Raising the Bar

Ever since I was a weird little kid, my dad has been telling me to do my homework. Only now do I understand why.

He wasn't just talking about schoolwork. He was talking in general about preparing for everything in life. Whether it's moving to a new house, giving a speech, or cooking a Christmas turkey for Karl Malone, you should always know exactly what you're doing.

I was doing a live show at local bar. This was a while back, one of the first stand-up acts of my adult life. I don't remember what I said, but I know I did impersonations. After my set, a fellow comedian beckoned me to the back of the club. He looked remarkably like Rodney Dangerfield (which could be why I remember him so well). Our conversation was brief.

"How long you been doing comedy?" He asked.

"This is my fourth or fifth time doing stand-up." I replied.

"Lemme tell you this... You're already funny, kid, but you gotta have structure."

This was one of the most solid pieces of advice I'd ever gotten. I knew my act wasn't perfect. But this guy highlighted what was probably the biggest factor as to why. At the time, I was practicing my jokes by writing key words on a piece of paper, practicing the gist of the joke, but never preparing it like a monologue. I still write my ideas on pieces of paper, but I've since been creating proper set-ups and punchlines.

I recently read about what makes screenplays powerful. The article described it something like this: Say you're pulling back the string of an bow, about to release an arrow into the heart of your foe. Ideally, you'd want the string to be as taut as can be before releasing the arrow. Bad screenplays tend to pull back the string, and diffuse the tension little by little, until the arrow is finally launched, but weakly and without the assertion it deserves, resulting in a series of dull cinematic would-have-been climaxes.

I'm paraphrasing, but that's how I started seeing comedy. I realized that when it comes to jokes, it's not enough to talk about something funny, but to build a good set-up and have a punchline that stings like a well-aimed arrow. Knowing this obviously doesn't make me an expert, but every bit of insight helps.

I tell ya.

The Time Quandary

Where was your consciousness all those years before you were born? Can you describe the feeling of not yet existing? What did you perceive? Was there a color associated with that time?... Or was it just nothing?

How can you describe something when its main characteristic is that it really is nothing?

I can still recall my first memory, vividly. It was a dynamic battle between a mythical, fiery-winged creature and myself. Our arena was a gigantic, odorless trash compactor (like the one in Star Wars). The beast soared from wall to wall as I tried taking it down with my retractable metal claws.

I should mention this was a dream, and in retrospect, I realize we were taking on the personas of trademarked characters, but that's how my life started.

I was 3.

My first solid memory of the real world was when I was a toddler, standing in the kitchen with my mother. I asked her her name. She told me. I responded with "What's dad's name?" She told me. I started seeing them as people, rather than long-term babysitters.

For some reason, I felt like I've been alive forever. As a child, I just assumed life was eternal. The thought of something as obscure as an 18-wheeler crashing through our house and crushing me just never crossed my mind.

...I don't know why it would.

Then I learned that life had an arc. Raised with a religious mindset, I figured that our spirits were alive even before we were conceived. I thought our souls were sitting in a waiting room up in Heaven, reading magazines until our number's called and we were sent down to Earth where our parents were expecting us, like they designed 3D models of our faces and ordered them from the Heaven store.

Whether or not we have souls, from a scientific standpoint, I can safely say we're born and eventually develop thoughts and memories. So where and when do our lives begin, really?

To those of you who say time is an illusion, or that it's not real, listen to this-- everything in life is dependent on time: catching the bus, the beat of a song, even pacing a joke just right so it's funny and not uncomfortable. You can meet the love of your life because you were late for work, or get mugged for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Time is a cruel and generous mistress.

Here's my philosophy on age-- we're as old as the beginning of time up until our last second alive. What does that mean? According to my philosophy, you and I are older than George Washington, King Tut, Lao Tzu, pretty much anyone born and dead before our time, no matter how old we are when we die. The reason is that if time is linear, and there really was a first moment in the universe, that first moment up until the end of your life constitutes how long you lasted, because it includes the time you didn't exist, all the time you could have existed, and your lifespan itself (imagine the universe's first moment as a shared birthday by everyone and everything that came after it).

So, what does that mean? Well, George Washington died at the age of 67 in 1799 A.D. If another guy dies at the age of 42 in 2020 A.D., the younger guy may not have lived as long, but if you compare their timelines from day one of the universe, the young man's timeline stretched further, so the young man is really older in relation to the universe.

This is all assuming, of course, that time is linear. If it's cyclical and just keeps resetting itself, I don't know what to tell you.

Internship Tycoon (The Disney College Program: Part 1)

Let's start from the beginning:

In the Spring of 2011, I decided to apply for my first internship. It was based in Anaheim, California. The deal?: Take at least one Disney sponsored class and work at Disneyland while living in a Disney funded dorm. Sounds perfect, right? Having never lived in a dorm until then, I was ecstatic. I lived on the 5th floor of a place called "Carnegie Plaza" with 4 roommates, 3 of which I was lucky to live with.

