What’s New
I am currently working on a set list for Monday and Tuesday as I will be performing at the Comedy Cabana on those two days. I feel pretty good about it, and I have a feeling my set will be dynamite. I usually do well at comedy club settings, but in other, non-comedy settings such as coffee houses and generic open mics, I often fail to capture the mood of the crowd, as they are more musical and poetry-reading oriented. Some people like to do that sort of thing and I’m fine with it. It’s just I feel like they have all this music and then, “Oh, by the way, we have a comedian.”
It is probably good experience anyway because I will encounter resistant crowds in the future, no doubt, and I will have to figure out a way to deal with them. But I am not so bad at thinking on my toes. When I was up in Rhode Island, I did a couple coffee shops and ended up totally scrapping my planned material and just commented on the room and talked about how the jokes I tried did not work. I got some gigantic laughs. I’ve been studying comedy for over five years now and what I’ve learned is that if you are not doing so well and do not acknowledge that, you will come off as ignorant. At least if you say something, as I did, “Someone better get over here and get me off this stage.” I kind of dragged out everything I did. Part of the problem was the house I was living in was not very conducive to coming up with a solid set that I could memorize. See the previous post for details. No central air, nowhere to really sit at a table to concentrate, constant distractions, and the heat was unbearable.
In order for me to concentrate fully, I need a quiet, calm, and comfortable atmosphere, like the one I harbor at home. And when I rehearse my act, I need to be alone. People always asking, “What are you doing? Why are you talking to yourself?” I need about a three-hour uninterrupted block of time to get into the “zone.” I could not do that in Rhode Island. The way my friend’s mind worked, we always had to be doing something external to my comedy. We had to go here to pick up this, we had to eat something, we had to pick up his drug-addicted girlfriend (which I will not comment on further). So it was no wonder I went onstage twice unprepared, not to mention that I was so exhausted because I could not get a deep sleep in such a humid environment. My condition calls for at least eight to ten hours of sleep for me to function normally, or at least close to normal. But if I were to tell him that, he’d look at me like I was from Mars.
It was the whole always having to be “on” that got to me. I need time to unwind and to get myself in a mental mood to do things, and there was just no time. I am not someone who can live life on the edge, completing millions of arduous and trivial tasks just for the sake of doing so. I carefully choose the actions I take in advance because I know what is important to me and what is simply not worth it. As a small example, I no longer go to movies much because most of them are severely disappointing. The only movies I will go see are the ones I am sure will be worth my time and money. When you are away from home, you end up doing things that you realize were not worth your time. I saw two movies I was utterly disappointed in and could have spent my time doing much more enlightening activities. For some reason, since I began this journey into self-exploration, entertainment does not do it for me anymore. Or maybe it is just the quality has dwindled so far down it’s just not worth it.
All I really know for sure is that I am ready to get on with my life. Overcoming obstacles is something I am now too familiar with and the only thing I can do now is take it easy. I need to work on comedy, work on getting my degree, and learn to embrace my life the way I was always meant to. It is a shame that some people will never break their mental model of reality to truly live the life of their dreams, but I know I am currently on that path, and the path is just as rewarding as the destination. Joy in the present trumps suspended joy in the future. That is all.