#193 - Rabbit Rabbit! Welcome to March!

Conan O'Brien is hosting The Oscars this weekend.

He's kind of a quintessential host-type. His "Gee We're Screwed" Music Man parody opening for the Emmy's gets stuck in my head no less than once a month since it was first performed.

I saw pictures of him rolling out the red carpet and they were just so classic Conan because he's always used the length of his body to accentuate his physical comedy and he's just so Aware of how to be funny after spending decades focusing on what makes people laugh.

I wasn't a Late Night🌙 fan because I just...wasn't. So his Inside The Actors Studio was the first time I found out about the masturbating bear and the strings dance and the fact that he wrote Marge Vs. The Monorail.

The Inside episode was filmed as a beautiful tribute to his career culmination of getting The Tonight Show, something he very candidly admits to coveting.

Conan wanted to be in a show business of the Bob Hope tradition, so he took tap dancing lessons as a kid.

He's sent off to this new arc in his career with all the well-wishes anyone could ever hope for. Here's thee pinnacle of his career and isn't it incredibly we all got to watch him achieve it together?

And then we watched him lose it. In this really awful publicly painful way, we saw the culmination and subsequent destruction of a dream.

So he took some time off, did a tour because he legally couldn't be on TV, continued to pay his staff out of his own pockets, made a documentary about the tour, and eventually returned to TBS with a show that was...looser (you could tell because his suit had been swapped for a denim jacket & jeans) and eventually launched a podcast.

He had his own network of comedians, he sponsored stand-up showcases, he even Executive Produced some other late night shows while at TBS.

He retired from television last year, his podcast is still going incredibly strong, and this Sunday he's hosting the Oscars.

And while I don't know him personally, I think it's been inspiring to see him keep going.

Sure, one dream was over. Brutally revoked with a hint of personal vendetta by the literal powers that be.

And he mourned it publicly.

But then he also moved on. He did a slightly different thing. He kept the people around him who he valued most and just...kept going. Kept creating. Kept figuring it out.

It didn't work out the way he thought it would and there was no way to know at the time if the next projects would work either.

I've been dealing with a big upheaval in my life this year. It happened in ways I could have never predicted, it's deeply shaken my understanding of myself, and cast a lot of doubt about how my faith in others manifests.

There's no roadmap, there are no promises, but I just have to keep going anyway. (What's the other option? Turning back around??)

Maybe the thing I thought I wanted wasn't what I thought it was when I finally got it. Maybe things are always changing and we just have to make the best of what it is right now. Maybe there's more fun in figuring it out anyway.

Maybe nothing is the end unless we let it be.

&& hiiii! Welcome to March! Winter is almost over and the world is in constant turmoil and I feel like I'm losing it a little bit so I'm redoubling my efforts over here/in life in general.

Write things down. Make sure I know what's going on in my brain because it's been so swirly in there that thoughts kind of flash by and are then once again swept away by the wind.

Feet on the ground though. Spring is almost here. I can feel the seasonal depressive episodes fading with every random glimpse of 50 degrees we're getting these days.

Hang in there!