Let’s see. This week . . .

Report cards, parent-teacher conferences, three Kaplan classes, four Kaplan students, 18 young Plato Academy students, Second City class and, when the weekend hits, my first show in Donny’s Skybox. Sleep optional, and unlikely.

Afterwards, Atlanta. Thanksgiving. The real kind of stuffing supplemented with the pan-baked kind. A football game I won’t watch because I will be sleeping in front of it. Cranberries. The Local. Werd.

What’s after that? Back to Chicago. New tutoring students and new lesson plans for a couple of weeks (I think I have a birthday in there somewhere too) and then . . .

Atlanta again. Christmas. Birmingham, Alabama, after that. Then . . .

New York City for New Year’s Day. I’ve looked forward to many things, but few so much as this.

First thing’s first. I need to sleep. This is going to be a long week.

Teaching means grading. Remember all those things you had to do in school? Some person graded those. The person was a teacher. Grading isn’t the greatest part of my life. I am proud of my system though. On the dining room table lies stack after stack of papers that need to be graded. I tackle each stack one at a time and between stacks I enter the grades into my spreadsheet and walk back for more.

There is no point to that system really, except that the walking prevents me from passing out on my desk and hurting my eyeball on the coffee mug in front of me.

Grading takes time and focus. Teaching takes maybe 55% of my focus right now. I forgot to sign up for Playground Theater Incubator auditions because my life is running at Ludicrous Speed. Somehow I don’t care. Second City, Improv Kitchen, Kaplan, the Kaplan related thing I choose not to explicitly share right now, and teaching for Plato Academy pretty much fill things up for me.

This, this, and this have caused today to be a beautiful one. Weather’s great and our government has some partisan checks and balances I think we call can appreciate.

I work for Kaplan, right? I teach the GMAT and sometimes tutor other things. I told you once awhile ago about how I had to substitute a class during the week I was only visiting this city.

Anyway it’s starting to become a little repetitive. Every new class is exactly the same. There is the know-it-all who answers everything and makes smart ass comments after everything you say. There is the one guy or gal who is trying really hard but just doesn’t get the difference between the combinations and permutations formulas. Amateur. There is the one guy who just leaves after he gets his name on the sign-in sheet. There is the smell of the Expo 2 Deluxe Dry Erase Marker, which follows you home because it’s all over your hands and clothes when you are done. There are the pronoun rules, including the rule for “which” which I exercised just a moment ago in the previous sentence. Which follows a comma and isn’t restrictive. Did you know that?

There is fucking subjunctive verb form. If I were (there it is) a millionaire I wouldn’t have to demand that subjunctive verb form be learned (there it is again) anymore.

Next session we’ll be talking about how to use proportions to solve rates questions while employing backsolving to increase our time efficiency. I wouldn’t miss this if I were you (there it was, one more time, in all of its subjunctive glory).

There is one thing about the job that I do really enjoy however, but I’ll save it for a later post.

Michael Gellman was once a member of The Second City mainstage cast. Now he is my Second City Conservatory Level 2 teacher. Here we have an improv teacher who lets you get away with nothing. He stops you for asking a single question to your partner (an improv rule that some teachers take more seriously than others). He scolds you if you are late to class. I actually feel fear when one of my classmates walks in even ten minutes late. The man sidecoaches unapologetically. His mission is to mold our young improvising souls into hardcore Second City style improvisors.

What I find interesting about him is that he is the first teacher I’ve ever had who really believes that improv can reach a level of quality on par with traditional theatre, that is he thinks that a show can be improvised to sound as if it were scripted. That intimidates me somewhat if only because I get so many laughs based on the imperfections of the scenes I help improvise. Audiences love to see you try and *almost* succeed, and I have been banking on that principle for some time. Gellman is pushing my crew to put all that shit behind us.

I was working the survey gig at Tower Records one afternoon. I recruited a nice lady over to my table to watch the trailer for “Miami Vice” – unreleased, mind you.

I told you about my “we’re out from Hollywood” approach or hook or, well, lie. Well she sat down and asked me, “Could I ask you to try to make some movies that don’t focus so much on violence and sex?” I was taken aback for a second. I don’t really work for Hollywood. I am a mere laptop hauling solicitor.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

When I came here it was about as cold as it is now. My single studio apartment was bare and I had so many dreams about my future. I have never felt so optimistic.

Months later I am in a better place with bigger paychecks and more friends. The difference is that I feel smaller, or perhaps younger. I have committed myself to teaching part time and work so hard to make ends meet. Tonight I had my second improv show of my Chicago career and I felt so inexperienced. I felt like I had never improvised a day. In so many ways I feel like I am fifteen years old and am just waking up to the idea of performing.

I don’t want to lose focus on my dream of being a performer, but life doesn’t ever go according to plan and teaching has become something I am focusing on all the more. I hope that with financial security I’ll be able to give acting the energy I once gave it, but for now I struggle to remember even the simpler things. If improvisation is my instrument, then I need practice and I need it frequently.

Where I started doing improv regularly. Oh the memories.

It’s a common mistake for a postman to put another apartment’s mail in the wrong box. The other day a promotional letter from Chase bank was sent to Current Resident at both Apt. 1 and my very own Apt. 2. They were almost identical, each one offering a monetary reward for signing up for a new account. The thing is that ours offered $50 and the one for apartment 1 was only offered $25.

I thought about why this difference exists. It has kept me up late nights in stir. Then suddenly it occurred to me. We are way better than those … those JERKS in apartment 1, or maybe the function they use to determine the bonus is BONUS = 25x where x is the apartment number. I should move upstairs.