Anyway, the long and short of it is, I won’t be there. I’ll be at work, which is not at all where I want to be. I would like to be with everyone else on the steps of Old Main, waving flyers, singing songs, and generally behaving silly as we introduce the campus to the joys and horrors of squirrel fishing. But like I said, I’ll be at work. The other members of the club — and we’ve got a sizable crowd this year — have much more flexible schedules, since all but one or two of them are students. Thursday afternoons are good for them, and given the number of people who will walk by on their way to class (not to mention the local weather forecast for this week) Thursday is probably the best day for the event. And like I said at Sunday night’s meeting, whatever’s best for the Society.

But still, it would have been nice to be there. This is probably the first Python Society event in seven and a half years of which I won’t be a part. And the truth is, I’m starting to feel a little less relevant to the rest of the group, like maybe I’ve reached the point at which I should have moved on. When Will Ferrell left Saturday Night Live at the end of last year, he said, “I don’t want to stay past my welcome, like the guy two years out of high school still hanging out in the parking lot trying to pick up chicks.” I’m starting to worry that maybe that’s what I am: the remnants of a different club, the old guy still trying to act cool.

Not that I don’t enjoy Society meetings or the company of its members, and not that I don’t contribute. I laugh, I joke, and I still edit the weekly newsletter, writing almost all of the material myself. And I’m proud of that material. I think it’s funny. But even there, I’m starting to wonder. I don’t get a lot of feedback on what I write, other than the occasional chuckle or giggle as people read silently to themselves. And while I get the sense that they like what they’re reading, I’m not always sure why. I put a lot of effort into the newsletter, and while I certainly don’t consider that effort wasted, I do get the sense that it’s more important to me than it is to anyone else.

“Which do you feel more comfortable being: the person who is loved more or the person who is loved less?” I came across that question the other week as I read Jeremy Bushnell’s Imaginary Year, and I keep coming back to it, wondering. I certainly don’t want false praise just for the sake of it, but I also don’t want to throw all of my effort into something that just isn’t that important to anyone else. I don’t think I want to be the person who is loved less. I want to feel like I’m relevant, and not just some guy hanging out with people cooler than him on a Sunday night.

When I first joined the Monty Python Society, in the Fall of 1995, I sat at the back of the room and was pretty quiet. I don’t know if I ever said much of anything to anyone. I liked the other members — I thought they were funny and intelligent, and they liked the things that I liked — but I stood out only because there were so few people at meetings back then. Even in my second semester, when I asked if I could take over editing the newsletter, I wasn’t really a part of the club. I was just watching. But then a couple of people graduated or stopped coming, and we were low on officers, so I ended up getting elected secretary. And then president. And then, before I knew it, I belonged. I was semi-important. I had friends.

A lot of those friends went away at the end of my senior year — to other schools, to new jobs, to Texas — but new people showed up, and they kept me involved. They wanted me to be involved. We started to seriously consider ourselves writers and performers. We rehearsed. We recorded a CD of original sketches and songs. We performed some of them in front of an audience, and they seemed to enjoy it. They laughed. It’s a wonderful feeling to make an audience laugh. We joked that we would be “famous by Monday”. We made buttons that said so.

But of course we weren’t. I’m proud of what we accomplished. The material we performed and most of what we recorded is, I think, quite funny. But it didn’t make us famous. No reporters came to talk to us after our last show. The president of the club left after that year — he didn’t get into his major, I think, and decided to go home and attend classes at Pitt — and the dynamic changed. The group didn’t fall apart — I think we were worried it might — but things definitely were different.

But the new president had big ideas. She wanted to write a musical based on Silence of the Lambs. She organized our last Ides of October event, a mock protest to neuter the Nittany Lion Shrine. The group wasn’t quite what it had been the year before, but we were busy. I still felt like I belonged, like my contributions really mattered. I was among friends. In the spring semester, we performed in front of an audience again, and again they laughed. I wrote two new sketches and a song (the latter we never got a chance to perform, sadly), and things were good.

And they’re still good, for the most part. I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m not still having fun, or that nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I’ll go eat worms. I have a lot of fun at meetings, and I like most of the new people who started showing up this year. I’m just starting to miss how it used to be. I’m starting to wonder if this should be the year when I finally just walk away. I keep trying to convince the current president that we need to record a new CD or schedule another performance, not necessarily because I think it’s the best thing for the group, but because it’s something that I want to do. I miss those things. I miss improv, even if we were never especially good at it. I miss laughing and performing until two or three o’clock in the morning, knowing that we were going to do the same thing the very next night. I miss having people to occasionally get drunk with, to laugh with, to tell me, “this is funny, do more of that.”

I don’t want to be the one who’s loved less. I don’t want to stay past my welcome.