up the last few lines. “It’s going be pretty awful, especially during the day. But the nights…”

Nights in New York City during the summer can be hot and awful, sticky too.

But mostly it cools off and the light lasts and lasts so 9pm could feel like 6pm and the warm weather, feeling tropical, could lead you out all night.

It was a night like on Sunday, after seeing improv, after seeing the Hangover II, after sitting in my house, seeing different kinds of friends.

I was strung out, come down on two nights previous of drinking and the two iced coffees and king-sized “small” soda I’d drank at the theater.

But damn, if that night wasn’t pretty.

As the crew of people I was with disbanded and went home after the UCB, I stuck around with Tara, an engaged Canadian high-school drama teacher, and Jeff, a Texan-by-way-of-Delaware engineer, who both had come to New York for this improv intensive and both were just trying to see the city one more night.

We walked around looking to see is Shake Shack was open (it wasn’t), talking about our lives “back home”, our present adventures and leaving out purposefully the somewhat-sad contrast of what we were doing now, versus what our lives would return to.

In a way, this improv class we were taking was summer camp again, a block of your life divided, where your adult responsibilities could hold for a while, suspended in the face of the people you were with.

That is, of course, unless you were someone with a night job like our “big brother” Sean, the singing waiter, who got on shift after taking notes for all of us to be sent out at the end of every day. Or Ray, who worked an afternoon-to-late reception gig. Or Natalie, who acted for scale and took tips at night, from a corner of the West Village.

Or if you were me and didn’t have much of “adult responsibilities” to begin with, with a job so occasional that you hoped you were still employed, so you could tell everyone how cool it is.

All of us still were “holding” for that time, for those shows, for those classes with different teachers. Like campers we bonded quickly, free to hug, free to touch.

We clapped for each other, called each other pet-names, laughed when we picked on each other.

“Juvenile”, my inner critic calls out and some friends would agree, but college is some form of that too, as is grad school.

A place where nerds hover and function, in suspension of real life.

But that time was now coming to an end. I’d told my boss my class was over on Friday. I’d told my new-found “intense people” about shows that were happening after they’d already left.

Camp was always interesting growing up because in some ways it represented an alternative reality. When you appeared magically in Vermont, you were context-less, separated from your environment. Even if you portrayed high status or low status through your bearing or gait, you were judged relatively, you were a person anew.

And then, after 3 or 6 or even 8 weeks, it was over. You might not see these people again. Life resumed.

Now I live a life without summer breaks from school or work or what have you. There is no “return to reality”, only the different phases, jobs, locations you live in, in your life, moving from crowd to crowd.

As I walked with Jeff and Tara, from out of town, it was Memorial Day, in New York City, the official start of summer.

And as I told them about how New York would be in the days to come, I only realized later they wouldn’t see them.

And I wouldn’t see them either.

But I kept on giving them the tour.

Because that’s what you do at camp; you pretend, for the moment, it won’t end.

***

 

“Excuse me, uh sir. I was, uh, just wondering, uh, if I could, um, get a… signature. Autograph, you know? Big fan.”

This is what I mimed to Rob Malone when we went to go see “The Hangover II” and he showed up in Galifinakis-style shaved-head-and-beard, claiming it had nothing to do with it.

“It has nothing to do with seeing the movie.” Rob claimed from his seat. “It’s just hot out. Also, sit the fuck down.”

I was standing in front of Rob in the awkward aisles of the 19th St East theater, where a group of us had been drafted to see the film on a slow Memorial day weekend.

I was just getting over an improv-prom I had attended, stag (actually with a non-date of the nice, but clearly engaged school teacher) which left me crying in bed over my loneliness at approximately 11:07pm, passing out in my clothes and waking up due to heartburn unable to go back to sleep at 4.

In these ways, the improv prom greatly resembled my real prom.

Plus I had someone tell me I was “adequately creepy” in a dead-pan and my enchiladas arrived cold on the table.

Just saying.

Rob and Chadd, who had met me for coffees earlier, helped me nurse through my stomach upset, my lack of togetherness and my generally weird improv-absorption by providing me some paths back to real life.

“I’m thinking of growing out my beard for the summer.” Rob claimed, during a conversation gap, causing all to jump on refute.

