#38. Extraterrestrial Believers and You
The truth is...right here???
Hi everyone,
This weekend I had a fun show and fun hangout in Woodstock, NY! I wish I had more to say about it than that, but this summer my life has been kind of tour/picket/tour/picket/tour/picket on a loop, and I’m running out of new thoughts about those things. On Sunday I got an email asking me to confirm with the rental car location that I’d have the car back on time, and for some reason it filled me to the cheap seats with an Andy Rooney-like fury. How dare you ask me to confirm that I planned to do the thing you were already going to financially penalize me for not doing? Especially when you can’t even confirm that you’ll have my reservation ready to pick up on time even after asking me to show up 15 minutes early to retrieve it.
See? I can’t imagine this was fun for people to read!!!
Fortunately, other people do have interesting things to say! My friends Dru, you may remember as Birthday Party Shrek from a short film I linked to a couple of newsletters ago, and Ellen have made a short film about the perils of the American healthcare system, especially for people working in the arts or other gig-based fields! It’s really smart and funny and well-made, and it’s for a really good cause! (Also, if you have a couple of bucks to spare and want to help workers impacted by the AMPTP’s continued refusal to negotiate with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, you can donate to the Entertainment Community Fund and specify it’s for people working in film and TV.)
My show this Sunday (8/6) at the DC Improv is really close to selling out! So grab your tickets now if you want to come! My shows on 8/8 and 8/9 at Zanies in Nashville and the Comedy Zone in Charlotte are NOT close to selling out, so please grab tickets to those as well!
Oh yeah! I’m also on the most recent episode of Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me with guest Randall Park and guest host Karen Chee (as well as panelists Zainab Johnson and Tom Bodett)!!! (Show night shoes pictured below.)
PEP TALK FOR PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE IN ALIENS
Well played, alien enthusiasts! You were right! I mean, I never doubted the existence of extraterrestrials, so I guess we were right, even thought that feels a little bit like an agnostic claiming victory in the event that it’s proven there is a god. It’s like betting that SOMEONE will win the Super Bowl. Sure! Okay! Technically I was right, but I was banking on what feel like overwhelming odds coming through.
With some government weirdo (didn’t research, not going to) admitting that aliens are almost definitely real and have been covered up by the government, it’s time for you (and Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge) to take a victory lap. You stayed the course even when people made fun of you and called you conspiracy theorists and were like: “Oh so you think there are little green men out there?” Why wouldn’t there be little green men? As if that’s so much weirder than the duck-billed platypus and the giant squid existing on Earth!!!
In the rest of our defense, why wouldn’t the government want us to know they found evidence of UFOs sooner? It feels like something we could all root for across party lines. Who doesn’t enjoy a little benign American nationalism? That’s half of the appeal of the Olympics and the moon landing. And in this case we didn’t even have to invent anything or hate another country! These bad boys literally fell out of the sky! Take the win, the government!!! Be cool and impressive like an older sibling who knows about hip underground bands and/or found porn in the woods. I know you want us to think you’re cool! Otherwise the president wouldn’t wear aviator sunglasses.
Long-time believers in this stuff deserve to feel vindicated! You stuck to your (laser) guns through tough times. You had faith even when that faith was not rewarded. You believed in something you couldn’t see and didn’t start some kind of holy war about it. I respect your tenacity and your pacifism. And yes, there’s a chance that a lot of what you believe is still totally ridiculous and off-base. But that’s a reality to deal with another time. Because right now, you’re right enough. So enjoy that sweet, sweet wave of public approval, before people turn on you and start to wonder if you yourselves have been aliens all along.
(Also if you liked this maybe you’d like Katie Heaney’s newsletter about aliens!!!)
PEP TALK FOR A READER
(I’ve done a little fiddling with this one for brevity! I CAN DO THAT IF I WANT!)
My two daughters are both adopted, from the same biological parents. We adopted our oldest in 2022, and then her younger sister was born a few months later, whose adoption we just finalized.
