Living a Dream

At some point in college, it dawned on me that my group of friends from home was unusual. Yes, we were all weirdly close an did some objectively strange things to each other (and with each other, but mainly to each other), but apparently it was weird to stay so close to people from your hometown. We all thought nothing of it, because that's just the way we were. Others, however, were surprised and often confused. Some of them were "adopted" into the group of us from the Chesterland area, and it's hard to say how much they still stayed in touch with people who didn't go to high school with us, because they sure assimilated into our friends-since-early-childhood clique. But still, that was only college. Later, I moved to Chicago and found that there were people who I hadn't seen in years who would gladly, willingly, almost eagerly bail me out of I was in a pinch or needed a place to stay. These were people I wasn't even necessarily close  with when we were...

As anyone who has met me knows, in 2014 I quit my job in Chicago, convinced my then-girlfriend (now wife) to do the same, and moved to Italy to teach English. It was a leap of faith, for sure, but it was never as scary as friends and family feared it would be. It was everything I dreamed it would be and then some; the stories of which have been peppered throughout this blog over the past two years. So today, I simply give five reasons to quit your job and teach abroad. It's surprisingly easy to get started . I used a company called International TEFL Academy to get licensed, but there are countless accredited "schools" that do the same thing. Major cities - both in the US and abroad - offer month-long in-person classes to get certified, but I did the online class. It was not difficult. Anyone who has been licensed and taught will immediately forget what they're taught at the exact moment they're thrown into a classroom, so there's only so much need for pr...

Not like that fake 100th post from a week or two ago. This is actually my 100th post at kevinpaulnye.blogspot.com, which would be more of an accomplishment if it didn't actually take me 6+ years. That's right, the first post on this site was in July of 2009 - about seven weeks after I graduated college, which is a seriously distant memory at this point. There've been some ups and downs along the way. Originally it was meant to be a journal of finding some legs in the entertainment world: I talked about my first ever stand-up comedy audition , talked about the week-long trip I took to New York with Lou-Chaz Bitsko, and even what my life would look like if it were a movie . Life changed: I moved to Chicago and wrote about people on the train biting each other's ears and just being gross , posted a total of five times in 2011, pretended to get back into blogging in 2012, then left this old thing dormant from August 2012 until November 2014. Oops. But now that I...

There's a popular phrase when people talk about improving themselves: "Be the change you want to see in the world." It's attributed to Gandhi, although that's pretty suspect ( source ) and there's no proof of him ever saying it (welcome to the internet!), and it appears on bumper stickers, motivational screenshots, and Facebook posts of girls aged 17-22. Since it's not Gandhi, and there's no really telling who popularized the phrase in the first place, you might think that I'm in the process of making fun of it and our culture for making "something" out of things that are really nothing. But that's not what I'm gonna do. Instead of being my normal angry-old-man self, I'm going to actually support this quotation and give an example. Everyone seems to think the world is trending in the wrong direction: gun deaths are up, religious insanity is *way* up, intolerance of LGBT/women/minority rights is somehow both up and down at ...

Part of the experience of blogging is to let the reader into the mind of the writer. Frankly, this is part of the experience of reading/writing at any level, but at the blog-level it feels a little more personal. With that in mind, I have some confessions that I really need to get off my chest. 1) I have never seen a Star Wars movie and I have no real intention of seeing them. If I would see any, it would be the old ones, largely because of this photo . I don't like CGI in movies and I feel like I've come far enough without seeing Star Wars that there's no point in starting at the ripe old age of 29. Related, there are lots of movies that are on everyone's list that I've never seen: Godfather and Scarface come to mind first, and I haven't seen an Indiana Jones since early childhood so I don't even know if that counts. The thing is, you're not allowed to judge me on this because I've been busy with being alive and choosing to watch other things that...

There's something to be said for a reputation. I know that, and I understand that. Michael Jordan is widely considered to be the best basketball player of all time - a claim which I won't dispute. He is a living god to the city of Chicago, and if you badmouth him in any way, locals will take it worse than if you'd said unkind things about their wives/mothers, etc. In Europe, when someone asks where we're from, Jenna answers Chicago, and if I answer, I say Cleveland via Chicago (or something like that). Invariably, everyone's response will mention one of two names: Barack Obama or Michael Jordan. But Jordan *much* more often than Obama. For the most part, I get it. He was the most dominant player for the better part of a decade. He was the face of the NBA. He starred alongside Bugs Bunny in one of cinema's greatest accomplishments. That's all true and inarguable. But there's a big part that I don't really get. For instance, I have a student of...

Here's a slice of life from our time here in Milan: Anytime you walk down the street and see something and your first thought is "wait, that can't be..." you're wrong. It can, and it probably is. Lots of things happen in day-to-day life in cities that defy logic, but Milan is leading the charge and blowing four years in Chicago out of the water. Allow me to give you some examples. Wait, is that car parked on the sidewalk? Yes it is. Not only is it parked on the sidewalk, it's actually parked beside another car that's parallel parked a full four feet from the curb. Wait, is that guy smoking a joint as he walks past an elementary school? Yes he is. This happened in front of me last night on my way home from work. He was in his 40s or 50s and looked relatively put-together, so this wasn't a homeless man who had no respect for anything. Just a dude smokin a joint. Wait, does that person have a dog-poo bag in their pocket and they're just leavin...

As I mentioned last time, people have asked me/us a lot of questions about living in Italy. Usually these questions are about the food and about our classes and we occasionally answer them. But living here is making us come up with questions of our own, and I'd like to share with you a few of them. Partly because they're interesting thoughts, partly because they contain a little more information about what it's like to live here in Milano. 1) What's going on with the opening hours of businesses? Several businesses - usually consumer-industry things like restaurants and small grocery stores - are known to close for an hour or two in the afternoon. It makes perfect sense with restaurants, as very few people will come in and do a meal between 3:00 and 5:00, but it seems a little stranger with markets to me. But there's more to this: There is a cafe around the corner from my house that is seemingly open all the time. It has been opened at 6:00 a.m. Saturday when we...

