In a recession, should you settle?

Response to a blog post about taking what you can in a down economy. I like her perspective.

Great post, Nisha. I’m only seven years into my professional career, but I can tell you that the job or two I’ve had that I was not passionate about at least helped me hone my skills. So if you need to “settle” for something that is not your dream gig, it’s okay. You’ve still got to take care of yourself with food and shelter and whatnot. As long as you are learning it’s not a waste.

Try your best to find a means-to-an-end gig that will still test your creative and mental abilities. No, it may not be what you want to do forever, but it’s not a waste if you are learning good lessons (even if they are defined by what NOT to do) and meeting new people.

I don’t think it’s too demanding for us to know what we want and strive to work our passions - but there is still something to be said for life experience, regardless of the sector or pay scale.

Fair question

I'm glad message boards exist to help us sort out questions like these...

Is drinking beer good if you have a cold?

http://qna.live.com/ShowQuestion.aspx?qid=1BF88664BACC45D2A336B9897C9E21A5

Michael Somerville

I always enjoy when we have a working comic talk to our stand up class and critique our material. It's a bit intimidating to tell your silly little jokes in front of some dude that is making it but it's also creates a relaxed feeling--this person isn't dramatically different than me. They're just farther down the road I'm on. He has his own show on the FLN network called Wingman. Here's his website:

www.michaelsomerville.com

Michael shared some advice which I'll briefly recount...

• Find what your strength is and build on it
• You can't write pure comedy gold every time you pick up a pen. Maybe 10% of the jokes you write will end up being solid material. Get okay with that and start churning ideas out.
• When you watch your old stuff and it makes you cringe, that's a good sign. It means you've learned since then.
  
• As you meet people in the comedy business, always be nice and friendly. Everyone wants to be around people they like so be likable. (Separate topic for later...how incredibly nice and supportive people I've met in NYC are.)
  
• Learn from comics you don't like. What is it that you dislike? Why? How can this knowledge help sharpen your approach?
• The secret to success is to just keep doing it over and over. He suggested setting a goal for ourselves of doing 100 hours of standup or 100 shows before stepping back to say "How good am I and where is this going?" Don't judge, just do.
• Start following comics around local clubs. Introduce yourself.
• The time you learn the most is when you bomb. Don't see it as failure.
• Typically, any comic's first hour of truly solid material is usually their best. Think of Chris Rock's Bring the Pain and Bigger and Blacker. Sharp, cutting edge material. Which he took a long time to craft. (If it didn't take him a long time I'm going to be pissed because those are incredible shows.)
  
• Hone your unique voice, get good at it, and good things will happen.
  
• Agents come calling when you don't need them anymore. Get good and get seen and things will fall into place naturally.
  
• NYC vs. LA--For standups, NYC is the epicenter. "Go to LA when they send a limo for you at the airport."

When I started the one year comedy program I was hoping I'd meet some high up person in comedy who could pull back the velvet curtain and let me into the inner circle. As if I could circumvent the struggle. That's why I flew to New York to try out for Last Comic Standing. Surely Kathleen Madigan will recognize my comic genius and pluck me from obscurity.

Not only is this complete hubris, it's not even desirable. If the top comic agent in the world shook my hand today, I wouldn't really have any favor to ask. I need to craft and build my material and develop my voice. When I have 20 minutes of solid material that consistently does well with diverse audiences I'll know I'm getting somewhere. Until then the onus is all on my shoulders. It's actually empowering knowing the only possible constraint is your own motivation and abilities.

Knowing what needs to happen is a good feeling. I didn't have that a year ago. Moving to NYC has been completely worth it if only for that knowledge.

See?

Finally a defensible excuse for my behavior.

"I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately."

--George Carlin

Little Boxes

I read this phrase today--"a shift in thinking." The reference was something related to the stimulus package recently debated and refined in Washington. However it reached out to my solipsistic tendency and quickly framed the last eight years of my life. My thinking has definitely shifted.

As would any person's during the time they grow from a 25 year old into a 33 year old. However, continuing the self indulgent tone of a blog, I'd like to think my shift was perhaps more dramatic than most.

