Striking out at a couples resort

My friend Ally put together an August trip to Jamaica a few months ago. It's difficult to think of anything more depressing than traveling for vacation alone yet as a single person it can be hard to corral several people to go to the particular destination you're interested in at the particular time you can go. So I was glad someone else did the dirty work of organizing and comparing rates and all that time consuming, maddening activity that detracts from getting through Season 3 of Mad Men or rushing home from a bar to watch Jersey Shore.

As it turned out the trip involved five single guys and a couple. It was supposed to be four single guys and two couples but a break up just before the trip left us with the trip organizer as the only girl in attendance. The break up didn't bother me as I was glad to have another person along also not getting laid. But actually we weren't really worried about that, seeing as how we were going to be getting mad tail at the all inclusive, drinks are free 24/7 resort waiting for us in Ocho Rios. It means eight rivers or some shit like that. No one cares what it means. It's a place with a beach.

What we didn't quite think through well enough, though, is the fact that most people aren't going to book a trip to the Caribbean without having an active sex partner tagging along. I vaguely considered this potential stick in the spokes but felt confident that a few extremely intoxicated women “trapped” on an island would be more than willing to force my roommate to sleep in the lobby or out on a deck chair somewhere. If either of us had the opportunity to bring a girl back to our room it was understood the other would bury themselves in sand for the night or find some way to suffer through till morning hit and the bedded down woman awoke to consider her all inclusive walk of shame and whether or not the dalliance would be repeated. It was just a matter of using our charm to show the girls why they should be interested in extremely drunk men sharing a hotel room.

Well they weren't. The brilliantly beautiful daylight hours seemed to carry with them an unwritten code not to hit on women while they sunned themselves and desperately avoided thoughts of work. Exerting effort to fend off awkward advances would have strayed dangerously close to work territory. So we gathered piecemeal bits of sexual intelligence while pretending to read and shared them amongst ourselves, hoping to turn raw, uninformed data into a late night make out session with a well timed and strategically informed advance later that evening.

That might have worked a little better if the entertainment at the resort hadn't surpassed our understanding of how bad live entertainment can be. But once a show that drags on for two hours starts to suck, it has the auxillary effect of stifling the sociability and libido of every audience members in attendance. Except the kids. The kids do not give a shit. They just want to see balloons pop.

I've seen this slow crowd death happen in stand up and it most certainly happens at a resort where 250 captive audience members aren't quite certain what to make of what's happening on stage. “Alright, they started dancing (badly) to that song but then they left the stage a minute in. Why did that happen? Then after the song ended the lights came back on and there was no music and nothing happened for five minutes. Did someone fall ill backstage? Is the show over? Is this an unannounced intermission?” It's one thing to not enjoy a play or a movie. It's another to remain in a state of confusion for two hours and feel your emotions cycle from amusement to scorn to bemused detachment to wholehearted despair.

I can understand how three pairs of dancers missed every possible chance at successful choreography during every song they performed every night while all the while carrying an air that they're taking a well needed pause from sizzling careers on Broadway. I understand they don't have the training they need and we're the assholes for forcing poor people to dance for us. I'm always impressed with anyone brave enough to act or dance on stage. I don't fault them as individuals and as someone who tries his best to entertain crowds I know how tough it can be. But niceties aside, the politely constrained sense of confusion that quickly settled over the crowd each evening during these performances really hampered my game. That's what we're going with for now.

The other thing is that if you only have three single girls in a crowd of 250 people that means you've really got to play your cards right. If they shoot you down your only remaining option is to steal a girl from her boyfriend. The same guy she's sharing a hotel room with and most likely has had sex with in the past 12 hours. That's not going to happen.

Well, it could. What if the guy was being a total dick and she couldn't take it anymore and so he leaves the resort three days early, summoning the next available Chinese manufactured tour bus back to the airport? Now his hot girlfriend is all alone, stifling tears and determined to have a good time anyway. Just to spite him, the fucker. See now we've got a hot girl with an ax to grind and a suddenly lonely hotel room to fill. Just a matter of time before that scenario falls together. Years maybe, but it could happen. Alright, but you don't have to be a dick about it.

So no one got laid. But that's okay. We weren't there to get laid. We were there to relax, have a great time with friends, and take a break from our achievement oriented lifestyles for a while. But mainly to get laid.