These were the moments friendships were made of.

Chadd for his own part was getting ready to shoot new projects in his exciting life as an “actual filmmaker” out of NYU-Film school and his enthusiasm and pluck in his progress, caused me to mention when we discussed some of our former classmates:

“Not ends up making movies and not everyone wants to.”

Chadd took a moment to take that in, with an Ohioan “I guess…” as if anyone who didn’t want to were crazy, in the face of his own refreshing certainty and commitment.

Andrew Parrish brought along his hot girlfriend, Kelly Hires, like a kidnapped Lois Lane, we imagined bound, gagged and saying something like “You’ll never get away with this, Luthor.”

But really they seemed pretty happy, away from their office jobs, on a warm afternoon.

Buddies Blake LaRue and Sean Dunn showed up just to look like each other, or like Blake was a 17 year-old impersonating Sean, and they mostly kept quiet except berating for peeing so often, a product of all of the caffeinated beverages.

The movie was terrible, we barely laughed. As another friend pointed out to me, “at some point it just became a weird drama and I just felt really bad for them.”

But on the street corner with Rob and his camera and his beard. With Chadd’s toothy smile, the Parrishes kidnap-y aesthetic and the LaRue/Dunn change-up, I felt surrounded in something worth while.

“Cheese.” Rob said as he took my picture.

And “Cheese” I replied when I took his.

***

If I’ve said it once on this blog, I’ve said it often: I hate breakfast.

But there are those times when you wake up too early on a weekend, bound by earlier awakenings and it’s 10:30 and you know you don’t want to wait until 11:25 or whenever the fuck these places start serving real food and you cave and you just go for something.

And sometimes, really, really rarely: It turns out good.

This is one of those times.

I ended up on a hypoglycemic Saturday morning at Bareburger, a spot near me in the South Central Village.

They just happened to have a 3-dollar egg sandwich, an early opening and an advertisement of a brioche and jack-cheese.

What I got was all the advertised above, along with the best tasting turkey bacon (something I usually avoid) I’ve ever had, “french fry hash” cooked with peppers and onions, and some pretty raw-dog organic ketchup.

When I was done it was sunny out. My stomach was full. I didn’t feel bloated or like I wouldn’t eat lunch.

I just felt like there was food in me that I didn’t mind eating.

At a table on a weekend afternoon.

Breakfast; that’s the highest praise I’ll give you.

***

BAREBURGER

Egg Sandwich w/Colby Jack, Turkey Bacon, French Fry Hash and Organic Ketchup- $8.95

LaGuardia Place between Bleecker and West 3rd Sts.

BDFM to Broadway-Lafayette Sts. ACE to West 4th St.

 

 

Inappropriate Jokes/Inappropriate Times

It took me dying two times in front of two different audiences to let me realize, I wasn’t naturally good at stand-up.

Not that I was supposed to be, or expected to be.

Still, it hurts when you stand up there in front of everyone, having received some praise and hear silence and smiles, followed by polite claps following you back to your seat.

Matt Chao and Dave Broad came with me to one of them, where I promised them a set full of untested material mostly referring to online dating and delivered just that, to no promise.

“Well, I still taped that if you wanted it.” Dave said, Canon 5D camera in hand.

I considered putting my dying on stage up here, but decided against it.

It’s good in a way, I know, just like with the sketch comedy. There needs to be pain for growth, struggle for learning.

“It’s like being a prize fighter.” My teacher Armando told me, while lifting beverage boxes in the break in our class, “You just have to go out there and get beat up a lot.”

I think it’s motivated me to do so, or at least try. For now, I’m bothering all my friends who do stand-up, trying to cajole them into mentoring me.

The second open-mic I went to was with a nice dude from my SNL writing class, where hubris and a small room led me to get up.

When I apologize to the M.C. afterwards, he told me to “come back with some punchlines”.

Another comedian, Dave Greek (a swell dude) told me about stand-up after I had died at the first open-mic, “What’s important is that you wake up tomorrow and keep doing this.”

“Don’t worry I’ll wake up tomorrow and still want to do stand-up.”

“Oh.” He replied. “I meant not killing yourself, but that’s good too.”

