doom, it’s what’s for breakfast

Peggy
November 18, 2016

Wake up. Succumb to crippling dread caused by reading the news before I'm even out of bed: Trump looks to be on track to have the financial sector regulated by total banksters. It feels like I'll be able to deal with this better after having breakfast, I know my blood sugar is low and that makes everything terrible forever, especially since I skipped dinner last night, but I don't even have the energy to get out of bed, much less leave the house and go get breakfast, which I'm gonna have to do since all that's in the kitchen for breakfast is a mostly-empty container of elderly yogurt. Mostly because the kitchen's been unusable this week while maintenance ripped out part of the wall to replace insulation that'd been saturated with water by a pipe leak two floors above me.

I also think it's time to switch from sleeping under blankets to turning the heat up enough to sleep under a lot less. It's cold enough in my bedroom that the thought of exposing my naked skin to the air for even the five seconds it'll take to get into my bathrobe feels like an insurmountable task. Why the hell is an exothermic Southern girl like me living in Seattle anyway.

hoarding

Peggy
November 14, 2016

My birthday’s coming up again. I think I’m gonna hit up eBay for another box of Mardi Gras doubloons to strew around my bedroom floor. Sometimes they stick to my bare feet, and as I kick them off I grumble at myself a little; then I grin because I’m complaining about my DRAGON HOARD.

Adding whimsy to my life feels really, really important right now.

more fucking politics

Peggy
November 14, 2016

Hey so, you know how I grew up in New Orleans? And how Louisiana's been a super red state for years? This year, one of their Senate seats ended up in a runoff. With a Democrat involved who might have a fighting chance of getting it.

If you feel like donating to him, his site is http://www.fostercampbell2016.com. I already have. I might do some more. I would love to not cringe every time I hear about what the latest thing a Senator from my home state did.

 

looks like I’m eating out this weekend

Peggy
November 11, 2016

This is the current state of my kitchen. Turned out that leak was going down the wall, saturating the insulation. Over the past week, maintenance had to do this to the third and second floor apartments above me; now it’s my turn. On Monday they’ll be back to put new insulation in, close the wall back up, and put it all back together. It will probably be dry enough to do this earlier, but weekends are important.

Things That Have Made America Great Before

Peggy
November 11, 2016

So. Trump’s slogan is “Make America Great Again”. His transition team has set up a website that, among other things, invites people to submit suggestions for ways to Make America Great Again.

Let’s see. What happens when I think of things that Made America Great in the past?

Hybrid vigor. America has always been a nation of immigrants. We are the rejects, the fortune-seekers, the transported. People came to this country to make a new life, regardless of their nationality. Including Trump’s grandfather Friederich, who went from being a draft-dodging barber in Germany, to being one in NYC, to building a fortune running restaurants in the Gold Rush. That’s the American dream: any random person can come to this country and build a fortune off the combination of hard work and a little luck. Our culture is a crazy mish-mash of stuff brought in by every immigrant, as is no small chunk of our population – I’m a French/Italian/German euromutt, myself. Keep those open doors, continue being the land of dreams.

Unions. Strong unions forced fair treatment of workers. Without unions, we get long hours for little pay. I don’t know more than the broadest outline of this, I only know about the history of unions in the US through what the history of cartooning taught me. I’ve seen the difference between union jobs and non-union jobs first-hand.

Innovation. We’ve had a lot of smart, dedicated people who have come up with cool stuff that we could sell to the world. Lightbulbs. Cars. Airplanes. Computers. Where’d we get that? Well, people had the time to tinker with things instead of spending all their waking hours slaving away to pay for the basic necessities. And they had a decent education to start them out, too, which leads us to…

Education. How many kids coming home from WWII got a free education thanks to the GI Bill? How many of them broadened their horizons by going to college and meeting people they never could have seen in the small towns they came from? How many of them built businesses and lives because of that? The Boomers like to point back to their childhood as a time of Greatness, and this is a large part of why. Today? A college education is out of reach for even middle-class kids, let alone poor kids. Hell, there’s a lot of kids all across the country that get shitty elementary school, as well. How can we channel money into paying for this for more people again? Give every family in the country gets financing to pay for college. Or pour a lot more money into public schools and universities, free for all to attend. Make teaching financially rewarding enough that it becomes an attractive vocation, too. Ditch mandatory testing to retain funding; that hasn’t helped. Or maybe keep it and use it as a way to find great-performing schools to reward with extra money, and poorly-performing schools to help with extra funding.

Immense natural resources. Part of why this country is rich is because it had a lot of fertile land and lots of oil and coal. We don’t have much of that any more, and extracting what’s left is an increasingly expensive prospect, both in terms of money and the effects it has on the land. We’ve got a beautiful country, but we’re ripping it to shreds trying to extract the last bits of meat from its bones. I think the way to greatness here is to acknowledge that the gifts of oil/coal/etc found beneath this land have mostly run out, and accept it and move on: repair what we can, enjoy the amazing views this country offers, treasure the diversity of its wildlife that remains. I don’t have much hope on this one given Trump’s interim EPA appointment.

