I’m home from Asheboro with enough time left over to snuggle kitties before I go to coach Kevlar. Excellent… because I love kitties and I love Kevlar!

Have I told you that I am having a cookout on Sunday? And have I told you that if you’re reading now, you’re probably invited. I didn’t get my shit together enough to mail to the listserv, since that’s been in transit, but it’s at our place, Sunday at 4. Bring your own meat; we’ll have beer and chips and lots of improvisers. If it rains, we’ll cook in the garage and have a fine time.

So, it’s no excuse that you did not get a hand-delivered invitation. Show up or be pummelled later.

Me and Corey are in a hotel room in Asheboro. It’s like having a roommate again, but we’re each on our individual beds, playing on our computers.

And, like many hotel trips, there’s a Hugh Grant or Jennifer Lopez movie being shown on a cable network, and I am watching it. (Notting Hill this time.)

The new episode of Kicked in the Junk is up!

A few random notes:

– You should not just commit to a scene, to a character, to an activity. You should commit to a process, a methodological and meticulous regimen through which theory can be put into practice. Commitment reaches beyond showing up and doing some scenes.

– Funny isn’t something you just created. Funny has been out there for centuries. Funny is a formula, can be anticipated, critiqued, and dissected to reveal its parts. Truth, however, is mutable, and every individual truth exists in its own space and in shared space all at once. Truth can be created, unravelled, discovered, and eventually dispersed, but honest truth is not formula and cannot be anticipated, critiqued, or dissected to reveal its parts. It is the distillation of one grain of the universe. However, you cannot create honest truth by yourself, you can tell the honest truth that you know, or you can participate in the creation of honest truth with others.

– I’ve had a long day at work. Every request that comes across my desk is from a different project. It would be so much easier for me to concentrate and do my job well if I could be working on one job uninterrupted. And when I finish that job, or at least one of its associated tasks, I could feel pretty good about it, and I could move on to another one. Why throw out information for fifty possible games when you could play the first one that comes across your desk?

– The only selfish play is “no.”

– Banned from first beats in my upcoming Level 4: robots, space, bears, children or children’s toys, time travel, and too many relationships where the people are so horrible to each other from the beginning that there’s no reason they’ve stayed together all this time. It’s great that you discovered all of that in your opening. So put it in your pocket and make some connections later. That’s what Harold is all about, smartypants. Let’s just see nice, patient, grounded scenework in the first beats and I won’t even complain when you jump on the train to Wackytown as early as the first group game. And, by the way, we’re going to take the training wheels off.

May Inside Improv schedule is up. Man, I feel awesome that we have so many great teams looking for stage time.

Hell yeah, Bill Cochran, you keep me giggling too!

Furthering my quest to become something of a Linux newbie, instead of a poseur Linux newbie, I was able to successfully install MT-Blacklist to a LEARN NC server today. That’ll keep the spammers away from Eric Drowatzky’s blog, the Blackboard K-12 Users Group, and some other stuff that’s up there. If you’re using Movable Type and you aren’t using Mt-blacklist, you are SOOOO missing out.

We went for drinks with Anthony and Kate. We found a bar that said it was “Georgetown’s Best Kept Secret.” It was packed to the gills. No secret, I thought, until Miellyn took us upstairs, where there were three people at the bar of a really nice, New Orleans-style room. We had a great time.

It was nice to get to see Miellyn two nights in a row. She used to date a boy named Sean that I really liked, and now she’s dating a new boy named Sean. Heidi said she dated a Sean in college. Go figure.

Yes, that’s Heidi with the Raging Grannies.

Having stayed in DC to hang out with Anthony and Kate, who are really pretty damn wonderful together, we decided that it would be a good thing to do if we went to the March for Womens’ Lives. The March website says that there were 1,150,000 people who marched on Washington for choice, abortion rights, and health care.

I don’t know that I can say a whole lot. It was sort of awe-inspiring to see so many people out there. The seven groups that coordinated the event had brought plenty of signs, stickers, and buttons, but I don’t even know that it was necessary– there were tons of homemade signs and buttons and shirts and flags.

I took pictures to try to capture the enormity of the event, and I think I pretty much failed. (I did manage to capture the enormity of the video screens, and while Senator Clinton was speaking. She was impassioned, impressive, and just generally wonderful.) Click the picture to see my snapshots.

Bah! There should be a law of nature that says that if you prepared for the storm and you had an umbrella, you won’t get completely soaked when it really starts coming down. At least my hair and glasses stayed dry, but that was it.

collaborative entry with Ladybug:

We left work at 1:00, and I picked up Dave. Tried to pick up my car from the body shop, but was stymied when the woman told me that they don’t take credit cards. A body shop what doesn’t take credit cards. Lame!

(Ladybug takes issue with me saying “A body shop what doesn’t take credit cards.” She says that it should be “A body shop that doesn’t take credit cards.” I say it’s a slang thing.)

Then we picked up Ladybug at work and drove to DC. Dave and I discussed his selection as the director of CHiPs, which took him somewhat by surprise but will end up being a great fit. He’s a good guy with a solid vision for CHiPs– I feel certain that he’ll be able to strengthen the group and further their status as one of the best college groups in the country. Ladybug tried sleeping but was kept awake by improv talk.

On the way up, Anthony called and said that he and Kate will be in DC this weekend as well, so we’re gonna stick around an extra night and see them.

We arrived at the Pearson home and found that my mom had cooked a huge dinner (claiming that we were just getting “a taste” but not a full meal). Then we bolted for the District, making a 40 minute trip out of a 20-minute trek to Georgetown.