The next night at McDonalds, I went out with a consortium of friends (Ro-bearded Malone, Simon Robinson, Sean Dunn and Zach Weintraub–pictured above) after a showing of the documentary Strong Man at IFC.

“I know I’m not funny enough yet.” I told Zach. “But I’m glad at least I know a lot of people who are doing this sort of thing, or at least trying, you know, to do something with their lives.”

“Oh, sorry bro.” Zach said contritely. “I wasn’t listening, I was too busy putting pre-chopped peanuts onto my Mickey D Sundae.”

“Thanks.” I replied.

Zach was off soon to Argentina to go shoot his crowd-sourced movie, “The International Sign For Choking” and Simon, whose Japan-o-philia included frequently recommending a semi-pornographic Japanese version of the Powerpuff Girls called “Panty+Stocking” to me, was off to teach English in Nippon, where I only assumed he would meet/marry his Japanese wife.

Recently, I had been wondering too if I should take a break, head to Europe or Japan or somewhere and see what was out there for me.

Now, newly girlfriend-less, I felt less reason not to leave New York, at least for a little while, to see somewhere else. Love is like a magnet, or gravity, in that way; good at drawing you back to where you’re coming from.

Still, I felt good about being out in the city, using my time, taking classes and electives and free practices and open-mikes. I was proud I had died trying stand-up, proud I had put myself out there enough to know that I had to learn.

Even if there still weren’t commercials to audition for, my life felt like it was moving and writing, terrifying/gratifying, was happening more than ever for me, with my classes spurning me on with deadlines and timelines and high expectations for material.

I finally met one of those expectations in my sketch-comedy writing class, where I just last week reported that same experience of learning/dying in front a crowd of people I could only assume didn’t respect me.

On that non-hungover Saturday morning before my class, I watched half an episode of “Mr. Show with Bob and David”, analyzed what each sketch was about, its reality and its jokes, thought about something in my life I knew the reality of it and wrote it.

It was a sketch about someone going up at an open mike, saying too many awkward rage-filled things and alienating people.

When they called for notes in the class after reading it, someone raised their hand and said: “I loved it”.

And it was only one sketch.

But it was one sketch to feel good about.

***

I ran into Eli Rousso, the other day at the movie theater, taking tickets by the door.

Eli was my red-headed doppelganger from Poly Prep, a web designer and man on the hand of cool, who was a good video editor back when I was afraid to even touch the computer than Final Cut Pro was on.

When I saw him, we talked for a couple minutes, just about what he was seeing, who this new girlfriend was he was with and some comments about my blog. Eli’s the sorta guy who says he’s your friend but who doesn’t pick up his phone and who you don’t see for a long time. It’s a good way of preserving that image, that many of have, of people from their high school eternally cooler than themselves.

What Eli said to me once though, upon reading my blog was something to this effect:

“Nick. You talking about girls on your blog, that’s like the pussy. Everyone wants to get to it.”

So yeah, after a year or so of relative domestic happiness and then a couple months of awkward rebound attempts/self-immolation, here I go.

When I talked to Schuyler, my co-worker at the movie theater, about being single and out there, he’d mock my attempts to meet someone on the internet.

“Why don’t you just go out to the bar or the club?” He’d ask. “Plenty of ladies there.”

“Going out to one of those places I won’t meet people that I like.”

“How do you know?” He replied.

“Because I don’t go out to bars or clubs, I don’t enjoy over-priced drinks or rubbing butts on people, so why would I enjoy the people who enjoy those things?”

“Well, alright then, where?” He asked.

“I don’t know. Online, maybe. Or at a party with friends. Or maybe an improv class.” I said and mulled on that last one for a while.

Given that my last attempt to meet someone at an improv class ended with Rob calling me “kinda sad” and the girl telling me she was “busy till [next] November”, I should have been hesitant, but also given that my old Nick Feitel self-embarrassing instincts were beginning to regenerate, I felt darn invulnerable. Felt that way, at least.

“So, teach. That cute coach have a boyfriend?” I asked Armando in between classes. I had been attending an “Improv Coaching Workshop” on Saturdays that was free, where Armando would teach seasoned improvisers how to teach students improv. I/we were the guinea pigs and “the cute coach” had told me a few times I was “real funny”.

