I recently heard someone say one of the smartest things I had ever heard in my life, that being that expectations are premeditated resentments. We already know that people are not perfect. We already know that no one is going to do exactly what we wish them to do all of the time. We already know that people are not going to applaud for us when we finally get that promotion. We already know that people will inevitably get comfortable and begin to take us for granted. We already know that romantic comedies are just poorly written romantic novels. Yet we continue to think that the happy ending is just right around the corner, always elusive, yet always somehow always just out of our grasp because we did not smile enough or laugh enough or meditate enough or appreciate enough. We assume that we need to work harder at...something, anything. But that is simply not the case. Our expectations are our minds playing tricks on us. If you do not get what you want, you will become extremely upset and if you do get what you want, it will never be enough, not if you already lived it in your dreams. Dreams are far superior to anything life has to offer; dreams are perfect and life is anything but perfect. You can go anywhere and do anything in your dreams. You can be amazing 100 percent of the time if you are dreaming. But that will never happen in real life. You will make crucial errors. You will fail, over and over again. And no one is going to come riding in on a great stallion to rescue you from your failure either. You will, eventually, at one point or another, have to admit defeat. But defeat does not have to be the end. In fact, loss can be the start of new beginnings. When my dad died, I did not know what to do. I lost a man who was an intricate part of my identity, and it took me so long to realize that, by being upset at the world for taking him from, I was being extremely unreasonable. What did I expect? Did I think an angry smoker and drinker would be alive forever? I probably did; that was my expectation and how horrible it was experiencing the disappointment, the let down and the maddening rage that came along with it. It is so awful that I did that to myself. I used to blame my father or my friends or my relatives for that pain, but now I realize that it was my unreasonable expectation that caused me such pain and grief. It is just like how I used to go into auditions expecting the casting agent to choose the most talented person, to not be discriminatory while making their casting decisions. What a huge mistake that was. I should have known better. I should have known that people discriminate all the time, that they have their own expectations and that those expectations can be downright mean. I once had a person tell me that they did not expect to see a person who looks like me playing a lawyer, just like I have had people tell me that actors who look like me should play gang members and drug dealers. I remember an old director of mine having to fight to get me into a production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest because I did not look the part to play Chief Bromden in the other director's mind. I remember how silly that seemed to me at the time. But I get it now. In the theater, realism is expected and realism is exclusive and discriminatory. I should have expected such idiocy, but I kept trying to argue to myself that we live in a more advanced era where such prejudices are irrelevant. Well, I was wrong. In the minds of the theater world, I am a drug dealer or a hustler or a slave or a rapist or some other derelict personality I have never been in real life because that is what the theater world expects of black people. And this is why expectation ruins art. Expectation puts art in a box; it restricts and tames it. You cannot have great art without experimentation, the will to try new things, to go where no artist has dared to go before. But artistic directors expect the same profits every year. Reruns again tonight.