Deer Dairy

Lost Boy

Some people say “everyone gets lonely”. There are always times when we feel stranded, completely isolated from those surrounding us: abandoned in a crowded room. But then there are times when we are actually alone. When nobody is watching or listening to us. It’s times like these that we reveal our true nature. While I value my solitude and occasionally seek retreats from the world, I prefer an hour with friends to a day by myself.

When I was littler, perhaps seven or eight years old, I followed my friend Chris Frank to the crick behind his house. We were going to a swimming hole with his older sister, Erin (one of my first major crushes, one in a long line -a subject for many other posts). She was a grown up woman, probably fourteen or fifteen, and she traversed the little stream on elegant stilts like a crane, ethereal. In my efforts to keep up with her on my own stunted pegs I paddled through the deep water and scrambled over boulders that, should I return to the spot today, would likely be embarrassingly dwarfed by my puberty.

It wasn’t long before Erin rounded a bend and vanished. I looked behind me and saw that I’d obscured my line of sight of Chris and now I was alone. I slowed to a trudge and carefully waded through the gloomy hallows of the brook. I was up to my neck, surrounded by water skitters and other unspeakable horrors of rural streams. It wasn’t long before I forfeited hope and began to cry, completely, deeply, emitting the kind of unabashed sobs only children are capable of. I felt abandoned. Looking back now I could easily have left the stream and navigated my way home by land, but at the time the banks of the crick composed my world and there was no leaving the only landscape I knew.

That was when I began to chant, pleading with imaginary gods in a creaky voice over and over, “I don’t want to be a lost boy.” This mantra accompanied me step by step as I made my way upstream, following the logic that I had no where to go but forward. After a childhood eternity I heard the rushing sound of cascading water. Almost as soon as I did the sun broke through the gloom and gilded the Frank siblings frolicking in the promised swimming hole. All at once my total loneliness was forgotten and I joined them, splashing with giddy delight bordering on insanity.

Romeo & Juliet in Ten Minutes

This is a condensed version of William Shakespeare’s play Romeo & Juliet, or to some Romeo+Juliet. Hope you enjoyed Gatsby you ADHD-tornadoes. 
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhQYbpYYKLo
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Tumblr thinks I can only give you 5 minutes of video in one session, so here’s a link to TWICE THAT. HOW LUCKY CAN YOU BE?!

The Suicide Blonde

My pet name for my ex-girlfriend was Juliet, because after spending two hours with her I wanted to kill myself. She was incredibly frustrating sometimes. Because things would be totally fine and then I’d say something innocuous like “Are you okay? You look kind of tired.” And she’d turn into this gremlin of insecurity that tears open my belly button and rips off my head and cracks my skull in two like Rafiki in The Lion King and uses my brain to sponge down a counter so Satan himself can rise from a pool of santorum to do body shots of a succubus with tequila abs as she he telepathically whisper-screams into my brain, “YOU DONE FUCKED UP NOW, BOY!”…Which could be pretty frustrating.

When Jules and I first started dating I was seeing a few other people because I’d learned early on not to put all my eggs in one basket-case. And we weren’t at the sex stage of dating, we were at the drink 40s and make out on my couch stage. I went on a date with this other girl, but the date was February 12^th, which apparently was a little to close to Valentine’s day for Betty Bi-Polar over here. After I get a goodnight kiss I check my phone and I see Juliet texted me asking where I was. So I tell her, “I went to dinner” which isn’t a lie it’s just…the prime cut of the truth. But she wants specifics, she asks me “with who?”, which is bad grammar but it’s an understandable question so I tell her, [Yeah, well where were you February 12^th?] I tell her, you know, this girl, and she doesn’t text me anything back so I assume we’re cool and I go to bed.

But, as is usually the case when we assume, I made an ass out of me and…also just me. I wake up and see that while I was sleeping the text message fairy visited me: 23 times. Who could these be from? It seems while I was asleep she dissected our entire relationship and went on this rant about how I’m the only thing making her life worth living foreshadowing so I text her back to see if I can’t talk her down. She agrees to come over, but when I try and have a conversation with her all of a sudden she’s at a loss for words! Talk about frustrating: she had just sent me this diatribe outlining my major character flaws and now she’s gone all mum’s the word on me. So, in a moment of genius, I say to her, “Look, let me be Claritan clear about this: we are not dating, we’ve never had sex,” which was true, “and I’m allowed to see whomever I want” She lashes back with a tirade of silence. And I don’t know what else to do so I go, “is that it?” And she stands up, walks over to me with her head bowed down and blonde hair cascading toward the floor, making her look like an Aryan version of that girl from The Ring. She reaches out her arm and gives me a Spongebob Squarepants valentine —like the kind you’d get in third grade. Then she turns around, and walks out of the room.

