Dear Journal,

I just got back from visiting my family and we did the one activity that my family has in common. We went to the movies. We sat in a theater quietly staring at a screen and no one had to talk to each other.

We saw The Pursuit of Happyness. I’m always careful when discussing movies with strangers because I think film is the new religion. A few months ago I was talking to this girl about a movie and I was like, “I hated that movie—and she was like, “that movie’s the reason I stopped cutting myself.” Then I had to pull it back. Like, “It was pretty good. I liked the ending when she didn’t cut herself.”

But this movie was about dreams and made me reflect on my own dream, which was to be a comedian, but really I think deep down I just wanted to have a job I didn’t suck at. When I was in high school I was a waiter at weddings and I was so bad that it seemed like my coworkers thought I was retarded. Now I’m not sure what the politically correct word for retarded was at the time. But whatever it was, they definitely didn’t use it. The word they chose for me was “retarded.” And then I got a job as a bagger as a grocery store. And some of the other baggers were retarded. I really started to think that I wasn’t reaching my full potential. So I asked my supervisor if I might be considered for cashier and he just kind of shook his head—and then I realized that the conversation was over. At a certain point after college, I realized that I had some knack for comedy, but in the meantime I’d have to get a temporary job doing data entry at a pharmaceutical company. It was so boring that I trained myself to stay asleep while sitting up. At one point my supervisor came over after I had woken up and she was like, “I caught ya! You’re checking your email!” And I thought, “You should been here 5 minutes ago when I was unconscious.”

The last few months I’ve been working with my friend Andy on a script for NBC based on my secret public journal. The script is about how getting my start in comedy was an unconventional dream because everyone in my life thought it was impractical. My dad would say things like, “This might parlay nicely into advertising.” I was like, “No, this is it. This is the plan.” Whenever you pursue your dream you run the risk that people close to you will think that you’re crazy. It reminds me of the movie Close Encounters Of The 3rd Kind- where Richard Dreyfus knows that he needs to follow the aliens but he doesn’t know why- and he’s building the mountain of mashed potatoes on his plate and he’s like, “This means something but I don’t know what.”

I’m not sure whether my secret public journal will become a show. At this point it’s just a script. I’m holding the rubix cube and I’m waiting to find out if I get the job as a stockbroker. (This makes sense if you’ve seen The Pursuit Of Happyness) But I’m going to hold on to the rubix cube until I get the job. Because I love comedy. In fact, comedy is the reason I stopped cutting myself.

The other night in Philadelphia, a woman came up to me after the show and said, “That was great, but were you drunk?” and I said, “No, I’m just retarded.”

And that concludes this week’s entry in my secret public journal.