Day 5: Avocados

This week unflinchingly stretched my perception of the words "fatigue" and "stress." I have neither been more exhausted nor more neurotic than I am right now at 11:00 on a Friday night. We've been in New York for just under a week, but it feels like two or three. The nine of us are out of our minds over the fact that this is only the end of the first five days of training. Five out of sixty-one. That's one-twelfth of the way to the finish line. A hair over 8%. Arriving in Chatsworth on a trip from L.A. to San Francisco. We are crawling naked on the tip of the world's largest, coldest iceberg, and boy, do we feel it.

We learned six of about thirty pieces this week to prepare for our swap-ins next week. Trainees will start swapping with regular New York Blue Men, the first going on Monday. I go on Wednesday. The last of us will go two weeks from today, meaning that those guys are reasonably assumed to make it to week three. As for me, going on Wednesday night with a post-swap check-in Thursday morning, that could be the end of the road. At this point, I'm not sure how I feel about it.

On the one hand, it's the chance to join a very tightly knit, elite class of performers of which there are only around eighty worldwide. (That's 0.00000001% of the population – one of our directors said that for every 1,000 guys that audition, ONE gets hired.) Despite that opportunity, though, the past five days have run me absolutely, thoroughly, to-the-bone ragged. Small example: I get a cold sore maybe twice or three times a year, either as a periodic inconvenience or as the result of stress or being sick or something. As of yesterday, I have three. The cause couldn't be clearer.

I'm honestly too tired at this moment to care about whether I make it or not. It could go either way. Thursday morning I will either be happy that I made it past this benchmark or relieved that I'm out of the fire. All I know for sure is that these were the five most grueling days of my life (so far), and I'm sleeping in tomorrow before taking a book to Central Park for a few hours.

For lunch this week, I've been frequenting a Subway around the corner from the training space. There's a big sticker on the glass above the ingredients that strongly recommends adding avocado to your sandwich. I haven't done it; partly because it makes me homesick for California, and partly because I now know how it feels to be pitted.