Category Archives: Humorous

Aug 14 2013
19 Comments
Anecdotes, Humorous, Modern Life

Meet Deb. She’s My Plant and I Love Her.

This is not deb the plant.

Last Saturday, I did something I’ve never done before. I turned 24. The great wheel of time, to which I am strapped, completed a rotation and left me all of the sudden an entire year older. My 24th birthday was on my mind constantly as a 23-year old. I was always thinking out loud to my friends about how I wanted to celebrate, debating between redwall-themed singing picnics to contra dancing to singing sea chanties in the Maritime National Park near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.

This is partly because my last birthday kind of sucked. I had just moved to San Francisco, had 3 friends, and worked until 10 pm at a restaurant where I felt as valued as an empty toilet paper roll one does not care enough about to throw away. In hindsight, it wasn’t all that bad, but I sure did like to complain about it to myself throughout the year.

I also thought about my birthday constantly partly because I am a ham and couldn’t wait for the next spotlight. So I wanted to make sure my next birthday party was awesome. AND. It was. I had new friends, we went to karaoke after eating family style Italian food and I wore a Scottish skirt with a peasant shirt and felt like the belle of the ball, and I think I was. My friends confirm that I was.*

But something was missing. There was a gap somewhere, even though my belly was full and I was surrounded by my dearest friends whose cheeks I want to pinch and whose backs I occasionally massage.

Deb

This is deb.

After contemplating this issue deeply and inhaling some of the second hand smoke from the KLM flight attendants sitting in the courtyard where I sit writing this blog post, I believe I’ve come to the conclusion I seek. My birthday was missing Deb. Deb is a plant. She is a succulent. Her full name is Deb Echevaria Elegans Drevets, and she is wonderful.

She is my little darling and I want to tell the world about her. The way she sits so patiently and silently, the sly way she grows, the way her leaves sometimes die and I have to pluck them off – it’s all too magical to put into words and sometimes, when I look at her, I just want to hug her and tell her that she’s all mine. I can’t, of course, because the oils on my skin can stain her leaves, so I just look at her and beam. It’s nice to care about something aside from myself, to move the focus of my life from me to Deb.

So when I say that I’m so over my birthday – aside from the literal way that my birthday has passed and that I’m metaphysically done turning 24 – I’m also done with the party being about me. I’m not that great. I’m only great in relation to other plants and in relationship with them. I’m great in my capacity to care for Deb and give her everything she needs, whether that be a new pot every 4 years, a good watering every 2 weeks or putting her outside for some socializing with the neighborhood flora. I’m gearing up for act two of the play, featuring not me, but Deb and me and starting with a musical number in a style known as deb step. I know I’m ready for this next phase in my life, but is the world?

Send your thoughts to [is] [the] [world] [ready] [4] [deb] [and] [emily] [at] [gmail] [dot] [com].

For more posts about my birthday, check out What My Birthday Means for You and Birthdays Mean Facebook Notification Overdose.

*They did not, in fact, confirm that I was the bell of the ball. I just assume they would agree with me.

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Jul 25 2013
15 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, Serious-ish, Writing

Why Do We Woo?

woo_audienceWoo: a verbal affirmation of support, delight, or marvel, commonly used in performance contexts such as rock concerts, improv shows, and evangelical church music; a verbal high five or pat on the back i.e. “Woooooooooo!” Not appropriate for chamber choir  performances. e.g. “WOOOOOOOO! (dirty looks).”

A show just ended and my feet are sweating from the laughter. I’m buzzed from the truth in comedy and inspired to live the rest of my life. The performance demands a response. What do I do? Do I go up to the stage and give everyone firm handshakes? Yes, because I love handshakefulness. Do I go and give high fives? Also, yes, because high fives are incredible.

But mostly, I woo. Before anything, I woo. What a strange thing to do. A kind of shrieking or yelling, it’s slightly aggressive and varied in pitch. I go high but not too high, and I never go too low. A low woo is no woo at all, and middle range woo’s are for woo n00bs.

Could a woo also be called a cheer? In Elizabethan times, when the riff raff became excited by one of Shakespeare’s new plays, how did they give their verbal high fives? Were I to step back in time and become a gladiator in the arenas of Rome, what would I hear coming from the audience? A buzzing sound? Ooooo’s without the W? Unformed screams? Clacks?

Were I to risk everything and build myself a time machine out of old toilet paper rolls and search for the very first woo, what would it sound like?  A moo? Would it be to celebrate a freshly slain pantosaur or skirtcelops? Would it be in celebration of nature, a group of my great aunts and uncles looking at a full moon over the prehistoric forest and grunting or shrieking? And when the moon did nothing but moon right back, what would the response be? Even more grunting because of the mystery and unattainability of nature’s beauty? Or frustration and the first mutterings of doubt, wondering if anyone’s even listening?

