2011: The Year I Became a Cat Lady

What I remember about the beginning of 2011:
My apartment was cold. Really fucking cold. We didn't realize that we had heat because Barry was away on tour and had stored all his stuff in his closet and we weren't going to go through his closet and apparently that's where the controls to the heat were. So we suffered through the winter, wrapped in blankets, watching Jeopardy and eating Plump Dumpling. I spent three days working on a shoot for free and it was freezing. There was one day very early in January where I found out that I had gotten a job I really wanted and also worked on 50 First Jokes 2011 and I remember thinking that was the happiest day of my life. I got fired from that job like a month later, but that's another story.

The point is I'm pretty sure when I look back on my life I will think of this year as a year of great change. January-March, I will always remember as being miserable, freezing, really really hard months of my life where the shit hit the fan a few too many times and I was sure I was just an unlucky person. Then we got our apartment, I got my current job, we got our cats all in the span of the next two or three months. Between the job I got fired from and my current job, I met with some really amazing people who do really cool stuff in comedy and I'm so grateful to them that they took the time to meet with me, let me shadow them on shoots, gave me work to do, kept in touch via e-mail, etc. I did taxes by myself. Jake assembled a TV stand from Ikea and I set up Netflix Instant. I signed myself up for health insurance from my new job. At the end of the year, I sent out Xmas cards with a photo of my cats. That's who I am now, I guess. And even though I still don't feel like an adult yet and I still don't know what I want to do with my life, I feel 175 times closer to where I want to be than I did at the beginning of 2011. At the end of 50 First Jokes 2012, I thought about going home to my warm apartment with my warm cats. The vet said their normal body temperature is closer to 101 degrees and that's why they feel so warm to us.



I never, ever thought I would be here. I used to think of my resting state, and the happiest I could be, as drunk at a bar surrounded by comedians until 3 in the morning and now I think of it as home with my cats and my boyfriend watching Parks & Rec. I don't even like writing that because I am still getting used to the idea that this is how people grow up and change and ugggghhh I don't want to be a grownup and there are still nights when I am so happy being at a bar watching comedy. But I am happy to be warmer now. What a fucking year. Here's to 2012!

the boy who cried "READ ME"

Well, at least my cat Corn reads my blog

In my continuing quest to figure out what to do with myself and how to be a person who just does a variety of things and dazzles people with their charmingly self-effacing and simultaneously self-obsessed personality (current heroes: Julie Klausner, Molls McAleer, Mindy Kaling, anyone who writes for Jezebel or the Hairpin), I keep coming back to blogging.

I've been thinking lately about the difference between practice and performance, and the shift towards the blurring of those two. Before the Internet, there were gatekeepers who kept the chunks of art that the public saw from just being anything. In my mind, I assume those are all dudes in suits with cigars, who talk like Garry Marshall, the kind of guy whose office that family walks into in those Aristocrats jokes. People would practice and practice before they get their stuff in front of the right gatekeepers who would show their stuff to their higher-ups and it would get passed along a chain until some corner office dude was like OK, green light! But now because of the Internet, people can get ahead without those gatekeepers and so they try. And because of the lack of gatekeepers, the quality of stuff that's out there is more varied. On iTunes, you can listen to a podcast that three friends who've never met an agent recorded where they're just shooting the shit, or you can get a Brandenburg concerto or some such other classy thing. Your Twitter feed might include a Kardashian, a Nobel prize winning economist and your mom's best friend. It's all muddled together.

The movement is towards everything being a performance. When I write a Twitter post or a blog entry or even a comment on Facebook, when I put up a podcast or do an improv show, I want everyone to read it and see it and listen to it and judge it, to give it a like or a comment, to up my pageviews. I think that's true of a lot of our generation, whether they're "performers" or not. Our Facebook profiles are a constant lesson in marketing and the performance of self. It's natural to want some sort of validation. But what we are losing is the time along the way to practice, to become a maestro in whatever field we choose. When we ask everyone we know to see everything we do, we won't be able to waste their time when we've finally perfected our craft. Our audience will have disappeared, unwilling to sit through another crappy one-woman show or read your third attempt at a single-serving Tumblr. We will become the boy who cried "Read me!"

We all think it'd be easier to be the next Bo Burnham or Andy Samberg and use the Internet and the eyeballs of our peers than wait for some SUIT to tell us we are finally good enough to perform in front of people. The whole millenial generation wants creative control. We envy the artist who's also an entrepreneur, the self-made man who can run his own podcast like Maron, distribute his own special like Louis CK and avoid having to cater to a network or corporation. But being that I also make my living by being "industry," I want to believe that there is a place somewhere for those people too.

Some part of me still wants to be the artist, and I'm hoping it's not too late and that you can be both without jeopardizing your chances of either. There are people on both sides, who are currently industry or who are currently performers, who've walked that line and been able to do things they love whether they're acting, writing, directing, producing, etc. But right now, in the words of my new improv teacher Becky Drysdale, I'm trying to build too many hamburgers. I have to focus and practice and put in the Malcolm Gladwell hours. I need to merge my millenial ambition with some good old-fashioned patience and diligence.

This is a $%*&ing Travesty.

My attempt to share with note the Google Reader blog post telling me that sharing/sharing with notes has been disabled... Kind of meta, but i know there are a select few who will understand this.

I.HATE.THIS.

TV: the new season!

