I am not drunk enough for this entry.

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, tweaking the phrasing and diction, until he gets a take he likes. 

If any of you ever wondered what my editing process looked like, there it is. I sit in the corner and talk to myself -- or, when available, rats -- until I get a sequence of noises that sounds like an essay. The typing part is just transcription. I've tried using voice-to-text, but OK Google and Cortana are both various shades of bluenose. Google Assistant won't read the swear words back to you if they occur in the text, but Cortana won't even admit she knows how to spell them. Although she must do, because she always gets the number of asterisks right.

Colbert writes his jokes for the day by front-loading the past 24 hours of news-cycle crap into his head on the drive to work. He quotes huge wadges of poetry, play dialogue, Scripture and Tolkien off the top of his head, spontaneously and at such length that he has to either be reading it off an eidetic snapshot of the page or playing the audio back in his head. He pops in and out of character like it's on a single-throw switch. He once landed a part that involved playing French horn, an instrument he had never touched before, so he cadged one from the company and taught himself in a week. He's told people he doesn't speak Spanish "that well", which seems to mean he understands it fine but can't spit it out fast enough to sound like himself. He took a Meyers-Briggs test on his show once and came out INFP, which I could have told you from the way he dodged every single question of even remotely personal import. Most of the self-editing he does when he hosts things is not for content, but for focus, keeping himself externally-oriented rather than falling back to rattle around in his own head. He spent his childhood fucking breaking standardized tests, until a major life event alerted him to the cosmic unimportance of school, at which point he stuffed his nose into a book and ignored it. He is all over the friends who let him do that, he tells people he loves them point-blank in front of the camera, and if you think I harp on that a lot, you should see him do it -- I don't have my props department print nice framed photos to show the audience in case they don't know what I'm asking the guest about. He almost seems to find it easier to work without a script than with one, to the point where he once stood up on stage, tired, cranky, drunkish, and probably on the verge of tears, and delivered a nine-minute completely extemporaneous monologue, 100% live to undelayed broadcast, that came together more cohesively than most people's multi-draft polished writing.

[In re: The standardized tests. He describes here being given an exam one-on-one where the administering teacher was timing his responses. That is some sort of childhood aptitude test -- the Stanford-Binet IQ test is mainly aimed at adults, so it was more likely a WISC, or the new-at-the-time WISC-R. The score on those is calculated not just from the number of correct answers you give, but the speed at which you spit those answers out. In the segment of tape they play, little Stevie is answering faster than the teacher can even deal with the stopwatch. This alone would knock his IQ score quite easily over 130, the threshold of "Extremely High" intelligence on the WISC scale, and also the point at which they stop giving you real numbers and just regard you with a mix of trepidation and awe. I ought to know; breaking the scoring algorithm on those things was also one of my childhood hobbies.

If your first thought upon reading that is, "130? Really? That low?" then congratulations. You also broke that test.]

Whenever I make observations like this, my knee-jerk reaction is, "That cannot possibly be right." Surely I am misinterpreting the context or the import of what the other person is doing, or my self-assessment of the level of similarity is inaccurate. And it makes no difference here whether I'm watching a celebrity on TV or just some rando who happens to have intersected my life -- I am so accustomed to being the alien that it knocks me completely off balance to see things I recognize. It doesn't mean people don't like me fine, but it does mean they don't generally grok my thought processes very well. It is discomfiting to see another person show so many of the same tells I know I have, not because I have flagged them internally, but because other people have alerted me to them over the years by remarking on the things I do without thinking. 

Colbert is doing all of this in a very public forum, where I can see other people's equally public reactions to it. It brings up the uncomfortable question of whether people react the same when I do these things, and I just don't know it because there isn't a YouTube comments page on my life.

I don't have heroes. I don't even really have role models. What I do have is a long list of people I think it would be useful to steal from. Clearly I should be stealing a lot from this guy.