If I Were on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

[This is a post in a series.  You may wish to read the introduction to the series.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

There is so much I want to know, there’s so many depths that I want to plum with my questioning, and yet there is no time.  So the scientists in the Late Show Labs came up with 15 questions, at the end of which, should you choose to accept the challenge of what has been called “The Colbert Questionert,” you will be fully known.
— Stephen Colbert

The “Colbert Questionert” (pronounced “questionnaire,” to rhyme with “Colbert”) is a newer segment of Stephen Colbert’s show: while The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has been around since 2015, the Colbert Questionert debuted just last year, with Tom Hanks being the inaugural celebrity (in Janurary of 2021).  Since then, 23 more celebrities have taken it, and it seems like he’s just getting started.

The structure of the questions is obviously a humourous take on the Pivot Questionnaire used by James Lipton, and perhaps is even an homage to it.  While many of the questions are designed to be silly, some are fairly penetrating, if occasionally in a roundabout way.  Here, then, are my answers—longer than most of Colbert’s guests, but at least shorter than Jeff Goldblum’s.  (Note: This is the original, slightly longer, version of the Questionert.  Later interviews have dropped questions #10 and #11.  But that leaves 13 questions, so ... yeah, I’m not doing that.)

The Colbert Questionert

• What is the best sandwich?

Well, if it has to be a sandwich sandwich, then I have to go with a turkey club.  Gotta have 3 layers, gotta have bacon and tomato (which is weird, because normally I don’t care for tomato), lots of mayo, lettuce optional.  But if a sub counts as a sandwich, then I’m all about the Italian cold cuts sub, but I’m very precise when it comes to ingredients.

First of all, salami and pepperoni are a given.  I have very occasionnally come across a sub billed as “Italian” with no pepperoni in it, and my first thought is, where do they get the balls?  Hard salami works better than Genoa, in my opinion.  Next comes the ham.  Now, the vast majority of “Italian” subs come with regular old deli ham on them, and deli ham is barely ham at all, much less Italian.  It’s 100% American, and it’s about a half step up from Spam.  So why on earth would you put that on an Italian sub?  No, an Italian sub needs an Italian ham, and, while for some folks that means prosciutto, I like to buck the trend: I prefer capocollo.  It’s hard to come by in the US, so you definitely want an Italian sub made with it when you can get one.  Finally, espeically if you’re using a hard salami, you need a softer meat to go along with all the harder salumi.  Now, most “proper” Italian subs will use mortadella for this purpose.  And it’s a fine choice, if that’s all you can get.  But, realistically, mortadella is too fatty for this application.  Honestly, just use a decent bologna.  Real Italian bologna is actually really good, and the fact that we think of the Oscar-Mayer version as cheap fodder for kids’ lunchboxes shouldn’t reflect on the proud heritage of the Bolognese people.

Toppings-wise, I like a little olive oil but no vinegar; lots of mayo; lettuce and onions; and salt, pepper, and oregano.  Mmmm ... I’m getting hungry just writing this up.

• What’s one thing you own that you really should throw out?

Out of all the questions, this one is probably the hardest one for me.  I mean, I have a lot of shit that one could make an argument that I should throw out: I still have over 500 CDs sitting right next to me, in spite of the fact that they’ve all been digitized and I never even take them out of the cases any more.  I have way too many of a lot of things: books, fantasy miniatures, old computer equipment.  But none of it do I ever look at and say “I should really throw that out.”

I think the best I can do is the “bar.” Once upon a time, when I was in college (for the second time), there was a party house that we used to go to that was owned (or more likely rented) by three college girls, and they had the coolest, raddest bar in the world.  It was an actual piece of furniture, perfect height, sturdy wood construction, and it could hold a metric shit-ton of liquor.  Then those ladies moved out and broke up their house, and they offered us the bar, because they knew we sometimes threw parties, and they didn’t want to see it go to waste.  So then our house became the party house, and the bar was a big part of the draw.  I dragged that stupid bard with me across three or four different roommmate houses, even to a couple of the offices for my company Barefoot Software.  Then I made eBay pay to haul it across the country, from DC to LA, where it now sits underneath my TV, full of DVDs that we also hardly ever take out of the case.  Needless to say, at this point, it’s looking pretty bedraggled (chipped corners and whatnot), and there’s so much crap piled up in front of it that you couldn’t even get to the DVDs if you wanted to most of the time.  Other than keeping the TV a nice distance up off the floor, and providing a place for the PS/4 and the Sonos soundbar and the UPS battery backup so the Internet can stay up for a while after the power goes out and all that jazz, it doesn’t serve much purpose.  But I keep it, mostly out of nostalgia.  Most likely I should just break down and buy a new piece of furniture that will serve that purpose (and probably do it much better).  And probably some day I will.  But not today.