When I was 25 I was a year into experiencing intown, single-centric Atlanta and busy building a career in corporate recruiting. I had hightailed it out of social work a couple years earlier and was glad to be developing a skillset that didn't involve convincing adults to change their behavior. I wanted to help people but I wanted to do it on a professional level and I wanted a decent amount of money.

It was a perfectly respectable path and it helped me carve out an independent life for myself. I developed a great group of friends and professional colleagues. I was knee deep in the real business world and thoroughly engaged by the challenge and learning curve.

And so it went. On and on. After awhile the momentum shifted from achieving basic mastery to a sense of competence and normalcy. My role models were corporate executives. They were razor sharp, smooth, worldly, and smarter than me. They were able to digest, comprehend, and act decisively on information I could hardly put my arms around. It was somewhat intoxicating.

I'd read articles in the paper quoting CEO's and read their quotations aloud. I wanted to train my mind to be like theirs. I love philosophy and strategic thought in the business world aligns quite closely with a philosophic mindset. Even better, business world acumen is tied to success and failure in the real world and offers numeric, specific guideposts as decision making feedback. Philosophy departments struggle (or are legitimately averse) to quantify their musings. This was real shit.

But somewhere along this eight year path my mind started to drift. For a time I focused exclusively on increasing my income and improving my lifestyle. It worked. I got farther than I ever thought I would when I was in high school, at least financially. This is it, right? Time to shift furniture shopping from Ikea to Intaglia and Buy Design (mid scale Atlanta purveyors). Amstel Light or Bud? Easy decision. MLB Extra Innings-done. I wasn't wealthy by any means but I was comfortable.

I remember sitting on my comfortable couch watching a movie in my perfectly fine townhouse in my perfectly fine neighborhood with a great social scene around me. Why wasn't this enough? Besides the obvious conjecture something is seriously fucking wrong with me I realized I wasn't fulfilled. Recruiting is great, but is it who I am?

To make my point simpler, here's a quick story. At one point I volunteered to help high schoolers put out a newspaper called Vox. Part of the program was offering to let the students shadow you at work for a day. Sure, why not. I signed up for the program with a carefree attitude. Come on by, I'll show you around.

The program coordinator called me bashfully one day and explained our predicament. "None of the students were interested in learning about being a recruiter." What? Really? Oh. Okay. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. But it's actually really interesting and complex and.... It didn't matter. Those kids didn't give a shit. No one thinks "I want to be a corporate recruiter" in 11th grade.

It doesn't mean recruiting is a bad profession. Far from it. It just means that recruiting doesn't set high school students' hearts ablaze. You don't sit up all night reading recruiting strategies when you're 17. You sit up all night reading Catcher in the Rye or Fahrenheit 451. Things that resonate with a human being trying to understand the world and their place in it.

Anyway, at some point in the past three years I started putting all this information together. I used to think the traditional template of success in America was the only appropriate standard to judge myself by. If I wasn't trending towards getting married, having children, and advancing along the corporate ladder, how could I possibly define myself as successful? I would just fall behind and sit alone in my apartment jealously envisioning the happiness and success others who followed the template were having. They were lounging in warm living rooms, laughing near fireplaces, living the dream. I was watching Dave Attell stand up and deciding which bar to start the night at.

But then I shifted my thinking. Why should I live my life by a particular template that happens to be popular in recent history? Why should any particular template, whether the one I currently was a part of or the one I evaluated myself against, be how I judged myself? Why should I care what other people think? Hell, who's to say people living out this template would recommend it? Who's to say people in my template would recommend it to others outside of it?

The point is it doesn't matter which particular template or lifestyle you ascribe to. I'm not judging other people's lifestyles. I'm just saying it's incumbent upon each of us to decide what works for us and then follow that wholeheartedly. To live sincerly, genuinely, with purpose. If your ideal life is having 4 kids and living in a suburb, chase that with everything you've got. If it's not, then don't feel bad you're not following that dream. For me, I started to realize how much I loved comedy and now I'm finally doing something about it. At times it's terribly foreboding but as Hulu CEO Jason Kilar says, "There's nothing more intoxicating than doing big, bold things."

