I Understand about Indecision

So, I got a response from my improv director and, long story short, she's encouraging me to stick it out through the term. She sees me as on the verge of a breakthrough.

I don't think I made it clear to her that I was only planning on taking a break, not quitting forever. Still, I wasn't expecting encouragement, and it's thrown me into confusion again.

I'm still leaning toward letting this be my last night for a while. Because I like the idea of not having to worry about it. Six more weeks of rehearsals and shows sounds long.

I don't need anyone else's blessing to quit. But as Mr. Bingley said in Pride and Prejudice, "I should like it all the same."

I'm inclined to trust that my breakthrough will still be there, waiting for me, whenever I decide to come back.

Lord, help me to make a good decision.

Get While the Gettin's Good

I quit!

This is a good thing.

I almost never quit things. I see my commitments through to the end. The bitter end. This often means sticking with things much longer than I should, just to make sure they're extra dead, and there's absolutely no joy left to be found in them.

I'd like to avoid doing that with improv. So rather than ride out this term of performing teams for another two months like I'd originally planned, I emailed my coach today to tell her that I'd like Tuesday to be my last show. Now I just need to hear back from her.

I don't know if I'll stay away from improv forever. But it's not fun anymore, and I want to have positive associations with it, so I think it's best to leave before I run it completely into the ground. My prayer now is that Tuesday will go well, like the grad show did, and I can go out with a bang.

Art Is Everywhere

There was cat hair stuck to the toilet this morning. No idea how it got there. Don't care to know. Then I looked out the window at the changing leaves. Suddenly I was inspired. Wrote a little song about it like to hear it? here it go:

The tree are getting pretty
Trees trees trees
I'm allergic to a kitty
Sneeze sneeze sneeze

That last part, about being allergic? It's not even true! Fiction! How's that for creativity? In your face, Art!

I bet Art likes it when you throw things in its face.

Famous People Who Are Nice, According to a FedEx Driver I Met in My Early-Level Improv Classes, Who Has Delivered to Said Famous People

Steve Carrell

Four of the five members of Aerosmith

My parents

... normally call me on Sundays. But tonight they were late, so I called and my mom answered. She sounded funny. Did I wake her up? Had she been crying?

"Oh, hi honey!" she said, "not that we forgot you..."

"Except we did." That was my dad's voice in the background.

"Did you really?" I asked.

"Rick and Christa came over."

Ah, OK. Old friends visiting from out of town. That funny sound in Mom's voice wasn't sleep or tears. It was alcohol. They had friends over and had a lot to drink and forgot they had a kid. So I said it was OK and they didn't have to talk and they could go back to the friends and the drinking and she said, "OK."

"I'm not missing any limbs and haven't gone to the emergency room."

"OK."

I know they love me and all, but it's hard to compete with a refrigerated box of wine.

Guess I'm Not the Only One, Then

Back in August, at one of my improv classes, I admitted to having seen the Hannah Montana Movie. My coach looks at me and says, "Did you cry?"

How did he know? He doesn't know about my blog. I didn't mention it on Facebook. This is so weird! I was almost scared. How did he know? How did he know???

I stared at him blankly, wondering by what kind of witchery he'd come by this knowledge.

"I know other people who've seen it, and they said they cried."

Oh.

I was at the grocery store

...and was having trouble finding the salami. And I thought, Where did they hide it?

Cuteness

... is Nature's defense mechanism for the incontinent and whiny.

Perhaps I'll live to be 100, in which case I'm right on track.

I've spent the better part of my life being impatient for things I don't have yet. This may be typical for people in their teens and twenties -- we think we should get the career and the money and the relationship, and then our adulthood will be established and we can spend the next sixty years living it out.

But I'm pushing 35 now, and these things are still in my future, if they're in the cards for me at all. Sometimes, I get antsy as hell. But being antsy doesn't really help. And at least in the career department, I've already been there, done that as far as picking one goal and focusing all my energies on it (music, in case you weren't paying attention for the preceding 334 posts). I'm now trying to learn how to function without a detailed plan, without prematurely committing to any one endeavor. My plan for the present is to not have a plan.

And it's hard to stick to! It takes a kind of discipline not to fall into my previously established forms of discipline. This is part of what I'm running into with improv. At this point, having graduated from this theater's training center and being on student performing teams, I find myself around plenty of other people who take the pursuit seriously. They're trained actors or stand-up comedians and on track to do improv professionally. I can see who the most gifted performers are, and look up to them and want to be a part of them like they're the cool kids at school.

In each activity you pursue, you're likely to encounter people who have made that their world. Not that they have no other interests; but we each have some "core worlds" we're a part of. Now that you're involved in this activity, do you want it to become one of your handful of core worlds, or do you want to hang on the periphery? You can only be a part of so many things, and you can be seriously dedicated to even fewer.

