When you shut up and listen, the Universe keeps on giving.

I guess that's not the most placid way to get such a new age message across, but I find it true, nonetheless. And here's why: in the past year, when I have been able to push my ego aside and listen to what the Universe is really urging me to do instead of trying to force my will upon it, I have experienced great things. For example, last week (Tuesday, January 5th, to be precise) I walked into Barnes and Noble in Union Square to buy a planner. As I approached the escalator to the second floor I saw a sign that said, "Elizabeth Gilbert, Book Discussion and Signing, 4th floor." Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth Gilbert, guru to divorced women everywhere. Elizabeth Gilbert, sole reason I picked up the most recent copy of Oprah Magazine, in order to read an excerpt from her forthcoming book, "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage." The very book she was SIGNING UPSTAIRS!

I kept gliding up the moving steps, past the children's section on the second floor where I used to take Adriana when she was an infant to chew on read books, past the third floor all the way to the top. My foot stepped off the electronic stair onto the industrial carpeting just as the room erupted into applause; her speech was over. I'd made it there just in time for the meet and greet. Of course I was way in the back of a sea of people, but I needed a copy of the book. I walked up to a shelf much closer to the front where loads of the orange-jacketed tomes were displayed. I took one and sat down in an empty seat in the first row of the second section. I noticed the guy who was organizing the line was a classmate of mine from high school. I'd run into him there years before but totally forgot he worked in management. We chatted for a bit and I felt totally at ease. I was running late for a meeting, but somehow I knew I'd get out just in time.

Inching closer and closer to the author herself, I rehearsed what I'd say in my head. "Think, Carolyn. You have 2 seconds to make maximum impact. Be funny, but be cool. Don't cry like you did when you met Margaret Cho." (Yeah, sorry about that Margz. I was PMSing for total real.) My mind was racing: "Your book got me through my divorce, and you're the reason I bought Oprah magazine this month (THIS month... last month it was Ellen... and the month before that it was, uh... Suze Orman... who's in the mag every month, with good ol' Dr. Phil...), because I wanted to read the excerpt from your new book, and your TED talk was amazing, and I do YOGA now, and (cue tears) YOU'RE JUST REALLY INSPIRATIONAL, OKAY?!"

But I didn't say any most of that. I simply said, "Hey..." and smiled, which really seemed to catch her attention. Then I kind of nonchalantly put my hands on the table and said, "Your book got me through my divorce, and your TED talk is amazing..." and before I could embarrass myself by saying "You're the reason I think I might be able to write a memoir of my own" get any further, her face changed. Her cherubic little blond face suddenly developed this look of concern, this pang of knowingness, and she said, "Oh, I'm so sorry you went through that."

"That's okay," I replied. "I've got a cute haircut and I do yoga now, so fuck it."

Fuck it?! Did I really just say FUCK IT in front of Elizabeth Gilbert?!

She chuckled. "Yeah, that's called a fuck you cut, right?"

OMG THIS BITCH IS SO DOWN!

I laughed, picked up my autographed book exited the podium. I tried to be quick about taking a picture once back on the floor, but my hands were shaking and I finally felt nervous. It took me about 6 tries to get one that wasn't too blurry, but I did:



My new friend Beth McGregor was also there and told me she used her two seconds with Liz (yeah, we're at nickname level now) to tell her that her skin was "luminous," and E. Gilbz shot back with, "Nah, I'm just sweaty."

OMG THIS BITCH IS SO DOWN!

But it's true, though! I know some people hate Eat, Pray, Love - and if they haven't read it they hate the IDEA of Eat, Pray, Love (Mara Herron: "My aunt told me to read it and I was like, what is this housemom bullshit?!") - but, I think the NYT says it best when they describe Lizzie G's prose as "fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit, and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible."

HERO. End of story.

But that's not the end of the story. So I went to the checkout with Beth, and we said bye, and I realized I'D FORGOTTEN TO BUY A PLANNER! So I asked the woman at the Customer Service counter where the planners were, and she said,

"Oh, the planners are all sold out."

"Ha! The planners are all sold out? All of them?"

"Yep. All of them."

So thank you, Universe, for sending me into Barnes and Noble for a planner and out with the signature of a hero. BethBert (that's a pet name just between us), if you are reading this, and I'm sure you are, since what deeply spiritual person doesn't have a vanity Google Alert on themselves, I want you to know that if we had time for coffee, I would have said so much more. I would have told you about my own EPL moment in Scotland this summer, that happened right here, on the grass in the park on that first day, with the extraordinary view of Arthur's Seat, and how later I climbed that volcano, and learned to love myself again. (Cuz, um, I have never had a problem eating.) And I'm praying again now, too, and meditating (a bit) *all the way down to my liver.* (Since I've never had a problem drinking, either, my liver probably needs it.) And I would have said, simply, Thank You, for your bravery and for sharing your story.