• What is the scariest animal?

Okay, this one is easy for me.  In general, I’m not scared of animals—I love animals.  All sorts of animals.  And, to me, most animals are easy to deal with: there are some that you just have to handle with a lot of care, and some that you just better not try to handle at all.  Animals make sense to me (often more than people do).

But I was watching TV once, and of those horribly cheesy “When Animals Attack!” shows came on.  And I thought, this should be good for a laugh.  And, sure enough, story one was a hunter who, when he came face-to-face with a grizzly bear, turned and ran.  Idiot.  Story two was an African guide who let his clients bully him into getting “just a little bit closer” to a group of hippos.  This guy even came out and said that he knew better.  Story three was a guy who, while out hiking on a beach, decided to go take a swim.  In 10 feet of water.  In Australia.  The only reason the sharks didn’t eat him was that the crocodiles got to him first.  And then came the last story: a guy in California (you know: the place where I live) was jogging down a highway, and stopped to drink some water.  And got attacked by a mountain lion.  Not doing anything, mind you: not encroaching on the cougar’s territory, not ignoring advice about what to do when confronted with one, just miding his own damned business on the side of a friggin’ highway, leaning against a rock, and blam! mauled by a puma.  That was chilling to me.

I mean, the standard advice for mountain lions is to use your clothes to make yourself appear bigger.  But he literally had no time: one second he was like, what the fuck? is that a puma? and the next second he was getting his arm chewed off.  If he hadn’t managed to stab it in the neck with ... something or other, something that no doubt didn’t do much actual damage to the cougar, just enough to make it think twice about this being an easy meal ... if he hadn’t managed to to that, he’d have been one dead dude.  Now that’s scary.

• Apples or oranges?

Oranges.  Which is typically the place where Stephen would point out that you can’t put peanut butter on an orange.  Which is true, but you also can’t bite into an apple slice and have orange juice squirt out.  So, you know: trade-offs.

• Have you ever asked someone for their autograph?

The draw of this question is that the person answering is themselves a celebrity, so it’s interesting to hear who a famous person thought was so awesome that they wanted to get an autograph.  So poor little unknown me can’t possibly be nearly so interesting, even if I had a cool answer.  But, sadly, I do not: I’ve just never been into the idea that having someone scribble their name on a piece of paper is all that cool.  But, I dunno ... probably if I get the chance to meet of any of my pentagram of literary idols before they start to die off (or before I do), I would be hard-pressed not to ask for an autograph.

• What do you think happens when we die?

I mean, the simplest answer is, I don’t know.  And also that I’m fine with not knowing.  Here’s a quote that I’m fond of:

There’s nothing shameful in acknowledging that you don’t have the answers to every question about life.  Just accept the fact that you know only a fraction of what’s going on in the world.  You don’t have to attach explanations in terms of a special revelation of God’s will, a glimpse at the supernatural, evidence of a conspiracy, or anything else ...
— Harry Browne

In other words, it’s okay not to know.  Voltaire (supposedly) said: “Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.” So I’m comfortable with knowing that we can’t know, and just dreaming of possibilities.  Reincarnation is a possibility that I’m quite fond of, coming as it does with the concept of karma, which really satisfies my overblown sense of justice.  I’m also intrigued by the possiblity of ghosts, and I think it’s a little weird that we’ve culturally decided that people’s energy hanging around to talk to us after their body has perished is scary.  There’s also the possiblity that our consciousness just ceases to be and our atoms get scattered across the universe to make new matter, and I’m actually okay with that one too.  So many possibilities that are really intriguing; again, pretty weird that so many of us got hung up on this whole heaven and hell thing.

• Favorite action movie?