I just realized I could have saved all this time by saying "Different strokes for different folks." I guess what they say is right--nothing is original anymore. However, I don't think most people take the different strokes concept to heart. I think many of us assume what has been done before and what has been done by many is the default option. I don't think it should be. I think we should continuously re evaluate our lives to ensure we're living the life we truly want to live. Otherwise it's just...

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

Ball control

Do you think most guys can control each ball individually? I don't think I can unless someone suddenly grabs my left thigh unexpectedly. In that case my left ball is going to spring into defense contraction mode first. Less of a joint ball reaction in this instance. This topic is making me nauseous. It is fun to control your balls though.

How to end a trip

Faced with a limited selection of elliptical machine reading material, I resigned myself to a weekly periodical I'd shun in any other circumstance. I'd been in this situation before and mistakenly selected a magazine called OK. I thought OK was the poor man's People but soon learned OK is little more than a pastiche of 300 pictures of dresses. That's a hard lesson to learn two minutes into a 30 minute run with no other reading material in sight. As soon as I realized my mistake I started brusquely flipping through the pages trying to get past the dresses section, hoping the guy next to me noticed my air of revulsion. Actually, I'm not even sure it was OK magazine that I picked up. I just know that its major themes were weight gain rumors and parties I hadn't been invited to.

I knew that I was about to spend the next 30 minutes covertly pining after women stoically bouncing nearby. I needed a distraction so they'd stay just shy of being creeped out enough to leave their machine and sign up for a membership at Curves. So I settled on The Week. The Week. Seriously? People are writing articles for this and sending it out to the world? It sounds like a cruel country club bet where the winner came up with an idea more boring than The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The kind of magazine with plenty of droll cartoons populated with obese men dressed in overcoats and monocles.

But to my surprise it did have an interesting news item. Apparently a woman from Brazil ran out of money on vacation in Bolivia. Left with no means to return home, she came up with this idea: Strip naked in front of a statue of Christ and hope for deportation.

That ought to do it. But nope, she got arrested and released within hours. She quickly realized the error of her methodology and did it again. As in later that same morning. A crowd gathered. (In my mind she's pretty hot with no discernible blemishes or tattoos.) This time Bolivia contacted Brazil.

Bolivia: Hey, is this Brazil?
Brazil: This is Brazil, how can I help you?
Bolivia: Listen, one of your peeps came down and she's naked in front of our Jesus statue.
Brazil: No shit. Is she hot?
Bolivia: I don't discern any blemishes or tattoos. Yeah she's decent.
Brazil: Nice.
Bolivia: We can't have guys getting worked up in front of Jesus Christ. You have to do something.
Brazil: Tell you what. Get her to the border and we'll send for a train.
Bolivia: Done. (Pause) I still think about you sometimes.
Brazil: Randy, don't start.

Anyway, that's basically what happened. She got a free ride home to Brazil by stripping naked twice. I can't think of anyone who didn't come out ahead in this situation. Do you think she knew this would work? Was it incredibly odd but effective intuition? Did she weigh the possibility her tactic would result in a prolonged jail sentence rather than a free train ticket? Is she imbalanced? Was she simply desperate? Or just someone who doesn't give a shit? I'd like to talk to her about it with a translator that knows when it's time to make himself scarce.

How to spend your time in college

Penelope Trunk is a badass. I could read her blog all day and night stopping only to read her Twitter updates. This is a great guest column:

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/12/04/twentysomething-why-i-regret-getting-straight-as-in-college/

I especially enjoyed it because it gave me the opportunity to be smug about a decision I made in college. Freshman and sophomore year I busted my ass academically. I had fun, but was very vigilant about maintaining high grades. Junior year, I stopped and looked around. Like Ferris says you're supposed to. I realized I had almost unwittingly developed a stellar group of friends and I only had two years left to spend heaps of time with them.

