Eric on the World

Estoy in Barcelona, baby! This week I talk about the craziness of getting to Barcelona, my retrospective on my time back in the U.S., the state of my mental health, and why you should eat the ham in Spain.

I'm feeling a little better, which is good. The brain is weird and fragile. I (probably) have a comedy show this Thursday at the White Horse in Oakland you should come to.

I'm sorry. I just wanted to make sure I got something out

I have been feeling a lot of feelings the past... 7 years? And nothing has encapsulated and made more real those feelings then the masterpiece and work of art that is Bo Burnham's new Netflix special "Inside."

From the ravages of the internet and social media, to mental health, to a general sense of hopelessness in ourselves and the world, Bo's special is all that and more, singular, genius, raw, moving, depressing. I talk about it.

This week I ramble about an instagram exchange I had that ended up turning into a bit on stage, my continued frustration with medical insurance, the history of HiP House co-op as the former Le Chateau co-op featured in the documentary Chateaupia, and needing a job.

What exactly is comedy? Why do we laugh? What is it that makes us feel bonded when we share a joke with another person?

This week Professor Brett Mills of Freie Universität Berlin joins the podcast to try and answer these questions and more. Brett teaches a course I'm taking called "Comedy in Film," and it's a complete hit with the students, thanks in part to his wealth of knowledge concerning comedy history and theory, and ability to ask provocative questions.

Some more topics we attempt to tackle:

• What are signifiers used in media to let us know something is intended to be funny?
• The difference between standup and improv as praxis
• Why the British Office is superior to the American version
• Is there an increased sensitivity to comedy with social media and cancel culture, or has it always existed and we just didn't know about it?

Follow Professor Brett Mills on Twitter and follow me on Instagram.

I talk about moving into my new co-op reserved just for grad students, getting a terrible massage, how crappy Medi-cal is, and whether happiness is something you can "fake until you make it." 

I ramble about the hypocrisy of people who don't want to follow the CDC mask guidelines and eating a weed cinnamon bun.

As the world continues to open back up from the pandemic, and I find myself literally in the same co-op system I was in when I graduated UC Berkeley at 20, I've been confronted with a very soul-shaking fear that frankly, my life is going nowhere.

The moment-to-moment can feel complicated, and like tiny steps of progress are being made, but when I zoom out on the whole, it seems that nothing has "gone my way" since I've graduated college, and I have no idea how to course-correct myself. My life back then seemed so promising, "ahead' of all those around me. Now it feels mired in pursuits that bear no fruit, and a crippling sense of existentialism and nostalgia.

So yeah, that's what I talk about haha.

The plot twist no one expected, or the plot twist everyone expected? I'm living back in the Berkeley Student Cooperative, the student co-ops I lived in when I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley, and boy is life crazy.

I'm going to do a co-op specific podcast, but for now, I give some general life updates, including what it's like to be back in student housing, Berkeley in general, and why shaving my beard has me looking more lady-like than ever.