So I go pack a bowl, see if I can’t smoke the nonsense off me. Brrbt Well, it seems someone’s found her voice.
“I’m afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Me.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“The bottle in my hand.”
“You’re not an alcoholic [yes, she is] that’s just something we joke about. [No, it’s not].”
“Not alcohol, pills.”

BEAT

“What are you doing?”
“Not sure”
“You sound pretty sure.”
“Well, if you don’t care I’ll just take them”
“Don’t”
“Too late.”
…So she tried to kill herself. Relax, it’s not like she tried to Jackson Pollack the walls or anything. She took a bunch of Children’s Tylenol. Which is appropriate, fucking child. But I didn’t find that out til later. All I know at the time is “pills”. So, meanwhile in the past, I’m starting to panic, thinking I’ve killed this girl, which would admittedly solve my problem, but morals or whatever. So I call my friend Megan, thinking: she’s had a pregnancy scare, her mom’s dead, she’s the closest thing to an adult I have right now. Plus, she owns a car.

She comes over and she tells me she’s a little confused because, turns out, over the past month or so the two of them had been fooling around with one another. So it looks like the pot’s been calling the kettle bi-curious on the whole monogamy issue! Megan goes over to her house, there’s no answer. We try calling her, there’s no answer. We text her….Brrbt.

She called an ambulance for herself, so we drive to meet her, stopping on the way to get some food because we’re both stress-eaters and, honestly, she can stand to wait a little bit. When we get back in the car and head down the road toward the hospital we see a perfect rainbow. We can see its origin and its touchdown. And Megan turns to me and says, “This is why I make art. Because fucked up shit like this [attempted suicide] happens, but then there’s all this beauty.” We drove to the emergency room, where the nurse wouldn’t let me inside, pegging me as “the boy” as in, “Are you the boy?”. A few days later she was let out of the hospital and a week after that we started dating exclusively. Because Juliet might be frustrating, but I am an idiot.

How to Win at School

*Please note, to win at school your integrity may be compromised (Unless of course, you don’t consider lying detrimental to your integrity)*

Introduction: Being Okay with a “B”
I had straight As until sophomore year of high school, at which point I decided I wanted to be an actor and determined actors don’t need to have good grades to be good actors: case in point, my friend and former scene partner Eddy now attends Harvard after finishing undergrad with a 2.7 GPA.

Some people pride themselves on achieving an As. Some people get money from their grandparents per A they receive. But if you’re reading this then, like me, you’ve probably figured out the grading system in America is at best flawed and worst [expletive deleted], and your grandparents are either dead or broke, as were mine. Count this as a blessing: it means you don’t need to get nearly so worked up about being “excellent”. You can just be “very good”.

So, without further ado, I now present:
Professor T.D. Wade’s Public Guide to Beating Public Education

Chapter 1: Attendance
Part of succeeding in school is nothing more than showing up on time. Throughout middle school I was too short to drive so I relied on my mother to fulfill the role of chauffer. This led to me being almost-late to school nearly every day and actually-late to school at least five times a quarter. 

While I pride myself on my health and strong immune system, I would occasionally take sick and be excused from school for the day to recover. However, this was not the case nearly so often as I wanted to stay in and play a video game or pull a Bueller and enjoy the sunshine/sing in a parade.

Learn how much you can miss. Whether your school operates on a quarter system or you fall victim to the unfortunate endlessness of the semester, your school allots each student a maximum number of absences. Take an extra vacation or sprinkle them throughout the year and it will make for a nice break from the monotony of constant confinement to campus.

In the same vein, take a class you can’t afford to miss. To keep your truancy in check and make the trek/trudge to your learning institution all the more worthwhile I insist you figure out either what you’re good at or what you enjoy doing (in most cases the two will be one in the same) and devote your energy to it. It might very well be academics: there’s nothing wrong with enjoying school but in my case I wasn’t so good at geometry as I knew it needed to be endured so I could study acting.