Well, as I’ve talked about before, I have a list of “top X movies”: I don’t like to restrict myself to any particular number.  Of those, none are what you might call a “pure” action movie—your Die Hards, your Lethal Weapons, your John Wicks or Jason Bournes.  But several are at least half action movie, and a few are more than that.  Here’s the ones that I think could be considered action movies: The Crow, Highlander, The Matrix, Pulp Fiction, and The Road Warrior.  Now, thinking about which one I like best as an action movie, I can eliminate The Crow, Highlander, and Pulp Fiction: while they’re fantasic movies, and they have some great action scenes, I’m not watching them for the action, if you see what I mean.  And, while I’m tempted to give it to The Road Warrior—while Mel Gibson did turn out to be an unbearable shit, George Miller’s movie is still an incredible piece of cinema, and (much like Mad Max: Fury Road) the movie isn’t very much about Max anyways—I think The Matrix wins out in the end.  While the science-fiction aspects are a big part of the draw for me, I can’t deny that many of the action set-pieces are just iconic, and still breathtaking even on my tenth-or-so watch.

• Favorite smell?

This question (and the next) are where the influence of the Pivot Questionnaire are undeniable: Colbert just took “what sound or noise do you love?” and turned it into “favorite smell,” because ... well, because that’s funnier.  But, sure: I’ll play along.

I was fortunate enough to grow up with both my grandmothers—all four of my grandparents, really, until I lost one grandfater shortly after graduating high school—and both of them cooked.  My one grandmother was all North Carolina farm girl, cooking ham and white corn and collard greens and potatoes in all their myriad forms and “cornbread” that was really something called a hoecake.  My other grandmother didn’t cook much—she had a housekeeper for that.  But the one thing she did cook, only on special occasions, was her spaghetti.  Now, there are competing stories on where this recipe came from, from the tall tale of an Italian cook that my grandfather served with in World War II to “she just found it in Ladies’ Home Journal,” but it was essentially just a standard American spaghetti-and-meatballs (and, if you think spaghetti and meatballs is Italian, I must refer you to Alton Brown’s “American Classics” episode of Good Eats for further education).  Nothing too special about it, really, but it has to cook for what seems like forever, especially when you’re a kid knowing that you’re getting spaghetti tonight.  By the time dinner was served, my mouth would be watering like crazy.  To this day, that smell (because of course we still make it) is both enticing and nostalgic.

• Least favorite smell?

Tough call.  In my family, I’m the designated person to deal with all undesireable bodily fluids: poop, blood, vomit, you name it.  So for the most part I’m inured to those types of smells.  I have a few food triggers, but they’re almost entirely confined to “only if there’s way too much of it” (e.g. cumin) or “only if I have to smell it for a really long time” (e.g. coffee).  A lot of pungent animal smells I have a weird fascination for, like skunk spray or crushed stinkbug—I don’t like smelling them, but I’m not repulsed either.  Even dead animal (say, if one of the cats brings us a “gift” of a dead rat or what-have-you) I consider unpleasant but bearable.  I think I may have to say dead fish: I’m not that wild about the smell of fresh fish, and the smell of a fishmarket or fishing dock, or just a beach where there’s a lot of dead fish washed up, and maybe a soupçon of rotting kelp ... that really turns my stomach.

• Exercise: worth it?

Well ... yeees?  I mean, who’s going to take the position that exercise isn’t worth it?  Maybe that’s why this question has been dropped from the newer iteration of the Questionert.

But of course the problem with exercise is that the benefits are long-term and theoretical, while the downsides are both immediate and practical.  So I readily admit that, even though I intellectually know that exercise is very much “worth it,” I still have difficulty motivating myself to do it.  Especially in the winter.  In the summer, I can swim, and I actually like swimming, so I don’t mind doing a few laps as exercise.  But walking or biking or all that other jazz ... yeah, I admit that sometimes I’m just “nah, the couch is fine.”

• Flat or sparkling?

This is the other question that’s been dropped, and I confess I miss it.  The most intriguing thing about it is, Colbert doesn’t specify whether he’s talking about water or wine (or I guess he might be talking about soda? but then is there really soda that’s flat on purpose?).  I always interpreted it to mean wine from when I first heard it; it was only later than it occurred to me he might mean water.  So, for wine, the answer is clear: you want frizzante.

Now, as a firm believer (and even pusher) of the theory of balance and paradox, it should come as no surprise to you that I find sparkling wines too sparkly and flat wines too flat.  If only there were a halfway point!  But of course there is: it just took me getting to my thirties (or maybe even forties) to understand enough about wines to realize it.  It’s called “frizzante,” and it means “gently sparkling,” or some say “semi-sparkling.” And, as it turns out, “gently” is just the right amout of sparkling, at least for me.