My family, my roommates, and my church are three core worlds for me. Music used to be one. Work, tellingly, is not -- though I spend a lot of time and mental energy there, it does not hold my heart. I could choose to become ever more a part of the improv world, and let that be my primary creative outlet. And it could be fine. But I haven't done all the exploring I need to do, so in spite of my creative serial monogamy, I think I need to tear myself away and dabble in a few other worlds. Yeah, there's the desire to have my evenings and weekends free and curl up with a candle and a book at home. But there's also the desire to do Shakespeare and dance and sing in musicals.

And darn it, all this exploring takes time! Yargh! I thought I'd have my ducks in a row ten years ago, but ducks are stubborn. And lines are probably overrated anyway. So here I am, almost old enough to be president (we all know the age requirement was the only thing standing in my way, right?), and I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do without prematurely putting down creative roots. (Oh my gosh, do you know what this means? I'm sowing my wild oats, artistically! Who knew I had wild oats?) I'm almost as old as Mozart was when he died, and I've barely begun to show the world what I have to offer. Heck, I hardly know what I have to offer. Yet this is a process that can't be rushed, like pregnancy or reaching your adult height. So as tempted as I am to settle into something so that I can say, "This is what I do, and this is my plan to become successful at it," I know that I did that once before. I'm having to unlearn it!

I'm trying to remember that taking my time is how this process will work best for me.

It's just that it feels so much like waiting.

"Just a Joke"

It sounds like an excuse, doesn't it? "Hey, it's just a joke! Lighten up!" Like the sort of thing you'd hear from a group of bullies, or from somebody who'd just insulted you and doesn't want to deal with the consequences of being called out as a jerk.

But I've found myself thinking it a lot. And I wonder if often it's true: Some things really are just jokes, and we don't need to get so ruffled about them.

This is an issue for me, both in public and private. In public, as you all know, I do improv comedy. Full of jokes. And nothing is sacred. I've dived right into subjects that some might find offensive, and others have dived into subjects that make me uneasy. But I'm finding more and more freedom in being unafraid as a performer, and also in being harder to offend as an audience member.

On a personal level, my sense of humor has gotten me pretty misunderstood. A few people have assumed that because I state something in a humorous way, I must not be taking a situation seriously. (On the contrary, I find that humor is often an acknowledgement of the seriousness of a situation, because that's when levity is most needed.) Or they have experienced jokes as taunts and mocking, and assume that must be how I'm using them, too. When I first encountered this, I was shocked. My experience was that humor was a form of inclusion; you joke around with people you like. Any teasing is done with affection, and requires a kind of intimacy. And it's indicative of trust -- you trust that the other person meant well, and they trust you to take it all in good fun.

I learned the hard way that not everyone functions on this level. I've been accused of having terrible motives behind the things I say. It was incredibly hurtful to have people I thought of as friends take one of the traits I felt I wielded most skillfully -- humor -- and tell me that they saw it as a destructive weapon. I spent a long, agonizing time looking inward to see if what they said about me was true, and eventually came to the conclusion that it was not. In my need to understand how they could have misjudged me so drastically and so aggressively, I came up with analogies.

One is that of a high school varsity baseball team. Imagine them throwing the ball fast and hitting it hard. Then imagine a 9-year-old on the field. If the teenagers include him in the game, it's a compliment, an indication that they see him as an equal. But if he's not used to that kind of game, freaks out a bit, and gets hit with the ball a few times, he's not going to have any fun. His pain is real. But it would be wrong for him and his mom to declare that the other ball players are terrible people, that they meant to hurt her son, and baseballs are weapons that should be banned from our schools. I felt like one of those ball players. I tossed jokes to my friends, they had no idea how to handle what was coming their way, and in return for a baseball I got accusations thrown at me. Where this metaphor breaks down: I never expected them to play at my level. I was always careful. But it wasn't enough, which made it even more surprising and difficult when even my slow pitches were mistaken for grenades.

From what I've observed, "taking a joke" is largely a matter of giving people the benefit of the doubt. Are we going to assume we know another person's motives, and further assume that those motives are bad? Or are we going to acknowledge that we all bring our own shit to the table, and perhaps our reactions have more to do with our shit than they do with the joke-teller? I'll even give an example by fessing up to shit of my own: I have a big nose. I know I have a big nose. So if, in an improv sketch, somebody in character decided to make fun of my character's appearance and called me a fat, scuzzy-haired, big-nosed stink-bag, I wouldn't react to the "fat," "scuzzy-haired," "stinky" bits, but I might feel a twinge at the "big-nosed" bit. But I'd be wrong to assume that the other actor meant anything by it, or that they even think I have a big nose. It's my issue. I could even approach it optimistically and hope that they consider that insult to be as fictional as the other three.