OH, BUT THAT'S NOT ALL.

Nope. So, I've been doing stand-up for about 7 years now, and I'm pretty good at it. That's neither meant to be boastful nor critical, just an honest assessment in the realm of the profession, in comparison to 20 year vets. I think in about 3 years, I'll probably be pretty great at it. But one thing I do extraordinarily well is freestyle rap. I don't know why. I'm a freak of nature - like Steve Martin in The Jerk. And my friend Adira Amram once told me, "Carolyn, I think you should freestyle every time you get onstage. Every set. Without fail. That's your closer." And I knew where she was coming from, but I thought, "Eh, I don't want to be known as the girl with the gimmick. I'm an artist! And that's not stand-up." No, it's not. It's something bigger than stand-up. It's entertainment, which is now, has been and always will be my aim. But because I wanted to be known as a stand-up, I resisted her excellent advice for some time. Finally, as years went by and funny hip-hop projects kept coming my way, I gave in, happily. In the last few months I've had 2 music videos hit number one on the YouTube Comedy charts and last Thursday, I had the chance to be on a lineup headlined by Colin Quinn (who is lovely, by the way), all because I put my ego to rest and let myself do what I do best. (See? I just rhymed. It's retarded.)

On that front, keep your eyes peeled for forthcoming video projects with Shayna Ferm (my partner in crime at the aforementioned Comedy Below Canal show with Colin Quinn), Jen Kwok (whose Date An Asian video was a YouTube smash with over 187,000 views) and of course Tom McCaffrey and Mara Herron! We shoot our next banger, S.A.D., with Anya Garrett this week!

In closing, save yourself precious time, children. Listen to your gut. Unless it's telling you to eat at midnight (ahem). Then you should listen to your head and go to bed. (Oops! I did it again! I rhyme all the time. Alright. Goodnight.)

New Music Video: Lemme See!

It's been such a whirlwind two days collecting links from around the blog-gay-sphere that I forgot to post my new video "Lemme See" here! I wanna thank everyone who posted it yesterday: Boys and Lipstick, Wicked Gay Blog, Queer Isn't It?, AKA William, House of LeMay, Instinct Magazine. Big ups to Joe.My.God, Towleroad and most especially MANHUNT DAILY!

I really love the stills that Andy from Towleroad and Dewitt from Manhunt used. Take a look:





Thanks for the love!

I'm proud to announce that Lemme See was the #1 comedy video on YouTube yesterday in 23 countries (assuming the blank category is a country... and I hope it's the good ol' USA!). We were also the 79th most favorited video of the day. If I can't 69, I may as well 79! (WORST JOKE EVER! Hahaha...) My last video, DAMN (You Wish) also took the number one spot back in December.



So finally, without further ado, please enjoy Lemme See! Starring me, Shawn Hollenbach, Soce the Elemental Wizard, shot/directed/edited by Anya Garrett.

p.s. - While you watch, look carefully at 2:31. My boy Adolpho Blaire plays a mean fork and knife!

Shows this week!

It's 2010, guys! We made it! Woo-hoo! Do you feel changed? No? That's cool! You'll try harder next time!

I am having a great 2010 so far! One of the ways I'm doing that is by using exclamation points a lot! The other way I'm doing that is by not killing CNN's Campbell Brown for trying to tell me yoga is a cult. The news ruins everything! (See? Even bad news is good when you sell it!)

Okay, okay. Enough of the small talk. I was just trying to butter you up so when you come see me at a show this week you'll taste good with popcorn! (Hopefully you will come see me this week. I mean, we are friends, or in some cases "friends" - but I am vowing to spend more time in people's physical space and less time in their FaceSpace, so why not start this week?!)

***

MONDAY, JANUARY 4TH AT 8 PM

Laughs at Luca Lounge
220 Avenue B (btn 13th/14th)
FREE

Featuring:

Carolyn Castiglia
Dan Goodman
Jiwon Lee
Sean Donnelly
Streeter Seidell

And your lovely co-producers Selena Coppock, Heidi Edsall and Giulia Rozzi!

Happy (Half) Hour with free pizza at 8, show starts at 8:30.

