Month: December 2023

This week took me to Nashville for Christmas, the same place we’ve celebrated for over a decade. There was a time when we’d celebrate early, as soon as a school semester finished, but now we navigate work schedules instead. Fortunately (or unfortunately), I’m able to work from anywhere so my schedule didn’t figure into the determination. I did shepherd a closing on Thursday but after that my 2023 matters were completed. Bill is still pushing hard for at least one more 2023 close but now all I can do is offer secondary support and set the outreach agenda for next year.

This weekend was the first time I’d ever seen a concert at the Ryman Auditorium. It is an old-time venue with significant history and incredible acoustics. I didn’t know all of the songs and the pews didn’t make for the most comfortable seats, but there is something magical about watching a show in a place like that.

We only experienced a childhood Christmas this year through a phone screen. It looked like a chaotic mess with the kids hyped up on sugar and dancing and running around the living room. I’m sure they crashed not too long after they showed us their new baby dolls and Flintstones car.

This was a rare year when I completed my gift shopping before Christmas Eve. My gift wrapping was still last-minute and shameful but it’s more about what’s inside the wrapping than the wrapping itself. Overall, everything was great. At least until I ate myself sick on Christmas Day, but that’s a boring story for a book I’ll never write.

For the past six weeks, I’ve attended an improv comedy class. Well, I missed the first week with COVID but I’ve already told that story. This was my second improv class. I took another one when I lived in DC. That one had a younger crowd of people in their 20s and 30s. In this one, there was much more variation in age among the participants. This one also had a public graduation show as a focal point instead of just doing exercises.

I took an improv class again for two reasons. One was to have an opportunity to meet new people and make new connections. This didn’t work as well as I’d hoped but I’ll keep trying. The second was to force me to be more present and spontaneous in conversation. Sometimes my conversations with prospective clients can get repetitive, introducing a danger that I go into autopilot, miss their core concerns, and lose out on the business. A similar dynamic can occur in my personal life as I focus more on what I’m going to say next than on what my conversational partner is saying now. In improv, you cannot get away with doing that. You must be present with your scene partner and in so doing get out of your own head. That alone was worth the time and money I invested into taking the class.

On Saturday, we had our graduation show. Only 8 of the 13 people who started the class were there for myriad reasons and there were only about that many people in the audience. Two of the audience members were even people I’d invited. My set was with 5 of the 8 as there were two sets during the show. During the set, I gave a monologue about a certain groundhog (or more realistically series of groundhogs) named Rufus that resides under my parents’ shed. This idea resulted from a prior scene where a young child named a racoon. My three scenes weren’t great in my own assessment. I inadvertently took over the first one about a frog from my scene partner and it stalled. A second saw me trying to buy a Christmas present while hopelessly lost in what became a French shopping mall. And I could not even remember my third scene at dinner afterwards. Overall my performance was better and I had more fun during the practice show we did on Tuesday, but that was largely immaterial.

Will I take more improv classes next year? Maybe. I don’t feel any compulsion to make a run at becoming a cast member of SNL. It may depend on scheduling and what other activities I find.

I flew down to Miami on Friday afternoon, took a rideshare to my brother’s apartment, and then waited for my sister-in-law to get home from work. We ate an early dinner at a place I’d eaten at with them previously, a rare-in-Miami southern place with some very good fried chicken.

I’m not a beach person, much to the constant chagrin of my hosts. This meant that we spent Saturday afternoon walking through Coconut Grove instead of going across to Miami Beach. There was also a visit to another holiday market, my third of the season after the two last week. This one was the worst of the three, even worse than last week’s that was interrupted by a protest, because we also had to drive quite a distance to get to it. We gave up very quickly and ordered pizza to pick up on the way back. On Sunday we did go across to Miami Beach but not to the beach itself as we walked through a section of South Beach before a quick visit to Brickell (after waiting what seemed like forever for a drawbridge in downtown because that’s a thing in Miami). Then we ate dinner at a new cocktail bar that was still finding its feet with its food offerings.

I spent most of the workday Monday watching continuing education videos. It might help my sanity if I spaced those out throughout the year, but I no longer beat myself up over having to endure two days of CLE per year. Only four more hours to go this year. Yay.

The plan was to go to the Titans game against the Dolphins on Monday Night Football. That was the original justification for my visit. Ultimately, we decided not to spend the $200 per person to drive 45 minutes up to the stadium and sit in the nosebleeds. Instead, we opted for a group parrilla dinner at an Argentinian restaurant. On this evening, it would have been warmer had we actually been in Buenos Aires and the meal would have been much less expensive. The amount of English spoken in the restaurant, though, would have been almost exactly the same.

We then returned to my brother’s apartment and watched a roller coaster of a football game that had one of the craziest endings I’ve seen in a long time and left us ruing moments earlier in the season that led to losses that will make it almost impossible for our team to make the playoffs. I’m not disappointed that we watched it on television instead of in person. We yelled just the same and at least this way we weren’t in any physical danger when the Titans pulled off the upset.

I went to two different holiday markets on Saturday, one in Raleigh and one in Durham. Neither was a first-choice activity for me but both were opportunities to spend a few hours with friends after a stop-start workweek.

The Raleigh event was in the early afternoon. It took place in the middle of Fayetteville Street, the main street downtown between the few skyscrapers. It was too warm for a holiday market but a few of the vendors had Santa-themed wares on offer. Did I accomplish any Christmas shopping? Of course not; it’s far too early for that. I also didn’t eat lunch before going. That was a mistake as it left me with a bit of a headache walking around. The dumplings that I ate when I finally did get lunch were very good though, better than my previous experience at the same restaurant.

The Durham event was centered around the lighting of a big Christmas tree in one of the angular plazas downtown that were created by the weird street alignment. The market was set up on a closed side street and there was a stage set up in the plaza for different entertainment acts. When my little group arrived, there was a Latin band playing. The sound was hardly festive, but it was at least thirty decibels too loud to make up for it. None of the vendors seemed to have gotten the holiday memo either as no one was selling anything that appeared seasonal to me. There was even a free Palestine protest starting to add even more confusion to the scene. We ended up punting on the whole idea and walking a few blocks to a place for burgers and fries. None of this was a disappointment to me but I suspect it was for my companions. I enjoyed dinner and interacting with their little one who is really starting to grow into his personality.