We just found out that their bio-mom is (likely) pregnant again. I won’t get into the specifics, but it’s probable that if she has another child, they would come to us, and likely need adoptive parents.
We have agreed that if a third child comes, we would open our home again to them and move towards adoption (should that be the case, which again, is a near certainty).
We are confident that this is the right choice, and we want to do everything possible to raise our girls with their sibling.
But man, I’m so scared. I’m not scared about taking another child in, we know that’s what’s right for our family. But it’s just such a huge shift in dynamic.
I don’t need to be talked in or out of it. I just need a pep talk.
Well, well, well. It seems as if after a couple of weeks of fairly straightforward requests right in my wheelhouse, I’m back to being out of my depth again! But, if people only wanted to hear easy things, I wouldn’t be of much use now would I?
Here we go: It sounds like you have made up your mind about this situation! It also sounds like, as big a change as this will be, you have the resources to accommodate another child! (I imagine if you hadn’t you would have said something like: “Where will we put this baby? And what will we feed it? And how will we acquire it a big floppy sunhat that makes them look like a tiny old person?”) You sound convinced that this is the right thing to do for this slightly-more-than-hypothetical baby, and for your family. So: It’s time to start preparing to cross that bridge, because it seems like you’re going to come to it sooner rather than later.
Aside from the practical concerns you’re dealing with, I am very impressed by your family’s capacity for love and care. As someone with zero children and one dog, I still sometimes feel overwhelmed by responsibility, obligation, and attachment. (My dog sleeps for about twenty hours a day and complains for four, and I would fight a lion for her.) I don’t know! Adoption can be so fraught, but I still really feel a lot of admiration for people who are open to adding a new child to their family in an unexpected way. I have a few friends who have become stepdads recently, and that always strikes me as such a beautiful commitment. Stepdad is a really adult relationship to take on, even more than biological dad sometimes. Like, no one becomes a stepdad by accident after his girlfriend was impressed by the Mustang he bought with money from his landscaping job in high school. But I’m still not fully used to friends assuming this responsibility. I’m just now growing accustomed to hearing a three-year-old call my high school friend “daddy.” I am not prepared to hear a nine-year-old call my friend “Craig” like they’re roommates or something. The point is, what you’re doing is admirable, to me!
So, good job being open to doing something so intense! I hope you and the family and your kids’ biological mom all make it through this transition as smoothly as possible assuming, as you’ve assumed, that it’s going to happen!
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
Carly Rae Jepsen - “Solo”
Carly Rae Jepsen released a new album last week, and honestly I haven’t listened to it enough for any tracks to jump out at me as standouts. So instead of picking more or less at random (or godforbid doing more research), here is probably my favorite CRJ track, which comes from a (widely released) collection of b-sides. It’s a bounce-back-from-a-breakup bop and is also in the lineage of her history of songs about one-on-none romantic encounters. Her overall vibe as a pop star is kind of…cheerfully horny, and once nice thing about that is that it means her music is good to listen to for cheerful purposes or horny purposes, dealer’s choice!
UPCOMING TOUR DATES
I’m in the middle of the second leg of my 1900s Kid Tour, and the first few dates are listed here! The rest of them so far are of course on my website!
8/6 - DC Improv (on pace to sell out!!!!)
8/8 - Zanies in Nashville
8/9 - Comedy Zone Charlotte
8/31 - Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me in Ann Arbor (sold out!!!)
9/8-9/9 - House of Comedy Detroit
9/29-9/30 - Laugh Camp St. Paul (several shows!!!)
For the alien believers who stick to their guns, would it be lasers or phasers?
As someone who has 2 kids, my wife & I stopped because we didn’t want to be outnumbered so I’m impressed that your pep talk writer is willingly taking on a 3rd. But I’m left with the feeling that the mom might have a 4th & then what?
dear josh,
you are great at pep talks! (pep talking the pep talker!) thanks for doing what you do always!
love,
myq