I've managed to turn comedy into an academic interest aside from an extracurricular one. Last term I took a class dealing with humor theory applied to Korean comedy films, and this term I'm taking a similar course focusing on Jewish humor in general. For one of my other classes, for my final project I'm going to translate and analyze a piece of manzai, a form of Japanese performance comedy. For my thesis I am going to focus on individual expression in manzai and in the Chinese equivalent to it, xiangsheng.
Simon Critchley wrote in a chapter of his book "On Humor" that the comedian is a form of anthropologist, so I guess like my interest in foreign languages, humor has become another manifestation of my interest in different cultures and just how people interpret the world in general. I guess maybe I should pursue a graduate degree in anthropology or something to bring together my interest in languages and humor and discourse. Then again, this could all just be a symptom of my general tendency to become interested with a particular thing, and then subsequently become obsessive about it. Those of you who known me since middle school have seen this happen to me with robotics and with pro wrestling.
However, I am trying to get some practical career options out of this obsession. I've applied for a couple of comedy-related internships: one with CollegeHumor.com, one with MAD magazine, one with Comedy Central, and one with NBC writing for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. I had an interview with CollegeHumor last week which I think went pretty well, and so far no response from the others, but it's still early in the spring. The deadline for applying for the MAD internship isn't even up yet. I'm not as hopeful about Comedy Central or NBC, although another Dartmouth student did an internship writing for Conan LAST term, and since I have a few more directly comedy-related credentials with him, I might have a chance there.
A few other Jack-o-lantern writers and I also sent in an application to MTV because a Jacko alumnus contacted us about being contributing writers for this animated series he created for them. We'll see how that goes, but in an ideal world it would be a nice supplement to my income.
I also applied/am applying to some Japanese culture-related internships too for the hell of it (one at Tokyopop in LA and one at the Japanese embassy in D.C.) so at least if the comedy thing doesn't go through I can do something related vaguely to my interests. I'm really hoping for the comedy thing to come through, though, because it would be a helpful jump-start to a career in that field. Since I applied to several of those, I hope the law of averages yields me getting accepted to at least ONE of them. Then again, bad odds times four is still bad odds.
I've started liking the idea more and more of pursuing the writing and performing thing after college. I'm not sure if I want to get famous as much as just be able to make a stable living off of it. If I can just keep myself fed and clothed and do something I like without it costing me my relationship, it'll be worth it. We'll see what happens.
This term at Dartmouth is looking good, though. I'm working a good amount of hours at DDS to make some money, my classes aren't totally killing me with work, and I'm studying stuff that interests me. The stand-up club is gonna be really busy this term with lots of shows, and it looks like we might bring in two professional comedians as well! I have high hopes. My hopes feel even stronger when I know I have Denise by my side.
It's always painful to accept that a dream has failed.
Chris is going to get a WWE tryout, and probably, eventually, signed to the WWE, and I won't. I will never ever be the professional wrestler I wish I was or could be, because I am 5'6" and have nowhere near the athletic ability to compensate for my height that Chris does. I spent several years of my life thinking that it was something that I can do, but I have to succumb to the reality that it's not, and it hurts. It hurts to see Christ get so successful when we both started at the same place, even though I wish Chris all the best. It just plagues me with regret and thought about what could be and what would have been.
It's gone and I can't have it. Why do I have this premonition the same thing will happen with standup comedy? I'm so confident in myself right now, but something tells me I'll get to as level where I have to compete with real professionals and just hit a wall and die.
So lately I have found myself with an extreme lack of motivation to go to the gym lately. Despite my vow to go to the gym regularly after having a rather sedentary summer term (which I have been doing for the most part), the last couple of weeks I just feel like I don't want to do it anymore, like I'm just tired of the ritual of going to the gym. It doesn't help that most of the time I'm working during the day, I'm on my feet, which causes my knees and feet to get sore by the end of the work day, and a general sense of bodily fatigue.
Today I also started thinking about how now I have less reasons to go to the gym that I had before, at least less reasons to be as intense in the gym as I used to be. I'm not playing a sport anymore, I have nothing that I need to keep myself in peak condition for. I have pretty much abandoned the whole pro wrestling thing, too. I know it's not going to get me anywhere as a career except injury and disappointment, and I actually want to do something that uses talents I've developed at Dartmouth. My dad is much more supportive of this whole comedy writing thing, which is something I think I might want to pursue. So yeah, I have no reason to keep up my physique for that anymore. I have a girlfriend now who most certainly loves me for reasons beyond my looks, so no reason to try and make my body impressive to other people.
