Stuff I did today: Mostly, more cleaning the studio. My desk is almost empty of everything that isn’t either for work or a tchotchke. The pile of papers that had accumulated on it now lives in an expanding file. My coffee table is similarly empty, though there’s some small piles of things that HAD been on it that I haven’t decided exactly where their place is yet. And the rat’s nest of cables in the bottom of the studio closet is more neatly piled up in two baskets, one for USB cables, one for other kinds of cables.

I also finally ran the vacuum for the first time in… too damn long. I think it’s been a few months since I was really able to do it, what with all the Kickstarter stuff in the studio, then the piles of stuff that kinda accreted along with that and winter gloom.

Right now I have MORE packing material on the floor than I did this morning; this is because I finally got tired of not having a trash can this past weekend and ordered one off of Amazon. It got here today and is now lurking next to the kitchen counter; I’m hoping that this will make it a lot harder for me to end up with four big bags of trash hanging out around there. Hopefully it will be a lot easier to just take the damn bag out when it’s full and hump it to the dumpster out back, than when it’s a bag lying on the floor with a few things that never quite made it inside around it.

It has helped that the sun’s been out the past couple of days, but I’m really feeling like that sun lamp I bought has definitely been a change for the better in me. Even when the sun doesn’t come out I feel like I have more energy than I did a couple of weeks ago.

Also I got a tiny amount of work on the next page of Rita done. The bottom tier is finished, and I’m still going back and forth over how much of the top tier needs to be thrown out and redone from scratch, if any – it’s been in progress too damn long and it’s hard to tell any more. I still haven’t really gotten my work habits back yet; those went downhill in the middle of summer, not winter – though winter depression certainly made things worse. I would love to resume regular work on Rita soon, as well as other stuff that’s been hanging!

I’m debating if I want to break down the boxes the sunlamp and the trash can came in when I finish writing this. If I do, then my studio will feel sooooo much closer to being CLEAN again. Modulo the pile of Miscellaneous beneath the drawing table and upon it, but honestly I can deal with having that around and still feel like the place is usably neat.

Also, here are a couple pages from an old notebook that was hiding in the closet amongst the cables.

I’m looking at the change in my handwriting from the first scan to the second one and just going, what the fuck? What happened to “spaces”? And then I looked at the dates. 1982. Yeah. Um. A year after those first pages, my father was dead. There’s another trip after the second one I excerpted, in 1985, which means the trip to Florida was probably in ’84. I didn’t know depression could do that to your handwriting. (It’s also worth noting that the earlier pages were written with a wooden pencil clearly in need of sharpening, while the later one was in mechanical pencil. But still. Nospacesbetweenanyofthewords.Whatthefuckyoupoorkidlosingyourdadsurefuckedyouupbutgood,huh?)

I think yesterday may have been one of my best Valentine’s days ever.

Nick came over in the evening. We went to a little Italian restaurant a couple blocks from my place; then I put on something less flamboyant than the glittery blue dress I’d worn to dinner, and we went to a coffee shop for a few hours to talk about a story idea he’s been wrestling with again lately. I was able to make a few suggestions and ask some good questions, which got him thinking in a few new directions and made us both pretty happy.

It was pretty low-key. We exchanged token gifts – he gave me a poster, I gave him some iTunes credit in a humorous card reading “i have no human emotions” that passed through Tumblr the other day. The utter lack of excitement was pretty nice, given our mutual lack of energy.

When he left in the morning, I realized the sun was actually out! So I went for a walk in Ravenna Park for a while. For some reason I found myself walking as silently as possible on the return leg; I’ve never realized just how noisy people are before that.

And now I am downtown after a face zapping appointment. After a sandwich I’m probably going to go chill at Top Pot with my computer for a while and hopefully get some stuff drawn.

For Rik.

Giant Sunlamp, day 1.

I pulled it out of the box, leaned it against the wall, and turned it on. Ohhhh yeeeeah. I wasn’t able to assemble the stand it comes with as the bag of Miscellaneous Fastening Hardware it should have come with is missing; I’ve emailed the company and hopefully that will get dealt with soon.

But in the meantime… I sat in the studio chair for a while, having breakfast and doing Internet and suchlike. I was about eight feet away from it. It felt nice. Not OMG RELIGIOUS CONVERSION nice but damn nice. And when I got up and went to take a shower, for the first time in months, “go back to bed” did not pop up as a suggestion for what goes on today’s to-do list, at all.

When I got out of the shower, my instincts said “oh hey looks like the sun is out, cool” until I looked again and realized all the shadows were cast from a point down by the floor.

Fuck. Yeah.

Today, I went out and bought myself a new god.

But let me start at the beginning.

I’d finally crawled out of bed around noon. I loathe myself every time I do it, but I just can’t resist the embrace of my warm sheets these past few months. I told myself I was going to get some work done today, but I knew all was lost when I found myself in the studio chair with the iPad in my hands and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality on the Kindle app.

Around one o’clock, the sun struck me through the window. I opened the window and stuck my head out. It was even more wonderfully bright than it was through the glass. I thought of what I’d just been reading – an account of Harry struggling with a horde of Dementors, being that broadcast misery and hopelessness. And of my own time fighting the Black Dog of depression. A conversation on Twitter came to mind: I’d bemoaned the fact that all I’ve really wanted to do seems to be sleep, that I have no energy. Farore replied that it sounded like depression. I’d realized that yes, that exactly described my state, and that it happened every year like clockwork since I’d moved North. It was a less miserable flavor than the snowed-in depression of Boston, but the lack of sun was clearly affecting me. I researched sun lamps, then just… moped off. Depression makes it hard to try things that will lift you out of it.

