Safety Not Guaranteed

My favorite movie genres in no particular order:
-80s teen movie
-twee indie romantic comedy w/ a great soundtrack
-time travel romance
-Apatovian bittersweet comedy examining lovable losers in realistic situations

So the fact that this looks like some combination of the last 3 sounds delightful to me. Jake Johnson, Aubrey Plaza, and Mark Duplass all do stellar supporting work on their individual TV shows as endearing slackers. Also, I like Aubrey's glasses in this.

A List of TV/Movie Characters That Have Reminded Me of Me at Various Points in My Life (In (Arguable) Order of How Annoying They're Supposed to Be)

Casey (Party Down)
Max (2 Broke Girls)
Lisa Simpson (The Simpsons)
Leslie Knope (Parks & Rec)
Liz Lemon (30 Rock)

Julia (New Girl)
Any character that Judy Greer or Krysten Ritter plays in a shitty romantic comedy who gives advice to the main character and then sits at home drinking wine out of a comically large glass
Monica (Friends)
Peggy (Mad Men)

Penny (Happy Endings)
Jackie (That 70s Show)
Megan (Unsupervised)

Drunk Girl (SNL)
Miss Piggy

Baby Sinclair (Dinosaurs)
Moaning Myrtle (Harry Potter)
Tracey Flick (Election)

Realizations based on this:
(1) It is a truth universally acknowledged that every sitcom contains a normal hot girl/hot guy pairing and then a couple made up of a wisecracking ne'erdowell and a shrill high-maintenance bitch. Guess which one I always associate myself with.
(2) I was a really annoying kid.
(3) Presumably, the most annoying characters are also the ones that are most like me when I was younger, so perhaps I've gotten less annoying.
(4) Or maybe annoying kids grow up to be cynical but sassy adults. And nerdy perfectionist teacher's pet kids grow up to be adults who GET SHIT DONE.
(5) Lizzy Caplan makes 2 appearances on the list. I would have put Janis Ian on there too, but I don't think I was cool/detached enough in high school for that.

4 quotes

"When did you stop being a dreamer? How did you become so cynical at 25?" -my mom

"My sister says she never dreams at night. There are days when I know why. Those possibilities within her sight,
with no way of coming true 'cause some things just don't get through into this world, although they try." -my aunt, on my mom in "Rosemary"

"You would think that in your capacity as a producer your job would be to churn up creativity, but mostly your job is to police enthusiasm." -Tina Fey, on the rules Lorne Michaels taught her

"I'm the kid who has this habit of dreaming/ Sometimes gets me in trouble too/ But the truth is I could no more stop dreaming / Than I could make them all come true."
-Dar Williams, "The Kid." Also one of two quotes I chose to include in my high school yearbook half-page to define who I was at 17

there was a time

children scare me

Via Happy Place

via Sofa Pizza

“But whereas a girl of nineteen draws her confidence from a surfeit of attention, a woman of twenty-nine is nourished on subtler stuff. Desirous, she chooses her apéritifs wisely, or, content, she enjoys the caviare of potential power. Happily she does not seem, in either case, to anticipate the subsequent years when her insight will often be blurred by panic, by the fear of stopping or the fear of going on. But on the landings of nineteen or twenty-nine she is pretty sure that there are no bears in the hall.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

i always feel old, i always feel young

I realize that part of the reason I've felt weird lately is because in many ways, I feel like this cycle of my life is coming to an end. 4 years of high school, 4 years of college, 4 years of real life, which i guess would make this my senior spring of grown-up life. But there's no graduation, no obvious next step, so I'm kind of at a loss. I wish someone would just tell me what my next steps were supposed to be.

Watching the Pudding with Rach was weird. The progression of my relationship with theater/comedy/etc. in high school/college/real life is basically feel insecure/admiring/bitter for 3 years, finally figure out a way to be part of the stuff in the last year, finally get the guy, and then after some awesome production, end up moving on, attempting to go back and visit, and realizing that stuff moves on, things stay the same, and you're not part of it anymore. In real life though, the hierarchies are more vague. There's no set time at which the old guard is forced to graduate and move on to the next stage of their life. People move to LA or get their big break, but the timing's much more unpredictable and you could spend 20 years hoping things change and finding you've stayed in exactly the same place.

