Only the good die young

I miss liking some shows. I remember when 30 Rock started, it...well, it 30 rocked. It was not long after the mourning began over Arrested Development's untimely demise, so it was the closest thing to fill that viewing gap. Every season it improved and got better and better. Last season it was perfect, and continued to be so until the last two episodes. It forgot to tell me that it was keeping its momentum and growing. It got, dare I say, too silly for me. It may be nostalgia, but I remember it taking the characters seriously and giving them room to grow. Now it feels too static, yet feeling the need to keep pushing those boundaries. I guess my lines are drawn in the sand, and it pushed right through them, leaving me here on the beach wondering how I got here. I'll keep watching it, but I know they'll keep pushing the world so far into the ridiculous that I'll lose all connection with it.

Same with The Guild. It wasn't that great to begin with, but I loved the idea of it so much that I supported it (bought season 1 and 2 on DVD out of solidarity). Then season 3 came and with it a rival guild with characters cut from...I dunno, some gothic cereal box, I'm sure. Characters who would never exist as real people, then it kept going and I stopped watching it. It outgrew me.

Maybe that's why I still love Arrested Development, it widowed me, and now all I have is the memory of the good times, and they were all good times. We never had the chance to grow apart. Same with Firefly and the tenth doctor. All my truest loves died young. What am I supposed to do?

I think that's me. I love the heart of things, where they come from. I find that the first albums by bands are my favorite (Cake's Motorcade of Generosity is by far my favorite of theirs, and Weezer Blue is one of my top albums of all time). I think it might be because those are the songs they spent years perfecting, that truly speak from where they come from, before record deals allowed them to create more in shorter periods of time and they attain the lifestyle they always dreamed of, which somehow stunts them in the way that they can live solely in their own worlds. Maybe that's just the story I made up to justify it.

I think my approach to all this is to create something myself and follow its growth and change. Thing about kids, you kind of know what they'll be like when they grow up, but you're never really the one who chooses it for them. Kids grow and change and become bigger versions of themselves until life events happen and they make choices and adjust accordingly. Where will this baby take me? Probably far from where I started, unless it dies young. That's the journey.

Apparently specific

Crap, I forgot I committed myself to doing this every day. I think that was only one or two blogs ago. Life happens. I just need to deal with that fact...no, I just need to accept that as fact. The two might look the same from the outside but make all the difference inside. The point is, I'm here saying things when I have nothing to say, but so much I want to say.

I want to talk about my first improv show at the Brody (level 3 class), and compare the art form to Hopi sand painting. Etherial, temporal. You have to be there to see them, because they are not built to last, they are built as a brief experience alone, like life itself. I want to talk about how I am happy to have gotten an email from the Brody people saying I am invited into level 4 performance lab, which means more chances to to this in front of people, but also means new people, which is what it is.

I want to talk about how I'll miss some of the people I've worked with, knowing that even if we all move on to 4, it will be about 16 people strong vs the 5 people intimacy of level 3. I want to talk about the past classes, how through all of them people have come and gone, with only, what, 3 or 4 of us that went through levels 1, 2a, 2b and 3 together? I want to talk about how my life has had wonderful moments with people flitting in and out of it, and that the moment is really all you have...or maybe that's just the song from the recent 30 Rock episode fumbling through my thoughts.

What I really want to talk about is life itself; the mystery. Though I guess I did, looking up at what I wrote. The more specific I am, the more people can relate to it. That's one of my favorite paradoxes in writing, or creating. The sheer volumetric power of specificity.