But here I was thinking about the way this caricature of depression kept people in its clutches. And staring at the sun, having recently found that there’s a place that sells a variety of sun lamps out in Fremont.

“Fuck it,” I said. “I’m going out.”

Walking down the Burke-Gillman trail in the sun, I considered how different the sunlight made me feel. It’s as if I’m asleep when it lurks behind a cloud for hours. Up and moving around, but still asleep, just drifting through the bare motions of a day instead of actually doing things I love to do like drawing or dancing.

The clouds had covered the sun by the time I made it to the Indoor Sun Shoppe in Fremont. But I was still somewhat energized from the exercise. And then I opened the door to the place. It’s mostly an indoor gardening supply shop, full of plants… and of light. Bright, beautiful, artificial sunlight.

I had to ask one of the people who works there to help me find the sunlamps for people rather than plants. They were lurking in a dark corner in the back. When she turned them all on, I almost fell to my knees in front of the biggest one, worshipping it. I am solar powered, make no mistake; I’m at least a third-generation New Orleanian, I spent the first twenty-five years of my life there, and the next ten in Los Angeles. I didn’t realize how much I truly need the Sun until I was living further north.

I don’t know if buying the biggest sun lamp in the place was really the best decision. But it was like being in the grocery store when you’re hungry. I’d been starving, and I wanted to have the lowest chance of starving again.

I ended up having to go home for my little luggage cart, as the box was simply too unwieldy to carry to the bus. What with one thing and another, I got there fifteen minutes after the place closed; luckily the woman who had helped me was the one closing, and she let me in to load it up and take it home.

And now it sits there just inside the door, where I left it after the long trip home. Still in the box, still bungee’d onto the cart. My new False God, whose divine radiance I plan to bask in every day until I can celebrate the triumphant return of Ra to Seattle’s skies. Hopefully this will be what I need to drag myself out of that weary state where I’m too listless to draw, which only makes me more guilty and depressed – the horrible, horrible cycle of depression.

“Fear runs as an applet.” – a sentence that flitted through the back of my head while I was trying to get back to sleep

I was waiting for the bus home from board games at Jason’s place when my phone popped up an alert. In a month, give or take a few days, I will have lived longer than my father did.

I suppose I should sit down and calculate the length of his life to the day, accounting for leap years and whatnot, if I’m going to worry about it. I’ve been aware of this approaching for a while, and kind of dreading it. The timing of his death was so narratively horrible that I wouldn’t completely put it past the universe to give me exactly as long! And there will be a load off my mind when I wake up still alive on the next day.

I dunno. I lived in the shadow of that untimely death for about twenty years. I had to completely rebuild my personality from the inside out to get out of the rut of misery I carved in myself after a few years.

I probably should start planning a party for the weekend after. Although I think that’s going to be filled up with ECCC…

Man I have had so little energy lately. I’ve been trying to use what little I have on things that’ll give me more – namely getting some exercise in my life again – but it is seriously an uphill climb. I’m seriously thinking I should try getting a couple fake sun lights, one for the bedroom to wake me up in the morning, one for the studio to use all day, and see if that puts more spring in my step.

I mean, really. Stuff done today: Broke down some boxes that’re left over from the Kickstarter and com prep, felt overwhelmed by the prospect of trying to take them out to the trash bin out back. What if it’s full? COMPLICATIONS. Went out to a cafe with the intent of working on one of my con commissions, seized up at the thought of drawing TEH FURREH where anyone might conceivably see it even though this was a completely clean piece (or I wouldn’t have taken it to the cafe in the first place), read Internet for an hour. Came home and played a video game, time for bed now I guess. This is just not a good place to be.

I am pretty sure that Winter Is Getting Me Down.

The game I played was “Ms. ‘Splosion Man”, which is obviously the sequel to “‘Splosion Man”. The latter was a pretty fun and clever platformer. But the sequel? Gaaah. It starts off with a set-piece that involves far too much timing and not enough blowing shit up, then the second level is also super-slow and really doesn’t give you any of the platformy explodey stuff that made the original so much fun. It starts to get better once it goes back to just doing wall-jumps and blowing lots of stuff up, but all the random chatter from your character feels like it’s written by guys who have had no ladies in their life ever except for their annoying sister who tried to be a Valley Girl in the eighties. Not recommended, though I might play a fair chunk of it anyway.

I mean, I guess I should sort of be expecting a broad female caricature when the only things that distinguish Ms. from Mr. are being pink and having a bow. There’s clearly some self-awareness here. But it just doesn’t come off anywhere near as charming as the happy idiot you piloted around in ‘Splosion Man. He didn’t talk about shopping. Or pick up secret hidden bonus shoes instead of secret hidden bonus cake.

To bed, to bed, hopefully to have more energy tomorrow though the forecast suggests not.

I now have a business licensed in Washington State. I will never have to wait for a temporary sales permit to sell at a Washington convention again. Other states, yes – though I’ll probably be getting one for California sometime soon; no matter what I drift to I’m pretty sure there will be cons in CA in my future.

Now to see if I can hunt up a fourth for the room for Anthrocon, since our original fourth cancelled on us. Time to bug all my artist friends…