Posts Tagged ‘getting older’

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Surviving the Dumbass Decade

Saturday, December 19th, 2009

Today is the milestone day, turning the big three-oh. I am spending it in my housecoat at home, and then quite possibly later on going to someone else’s birthday party as well as a reunion party for the Cannibal cast.

I’m kind of caught between wanting to downplay the morbid significance of the occasion and embracing the landmark that it is. I don’t feel remarkably older, and most people are spinning the positive side of it… I think my favourite comment I’ve received over the Internet is from improv legend Joe Bill, who I’m not especially close to but I’ve taken several classes with and was kind enough to drop me a note saying “congrats on surviving the Dumbass Decade”.

The theme for this week was, coincidentally, “survival”… I had a stomach bug early on which took a lot out of me, and then got passed on to my girlfriend and took even more out of her, so much so that I had to take her to the E.R. on Wednesday, causing us to miss both the holiday party at Unexpected Productions (which I was totally psyched for) and a holiday show that our friends had set aside an extra Wednesday performance just so those of us with heavy schedules could make it. We are both much better now, but it took a pretty significant toll.

Not so fortunate, however, is my poor laptop, a MacBook Pro that I co-purchased with my then-employer back in 2007. It has been having trouble playing DVDs since, well, forever. I got the DVD drive replaced several months ago but surprisingly the troubles quickly came back. Still under AppleCare, I took it back a second time when I had a DVD that I could consistently reproduce the problem on within the first ten seconds of it playing. I left the DVD with them while they ordered and replaced the drive for a second time, and when I returned I thankfully had the foresight to try it out in the store, only to confirm that replacing the DVD drive hadn’t fixed the problem.

I then spent about an hour in the store with their technician, who suspected it was a problem with the memory and was trying out various configuration of memory in the device. At the end he concluded it wasn’t in fact the memory but the logic board, which meant ordering yet another part to be replaced. I left the DVD with them again, and when I got the call and returned for a third time I was incredibly frustrated to try the DVD only to find it still crashing within the first ten seconds.

I explained to them that my issue wasn’t that they were having difficulty fixing this problem so much as each time they called me and said it was fixed I returned only to try it out myself and find out that replacing the part hadn’t fixed anything, and if they had so much as tried the DVD themselves (which is why I had left it with them) then they could have saved me a trip to Bellevue Square which, at Christmas-time, isn’t exactly a holiday.

After admitting that they had dropped the ball and didn’t know exactly what was wrong with my computer they (finally) decided to replace it, so the good news is that I will be getting a brand new MacBook Pro with even slightly better specs than the one I have right now. The bad news is that I might not be receiving it in time for my next scheduled trip to San Jose. I received a call from the manager today and as penance for their errors and putting me in a bind he’s going to cover new AppleCare on my machine and throw in a backup drive as well, so at least that’s good.

The rest of the week has been ok, illness notwithstanding. My Theatresports team won last Friday by a single point against a very formidable team, although I think they did better narrative work than we did. Unfortunately we didn’t come back yesterday because the regular teams were usurped by special teams celebrating the departure of one of our ensemble members. We’re supposed to come back again, but with the Christmas holiday and then the new year frankly I don’t know how that’s going down.

On Thursday I was treated to a surprise birthday party that I knew about in advance, on account of the E.R. visit on Wednesday and scepticism as to whether or not it would still be happening. It was really nice to see people there from all walks of my life, and I am grateful to everyone who made it out to it.

It feels weird having left my twenties behind. They had their ups and their downs and in many ways were very successful and in other ways not so much… I am sad for the failures that were most profound, the wasted days and missed opportunities, and feel a strange sense of mourning for the closing of a chapter that I am no longer writing but instead has been written, and knowledge that the last chances to make any alterations to it have finally slipped away.

But then, there is every reason to believe that thirty will be the best year of them all so far, so I shall be happy. After all, having written the past is a small price to pay to get to write the future.

