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When I close most of the improv classes I teach, I quote one of my favorite things Mick Napier, the Artistic Director of the Annoyance Theatre, ever taught me: assuming competence.

So often we enter learning situations with a losing perspective. It may be feeling like we need to “fix” something wrong with ourselves. Or, feeling like we’re we’re up for the challenge…but only to the point of initial discomfort, at which point we decide we’ve made our maximum effort and that’s the limit of our abilities. My friend Annie yells at me for not working hard enough at the gym — I flex my muscles till I can feel them warmed up, but she insists that the muscles must shake for them to actually improve!

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After my mother died, I went through the things in my childhood bedroom. I was going to be home for awhile, and I didn’t have much to do, except feel pain. So, I rummaged around a bit.

I found the cassette tape my mom gave me on my 18th birthday. It was an audio recording of my natal astrological reading from a famous astrologist in San Francisco, delivered shortly after I was born on 12/29/1985.

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It’s traveling season. Everyone and everything will likely be insane at the airport.

So, I’ll share with you tip that make some people’s day and possibly upgrade your airline experience at the same time. This tip was taught to me by the illustratious Brad Moore, who is a kind and smart man and also a contender for the Mars 100 project to save the human race.

It’s so simple and human; it’s mindboggling.

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I was in Cyprus, standing over an ancient cliff, looking at churning waters below.

My body would not do it. Physically, all the nerves in my body resisted. Alarm bells! The drop was two, maybe three stories, and you had to jump far enough to make it to the deep water, or you’d land on the rocks. It was enough to stop me cold. My body wouldn’t jump. No, no, it would not.

“JUMP!” My friends were screaming at me from the crystal waters below.

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I was depressed about Donald Trump winning the election, and I decided the antidote was apple picking:

I sequester two of my best friends, Annie and Joey, into joining my escapade. I borrow a car, plan the five-hour roundtrip route, and pow-wow an itinerary with my WASP-y friend Sam, who went to Bard College. It would be an Americana-ish adventure to distract me from feeling like a stranger in my own country.

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How do you talk to people when they aren’t on receive?

Commiserating with my friend last night at Old Town Bar in NYC over the state of affairs in the US, he urged me to talk to people. The solution, he said, is to get out of our online echo chambers and reach across the political spectrum to anyone you know who doesn’t hold your values and try to start a dialogue.

But what if people aren’t open to listening? What if no matter how gently or forcefully you try to broach a subject and get a dialogue going, your words are just going in one ear and out the other?

I was at my cousin Jerry Sorkin’s funeral. He had fought a death sentence of Stage IV lung cancer since August 2007—cancer created by the treatments necessary to cure the Hodgkin’s Lymphoma he overcame in college and before that as a teenager. The first-year survival rate for Stage IV lung cancer is 2% or less; he lived nine years. He was someone who faced pain and suffering on a level I can’t even begin to comprehend and soldiered on positively to enjoy a standard of life unheard of with his diagnosis. He organized the first (now yearly) Breathe Deep fundraising walk on Washington for LUNGevity to bring that foundation’s cause to the national stage. He became the President of his synagogue; the synagogue for his service was packed wall-wall. He had gone to law school and studied in the same peer group as President Obama, and Obama himself called Jerry’s family to offer condolences. Jerry had obviously meant a lot to a lot of people whom I’d never met.

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I got catfished once in Positano, Italy.

I have a habit of taking solo trips to destinations chock-full of honeymooners. As a single gay man, it drives me insane. I don’t know why I repeatedly torture myself.

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I’m laying on a yoga mat; my mind is going insane.

I’m caught in-between being over-gorged on a buffet dinner I’d went to town on (eating tempura after tempura at the time felt so good, justified cause I’m on vacation, happy-happy-joy-joy), being bitten alive by mosquitos swarming over the parapet, alternating cold and hot, torn between action and inaction, and randomly lying next to some creaking wooden window frame that is driving a hard wedge between me and mindfulness everytime the wind blows.

This is me at the sacred Tibetan Bowl ceremony at The Yoga Barn in Bali.

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Coming off my three week adventure to Bali, I can admit: returning to New York City haunted me the whole time. Not only because I faced a 28-hour flight (with eight-hour layover in an obscure Southern Chinese Airport where the barely functioning WiFi restricted all access to Facebook, Instagram, or the New York Times). But because it meant that fairytale, find-your-soul, fun time would be over, and I would be faced with the question: “So, do you feel refreshed?”

And: “Are you ready to get back to work?”