Single

Allow me to start by being candid about my dating history; or at least as candid as one can be without truly “kissing and telling”. I have gone steady with a grand total of five women in my entire life. I use the vaguely outmoded term going steady because, in my mind, it is far more accurate in describing the activity. “Dating” seems too casual, as if just meeting for coffee were sufficient and “girlfriend” feels far too official – the kind of thing that you could change your Facebook status to. (I do sometimes miss the term “going out” that was popular when I was in junior/senior high school, but taken literally doesn't make sense and only imparts some sense when you understand the colloquial use.) Of those five women, I dated no single one for longer than five months, and three of them were during high school. The last one ended in March 2014. Excluding that relationship, I have gone a grand total of five dates in the last five years, none of which were second dates. (As I said, I'm going to be candid, which will likely not be charming or uplifting.)

What is the point of this depression dredging material, you ask? I'm not looking for pity, and I'm also in no way boasting about my single life. In order for me to speak frankly about being as single as I am, you need to understand just how single I am. (Answer: very.)

Being single in college is fine; the vast majority of people you meet are also single, engaged in a massive game of musical chairs wherein the music only stops in certain sections of the circle at any one time. When you meet someone who is in a relationship, you're usually assured of its brevity; those in long-term (>1 year) or “serious” relationships are extremely uncommon – the unicorns of the university. This is, for the most part, fine. You likely have a fairly large circle of friends in a similar situation, and you can always have someone to a) commiserate with and/or b) pine with. The change happens very slowly however from one crystalline state to the other. One day, your usual going out/game/movie/whatever night is different and Sean has a date. At first, this doesn't seem unusual because your friends are always going on occasional dates here and there, so it will only be with hindsight after a few months that you realize this is “serious dating” and that you will start to see your friend a lot less.

I feel like I should stop here and point out that this is not a missive against women or men violating a “bro code” or placing “hos before bros”. I am authentically happy anytime one of my friends settled down and with exceedingly few exceptions the counterparts they have selected have been wonderful. I'm just trying to tell the narrative.

Even the loss of one of your friends will likely not raise a red flag, because you still have the rest of your friends. You're not alone, yet. This process will continue to repeat however, and the next thing you know, you're the only single friend you really know. Or, possibly even worse, there is one other single friend and you two are forced to hang out as the only ones who can. If you're lucky, you'll like this person. (Though god forbid they are a member of the opposite sex (or same sex, depending on how you swing) because there will be no end to attempts at unifying Germany, so to speak. This process seems to happen so seamlessly, so silently, like a background computer program that it is quite a while before you realize the music stopped on the musical chairs game a long time ago and every single one of your friends is in a long-term committed relationship.

Why is this bad, you ask? So many websites, Tumblr feeds, books, and memes constantly extol the virtues of being single (Do what you want! Have more money! Live free! the pamphlets would say). There are two primary problems: being single is lonely and being single is a threat to your friends.

First, that being single is lonely seems like a no-brainer. But I'm going to paint a picture. It's Saturday night, and I've just done an improv show with a bunch of my friends. All of their significant others need not be present for this to work. If you're lucky, you all go out to the bar for post-show frivolity and drinks; if you're unlucky, only a few of you will actually be able to participate in the ever evaporating team-bonding. You have drinks, you talk about the show or movies or whatever, and slowly your paired friends depart either with or to join their partners at home. Being the only person left, you pay your tab, get a burrito at the late night place next door, and return home to watch Hulu until you fall asleep. (And, scene.) This is quite nearly all of my going out experiences. Being single in a group of paired friends is a detriment, because you get forgotten. Our world is geared to couples – tables have an even number of chairs. Everything about being an adult is built for “double occupancy” and your coupled friends will throw parties that you will only find out about when the pictures appear on Facebook the following morning because the phrase “odd man out” exists for a reason.

This leads to your being a detriment to your friends, and it should be pointed out that this is actually very altruistic. Your friends want you to be happy and to join them in a world of “everyone plus significant others are invited.” I realized this one night when I was at a birthday party, when a friend's girlfriend pulled me aside to inquire why I was single. I looked around the party to realize that I was the only single person in a room of 20 people. I had become a social pariah. Being unattached and alone in a room full of people who are happy is a potential threat to social order – an unpleasant reminder.

“Why are you single? You're such a catch.” she said to me. Believe me, it wasn't a choice. But that line right at the end about being a “catch” is the exact problem. On paper, I appear very appealing: smart, educated, healthy, good family, employed, and funny. I am in some ways, better on paper than some of my friends. But people do not choose to date other people based on a character sheet. It doesn't matter how appealing I make my profile – there must obviously be something wrong with me that potential dates can see but that can't be named. Available partners are without fail uninterested in me; people either “like” you or they don't.

All the women I meet fall into one of three categories: already committed, homosexual, or uninterested in me. Without exception. One of my friends casually said at a party about me “Oh, he never dates anyone”, which believe me is not by choice. I have been turned down more times than I can count, and the number of empty chairs is rapidly fleeting.

I dated someone last year who, when I told her about my dating background, said that “she would like to send me out into the world to get some experience and then come back in a few years”. I have reached the ultimate catch-22: too inexperienced to date, no dates to get experience. This is frustrating, to say the least.