Roughly 100% of what I've seen from the internet this week has been bad news. I don't want to contribute to that flux. Chin up, world, we can't all be that bad. The fact that a lot of people are angry and protesting and showing that they actually give a shit shows that, well, people are angry and protesting and showing that they actually give a shit. Giving a shit is a great thing. Continue. Fight the fights that deserve to be fought. Being 4000 miles away from the US is weird, especially when I'm reading about the states all the time and what's going on there. I don't really want to write about the things I'm reading because everyone has, so I'll trust you (people who are so obscenely smart as to read things that *I* write) to make informed opinions about life and try not to generalize everyone and everything. Three things have happened to me that were really note-worthy this week and I'm gonna tell you about them now. Number 1: Someone asked ...

Sometimes I think all day about something I want to write when I get home. It might be something funny that I saw/heard/read/took in by using one of my senses. It doesn't have to be funny...it could elicit any emotion, really. Or it might be something that I just kinda thought up during the day and wanted to elaborate on. What invariably happens is that I think about it during the day, lose some steam on what I wanted to really get into, talk for about 20 minutes with someone about that thing, and don't bother writing it. So where does that leave me? It leaves me with a good conversation and nothing to write about. It's a blessing and a curse. Curse because I like writing and generally want to write about these things I think up. And blessing because I'm not so painfully alone that I have no one to talk to and am forced to write it out instead. (Not that I'm suggesting that all writers are the lonely/reclusive type...but have you seen most of these jokers?) Here...

As I sit here on my couch and watch the end of the Monday Night Football game (it's been a good one, fyi), I find myself struggling to successfully wrap myself in my blanket. I'm cold, but I need to figure out how to keep myself free to type while keeping the rest of myself warm. And now I realize something. THE SNUGGIE IS EFFING INCREDIBLE. Go ahead and make fun of it. Goodness knows that I have. I've made fun of my mom a bunch of times for having one. I even got one of my own when they gave them out at Cavs games last year and made fun of myself for having it. Occasionally I used it...and if the time was just right, and I really needed it...my god. That was a great invention. That's really my whole thought. I guess I'll move on and say that I actually got a job. It's part-time, but I may have gotten a 2nd one also. After routinely getting rejected from all kinds of jobs in all kinds of ways, I was walking past a shoe store near my house with a "help wante...

Dear Couple Sitting in Front of Me on the Train, Let me start by saying that I believe that love, in all its forms, is an inherently beautiful thing. I believe that it is an important thing in a human's life to find someone who understands their neurosis, but beyond that, someone who actually enjoys it. It's wonderful to think there are people out there who want nothing more than to make you happy. But that's not what this is about. This is about your cutesy/lovey/nuzzling games that you played for 13 stops - aka 24 minutes. First of all, yes, I said it's great to have someone who understands you, but that someone should also understand that you both look like complete and utter assholes. I'm fine with having your arm around someone, but you (girl, who I'm now naming Megan) actually took the initiative to sit up straight, turn toward guy (who I'm naming Kyle), and properly give him a legitimate hug on an extremely crowded 1:30 A.M. train. My initia...

Baby, don't hurt me . Sorry about that. This entry should really fall under the "makes you wonder" category and thus the other blog, but it's something that I've been thinking about since moving to Chicago, so it stays here - as this is the Chicago/entertainment world/whatever it is blog. I was on the bus home from the first time I've ever done improv on a stage in front of people who weren't my classmates (went alright, more nerve wracking than I expected) and I got to thinking. Over the last month or so I've had to say goodbye to an awful lot of people. Not permanent goodbyes, thankfully, as I think I've done a pretty good job keeping up with most of them. These people are my closest friends and family and they mean the world to me. So when I tell these people that I love them, it comes as no surprise. They say it back in most cases, and we go on our way. But we never stop and try to articulate it. There were at least two people who I had planne...

I had another one of those moments today. It reaffirmed that I'm making the right choice by wanting to go to Second City and go after the ultimate goal of making people laugh all the time. That's actually one of the nice things about caddying, is that it makes me realize that I don't want to be caddying and would rather be out doing something I enjoy. Now that I'm thinking about it, there were actually two moments, and I'll explain them. Starting now-ish. I was forecaddying for a group of four really nice guys. Being nice guys, they asked me what I wanted to do and what I was doing and all those standards, so I told them I was saving up some money from caddying and was gonna head to Chicago in the fall to go after the dream of Second City and either Improv or Comedy Writing. As we talked about it, the one guy said something like this: "Well, you're looking at three CPAs and a business owner. They're good jobs, it's a great way to make a living...but...

There's a commonly used expression that says you should do something every day that scares you. I'm not so sure that this is a safe practice because I don't have the money to do a lot of scary things like parachuting, alligator wrestling, heli -skiing, or asking someone to marry me (easily the scariest on the list). That leaves me with less expensive fear options like driving on the wrong side of the road, walking into the Crip neighborhood with Blood colors on, or what I did today; stand on the top of a really shaky ladder and paint a barn on a very windy day. I realize that painting a barn isn't gonna get me the street cred that Coolio has, but I'll be damned if I didn't feel a gust of wind, wobble a little bit, feel my heart skip a beat, and then laugh about how awesome it was. My point is this: How great is that feeling? How cool is it to know that something could have gone horribly wrong, but it didn't? Does anything make you feel more alive than that...