Interesting conversation at work today, even though it teetered on causing me additional problems — My boss (putting aside the administrative structure who they (the people who keep me down) say is my boss), anyway, she asked me how things are going in comedy. I admitted not as well as I thought and what I had noticed and how I was currently unable to suss out how I fit in within Boston. So, the teetering, sketchy part, is she assumed that was because I’m realizing that a move might be in order. I learned a bit back, better to keep the hand with that final decision close to my vest. For now, I’m there, and we all gotta deal with that reality.

Anyway, I told her among my points of dissatisfaction with comedy was trying to figure out if enough of what my goals/desires are overlap with what stand-up comedy is. And, of course, there’s the fact that comedy is dead and the whole bullshit, brickwall, wacky comedy, funny voices, rimshot nightclub on the road thing has passed far beyond rigor mortis and beyond decay into dust. Maybe it ain’t that bad, but the world in which I fantasize about joining does not involve my traveling to small cities, performing comedy and sleeping in a club-owned condo.

I think M. is right, my future is more in writing, multimedia and maybe performance that’s not purely comic.

The good thing is the boss lady offered that she thought I should work more on writing, too. Better than her saying, what the fuck, you a writer? Get real.

So we were swapping story ideas. Her idea was that someone should write a story about when money kept disappearing from wallets around our office. We started locking more doors, reminding people to lock their drawers, all that kind of stuff. I was shocked one day when very confidentially one admin assistant (very young, white, from small town Conneticut, in an MFA program) told me she thought it might be the other admin assistant (a little bit older, high school graduate, African American, very urban, never left Boston upbringing). They were very friendly with coffee breaks, lunch, chats all the time. I think they are friends, but it’s hard for me to reconcile how you could think that about your friend. While all of this was going on, I was kind of out of it, first my mom was becoming much, much more of a critical worry in my life, then, she died. The two admin assistants ganged up on me as the worst supervisor, official complaints behind my back, blah blah. I never got along that well with the African American woman, minutes after she passed through her three month new hire review, she started bitching about all of her work and all of the doctors in the office. She became the ringleader in complaining about me to the docs for whom we all work. The story has possibilities. Despite suspicions there was also the total lack of proof. And, of course, her skin color in an office of well-educated, intellectual liberals is a natural subject.

My story idea was less defined, but I think it could work. The boringly autobiographical antagonist is a total underachiever working in the middle of super-achievers. The hook and point would be her perception of herself as a totally untested underachiever who manages to work among, hang out, talk to these movers and shakers. And, the comedy, the sheer arrogance of assuming yourself an underachiever who could be on par with them, even though there is zero evidence. Is she an underachiever, who could have been one of them, or is this really the best for her?

My other story ideas involve stabbing people in my office, I alluded to them, but I figured it best not to say too much to the boss, lest she stop me.