Cookin' Time!

We finished it. I directed this.

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Our first Funny or Die video. Only the audio from the second tape was completely useless. So we're either going to re-shoot the whole thing or just the second tape... not sure.

Requiem for the Cool

The following is going to be soulful and honest, but that means it might also be long and a little bit depressing... so if you aren't down for that, may I suggest this website instead.

It was altogether too short.

I spent my Saturday afternoon at Long Beach State where I had been commissioned to document the Greater Long Beach round of the Miss America competition. Other than hoping the footage would turn out viable and vague wonderings about the necessary inspiration for a girl to enter such a pageant (There is no qualifying round for Miss LB), my overwhelming thought about the goings on was a strange feeling of loss.

Miss Greater Long Beach 2008-2009 was a dear friend of mine named Cynthia. For as long as I have known her, Cynthia’s most outspoken interests have always been politics, social justice, and beauty pageants. The strange intersection of these three things was clear from the beginning of our friendship when I, as a sophomore, met Cynthia as a freshman who had just joined my service club Sursum Corda at LMU. She energetically shared her passion project with me: an organization designed to guide first generation college applicants through the labyrinth that is the college application process. Cynthia had designed the project as her philanthropic interest as a candidate for the crown that she would not win until three years later, and that I watched her give away Saturday afternoon.

It was a peculiar loneliness that came over me while watching this old and close, but certainly not oldest or closest, friend of mine passing on a defining dream she had realized, and talking about leaving for London after she graduates in May.

This is an example, but certainly not the only one, of the odd flood of emotion that the passing of the LMU Class of 2009 has beset upon me. I can’t shake the sense that things are truly not going to be same. The oddest part about this is that I myself graduated from LMU a year ago.

It has taken me a year to fully realize what it means to graduate from college. None of the ideas that have taken hold in that time are particularly surprising. I saw them coming and in the days leading up to graduation sturdily prepared myself psychologically for the sweeping change of a life sans school, taking special care to fully appreciate all that was unique and beautiful about my existence at that point.

But when the time came for everything to change, the strangest thing happened: it didn’t. Certainly, there were many important goodbyes to be said. But if you really look at my life before graduation and after, there was more that stayed the same than that changed.

I moved out of my house, but only a couple exits north on the 405. The people I hung out with stayed virtually the same, and the things we did and the places we went looked very similar as well. I continued supporting myself on the ample money I was making as a server at Islands restaurant as rather than seeking out a career, I had decided to direct that energy in other directions in my final semester of college.

It was at Islands that summer, in fact, that I had the first sucker punch of unprepared-for paradigmia. It had always been my practice from my bus boy days onwards to, if not hit on, to at least chat up anything with a ponytail that had the good fortune of finding her way into our standard issue black slip-resistant shoes and khaki shorts. So when a new batch of hostesses arrived for the summer, I sidled up to the host stand like usual.

It was a very odd feeling that followed when I found myself unable to offer any sort of credentials. If telling high school girls that you are a college guy does not give the teller coolness credibility, it at least offered me a little spring in my shin-splinted steps up the steep staircase of stories and jokes I had to climb to get there. But all of a sudden, I had no real basis for claiming I was any different from, or less a careerist than, the 40-year old UCLA grad who had been serving section three for the last 20 years, other than the dubious claims that I was writing a screenplay and was planning to find a Hollywood job in post-production. I was just some asshole who worked at a restaurant in L.A. Impressing those girls had certainly never been important to me (at least not in a way I would ever willingly admit to myself), but the sudden inability to do so was disturbing.

This was not, however, the deathblow for my false image of continuity. When school began again in the fall, I took a weekend off from Islands to spend on campus as a PeaceJam mentor. Back amongst the undergrad members of my service organization, many of whom I was closer to than those in my own class, it felt right. It felt, as my friend Alaina observed, like I had never graduated. The unreasonable idea that LMU was there as a fallback for me had been confirmed, despite my efforts to wean myself off that misconception.

The biggest change that had come to my life was the existence of Joshua, my highly improbable baby brother. Across the country, my late-40's parents had somehow given me another reason to seek self-actualization in the form of a little pink spud whom I desperately find myself hoping will be proud of his eldest brother come the day that he is old enough for that emotion. This consequently has spurred my creative efforts.

But the summer ended, and the economy took a nosedive and since the natural cycle of restaurants dictates that money dries up in the fall anyway, I decided I needed to get a real job.

That was when my uncle died. When my flight to Milwaukee for the funeral was delayed, I met Tony: a friendly Wisconsin-native in his mid-30’s who had come to L.A. working for Kevin Smith and chasing a very similar dream to my own. However, things had not worked out as expected for Tony. He told me of years in L.A. and how the time goes by extra quickly due to the lack of seasons to mark its passing. Despite picking up fairly regular producer work, he was at a crossroad: continue chasing said dream despite the obstacle that is the direct proportionality of aging to health care costs or go back to Wisconsin and seek a new, unknown but less radical horizon.