Dan.

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Knee-deep in nostalgia

Friday, December 11th, 2009

My pages of Night Zero are out! I am positively tickled by them, in particular how I am left begging my associates to kill me on the page immediately following their callous and lethal betrayal of me. (I was given a summary of each shot we were taking, but didn’t fully comprehend just how spectacularly undignified my character’s end would be.)

I went to San José for two days last week on business. It was a pretty productive trip, although we have an intense road map ahead of us. My return to Redmond was graced with my new work computer finally arriving: a beautiful 27″ quad-core iMac (with a secondary 24″ cinema display). The story behind these computers is that they were introduced a couple of months back as the latest-and-greatest iMac entries, but in doing so they killed the 24″ model line which I had been using at my previous job, leaving me the rather undesirable options of either going down to 21″ or up to 27″. If I wanted the quad-core, though, there was no choice but to get the 27″ model. Which means I now nearly have to strain my neck in order to read the time in the menu bar. Man, is it beautiful though, especially with Parallels technology that lets me run my Mac on one screen and Windows simultaneously on the other.

Turning thirty has been on my mind as of late. My birthday is barely a week away, and I can feel it creeping up alongside the various holiday business that otherwise occupies my free time. I wouldn’t exactly say it’s been bothering me a whole lot, but it’s hard for me to ignore the milestone, no matter how contrived it may be.

My parents sent me a very nice care package to celebrate which had me wading knee-deep in nostalgia. Among its contents were an outlandishly Canadian tuque and mittens, a block of 6-year-old Balderson cheddar, Mennonite salami from the St. Jacobs’ Farmers Market, President’s Choice white cheddar macaroni and cheese, and perhaps most interesting a wall calendar of various gorgeous shots of Ontario, including places like Webster Falls that I used to go to back in university.

Tonight I return to Theatresports with my team that won last week. It’s been terribly hard to get cast in the show with all of the new apprentices and my general dislike of manually setting up teams, so it was a relief to win last week and get a chance to play a second time. There is also talk of returning to the randomized teams one night a week, which would make me very happy. Next week regular Theatresports is being preempted by a special show, so it doesn’t really make a difference if my team wins or loses tonight.

The temperature has been below freezing all week. It mercifully hasn’t rained and as such the city remains functional, but there’s talk of it snowing tomorrow in which case I might as well batten down the hatches and hunker down until spring arrives, as there’ll be no hope of going anywhere or doing anything until it does.

Dan.

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A lifetime of memories

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

Rehearsal let out early tonight, so I have time to write an update as reruns of The Office keep me amused in the background. Hooray!

My team won a second time at Theatresports last Friday, which means we’re returning again this Friday. My teammates did well, but it was a close call and I didn’t feel like I deserved to win… I let myself get psyched out again, something which hasn’t happened to me in quite a while now, and basically failed to contribute anything significant on stage. I took a class at the Seattle Festival of Improv back in February and was a bit shocked by a revelation that occurred there: the teacher had all 30 or so of us line up in order of the number of years we’ve been doing improv, and I was third from the front of the line… notwithstanding some considerable dry spells I’ve had, I’ve been improvising for about 10 years now. We’re all permitted to regress and make mistakes, especially in improv, but I’ve been doing this for so long; I’m pretty humbled by my ability to lose it all in an instant and suddenly behave as if it were my first time on stage. Hopefully this Friday will be better.

Saturday marks the five year anniversary of my arrival in the United States. I’m having a barbecue in the afternoon to celebrate, but don’t know what attendance is going to be like. If you read this blog and can make it, I’d love to have you! I’m a little nonplussed about the whole situation… it certainly doesn’t feel like I’ve been living on my own in a foreign country and doing that whole adult thing for five years now.

I was supposed to clean my condo this past weekend in preparation for it, but only got so far as cleaning the bathroom (itself by no means a small task). Gonna have to find time this week to finish the job… don’t quite know what hat I’m going to pull that rabbit out of.

