Here’s Shaun, who I’ve written about periodically in my previous blogs.

As I’ve explained before, he’s a funny, somewhat morose guy who’s had some tough breaks. He spent the last several years trapped in Arizona after an optimistic move to Los Angeles left him completely broke.

My last blog was titled, ‘A Year in Pictures of Comedy,’ depicting, among other things, my small corner of the Chicago comedy scene. Meanwhile, from Phoenix, Shaun kept a blog called ‘A Year in My Non-Existent Comedy Career’ where he posted pictures of himself pointing toy guns at his head with captions that read, “I did stand-up today and it sucked.”

Someone pointed out that maybe we were opposites. I wrote, “I don’t really buy the premise that Shaun and I are opposites, beyond the fact that he hasn’t had quite enough failure to give up and I’ve had just barely enough success to keep going.”

Back then, Shaun wrote to me, “It's more like we're parallel. If I may chance an analogy, it's like we're both on the same river in separate rafts, it's just that I keep hitting the parts of the river with rocks, turbulence and predatory aquatic life. The good part is if I we can both stay on our rafts, we will get to the same place eventually.”

And now we are in the same place, at least geographically. Shaun finally saved enough money to move to Chicago. In fact, he moved into Sarah’s apartment when we moved into this place together.

He seems to be doing at least a little better.

Shaun: [via e-mail] “Right now I'm temping, with the same temp job I've had since I got here, which consists of sorting spam e-mails. I go through spam e-mails and categorize them and put down pertinent information so the company may analyze them for the marketing of better spam e-mails. It hasn't really paid enough for me to get by, but apparently paying me too much as the company is outsourcing our task to India. So, at least I have a month to find another job before I run out of income. I've had it worse, that's for sure. I still have my freelance work through Topless Robot that pays a little bit. Also, I've gone through one Annoyance improv class level while here and done some open mic nights here in the city. So hopefully soon I land another job. I just need to get a decent job and things will pick up for me considerably here.”

Good luck Shaun.