Flying down a country lane in Bologna on a rented bicycle with my hair undone, I burst into song, unable to keep it inside. When the adrenaline’s pumping, when the energy is there – it feels good to scream, to belt something out from the gut, to make your internal bliss external and give it back, because if it stays it might grow into a watermelon plant.

Maybe the woo* is the most perfect form of human expression, uninhibited by the burden of forming words. Just imagine, after a particularly moving performance of any kind, rising and yelling, “I really enjoyed this! It was good because it was acted authentically and made sense in its own world! I feel I better understand my own place in the world as a result of this performance!”

That man would be sedated instantly. But the one screaming almost animal-like sounds, “WOOOOO….WOOOO…..WOOOO….” is normal.

The next time I read something true, my response will be “WOOOOO!”

The next time someone says “I love you” and I love them, my response will be “WOOOOO!”

The next time I eat a delicious breakfast, my response will be “WOOOOO!”

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Jun 12 2013
9 Comments
Anecdotes, Humorous, Modern Life, Writing

The Flossing Jar

The flossing jar

The flossing jar is less a jar and more a cream dispenser, but who cares about formalities?

I read an interesting quote in my paperback vampire novel two weeks ago. The vampire Pandora spoke to her victim before sucking the blood from his body, telling him,  “You should do something every day simply because you would rather not do it.” It was solid advice, and something that’s stuck with me.*

Since I’ve read the quote, I’ve gone to the dentist and purchased protein powder. These events are relevant to this story.

For the past two months, my diet consisted of a daily gallon of salad and some oatmeal. Note the lack of protein.

At my first physical in seven years, the doctor told me that I should eat lean protein in the morning to boost my metabolism and make my hair grow long like Tarzan and to make my muscles bulge from my slacks and Christmas sweaters.

I was ready for this to be a huge hassle. The idea of having to plan to eat protein seemed so unnatural to me that I hated myself for even thinking about it. Nevertheless, I figured I should follow the doc’s orders, so I bought Musclez protein powder, 2 dozen eggs, 5 cans of beans, and 6 cans of tuna and prepared for the lean protein haul. As it turns out, garbanzo beans taste incredible prepared can-to-microwave, but this was only a minor consolation for the protein nuisance.

In order to motivate myself to become a protein-eater, and thinking of that vampire quote,** I said that this was going to be the one thing that I do every day, the thing I do in order to build character and become famous and successful.

Shortly after my trip to the doctor, I went to the dentist, who peeled my gums off and sandblasted my teeth before removing the shards one by one. In the midst of removing a tooth splinter, he asked, “How often do you floss?” “Never,” I said. “You should floss,” he said.

I hate flossing. It takes time and it isn’t rewarding. So I thought to myself, this could be my thing, the thing I do everyday even though I don’t want to. Almost as soon as I’d resolved that conflict, I came across a glaring contradiction. I already had the one thing: the protein! And then they came like a flood, the millions of things I do every day that I’d rather not do, like shaking hands with all the invisible people in my room every morning, sleeping in occasionally, going to work, and getting my hair cut.

My day was filled with things I do even though I’d rather not. True, most of these activities are things I have to do and don’t do just for the heck of it, but still – 75% of my day is built out of necessity.

So I thought, maybe something equally important is finding an activity I love doing so much that I’d rather die than not do it. That’s why I do improv, and make time every day to eat calcium chews and sing loudly to myself in public.

And I solved the flossing problem by putting a quarter in a jar every time I floss; one day that jar is going to buy me a Carnival cruise ticket.

*****

*This story isn’t true. The quote is from somewhere else, but I couldn’t remember where.

**Again, not actually from a vampire.

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Mar 25 2013
8 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, Success, Writing

A Short History of the List

To-do lists on post it notesOne day I woke up and found lists all around me.

They were telling me what I needed to do, what I wanted to do, restaurants I had to try, the must-read books of the year, bills I hadn’t paid, people who owed me money, action items from meetings I’d forgotten, and other things I absolutely could not forget. The lists covered the walls and lay heaped on the ground, were pouring out of the closet and bursting from drawers.

I was completely surrounded by them and immediately began to panic, the weight of all this crucial information bearing down on me with the force of an anvil, paralyzing me from acting at all or crossing even one item off one list.

So instead of beginning my work, I waded through the lists to my computer and began to procrastinate. I looked up the history of the list.

