Mindfulness

The most important detail for you to be clear about is who is in the audience. How much did they pay to get into the event? Say, for an art competition, who are the participants: adults from a local correctional facility or high school students? You’ll want to cater your talk to their perspective.

I get very upset thinking about our president and how he mistreats people. This whole disgusting administration makes me angry. I’ve been told that I should have compassion for him, but how is it possible to have compassion for this fascist?

People breed puppies in their backyards and then sell them to pet shops for a couple of hundred dollars so that the pet shop can turn around and sell them for twice that much to fools like your boyfriend.

I am inspired by artists who say “I’m going to write or paint this weekend” without regard to “what” they are going to write or paint. Sometimes we just have to put brush to canvas, without being attached to the result.

I want to work on making things better, by voting, by talking about this stuff online and in person, by recognizing my white male privilege and not abusing it, by being a vegetarian, because “human privilege” exists too (and I know that the way we treat animals reflects how we treat each other).

Keshet’s Carolyn Tobias asks: How do we water the seeds of failure to have that pain actually produce something valuable? Learning is a verb; an action; a continual process. Learning from failure is actively choosing to see each failure as the beginning, and not the end.

Instead of interpreting everything in order to feel like I have a grasp on what is going on, I am actively sitting back and looking and listening in the studio and playing with space. I’m learning, or unlearning—whichever way it goes. Isn’t this how we evolve as humans, artists and a nation?

I was a bookish, literarily-devout writing major. The type who read prose poems and flash fiction anthologies in the corner at parties, that sort of thing. And though I wouldn’t have admitted it then, one of the reasons I didn’t own a smartphone was because I was afraid of it.

Driving across the country solo can be one of the loneliest parts of the life of a comedian, but the open road has recently become one of my favorite job perks. Letting the thoughts flow with the asphalt has the power to put me in the zen state I need for my creativity to come alive—and podcasts can really help.

How about acting out the fantasies that you only dreamed of during “The Before Time” (which is how I think we will soon be referring to everything that happened prior to January 20, 2017)?

There’s a saying you’ll hear all over the arts world that goes, “If you like anything else, do that instead.” It can mean whatever you want it to. For me, it meant, “If you do something else, it’s because you failed at acting.”

If I look tired, I probably am, and therefore I am either: A) grumpy or, B) not wearing eyeliner, and well, screw you either way. If I am angry or anxious, maybe I have my reasons, and a chill pill isn’t what I need.

Some of these tomes will open you like a window and let it all hang out. Others will flash some skin. Others will make you weepy, with a whopping hangover after. And, some, I can promise, you just might hate.

I’ll be honest, the simple act of listing what we’ve accomplished makes me feel pretty great and makes me excited to contemplate what we’ll achieve in the coming year and years beyond that. Because, to continue being honest, I feel a palpable feeling of overwhelm.

Women who found themselves marching with us joked about “being Indian for a day” and then got angry when we asked them to leave because of their disrespect.

Ocotillo medicine is used to move stagnation. Thus “thorn-bed” has a double meaning suggesting pain, while acting as a remedy for ending the phenomena of being stuck, blocked, or otherwise suffering.