That last point is important, because the way I and many people I know use humor is to tell others that things are OK. You don't make fun of something if you think it's a real problem. Which means that, if somebody makes a joke about something that feels scary or sensitive to you, you can take it as a sign that it might not be as bad as you think. But to do this, you again need to give that person the benefit of the doubt.

This applies to public situations, too. There are some performers we come to trust, and we can take jokes from them that we might not take from an unknown. But we can choose to give the benefit of the doubt, even when unknown performers are involved. It'll stop us from making unfair accusations about people we don't know, and it will keep us from getting our feelings hurt so often. Less pain all around.

I think, in our culture, we have a tendency to take offense and express outrage because it shows that we care, and that we have standards. But from my vantage point, it seems like that's just a large-scale way of making ourselves look good by making others look -- and feel -- bad.

It's a lot more fun to be free to laugh.

No Long Processions or Boring Speeches Here!

My improv graduation show went well! I had been in a slump for about a month, and even now have some negative feelings about performing improv in general. But the show itself was fun, felt pretty good, and the positive feedback seemed enthusiastic and genuine, both from friends and family, and from the experienced performers and teachers who were there. I had begun to feel like I wasn't good at it, but now I think it's just that I had some weak performances, and there's an important difference.

I may still take a break after this term of student teams, but now I don't have to feel like I failed, or have a sad feeling whenever I think of my time in improv. The grad show was redemptive. I'd prayed a lot about it, and when there were opportunities to get prayer from other people, I asked them to pray about the show. I really wanted it to be a good memory. And now it will be.

It was also an interesting experiment in pushing my own boundaries. I hadn't realized how much of our show was about sex until we did it all together, and the fact that a lot of our improv went in that direction added even more. I may have been the guiltiest party in that regard. Yet, in spite of the presence of my parents, little brother, several church friends, and God in the audience, I wasn't embarrassed. I ended up being more concerned that I'd taken a comedic cop-out. Even then, when I asked a couple of my teachers whether they thought that was bad, their response was, "Nah. It just tends to go there."

Cool. I feel like one of the things God is working on in me is this sort of internal stiffness -- stick-up-my-ass-ness, if you will. I don't want to be afraid or unable; if I'm not going to do something onstage, I want that to be a choice that comes out of confidence in my relationship with God, not merely a fear of risk. My natural tendency is to stay on the conservative and careful side of things (and this tendency is not necessarily godly in itself). I don't think I'm in danger of becoming a libertine just because I pretended to eat a mushroom burger while bowm-chicka-bowm-bowm music played in the background. And besides, it was funny.

I was also pleased that the other actors didn't seem afraid of me. Most of the time it's like I have this invisible force field around me that convinces people that I'm made of glass and will shatter in tears if they touch me or say anything untoward; I guess I come across as emotionally and physically fragile. But in our last improv bit, I ended up on the floor, and one of the guys came over and sat on me. (It's funny how something that would feel weird in real life can barely even regisiter in your consciousness when you're in the middle of a scene.) He didn't put his full weight on me, but I was still happy that he didn't hold back out of fear of breaking me or freaking me out.

So, here's to freedom!

And as we learned that night, sometimes you just have to sit on each other.

Sick, Again

I don't know what kind of game my immune system thinks it's playing.

I had some cold-cough weirdness less than two months ago, during which I lost my voice for a few days. (OK, I find laryngitis fun, I'll admit that.) I almost never get sick, but now here I am, with throat-nose weirdness. Very similar. And a little embarrassing.

Here's a good thing: They gave me a laptop at work a few weeks ago, which means I'm able to work from home, which means I don't have to get behind or use up sick days when I'm functional but germy.

I've cancelled my evening appointment, and will try to rest and recover. Here are some things I won't be doing:

Cleaning my room
Cleaning the apartment
Shopping for groceries
Filing my loose documents
Unpacking from an overnight trip and putting my duffle bag back in the basement
Putting on makeup and doing my hair
Tae-Bo (ha! like I was about to do that anyway)

I've Come So Far

On Friday, I was telling my family the body-parts-that-begin-with-P story, and my brother informed me that being female was no excuse for drawing a blank, because we also have a body part that begins with P if you use slang. Not the nicest word, but in a comic setting, not to be ruled out. But I didn't even think of it, much less rule it out.

So I guess I have a way to go yet. But if you agree that swearing, drinking, and using naughty words constitutes genuine progress for me, then you'll be proud of what I'm about to do in the graduation show for my improv class.