Only two more years to alter the scoreboard at a Mercer Bears baseball game to briefly contend we were somehow beating FSU. Two more years to sit in the cafeteria from the time it opened for lunch at 11:15 to the time it closed at 2:15. To somehow end up bumping bare bellies on the ground with Coby Nixon outside the bar Darrell's near closing time. Besides the possibility we are gay I can't for the life of me figure out why we did that.

I realized that I cared far more about helping a frat brother pull a Greek letter off a rival frat house at three in the morning than reading 14 chapters of Industrial Psychology. I'd hear stories of Friday and Saturday nights spent studying, cramming, achieving. Fuck that.

My decision to embrace the theory that "learnin' is more than just books" probably shaved half a point off my college GPA. And I don't give a green goddamn! I suppose I didn't get into UGA law school because of it but you know what? I didn't really want to go to law school anyway.

I'm not advocating dropping out of college or declining into alcoholism during the first two years of your twenties. But if you have to choose between a 3.8 and limited social memories versus a 3.3 with a swarm of parties, booze, and laughing uncontrollably at ridiculous antics and comments...well my friends, for the love of Christ choose the latter.

Question

After you use a towel for a few days, does it start to smell like French toast? Is that just me?

Brazen Careerist

Penelope Trunk has a great career blog.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/

I like this quote from one of her posts:

There is not finite success in the world. There is just a finite amount of people who can stomach the pain of wanting success so much.

Snippet from an interview with The State

AVC: Tom and Kerri, you guys have made your first forays into stand-up comedy. What made you do it?

TL: I think it was just a pure unadulterated fear of doing it. Once you do it and it goes well, it's extremely addictive. It's kind of like the crack of the entertainment industry. If it's going well, it's a really fast, powerful rush that's hard to stop doing.

KKS: Honestly, it's like trying heroin. It's one of those things that you think, "I think my life would be really different if I did that." So I'm turning 39 in a couple of weeks, and I sort of have that feeling of, "What the fuck, let's just do this."

Problematic sports announcer

Someone asked me why I don't like ESPN blowhard Mike Tirico. Yeah, well here's why:

Mike Tirico is the worst announcer of all time. He has singlehandedly ruined the Monday Night Football franchise. He has no sense of when to let the moment speak for itself. He crams every split second with his plasticky, mundane, pre packaged commentary. Just shut up for 6 seconds now and then. We're interested in watching the game, not listening to you state the blindingly obvious for three hours. The broadcast is more about him than about the game or the players. He never says anything interesting or controversial. He has mastered saying what you're supposed to say at exactly the right time like some sort of sub human drone. He's a mindless collection of facts and statistics pushed in front of him by researchers. In short, he sucks and I'll continue railing against him until I reach a settlement with ESPN.

What's around us

En route to Newark I read an article about a retiring minister. One of the stories he told at his farewell speech was about being in a boat at sunset. He looked off into the horizon and saw a golden hue across the water. So he steered the boat out to sea in the hopes he could immerse himself in the gold. After a few minutes he realized that he had been in the gold all along.

I'm not sure what lesson he extracted from this experience because the article didn't say. But the idea resonated with me. I spend a lot of time thinking about what is out there, what can be achieved or grasped if I string together a series of successes. Press down on the throttle a little harder, will the gold to come a bit closer. But if you spend all of your time apart from contentment and relying on external factors to bring you happiness it's going to be a frustrating life. I try to calm my mind periodically and, taking a cue from my sketch writing teacher, embrace the process. Embrace obscurity, toil, failure, and what exists today.

I've developed a cynical mind and anytime an idea pops up that could possibly be branded as New Age I summon my inner bully and kick it in the stomach. This idea of a golden hue just out of grasp certainly could fall within that category. But any true intellectual journey is going to have to ignore popular conceptions and labels in pursuit of an individual knowledge and truth. So why not pull from New Age wisdom, religious traditions, secular thought leaders-- hell I'm sure even John Daly has a thing or two to say.

It's a nice image, seeing the wise old man in the boat figuring out a way to live.