The last time Tony emailed me, he had a final callback auditioning for “Cats” of all things.

And then I moved away from the west side, though still close enough to be there more or less when I chose to be. And I finally found a real job. And I didn’t see people who were still at LMU for a long time. My roommate Bridge and I attempted to seek out new friends here in Echo Park with moderate success. And we have developed a collaborative writing partnership that I have high hopes for.

Through all of this, I have maintained a close friendship with Brennan, one of my best friends and a fellow alumnus of Sursum Corda Class of 2008. He recently convinced me to return to LMU and crash a service organization meeting. As I had expected, everyone was wonderfully welcoming to our surprise visit, but for the first time since graduation, I got the oddly normal sense that life had truly gone on without me, and that it was very good. The cosmetic makeup of the organization was very much the same, but the PeaceJam sense that I had not graduated was gone. Listening to my friends filling me in on the latest happenings, I felt like George Bailey, almost… suddenly non-existent in a pond in which at one point I had been a pretty well-respected fish.

The strange thing about the way I feel now is that even that life is coming to an end, and that is worse. The Class of 2009 with whom I shared so much are spreading their proverbial wings and going away. And this, finally, truly, feels like the end of a time and a place that I loved.

It’s probably because even if the campus was no longer home, as long as my very good friends were there, it still felt like my campus. It’s probably because watching the ‘09s going forth means new adventures for them while mine is just a year older with no seasons to show for it. It’s probably because She is graduating, and despite the fact that intellectually I question what the potential ever was for us, I have an inescapable fixation on the idea that it could have been different. She gives my emptiness a name, and her living happily ever after does not take that name with her, but completely the opposite. It’s probably because the people I typically spend my time with do not seem to feel any of these things in the slightest.

The redeeming quality in all of this is that it is in my nature to believe that it does not have to be this way. I have bet my future and all of my happiness in that place on my ability to succeed as a filmmaker, and I still (if not more so now than ever before) believe that this is a bet I can and will win and that when I do, it could be the best times yet.

The truth is that for all of my concentration on not doing so, I took the way things were for granted. I got every last drop of enjoyment from the house parties and being Sursum of the Year, and from the once in a lifetime pleasure of being on a sun-drenched campus, any given day of which would include 100+ encounters with a fascinating variety of people who loved and respected me for a variety of reasons. What I took for granted was the way that having a pre-planned path made it so much easier to enjoy the little things. Moving forward in life by going with the flow made it so much more fun to get there than having to be responsible for the flow.

The sense of my mortality, that I truly do not know how much time I have left, and that it’s a race against time because once I’m gone, every idea that I’ve ever had that I haven’t committed to paper goes with me, makes it much more difficult to enjoy a Saturday night, no matter how similar that Saturday night is to the ones I used to love. The sense that I have done enough to earn the right to relax with friends is much more difficult to come by than when all that was required was going to some classes.

So I will remain here in the City of Angels, and I will continue to fight for my dream while building a legacy, seeking love, exploring the wonders of the world big and small, and trying to reclaim the joy that those pursuits used to bring me. But in the mean time, here’s to the Class of 2009 and to college; to service organizations; to houses and apartments and friends; to impressing high school girls; to remembering that while growing up is difficult, growing old may be worse; to beauty pageants and the women who desire to win them; to the Cool; and to all of the things that live in the world that I finally feel like I’m living behind.

It was beautiful.

Standup comedy

I would love to do standup comedy at some point in my life. I actually wrote some over the summer, but I doubt I will ever actually perform this because I think ultimately, it reads better than it would perform. Curious what you think.

I was eating dinner with someone the other night, and I was telling her my jokes. And she tells me Mike, your sense of humor is an acquired taste. Now, the really shitty thing about that tonight in particular is that this is the first time I've ever performed. So I think it's safe to say that every one of you are going to think I suck. For those of you with the power to do so, now would be an excellent time to change your phone to vibrate and your state of mind to Taste Acquisition. For those of you who don't have much practice in acquiring tastes, let's talk a little bit about how it's done.