“Oh. Her.” Armando recognized after I whispered her name for clarification. “Yes. Yes she does.”

“Well, I mean you met him? Nice guy? Cool guy?” I asked.

“You’ve met him too.” Armando said. “He’s another coach in the class.”

Strike one.

“Oh.” I replied.

“Yeah, but there’s nothing wrong, you know, with having an affinity for someone.” Armando said, in an airy, comforting tone.

“Yeah, I feel ashamed. See you guys in 5 minutes. And went to get some Bubble Tea.

When I came back, the “volunteer” portion of the coaching class still hadn’t begun and so I sat down and played video games on my DSi. A curly-haired young lady, who’d also told me I was funny when I left class last week, in the sort of the way that someone empowers another, sat down next to me and tried to talk to me about video games.

Mmrow.

We talked a bit about them, though she was no afficianado, about her job and our college time.

“What did you major in?” I asked, after she told me a fun story about learning improv on a cruise.

“Psychology. But that was 20 years ago.” She said.

Not a deal-breaker.

“Well, uh, sorry if this is like weird.” I replied. “But you don’t look it at all?”

“No, not too weird.” She replied, but then we were ushered in.

I spent some of the class looking over at her, trying to catch a glance or two, noticing her sweater, or her jeans, looking for age or lack thereof, or if she was looking at me.

After class, I went up to her and asked “What’s your last name?” my iPhone out, ready to friend her instantaneously.

“My maiden or my married name?” She asked with a smile and if she was looking for something in my face, I thought I did a decent job of freezing it, before saying “Either one!” and adding her as a friend, just a friend, indeed.

Strike two.

Then there was the girl who came in the first week with leg-warmers, a skirt and a t-shirt that had an ironic description of caves written on it.

Love at first sight.

When she didn’t come back to the second class and someone mentioned he had come in her stead, I let loose one of my weird truthful-isms, saying to him: “Well that’s pretty lame, I was trying to get her number.”

When she came back this week, I wondered as she laughed at some of my creepy “hitting-on-crying-girl improv” scenes, whether word had gotten back.

When I tried talking to her after, waiting on line for the bathroom, she started talking to me about acting and classes and whether I was interested in that.

“Yes.” I told her, without much other context. “Then let me get your email.” she said, followed closely by. “Gotta go, bye.”

I still don’t know what it was for, but I guess if it’s some sort of recruitment for “The Landmark Forum”, I’ll feel bad later.

Strike three?

I left then and headed to Last Pictures’ TOMORROWLAND, a screening of my Feitel-Friend Chadd Harbold’s film BLOCK, as well as others by the good ol’ LP crew. When I stood at the bar by myself for a while, sneaking Whiskey-Ginger-Ales, I took the above blurry picture of Gavin McInnes trying to corrupt Chadd’s parents through conversation, which sounded the alarm with his crew of flunkies and caused me to flee, or retreat, at least.

“Where are you?” I texted Chadd, with the picture. “Your parents are going to grow moustaches and start experimenting with Mescaline.”

Of course, Chadd did some soon; it was his party. I hung out, mostly with Andy Roehm and Brennan McVicar and his lovely girlfriend Vanessa.

I got to see all my friend there, including Rob, shaking thighs like he’d never have to go home, and Zach again, who showed up with Michigonian girlfriend Jenny.

As for me, I found myself stuck at the bar again, with a young lady, a friend of a friend, who kept on talking to me, wanting to hear about improv classes and our respective lives. I snuck her a couple drinks from the open bar, as she wasn’t there to partake due to early morning work (with children no less!) and I even asked for her number at the end of it all and she gave it to me, even though I just kept expecting her to walk away.

“Oh yeah, she does that all the time. Very nice, friendly type.” Brennan told me later on, when we walked down the block to get tacos, but super-funny man Ron Phippen told me, when I admitted to him I had forgotten her name when I first saw her:

“Dude, if a girl knows your name and you don’t know hers, it means she wants to fuck you.”

And like being called funny, I don’t take it as the truth.

But it’s nice to feel that opinion sometimes, true or not.

Was that four strikes? No one’s watching baseball now anyway.

