You can tell I don’t know what to blog about when the title is that vague.

Did the comedy thang last Wednesday night. Tried doing it with zero prep. No joke list or anything. Just the thoughts in my head based on the latest news from Facebook.

That went about as well as you would think. Got five jokes or so out then drew a blank. So it was a brief performance.

But I scratched that crazy itch that said I should try that approach. And I am not giving up on it entirely. I still think it has some merit.

The idea is that by not having notes or anything with me, I can be more present and engaged with the audience.

And that’s my goal – to be connecting with the audience so I can engage them and make the best use of my gifts for oratory and my charm.

I also want to preserve the spontaneity of the material. I suppose ideally that would involve me simply improvising with the audience, but I am nowhere near that level of confidence, so for now, I write jokes.

But I can see a future in which I just show up with a few topics in mind and then just riff on them, plus the audience’s reactions to them.

But if I want to get to that point, it’s going to take a lot more work. I would have to write the jokes beforehand and (urk) memorize them.

I hate memorizing anything. And I have been able to get away with almost never having to do it because of my natural gifts.

I never had to memorize anything in school. I just remembered it.

But I suppose I wouldn’t necessarily have to memorize the jokes per se, just memorize a set list. Something I write down beforehand. Just a few words per joke to remind me of my material when my mind goes blank.

I continue to struggle to remember that when I am performing, I will be in an entirely different head space than when I am relaxed at home, and that I have to prepare for my performance with that in mind.

Scientifically speaking, what happens is that adrenaline hits my system and my mind responds by dumping everything out of my short term memory in order to free up resources to deal with the immediate situation.

Think a caveman being chased by a predator and you can see the wisdom in the system. The cavemen that were still thinking about the roast buffalo they had last night when being chased by a pack of wolves did not live long.

That’s also why so many people find their minds going blank when they sit down to take the big test.

I’ve never had that problem, but that’s because tests do not stress me out. I have always done well on them. If anything, I am excited to have something approaching an actual challenge to use my mighty brainpower on.

Anyhow, my point is that I have to go into doing standup knowing that my mind will shift gears and therefore I need to minimize the amount of data I need to remember.

Maybe then, I will be able to be the comedian I keep trying to be.

More after the break.

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On third genders

If you ever find yourself wondering whether or not gender is a social construct, just take a glance at the pages of history and read up on cultures with third genders.

One example would be pederastic cultures, the most infamous being the ancient Greeks. To them, “boy” was a gender. There were men, women, and boys. Men pursued woman for marriage and boys for romance and sex (more or less).

And the thing is, every man who pursued boys has once been a boy pursued by men. In that sense, there was equality, at least as viewed over time.

Another example would be cultures where there are men, women, and men who dress and live as women.

We will call these “two spirit” cultures for lack of a better catchall name for them.

Unlike pederasty, there are still many modern cultures where this is wisely and openly practiced. Parts of India include “two spirit” genders, and these third gender roles are not merely tolerated but have well defined and important roles in that society.

So clearly, a society can function perfectly well without our rather quaint and provincial (and quite recent) notions of a gender binary and gender specific attributes.

And yet, violence against gender nonconformists is rampant worldwide. Being nonbinary means you are many more times more likely to be a victim of violence than the more traditionally gendered, up to and very much including murder.

What makes people so damned angry?

I say that what makes people murderously angry is the ambiguity. Ambiguity leads to uncertainty and uncertainty, for some, leads to great anger.

In the two example I listed above, the third gender has a clearly defined role in society. They are a known quantity, and people know how to interact with them and what sort of things to expect from them.

But alas, for the innocent gender nonconformists in modern societies, there are as yet no clearly defined roles for them and no well established expectations as to what they are like or what to expect from them.

And while they themselves have developed a flexible notion of gender by way of necessity, other members of their society remain stuck in the gender binary and therefore the presence of nonconformists causes them acute social stress.

They feel conflicted. Some signs point one way, some the other. They have to come up with some way to resolve this ambiguity or the cognitive dissonance will kill them.

Unfortunately, the most basic and primitive response to pain is to attack the perceived source of that pain, no matter how innocent that person might be.

Clearly, what is needed is a reimagining of gender to include those who fall between genders and who only want to live their lives in peace and safety.

A well defined third gender role would be a good start. But it’s hard to imagine how such a thing would be created.

We will just have to fall back on the foundation of all modern society, tolerance.

You be you, and I’ll be me, and we will judge one another individually. See?

It’s really not that complicated at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.