MadMup.com

I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I wasn’t in any plays in high school. It was my Senior year that I started to figure out that maybe I’d like to try that sort of thing, but I didn’t have the opportunity. When I hit college, I was still trying to get my footing when Jeff M. approached me about being in his Senior Recital. He needed to direct and put on a play for his and he asked me to try out for a specific part. I had gotten to know him a bit (our high school was on the same campus as the college I attended), but I still asked him, “Why me?”

“Oh, I just think you’d do a good job with the part,” he said.

So I tried out and got the part: a mentally-handicapped gardener who gets killed before the second act. Nice.

The advantage of being in a small college (around 800 students was the max during my time there) is that there are more opportunites to get involved in things. My brother went to a larger college (around 5,000 students), and some other people I’ve talked to that attended there didn’t have nearly as many opportunities. At my college, there was a “big” play every semester and there were generally a couple of Senior Recitals in any given semester, too.

With one play under my belt, I tried out for the big college play the next semester. Miss Senn was particularly urging me to do so, and that didn’t hurt any. I found out later that directors were always trying to get more guys to try out for plays because they never had enough, but at the time it felt nice. This play was a musical, and it’s because of it that I gained a loathing for Gilbert & Sullivan. The process was fun and I still enjoyed being on stage, but I did not care for the prancing about and the singing – I was, in fact, the first male voice to sing on stage in that play, and the part was a tad too high for me. I can still remember the line and the tune: “Good morrow, pretty maids. For whom prepare ye these floral tributes extraordinary?” The highest note was on “ex” and I squeaked it in every performance, I’m fairly certain.

Here’s a list of the plays I was in during my college years:

• The Night Is My Enemy (recital) – I was the aforementioned gardener. It’s funny how many lines I still remember from this play.
• The Gondoliers (school play) – Singing, wearing tights, and prancing about. That’s no way to go through life, son.
• Flowers for Algernon (recital) – I was Charlie, so I went from mentally handicapped to genius to mentally handicapped again. It was at this early point in my career that I felt I was headed for typecasting.
• Anastasia (school play) – I was one of the conspirators that presented the girl as the real deal. I remember Jack B. making fun of the one line I said (something like “Why did I let you talk me into this? Why? WHY?!?”), and I think it was partly the sitcom-y line and partly my ridiculous delivery.
• A Man for All Seasons (school play) – Probably my favorite part. I was “The Common Man,” which had me being a jailer, a boatmen, an executioner, and several other parts. It gave a neat perspective to counter the “Great Man of History” shown in Sir Thomas Moore, and it was fun to play.
• The Ugly Duckling (recital) – I was a replacement for a fellow who… well, was no longer at school. I joined the production with only two weeks left before performance, and I found that that was just about right for me. Everyone else already knew their parts, which helped me lear mine pretty quickly. I was the old king, so I got to “act” crotchety and a little senile.
• The Robe (school play) – I was the main dude in this one, for whatever reason. I wasn’t actually a student anymore, either. I was working at the college after graduating, and the opportunity presented itself.

I might be missing some – in fact, I’m sure I am – but those are the ones I can recall.

I figured out pretty early on that people like to laugh, and if I could be the person making them laugh, maybe they wouldn’t be giving me facewashes. (For those who didn’t grow up in Wisconsin, a facewash is when snow is rubbed into your face. They’re about as fun as they sound.) My foray into being a class clown started in earnest right around the fifth grade, as I recall, borne of my experiences being picked on by the older kids I grew up around.

I’ve long wished there were a way for me to make a living at entertaining people, but it’s hard for me to think of it as worthwhile a worthwhile pursuit. A movie, a play, or even a stand-up comedian can make you think about life in ways you hadn’t before, but rarely is the experience life-changing.

The other half of that story is that I’m very much like Ringo: most of my “characters” are MadMupesque, just versions of me. I have a hard enough time maintaining a distinct character for a three-minute improv bit, much less anything longer.

So if you’re around me when I answer a question in a ridiculous accent or crack jokes at a time when people oughtn’t be cracking jokes, I hope you’ll have a little patience with me and understand it’s the entertainer in me wishing he could make a difference and trying the only way he knows how.

