November 03, 2006
I haven't been writing here. In a strange twist of fate, my hits have gone up, up UP! (largely from traffic through the DERRICK site) and that's a HUGE dis-incentive to actually, y'know, write.
Nerdiest complaint in history on the way: People have no respect for quiet in the NYU computer labs anymore. There, I said it. A man needs a place where he can go and type in peace without assholes talkin' out they neck. It's not like I'm even trying to get anything done: I just watched the latest 30 Rock (which was par for the dope) and now I'm writing this. I'm not trying to study. I just like to have an hour or two every day where I'm not listening to someone near me have an inane cell phone conversation.
There are tiny curmudgeons in my bloodstream, and they flow to my heart and brain when I am forced to listen to somebody on a RAZR tell their friend Kylie about how terrible work at the botique was today.
I just re-read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. It reminded me that the last time I read it, I must've been about 12 or 13, and either still wanted or recently got over wanting to be a computer programmer when I grew up. It's interesting: I didn't end up doing what the people in the book do for a living, but I managed to emulate their distincly unsexy work habits. A lot of people lamenting about working too much and not having a life. I can convince myself when I'm in a lame mood that that's what I've done.
Anyway, it was fun to revisit a previous incarnation of my nerd-dom (I traded computers for movies, and then movies for comedy.) I think I've found my lifetime nerd-domain. I think this nerd-dom will pay the bills. I hope it will. It sure is fun.
This week has been a barrage of activity prepping for the second HKATZNYU show of the year. It should be a gas: it is adequately strange and fast. It's weird how show week works: You go into the week with gusto, you burn out around Wednesday and think everything is awful and this is the time we won't pull it off, but you plow through and the show happens, and you go, holy fuck, we fooled them again. And you feel pretty fucking great about it and think, man, is making stuff ever cool. Man it's cool that insanely talented people gave you their time and energy and ideas and support. And you think, who wouldn't be a workaholic with work this cool?
It bugs me when people leave comments on YouTube videos (not just ours) to the effect of "get a job!" Like they can't understand why somebody would want to just make something because it's fun and interesting to them and geeks them out. Like the most effective use of anyone's time is being miserable at a job.
And I understand that, being a student, I am in a very convenient, luxurious place to be making those kind of statements. And man am I balls-scared of having a dayjob when I graduate (soon). But I know enough people with dayjobs who use their off-hours to make their weird ideas into real things that at least I know I won't be alone.
There's a great passage in Microserfs which I can't quote directly because I returned the book to the library, but it's basically the main character justifying writing the journal that constitutes the novel, basically, that things change so fast and so imperceptibly that there is absolutely no shame in putting down what seems like minutiae at the time. Actually, it's kind of sacred. And I'm probably not even paraphrasing, just coloring whatever I thought I read with other shit I've been thinking. And time has felt particularly fast lately so that's why I'm writing this. That and because I drank a huge coffee and a huge Diet Coke at rehearsal a couple of hours ago while we were choreographing a vampire dance-fight.
Special thanks to Steve for lending us his staging/stage-fighting expertise at such a retardedly late hour.
Should be a good one tomorrow.
Posted by DC at November 3, 2006 02:08 AM