Spring, 2014

I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t having any fun. I was just feeling like a guilty useless mess with no appetite for my alleged passion. I was a deflated party balloon. On the advice of a friend, I decided to take some time off worrying about stand up (I wasn’t actually doing any stand up). My friend thought it would be good for me to simply cut the cord, stop dragging the dead dog of jilted promises around and maybe do some other stuff. She thought things had gotten stale, and that by doing other things, and with less expectation, it might freshen up my perspective and get me excited about excitement again. I agreed. I had become too serious. My plans had taken on a monstrous level of importance and severity. No wonder I wasn’t into doing my thing. I couldn’t see the joy in it. Comedy had become no laughing matter. And I was depressed. On the other hand, I had invested so much thought and angst, albeit very little action, into all of it. How could I just …stop? Wouldn’t that be even more painful? Even more depressing?

FLASHBACK TO ……

Winter, 2012

Following the other dream—the truly dead one:

When I moved to London, I got into teaching English as a foreign language (also known as EFL (UK) or ESL (US)). It’s something I had toyed with for a long time, and when I went there I decided to check it out. Okay, so there was a little mini-sized crisis involved too.

I had worked as a substitute teaching assistant for years in the US, and had signed up with an agency in London the instant I arrived, figuring I’d just continue making money that way. I knew the work, and it would keep a roof over my head while I spent the rest of my time figuring out how to become an international superstar. But the instant I got hired on with the agency I had a breakdown over the whole TA thing. I just couldn’t stand the idea of doing that kind of work anymore. It was hard, I had done it for a long time, and I had had enough of it. My TA tank was empty and I didn’t want to refill it. I wanted to do something else. I called the agency and told them, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

At that time, I did manage to get some work as a server with a catering agency—my other professional milieu. Again, yuck. No, thanks. I lasted a month. My poorly paid shifts came to an end when I lost my job with that agency over a mistake they made, blamed me for, and then threatened to withhold pay for completed work over. That until I informed them that I was very well connected in the legal circles of London, that what they were proposing was illegal, and that I’d have them closed down if they even dared. It wasn’t true but they got scared enough to pay me immediately after that phone call. For whatever reason, though, they never gave me any more shifts.

So there I was. No income. No willingness to get into my old gig. I had to try something new. How about teaching English as a foreign language? That’ll be easy.

I went to schools to see about teaching opportunities. All of them required you to be certified in a standard system of training, and by a recognized and accredited training body. I was not. I had had some related experience in classrooms from my TA work in the US, and a bit of volunteer experience, but it wasn’t enough. Nobody would hire me. I was doomed to either continue working as a TA (GOD NOOO!! PLEASE GOD NOOOO!!!) or as a server for another catering company (GOT ROPE?).

NOTE: In the US, working for catering companies and related agencies is not a bad deal. They usually pay okay, and aside from the heavy lifting, shit hours, and cranky managers, it’s not an unpleasant work experience. Plus, you get fed, and sometimes it’s steak. In London, catering is the Calais Jungle of unskilled labor. The pay is minimum wage, you often get nothing to eat, and the attitudes I found myself dealing with most of the time were downright hostile. The rabid leading the rabid. And, of course, it has to be said that I found many exceptions to this rule, but I would still classify it as a rule. No thanks.

Okay, so nobody would hire me. It looked grim. I tried a few more schools, but it was becoming clear that if I wanted to teach English, I would have to get trained. I had no money, no time, no way of doing that. Then, my last try. I walked into this school that claimed to teach a non-standard method. I inquired. They said they had nothing but took my details. A few weeks later, I got a call to go in and see about a job. I started training a week after that. In February of 2013, I became a teacher of the Callan Method for learning English. No certification required.

The pay was bad and The School only took me on for a few hours a day, but at least I was in there. I loved teaching English, and The School was a circus of characters. I ended up doing other jobs to make ends meet. I did a little comedy here and there, but then I started to take on night shifts. Being spread thin in a big city can be exhausting. It’s easy to let things go. The comedy boat kept drifting further and further away from shore.

