Every Day When I Get Home From Our Morning Walk, I Carry Muddy-Pawed Luna Up The Stairs Facing Out From Me Like She’s In An Invisible Baby Bjorn, All Of Her Belly And Legs Sticking Out, And I Always Pause For Several Seconds By The Bathroom Mirror, Wondering If She Will Ever Acknowledge That I Am In That Mirror And A Dog Is Also In That Mirror, But No Matter How Many Times I Bounce Her Or Kiss Her On Her Soft Luna Ear, She Looks Blankly At Everything But The Mirror And Yet At Night, When The Windows In My Room Become Reflective, She Sees A Ghost Dog Trapped In The Window And Will Bark At That So Obviously Dogs Can See Their Reflections And They’re Just Not Letting On To Us For Canine Reasons And Anyway Luna Is Already Two Years Old Today And So She Had A Birthday Meal Of Free Range Chicken Thighs – Luna Is A Big Believer In Animal Welfare – And Kibble And She Swallowed It In 2 Minutes Like Every Other Meal And Now She’s Lying Here In My Bed Probably Dreaming Of Squirrel Murder And This Following Section Has Nothing To Do With Luna And Everything To Do With Retreat

My wife has been in full time university for more than 4 years now, and is now entering the final phase of her degree. She is never not working on a paper or presentation in addition to having to spend full time hours at the hospital most weeks. Luna needs to run the equivalent of 6 marathons a day or she will sit next to me while I’m working and bark at me, enumerating her Dog Rights. Ethan and Rose are 8 and 6 yet somehow haven’t become anywhere near fully independent. It has been Permanently Busy And Sleep Deprivating for a long time, and while I wouldn’t trade any of it away…I also very much do not mind flying away from it for a week.

I love every single second of Zapier retreat. If the plane got trapped in an endless cycle of vomit-inducing somersaults while quadruplets in the row behind me cried and kicked my seat, and if I was detained by Homeland Security and all my chocolate burned in front of me, and if the hotel room had been the site of a grisly Ice Cream Incident and I was forced to sleep in a hallway with a vacuum cleaner bag for a pillow and blanket, and the food was exclusively Grape Nuts with milk that was somehow boiling(?), when that retreat feedback survey comes in, I’ll still grade it straight 10s. Any additional comments? “I liked the novelty of the bubbling milk and I had the coolest dreams where I was sucked out of existence! Best retreat yet, Zapier!”

But instead, the retreats are an incredible miracle of organisational prowess and the finest group of people. It is a Summer Camp atmosphere but without Bug Juice and confusing hormones or cutting out almost the entire second act of Little Shop of Horrors like everyone did at their Summer Camp, causing me everyone to go back to their bunk and cry. There were several moments in the hospitality room where I looked around at everyone, and, as I heard one of our Emilys declare various people fascists, I thought, “God, am I lucky to work with this great group of folks.” (…They were playing Secret Hitler.)

On my very first night, I opened up to coworkers about some heavy life things – beyond the universal experience of cutting out almost the entire second act of Little Shop of Horrors on the one night that parents could come so they never saw their child perform – things I never would have brought up to any coworkers at previous places I worked at. There are so many people at the retreat I’m excited to see and just talk to. (In particular this time around, I had the best chats with Kristie and Frank and my Saturday Breakfast Buddy Danvers, and also with Nivedha at 2am over several chocolate samples, the best kind of chat there can be)

My Permanently Busy And Sleep Deprivating life means that I get out of the house to do something that is not family-related maybe once a month. And that thing is generally a movie with two other sleepy Dads, and we get to talk about the latest annoying thing our child did for the 15 minute drive to the movie, and then yawn the 15 minutes home. What a joy it is to have the comparatively limitless time to play and laugh and talk with other Adult Humans, and not so much forget that I have this (wonderful) family (that I am grateful for every day), but remember that I am something more than Father and Dishwasher and Husband. At retreat, I can be Chocolate Presenter and go on an extended bit about Sade. I can be a Mingler, welcome new recruits. I can be Someone Who Talks Under A Table with Frank and Katie. Or, at 10:30 at night, I can think, “Pizza would be good right now”, look up a place a mile away on Google Maps, saunter over to that place while listening to a sad, heartfelt album, eat that delicious pizza with a FREE pink lemonade while Kyle Morton sings poetically about dementia, then somehow wanting to listen to that sad album in its entirety, spend 30 minutes snapping pictures of hand-drawn advertisements on a covered bridge. I store up all of these experiences, with all their laughter and discovery, and I have the energy to power through at home.

This Chocolate Tasting was my favorite one so far, even though it gave me stage fright through the entirety of Wednesday. I realised 10 minutes before coming downstairs to set up the room that I had completely missed adding a bar to the presentation, WHICH DID NOT HELP MATTERS. I got downstairs to discover that the room I hoped for was still full of dining Zapiens, but Cody sprang into action and found a room, several people helped me pass out all the materials, and our activist-in-residence Spencer found me a television by, I’m assuming, putting pressure on the local government through a peaceful protest followed by a petition which all resulted in a local ordinance.