Song Info (from Beatlesongs): “Yesterday” is on the Help! album (and is probably one of the most famous Beatle songs ever – it’s certainly the most covered, having more than 2,500 artists covering it by 1980). Authorship is 100% McCartney, and the group was surprised by how big a hit it became. Lennon had this to say about it: “Wow, that was a good ‘un,” and “Well done. Beautiful – and I never wished I’d written it.”

As far back as I can remember, I’ve liked science fiction. We didn’t watch much TV while I was growing up, but I have vague recollections of watching episodes of Dr. Who and Star Trek with my dad here and there. My earliest recollection of Star Trek is actually one of my earliest recollections of being scared. Our family was over at another family’s house and the parents were all talking (and probably playing Rook), and we kids were in the other room flipping through the channels. One of the channels was showing Star Trek, so we stayed on that channel for a while. Come to find out, the episode showing was “The Man Trap,” which featured a salt vampire that would kill people by sucking all the salt out of them. If you click that link, you’ll get an episode synopsis and a picture of the thing that scared me for a couple days following. It still looks creepy to me today, but I know a bit more about special effects and costumes and the like, so I’m not afraid of it anymore.

A big staple of sci-fi is time travel. Dr. Who was centered on it (what with him being a Time Lord and all) and several episodes of Star Trek featured it, including what is widely considered the best episode of Trek ever, “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Plenty of TV shows and movies use time travel as a device – Quantum Leap, Back to the Future, the Terminator series, and even Somewhere in Time for the romance-minded set.

What’s the appeal? Why is it so intriguing to visit a time long since past or see a possible future? It’s a combination of knowing and dreaming, I think. Imagining what the future could be is mind-boggling. Cast back 100 years and imagine them knowing all the advances we’ve seen since then. Now apply that to the next 100 years. It’s funny to see what Popular Mechanics predicted even 50 years ago, and there’s no way to know what life will be like.

We read books and see pictures or paintings from long ago and we wonder what it would have been like “back then.” It would be nice to just know, wouldn’t it? To know for a fact, rather than deal in conjecture. I’ve long thought it would be awesome to somehow travel back in time and be able to video historical events – the meetings of our Founding Fathers, the birth of Christ, JFK’s assassination (probably would be best with a 3-camera setup), Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address… It would be so neat to see these events as they actually happened.

For me time travel ties in with the age-old “what would you do differently?” question often asked as a get-to-know-you question in groups. For me that question is almost paralyzingly broad – I’ve seen enough sci-fi to know that even a small change at a critical point could make huge differences down the line. If I hadn’t pretended to trip David S. in first grade and gotten an unearned spanking when he tripped himself and blamed it on me, would my course through my elementary grades been different? Would my “well, if I’m going to get spanked for things I didn’t do I might as well do things to actually earn spankings” attitude never have been born? If I hadn’t chosen to sing on the bus too and from school every day, would I have avoided creating the weirdo outcast image I stuck myself with? It’s impossible to tell. We don’t get the chance to re-live our lives.

For me, these thoughts lead directly into “What would you tell yourself if you could go back in time?” First – and I have given this a lot of thought – you’d have the problem of convincing your younger self of who you were. If you couldn’t do that, why should this younger you pay any more attention to older you than any other adult in younger you’s life at the time? I hit upon the idea of writing a series of letters, to be opened at certain moments in time, some with records of events (“Hey, today you got hit in the head with a basketball at recess. Sorry I didn’t tell you about it sooner, but I needed you to know that I was the real deal.”) and some with advice (“When you’re tempted to tell [NAME OMITTED] tomorrow that you like like her, don’t. It will just mess up your friendship.”). Still, I’d have problems with specific dates because I can’t remember them, and younger me would probably open them all up and read them ahead of time and it would really mess him up, maybe more so than he already was.

And, really, how would you tell your younger self to change?

“Hey, it’d really help me out if you could develop some sort of eagerness to study and willingness to work hard on things.”

“Uh… okay. How?”

“I don’t really know, as I didn’t figure it out when I was younger. Also, stick with the piano playing, as it would be better for you than the football thing turned out. Also, try to learn how to like food that’s good for you. Oh, and start saving money. Got all that? Don’t make me travel back through time again, mister. If I happen to run into my future-self here in the past, there could be trouble, and I’m not talking about in-school suspension kind of trouble, like you’ll have in your sophomore year of high school.”