At the dawn of time, when all the earth’s matter and energy had been vomited up from the great unknown, the sole purpose of each individual bit of matter and anti-matter was this: to become more complex. Billions of years later, after a couple supernovas and other heavy-element producing astrological events, humans evolved and shortly thereafter started wearing trousers. Roughly around that time, the clock was invented. Prior to trouser-wearing and time-minding, the human’s to-do list looked something like this:

1. Survive

Or maybe like this:

1. Obtain food

2. Eat

3. Talk to Mom

At any rate, it was incredibly short because the basic tasks that went into a productive day were obvious and didn’t need to be remembered because if they weren’t, death would result shortly after. But in the time of trouser-wearing, the basic tools for survival became a bit murkier. It was no longer necessary to worry about obtaining food. It was readily available. Survival, too, turned out to be slightly easier than before, due to advances in leeching and humour-reading. All of the sudden, the question of “what do I do now” became much more profound.  It was no longer “what do I need to do today so I don’t die” but “what do I need to do today so I can do what I need to do tomorrow” and so on and so forth in a never ending cycle of perpetual productivity.

That’s when the humans invented lists, an all-powerful demigod that would tell them what they needed to do today in order to prosper tomorrow, or be happy, or avoid debtor’s prison, or remember the things they already knew.

Soon, lists became too complicated to understand, so it was necessary to develop a system where the lists could be listed, organized and distilled into something intelligible. Soon even that was too complicated to understand, so further reduction processes were undertaken and so on and so forth in an eternal battle between existing knowledge, and the desire to remember and act upon it.

There is a legend among the hill people of San Francisco that soon there will be one List that descends from the heavens, restoring order to the world and a sense of purpose, the List to end them all, to forever guide and inform, to comfort and encourage.

Until that day, the list demons proliferate, accusing their victims of sloth, of indirection, of forgetfulness. And the victims accept gladly, and create even more lists. Occasionally, on the most unusual of days, a list gets crossed off completely and disappears. Most often, however, the lists torment the list-maker to a point of madness or indifference, which could be the same thing. It depends on your perspective.

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Mar 21 2013
10 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, San Francisco

What Improv Taught Me About Life

Life lessons from improvSo I started taking improv classes. I just did it for fun, and to meet other people and find out if my humor could translate to the stage. Three months later, I’ve accomplished almost all of my improvising goals, including being told by the teacher to try “less yelling.”

Unexpectedly, I also learned things that are useful for life, lessons I believe are helping me become better at sucking out the marrow of life’s ribs.

Other people have also found improv valuable. Heck, this guy even wrote a blog with the same title as mine.  It’s valuable for writers who want to write better, for actors who want to act better, and for humans who want to human better. The really incredible thing is that I have different points to make than these other chucklenuts. Let’s get going.

1. Live in the moment

It’s impossible to improv effectively if you’re inside your head, thinking about how the act is going, what you should do next, or what you could have done better. Every moment spent inside your skull monologue-ing to yourself, is  moment your body is occupying space onstage and going nowhere. Be present. Don’t over-think it. Silence the inner critic.

The same thing applies to living. How can you live effectively if you’re always thinking of what you could do better, judging yourself, or comparing yourself to other people. Life is going on outside your skull, and it’s meant to be lived, not tiptoed around.

2. You have a body

All day long, we use this body of ours to do things like type on computers, sit in chairs, stare at powerpoint presentations, make coffee, see patients, put on clothing, digest food, pick other people’s noses, etc. But how often are we conscious of it, of the weight we support on our frame, of the way our ankle feels when the other one is resting on it, the rhythm of our own heartbeat, the blood in our veins and the juices in our stomach.

Taking a moment to consider the universe of our own being is somehow relaxing. It helps define a space for me, reaffirms my existence, and helps me connect to the essence of what I am, namely, a being made of animated atoms. Wild, isn’t it?

3. There’s no right answer

Improv is not about being funny. It doesn’t matter if you say “thumb-flavored jello snacks” instead of “a pink ruler,” so long as you say something. The reality is that everything is right and good. My partner throws out something about being in a kitchen. Awesome. Yes. Or maybe she throws out something about me as her daughter that’s recently been having trouble wetting the bed. Awesome. Yes.

In life, I get so caught up with trying to find the ‘right’ idea or the ‘best’ idea that I don’t end up trying anything at all. I’m paralyzed by indecision, and the end result is much worse than if I’d run with something and improved it along the way.

4. Nothing’s funnier than the truth

Yes, space aliens that sprout wings anytime someone says the word “kerfuffle” are interesting, but so are work crushes, parents, grandparents, sisters and brothers, churches, bars, hair salons, the whole mix and everything. Our everyday life and relationships are incredibly rich, laden with beauty, pain, and humor.

What makes improv really great, and all humor really great, is its ability to relate to the truth in a unique way or portray it in a new light. That’s the gotcha moment, when all of the sudden you’re on the floor crying from laughter because of a scene about someone eating a donut. That’s where the real magic is, it’s in the everyday, the mundane, and the banal. That’s also the title of my next improv show. I hope you come.

P.S. I’ve been taking improv with Leela and am really enjoying the classes. If you’re in the Bay Area, you should definitely check them out.

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