I mean, I guess I want to keep my body in shape for the health benefits of it. I love being in shape and being strong. However, I hate feeling tired and sore all the time and the amount of time it takes to keep up what just feels like a ritual and nothing more. I don't want to get fat again like I was in middle school and before. I'm deathly afraid of that. I dunno, maybe next term when work doesn't tire me out so much I'll feel more motivated again.
On a side note, Prop 8 in California, Amendment 2 in Florida, and Prop 102 in Arizona all getting passed upsets me TREMENDOUSLY. I'll hand it over to Keith Olbermann to express my feelings for me.
I'm starting to get even more paranoid and less sure about who actually likes me and who just tolerates me to my face. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that there are just very fundamental things about my personality that annoy people or make them dislike me. I'm hyperactive, too talkative, crack jokes too much when I shouldn't, just things that are how I am and I don't know how I can change them when they're almost reflexive to this point. It seems like a lot of my attempts to be friendly, or helpful, or funny, or proactive, or whatever are either rejected and met with annoyance or somehow backfire on me. Three years at Dartmouth and I really don't feel like there's any specific group that I fit in with. There are certain individuals I know like me and I can connect with, but it seems like now I go to every club meeting with this kind of fear. Almost every Jacko and Stand-up meeting I've gone to ends with me starting to feel like I'm not funny at all and should stop trying to be because all of my jokes just annoy or offend people. I am starting to be afraid to even open my mouth for fear of being too loud, but I know I'm not going to stop talking because it's just me.
Today working at Novack I had to keep myself from having a big emotional breakdown in the middle of everything. During a short break I ended up having this e-mail exchange where an attempt by me to be proactive and express interest in a potential activity for one of my student clubs got misconstrued as some attempt to jump over people's heads or circumvent authority, and I just felt amazingly bad because that's not the meaning I wanted to convey at all. And then after that I had to deal with this seemingly endless line of people asking me for things when I had already started convincing myself that I can only give people things they don't want. I cracked at one point, and after handing someone her hot chocolate I just ran to the bathroom and started sobbing as quietly as I could to myself. The sum total of several weeks worth of what I have felt as awkwardness and subtle rejection by people around me just came crashing down on me and I felt like I did not want to be alive. Luckily I pulled myself together long enough to drag my carcass through the rest of the shift, and other people noticed how different from usual I was acting.
I just want to know whether people want me around or not. I don't want to have to play this game of constantly worrying and guessing. I just want to actually feel comfortable for a day or two with the things I like to do, the places I like to go, and the people I like to talk to. I want to feel like I belong and not just skating on the thin ice of other people's acceptance of me. I feel like I just can't be who I naturally am anymore, that life has finally imposed its will on me by convincing me of that. I am doomed to join the mass of bitter, subdued, apathetic people, so I'll be less of a disturbance.
Working at Novack means I will never get angry at food service personnel ever again. I really wish people would decide what they're gonna get BEFORE they walk up, because when there's a line of 10 or so people waiting to get served, and the guy at the front just asks for "tea" and you have to try and coax the size and KIND of tea he wants while he stands there and goes "uhhh...uhhh..." can get grating both on the people in line and the server himself. It can't be that hard to at least know what SIZE cup you want. Take a guess. Chances are there will be a small, medium, and large option, or at the very least, small and large.
I also hate when people try to almost whisper their order to me. Novack is a noisy place, and I have a bunch of noisy machines whirring and clicking behind me. I need your order said in a clear and understandable level of loudness, at least if you want me to get the order right and not make ME have to go "What? WHAT?" over and over.
I guess I'm kind of grouchy because I had to work from 4PM to 5PM completely by myself today because nobody else showed up for the shift until a sub showed up around 5. And then some lady came bitching to me about the vending machines when Novack has nothing to do with them, it's a completely different contractor, etc. I'm just paid to work the register and move the food.