How about four downs, for football.

Or maybe a hit?

Or a concussion?

Or something else.

***

When I told Matt Chao that we were going to dinner at Grand Central, despite not having any real reason to do that other than a promise of home-made doughnuts, he kinda shrugged and said whatever.

“Better than going home to Jersey.” He replied.

Matt had been getting a lot of ribbing from me, for the fact that I had made fun of him for years for his corporate slavedom working un-paid for PBS a their longest running intern and now here he was, with his first feature-film assistant editing gig, credited as a “shooter” and a “PA” as well on set, getting paid, reportedly, 4 times as much as me and getting a short-short he made for them on the web.

But there he was still, after work, with nothing to do but go home to Jersey.

Which means, he’d call me up a lot.

It was Matt who went with me to the Diamond Lion show, where we laughed our asses off watching people improvise a musical about child abduction and Lord of the Rings copyright infringement. It was Matt who came with me to see Billy the Mime do a show that included a sketch called “The African-American Experience” and “Thomas and Sally: A Night in Monticello”. It was Matt who sat with me in Grand Central, before my Writing for SNL class and was down for getting the prix-fixe menu when all the doughnuts we’d gone all the way uptown for turned out to have sold out at 3pm.

The prix-fixe was at Caffe Pepe Rosso, an outpost of the Italian place by my house, but it was notable for both the portions (a huge soup or smaller salad and a main course) and the price (under 11 bucks) which was less than ordering even any of the entrees on their own, at the location by my house.

The Chicken Parmigiana was great, an unexpected surprise at the uptown locations, which mostly serves Paninis, with a good deal of Italian espresso.

I lapped it up with a salad, but Matt got the soup with some gnocchi for his main and the soup seemed bigger than my entree.

After finishing up, in between biting and Matt reading, I found the check already paid for in classy fashion.

“Don’t worry about it.” Matt said cooly.

“Fuck you, Matt, I didn’t ask for that.” I said full of spite.

“Fine, pay me, bitch.” He said staring down at his book.

“Yeah, whatever, thanks.” I mumbled. “Only cause you make four times more than me.”

Today my best friend Frank called me, after texting me all weekend dealing with his existential lady crisises. Frank lives in Brooklyn, but he’s too busy between the gym and mostly unemployment to ever come by the theater to say hi.

“That’s like, 2.50 there and 2.50 back, bro.” He said.

“2.25.” I commented.

“Anyway, I’m broke.” He said. “And almost to the gym.”

People have their lives, I guess. But it’s nice sometimes, when someone’s down like that Matt.

All, I’m saying.

***

CAFFE PEPE ROSSO

Chicken Parmigiana with Penne and Lemon/Garlic Arugala Salad- $10.95 (free w/Matt Chao)

Grand Central Terminal Dining Concourse (specials change daily)

4567S to Grand Central-42nd St

Break-Up Diary, Day Five

It’s strange think that at one point in my life, I aspired to sit in a small smile-shaped area. That that was what I worried about.

The box office shift at some point in my job at the movie theater was, in fact, an aspirational zone for me. It represented a level of trust from the bosses; the place where the most money was handled, where you could sit left to your own devices, a sort of zen-zone.

But today looking at the customers, I hated all of them, regarding them as annoying as the mosquito who had erred through the vacuum tubes into my booth, each one just drawing my attention from my defined goal of vicarious escape through video games and poorly streamed episodes of In Treatment on my phone.

All to escape, what?

What I felt, what I had become, what I was afraid of becoming? I didn’t know.

“Be in your feelings.” my therapist had advised me. “And don’t do anything you wouldn’t do normally.”

What I had done was make a pass at a friend (unsuccessful, but harmless, by her grace, not mine) and tried to make a pass at a casual acquaintance (creepier, depressing, done online).

The street-balling Tibetan kid at my movie theater had asked me if I liked reggaeton, which he described dancing to as “sex with the pants on” and offered to take me out clubbing. The security guard tried some fatherly affection and knocking my head up with tales of “looking good to get back at her”. I didn’t know whether a rebound would work or not, but the truth was as Andy later told me, that what I wanted wasn’t sex or at least not really.