The audience

Now that I've been doing stand up fairly regularly for about a year I've developed a sense of The Audience. I never thought much about The Audience before I started doing stand up. I just assumed that if you were funny everyone would laugh and that's that. But audiences are comprised of complex, multifaceted individuals with varying life experiences and motives. Any particular audience member may react one way to a joke one day and in a completely different manner on another.

An individual may laugh at something alone in her home or in a small group of friends when no one else is around. But obviously in a public setting we all place a discerning lens on our behavior to ensure we generally comply with norms and aren't singled out as bizarre or problematic. So to get people to laugh in public you have to navigate your way past the "This is how I'm supposed to behave in public" veneer most people have to get them comfortable and laughing.

In a comedy club, the audience has a predicament. As a single entity, which it becomes to some degree when the show begins, an audience has limited means to express its collective feelings. Each member can't shout out a response or provide feedback or the room would devolve into chaos. So the feelings an audience can communicate most clearly are approval, concern, and disinterest. As a comic, I have to respect the fact that they only have a few choices. Too often I see comics interpret silence as an indication that the audience wasn't smart enough to understand the joke. No, my friend, they got it--it just wasn't funny.

So for me I am trying to respect the audience's predicament, treat them as an equal, and build up a trusting relationship where they feel comfortable with me and natural in their own skin. Obviously this is one of the primary challenges of stand up. Hopefully demonstrating respect for the people sitting there listening to you will help build a successful evening.

Treating success and failure the same way

I'm grateful for the new MLB Network channel. They have more time to go in depth on baseball, well beyond the tired 3 minute SportsCenter clips. And watching spring training games in HD is such a nice contrast to the tiny box scores I used to get in the paper as a kid.

Anyway, I feel that most baseball players and managers give better interviews than athletes in other sports. They're more likely to go in depth about their challenges and show a healthy respect for the game. It's such a difficult sport no matter how good you are that an overall sense of humility is usually the rule. And humility typically leads to deeper thought and introspection than you'd see from some blowhard wideout on the Eagles.

Pitchers in particular learn how to be humble and resilient. Over the course of a career in the big leagues every pitcher will have down times and struggle. Which is when you really have to use your mind in a disciplined manner in order to persevere. As a commentator who had recently interviewed a struggling pitcher about his mentality put it:

"You have two choices--You can let it eat at you or you can learn from it. Last year he got caught up in trying to do too much, to control things he couldn't control, and letting things bother him more than they should. You have to start to treat success and failure the same way. You can't get too mentally up or down. Easier said than done."

A lot of this applies to stand up. No comic will have amazing gigs every night their whole career. A lot of it is going to be struggle and half empty rooms and punchlines that don't hit. But I'm trying to learn how to treat success and failure the same way. Do good, do bad, it doesn't matter. Keep getting out there and doing it day in and day out and focus on learning more than success.

In this vein here is a snippet from an interview with author David Shenk:

Question: How do we go about finding the genius in all of us? What steps we can take to unlock latent talent?

David Shenk: Find the thing you love to do, and work and work and work at it. Don't be discouraged by failure; realize that high achievers thrive on failure as a motivating mechanism and as instruction guide on how to get better.

Amateur arts

I did a set tonight and I was like at least the 15th comic to come on. The guy before me--it was his first time doing stand up comedy EVER and he struggled. It was quiet for like 3 minutes out of 5. He got a few laughs but overall people were pretty disinterested/uncomfortable.

Anyway, the SECOND he stops talking everyone starts talking to each other. Why wouldn't they? That just sucked for 5 minutes, I'm bored, let's talk about something else. I have such empathy for the crowd now. Anyway, I go up and people are still talking through the first joke. Some are listening, and they laugh. Then I do the second joke and I win over a few more people. Then by the time I got to my 4th joke no one was making a noise. I feel more proud of that fact than a laugh that any particular joke got. An hour and a half into an amateur comedy night I got everyone in the room to think "Alright this guy could be funny." At this stage that's all I really want. They're giving me a chance. It's a nice metaphor for my life overall. People in this new field are definitely giving me a chance.

Also, I have a newfound respect for arts at the ground level. It's one thing to go watch a Broadway show, it's another to see the star when they're starting their career and not many other people are in the audience. I think that's a vital component of what makes art art. There's something aspirational and hopeful about it when it's done well. When you watch people new in a field trying to get better you're buying into the whole artistic enterprise. You're implicitly stating through your attendance that the creation process is just as meaningful and enjoyable as the end product. That you don't require a major studio to green light your entertainment. It's more personal and intimate.