I've also found it much harder to resist temptation food-wise when I spend 4 hours a day surrounded by various pastries. My sweets consumption has risen to at least one cookie a day, it seems. At least it's free, and I guess since I spend those 4 hours on my feet instead of sitting down like I would in class, one could arguably say that my caloric needs have increased accordingly.
My energy level just seems to be dropping. I have not been able to do any of my Novack shifts or drill sessions with the usual energetic animation I have made myself known for. I know I'm getting much more physical exercise than I did over the summer, so that's no factor in it. I wonder if I'm still recovering from this depressive spat I had a week or so back where I had just felt really bad, because in the span of a week I had read this post on BoredAtBaker.com calling me a tool, and then had a really jarringly sad dream that I woke up from crying, that had kind of robbed me of my energy for the rest of the week. I still don't feel like I'm 100% my normal self again, however "normal" that might be. I do think I have been a bit more social in the past few weeks and hanging out with more people, so it's not all bad.
Going on a tangent, I think things like Bored at Baker (and even the Honesty Box on Facebook, to a lesser extent) are one of the greatest negative consequences of internet anonymity, that, of course, being that people no longer feel like they need to take responsibility for what they say, or like they can say things without fear of rebuttal. It's like I was saying how I hear more people talk trash about other people lately than say nice things, when they probably would not even dare to say those things to that person's face. Some people just need to grow spines and/or balls/ovaries.
I've noticed lately that people have a tendency to always try and justify not liking a person rather than try to give him/her the benefit of the doubt that there might be something to like given more trying to get to know someone. If someone does something that someone else dislikes or behaves in some way they find annoying, they are prone to pretend they're experts in psychology and analyze and diagnose whatever mental neurosis they might have, since if they're not a perfect person by their ideals, they MUST be messed up somehow. In the past week or so I've heard plenty of people talk about how someone else is a bad person based on what limited contact they've had with them, but have not heard one single person step back and say "Okay, maybe in this situation they might be annoying or whatever, but they might actually be a good person either way." I don't think I've ever personally met anyone who was truly a bad person and deserved genuine hatred, but that's just me. I have met other people who would be perfectly willing to dispense genuine hatred at anyone for anything. It boggles my mind how man can be such a social animal but in general have such antisocial tendencies. If I was one to spew end-of-the-world prophecizing I could say it's a result of the internet and the "me" generation becoming more self-centered and anti-social and more willing to just justify why he or she is the best in comparison to everyone else. But that would just be completely ignoring my own complaint.
Now that I'm done hating humanity, I will now type in a complete stream of consciousness:
Elton John wrote that song Benny and the Jets simply as an excuse to talk about electric boots, which I think is just as valid as anything in the case of fire or other emergency, but not in cases of incest and rape. Forever have we been wearing the manacles of chastity in a violence-induced rage and perhaps maybe we can let out these urges when we get 'round the fire with a Brady Bunch Family Christmas! The partridge Family never got anywhere near the awesomeness of the Brady Bunch but they were the product of a television strategy that yielded many pale imitations and revivals of popular premises. Josie and the Pussycats in outer space anyone? I mean, shit, 2 Stupid Dogs has been compared by some to Ren and Stimpy, but the internet tells us many things about life and pop culture, and then we begin to mistake pop culture for real life, which I guess is what Daft Punk meant when they made the song "Television Rules the Nation." My blitzmail keeps interrupting this and popping up new windows, and I absolutely despise any program that opens up a new window in front of something I'm working on, interrupting whatever I'm typing and thus throwing me off, the Achilles heel of anything matching a stream of consciousness, stream, like the River of Dreams, one of my favorite Billy Joel songs, you know he said he didn't even know why he walked down to the river anymore, but I bet he appreciated the excuse to get outside and get near the water. Man needs ritual and routine, and perhaps walking past the Mountains of Fear and the Valley of Doubt to a river so deep probably gave him a sense of stability in a world where things are only seen by the eyes of the blind. I had just mistyped the word "world," and I think because of my childhood exposure to video games I now forever and always associate "world" with "Super Mario World" which was a fantastic video game except for some reason you could bounce off a ghost as long as you were SPINNING when you jumped off of