Unsolicited Advice

I am stuck on a thing. Not because I don't know what to write, but because I have no idea why I'm writing it. I used to not care, but then Colbert said a thing in an interview about working "with intent" and now I feel wholly inadequate because that seems like an important step that I keep skipping. I also don't normally care about conforming to other people's processes, but everything I've seen of his is a terrifyingly accurate mirror of how I do these things. I tripped over this a while ago, which is a reel of BTS/raw footage from an interview he did (in character) when Jon Stewart was asked to host the Oscars. They clearly told him what they wanted to talk about when they called him up, but also clearly did not bother to hash out a script, so he's running the character improv. There's a bit near the end where he knows what the character's response would be, but hasn't quite settled on how to phrase it, so he just runs it over and over, ...

I woke up this morning trying desperately to remember what day of the week it was and whether there was anything special about it. As of this writing, it's Friday, and no.  It has become clear that I have moved into a situation of grinding poverty. I knew when I got here that nobody was going to have any money. Literally everybody involved in this venture is disabled in some way, which in modern America means you are left to starve by default. What I didn't realize until I got here is that the other two kids in this apartment grew up in this kind of deprivation, without any useful parental figures of any kind. When I arrived, there was no bath mat. I assumed this was because everyone was skint and had better things to do with $8 than buy one. I probably had better things to do with that money, but I was tired of slipping on wet tile, so I went and ordered one anyway. They said thank you. I also ordered a wire shelf for the freezer, because I was tired of vegan "patties...

[Addendum to the earlier note--] Firstly, I would like to say, God bless the obsessive stans of the world. They save me from having to track down each and every individual goddamned piece of media one by one when I go on a tare. There is no project so obscure that they cannot give me enough information to find some chunk of it somewhere on the internet. I can't honestly recommend Exit 57 for entertainment value (it's recognizably in Colbert/Dinello/Sedaris' style, but, uh, they got better) but if you ever wanted to know how they worked their way up to Strangers With Candy , that'll definitely tell you. The down side to this is that their laser focus sometimes gets a little too narrow. The hive mind tends to assume that anyone who's found their way down the rabbit hole already knows what's going on, or that nobody ever needs a reason for the "smexy", and they can edit things down to just the "good bits". This is aggravating if you're actu...

A friend of mine was tolerating my drunken fangirling last weekend, patiently agreeing that yes, it is the cutest thing ever when Stephen Colbert turns around to hit on his off-camera wife every time he fucks up a line in his monologue. And yeah, I keep watching that because he's being comfortingly sane/angry right now, but also because it feels like representation, in a weird sort of way. Colbert is, in many respects, what a lot of people would think of as the quintessential American: A straight, white, Christian man, married with kids, on a lifelong career path that has earned him substantial material wealth. Left to his own devices, he dresses like the dadliest dad who ever dadded. He's expressed some ambivalence about the knowledge that at least some of his media clout comes from this. On the one hand, he is perhaps not the best person to speak to the lived experience of institutional disadvantage; on the other, there are a lot of straight white Christian men in America who...