“Well I mean what I want is to be with someone I know, someone who respects or accepts me.” I told him, while cleaning up stray popcorn. “Otherwise, well, I’m just fucking someone and that just doesn’t work for me.” It was true. For some reason, I felt like my connection to someone, that they accepted me and I accepted them, that release of boundaries that knowledge, or want of knowledge, that’s what’s sexy/attractive, which makes it sound like I like fucking books.

But what it really means, predictably, is that I like being with people who I have a loving relationship with.

And right now, I’m all out of those.

***

It’s not that there are things that don’t help or that I just feel bad all the time.

It’s just like I said last time, if you turn on enough lights, you can try and forget it’s not sunny.

Sorry, that sounded pretty lame.

But I had a good writer’s group, maybe the biggest one I’ve ever had. I felt all authoritative and cool with the surfeit of new people staring at me as I explained the “rules” and gave incipient feedback to each piece, sounding like an expert, like a teacher, like a man who wasn’t 6-7 mugs of PBR deep.

People laughed and had a good time, I kept nodding to the vibe and rubbing my hair, happy that people were there, that they thought I  was cool, that they thought this thing I had started worked or was at least worth checking out.

They all left afterwards, but Ro-beardo and So-Cal Andy stuck around to go karaokeing afterwards, a categorization that Rob broadly rejected.

“Listen, Nick. We have to stop this misinformation on your blog. I am only somewhat-to-occasionally bearded and Andy is not from Southern California.”

“He’s from Santa Barbara.” I countered.

“That’s practically No-Cal.” said Rob apoplectic, in what was either an attempt at mid-Californian snobbery or an attempt to stay warm in the temperature-dipping night.

Andy on the other hand, had a very warm looking hat and so chose to remain outside the conversation.

I did a few good songs at the bar and Rob liked that I picked “Secret Agent Man” for him, the subject of much anxiety on my part for its obviousness, but ended up a ball he knocked out of the park.

No one seemed to get me when I did Devo’s “Beautiful World”, but I did end up with some awkward cheers from the French-speaking lesbians across the lounge area for a scratchy rendition of Train’s “Drops of Jupiter”, a song from my upbringing.

It felt good to get a couple claps, even if it was just for that.

Rob and Andy hopped the L-train home, after some more words of wisdom, but my mood faded down as the extra beers’ soporific effect hit me, wandering down 14th street in the dead of night.

The thoughts came at me as they do. Was she happier without me? Was I supposed to be happier for her if she was? Did she ever think of calling me in these late nights? Was there someone there, taking care of her? How much of this whole much relationship was real and how much was it just intentional blindness?

It was easy down those closed, commercial blocks to wonder at one’s own insecurities, with hindsight unpicking the moments previously obscured by your own sense of love or contentment.

I guess it’s also a bad time to contemplate your partner’s parting assertion that you were “unhealthily” involved with her, when you’re trying to pick up your pieces, many drinks and a couple songs down.

It’s not lost on me that the girl I hit on last opened with the line: “I just want you to know your girlfriend loved you until the end.”

Or maybe that’s just paraphrasing.

Anyway, I got Taco Bell and it was good for the situation.

I went home.

***

The next day I woke up to no hangover, except my mom calling me asking me for Lena Dunham’s contact info.

“You should date her.” Rob replied from across the internet. “Didn’t you see Tiny Furniture? You guys are cut from the same self-deprecating, probably Jewy cloth.”

“You’re just depressing me.” I told him. “Because she’s doing something with her life and probably has lots of guys around. And me, I’m just doing, well I don’t even know. I don’t even know who’d want to date me and certainly not her.”

“Yeah, I feel that way sometimes.” He said.

“That’s fucked up man, you’ve got a cool beard and make cool movies and you’re a better karaoke singer than me.”

“Well, I do have a nice beard.” Rob admitted. “And I may be a better karaoke singer. But you’re still a damn good one and that’s what matters. And you’re a semi-famous blogger.”

“Micro-famous, maybe.” I replied with some foolish pride. “Among like 5-7 people.”

“With a growing following in PA.” Rob returned. “I’d know.”

As for me, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, what it means to “be in my feelings” or what it is that would make me feel better.