Anyway, at some point, after about a year and something, The School sort of changed hands. Essentially, it was the beginning of the end. Le Nouveau Management was all about taking over with an iron hand, and overhauling everything that had existed before the takeover. That meant everything, whether it was broken or not. Before the takeover, The School was a relaxed environment with a really diverse and eclectic staff body that boasted teachers from every persuasion and walk of life. Some taught in suits. Others taught in jeans and t-shirts. It was great. The opposite of corporate in a sea of corporate. It was to its surrounding business environments what Austin is to the rest of Texas. And we all loved it. Then, they came in. They. With their suits and their spreadsheets and their plans. Some faceless lady carved out a giant office for herself on the same floor as the rest of us peons, but we never really met her or had any actual contact with her. Every now and then, she would call a meeting with us. At said meetings, she would stand coldly in front of us, avoiding eye contact while updating us on the plans for The School, and with special charts that nobody understood would let us know how the budget was shaping up, which apparently it wasn’t. In fact, it seemed to be increasingly shaping down. Student numbers were dropping like inhibitions at an Ayahuasca ceremony (Zing-zing-zing-zao!!). Yes, numbers were dropping so much that there would have to be cuts. Cuts?! Yes, cuts!! Oh, yes. The cuts were coming. And they would be significant. It was now everyone’s job to try and be as tip-top as they could in order to hold onto their shitty jobs. The School needed streamlining and that meant, above all, cuts in the staff. What it didn’t seem to mean was Le Nouveau Management, which was hired on despite the fact that it had no previous experience in anything even remotely related to schools of any sort, actually trying to figure out what needed to be adjusted in order to oil the machine and make it run more smoothly. No, none of that. The streamlining process would instead involve pitting staff against one another by creating a hierarchy of validity based on arbitrary merit alongside a checks-and-balances system where we were all supposed to spy on one another and report offences and betrayals. Nobody did that, by the way. The process also involved the implementation of a corporatized dress code, because figures had revealed that the students were disappearing because they disliked teachers in t-shirts. Figures, for some reason, were not revealing that students were disappearing because they disliked all of a sudden paying 40% more for their classes and being treated like dog shit by untrained receptionists that had come in with Le Nouveau Management. Quelle Surprise.

Whatever. It all fucking sucked. An era had come to an end. The cull began and it was to be survival of the fittest. It was announced that teachers in possession of standardized training diplomas would have priority, and that all others would have to get certified if they were interested in being kept on. This all had something to do with plans for making The School eligible for accreditation by the British Council—the top accrediting body for English language schools in the country. That way, they could broaden their scope, offer more options, increase their market, blah blah blah.

I wasn’t ready to let go of my low-paying part-time job. Even if it wasn’t worth hanging onto anymore. That was irrelevant. I’ve never been ambitious career-wise. I hated the idea of looking for another job. I also needed an excuse to officially quit doing comedy for a while. So, in the spring of 2014, I decided I would take whatever money I had and get my certification in formal standardized accredited English teaching. I found a school that had a summer program, applied, got accepted and I was on my way. I would spend the summer working in the morning and going to school and studying at night and on the weekends.

Damn, this is a long post. Okay, so yeah. I got certified, kept my job, ended up getting a bit of a raise, and reluctantly accepted a full-time position as something they called “Expert Teacher”, which essentially meant I could spell pretty well and stayed within the dress code (although sometimes I snuck on black jeans—all denim was forbidden after the takeover, and covered them with long tops. It made me feel alive to know I was getting away with dress code murder). Where am I going with all this? I didn’t mean for this to turn into a professional autobiography, but it somehow has. My job is not why I drifted away from comedy, although sometimes I think we creative sensitive types do have issues balancing roles. Who am I? The workie workie me or the rebel soul me? Dress codes can really dampen your rebel soul. Just sayin’.