***

THURSDAY, JANUARY 7 AT 9 PM

Comedy Below Canal at 92YTribeca
200 Hudson Street
$10
www.92ytribeca.org/comedy

Featuring:

Rory Albanese (Executive Producer of The Daily Show)
Shayna Ferm (The World Stands Up)
Colin Quinn (Tough Crowd with... him.)
Tom Shillue (Comedy Central Presents)
Brooke Van Poppelen (Chicago Public Radio)

I'll be making a cameo appearance with Shayna on a brand new song! Don't tell Kanye!

***

FRIDAY, JANUARY 8TH AT 8 PM

Splurge! at Happy Ending
http://splurgeathappyending.blogspot.com/
302 Broome Street (Forsyth/Eldridge)
FREE



Featuring:

LEO ALLEN (Comedy Central Presents, SNL)
CRAIG BALDO (Last Comic Standing, Premium Blend)
CLAUDIA COGAN (NY Mag's 10 New Comedians, Here TV)
GIULIA ROZZI (Jimmy Kimmel, Stripped Stories at UCB)
TOM SHILLUE (Comedy Central Presents, Conan O'Brien)

Musical Guest: SHAYNA FERM (The World Stands Up)

Hosted by CAROLYN CASTIGLIA (MTV, VH1)

SPLURGE! at Happy Ending is a monthly comedy showcase featuring stand-up and musical comedy from New York's most exciting talent. Every month will bring the premiere of a new short comedic film. This month unveils CKC's newest rapsterpiece, "Lemme See," co-starring Shawn Hollenbach and Soce the Elemental Wizard, shot/directed/edited by Anya Garrett! Splurge! Go ahead, it's free.

***

JANUARY 9TH AT 8 PM

If You Build It at Karma
51 1st Ave. (btn 3rd/4th)
FREE

Featuring:

Carolyn Castiglia (Broad)
Rachel Feinstein (Womyn)
Kate Hendricks (Lady)
Mara Herron (Tits)
Jamie Lee (Gal)
Jessie Richardson (Doll)
Brooke Van Poppelen (Vagina)

Hosted by Kara Klenk (Earth Mother Destroyer) and Chelsea White (Fairy Princess)

Get it? It's ladies night! Woot! Collectively, our breasts have been seen on MTV, VH1, Last Comic Standing, College Humor, Boston Comedy Festival, Spike TV, Nickelodeon, Montreal Just For Laughs Festival, Premium Blend and Comedy Central Presents.

Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

The need for speed is ubiquitous these days, surrounding us in a maelstrom of noise, from high-speed Internet that lets us multitask (and by multitask I mean uploading a video to YouTube while Twittering about Twilight) to action movies filled with 2 hours of explosions and jump cuts. The intensity of the media we consume, media that is designed to make us solitary, selfish creatures (Yahoo! is all about you! Customize your profile! We won't even show you any ads you don't relate to!) bleeds over into activities we execute away from the computer, like driving. As we all know, a major problem on the road today is that people can't seem to go without technology even behind the wheel, causing aggressive and absent-minded driving, accidents and unfortunately, death.

Just as generations before us were sold Electrolux and better living through chemistry, we are being sold social media as the revolution of the future. (For the record, I am not here to dispute the fact that the refrigerator is the best thing that was ever invented. It's a great place to store your sliced bread.) But we are duped into thinking that because most of the social web is offered as a free service, there is something liberal and democratic about it. Not necessarily. When I worked in online marketing, my supervisor once said, "I don't understand when people complain that they're being marketed to in a branded, online space. Do they think this is actually free?"

If we are going to be critical of big corporations and go green, use organic cleaning products and buy local produce, maybe we shouldn't be so blind as to think that our constant use of social media comes without a price. It pulls us away from our real lives, from nature, from interacting physically with one another. Yes, the web can be a brilliantly useful tool; certainly there is a phenomenon of parents coming clean about the perils of child-rearing and connecting in new, supportive ways. And it is of course a fun-filled arena of "communication," but is that communication of quality?

I am as guilty of TwitFace addiction as the next guy. I know that social media can be a friend when you're alone and suffering, be it going through a divorce or just forced to watch aging hippies perform poetry for hours. ("Only 14 hours of poetry to go. The old hippies have taken over the stage. I feel like I am inside Jerry Garcia's dead butthole." - Diane O'Debra). Who doesn't love getting a good quip in as they RT or respond to a status update? But at the same time, how many of us are "connected" online to people who, when we are face to face, have no idea what to say, or worse yet, wouldn't even bother?

