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this isn't happiness™

  “Idiot. You wouldn’t have this problem if you had killed yourself after the prom like I told you to.
- Andy Richter, talking to himself on Andy Richter Rules The Universe

Re-watching the 30 Rock pilot

It's weird when you watch a show from the beginning and then it suddenly goes into syndication and you get to re-see Chandler's original floppy haircut and how young and pudgy Michael Cera used to be. After a while, when a show's been in syndication for a while, you become accustomed to every possible version of the show. But at the beginning it's kind of jarring. How young the youngest kid in a sitcom family used to be, how '90s they used to dress. It's also weird working in TV now and knowing how much work goes into just the pilot, so much more analysis and worry and rounds of notes than any episode after that. So re-seeing a pilot is a different experience for me now.

Some thoughts on how 30 Rock has changed since this first ep:
-It's way more realistic, way less out there. It actually seems like a semi-serious critique of the TV business. Which makes it all the more surprising that it managed to stand out past Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which at the time looked like it was going to crush 30 Rock and be the next big show.
-The voice of the show seems completely different. There's none of those flash-tos, which seem like they came out of improv's revolving doors (down to the way those scenes are edited). It feels more like a mainstream sitcom.
- Jack doesn't have any quippy jabs that perfectly convey his point of view. He's just kind of an anonymous boss.
-Tracy is way more likable. Crazy but not the level of crazy he is now. He doesn't say weird babylike things.
-The set and concept of the show seem more like SNL.
-Tina Fey wears less makeup. Also Tracy seems way thinner.

Personally, I like 30 Rock a lot, and I guess the show has found its voice in its creation of an absurdist world where anything could and does happen and Margaret Cho plays Kim Jong Il. But I also miss some of the realness of that first season. The characters seemed more real and worth rooting for. There must be a way to have both.

Things in the cultural zeitgeist I formed an opinion on in 2011:
The Help
The Hunger Games
Words with Friends
American Horror Story
Dylan McDermott's butt
2 Broke Girls
Spottify
Netflix Instant
Homeland
Drake
Community getting shelved
Rachel Maddow
New Year's Eve
Michelle Bachman
Grizzly Bear

Things I still don't have an opinion on:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Tim Tebow
Lana Del Rey
Oprah leaving
Regis leaving
The Wire
Turntable
Friday Night Lights
Selena Gomez
"Countdown" by Beyonce
grizzly bears

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.