I Don’t Know Who I Am - Part I

Prior to landing at Heathrow Airport in the UK, the flight attendants handed out a Landing Card to anyone who had citizenship outside the EU. I took one and filled it out with relative ease: name, occupation, nationality, and address of destination. The only one that gave me a bit of a dilemma was the inquiry of my “occupation”. This seemingly innocent question of my identity invades my life quite often in oral and written form, ranging from cocktail parties to credit card applications. Some people are very comfortable and quite confident of who they are and what they do. The reason I hesitate to answer this subject is because I’m not sure of who I am or what I do exactly.

My life is similar to Bruce Wayne and Batman sans billions of dollars, having un-murdered parents, a kick ass car (or even a car for that matter), and pectoral muscles (quads, delts, calves, etc…). By day, I have a Johnny Punchclock job that pays the bills and provides health care but that is not who I am. By night, I pursue “who I am” as a comedian but I’ve decided to limit my roadwork (read—paid gigs) and have concentrated on being in NYC as much as possible (read—unpaid or next to nothing gigs) to create relationships with casting agencies and the television networks. I wish they would breakdown the “occupation” question into two parts: “occupation of desire” and “occupation of necessity”. I don’t even want to throw in the labels of “writer”, “blogger” or “actor” into the mix or my known issue of bipolarized occupations will escalate to schizophrenic.

Putting aside my own existential issues and insecurities, I’ve become timid of filling in the word “comedian” on official forms because it always seems to create a dicey situation of no return because if you start to back peddle you appear like a liar. Credit gets turned down, premium rates go up and the automatic assumption that you would love to hear lame over told jokes from that point on.

So back to the landing card (…to be cont’d)