What I’m doing is thrashing about, trying to recognize that I’m thrashing about, trying to calm down and eventually starting all over again.

When my therapist took out her book this week to offer me another session, she looked and said “I have nothing for you” with a sad twinge and it.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I have a support system, friends, I’ll be fine.”

I felt like I was reassuring her more than me.

But the truth is I’m not fine.

I don’t react well, I’m grumpy, I’m thin-skinned and I’m really just down as shit.

But I can write about it sometimes.

And that’s good, I guess.

***

TACO BELL

Chicken Enchilada Grilled Stuft Burrito- $4.87

14th St bet University Pl. and 5th Ave.

NQR456L to 14th St- Union Square

Open late.

***

BONUS:

Sean Dunn, a good friend of the good man Blake LaRue, decided to cast me in one of the shorts of his upcoming feature “The Confabulators”. I didn’t even look at it, out of sheer self-embarrassment, but I hear it’s funny and Andy and Rob (who you may recognize from the above post) are the stars. Enjoy.

LINK

Kentuckered Out

I should note that I do not know Kentucker Audley.

In fact, I’ve never even met him.

But he’s been the subject of some online discussion for the past few days.

He’s been popping up on my Facebook as my “friends” (Facebook? Real?) discuss him and his movies and I guess, their friendship with him.

What I gather is that he’s a mumblecore filmmaker, stuck among the bunch of my friends who also roughly consider themselves in this category.

The way that I gather this stems at least somewhat from a conversation I had with Rob-mlecore Malone last night, as I sat on his couch/current place of sleeping:

ROB: Do you know who Kentucker Audley is?

ME: No, not really.

ROB: I’m going to be playing “Sound Guy” in his next movie.

ME: Wow, how’d you land that?

ROB: Because I was the sound guy on some other movie.

*End of conversation*

I also mentioned Kentucker Audley to Zach Weintraub, another mumblecore filmmaker/friend, this morning though the subject was mostly on yet another mumblecore filmmaker in what amount to a sort of mumble-jerk.

That filmmaker, who is presumably friends with all of the above filmmakers, is Lena Dunham whom I interviewed and then found, to my surprise, in a feature article in the New Yorker.

I say to my surprise but it was really to my shock and horror as Lena Dunham, director of the film “Tiny Furniture”, is roughly my age, shares childhood friends with me and is currently writing a pilot for HBO with Judd Apatow.

Also, and this is verging on the personal here, it is actually my secret dream to have a New Yorker profile about me.

I’m not sure if I’ve told anyone that before.

What a bloggy thing to say.

Anyway, when I found out that she had her New Yorker profile I ranted and raved to my friends, nothing personal of course, just that “fucking Lena Dunham has a fucking profile in the fucking New Yorker”.

“So?” Zach said, in that very same G-Chat conversation. “She built herself up and has earned everything coming to her. Good for her.”

The words of someone living a Kerouakian lifestyle, starring in his second mumblecore film.

Meanwhile, I work in a movie theater.

Which brings me to an audition I went on yesterday, a callback actually for a yogurt ad, where I’d be playing a sleeping roommate.

No lines, no movement really. Just sleeping on a bench.

Actually, when I got in the audition room for the callback I saw there was a couch and thought I’d been upgraded due to my callback “first reject” status, but no.

It was back to the steel bench for my sleeping audition.

The callback was nice, my first one in 3-4 weeks after a mini-dry-spell. When I told my father I had auditioned for the part the first time of “sleepy/gross roommate”, he would make a point of bringing it up in conversations to ask why I hadn’t been called back yet for “a part you are so right for”.

Thanks, dad.

But as I waited in the waiting room for the callback, way early in the morning, the first one called (good? not good?) I saw my old boss, an acclaimed doc-director, walk in and sit down to talk to me. She was directing the commercial and I was her intern for 8 or so months. Seeing her brought back both the swell of emotions from that time in my life, a time of both learning and tumult and also led me running to my memory trying to figure out whether I was “net-positive” in her book, a rather sudden assessment of my internship experience.

