Hi. I'm an actor.

It's true. I act. Not just, you know, the way everybody acts. I mean, everyone takes action. I do it differently. See, I do it in front of people.

Oh. Oh, you do too? Well, I'm not making myself clear, obviously. See, I take action that I plan out days or weeks in advance, according to a specific order. Except that, see, when I'm acting well, I usually don't know what I'll do next. I'll do something else instead, and that makes everything go better. More unpredictable, and real. But I have to use lots of planning, too, to make that spontenaity more useful to me.

That sounds familiar too, huh? Okay. All right. Oh! Oh! How about this? I have to learn and memorize all this information that means little-to-nothing to anyone else, and am expected to regurgitate that information on cue. In fact, in terms of job security, I have to keep re-applying to my job. Sometimes my life seems like nothing more than a series of challenges, a sequence of putting out fires or keeping multiple pots from boiling over, so that it's all I can do to keep up with it all and get to the next day.

This really doesn't sound unique to you, does it? I can tell by your silence, and your facial expression.

That's it! I have an extraordinary sense of people's emotions! I am an emotional communicator extraordinaire, to the extant that, when I see people smile, I know I've made them happy, and when their eyes get wet, I know they're sort of overcome by...something...and...and...

Crap. I give up. I don't know distinguishes an actor from a "normal person." I've heard it said before that actors are simply normal people with the volume turned up, or slightly different balances of priorities, but the undefined-ness of those statements bugs the detritus from out of my person (look at the lengths I'll go to just not to repeat "crap" [Crap!] in the same paragraph). What is normal? Who defines that? Is it merely a statistical average? Median? Mean? (That does seem pretty mean, but who am I to judge?) Is it community defined? In which case, is that why so many actors feel more normal living in New York, because everyone's a bit more neurotic than the rest of the country?

I quote The Muppets Take Manhattan: "Peoples is peoples."