This Is Why I'm Like This: Tim Minchin and Jim Carrey

   Australian musician and comedian Tim Minchin gave a graduation speech in Australia in 2013 that I recently discovered. I played it for my poetry class in January, and have used his words to guide this semester. I recommend everyone take time to watch it. I'm just relating his words to my life here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoEezZD71sc

   "Be a teacher. Please, please be a teacher. Even if you're not a teacher, be a teacher. Celebrate your knowledge and spray it." The most impactful people are those willing to teach, and they don't have to work in a school. Edward Albee taught me volumes, and he wasn't a 'teacher', but he was a teacher. I've learned from directors, from bartenders, head waitresses, fellow playwrights and actors. They were generous and allowed me to "go to school on them", sharing with me their training, their understanding of humanity, their education and experiences. I believe I have managed to teach others both in and outside of school, simply by being a cautionary tale. You can also teach others by sharing your mistakes. Of course, it's helpful if you learn from them as well and stop repeating the same errors over and over....but that's for another time.

    "Be grateful. Send thank you notes, be gracious in your praise of those you admire."  My poetry classes begin each day by writing a brief but authentic note to a teacher in the building. I said "It doesn't matter if you've never sat in their class, or if you have and you didn't get along with them. That's irrelevant, they still earned gratitude for giving up their time planning and teaching."So it's forced gratitude, but it has made a difference to most of the teachers who have received the notes with equal gratitude, and frequently on a day they say they needed it. Which, as a teacher, I'm telling you is every day. I have to believe that even though they groaned the first day of class when they heard we were doing this, that now, eighteen weeks later, they have come to understand how important it is to say "Thank You" on a regular basis. I have taken my own advice as well, and started sending cards again. I believe people like to get mail that is not a bill or junk, and only yearly they get grad announcements. I was also very sugary and verbose in a letter I wrote to Mr. Albee, praising his impact on my stupid little life, and thanking him yet again for meeting with my students. I will never understand why he impacted me the way he did, but I am beginning to at least be able to identify it. Ultimately, I'm a grouchy homosexual eighty year old man.

    "Define yourself by what you love, not in opposition to things." This one needs to be heard by most of the country. He posits that, instead of hating or being in opposition to everything and using that as your guide to who you are, be enthusiastically dedicated to what you love. I couldn't agree more, and I have tried my damndest to do this in an environment that I frequently hate. To be clear, I don't HATE language arts, it's just not what I love. Joseph Campbell said "follow your bliss", but he gives us no road maps as to how. What if you haven't found your bliss? Then, I argue, you celebrate what you do enjoy, pay the bills doing something adjacent and catch yourself when you are negative. I believe your bliss is there in your heart, you just need to be quiet and listen to it. In my case, of course, this causes the bipolar to flare. I'm celebrating the poets I do love and teaching them to people who don't care. BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME.  This statement is a great way to remind everyone to get their hate off of Facebook, stop tweeting and retweeting hatred and defining yourself by it. I have Facebook friends who are defining themselves by their hate. They don't even know they're doing it, they think they're just expressing their opinion...over and over and over...but I had to silence them, and in some cases just unfriend them, because stop. Stop it. I get it. I get that you hate Trump. You're letting that consume you  and define you instead of stepping back into what it is that you LOVE and celebrating that. I, personally, love sloths. I post sloth videos, specifically of them getting baths. I also love Ireland. And for a bit I was flying pithy affirmations to get through rougher patches. Thank you, Facebook friends, who consistently post photos of chickens, the Botanic gardens, affirmations, shows you are attending, past shows you've attended, gymnastics...OK, most of that is Eric. Be Eric, everyone.

  "A passionate commitment to short term goals." This was rough as a core teacher in a building pushing long term goals. Go To College! But dude, maybe you just need to go to class tomorrow. Maybe you need to stop passing out, to get over a break up, fight the green eyed monster (thank you Shakespeare for that term) or find a reason to get out of bed. Be passionate about those goals. I like doing this. I was passionate about getting us to Ireland, passionate about being in Ireland, passionate (until I couldn't any more) about the renovation, which was supposed to be a short term goal five months ago...:P But I like it, it relieves the anxiety and pressure of "What the hell am I going to do with my life?" I worried about it for 52 years, and it got me...here. So now, I commit myself fully to short term goals, and I mean short. Like "clean the floors on Sunday".

  Jim Carrey gave a commencement address to the Maharishi University, which has gone around more popularly than Tim Minchin, for obvious reasons. I love that he has embraced this spiritual approach and one of my short term goals is to learn more about various religions. But when he talks of his father, who, out of fear, made a safe choice instead of doing what he loved, I stop breathing every time I watch it. His father lost his "safe" job, throwing the family into disarray. "You can fail at something you don't like, so why not take a chance on what you love?" It hurts on many levels, as first of course, I was doing what I loved and still lost it. But I know people who made safe choices and are unhappy, and now feel trapped. This idea feeds "Let go and let God", don't you think?  As a theatre teacher, I preached "NO FEAR", constantly, but in lang arts that's not really a thing. We have to test the crap out of them, meet standards, blah blah blah all based in fear. It's sick and psychological warfare and the kids are suffering. Their anxiety level is the highest its been in generations. And I am now getting off track....

  Don't make decisions because you panicked, because you're afraid. Make decisions because you want to do The Thing That You Love. Make short term goals as stepping stones to get there, commit yourself fully to what you love. Share what you have learned. Be grateful. The sad truth is that nobody from my age on down is going to have any type of retirement, we're all working until we die. So fill your life with gratitude, with experiences, with travel and love for whatever it is you love.
 
  Scene.