Things that vanish

status games

I did improv for about eight weeks—long enough to become insufferable about it, but not long enough to be any good. Still, that hasn’t stopped me talking about it like it’s changed my life.

There’s a game we played called Status, where you walk around silently assigning imaginary hierarchies: who’s high status, who’s low. Which is to say, we rehearsed the part of life most people perform unconsciously (boom-boom.)

I was thinking about this recently while Googling okapis.

I’d been reading Barbara Kingsolver, who wrote about the okapi as a rare, majestic and otherworldly creature. So I went to Wikipedia, hoping to confirm this and maybe see it described as elusive and powerful and wise. The kind of animal that, if you saw it in a forest, you’d instinctively curtsy to.

And wouldn’t you know it, there was a whole section on the okapi page entitled ‘Status’. Which I thought was pretty impressive. Even in the animal kingdom, the okapi has main character energy! Do other animals bow to it?

Turns out no. Its ‘status’ is: Endangered.

Which is basically the saddest kind of status to have. Revered, but disappearing.

You can be magnetic, mythic even, and still fade from view.

It’s almost like being written about beautifully and insightfully… in a review no one reads. Brilliant, but barely witnessed.

It made me think—maybe that’s why I found improv strangely comforting.
Because unlike the okapi, improv doesn’t even try to stick around. It doesn’t aim for legacy. It knows exactly what it is: a single moment. One shot, no second takes.

You had to be there. And if you weren’t, too bad.

(Of course, you can still talk about it afterwards! I actually did the whole beginner course! I might have zero skillz but I’ve got at lot of anecdotes!)

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Rejection

I tried to secure my immortality by getting this cartoon into The New Yorker, but they passed. Which is fine, because I actually love it.
It was a commission—someone asked me to make something about women and swords. Okay, it was a friend. But I prefer the word commission.
(I just like saying it. Commission…Commission…)

Bye for now,

Katherine

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