Tonight has been kind of a rough night. It's the first Friday night back at school, coupled with my first attempt at doing a #standup-routine type-thing after bombing in high school.

None of it went as planned. I was very, very nervous about the story I was telling but figured after the first laugh everything would be fine. And it was, except the first laugh took forever. In a nutshell, the story wasn't funny until I added an extra line to clue everyone in to what was really going on. So yeah, once I threw that out there, the crowd warmed up. Everything went smoothly, all things considered. I wasn't getting as many laughs as I thought I was going to get, probably because the full context still wasn't clear AND there were certain parts of that seemed a little out of order, but even so, there were some funny parts and funny lines and I had a pretty good feeling about it until...

The ending. It wasn't funny. I knew when I was writing it that it wasn't funny. At the time, I figured I could ride the funny waves all the way til the end. People would think I was so freakin' hilarious that a thrown together ending wouldn't even matter. Not how it worked out; instead it was anti-climactic and kind of brought the whole thing down.

I should have taken Anna's advice and ended with that last funny bit about the sketchy situation, with the final line being like,

"you can guess what happens next. And even if you can't I"m not going to tell you. So yeah, goodnight!"

And if people said something like, "blahblah blah tell us the rest blahblahblah!" I could just be honest and tell them, "I just need to get offstage gracefully here people, okay?"

My inability to think of this onstage, where it really mattered,has caused me to wake up and smell the roses:standup is a lot harder than I thought and naturally I'm. Really. Not. That.Funny.

There are some people who just have it. Like, Tess and Owen, these two other theatrical sophomores who just happen to be dating... they just...bring it. They could stand up and tell a story about almost anything and it would be hilarious. Same for Steven and a number of other people who went up. Sure, there were people who bombed worse than I did. But those people didn't halfbrag all of freshman week about doing standup. Well, it wasn't really bragging...it was just mentioned casually heheheh.

I'm not really worried about that, though. People who want to judge me on stuff I said my first week of college, two years later, are not worth my time. Really, this bugged me because it's  just another example of how I'm kind of average. Not the best, not the worst, just average. And who wants to be average? No one. Certainly not me.

And sure enough, when I got offstage it wasn't like at KGS. There wasn't a sea of support, hugs and high fives and all that jazz. Just a couple of quiet "good jobs" and "great story", mostly from my friends or people who want to be friends.

At one point, I ran into Forest (my ex who I'm still kind of tight with--we don't hang out a lot, it's more of an unspoken understanding:, he knows that I know that he understands me, and he also knows that he can tell me just about anything he's thinking, about himself or about me, and that I won't judge him.) He had seen me walk in, we had made eye contact a few times/were aware of each others presence. When he  didn't immediately say "good job", I knew this routine had really sucked. Or at least, had ended poorly.

I asked him flat out, "sooo, what'd you think?". He goes, "Well, honestly, you weren't really that funny. I mean, there were parts of it that were really good, but the only part people are going to remember is the end and that wasn't so great..."

Trying to play it cool, I told him I agreed (which I did), and I knew what he was talking about. Nonetheless, it hurt. Because it was true.

I wanted to tell him I admired his honesty. But I figured I didn't have to--he told me because he knew that's what I wanted from him. This is what I love about my relationship with Forest. Even though I have no romantic interest in him anymore, I'm glad we've managed to maintain that openness.

Speaking of romantic interests though, finding another person who I connect with the way I connected with him has been difficult. Partly because of the #NLD, and the intellectual strategies I use to analyze #social situations, I can sometimes go a little bit too far. Too much of my brain is taken up with the analysis, and there isn't a whole lot left to deal with the part of social interaction that involves me responding to what other people are saying. This leaves me on auto pilot a lot of the time, especially in group situations.

Because of this, I often come off as frosty or aloof. It's not that I don't have a lot to say to a person, I just don't know how to work past that small talk. And if I try to make some kind of comment like "I hate small talk", 9 times out of 10, people get offended or are just stumped. They don't know what to say, so they just end the conversation. In other words, they don't know me well enough yet.

But how the hell can I get to know them if we can't even get past: "how's your night going?" or "what's new"?

More on that later.