Living a Dream

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...

(See last week's post for Rome part 1 , which covered the following: Outside the Colosseum, inside the Forum, first trip to the Pantheon, Torre Argentina/Area Sacra, Piazza Navona, the outside of Castel Sant'Angelo, and a few other incidental visits.) After a wild first day in Rome, we jumped out of bed early for an over-fill of our hotel breakfast because we knew we'd need calories. By 8:30 we were queued for the Colosseum and were inside before 9:00. Of course, it was still head-scratching to walk there and pass Trajan's Market, the various forums, and the Arch of Constantine to get there, but that's just part of being in Rome. Inside the Colosseum though...that place is a trip. They do a pretty good job of loading the concourse-area with information and artifacts, allowing you to learn about the building instead of just rushing to the inside area and looking around (which is obviously what everyone wants to do anyway). There's not a whole lot I can say ab...

One of the best things about having a wildly popular blog is that celebrities from all walks of life find their way to it and express their gratitude for what tremendous work I'm creating. On rare occasions they even express interest about how they can get involved. Unfortunately, I don't accept guest posts from these attention-hogs - I know they're just trying to use me for publicity and that's not how it works here at LaD. However, I'm a man of the people, and I know what the people want. With that in mind, and with the presidential race taking center stage over the last couple of months (and continuing to hold center stage for the next year), I was able to get some time on the phone with a man very familiar with presidential races: Former President of the United States of America, Billy Bob Thornton . Me: Mr. President, thank you for taking some time out for me - I know you're a busy man. POTUSA BBT: Well you're certainly welcome, although I feel li...

One thing I probably didn't do enough of while tutoring in Italy was to actually tell stories about tutoring in Italy. Of course there are plenty of posts about where we went and what we did in those places, but not much about the actual teaching, save the vespa disaster . Shortly after we arrived in Italy we started making flyers to advertise our services, and we proceeded to post them around the city (near schools, mostly). We received a few bites from these, including one from a woman named Flaminia*. She wanted to meet me to talk about a few things and she had specific questions in her attempt to learn English. I agreed to meet her at a bookstore which held a cafe in the basement and we began talking about what might be a good way to get her started with the language. She very quickly began asking me specific questions that I was completely unprepared for: Things like "how is my pronunciation?" or "When these 2 letters go together, how do I make that sound?...

People ask if every idea has been had before by someone else. The theory is that there are so many people in the world - and so many who have already lived - that you don't have a truly original thought in your head. In response to this question, I pose a question of my own. Who cares? It doesn't matter if no one has ever thought the exact things that you're thinking, because you're you and that means that it's different. No one has the exact experiences and lenses that you see the world through. When taking improv classes at Second City and iO Chicago, there were plenty of recurring themes, and while the majority of the lessons centered around freeing your mind and being in the moment as you're onstage, there was a specific explanation that stuck with me. As per Colleen Doyle (a teacher I had/genius whose shows with Dummy at iO were/are absolutely incredible), the characters you play are affected by your own life; you see what the character sees, but you...

Ever have one of those days when you wake up and something is a little bit off? Maybe the blanket has bunched up around your knees, maybe the alarm clock didn't go off, or maybe the person you thought you were sleeping next to is already awake and in the bathroom...or doesn't exist. Whatever it is, the day just starts wrong. Ever have one of those days when it gets worse? Maybe you're out of cereal, maybe you miss the train by 30 seconds and end up late for work, maybe someone spills coffee on you - if you'd made it onto the first train you probably wouldn't have had a stranger with coffee right next to you, so this is technically your fault. So things get worse. So work starts and you suddenly realize you forgot about a presentation you were going to give and have to scramble to piece it together. It doesn't go well, and the proof is when your boss gives you a resigned *sigh* instead of a congratulatory handshake before walking out of the room. You need ...

The Eternal City, the birthplace of seemingly everything, one of the most history-rich places on the planet, and a hell of a place to spend four days. We planned to visit Rome for a while but we needed a long-weekend to make it work. We found that long weekend in February (normally the worst month of the year, but it wasn't bad in Italy) and headed out Thursday morning with a return train Sunday night. The train to Rome took us farther south in Italy than we'd previously been, so that was cool. We got to see more countryside from the train than before and even spotted a few hill-towns off in the distance. The difficult thing with writing about Rome, and the reason I've been putting this off for months, is that everything in Rome deserves your attention. Everything that we took a photo of has a story, and those stories are slightly more familiar than they are in other places. Everything is so grand, so incredible, so ostentatious, so brilliant, or so classically lovely, ...

It's hard to deal with things. That's OK, but it's hard to deal with things.  There's a lot of stuff going on in the world, and a lot of people are saying a lot of things (most of them are kinda stupid and rash, but that's another issue). These things make me think things, and blogs are a good place to express thoughts, but I don't think I want to do that. I'm not interested in ruffling your feathers, changing your opinion of me/a situation that you don't want to be influenced on.  As a result, I've been staring at a blank post for quite a while, trying to figure out what to say. If I don't talk about what's going on in the world - in Paris, in Beirut, in Maryland (student with gun on campus today, Monday), in Syria, and in about a thousand other places in the world, then I may be ignoring the problems and bottling up my emotions. If I do talk about what's going on in all of these places, then I'm putting my stupid opinion out ...

