After an almost two-week respite, I got my ass out of bed before 6am and went for a run this morning. Did the hill at Taylor & Broadway, the Broadway side because it's got stairs. Think I did 4 or 5 repeats on the stairs, and one or two recovery loops up & down the Taylor side. Best time getting up those stairs: 43 seconds. Now this was admittedly not a huge distance, nor was it an extremely long workout, but considering that my recent caloric intake has greatly exceeded output, it still made me feel much healthier & less pudgy. Plus I'm on my way to the opera at the ballpark, where I'm bound to need an extra inch in the cumberbund, so I've alleviated some future guilt. Logical, right?
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Back in ACTION!
June 19, 2008 – Phylicia Rashad turns 60, looks 100
Y’know how every year, around their birthday, people always find one new person who also has that exact same birthday? And they always get excited… “Oh my gosh, what are the chances??? That’s awesome, we should share a cake! Let’s have a double-bday happy hour with our co-workers! Oh man, make sure you get me a card!”
I found out this morning that a co-worker has the same birthday as me, and I said “FUCK! That’s my day, asshole! Get your own damn birthday! I fuckin’ hate sharing my birthday with you! You’re gonna get all the presents & I’m gonna get screwed AGAIN!”
That’s just how I feel.
Oh, and today really is Claire Huxtable’s 60th. But check her out on IMDB. She looks like Leatherface, only more menacing.
Acknowledgment
My wife is awesome. Less than a week after she was running around like a nut, trying to get everything done during her Busy (with a capital B) time at her new job that she loves, she has totally come to my rescue.
As I twittered yesterday, my fingers are in lots of pies… Even though most of them are fun pies for me to have fingers in, they still require effort, attention, balance. If I go too deep into one pie, a finger pops out of another, and both the pie and my sense of fulfillment are deflated, pierced, wrecked. And they start to rot. My wife has graciously swooped in and offered her assistance. She's there to help me keep each finger in each pie at just the right depth. And I love that about her.
Tis true that, behind every man who aspires to be great, there is a woman who has already figured out how to be both great AND patient while that man figures the whole thing out.
Thank you, dear.
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Comedy!
Last night R and I and her brother Adam went to Cobb's for some $7 stand up comedy. Arj Barker and Doug Benson were there, and this teacher from Oakland named Chris Tinkle (not making that up) was the emcee. I definitely laughed my ass off for a straight 2 hours, so as far as getting our $'s worth, mission accomplished. But the bigger news is that I can finally confirm for myself that what I read in Franklin Ajaye's book is true: a) comedians have a near-impossible career if they tell themselves that every bit of material has to be 100% original, because almost every joke has already been told somewhere, and at least one member of your audience was there when it was; and b) your subject matter is only maybe 40% of your schtick – more important is the voice/character you use to talk about it. Put simply, in comedy, the message is less important than the delivery.
This isn't exactly a higher being standing on a stage somewhere with a mic plugged directly into my brain & sharing some huge secret… But it does mean that I can stop stressing about originality or about inadvertently bogarting someone else's material. I can focus on figuring out which inner demon can have complete control of my brain and my body for 10-15 minutes of harvesting laughter. That, dear reader, is a comfort.
Sent from the tippy tips of my thumb nails. 
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Pew-Pew
My friend Rommy is on today’s Pew-Pew tmblr. 4th picture down. While I acknowledge & respect the glam rock shot, this one made me spit out my Dal Makhani:
I think his Rock Band just won the Bay Area’s Battle of the Rock Bands, in which he & his band raised money for a charity & rocked out. One might assume that’s where his Pew-Pew picture came from, but it actually wouldn’t surprise me if that’s from a completely different event. He often dresses like a cerca-1979 rock star, except he’s Middle-Eastern.
Rommy’s exactly the type of dude that gets on sites like this. He’s rarely NOT the reason most people show up at parties where he’s at. And he’s always got some sort of bit that’s a total crowd-pleaser; in college, it was the Rommy Belly-Slap (I named it, not him; I don’t know what he calls it). He’d get all drunk & put on a fro-wig and then come out lifting his shirt up, slapping his belly all while doing some sort of Carlton-esque Egyptian carpet dance. We’d all applaud, encouraging his antics… and then we’d give him crap the next day for breaking sh!t or for getting the cops called on us. He couldn’t win.