Played the show– good stuff– and watch the other groups. Andrew Hutson did, in fact, roll in for the show after leaving a comment here yesterday. That was cool as hell to see a familiar DSI face in the crowd. Went with Ladybug’s friend Miellyn, Miellyn’s friend Courtney, and some guy Michael who thinks he knows everyone (and the Diplomats) to a bar where we saw some standup by some of the improvisers who’d been in the show.

Talk about the worst fucking way to see standup– I don’t think that anyone had ever done standup in the bar before, I don’t think it was advertised in any way, and I don’t think the staff even knew it was going to be happening. Performers got stuck on the ledge of the fireplace in the bar with some track lighting above them that almost managed to light them, with a mike that could not get loud enough to be heard over the chatter of the lameasses at the bar. It was enough that you genuinely felt bad for the comedians if you have ever performed in your life, and those who hadn’t clearly could not give a shit that there was a standup show happening in front of them.

Many pitchers later, we retired back to the Pearson home to find that when my Mom and John left for the beach, they took the cat with them! Travesty!

Ladybug took some pictures, which I would imagine I’ll rifle through and then fail to put up online.

People, if you have no wish to be completely grossed out, made to vomit, or reassured that the world is a disgusting place, do not click here.

Mister Diplomat leaves this afternoon to head up to Georgetown University, where we’ll be playing a show with their improv group and Littleman, an excellent group that’s now based in NYC and, the last time I checked, had a huge fan base of teenage girls. I’m super-excited about this show, for several reasons, including but not limited to the following:

• I get to knock off work early and spend five hours in the car this afternoon with Heidi, who I haven’t really seen enough of this week and who I really like to spend time with.
• I’ll get to spend some time talking shop with Dave Siegel, who was named director of CHiPs for the fall semester, I think to his surprise (but not to mine, he’s an excellent improviser).
• Mister Diplomat gets to go spread the love in other cities. The rest of the gang is headed to Greenville Saturday night to play at ECU with The Swash, a group Corey founded. (I’m gonna sit that show out. Let’s be real, two shows, two days, 13 hours in the car? My old bones would collapse.)
• Heidi will get to hang out Mielyn, who is really neat despite the fact that she broke up with the boyfriend I really liked to hang out with.
• I’m really looking forward to seeing Littleman again.

Improv road trip! Whooooo! (Also, I am going to go to CIF in June.)

I’m taking a moment for me. It’s been a busy couple of days. Jim and I will head to the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in a few minutes to talk about online registrations and the like. I’ve spent much of the morning doing things that I didn’t think I would be doing today, including tweaking a Virtual Host file on the Linux box after I discovered that I screwed it up, perhaps as early as yesterday. (And of course, I cannot mention that episode without mentioning how excellent the Doctor is when you have a Linux question.)

Some days, you wonder if it would be nice to be invisible. Then, others, you realize that what you do has meaning, even if you don’t really see it right at the moment.

There’s an improv lesson in that: everything we do is meaningful. Because we react as human beings. So, in the scene or off the stage, find the significance of your everyday actvities. The more meaning you find in the world, the more opportunity you have to share it with someone else, and have fun with it.

You don’t want to be the invisible man. You don’t want to enter the scene and realize that there’s no significant proof that you are there.

Fark’s new Photoshop contest

I’m on the Blogrunners Top 100 page. Well, by the time you read this, I probably won’t be, but I was #6 in the top posts of the last three days. For a post that’s much older than that. And it was the Carnival, which is pretty much a guaranteed read. Still, cool to see.

…and though the sweetness of being invited blew me away, the completely kickass design of the invitation was what really got me. Holy cow, dude, Chris and Nic have some freaking amazing looking wedding invitations. I’m going to take it home and show it to Heidi and say, “It’s obvious that someone with a design acumen thought these up. This is the kind of thing I want.” Maybe I’ll scan it. It’s freaking beautiful.

Friends who have known me for years may take it as a sign of the apocalypse that I am this excited about a wedding invitation.

Here’s an oddity from Die Puny Humans:

An Austrian man cut off his toes, fried them up and ate them between two slices of bread after getting high sniffing butane gas.

This is enough to make me glad that I don’t sniff butane gas. I was not previously glad. I’m glad now.

I just saw Hair in the Old Playmakers Theater. It’s a good production, one that I would highly endorse under normal circumstances. But Jesus God, that theater is one of the most uncomfortable places on Earth. No air conditioning, and clearly built for people under 5′8″. I was thanking any diety that came to mind that I wasn’t six inches taller, and I even had no one next to me, since I was in the second row (the stage stretched out past the third row… so I was right up on some action).

As it stands, the show itself gets a high endorsement, having to see the show where you see the show gets a vote of no confidence. If it’s under 90 degrees tomorrow, you may want to risk it. (I think they have one more show at 5 PM, only $5.)

LEARN NC moved offices today. I’m sharing a cubicle with Jon Karpinos, the nicest man alive and a super Blackboard registrar, out at the Center for School Leadership Development. We’re in here with NC TEACH, PEP, and some other programs. I suppose it’s all right… it’s a cube farm. I kinda hoped I’d never have to go to a cube farm. Oh, well.

Here’s my cube, a work in progress. If I can make it obnoxiously eccentric, I may do so.

See, completely generic.

(I’m also planning some creep, on the cube wall immediately facing the entrance where I sit, and on the walls above the cube.)