For water, it’s flat.  I don’t want bubbles in my water.

• What is the most used app on your phone?

I mean, pre-pandemic, it would have to be Waze.  The only reason I bought a smartphone, originally—and I held out long after most of my friends already had one—was so that I’d never have to try to read another map in the car again.

Nowadays ... well, my podcast app is a strong contender.  I listen to a podcast or two nearly every single day.  Other than that ... I guess it would be Medito.

I decided I would try meditating, and an app on my phone seemed like a decent way to go, but I soon found that they all want you to sign up for something or subscribe to something.  And then I found the Medito Foundation, with their radical concept that meditation—a global human practice for literally millenia—ought to be free.  Doing some research, I found a really cool article about its founders and decided to give it a try.  Now, I have to admit: when it comes to actual meditation, I’ve pretty much been a failure.  But the app also has a “sleep” section, where they give you meditations to do to help you relax and fall asleep.  And a subsection of that is “sleep stories.” These are brilliant little vignettes which tell an actual story that still somehow manages to work in the cues that help you relax: from “everything is completely calm” to “everyone is exactly where they need to be” to out and out “you feel your whole body relax.” Some of them are mostly realistic, some of them have a slightly dreamlike quality, and some are completely fantastical.  Many of them have a few different versions, read by different readers, so you can pick the one that you like best.  I listen to one of these sleep stories almost every night, rotating through the list of the ones I like, and I rarely get to the end of it.

• You get one song to listen to for the rest of your life.  What is it?

This is probably the biggest pain-in-the-ass question of the lot.  As of my typing this, I have over 20 thousand MP3 files under my music directory.  How am I going to pick just one?

Now, if anyone asks me what my favorite song is, I have an answer: there is one song that is exempt from my “no reuse” rule on my music mixes, and that is “Bonin’ in the Boneyard” by Fishbone.  I can’t say it’s my favorite song, but it is the one song that shows up on more of my mixes than any other, and that’s at least saying something.

But this question is not about my favorite song.  It’s about listening to one song for the rest of my life, and, as magnificent as “Bonin’ in the Boneyard” is, I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t eventually get sick of it.  Something a bit more complex is needed, something that can serve multiple purposes, can stand repeated listens and still reveal new depths.  Today, I think the best choice for that is “Lazy Calm,” by the Cocteau Twins.  It was the very first song of theirs that I ever heard, being the opening track of Victorialand, and it still has the power to immerse me in its swirling depths some 35 years later.  It has that lonely saxophone that I dig so much (provided by Richie Thomas of Dif Juz), a hypnotic bassline (weird, since they were without their longtime bassist Simon Raymonde at the time), and that ethereal guitar work and formless vocals that are the hallmark of the Cocteaus.  There’s even a long version that adds another 3 minutes to peruse, if I’m so inclined.

But if you ask me again tomorrow, I might have a totally different answer.

• What number am I thinking of?

23.  It’s always 23.

• Describe the rest of your life in 5 words.

First, let me say that I think the word “childish” gets a bad rap.  Once we get to be adults, we somehow imagine that we’re so much better than chidren that to be compared to them is insulting.  Pish-posh.  If more adults were like children, we’d be far better off: to be childish is to be innocent, guileless, creative, to want to play instead of to acquire power and wealth, to be trusting instead of devious.  And, if you know children who are not those things, you know children who have already started to turn into adults ... more’s the pity.  Me, I’m happy to be childish, regardless of how old I am.  So, therefore, my 5 words are:

Being childish with my children.

Next in the series is actually the one I wrote a while back: Talking with Chris Hardwick.

If I Were Inside the Actor's Studio with James Lipton

[This is a post in a series.  You may wish to read the introduction to the series.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

We begin our classroom with the questionnaire that my hero Bernard Pivot popularized for 26 glorious years.
— James Lipton

James Lipton was probably the first person I ever heard interview someone that made me really care about what the answers were.  Up until then, I was seeing people like Johnny Carson or even (in my youth) Merv Griffin talking to celebrities, and I mostly didn’t care—neither about the questions nor the answers.  Lipton was the one that drew me in.  Previously, I could barely stand to watch an actor get “interviewed” for 5 minutes.  After I discovered Inside the Actor’s Studio, I was watching it for an hour at a time.  Primarily this is because Lipton is a genius interviewer, almost certainly unmatched in our time.  He was such a cultural phenomemon that he became a running skit on Saturday Night Live, with Will Ferrell doing a spot-on impression (which Lipton reportedly loved).  He was famous for meticulous notes, often surprising actors with his detailed knowledge of their careers (on more than one occasion knowing about something which the person themself had completely forgotten).  And he was famous for ending every interview with what he referred to as “the Pivot Questionnaire.”