People's advice is generally bullshit: “love will find you when you're not looking for it” would essentially describe all of my college and grad school years almost exactly and “put yourself out there” would describe 2008-present. The problem is that there is literally no way to “make” dating happen. You can't actually purchase it, you can't build it from scratch, and you can't will it into existence. It either happens, or it doesn't. And the problem becomes additive: girls don't want to date boys who are essentially “new” to dating. The older I've gotten, the harder it's become to get into a relationship. When you're 20 being awkward on a date is expected, and when you're 30 it's downright creepy.

I am okay being alone. At this point, I've had a lot of practice. But being truly alone – that is when your friends ostracize you because you can't get a date – is hard. You probably even have that friend who's never really in a relationship, but always has a date. He has someone to go home to at night. But the real problem is that your interests start to diverge from your friend's. And there's no fixing that. You are living a life that you can't alter and that makes you an oddity.

(This essay written one night over a burrito in lieu of watching Hulu.)

The Beginning of the Beguine

First off: If you're reading this, thank you.  I always teach my students that communication is information traveling from one point to another.  If a train leaves a station and never arrives at the next one, then no transmission of information has occurred; that you're reading this allows those businessmen to go about their day.  For that I am eternally grateful.

Second: every blog post you have read up to this point was written during a period of particular industry for me in 2011-2012.  They were all loaded into the blog with release dates and times and then the blog left to its own devices.  So for the last 2 years or so, blogs were released like clockwork because they were supposed to.

There was something nice about this.  One, it meant I could be unbelievably lazy and basically quit writing.  (Nice and also bad.  It's a double edged sword.)  My writing continued to be "published" (as much as a free improv/movie/bullshit blog can be considered publishing) and I could focus on other projects.  Since the last time I sat down to write, San Diego has gotten a real, legitimate longform improv theater; sold out classes, standing room only shows, and now two nationally attended and exceedingly successful festivals.  2014 turned out to be a major growth year for San Diego improv, probably the first real "boom year" in over a decade.  Occasionally I would meet a student who mentioned that they read my blog, and I would have a twinge of panic.  This is mostly because I never expect anyone to read this (but low and behold we crossed the 10000 page view mark a while ago, apparently) and also because I don't really remember what's in this time capsule.  I shudder to even go back now and look at what I thought or -worse- how I wrote.

The other nice, and morbid, thing, is that I always thought that if I died suddenly there would still be a little way that I would continue to exist.  At least until the blogs ran out.  Then I would really not exist.

That brings me to this post.  I'm out of blogs.  Everything I wrote has already been published, and now I must start writing again.  Everything you read from this point on has been written recently (or, in very few cases, is a post I started on, never really got very far in, and have actually made a real post, not just a two sentence idea, out of it).

So thank you for reading.  If you've posted a post somewhere or recommended it to someone else, thank you.  If you've come to see a show or taken a class, thanks for that as well.  This is all for nought if it has not an audience.  And this is all for nought if I do not create new content.

Commitment Game

One of the great things about improv groups is their mutability; no where in any book or blog does it say that in order for improv to work, it must have “these” people. Improv groups change rosters every now and then, people come and go, and hey, that's just life. Work schedules, moving, just life – all of these things tend to interfere, and often the first thing to take the hit in order for your schedule to accommodate is that one thing you do a week for a couple of hours that you don't even get paid for. Even though these things do happen – there's no reason to say that they have to happen.

This is a tricky artform that we do, and its mutability, ease of doing, low cost, and even worse, it's capacity to be just picked up and dropped just as easily makes it very easy to treat it with a certain degree of carelessness, especially for the 90% or so of improvisers that do it as a hobby. Improv groups, like a lot of other things, go through various periods – there will be times when it feels like everything is clicking, things are going great, everyone is getting a long, and you drive home every time after practice with an electric feeling in your body. At the same time, there will be periods where you can't even remember why you do it, when nothing works right, and when you want to just walk away. Certainly there is nothing stopping you, and that's part of improv's mercurial nature – it's really easy to just drop it, forget about it, and quit, or start a new group all together. “This time, things will be different, because we get to start from scratch, etc.” Keeping improv groups going is hard work – any body who says different is lying. Those same life things that can eventually derail the group altogether are at work everyday; it's just that most of the time, they don't mount up to the point where they mess with your schedule. You have to work late, miss a week so you can go to a family reunion, meet a new boy/girl that you want to spend every moment with – all these things happen all the time.

But what makes the difference, is your commitment to your team mates. No one can decide for you how much you want to play with your team – only you can. Every time one of these life “things” happens, you decide how much you want to keep doing it. You're having a lousy day; do you go to practice anyway, or just stay home, watching T.V. Instead? I can tell you this: as hard as it is to keep a group going, it's much harder to start one from nothing. It's those moments, the ones where you've had enough, where your seconds from the door that make all the difference in a group. It's easy to walk out the door – it's much bolder move to stay. If you don't like a group the way it is, if it's not working for you, it's up to you to make the decision to change it. I guarantee you, if you don't like something about a group, chances are someone else probably echoes your opinion somewhere in the group, and you will get much more out of addressing it and doing something about it than you will out of just giving up. Most groups suffer from chronic internal commitment issues. Everyone expects someone else to do the hard work for them, and the last dying breaths you see out of that kind of group is every week a different person not showing up to practice – the long ride circling the drain. But what we do on stage isn't the only group work we do – it's in the very structure of the group itself. You can't just presuppose that you'll do group work from the time you get your suggestion until the lights get pulled and spend the rest of your time being an individual. You have to play for your team the whole time.

Life things will happen – they are unavoidable. The question is which way will you choose – individual or group?

“If you're not having fun, you're the asshole.” - Rachael Mason, iO Training Center Director