Having said that, parts of it suck. But it's good to pause to recognize things that may be transcendent.

Fandom. Almost rhymes with bantam.

Intense fandom over time seems to depurify what it is that made you a fan in the first place. You love a certain singer for whatever basic response they elicited in you but then that high goes away. So then you read about their background to feel closer to them. That intimacy feels nice for awhile. Sooner or later it becomes less about admiring talent and more about the fact that this person you’ll likely never meet is important to you. Why are they so important though? What does it mean if you really love an artist? At some point the connection requires more and more intricacy and work. You take pictures, but then the pictures aren’t good enough. You compare opinions with other fans and see who took the best pictures. Well, my picture was good but it wasn’t the best. If I was a better fan I would have gotten closer to the stage. In conclusion, music fans are crazy.

Graffiti

Have you guys noticed the graffiti that’s on the subway tunnel walls when you’re between stations? What insane person is going down there and doing this? Is someone just standing at the end of the platform with his buddy and he says “Fuck it man. We’re going in that pitch black tunnel that a train could enter any second and we’re spray painting drawings of our dicks. You in?”

www.pettheories.com

Yeah, pet theories. I think pet theories are rad man. Think about it. All the ridiculous and reasonable ideas people have about how people work. Like how to get girls into bed or other ones I can't think of right now. Even cliches like "What comes around goes around." Who decided this was wise and universally true? These kinds of things usually comes up 4 or 5 drinks in at the bar.

Anyway, I'd like to start collecting these and then assemble them on a website as soon as someone shows me how to do a website.

Damnit! Someone has kind of done this already! Okay well I'm throwing my full weight behind this:

www.unsubstantiatedtheories.com

I still think my site would be cooler. It would be more about social pet theories rather than space and colors and bullshit like that.

Headed back Stateside

You know what I hate? I hate when people who have lived in the U.S. their whole lives leave the country for a couple weeks and then they start telling people how they’re headed back to “The States.” You know what, screw you. It’s not The States to you, it’s where you fucking live asshole. Yes that was harsh and yes it was warranted.

Greatest job in the world

It’s tough to find a job you like. You’re always wondering if there’s something better out there. But then you hear something like what I like to call the greatest actual headline ever:

'Best job in the world' winner stung by dangerous jellyfish

Congratulations. You won the best job in the world. And then you got stung by a dangerous jellyfish. I’ve never been stung by anything at my work and it’s not even in the Top 100 jobs.

Why being single is great whenever I can see through the tears

So now I’ve been single for um like a lot of years. And I gotta tell you being single is great. It genuinely is. Breakups are difficult and you don't think you can move on and live life without her or without a girlfriend in general. But now I feel like I’ve gotten to a much healthier place and I truly enjoy being single and when the prospect of a girlfriend comes up I think “This sounds like it will fuck up my fun.”

I read a story recently about a train conductor that got in trouble because every time he’d drive through a town in New Jersey he’d toot his horn when he passed by a certain girl’s house. She’d run outside and wave and he’d toot it again. I realized that’s about the level of intimacy I’m looking for. I drive through your town, toot my horn a few times, and then you come outside and wave, maybe show me your tits, and then I continue on to the next town. That I can handle.

Exes

Did we become Facebook friends after we dated? Yes. Do I look through her pictures? Yes. Do I look at her husband’s head and imagine my head there? Yes. Do I end up licking his head on the screen? Yes.

Boredom in the Lone Star state

How many times has this actually been said in Texas: “Hey man, are we just going to sit here all night or are we going to go to the rodeo?”

Why do women love psychics and horoscopes so much?

I don't have an answer for this. I'm just wondering. I guess you could extend my question to ask why humans try so hard to know the unknowable and claim to know the unknowable in such certain terms. But on a more basic level, knowing facts about a girl's horoscope sign can help you get laid.

Weather.com

Some of these websites—they just throw up so much crazy, unrelated information all on one screen. I was on Weather.com this week and the big story is a 22 year old dying in an icy river. That sucks, just tragic. Then right next to that there’s a big headline: “Cold weather experiments—try one!”


Hey guys--being outside in the cold is fun!

Being a Browns fan

When the Browns make the playoffs, which is rarely, it’s usually some situation where a lot of things have to happen for them to get in. The Colts have to beat the Bengals, Pittsburgh has to lose or tie, and the moon has to turn into blood.