In a similar vein of milestones, time passing, sunrise-sunset and the like, my parents just sold their house in Toronto. For many families this would be nothing special, but it has some significance to me… my parents spent over thirty years there… it’s the house I grew up in with them and my brother, the only home I’ve ever known in Toronto, and the place I’ve always listed as my “permanent” address. With me flown from the nest and my brother starting in assisted living, my parents are eager to move to a smaller place that’s less of a burden for them (my dad in particular has had nothing but grief maintaining it over three decades). They are far more sentimentally attached to the cottage, and from their vantage point I can hardly blame them, but it’s weird for me… I’ve always taken for granted that I have a lifetime of memories built up there (right back to the earliest I’ve got – I’m talking stuff like being held by my dad in a rocking chair while he sings “rock a bye baby” to me) that I can revisit anytime by going there, and now, well, I have only the memories. It’s not a big deal to me – it’s the memories that are important, after all, and not the place itself – but it’s another little stinging reminder of how quickly life is passing by.

It’s somewhat ironic that in getting the place ready for sale, my parents have had to overhaul the entire house to the point where it seems practically new. All of the old knob and tube wiring has been replaced, new floors installed (ancient carpets were pulled up from the upstairs only to reveal beautiful hardwood flooring underneath… who knew?), old basement rooms thick with dust and disuse now revitalized. My mom has said she actually wouldn’t mind staying, but my dad is determined to get out while the getting’s good.

Fiddler quickly approaches; I look forward to getting my evenings back when it opens. Things remain busy at work, but I’m enjoying it and I feel appreciated by them.

Life, it seems, carries on…

Dan.

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Thundersnow

Friday, December 26th, 2008

Been a while since my last post. I’ve been busy, though… rather notably, my birthday was crashed by Joel McHale, the host of E!’s The Soup. More specifically, Joel is an alumnus of Unexpected and was in town briefly, so was invited to play on a Theatresports team. This just happened to be on the same night as my birthday Theatresports performance… so my team was suddenly up against a team of UP’s most experienced ringers.

At least I got a picture of him giving me noogies, the second in my series of celebrity noogies (the other entry being Screech from Saved by the Bell):

McHale Noogies

Joel is a nice guy and an excellent improviser (his ringer-team justifiably won by about ten points), but I got the impression he is jaded and annoyed by his own celebrity, and that he liked me less after I asked him to pose for that photo. It was interesting sharing a stage with him, although I had to roll my eyes a bit at my birthday being upstaged.

I have to admit, though, that it was useful having him there to get more people to come out to the show, which initially wouldn’t have been a problem except that we have been enduring a minor snowpocalypse these past couple of weeks. We had the rather unusual situation that there was not only a storm, but once the storm was over the snow kept on coming, and just when you thought that had petered out we had another storm, this time with the extremely rare and awesome-sounding thundersnow.

Having grown up in Toronto, it’s easy for me to dismiss the average Seattlite’s unpreparedness to deal with snow. But the truth of the matter is that both Toronto and New York are pretty flat whereas Seattle is practically carved into the side of a mountain, and for the week or so of snow that we normally get out here there isn’t the money budgeted for a proper snow-removal infrastructure (although I’ve heard the argument that the lost retail sales tax from this last week or so alone would have paid for the equipment and labour).

The upshot is that many people were effectively trapped at home (if not actually then psychologically), and so I had a lot of unfortunate cancellations. The discovery that Joel would be there may have persuaded a few of those who otherwise wouldn’t have braved the elements to do so, though, so I’m grateful for that.

Now I’m quite used to driving in snow back in Canada, but I’m also used to having snow tires on for five or six months out of the year, which is something that simply doesn’t make economic sense out here. So I experimented with buying chains for my tires… and I’m thrilled to report that they managed to break within the first day I owned them, catching on the metal in the interior rims of the wheel shaft of my car and damaging the rims rather badly (although it only appears to be cosmetic damage). So much for that experiment.