“What?!?”

“Nothing, just forget it.”

In pondering all the changes I’d make, though, I’m struck with the thought that if I made them, I wouldn’t be who I am now. Most of our important life lessons are learned through mistakes that we’ve made. If I somehow were able to avoid the ones I have made, I’d most likely make completely different ones, thereby learning different lessons and, in the end, becoming a different person. I wouldn’t know the people I do, I wouldn’t have the friends I have, I wouldn’t know this life at all. Time travel paradoxes aside, there’s too much that could go screwy with even just a little bit of fiddling.

While it’s fun and even good to reflect on yesterday, it’s bad to focus so much on it that it cripples your forward progress.

Song Info (from Beatlesongs):”Here Comes the Sun” is on the Abbey Road album and was 100% written by Harrison, who also sang lead on it. He was quoted as saying it seemed like winter in England went on forever and responsibilities with Apple (The Beatles’ recording venture) were getting him down, so one day he took off, went to Eric Clapton’s house, and wandered around in the gardens with one of Clapton’s acoustic guitars and wrote this song.

Earlier this year my cousin Jim posted suggestions on how to wake up early. A few months later, Gretchen did a post on gaining more time in your day. While I’d been mulling Jim’s thoughts for a while (six months!), Gretchen’s was a kick-in-the-seat sort of enabling post that got the ball rolling for me.

During the summer I had gotten into the habit of going to bed really late. This, of course, made it difficult for me to get up on time in the morning. With that kind of start to my day, I was having difficulties just getting stuff done and even feeling like getting stuff done. Every few weeks I’d hard-crash and have to take a day to try and catch up on all the sleep I’d been missing, something “they” always say is impossible to do. Once your sleep is lost, it’s lost, man. Best you can do is try better in the future.

With the new school year fast approaching, I decided a change was in order. So, pretty much just like that, I started getting up at 5:00 a.m. And, just like that, it was a good thing. I had time to eat breakfast, do some reading, catch up on email, forums, blogs, and comics, and still get to work on time, even early many days. I was up before the sun, even when the sun was getting up earlier than normal (stupid DST *grumblemutterfume*).

There were other benefits, too, harder to define. Because I started putting some order into this area of my life, it seemed like other areas of my life started feeling more orderly. I felt better throughout the day, my thinking was more clear, I was organizing all of my time a little better, and I was being a more effective friend. Living on a schedule was helping me live more specifically.

There were a few downsides, of course, the main one being that I would get tired earlier in the evening. To get up at 5, I needed to be in bed somewhere between 9-9:15 p.m. Any later than that and it started getting difficult to get up at 5. Too many days of that in a row and it became almost impossible. The only solution was to go to bed at the right time. This meant forgoing “just one more level” on my latest game or that “one more episode of Seinfeld” while sitting on the couch. Just like anything worthwhile, it meant giving up something in the now for benefits in the future.

I kept at it very well for a few months – like most anything, a habit can be made of it. But, then, somewhere along the way, and for reasons I can’t specifically point out, it fell away. I’d stay up past 10 one night and then feel too sleepy to get out of bed until closer to 6 in the morning. Since I wasn’t resting well, I’d be sleepy during the day, but get a burst of energy in the evening and stay up late again. I’d be out with friends and not want to leave at 8:45 to get home in time to go to bed when I needed to. Little things kept creeping back in, and pretty soon I was back to living haphazardly, along with the malaise and the lack of will to go along with it.

One of my original intentions with getting up early was to eventually start exercising in the morning. I never got to that point, and I’m certainly not at that point these days with my late rising. Winter seems to make early rising more difficult – even those of us who aren’t “outdoors people” feel the difference that less sunlight in a day makes.

I know what I need to do, and I know it can be done – after all, I’ve done it before. I’m a firm believer that a person can change from being a “night person” to a “morning person” because I’ve done it a few times in my life. It takes effort, though, and that’s usually what stops a person – it’s what stops me from doing most of the things in my life that I ought to be doing.

I think it’s high time I get back to it. Regardless of the snowfall we had last night, I feel the ice is slowly melting. It feels like years since it’s been clear.

It’s all right. Or at least it will be.