[Seth Says] In Which Seth Gives A Speech
Hello Friends (and Very Committed Enemies),
Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Blatherton Court, the place where we court blather. (The judge's shower is the place where your court lathers)(the metal shop afterparty is the place where you court lathers)(DemoNEY)
As it turns out, sometimes I'm more comfortable talking to a larger crowd than individual people. I'm not sure why this is (aside from the general answer of: "me am weird"), although maybe it's because talking to one person is too much pressure, whereas talking to many people increases the odds that at least one of them thinks what you're saying is good.
Well, good news for me: Last week I got to deliver an acceptance speech at the National Press Club, for receiving the Angele Gingras Humor Award. Of course, as I'm still taking abundant Covid precautions, I delivered the speech via video. But now I can double down on that and deliver that videoed speech via video to you -- and it's even queued up with a timestamp, because I presume you don't necessarily want to watch a 3-hour awards banquet.
But I hope you do want to watch the few minutes of my acceptance speech, even though if you're a faithful reader of this newsletter, you've already heard one or two of the jokes, because I first made them here when I found out that I won the award and surprise, turns out you got a behind the scenes look of comedy in the making. (The documentary you never asked for!)
Still, there are also some jokes you haven't heard yet, and it's on YouTube so you can watch it without having to use your browser's private/incognito mode to evade a paywall, and how often do I give speeches (rather than selling them for someone else to give) these days? Not often. ("Oh, answering rhetorical questions now, are we?" "It appears so." "What's the point of that?" "I couldn't say.") (*picks up phone* "You don't say! You don't say! You don't say!" *hangs up* "Who was that?" "He didn't say.")(Vaudeville is the best place to find a slightly used vaude.)
Anyway, here's my acceptance speech.
MORE AWKWARD ONE ON ONE
(There's something pleasing about the phrase one on one, with the triple on and a pair of e's. I wonder what other similar phrases. Bin in bin? Cat at cat? I guess more similar would be something like Ink in ink.) (Sorry, I was distracted by letters, and oh look, there's a ton of them on my keyboard, dozens of them, we'll be here all night.) (Tip your waiter)(although tipping is an immoral system and should be abolished)(then again, what isn't when you look where the money's flowing?)
A fun email I've gotten to write at least twice in the past fortnight takes the form, "Thanks for thinking of me, although the execution of your thought is not, technically, pleasing to me." This is a great email to write because in a world of cruel or mostly uncaring people, it's an opportunity to reach out to one of the few people who do care and say, "Hey, quit it, you're doing it wrong."
I just have to hope that my appreciation carries through and that they don't focus on the negative -- or in other words, I have to hope that they're not like me, because I am 100% ready to believe that everyone thinks the worst of me with only the slightest of evidence. This is, as it turns out, not the ideal quality for a freelance writer, a job that generally includes a lot of feedback from clients asking for edits and revisions.
My blessing and curse is that I end up with a lot of wedding speeches where the client loves the first draft and just wants to use it with no revisions. Blessing because, hooray, I wrote it great! Curse because my brain now firmly believes that any time a client asks for significant edits, it means I've done something very wrong. This week I had a client ask for some revisions on a big corporate piece, and my immediate reaction was to presume they hated it (and possibly me). Of course, the follow up email thanked me for the revisions and said the piece was great overall, but my baseline is pretty skewed even though intellectually I know that edits and revisions are par for the course.
PAR FOR THE COURSES
It's back to school season, which means we got four whole days into September before yet another school shooting, a topic about which I've previously written a slam poem, and a column, and a column that is also a poem, but also don't click on the last link there if you have limited free Eagle articles and want to save it for my latest column. Since the above three links pretty much said everything I have to say on the topic, my latest column is NOT about shootings, just school -- specifically, it's a fun college course catalog I wrote up for the hastily invented
New University of Teachable Stuff
SHOT, CHASER
Speaking of getting shot, tomorrow I'm off to get my updated Covid booster, a thing I certainly recommend to anyone especially if you're a year off your previous, as we've been back over 1,000 deaths a week for a stretch, since like school shootings, a lot of people in the halls of power prefer to just file it under "Welp, that's how it is now, deal with it" rather than making inconvenient systemic changes. (Also, there's something about starting sentences with a worrisome phrase. Earlier this week I was walking with a friend and said, "Before all the raping... I was a big Bill Cosby fan.")
If this were a sitcom episode, I'd be sitting my sitcom kid down and talking about relying on praise to avoid feeling hated, and the importance of vaccine updates, and say, "I guess we all need our boosters." Freeze frame, roll credits. Well, unfreeze briefly to say thanks for reading, back in two weeks with another column, and thanks doubly if you watched my acceptance speech. This newsletter has been written in technicolor.
Role Credit,
Seth
P.S. I'm aware there were some font irregularities with the previous newsletter. Hopefully I've fixed it, but then again, this newsletter is nothing if not a font of irregularity.