Bernard Pivot was a French journalist and host of several televsion shows, including Apostrophes and Bouillon de culture, an episode of one of which inspired Lipton to create Inside the Actor’s Studio.  Liption adapted his version of the questionnaire from Pivot; Pivot adapted his version from the Proust Questionnaire, which Marcel Proust answered in 1890 (or thereabouts).  The author of the original questions is unknown; apparently writing down your answers to a set of questions that were passed on from person to person was a sort of Victorian parlor game.  (Reminds me of the “purity tests” of my college career.)  But it strikes me as apropos that this whole thing started as a person answering the questionnaire unasked so that people who came after him might know more of him.  Which is exactly what I hope to achieve here.

The Pivot Questionnaire

(as adapted by James Lipton)

• What is your favorite word?

This is a tough one.  I can tell you that many people given this question tend to interpret it as “what word represents your favorite thing?” On the other hand, some people (including myself) are more of the opinion that it means “what word do you find most euphonious?” “Euphonious,” by the way, means “pleasing to the ear,” and is itself a pretty euphonious word.  Being a writer by inclination (though not by profession), I love words, and there are many awesome words which are both pleasing and useful.  I’m fond of “serendipity,” which I learned at a moderately young age (I would guess around 10 or 11) from a book of the same name.  I also like “verisimilitude,” which is a wonderful word that I use all the time in connection with my D&D games: to talk about “realism” in a fantasy game is silly, but you can strive for verisimilitude, which just means that the internal story logic has to be sound.

I tried checking what words I’d used most in my blog posts, but of course I don’t want to look at small words like “the” or “to.” So I decided to define “interesting words” as words of a certain length.  I experimented with my most used 8-letter (or more) words, 9-letter (or more) words, and so on up to 15-letter (or more) words, and found some interesting results.  Throwing out the proper names and whatnot, the word “interesting” itself is in the #2 spot for both 10- and 11-letter words (beaten out both times by “necessarily”).  In fact, adverbs make up a big part of this group, since you can make almost any cool adjective just a wee bit longer by tossing an “ly at the end.  Some of these (“particularly,” “unfortunately,” “occasionally”) are not that interesting, but some, such as “simultaneously” and “paradoxically” are.  Apparently I’m also fond of “responsibility,” “aforementioned,” and “implementation.” My favorite was the #1 word at 15-or-more-letters: “phosphorescence,” which I’ve apparently used 14 times (although that’s cheating a bit, since it’s in the name of one of my music mixes).

Actually, I don’t know if I can pick just one word.  I’m fond of semi-obscure words that people probably have to look up when I use them, like “diaphanous” or “mellifluous” or “effervescent.” I’ve often been advised by readers that I asked for critiques (in college or since then) that I should change this word or that to make it more “accessble,” but I say screw that.  If you never hit a word you don’t know, you never have a reason to expand your vocabulary, and the language starts withering away from lack of use.

I guess if I have to pick just one, I might go with “paradox,” which is both pleasing to say and also holds great meaning to me personally.

• What is your least favorite word?

I’m not sure I even have one ... I know that a lot of people hate the word “moist,” for instance, but to me it’s just another word, and it can come in quite handy on occasion.  There are also very few words (outside racial slurs) that I find displeasing to the ear.  I don’t know ... the best I can come up with is “dreck,” which is both dissonant to the ear and also an unpleasant concept.

• What turns you on?

I really love heat.  Almost everyone I know says they’d rather be cold than hot: “you can always put on more clothing,” they say, “but there’s only so much you can take off!” Pish-posh.  I despise being cold, and while being hot and sweaty isn’t pleasant, it’s more tolerable than shivering.  I also don’t really care for clothes all that much.

And there’s a lot of really great applications of heat, most of them employing limited amounts of clothing (or none at all).  I love taking a hot shower, for instance, and I love saunas, and especially hot tubs.  For that matter, just laying in the sun on a hot (preferably not too humid) day is pretty damned fine if you ask me.

• What turns you off?