Chapter 2: Participation
You’re not just expected to show up, you actually have to contribute to the class if you want to make it through. If you remain silent the whole time the teacher will prey on you in an effort to “inspire” or “encourage you to come out of your shell”. It means that when the teacher is trying hard as he might to illicit a response from the class he will pick on a student AT RANDOM. This is not what you want. You want to be the Hermione.

You’ve probably seen this student: The Hermione is the one whose hand shoots up the moment a question leaves the teacher’s mouth (often before) and always has the answer. The teacher loves the Hermione, but also has to include the other 20-40 students packed into the room with you. So here’s the tip: answer as many questions as you can at the beginning of class until the teacher utters those fantastic key words, “Someone other than Hermione”. This is your cue to sit back and doodle or read or daydream, in other words, to devote time to your passion instead of memorizing who invented the cotton gin. (Eli Whitney)

Chapter 3: Paying Attention and Doing the Reading
This is a skill I didn’t develop until college because it became much more obvious to me that some teachers’ teach the reading. I would dedicate a night to ingesting a chapter on the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, attend lecture the next day, and listen for an hour as my professor summarized what I’d just read. What a waste of time. 

I’d already determined attendance was crucial to success, so I paid attention for an hour in class and forsook the three hours of reading I would be assigned. I applied it to the rest of my classes, too: I either listened in class OR did the reading, but never both. I recommend paying attention because you form a relationship with the teacher, the actual person who will be grading you, and fostering your relationship with them is the difference between a B- and a C.

Now, you may be wondering how you’re supposed to participate in regurgitating lessons from reading, as in Chapter 2, if you didn’t do the reading. Here’s where you have to play a game I call “Talking Around the Plot”. Let a few of the legitimate Hermiones answer the first few questions, which almost always are about plot. Once you’ve gleaned what went on and who the principle characters are you can raise your hand to talk about how that relates to the THEMES of the book, of which there are really only four (Man vs. Nature, Nature vs. Technology, Man vs. Man, Man vs. Self). Then let another Hermione talk about plot and you can expand on your new knowledge of A happened than B happened with “This means X”. And everyone knows X is greater than A and B put together.

Now, this is not to say that reading is bad. Quite the opposite. But some published authors are just plain bad writers. They’re boring. I spent my time reading a book I enjoyed, rather than phasing in and out of a text that didn’t suit my taste. I don’t care how long its been applauded, The Scarlet Letter is trash to a fourteen year-old me.

Chapter 4: Taking the Test
This may actually just be more of a talent than it is a learnable skill, but I am blessed with a wonderful memory. I was raised on Jeopardy! and Trivial Pursuit and I can recite dates and other trivia rather easily. I need only listen in class to be able to correctly fill out my multiple choice bubbles and I’ve studied for a test twice in my life: The Constitution test in 8th grade and the etymology test in Biology my freshman year of high school.

If you don’t have a natural knack for recalling facts, don’t fret: while I don’t recommend studying (that’s just extra school), you can approach a multiple-choice test with a degree of preparedness. There will always be a bunk answer, one the teacher threw in as a joke, and while the answer isn’t actually “C” for most questions, you can always just guess if you really don’t know. Most of the questions will have been drilled into you by your teacher, who more and more often these days have to sacrifice a lesson to prepare you for an exam.

And if you do share my penchant for retaining knowledge, try not to rub it in your classmate’s face too much.

Chapter 5: Writing the Essay
This is where I got to really shine. I am an excellent bullshitter and I know how to stretch a four word point into an entire paragraph (take, for example, the blog you are currently reading). I have a vocabulary I’m rather proud of and I can pepper ten-dollar words throughout an essay to really catch the teacher’s eye, or to put in another way, “my lexicon is rather astonishing, allowing me to embellish my essay with arcane terms which impresses my instructor” 

It isn’t enough for most instructors to take your points on ethos alone, so they ask for you to cite specific examples from the reading, and more often than not the assigned reading. If you haven’t done the assigned reading, as I’ve recommended (again, case by case. There are actually some great books in the high school curriculum), then you can use examples from books you have digested in their stead. This is called “tangential knowledge”. As I mentioned, I didn’t make it through Hawthorne’s opus. I had to read it junior year. I had English right after lunch and in the spring every time I cracked open …whatever it was, it put me right to sleep. However, I was a drama nerd and I’d readArthur Miller’s The Crucible. That was all I needed to write this essay:
1. Make my point
Puritans were repressive of adultery, which wasn’t actually all that bad.
2. Relate it to the assigned reading
In ‘The Scarlet Letter’ someone has sex and people get pissed but they’re really the ones in the wrong.
3. Relate that to the reading I actually did.
This is just like in ‘The Crucible’ where John Proctor has sex but the people of Salem are in the wrong. Also…McCarthyism.