Between my birthday Theatresports and Christmas Carol I’ve been spending an awful lot of time at UP. We had a holiday party as well, which was plenty of fun, but I’ve determined that White Elephant is just about the most vicious and evil form of gift exchange there is. At least, this is the first that I’ve seen a gift exchange make a small child cry, which is what immediately happened at the first attempt to steal one of the gifts (a model car that the initial selector had already given to her son to play with).

I love being there, but last weekend was a little tetchy for me as I was doing a lot of dangerous driving to get to Christmas Carol in full knowledge that the house would be mostly empty on account of the snow. I feel badly for them, especially since last weekend was closing and we had six performances scheduled. We are having two make-up performances tomorrow and Sunday if anyone wanted to see it and couldn’t make it out.

Due to about equal parts the bad driving conditions and my own humbuggy nature I spent Christmas alone in my condo yesterday, but it was okay. I got to relax some and mentally steel myself for the new year… which I know will be interesting if nothing else.

Dan.

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Half-way through the woods

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

I had two extra “gigs” with Unexpected this past week. One I had fallen into pretty randomly a month or two ago: I was performing at one of our oft-underattended 7 PM shows, and it turned out there was a woman in the audience from ReMax who was scoping us out for their Christmas party. She loved the show and specifically requested the five of us who had been performing that evening. The party itself was interesting in a down kind of way… the real-estate company has obviously been struggling in the bad economy, and the owner determinedly made a speech about how when you’re half way through the woods, it’s just as far to press on as it is to turn back. (I’m sure he intended for it to be more optimistic than grim, but I don’t know that he succeeded.) The show itself was somewhat mediocre by our own standards but the small group of 25 or so people were eager for some levity and relief, and we made a lot of good use of getting them up and participating with us in our games and making it a very nice and personal experience for them, so I think it was a success overall. Plus in addition to gig pay I scored a $30-off coupon to Ray’s Boathouse, which I will have to try to use in January.

The other gig was a special breakfast performance of Improvised Christmas Carol in front of about 400 members of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce. We had to trim the show’s usual running time of 75 minutes or so  down to 30, which was difficult in spite of our cuts and preparations. I think it was a rather weak performance on my part but Fred kicked ass at Scrooge as usual and the show held, even though the audience wasn’t terribly responsive.

In spite of that gig, I think I’ve been doing much better at Crachit and the show in general. We had an excellent show on Thursday which I recorded and put on YouTube, split into ten segments:

Unfortunately the faces are all blurry because the camera doesn’t focus well at the distance I have to keep it. You can get to all ten segments here, or jump directly to the third segment if you want to skip the suggestion-gathering phase, which takes a good ten minutes for us to collect the many suggestions that are used as a kind of giant mad-lib with the Charles Dickens tale.

I have this weekend’s final performance of Christmas Carol in a couple of hours, and I’m still utterly exhausted from yesterday. I made the mistake of not taking an antihystamine before helping a friend move, and the exertion combined with the hair from her pets left me short of breath and drained. It got better, but triggered again when I tried to make up for a Theatresports that wasn’t going particularly well by going into physical overdrive. The audience was especially unruly and we were playing games I wasn’t very familiar with, which aren’t excuses for lousy scenework but didn’t help matters either. The second half was better… we did a particularly solid narrative collage that was almost great, except that I missed the perfect ending and started talking again just as the lights were going down, forcing us to find a second, less satisfying end to the scene. I never claimed to be perfect.

It began snowing yesterday as well, but fortunately not before we had finished the move. The snow isn’t sticking to anything but the grass yet… hopefully it won’t get any worse.

I would love to simply sleep through this week, but it’s already booked solid with various holiday and birthday parties, not the least of which is my own. If you’re reading this, then come on down to the theatre and celebrate it with me!

Dan.

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