3:49 pm - Fri 2.15.2013
Did I just write a journal entry, or am I actually dead on the toilet?

Week #3 of no auditions.

Starting to wonder if I'm dead, and only think I'm going about my business (Writing in here, for example), when my corpse is actually slumped over on the toilet.

(I assume if I die in this apartment, I'll either be on the toilet, or at the computer watching porn - I somehow doubt I'll be granted the dignity of dying quietly in my sleep. But anyway...)

There's nothing to do, really, when auditions aren't happening, but to "hang on and hope for the best".

I don't have a "Plan B"...

We hung out at House of Pies for the better part of two hours; I was concerned, as I often am when meeting new people, that I talked too much - nervous habit - while he confessed, afterward, that his nervous habit when meeting new people is to ask a lot of questions (And since I'm currently re-reading How To Win Friends and Influence People - which is basically all about expressing interest in the other person - I'd say his nervous habit kicks my nervous habit's ass).

But whatever the ratio of talking-to-question-asking, there was enough of a positive vibe to the meeting that we were both up for hanging out again sometime ("Sometime" being in about an hour-and-a-half, when I'm meeting him and his girlfriend for coffee, then to see a movie at the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax).

I'm hesitant to write too much about him in here, because, after all, two hours isn't enough time to really get a complete sense of someone - especially when you spent the majority of the time talking about yourself - but one thing that stood out in the conversation, maybe because it's a difference between us, is that he's pretty ambivalent about the whole "coming out to LA to be an actor" thing.

I'm not sure what that's about, and I don't want to speculate on it too much because, again, I just met the guy...but I do find it interesting, because it's very much "not where I'm at".

I very much want this to work, don't have a "Plan B", as I said before, and can't imagine going back to Lansing at this point (What would I be going back to, exactly?), while he was pretty happy with what he'd created for himself in Austin - where he landed as an adult - and during our conversation, seemed to actively question whether whatever LA had to offer was worth losing what he'd had back home.

(But he's talking from the perspective of someone who's been out here for a year...not a dozen years and counting.)

He said something which I've said to myself more than once, about life in LA as an actor, which is basically having the realization that "LA doesn't need you".

Of course, the argument could be made that no place "needs" you - the world was here before Josh and me were around, and will manage to muddle on once we're gone - but I know what he means; in our "small ponds", we felt like we had accomplished something, something we felt was meaningful, while here, you feel like a non-entity, that your presence on the scene or absence from the scene...is meaningless.

I know that's a feeling I continue to wrestle with, even as I enjoy some small measure of success; it's not enough for me to be a tiny little cog on a show like Shameless, for example; I want to be a big part of the reason a show succeeds or fails.

I want to be the reason (Or at least one of the reasons) people watch a show.

I want to have an effect.

I want to matter.

Anyway...

It's not a ratings behemoth like NCIS, so even though I flogged it fairly hard - "fairly hard" for me, anyway - on Twitter and Facebook, not that many people watched.

That felt pretty ego-deflating and anti-climactic, but "It is what it is", as they say.

I watched the episode "in real time", then a long time before I watched the scene over again by itself.

My judgement? I did fine; the scene really belongs to Dave - my scene partner - but my actorly ego aside, the scene as a whole played really well, I thought.

And even if most of my Facebook "friends" were not that interested in checking it out - I don't even know if Jane's seen it yet (I got bumped that night in favor of some PBS science show) - I still felt gratified that the episode got an "A-" review on The Onion's "AV Club" (Which is my go-to website for recaps of my favorite shows).

That's not really my "A-", but at least I was "in the neighborhood".

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