Anyway, point of this post was to share the website & spread that Tom Cruise picture that caused a lentil shower in my cube-ikkle. I’ve tried to cook up a few other posts lately, but nothing seems to totally mushroom like it normally does, so I’ve decided not to try and force it. It’ll come. It always does.
BTW, Twitter is no longer my main obsession. My new main obsession is my Blackberry. My NEXT obsession will be the new podcast that Cermak & Dan & I will start recording in a few weeks. And my next obsession after that will be the Russian Hill version of Living Room Improv, directed & starring yours truly. 
What? You don’t plan your obsessions? You should. Makes them much easier to manage. Like a trip to the zoo. You wouldn’t NOT plan your trip to the zoo, right? You know what happens to people who don’t plan trips to the zoo, right? They miss stuff.
Shameless Friendly Plug!
Last night we had some party people over, drank lots of beer & ate a ton o' pizza. Finally got to meet R's work friend Nick and his wife Carrie (sp?). Awesome people. Nick listened to me spout off about improv & comedy stuff for like twenty minutes while our wives bonded. (Given the way they giggled, they either shared wedding stories or compared notes on sexual habits as married women. No sign as to whether or not those compared notes were rave reviews or "constructive feedback.")
And Carrie is the life of any party; girl sure knows how to have fun, esp. when fun includes making people do shots in my kitchen. So in order to balance out the favor they did us – preventing us from having a semi-boring Friday night, here's a shameless plug for Nick's website: http://www.cliquepick.com.
Its kinda like a Yelp but for all types of stuff. I wrote a review for a movie (The Hulk I think?) and then got waylayed into other projects, but there's value in collecting crowdsourced reviews and making them searchable. They've got a healthy amt. of content at this point, so check 'em out and make sure you sign up & write at least one review. Do it.
Why are you still reading me? Write a review, will ya?!?
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Test
Testing my ability to blog… FROM MY NEW BLACKBERRY!!!
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Venice Beach? Picture Me Rollin’
Best $10 Sunglasses Ever.
How Would Life Be Different as an IT Analyst?
1. I’d never get to have sex. In real life. With another human being. With another FEMALE human being. With another female human being that still has all her teeth. With another female human being that still has all her teeth and doesn’t have a menu of ‘services’ tattooed on the small of her back.
2. Instead of blogging, I’d play Second Life and World of Warcraft, and instead of referring to them by name, I refer to them as 2L and WOW in order to make myself feel like I’m part of an exclusive club.
3. Instead of improv, I’d make up words with non-sensical alphabets, like n00b, pwnd, w00t, and 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100100 01110101 01101101 01100010.
4. Instead of running, I’d… um… maybe think about trying to join the kickball league but get nervous about spending time around the girl from sales who’s also on the team and has nice knockers.
5. Instead of calling them breasts, I use all other words possible: boobs, tits, jugs, fun bags, chest udders, hooters, sweatermelons, chesticles, gazongas, stare bait, lung bongos, the aformentioned “knockers”, or chest hams. I’d also think these were hilarious. … Ahem.
6. Instead of occasionally wearing one of several humorous t-shirts for a day/night out in the city, I would stay at home and catalog all of the video-game t-shirts I collected (& still haven’t opened) from the free giveaways at the back of Nintendo Power magazines. My favorite would be the Contra t-shirt, but I wouldn’t have to explain why to my friends.
7. Instead of working in a cubicle in an office building at least 10 miles from where I live, I would live AND work in a cubicle I built myself in my cramped apartment building and know all of the free wi-fi spots within 10 miles.
8. Instead of talking thoughtfully about a movie with my friends after seeing it, I would text my fellow nerds during the movie. Each scene I particularly enjoyed would get the same rave: “Best. Plane fight. Ever.” or “Best. Nude male sex scene not starring Heath Ledger. Ever.”
9. Did I mention I’d never have sex?
10. Instead of writing Movie Quote of the Week emails that everyone enjoys reading & that have the potential to be sponsored (!), I would write very long letters to my favorite sci-fi androids (such as C3PO and Data and Vicki from Small Wonder), put them all together in an anthology, post it on Wikipedia as the entry for “robot love”, and then get pissed off at everyone else who tries to edit the facts that I know are accurate and this guy’s just being a d!ck.
Ahem.
