by The Awl
Our old pal and playmate Julie Klausner has a TV series called Difficult People, and it goes up on Hulu today. It’s about two New Yorker best friends who “love pop culture and hate everyone except each other.” She chats here with our buddy Megh Wright.
You’ve been working on a lot of things this summer — Difficult People, your Joe’s Pub show, and your podcast, to name a few. What’s your idea of downtime?
I’m not very good with downtime, in general, any time of year. I have a hard time relaxing. Some people say “Oh, New York is so overwhelming!” but what’s in between my ears on a day-to-day basis is basically what happens between 26th Street and 42nd Street between 6th Avenue all the way to Grand Central. My mind is kind of a claustrophobic place that’s always sort of buzzing, and if I have a moment to slow down and think about what’s happening I can actually get really maudlin and bummed out. So as far as what downtime means to me, it’s not that I’m not lazy, it’s just that when I’m not busy I tend to start feeling blue, so I try to keep my downtime contained. I tend to get bored after a week of vacation.
Do you, in a weird way, enjoy it like that at all? Being trapped in that buzzing mind?
No! No, not at all! I was hoping you had some LSD to sell me…wait, I’m sorry, are you not a drug dealer? Can you not offer me the sweet relief?
No sorry, wrong number.
It’s funny…like if you look at Being John Malkovich and all these Charlie Kaufman movies that illustrate the artistic turmoil of the human mind, we really are, as human beings — whether it’s drugs or movies or any experience — just constantly trying to get out of our heads. But the only sweet relief will be death.
