This is Shaun.
Back when I was in Comedy Corner he was in a different group on campus, The Charles Darwin Experience. We were sort of distant acquaintances then. I moved to Chicago for several years and started doing improv. Then I followed a girl back to Arizona for a year and a half. During that time I got to know Shaun a little better. I briefly coached a team he put together. Then my relationship fell apart and I moved back to Chicago and that pretty much brings us up to date... for me anyway.
Shaun and I aren't particularly close but I follow what he's up to via his blog, and, I think, vice versa. I do yearly blog projects, he does yearly blog projects. My current one is "A Year of Comedy," his current one is "A Year in My Non-Existent Comedy Career." An old friend wrote to me recently to say, "I keep up with your blog still, and it sounds like you're doing good. Your blog is kind of the complete opposite of Shaun's, which makes his fun to read as well."
Back in October Shaun wrote on his blog, "Today marks the tenth anniversary of my first show with the Charles Darwin Experience. I joined the group in 1998, and stayed until 2002, and it was a very fun part of my life. Things since that time have been very unhappy, certainly. Most saddening to me is that I feel like I have gone nowhere, that after five years out of college I haven't even achieved the smallest of what I've hoped to achieve." Many of his blog entries since then give the impression that he is both very driven, and more than a little depressed. "I will redeem myself. I will write an act that I find to be very funny and practice it until I find it satisfactory. Then I will go out on stage and kick ass. Then I will take less pictures of myself with a gun to my head."
The last ten years for me have been... different. I've had some luckier breaks, maybe, and I would say that on the whole I am happier than I was during that time. Still, I don't really buy the premise that Shaun and I are opposites, beyond the fact that he hasn't had quite enough failure to give up and I've had just barely enough success to keep going.
4 comments:
What's his blog address?
Shaun
Currently performs with:
Torch Theater
Phoenix Neutrino Project
Past shows/teams:
Charles Darwin Experience
New Kevin
Mechanically Separated Chicken
Comedy Corner
I'd fallen a bit behind, but I've updated the links along the right hand side of the blog. A link to Shaun's blog is there.
Shaun: [via e-mail] "I would say that my blog being the opposite of yours is not too entirely wrong. I mean, yours has a more positive tone and mine has a more negative tone, yours is about being in a place of moderate success, mine is about being in a place of moderate failure, the titles are almost opposing, but I would agree that as people we are not opposites. I mean, if I was truly your opposite, I would not even be blogging, probably working a construction site and nodding reverently to Rush Limbaugh spouting out of my truck's radio as I drink during my lunch break. It's more like we're parallel. If I may chance an analogy, it's like we're both on the same river in separate rafts, it's just that I keep hitting the parts of the river with rocks, turbulence and predatory aquatic life. The good part is if I we can both stay on our rafts, we will get to the same place eventually."
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