The best way to discuss such things is with examples, and fortunately for my chances of being funny here, the acquired taste that I am most familiar with is beer. I don't care what you say, or how much of it I drink: beer does not taste good. No normal person is going to taste beer for the first time and want beer-flavored bubble gum or a beer float with ice cream. When I drink it, I still sometimes tilt my head back and just pour it down my throat. I guess you could call that cheating actually. The fact that people drink non-alcoholic beer really boggles my mind. I understand it's for recovering alcoholics who like the taste, but to me that's like cruising the 405 during rush hour just cause you really love to drive. The taste is certainly not the end in and of itself. It's a necessary evil to get your buzz on. Anyways, my point being, the way you acquire the taste for beer, at least in my experience, is by putting yourself in a series of incredibly awkward social experiences with complete strangers. It's like teaching a girl to swim by throwing her in the water, or teaching a boy the joy of butt sex by putting him in prison. Beer is a taste you're forced to acquire as a male who wishes to have a social life in college. That's not to say that I don't know guys who had social lives despite being sober.

Wishes isn't really the right word as much as males hell bent on going out come the weekend. I'm talking about the kind of college guy, and I'm not going to name names, who, come Saturday night, will do whatever it takes to party. You gotta party. College isn't college otherwise. If people possessed the kind of determination that these guys do in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, his beard would be on eBay right now selling as the most controversially kitschy Halloween costume ever. You want to party so badly that you'll climb in the trunk of the SUV of some person you've just met, walk into a complete stranger's house, and spend the next couple hours either begging for booze or waiting in line for a nice cup of warm, disgusting foam from a rusty keg that you'll of course chug quickly then do it again. It's the awkward necessity of the former that forces you to develop a taste for the latter.

I think what it means is basically, by the time we hit college, most of us are already damaged goods. And the only way of escaping this is by not being in your dorm room on Saturday nights. Be anywhere--a house party, a bar, down the hall in someone else's room, anywhere--but in your room. There's this cultural idea, somehow, that college is the heaven we get to by spending time in the purgatory of high school. If you don't like high school, people tell you it doesn't really matter. High school doesn't matter in the grand scheme. No one is going to care when you're dead. Now, first of all, the idea of me being dead and no one caring was pretty much the sum of all my fears back in high school so that didn't help. I know what they meant was the way the majority of people are remembered is by their actions later in life, but tell me this: who the fuck are you to tell me what part of my life is more important than any other part? In the grand scheme of things, the four years you spend in high school are not as important as four other years. That doesn't even make any sense. If high school sucks, and to be honest it was a mixed bag for me, that is one eighteenth of your life that sucks. No publisher is going to tell a first time writer who thinks one eighteenth of his book sucks that it's not an important eighteenth. He wouldn't just be like oh well, it's early on and by the time you get to the end you won't remember it so fuck it. That's called coping, and God bless the people who have to do it, but don't tell people it's okay for life to suck now because you can retroactively cope with it forever afterwards. That's just not a healthy way of approaching life.

I don't know if it's a cultural thing or just human nature, but there's this tendency we have to assign these arbitrary values to things we want to believe have less value, because it's convenient to do so. It's probably cultural, cause of Native Americans. The Native Americans are always fucking up my universal truths. Whenever I think I've come up with some universal human limitation, like communism just doesn't work, somebody gives me a Native American counter example. I'm sure some Native American tribe practiced true objectivism. In some ways, and you might hate me for this, I feel like the Native Americans are the lucky ones. They're like the John Belushi of cultures, cut down and always remembered as the peak of talent and potential, while the rest of us are Dan Aykroyd coming to terms slowly and painfully with our limitations and dealing with our responsibility for what happened to Belushi.

But I have discovered the secret to finding peaceful objectivism, and I'm gonna let you folks in on it here tonight. It is the Infinite Universes Theory. I don't know if it's what you would call commonly accepted science, but the idea is that there are an infinite number of universes, all with minute differences so that every possibility for existence exists somewhere in this spectrum. Like in some alternate dimension right now, I'm wearing a blue shirt, or came on stage five minutes later. In another dimension, human beings have never heard of belly buttons. I think this is fucking fantastic. It's beautiful. In some universe, I am not just up here talking, but I am also getting a deep tissue massage while eating Swedish fish, and you guys think I am the funniest sex machine you've ever heard. So logically, in lots of other universes, things are a whole lot worse than they are in ours. It just has to be that way, objectively speaking. Naturally, you work to make our universe as good as possible, but if you can't, someone's gotta be the universe where six million people died in the Holocaust. So it's just us. You're not escaping from our reality, but taking solace in the existence of the other. Our universe is just "that guy" at the inter-universal party.

And speaking of fried chicken... I think it’s interesting how when you go into KFC, and you order your chicken, you can get the original recipe, or you can ask for "extra crispy." You can’t get it cooked well done or anything, but if you love your crisp, you are set. Let me tell you this: there are not many food items where you can request the texture. Particularly one so completely unrelated to, you know, presumably the food itself. You don’t look at a chicken and say, fuck, that is a crispy delicious-looking bird. Can I get some fluffy nachos? And can you make me a leathery milkshake while you’re at it?

I'd like to thank you all for sitting through my first ever performance. My name is Mike Litzenberg. Good night.