PC's had become commonplace in offices and colleges by the late 90's when the Internet took hold of the American public's imagination. I remember signing up for my Yahoo email account as I graduated college in 1999. It felt so magical. When I entered the workforce, online shopping was the great distraction of employees nationwide. And then in 2004, I started to blog. Blogs were the first social networks, and they were - and for the most part still are - so much more substantial than the bite-sized nuggets of information offered on Facebook or Twitter. You could "meet" a fellow blogger online that you'd never met "IRL" and get to know them through their posts. Chances are, after enough online interaction, you'd end up meeting in person. I still lament the loss of the great WYSIWYG Talent Show at PS 122. My appearances there not only served as networking events during which I met some incredible people, but also helped advance my profile on the New York scene. Yes, bloggers were taking photos of each other just to put on their blogs, much like the Facebook pics of today, but on a blog, photos were accompanied by stories and links. You had to invest something to be a part of the blogging community.

And sure, there are uses and even advantages to Twitter and Facebook. Both can allow you to lead the people you're connected with to meatier content elsewhere on the web. The trouble is, many people (myself included) are so bogged down trying to keep up with everyone they follow on these sites, they don't have time for meatier content.

Which leads me to Trevor Butterworth's media manifesto, "Time For a Slow-Word Movement." In it he says:

In short, a relentless, endless free diet of fast media is bad for your brain. Generation Google--those who have never known a world without the Internet--it turns out, not only cannot use Google effectively, they don't even know enough about how to search for information to know they can't use Google effectively. The idea that the kids are whizzes at multimedia tasking is a platitude confected by middle-aged techno gurus to peddle their expertise as explainers of generational difference. In fact, relentless multitasking erodes executive function. And while the brain may not be overloaded by 34 gigabytes of brute information a day, it appears that too many of these mental quanta are the equivalent of empty calories. PlayStation and texting need to be balanced out by reading novels, handwriting (for old-fashioned digital dexterity) and playing with other live people if you want your child to develop to be an effective, skill-acquiring, empathetic adult.

Marty Beckerman has a piece up on The Daily Beast postulating that the aughts were the Worst Decade Ever, based on this Pew report. I wonder how much the dawn of the Internet has to do with our dissatisfaction with the new millennium thus far? According to a chart on the Pew site, 65% of people think the Internet as a whole is a change for the better. But when elements of Internet culture are broken down, the numbers look like this:

BlackBerrys/iPhones 56%
Online Shopping 54%
Social Networking Sites 35%
Internet Blogs 29%

(More people getting tattoos is only considered an improvement by 7% of the people questioned. Maybe I should get a tattoo of my blog layout?)

Of course 9/11 and the subsequent years of tyranny under Bush have a lot to do with the negative opinion people have of the last ten years. And the media's intense and frenzied response to the polarizing culture that followed was all over the TV and web, making us ravenous in our consumption of not just news, but views. Of course I realize I'm part of the monster; just another college-educated idiot (that's what it says on my SUNY diploma) with an opinion to share and a free publishing platform with which to do it. It's not the technology I find objectionable, but the urge to make the technology the center of our lives, which, if left unchecked, is worrisome to say the least.

My niece is a part of generation Google, and not only does she have a smart phone at age 12, she also sleeps with it. She texts at a break-neck pace and can't have an uninterrupted conversation to save her life. She hates that I impose rules on her phone use when we spend time together, but I have to. This summer, when she spent the night with my daughter, they were lying in bed together, sleepover style, and she was texting her boyfriend (which is another thing a 12-year-old shouldn't have). When I asked her to hand over her phone for the night, she cried and hid it between her breasts (yet a third thing she shouldn't posses).

So, in 2010, I plan to draw some lines. I have decided to limit my use of Twitter and Facebook to 2 hours a day (whether consecutive or total), and to dedicate myself to writing fuller pieces, be they scripts, blog posts (leading, hopefully, to a memoir), stand-up or songs. I do not have a smart phone and though I considered getting one, I've decided against it. I think one of the most important things we can do for ourselves in the coming decade is take time to disconnect, power down and go offline.

The Pew report suggests that people have fond memories of the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's, and I can see why. Life was uncluttered; there was more time then to just be. So I'll sign off now with this song, courtesy of the greatest/most disastrous website on all of the Internet, YouTube.



Slow down, you move too fast.
You got to make the morning last.
Just kicking down the cobble stones.
Looking for fun and feelin' groovy.

Ba da, Ba da, Ba da, Ba da...Feelin' Groovy.

Hello lamp-post,
What cha knowin'?
I've come to watch your flowers growin'.
Ain't cha got no rhymes for me?
Doot-in' doo-doo,
Feelin' groovy.

I've got no deeds to do,
No promises to keep.
I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.
Let the morning time drop all its petals on me.
Life, I love you,
All is groovy.