Creation

This blog has been bubbling in my crock-pot brain now for some time. I feel guilty that I used it for the summer, took it out for some air once this year and have left it to atrophy from lack of views and posts. This blog does that, though. It may be an annual or some other species that comes to flower a few times a year and you always look at it and think, "Oh, wow. I should feed that thing more so that it blooms all the time" and then you walk away, letting it stay barren until some magical mixture of sunlight, rainstorms and random touch it in just the right way to make it open.

I guess that magical circumstance would be my new infatuation: The Nerdist podcast.

I have a 45 minute drive to work and back. Radio was sucking my soul out of my ears and I lacked the time to go "discover" new music. I also don't like new music. My soul was being sapped by "Moves Like Jagger" (or moves like a gay chicken as I like to think of it) and other such nonsense, so I switched to NPR. If you are a worrier like me and worry that you are not current on world events, listen to NPR. It'll make you worry that much more. Once you get the big picture that all throughout the world people are being hurt, oppressed and fucked your worry quotient for the day will be hit before you even step foot into your insane place of employment. This did not do great things for me emotionally and was probably not the kind of thing I should be listening to while I was hurling down a cement water slide in my two ton projectile among thousands of unpredictable people, some of who have a demonstrable sense of immortality.

So, I switched to Podcasts. I liked a few "This American Life" episodes and went a few steps further. I am a geek girl, so I liked the name Nerdist. Then, I pressed play and the main host, Chris Hardwick, uncovered himself from the dust-covered flannel of my middle school years. Oh My God. This guy is still alive and doing stuff? I secretly thought he was the best part of Singled Out. I mean, it was Singled Out and it depressed me that this is what I could expect from my twenties; man-boys and girl-women dripping in so much insecurity they needed to "win" a date on cable to justify their appeal. I watched with an open mouth as they objectified themselves and performed tasks that would never be great relationship indicators. This was reality television as it used to be called: "Game Shows". Only the prize was a date you won with some stranger who was great at nothing that actually mattered in love. It didn't matter. I was young and fascinated by the exploitive properties of all dating series. Plus, the host was hilarious, cute and paradoxically shy-seeming. This was the only reason I knew the name and the prime reason I tried to navigate my way through the Nerdist's John Hamm interview which literally sounds like the most fun, random and insane form of chaos you ever heard. After listening to about 25 Nerdist podcasts, it was clear that you shall never speak of this show to Chris Hardwick's face. I guess it's like calling Mark Wahlberg you know what. I guess the show did do some good things, like help me hang on through the John Hamm interview enough to realize that this podcast is something I would like to hear again. And again because the hosts genuinely and enthusiastically LOVE their craft.

This isn't a blog about The Nerdist (entirely), it's about creativity and the nature of doing what you love despite how terrifying that may be.

Yes, it's terrifying to do what you really, truly live for because if you are by chance bad at it or it goes down awfully, what bastion do you have left? On the podcast there are one to three hosts, one of them always being Chris Hardwick, and aside from having the nerdiest, most awesome guests ever on the podcast, the guys are just ad-libbing, living room style. The formality of a traditional "interview" is gone and that opens the guests up to riffing most of the time. There is a feeling of everyone's just "hanging out". At its most perfect, you'll have an episode like the Bryan Cranston episode where you are laughing your ass off and at its worst, you'll chuckle a few times and get some very deep insights into the darker sides of some of the guests. Either way, the inspiration is there to me. Here they are, just doing everything they love. I think the stand-up backgrounds of the hosts makes it possible to just bare soul to the world. There are constant themes that emerge throughout the podcasts like mechanisms for coping with the rejection of stand-up and how stand-up is not a choice, it's a calling. I'd say that about 70% of the episodes I have heard tackle this issue.

But, you are not a stand-up comic, blogger geek girl, you say.

No, but what I do (secret) is basically the same thing only it comes with certain topics I must cover and my audience changes out every few months. There are days/months/years where I bomb up in front of a very vocal audience and other moments where I kill. Whenever the hosts on the podcast switch to some comedy-related topic, I just think they are talking about my job and it's true what is usually said: Just get up there and keep being yourself. It's the only way it works.

Sometimes there are interviews with writers as well, my other half - the conjoined and half dead fetus type of a "half". I am a coward, writing in a dark box or in my head or only for speeches I have to give in front of authority figures. The compliments come and come and I think that I am OK, but not nurtured. Brad Meltzer spoke in a Nerdist podcast about just sitting down and writing and I felt shame. Shame because that is what I should be fighting myself to do. This blog WAS hilarious in my mind. I took every Saturday to turn out a post and then I let life wash over me and pull me down, away from creating. And truth be told, every time I "publish" a post, I look at it like a random visitor, all posted without the ability to edit and I find mistakes and changes that need to be made and obsess over it for a little. Then I fix it up and re-publish it and wait to see if anyone has seen it. That's when terror hits. I just put my heart in the street and walked away.

My friend Danny had this quote which I can't remember, but it sums up creation for most people. The effect of the quote was something like: the world demands talent and you have to reach belly-button deep, sometimes pinky-toe deep, to emote in a way that translates and if it does, the most that will happen is someone will "like" it and ask for more, expecting that you can just dig pinky-toe deep to entertain a stranger. It's exhausting.

There is something in that sentiment that kills me.

I once wrote with a bunch of other "writers" on a short story collective blog. I LOVED it. I wrote stories, good, bad, ugly, but I always completed them and posted them. Some of the other writers couldn't even do that and they were better than me. By a lot. One writer is a downright genius and in out collective Haiku blog, he slaughtered. Haiku blogs, by the way, just turn into one-liners by the time you do them for a year. Anyway, the short stories stayed on the Internet for months and months, maybe even years and then one night I woke up in a cold sweat thinking that some hack, jerk-face kid was going to lift the stories and pass them off as his own. I took them down immediately.

I had a great inner monologue debate about things like writing blogs after that. I want it to be public so people can see, read and love, but I do not want someone to exploit it or take it as their own. I guess that's the dichotomy of showing what you love to the world. I hid behind that shield for a long time and stopped all together. . . . .

. . . Until the frame of mind shift inspired by a bunch of nerds recording their adoration and goofiness for nobody and for everybody. It's really taken off for them. The site is huge with a million different dorky things to see, read and watch and they've graduated to recording their podcasts live. They prove that people like me can work doing what they love and be as dorky as they need to be. As long as it is genuine, it'll fly.

Jeff Buckley once said "If you do something long enough and often enough, sooner or later the weirdos will show up".

I need to get myself a pack of weirdos.