It’s as simple as talking fancy about what you do know to hide what you don’t.Oh, and hit the word count.

Chapter 5b: Or Maybe You Don’t Write the Essay
This chapter tows the line between a lesson and me bragging, but perhaps you’ll be able to pull a morsel of moral from it.

I took a course in college called “The Life of the Theater”. I was a theater-major, having elected to focus on my passion since I was going to be spending four years here anyway. The class was a basic lecture: twice a week we would meet in a hall and listen to the professor to talk to/at us and once a week we had a section with a TA where we would discuss the reading. Of course, I never did the reading, but I Hermioned my way through section week after week with the knowledge I gleaned from lecture and sorted it all out with wisdom I’d soaked in from my leisure reading, which happily enough often applied. 

When it came time to take the final for the course I was in the middle of rehearsals for a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. We were given a take-home final, the Christmas Special of academic assignments, to be turned in no later than four o’clock on the last day of term. I propped myself up on my bed with my laptop and looked at the prompt. There were five essay questions. FIVE. This would not do.

I answered one of the questions as best as I was willing to be and dropped the paper off at my TA’s office at about two. During rehearsal I was interrupted when my TA (who we call Gary) ran in to retrieve me. It seems I had not completed the assignment. Oh, dear. I put on my best “terrible realization” face (remember: acting major) and asked Gary, “You mean we were supposed to do all five?” Now Gary thinks I misunderstood the instructions, so I am not at fault. I’m given until four the following day to finish the others. A twenty-four hour extension. Now, it should be noted that it is only because I’d nurtured my relationship with Gary in class I was having this conversation at all, I very well may have been failed for my laziness but luckily, I’d been playing the game long enough to get a second chance.

Of course…I still don’t want to do the work. So I took a fantastic leap. It’s called the “Nobility Gambit” and it had worked for me before in lower stakes situations, so I employed it now. Instead of writing the essays I was supposed to I wrote an e-mail to Gary saying, “Thank you so much for the extension, however; (the use of the semi-colon gives me a little boost) it would be unfair to my fellow students, who had the same stresses I did but still completed the assignment on time, for me to use this extra day. I have to accept the consequences of my mistake.” An enormous gamble. Gary has every right to fail me for the sheer cheek of the move, let alone the disrespect. I should not get away with this, I should have to repeat the course and learn from the error of my ways.

I got a “B”. And I’m perfectly alright with that.

Conclusion: 
It’s a little ironic that I wrote such a long post about this as I’m lecturing to folks who are least likely to read a headline, but maybe with some stake in what they’re learning they’ll have made it to this sentence. If you are they, and you have, that is my key lesson. I played school as a game because it made it more interesting to me. But I didn’t forsake it entirely, I just applied myself in an unexpected way. I made it fun for myself. That’s the key to it all, find a way to have fun. Learn what you’re good at and what you enjoy and it will make the things you don’t enjoy all the more enjoyable.

I Wanted to Feel Like a Main Character

My freshman year of college I spent most weeknights in the formal lounge of my dorm multi-tasking: on one half of my computer screen was an episode of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and on the other half I was running a game of World of Warcraft.

I’ve just always been that cool.

College was my first time away from home and great things were happening: I’d just been exposed to Joss Whedon, I was smoking pot, I made new friends, but I was also going through a lot; I missed the friends I’d left behind, I had a wealth of new responsibilities that were (at times) overwhelming, and I’d just been rejected by the girl I’d convinced myself I was in love with while simultaneously brushing off a legitimately cool girl I was too afraid to start something with.

A lot was happening in my world, in my head, and something in the water catalyzed me to feeling overwhelmed. Couple that with long hours watching Buffy and a misplaced sense of fiscal responsibility and it’s no wonder I wound up ordering a leather trench coat on eBay.