My favorite bit of this chocolate presentation was a 2-minute bit that involved Sade that, as soon as I thought of it, I couldn’t wait to deliver in person. It went over as well as I hoped it would, and I’ll be riding that high for the rest of 2019. I’m sure it doesn’t say anything at all about me that when I devised a comedy bit earlier in the day, I couldn’t wait to stand it up, as it were, in front of an audience to see if it worked and when it DID work I felt deeply fulfilled. Nope, don’t have to explore that universally applicable feeling at all.

Something I do have to explore though – wearing more blazers. Here I am wearing it for the first time on the Friday night, skipping karaoke so I could light rail across town to meet Brian Tuttle, who just happened to be in Minneapolis that day. I hadn’t seen him since I left Massachusetts in 2007.

I came to know Brian because my best friend and I were at the beginning of what would be a years-long falling out (we’re best friends again). Not wanting to be relentlessly lonely, I searched for a theatre at work, hoping to audition for something. One of the first, if not the first thing I clicked on was an advertisement for 11:11 Theatre Company, which was holding its rehearsals at MIT, a 5-minute walk from my office. I went over there one night and got to the room. I peeked in through the door and, not wanting to bother anyone – not ideal for someone who also loves to perform – I was ready to walk all the way out of there and straight home and never come back. I ended up getting all the way to the exit, but Greg, who had followed down with some others for a cigarette, asked if that was me at the door and invited me to come into the room. Now that I was officially Not Bothering, I watched the rehearsal, and I ended up being in that company for more than 3 years and 10 shows. Rehearsals were 4 days a week, 2 or 3 hours a night, and it was my favorite thing about Somerville, even more than JP Licks, the best ice cream in the world. Oh, and I never ended up cutting out any of the Acts.

The director and founder and playwright was Brian Tuttle. I always described his playwriting process as him jamming his hand into his chest, ripping out his heart, and splatting it on the page. His directing was just as intense and heartfelt. He ended up writing a show where I played the main role, and that role was essentially a version of myself. He knew me well enough to write a scene where I walk out of an apartment and then come back in and yell “KEYS!” because I’m so annoyed I forgot something AGAIN.

The company was funded and run by all of us. I helped put together all the programs and used many hundreds of pages from my company’s printer to do so. I also helped put together several fake programs and again I’m sure I don’t have to give any more thought of the many hours of effort I put into those fake programs and the irreproducible joy of sitting in a room hearing people laugh at my jokes.

And just like 11:11 appeared at just the right time, so did Brian Tuttle on this visit. As he’s done several times over the years, he wrote me a long message in December about how his year had gone. I’d thought about getting back to him every single week since, but I generally don’t have the time or energy to write even more when I’ve spent the whole day writing emails. But 30,000 feet up, that’s prime email time. I emailed him back and that’s when I learned he’d be in Minneapolis. If I’d written back any other week, I’m sure I would have missed him.

When he walked into his suggested restaurant, the very hip Chino Latino, he looked like he’d barely aged. We had a hug and then didn’t stop talking for two hours. It was so easy. I’d forgotten how much his hands are in motion when he talks. I told him about heavy life things and good life things, and he mainly told me good life things, like how he devises and writes scripts for food tours in Chicago and is that somehow a position I can get at Zapier, please? “Now these are the best meat pies in all of Warrington, each made by hand with organic flour by this cloister of Scottish Nuns. This is something that could never be automated. But you know what can be automated? Tasks that your computer should be doing, and you can automate those tasks with Zapier.” Look how natural that is. He told me about his wife commuting to Seattle from Chicago to work at something prestigious, and about playing soccer with 20-somethings and how strange it is to be the oldest person in the room, and how the most attractive man – according to me – in the theatre company ended up becoming a Public Defender with a caseload of 140.

Our waitress was a literal beam of warm sunshine, telling us at the end of each sunburst of a visit that she’d be back in just a second, and a blond dude with the kindest dudebro energy wearing what appeared to be bike shorts as part out of his Chino Latino outfit would occasionally float by and fingergun to the food, telling us, “It tastes good, right?” and Brian and I had to agree he was correct.

Brian paid for the meal, the jerk, and then drove me back to The Graduate. He got out of the car to give me a hug and he said, “I would invite you to write to me more.” So although Brian is clearly some sort of mutant human who can see directly into my soul to satisfy one of my deepest needs, I will accept that invitation.

I came back to the hotel, changed into non-blazer clothes, loaded up my bag with a very reasonable 50ish bars of chocolate, and headed off to the 2nd floor. Karaoke night was still going, with someone screaming out a Queen song. In a little office room, a dozen people sat around delighting in Michael Shen expertly playing Ed Sheeran and Sia on his violin. In the next room over, a few groups playing cards. The photography crew who must either be insomniacs or were contracted to never sleep were all on laptops, still working. Another group was accusing each other of being wolves. In the hospitality room, Frank and Randy were hitting ping pong balls at each other at 100 miles an hour, gamers were Smash Brothering and someone was Hitler. I talked with Kristie about stand up and marvelled at her casually talking about making a neural network with 11 lines of code and loved her idea on alternative business cards. I went to bed at 2am, exhausted and invigorated.

This was a wonderful retreat. I’m grateful to work here every day, and retreat only reinforced it, as has every other time. I get to be my best self here. Can’t wait to do it all again in January.