I got very excited to make this post today because Blogger informs me that I've completed 99 posts before this one. I was on blog post 100 on this particular blog! I had written two paragraphs telling how I was going to do a clip-show like on any sitcom that has ever reached 100 episodes and I was going to include links to my most popular and least popular entries. I had it all figured out. And then I noticed that 8 of those 99 were drafts, so I guess you're all gonna have to wait for my look back at what this blog has become over the years (!) that it has existed. Instead I'll keep it short today and make this a weekly round-up of things that I've written here and elsewhere, plus a few links that have really tickled me from around the internet. Maybe this can become a Friday-thing for this blog, or maybe (likely) it'll happen once and then I'll forget that I tried to make it a thing. First, over on partner-site RobotButt.com, you can take a look at volume...

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 ...

I know I haven't posted about travel in a while now, and that's a shame for the handful of you who liked looking at photos from around the world. On the other hand, it saves you from having to read about it all the time. I'm going to try to temper all of that by instituting Travel Tuesdays. I'll post something about travel on Tuesdays and Tuesdays only. In a happy accident, I posted a brief write-up of our honeymoon last Tuesday, but we're pretending that this whole idea starts today. To start off this new idea, it only makes sense to start close to home. Upon returning to the USA, Jenna and I moved to the west side of Cleveland despite how it has almost nothing in common with Italy. She got a job on the far-west side and I followed. While there are ups and downs in Cleveland, we've picked out a couple of favorite, beautiful spots. And then we bought a nicer camera than our cell phones so we could take some cool photos, starting with the Rocky River reservat...

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...

Having been married for WELL OVER a month now (33 days), I'm pretty sure I'm qualified to tell the lessons I've learned and give unending marriage advice. I am, after all, almost halfway to Kim Kardashian's wedding-length with Kris Humphries. Lesson number 1: Saying the H and W words is different. It's always weird to switch titles in a relationship. It takes a minute to get used to saying "girlfriend" and then takes some extra time to get used to saying "fiancee" but neither of those shake a stick at the weirdness of saying "wife." This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's a thing. Both of us have felt this and we're pretty well confused about how it's making us feel - it's anxiety-inducing, possibly because it's a forever word. In any case, it's taking some adjustment-time, and we haven't quite gotten over it yet. Lesson number 2: Getting gelato for your reception is the best thing you can ever...

If you look back at the travel posts I've posted on here (and I've only gotten to about half of the trips we went on while in Europe), you might've noticed a theme. We don't relax very well. There were plenty of times that a trip was supposed to be relaxing - we were going to a beach-town or we were going to a sleepy-town with not much to see or we were going to a town where we knew nothing about its history - but they never turned out that way. We would always end up walking between 15 and 30,000 steps (shout-out to Samsung Galaxy S-Health Step-counter. You work mediocre-ly) and feeling too exhausted to do anything past about 9:30 p.m. Not that we were gonna do anything past 9:30 p.m. anyway, but still. As of 6 weeks before our wedding we had still not decided where we would go for our honeymoon. On the one hand we could take a few days and go to a mountain getaway in Pennsylvania, relax a bit, hike a lot, look at possible color-changing foliage, and - hopefully ...

Ever been walking and caught your toe on the ground and stumbled forward for a moment? Maybe you fell to the ground, maybe you caught your balance immediately and everything was fine after? Regardless of how it turned out, you immediately looked back at that spot on the floor, didn't you? Of course you did. This is the arrogance of humanity. Think about this: It took you (probably) somewhere between 12 and 18 months to learn how to walk. People who suffer spinal injuries lose the ability in an instant, and those who get it back have to re-learn and that takes a tremendous amount of time as well. Think about how amazing it is that you can walk at all. How many other animals on the planet use two legs as their primary form of movement? There are lizards that run sometimes, ostriches (although the other birds all prefer to fly), maybe some kangaroos or hopping-rodents - but even those are primarily by hopping. There are approximately 6.5 million species on land. We can be genero...

I don't enjoy writing about professional football anymore. I used to. A lot. I think I've had 3 or 4 blogs dedicated to writing about (mostly) the Browns, and there were even occasions when people would read these things I wrote. But I stopped for lots of reasons. The most important reason? Because of the Browns. Years ago I would write about how the Browns were terrible and they were actively putting out a crappy product and telling fans to buy it, so I was done buying it. Time passed and they got worse. Then they raised prices. That is not a consumer-friendly sequence of events. I love Twitter. I get most of my world-news from Twitter by seeing people talk about something and then looking for details about it. Watching a sporting event alone on the couch while refreshing Twitter is more fun than watching a sporting event with two friends who aren't funny. You might think this is stupid, or you might have Twitter and know that this is the truth - it's just more fun...