I suppose it sounds a bit pretentious, but I have to say: injustice.  I often tell my kids “the world isn’t fair ... but people can be, if they choose, and it’s not unreasonable to expect them to be.” People treating other people unfairly really gets under my skin, whether it’s something as small as one person trying to pay less than their fair share, or something as big as institutional racism.  People can do better, and they damned well should.

• What sound or noise do you love?

The go-to answer here, from my years of watching Inside the Actor’s Studio, is “the sound of a baby’s laughter.” To the point where you kind of feel like a shitty parent if you don’t say that.  But I’ve always been one to buck a trend.

For me, it’s got to be music.  Music is always such a big part of my life: I play it while I work, while I read, while I program for fun, while I play D&D, while I sleep.  If you’ve read this blog more than casually, you’ll know that I have a ridiculously extensive collection of music mixes, where I try to have a mix on hand for any possible mood I might be in.  I’m listening to music right now as I type this.

• What sound or noise do you hate?

This is another one that some people try to turn into more than what I think the question is actually about.  “I hate the sound of people yelling at other people,” they might say, or somesuch twaddle.  But I take the question literally, so the sound that sets my teeth on edge—even more than fingernails on a chalkboard!—is a knife scraping across a plate.  Not all plates, and I suppose not all knives, but there’s a certain resonance and grinding dissonance that you can hit that just makes my whole body tense up.

• What is your favorite curse word?

This is, of course, one of my favorite questions.  In my experience, most of the men hesitate, and most of the women cheerfully respond with “fuck!” And, hey, don’t get me wrong: “fuck” is a great one.  It’s a classic for a reason.  But I’ve come to love portmanteau curse words: where you take a common curse and tack on something completely silly at the end.  I think “fucksticks” is my all-time favorite, but “shitballs” has its charms too.

• What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

For this question, “other than your own” was always assumed to mean “other than being an actor,” given the context.  For me, it would mean, other than being a programmer.  And I’ve always loved being a programmer.  I find it quite creative, first of all, and also challenging, which is important to keep from getting bored.  Other than that, I suppose “famous author” isn’t exactly a profession, so I think I would say a teacher.  Sadly, there just isn’t enough money in it to support me and my family and my house in sunny Southern California with the pool out back where I can engage in many of those heat-related activities that I described above ... I’m not primarily motived by money, but I do have a certain comfort level that I want to maintain.  I wish that our society valued teachers more.  I’ve taught a few classes in my time (technicall classes, for adults, that is), and I’ve also done some tutoring of people younger than I, and I’ve always enjoyed it and found it very fulfilling.  I would really love to design a college curriculum where I teach classes that eventually deliver you a B.A. in computer programming; I think the current B.S. degrees really don’t prepare you for the reality of programming.

• What profession would you not like to do?

Well, I suck at nearly all forms of physical labor: even when I was more in shape than I am now, I always lacked physical coordination, and I have a tendency to overthink things.  But that feels like a bit of a cop-out.  I think what I would really hate is any job where you have to reject people a lot: HR, maybe, or casting director ... something along those lines.  How can people spend all day breaking other people’s spirits without it breaking their own?

• If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

Well, being the confirmed agnostic that I am, I don’t always think of this one strictly in terms of religious imagery.  In fact, there’s something both poignant and comforting in the image that the Red Sea Pedestrians paint when they point out that “We Are So Small”:

So now we long to take to the sky and traverse the reaches of space,
Returning our bodies back to the source that led them to this delicate place.
We’ll ask the forces unknown,
“Are we out here all alone?”
They’ll say “you are so small we can’t see you at all,
But we love you: come on back home.”

But, to answer the question more succinctly and more personally, I think it would have to be: “You did the best you could, and that was good enough.”

Next time, I’ll essay the Colbert Questionert.

The Self-Interviews

What It Is

Sometimes when I watch or listen to one of these shows, I imagine how I might answer the interviewer’s questions.
— me

I’m embarking on a new series in which I answer the questions that some of the great interviewers of our time typically put to their guests.  If you’re interested to know why I’ve decided to do this, feel free to read “The Motivation” down at the bottom.  But it’s not required.

Here’s a list of of what I’m planning to do; I’ll update these so they’re links to the posts once I write them.  Note that I’ve actually already written one of them: it I have a post from nearly 5 years ago that fits right into this theme, so I’m retroactively declaring it to be part of the series.

I may add more later, as they come up.