What I've learned from watching the Emmys, the season finale of Louie, the roast of Charlie Sheen, Charlie Sheen on Leno, 2 Broke Girls, 2 and a Half Men, Dancing with the Stars, The Playboy Club, WWE Wrestling, the Republican National Debate:

You can't say midget or Down's Syndrome on TV.

You can say "I want to show you my pussy" on cable television. You can make fun of someone's friend for dying or make fun of a cherished American hero for having Parkinson's disease. You can receive a standing ovation for killing people (not just people, the most people). You can be a viable candidate to lead the free world and pull us out of an economic depression without believing in science. You can show people going totally wackadoo for months, then basically groveling to the American public for forgiveness with the most awkward television appearances in history. You can create a new genre based on nostalgia for a time when sexual harrassment was okay. You can keep Entourage going for eight seasons. You can show NANCY GRACE DANCING BALLROOM.

You can't say midget.

Oh, what a world we live in.

An earthquake, apparently.

From an e-mail I sent to my high school friends:

Apparently, my entire building shook (I was on the 33rd floor) but I was on a conference call and did not notice at all. When I got off (the call, not from earthquake-induced orgasm), I called Jake to see if he wanted to get lunch and he was like "Are you calling about the earthquake?" at which point I looked around and noticed that literally everyone from my floor was gone. I went downstairs and everyone on my floor had been evacauted and they were all like "Oh, I guess we should have told you that we were leaving."

The same thing happened to me when I was a freshman in college and there was a fire drill that I slept through. Why is everyone so okay leaving me to die? Is it because they know I'm a strong, independent woman who can fend for herself? I think so...

Thank God for these videos with messages!

Marlo Thomas is the original Gaga

According to Perez Hilton , the MTV VMAs will feature a new category: Best Video With A Message. Here are the nominees:

P!nk – F****** Perfect - P!nk lets out a rally cry of reassurance for anyone who’s ever felt less than perfect.

Lady Gaga – Born This Way - Mother Monster gives birth to a world free from prejudice, judgment and self-doubt.

Katy Perry – Firework - The California Gurl celebrates the spark and originality in all of us.

Eminem feat. Rihanna – Love The Way You Lie - Em and Rih Rih illuminate the pain and peril of domestic violence.

Rise Against – Make it Stop (September’s Children) - Rise Against reminds LGBT teens pushed to the edge that “It Gets Better.”

Taylor Swift – Mean - Taylor Swift cautions negative naysayers that being mean gets you nowhere.

Okay, is it just me or are they stretching here? Let's go back in time and look at some of the videos that could have made it into this category had they only introduced this category a little earlier:

1989: Madonna- Like a Prayer-- Promoting prayer in schools! Also interracial dating... It doesn't matter if she's white and he's a wooden black Jesus if they love each other!

1992: Nirvana- Smells Like Teen Spirit-- Encouraging effective deodorant use in teens

1995: TLC- Waterfalls-- AIDS, drug-dealing in front of your mom, believing in yourself, erm... This song was a little all-over-the-place, but the takeaway is something like don't go after your dreams?

1998: Madonna- Ray of Light: Encouraging the use of solar power

2001: Britney Spears-- I'm a Slave for You-- Abolishing slavery

2004: Outkast- Hey Ya!-- Racial equality between Beyonces and Lucy Lius (and baby dolls)

2005: Green Day- Boulevard of Broken Dreams-- Cleaning up our nation's highways

2007: Rihanna- Umbrella-- Sharing is caring. Also acid rain.

2008: Katy Perry- I Kissed a Girl- Encouraging sexual exploration and polyamory among young girls

Who says the era of the protest song is over?

Adventures in Sleeping and Not Sleeping

I came home to find Jake asleep. His laptop was still open on the dining room table. The TV was still on, tuned to Anderson Cooper, on mute. And every 10 minutes, his cell phone alarm would go off and he would roll over, murmur and then shut it off. At a certain point in one of those moments between alarm and snooze, he became aware I'd come home and assured me that he was only taking a nap. It was already 11pm. Perhaps we had a night of midnight frolicking ahead of us, but more likely, the nap would become the sleep. I convinced him that there was no point in getting up and back he went to sleep.

I have always had a hard time with sleep. I like to think of it as a state of inertia. When I am awake, I have a hard time shifting to sleep. And when I am asleep, I can sleep like the dead until far into the afternoon. I have lain awake, frantically trying to calm my body, until 5am, rising every so often for warm milk, peanut butter, yoga and Google searches of what cures insomnia. And I have slept through exams, appointments, work, rehearsals, my freshman-year Japanese midterm... slipping back into consciousness, rolling over and checking the clock and being shocked to find it is hours after I was supposed to wake up. How startling to hit snooze once... twice... and then find that it is suddenly and alarmingly (pun intended) three in the afternoon.

Besides these frantic moments, I have visceral memories of trying desperately to stay awake, of being mad at myself for falling asleep or staying asleep. Last nights of vacation, last nights before the end of college, last nights with best friends or boyfriends or family members where you knew you had to say goodbye in the morning... I would angrily try to convince my body that these moments of happiness were worth it but my body disagreed. My body let me sleep and in the morning, when the time I had thought we had was gone, I would feel betrayed by my own inner clock. What does it matter now, whether I slept at midnight or 2 or 4? In the long run, why do I still remember those moments as defeat at my own hand? Time would pass regardless. Staying awake wouldn't have stopped the morning from coming... although I guess I wouldn't know, since I always fell asleep before I could find out.