it. Somehow the immaterial was made material and even HARD SOLID material when it was touched while spinning. I guess it's one of the lesser incongruities of gaming reality once you get past the inherently impossible idea of multiple lives, unless you're a believed in reincarnation, but even then they don't believe you'd get reincarnated in the very exact same body at the very exact same point in your life in the very exact same level, level world 8-8 where the princess is in ANOTHER castle because any good abductor knows you never keep the victim in one place for too long or else Mulder and Scully show up and bust your ass FBI-style, I guess that TV show never dealt with abductions except the whole side story about Mulder's sister getting kidnapped by Aliens. Fuck David Duchovney must have had a lot of fun playing that role, but what the hell has he done since then? He was in some sci-fi movie with David Arquette which I saw in middle school, but since then, zippo, nothing. Some people in sci-fi television just become so associated with their characters that it kills their careers. Alec Guiness despised Star Wars because he could never escape being Obi-Wan Kenobi. But then again, conversely, nobody can ever escape Obi-Wan Kenobi BEING Alec Guiness. The only reason Ewan McGregor is tolerated as Obi-Wan in the prequels is because he is a suitable stand-in for a younger Alec Guiness, and imitates the way Alec Guiness spoke in the movie. I think there are probably a million internet fanfics written by thirteen year-old boys with nicknames like ThUnDeR_gOkU_dRaGoN666 that have Obi-Wan Kenobi as played by Alec Guiness facing against Gandalf as played by Sir Ian McKellan, but if those are fanfics instead written by 14-year-old girls with nicknames like xxxkAwAiI_tInKabEllxxx then it would end in Gandalf and Obi-Wan having a big gay threeway with Severus Snape, although when you think about the fact that Ian McKellen IS openly gay, and there being some kind of homoerotic aura around Alan Rickman's portrayal of Snape, it is quite possible. Man it would be a dork wet dream if Ian McKellan and George Takei started gay-dating. My girlfriend keeps using the word "poke" in the sense of "remind" and it makes me think about the "game over" screen in Kirby's Adventure for NES where there's a big hand comes and wakesup a sleeping Kirby when you select "continue."
Definitely one of the reasons I wanted to be IN Hanover for Fall term even if it it's my off-term, is the freshmen. The campus is going to be buzzing again with that air of novelty and excitement brought on by 1000 new students who are totally excited to see what it's like to be by themselves completely away from their parents making new friends and experiences in the middle of the mountains of New Hampshire. People are coming back from their DOC trips and getting ready to start orientation. I remember when I was wondering if my whole Dartmouth experience was going to have that air of excitement and willingness to bond that my DOC trip had. I barely talk to any of my tripees anymore, though, save two whom I semi-regularly see and the occasional hello to the others when I do see them.
It will be amazing to be back participating in all of my old club activities with new fresh faces wanting to get into the act and bringing in whatever new ideas they have. I'm excited to see what new students decide to take Chinese or Japanese this year and to teach them in drill. I only hope that my juniors (I don't mean other COLLEGE juniors, like me) will find me respectable enough to solicit advice and guidance from me because they'll find it useful. I want to try and help some incoming first-years build a Dartmouth experience that's been even BETTER than mine has been.
It will be nice to fully enjoy the Fall Dartmouth experience without having to worry about classes. AND, if things work out, I might actually be able to step inside a pro wrestling ring again soon!
I think Chris getting the WWE tryout has re-ignited my somewhat dormant interest in pro wrestling, I suppose because the optimistic part of my brain has managed to focus mostly on the "if it can happen to him, it CAN happen to me" part instead of the "it happened to him, WHY didn't it happen to me?" part. I decided to re-visit an attempt I had made a while ago to find independent promoters in the Northeast/New England area and e-mail them asking if they were willing to book me. Yesterday I searched and found a few promotions with e-mail addresses, sent them some e-mails introducing myself, my gimmick, my training history, and a Youtube link to my longest complete match.
I got one response today from "New Pro Wrestling" which was just this one line:
"Thanks - we need to see some physique photos of you, no mask."
Now, then again at least it's not an upfront refusal. Maybe they like my credentials and the gimmick and thought the match was okay. Then again, maybe they didn't look at any of it at all and just want to see how I look. But my physique has been under some considerable neglect over the last term. It's not HORRIBLE right now...but it's not good. What should I do? Wait until the end of Fall so I can work on it and get leaner/bigger? Or just show them how I am now and see what they say? And assuming they DO say they'll book me, how the hell do I get transportation to their shows? Grr...