The List

• Variation on the Pivot Questionnaire (James Lipton, Inside the Actor’s Studio)
• The Colbert Questionert (Stephen Colbert, The Late Show)
• One Question (Chris Hardwick, Talking with Chris Hardwick)
• Rapid Fire (Mayim Bialik, Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown)

The Motivation

So, it’s occurred to me that my blog is a bit like a diary.  My kids absolutely don’t read it now, but perhaps some day they will.  Now, I don’t know if any of you other readers much care what my answers to any of the questions posed by famous interviewers are, but I think that my children may find those answers interesting, one day ... maybe after I’m gone.  Not that I expect to be gone any time soon, but I do fully expect to be gone before my children ever get around to reading any of this stuff.

It’s a weird thing that we often want to try to connect with people after it’s too late to do that in person, instead of doing it while they’re right there next to us.  I’m sure there’s some aspect of human nature that explains this, but I have no clue what it is.  I just want my children to know that I did the same thing when I was younger—hell, I’m still doing it, though I’m finally old enough to realize I need to do better—so, you know ... don’t feel bad about it or anything.

Hopefully these posts give some insight into what I thought and felt, about life and living and all that jazz.

Caveats

I’m sure most of these questions are designed to be answered with brief responses.  I don’t do brief.

Also, there will be cursing.  Because, of course there will.

If I Were Talking with Chris Hardwick

I used to hate “talk shows” when I was younger.  I still do hate most of them.  But more and more I find that I enjoy watching certain people ask questions of people that I know the work of (be that musical, cinematic, or what-have-you).  I have some vague thoughts on why that is, which will perhaps become its own blog post one day.  Today, though, I wanted to chat briefly about one such certain person, mainly to use that as a springboard for a whole ’nother topic.

This certain person is Chris Hardwick.  So far I’ve watched every episode of his new show, titled simply Talking with Chris Hardwick.  I didn’t actually expect to enjoy it, but I figured, I loved @midnight, and I enjoyed Talking Dead (and the far more occasional Talking Preacher), so why not give it a try?  And I’ve actually liked it quite a lot.

This has a huge amount to do with the fact that it’s Chris Hardwick asking questions.  I enjoyed Jon Stewart interviewing people, and I continue to enjoy Stephen Colbert doing the same.  Once upon a time I was really into Inside the Actor’s Studio with James Lipton, and I’ve even listened to quite a few episodes of Fresh Air with Terry Gross.  What all these people have in common is the ability to ask interesting questions, the sort of questions that you wish you’d asked.  Often the sort of questions that you didn’t even know you wanted to know the answer to before it was spoken aloud, but now that it has been you’re really desperate to hear the response.  And they’re all interesting people themselves, people who can interject their own stories without taking over the conversation, which is a tricky thing to manage.  An interviewer who talks about themself too much instead of letting the guest talk is annoying, but an interviewer who just asks question after question without throwing in their own 2¢ every now and again is boring.  It’s a delicate balance, and these are the folks who get it right, at least for me.

One thing that Hardwick does that reminds me (fondly) of Lipton is that he ends each interview with the same format.  In Lipton’s case, it was the long-form Proust Questionnaire.  Hardwick takes a simpler approach, and just asks a single question: what’s one piece of advice that has always inspired or helped you, that you might want to pass on to other people?  He rearranges the wording every show, but that’s the gist of the question, and I think it’s a good one.  His guests have had some interesting answers.

And, to once again quote Bill Cosby,¹ I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Sometimes when I watch or listen to one of these shows, I imagine how I might answer the interviewer’s questions.  I’ve come up with answers to Lipton’s whole list, at various times.²  So, the other day, after watching eleven episodes of Talking, I started to wonder what my answer to this question would be.

Of course, I couldn’t have a simple one-line answer.  Like everything I write, or say, or think, the full answer is more complex.  But, if I had to boil it down to a one-liner, it would be this:

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Now, this is generally attributed to Confucius, but that’s mainly because all quotes in the history of man were either spoken by Confucius, Voltaire, or Mark Twain, and which one your quote was spoken by only depends on how old you’d like to pretend it is.³  But it doesn’t really matter who said it; it’s a pretty little nugget of wisdom regardless.