As I talked to her and showed her the spec commercial I made, I tried to balance the professional (“I was a post-coordinator on a doc!”) with the pathetic (“I’m hoping to be promoted to projectionist so that I can tell people I meet that my job has the word ‘-ist’ at the end.”) and make it seem like I wasn’t the whole mid-young-life nervous-trainwreck I absolutely was. All I was thinking as I talked to her though was, would this be my break? I had been told repeatedly that if I booked a project, I’d be called in and signed. The part was a sleepy roommate, lineless. My old boss could probably fill it with whoever she wanted in that anodyne callback-waiting room of me-look-a-likes. I would go out on comedy auditions then, freelance again. I’d be a signed client.

Only, was my ex-boss still angry at me for poorly packing family photos while we were moving out the office? Would she remember when she saw me sleeping there in that audition.

Whatever way, she didn’t let me know.

When I went to go do my slate, the portion of the audition where you look at the camera and say your name and agency, I couldn’t help staring at her instead, looking at me, impassively smiling.

“I’m sorry.” I said, getting my bearings. “It’s a little hard not to.”

And then, on that cold metal bench, I went to sleep.

***

I know in some way there’s no closure to the story I told there. Lena Dunham is doing very well, god bless her, and I wish like Zach or Rob my feelings towards her could be something other than unrepentant spite.

I’ll know if I got the audition when I know, just like any other one, though it still makes me crazy even as I beat myself up and remind myself that “only one person can be hired”.

I guess, like I’ve said before, I’m so anxious for my life to “start”, that it’s hard not to stare and look for it, even when it won’t do no good.

When I was G-chatting with Zach, he sent me this link for Kentucker’s first movie which he said is available for free on Vimeo.

He told me to watch it soon.

How I found myself at Rob’s apartment last night anyway was shooting a short-from-a-feature where I was playing a character named Nick who interrupts conversations with musing bridging from pizza toppings to Barack Obama.

Sean Dunn, the writer-director, asked me whether it was ok that he had written this for me without meeting me much in real-life.

“No, I assume you read the blog.” I told him and he gave me back a happy nod.

I made a bad mistake and drank a 40 of Steel Reserve I got from the ghetto-deli downstairs at 7:30 when the shoot ended at 1pm.

By the time I got out, I had a head-ache and a quarter-drunk and a couple Tylenol downed to keep me from barfing on the subway.

“Did you mix Four Loko into the Steel Reserve and then drink it?” Zach asked me later, still in that very same G-Chat.

“No, are you fucking serious.” I replied.

“Yeah, I did it for fun.”

“And how was it?”

“Gross.”

***

To tell you the truth, I was hoping to have something more exciting to tell you about food-wise, but it sort of fizzled-out this week.

For my heavy work scheduled, I ended up trolling the usual places, eating halal and pizza and leftover sandwiches from Better Being Underground.

I did manage to go on an audition to a new-fangled burrito joint in the Flatiron and snuck off on a doctor’s visit to a place that offered “Arugala and Warm Chicken Meatballs”, but neither one of them ended up being worth talking about.

Instead, what ended up here again, was a sandwich brought by my mom to me at work with half-an-apology, as it was purchased sadly, not even from her work cafeteria, but from the work coffee-bar downstairs.

“I was happy they had anything that even remotely looked good.” My mother told me, before hurrying back to meet a deadline.

And good, surprisingly, it was.

It was grilled chicken, sundried tomatoes, broccoli rabe and roasted garlic on seeded semoline bread.

Surprisingly, it hit the spot.

It could have used maybe some cheese, some fresh mozz, but it thankfully didn’t have mayo.

The broccoli never was unchewable, the roated garlic was sweet and a little spicy.

And the chicken was real, not sliced or processed, which was particularly welcome.

I finished it and was full, with a little help from my free soda-Sprite mixture in my water bottle and pack of employee-priced Sea-Salt-and-Vinegar potato chips.

Congratulations, Mom. You win.

***

SCHOLASTIC RED BAR (employees only?)

Grilled Chicken, Sunried Tomatoes, Broccoli Rabe and Roasted Garlic on Seeded Semolina, w/free soda and Employee-priced Potato Chips (not included)- $6.75

Scholastic Building, Broadway between Prince and Spring Sts, 2nd Floor.

R to Prince St, 6 to Spring St. BDFM to Broadway-Lafayette.