The majority of these hundreds of interns didn't choose their roommates ahead of time. No one chose their apartments. You just show up, and take what they give you. You either live in a place with 4 other guys, or 2 other guys-- that's it. It's a ten minute drive to Disneyland. Rent was roughly $150 a week, no matter how many guys you lived with (which is siphoned from your weekly paycheck). Altogether, we paid almost $3000 a month for a living room and two bedrooms. I wouldn't have complained about it if we made more, but the starting salary was something like $9.03 per hour ($9.33 if you stay with the company after the program).

During the phone interview, I expressed my love for the Jungle Cruise and told the interviewer that being a skipper would be my dream job. I didn't the Jungle Cruise, but I did get the next best thing which was Storybook Land in Fantasyland. The whole reason I got into Disney in the first place was because I loved the animated movies, and my job was to tell people about those stories while I drove them around a canal in a little boat. There were obstacles, no doubt. When I was working on the dock, grouping overzealous guests up to 14 per boat, there were times where I lost track of time and hours felt like days. Then there were folks who entered through the special assistance line with ECVs. Now, if you don't know what an ECV is, it's an electronic wheelchair/shopping cart hybrid that wasn't designed to maneuver in any proper direction but onto innocent victims feet.

These are ECVs. They're apparently harder to pilot than an F-16.

All in all, I considered myself lucky to work at Storybook Land-- I was lucky to work attractions in general. I've had friends in the custodial program, fast food, shops-- these jobs were all way more stressful and in many ways, less fun. I was pretty much playing with over-sized toy boats, taking strangers on tours through a magical, miniature world. Still, there was always drama no matter where you worked. In attractions, there was something called a "Safe D" which I was terrified of getting because it basically meant you made a hazardous mistake and can't move up in the company for at least a year. I never got one, but I've heard stories of people accidentally ramming boats, or hitting a red light on the canal (which would derail your boat from the track). That'll grant you a "Safe D". Some paranoia came with the territory, and it wasn't uncommon for employees to be suspicious of others trying to report them something as severe as negligence or something as minuscule as pulling out a cell phone to check a text. Pulling out a phone is taboo at Disney parks, no matter where you work.

Ultimately though, I was really lonely working at Disneyland. I had some great roommates, like I said. But our schedules were usually opposite, so we rarely saw each other. My family visited often enough and I met a lot of good people in the dorm, but something was missing. I hung out with different cliques, like the three blonde girls down the hall, the boozers downstairs, the saintly underage kids on the other side of the building. I've always thought my loneliness derived from my being spread out too thin, but it's more than that.

My job exhausted me mentally. I worked an average of ten days in a row, but that's not what did it. What got me so tired by the end of a week and a half of work was constantly seeing different faces, greeting strangers from all over the country, all over the world, wishing them well and never seeing them again. It's not a good feeling. There were times when I made kids and adults really happy simply by complimenting them, saying "happy birthday", cracking jokes, and after my 7 minute boat ride, I'd tell them it was nice to meet them and that was it. Sometimes, they'd wrap their arms around me, thank me for my kind words and actions, but with the looming quota of passengers per hour strictly enforced by area managers, the bonds lasted mere seconds before I had to load my next boat of paying customers (Do I have to spell the word?).

I'd see my co-workers often, but even a lot of those relationships were contrived. Even though I was usually happy just to be working where I was, we as a whole had to appear happy when we were on the clock. Management would often come down on all of us because certain employees didn't smile at times and the park guests actually went to Main Street City Hall to complain about that. Big brother, much?

The internship flew by. It lasted from mid-August until January 2nd, and on moving day, it felt like the walls were slowly collapsing as our rooms were getting their final monthly inspections. The administrators were gradually shooing us out, room by room. I vividly remember gathering in the hallway with some friends I'd met throughout the months, and we embraced one another. It was the last time most of us would ever see each other. These interns were from all over America, from Hawaii to New York. The four months we'd spent together created lifelong friendships.

I'll tell you what hurt, though: Remembering certain days of sheer bliss that just won't be replicated like they were. There was an indescribable feeling that came with the freedom of waltzing around Disneyland with some of those guys and girls during August when we first got our free passes, September when it wasn't crowded, Halloween and Christmastime. Even our classes had a specific charm. It felt like a fraternity in a lot of ways (minus the paddle). It didn't even hit me until I was well on the freeway, heading toward my house in West L.A.

I worked there for another 6 months, commuting for hours a day until I just couldn't take the commute, the low-yielding pay, and the unending sense of loneliness that came with working at the Happiest Place on Earth...