It reminds me of something I read on Bruce Campbell’s website.  Now, if you visit his site today,⁴ it’s all slick and commercial and bleaugh.  But once upon a time it was all dorky and stripped down and black and white and blue, mostly consisting of big walls of text and looking like he slapped it together himself.  (Which I suspect he did.  For the record, Mr. Campbell, I liked it better before.)  But it had some cool shit on it.  Like this quote, which I immediately stole for my quote file:

I just love acting.  I can never understand why more people don’t make their hobby into a career.  Sure, it’s unpredictable, but no job is 100% secure these days anyway.

— Bruce Campbell

Ain’t that the truth.  And it perfecty dovetails with my personal experience: I ran my own company for years, and it was not always fun, and it was never easy, but I loved it.  I loved what I did, and I loved all the people I did it with,⁵ and I loved being able to set my own schedule, and I loved being able to say “no” to work if it offended my sensibilities, or if the customer skeeved me out, or whatever.  I loved being the conduit for other people coming to work every day and loving it.  I loved being in charge when I wanted to be and making other people be in charge when I didn’t.  And, even after I stopped running my own company and went to work for someone else, I still loved it.  I’ve had pretty decent luck picking great companies who respected me and trusted me and gave me freedom,⁶ and I tell computers what to do for a living, which I find to be creative and satisfying.  I love my job, and I think I’ve had success and happiness because of it.

But it also occurred to me to contrast the Bruce Campbell quote with another quote from another screen star—in this case, Mike Rowe, famously of Dirty Jobs.  And here’s what he had to say on this topic:

The idea that there’s a perfect job is really comforting ... but dangerous, in the same way that there’s a perfect soulmate. The guys I met on Dirty Jobs, and the women, by and large, were living proof that the first thing to do is to look around and see where everybody else is headed, and then go in the other direction. The second thing to do is embrace the thing that scares you, frightens you, or otherwise makes you blanch. The third thing to do is to become really really good at that thing. And then the final thing, the thing that makes really happy people happy, is to figure out a way to love it.

— Mike Rowe, Ask Me Another, 5/20/2016

Now, I have to tell you that, at first, I hated this quote.  It seems to be saying the exact opposite of what the Bruce Campbell quote was saying.  Instead of “follow your passion and turn that into your career,” it says “find a career that nobody else wants and then learn to love it.” That didn’t feel right to me ... at first.  But then I realized: it really is the same thing.  Either way you get there, you arrive at loving what you do.  In the end, does it really matter which route you took?

So I think this is the heart of the advice: love what you do.  Whether that means to take what you love and do it for a living, or whether it means to throw yourself into what you do so hard and so thoroughly that you come to love it, the point is that, when you love going to work every day, you’re a happier person.  When you dread it, it’s hard to be happy with everything else you have in life.  If your work makes you miserable, you’re going to be miserable, and also you’re going to make everyone around you miserable.  That’s no way to live.

But when you love what you do, every day is like a gift.  Oh, sure: you don’t always love every day—you don’t always love every gift you get either.  There will be bad days among the good, sure.  Days when you come home and you’re just tired, and you don’t want to think about anything.  But those are the exceptions.  Most days, you get to work and you see a bunch of people that you like (or at least ones that you don’t mind tolerating for the bulk of your day), and you sit down at your desk (or whatever workstation your job demands), and you do something fun.  And even when it’s frustrating, or it pisses you off, or it makes your brain hurt, it’s still fun anyway.  And one day you wake up and realize it’s been years, and that you’re still happy, and then you think about what it might have been like if you’d just done a job all those years for nothing but a paycheck, and you’re glad you didn’t have to find that out.

So, Chris Hardwick: that’s my piece of advice, the thing that inspires me, that I think would be useful for other people.  Love what you do.  It’s always worked for me.

Next in the series, I’ll essay Mayim Bialik’s “Rapid Fire.”

__________

1 Who has become a much more controversial figure since the last time I used this quote.  To the point where some may say I should not continue to use it.  Obviously I’ve decided to do so anyway.  Not because I’m a Cosby apologist—on the contrary, I’m quite disgusted by the whole situation—but rather because I don’t believe that the bad that people do erases the good.

2 For the record: I’ve decided my favorite curse word is “fucksticks.” But it’s a tough choice.

3 For an excellent breakdown of the possible origin and certain popularization of this quote, the excellent site Quote Investigator will hook you right up.

4 No, I won’t link you to it, as I didn’t the last time I mentioned his website in a footnote: see my open letter to Wil Wheaton.

5 I mean, of course I did: I hired ’em all.

6 Which you may recall is, according to me, the 3 things that employees want.