In college, they groom you to care about traditions, to pass the torch on and be proud of the next wave. It's kind of a miracle that things could stay so similar when there's someone new in charge of an organization every year-- that not only can CityStep, the Pudding, the Crimson, and the Lampoon continue to exist but can so consistently have the same mindset, mentality, language and culture with an entirely new group of people. The Pudding is extremely committed to tradition to the point of formula. It's bizarre to watch a group of 19-year-olds that you've never met step into the shoes of their predecessors so flawlessly-- when you watch the show, you can see which character Peter Dodd and John Blickstead would have played and I'm sure someone 10 years ago felt the same way about some alumnus before my time.

On a different note, on the first warm day of 2012, I bought a pair of plastic pink sunglasses and a Ten Ren bubble tea, took out a book and walked. I felt like I was 13, 16, 19, and 22 again. So I guess it's nice that some things still make me happy a decade later.

Calling and not calling my name

A couple days ago, I attended the Moth StorySlam. For those of you who don't know, the Moth StorySlam is basically an extremely well-attended open mic for storytellers. It was my fifth time and the first time the producer recognized me and said, "You putting your name in the hat?" I thought this was a good sign. You put your name in the hat, and then immediately before each story is told, they call out the next storyteller.

The next morning, I had to go to grand jury duty. I had postponed twice and so it was the third time I heard the rules of their lottery system. You could say "serve," which meant if you were picked to serve, you had to serve, or you could say "application," meaning you were asking to postpone again. I had seen some people say "serve" and then not have their name picked, although they never tell you exactly how many slots there are or how many people are must-serves, so you don't really know your exact chances. All the "serve" people's names go into a big Bingo machine and the warden pulls out names one at a time until the juries are filled up. They don't even give you a chance to say, "I'm a racist" or "I don't believe in the judicial system because I think most people are too stupid to understand basic concepts of legality and ethics."

In both instances, I was filled with anxiety. Like Hunger Games level anxiety. With each name called, I knew my chances of being called were less likely. But my body still tensed up each time a name was drawn, and I still willed my name to be called in the first case and not called in the second. Every time they called out a name starting with S or Sa, my heartbeat quickened and I was sure it was me. It felt excruciating. And in both cases, I was unlucky. I did not get to tell my story and I was picked for jury duty.

In the end, neither of these things turned out to be monumentally important. 6 months from now, I probably won't miss these two weeks of work or bemoan the fact that that story remains untold. But during those moments, the anxiety of the lottery system and the element of chance really affected me. I read a study a while ago when they put in those NYC subway electronic alerts that tell you how far away your train is, that said that people's well-being was drastically improved just by knowing how far away the train is. Even if your wait is exactly the same length of time, you feel better knowing it will be 10 minutes than thinking there's a chance of it being 1 minute and then having it be 10 minutes.

I know I would have felt better in both cases not having believed that there was a chance things would go my way. If I had just gotten a letter saying I was definitely serving or if I was told at the beginning of the show exactly who the storytellers were. I was the kid in class who was always whining to the teacher, "But that's unfair." I wanted merit/effort/my pure and good heart/how annoying it was to listen to me whine to have an effect. A lottery system is probably the most "fair" system there is, but I would rather the system not be so publicly visible as a giant wheel where names were pulled out one at a time, leaving you to wonder, moment by moment, whether fate will spare you this time. The knowledge that through luck alone, someone else got the reward I was equally likely to get but unlucky enough not to receive always makes me feel deprived and frustrated. You might think I would feel deprived no matter what. But the time spent listening to other people's stories, the time in jury duty, those things don't bother me as much as the moments where I could see someone looking at a name and I didn't yet know whether it was mine.