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Monday, May 29, 2017

Why We 'Prov

I know, I know.  It's been another very long gap since the last time my fingers graced the MacBook; this is less of an excuse or an explanation than it is now just pure fact.  Since the last time I posted, I have continued to work full time, commute for 2 hours a day, got an improv team, Boy Moms (nee Ketchup on Vegetables), and was cast in a production of Midsummer Night's Dream - if you find yourself in Chicago in June on a Sunday afternoon, I mostly will suggest this as a good time.

I find myself tired all the time; not so much from "doing" - when in San Diego I rarely had even a single free night, and I now find myself often with too much time.  I watch a lot of stuff now, but mostly find myself listless and stressed: conditions which are not exactly conducive to the mixed reward of sitting down to write.    I've been battling depression for a few months now - undiagnosed, and surely a mild depression, I would never presume to be struggling with mental health at the level of true depressives, but I'm cognizant enough to recognize the signs.  This isn't meant to try and elicit any help from anyone, when in fact a) most people don't know what help to offer and even then won't offer much beyond "grab a beer, sometime", b) usually are too busy to really help, and c) even when people offer an ear, they usually get bored with "helping" after an email or two.  (A side effect of our Twitter Culture - we assume everything can be resolved with a tweet or a post, but don't really have the wherewithal to follow through if something more is required.)

I talked last time about my considering quitting improv - it's still on the table, I suppose.  I think I keep looking for a sign or indication that one choice or the other is "right".  I still have trouble figuring out "why" I'm doing it.  It leads to an interesting analysis of why we engage in really anything.  When I posted last time (supportive) people offered:

1. "You inspired me." Deeply flattering and humbling, but I would ultimately be very skeptical and suspicious of someone who set out to do something with the express purpose of inspiring others.  At face value, it appears altruistic, but would you trust someone who said they only do things to make people fawn over them, idolize them, and/or get prophets?  Certainly inspiration is a thing, but I think this is in reality a byproduct of someone's work and can not, in good conscience, be the end goal.

2. "It's fun."  True, probably 65% of the time.  There are of course many things that people can do that are fun, and often single individuals will have multiple "fun" activities they engage in (video games, movies, banjo playing, stamp collecting, scrimshaw viewing) so to say one activity takes the cake and is the thing feels a little extreme.

3. "It's a passion."  True, for the small percentage of people who own theaters, teach classes, or have dreams of moving to Hollywood.  For these people, they cannot live without improvisation, both monetarily for creature comforts like food and rent, and for their own spiritual life.  I guess I can see myself doing other things, so I can't count this one."

4. "All your friends and social contacts are there."  If all your friends were heroin users would you also feel obligated to do heroin?  And what would happen if heroin magically ceased to exist?  If your only social structure exists in a weekly 2 hour practice and nowhere else, can you truly count those people as friends?

5. "You're good at at."  Again, humbling and flattering, but I objectively feel that I am only OK and have limited precision.  If I sucked at making chairs, would it be worth it to create a dinette set?  Or, if I were say, the best at making chairs, but everyone else was also really good at making chairs, would the chair community feel a loss if I quit making rockers?  Or would everyone else just keep on making chairs?

6.  "It makes you a better person."  Probably true, though I have also known some pretty garbage people who are also improvisers, so doing the craft is not a guarantee that you won't be petty, short-sighted, jealous, derivative, non-collaborative, disloyal, unoriginal, or marginalizing.  And while I do agree that if more people did improv the world would likely be improved in some capacity, I can't shake the feeling that this reason is the kind of quote that theater owners put on websites to sell classes.  While it is likely accurate (but by no means definite) it's regular co-opting for capitalist gain sticks in my craw.

Probably more than anything, I do improv because it's what I've been doing.  Patterns of behavior tend to continue once established.  I improv, therefore I am.  Improvisatio ergo sum.

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