Sorry, not leather—pleather. A faux-cow alternative product that has none of the appeal of leather at a fraction of the price. Also, because Spike wore a woman’s coat, it was a woman’s coat. (Please don’t freak out about gender roles in fashion on me: it’s how the garment was billed) Oh! And it was patched. It was stitched together from multiple scraps to have a more punk-rock/Frankenstein aesthetic  (or so I thought).

The thing was hideous. And it was bulky. And I wore it for a solid month. Trench coats had always been cool: I was a white nerd who grew up in the 90s and 00s: I’d seen The Matrix trilogy and The Animatrix, I watched anime, trenchcoats had top billing for “cool guy uniform”.

What I didn’t realize is that the cool guys wear the uniform, the uniform doesn’t make you a cool guy. I am sorry (glad) to say I don’t have any pictures of this unfortunate phase, but I was far from cool. I didn’t have a katana or an uzi, I wasn’t magic or supernatural, I was just a gangly goof in a terrible coat. It was an ill-advised decision.

Eventually my friends ridiculed the jacket back into my closet and even more eventually I became comfortable in my own skin and forsook fashion. As for the coat? It hung in my closet for a while, my black pleather skeleton until I gave it away the next year when I watched Firefly and started wearing a brown coat…

My Worst Performance Ever

I’ve bombed a couple times on stage, spoke for a whole five minutes without earning a single chuckle, but that is nothing compared to the complete lack of response I received at the very worst show I ever had. It was at the Nevada County State Fair and it happened when I was thirteen years old.

There is a phase that most middle school boys go through that I will call “Good Times Bad Times”. You see, when a boy (or girl) first discovers Led Zeppelin it is an occasion to be celebrated. You should encourage their decision to wear the Icarus emblem on a tee-shirt and hang the Father TIme poster on their wall. Sure they might lecture you on how Zeppelin is the greatest band ever, an epiphany you yourself had and perhaps have since forsaken, but they’ve stumbled onto a truly powerful rock’n’roll band and the enthusiasm is to be endured as the overall experience will improve their musical taste. 

There are, however, limitations.

Every summer, on the Wednesday of the County Fair, there is karaoke in the Zone One Activities Tent. Anybody and everybody is welcome to flip through the binder, fill out a slip, and belt out a tune for the folks sitting on hay bales. This is where I first heard a man serenade his date with “The Lady in Red”, and its where (a few years later) my friends Tim, Danny, and Justin would expose me to The Beastie Boys. It’s also, where I sang what might quite possibly be the single worst rendition of “Stairway to Heaven” in the last thirty years.

The thing about GTBT is it is meant to be a private, personal experience. The only humans a child learning the words to “Immigrant Song” should subject their passion to are their friends, family, and possibly a few school mates. The Nevada County Fair is the largest event of its kind in California. People flock to the week long festival of carnival rides, midway games, and animal husbandry from all over the country. I was in eight grade and deep in the throws of GTBT when I was seized a foolhardy performance instinct and elected to educate the good people of Nevada County about the band Led Zeppelin with their famous ballad.

At no point did it ever occur to me that if one is to sing a Robert Plant song one should be able to sing better than a common house plant. But at least I’m an experienced performer, right? And I was able to sell the song even though my vocal range couldn’t quite cover my cover?

Nope. Not even a little bit in the instrumental breaks. I am a (somewhat) experienced stage presence now, but when I was going through this climactic event of my GTBT I had been on stage twice in my life. I stood there, stared at the monitor, sang the words mostly to the tune and somewhat-kindof on key, then when the melody played I STOOD THERE AND SWAYED.

If you never went through GTBT and don’t know the song in question, “Stairway to Heaven” is an eight minute song. So not only was I subjecting the horrified, corndog-eating masses to an awful pre-pubescent rendition of a lovely song, I picked one of the longest, slowest songs in the classic rock canon. It’s nearly double the length of your average stand-up set. And “Stairway” isn’t exactly “Come Sail Away”, it doesn’t really pick up until the last verse and if you don’t have the crowd with you by then you’re not suddenly gonna pick them up with an uninspired falsetto.

When the last notes finally echoed from the amplifier and I handed the mic back to the host, that Adult man brought it to his mouth and gave me my first review, “Well, that’s finally over.” I hurried offstage and didn’t speak the entire car ride home. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the worst performance I ever gave.