Jobs. Lots of jobs. Lots of things for the average American to do that people would find worth paying for. We needed a lot of people to farm and mine those resources. And those people fought for fair wages and We’ve got a lot less of those now, thanks to businesses paying people in other, poorer countries slave wages to do as many of these jobs as possible. Honestly I can’t argue with Trump’s rhetoric about pulling back from some of these global-trade treaties and imposing higher tariffs on imports; while I feel that the future lies more in increased automation, basic income, and a lot less jobs, that’s a hard sell, and “let’s stop buying so much cheap shit from overseas and make it in the US instead” sounds like a decent fix if I assume that capitalism ain’t going away any time soon. Although I’m also gonna suggest “raise the national minimum wage”, because nobody can live on forty hours of that right now.

Entertainment. We invented television and movies. We invented rock and roll, jazz, and rap. Our entertainment media is one of our major exports. I wonder if Trump’s got any position on funding the arts? High or low? Regardless, a hell of a lot of great work’s been done by people who had a decent day job that paid well enough to have energy and passion left over for their work. Really, “keep making great entertainment” comes back down to “minimum wage/basic income” and “education”; gotta learn the skills to do it and have the time to do it in until you’re good enough to make it your day job.

Genocide and slavery. You know what, let’s not shy away from this. America did this. America is built on this. All those immigrants I mentioned in my first point killed most of the people who were already living in this rich land, and made most of the ones we didn’t kill go live in the least-hospitable parts of the country. And we imported huge numbers of people from Africa to work under harsh, inhuman conditions, and called them animals. We enslaved them to do the manual labor of no small part of the task of harvesting the fertility and resources of this land. We deny them education, we deny them jobs, we make them live in the least-desirable parts of cities, we throw them into increasingly horrible prison conditions when they turn to illegal ways to make a living. This… this really isn’t very great, much less Great. This is the Original Sin of America. This is the secret that we keep wanting to sweep under the rug when we look back at our history. Greatness would lie in apologizing for it and not continuing to treat these people as an underclass who’s not worthy of education, help, a nice place to live, or dignity. Greatness would lie in not shipping out the undocumented Hispanics who fill many of the shitty slave-wage jobs now, as they attempt to walk the same path ol’ Frederick Trump did from “barber” to “hotel magnate”. Greatness would lie in embracing the Middle Easterners fleeing the constant war over the oil their homelands are on top of. Greatness lies in raising up the poor African-Americans along with the poor German-Americans, French-Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, and all the other ethnic extractions we mush together under “white”. Because things are shit for a lot of people right now, not just the ones Donald Trump spoke to during this election.

I may be dumping a version of this into that form on Trump’s transition site after some further editing. I have little hope that it’ll be greeted with more than derisive laughter at a bunch of liberal waffle, but you never know. It’s better than silence.

pruning

Peggy
November 10, 2016

Finally unfollowing someone you went to animation school with whose entire facebook presence for the past several years has mostly been right-wing memes is a nice feeling.

Yes yes I know reach out make bridges and all that but uuuuugggghhh.

And thus Hippie Liberal America continues to widen the gap between itself and Broke, Betrayed, Angry Middle America. I acknowledge the hypocracy of doing this while poking at a TV show propsal about “understanding the enemy”.

entropy continues

Peggy
November 8, 2016

Well that was fun. While I was blearily showering the shelves I have in the tub broke. They’re one of those affairs with a series of triangular baskets on a tension pole; I probably paid like $20 for it five years ago when I moved in here so I can’t really complain.

Guess I’ve got a new thing on my task list today. But it is not going to take priority over “sign the goddamn contract to print rita 3 and get the covers aligned to the specs so I can send everything off soon and be done with this phase of the process”. Despite part of my brain very much wanting to sieze on this and make it super important so I can put off the scary thing that involves lots of money one more day. I’m fucking sick of that part of my brain doing that.

edit: yay my second misquoting accident means i’m in for about $3k more to print book 3 than i budgeted, wheeeeee, never doing this again without the indesign file in hand so I have accurate numbers. I have the funds to deal with it; it’s less than the mistake I made last time cost to fix. Signed it and emailed it back.

the dream of the forgotten closet

Peggy
November 8, 2016
(I was looking through Evernote just now and I found this, which I seem to have never posted.. It’s backdated to the date Evernote says it was written on.)
There was a closet in the house I grew up in that formed the wall between the rarely-used front hallway and the dining room. It was a wide, shallow one, filled with things my parents owned but rarely used – good china, various single purpose cooking gizmos, and assorted stuff that blurs together in memory.
In my dream, I opened this closet to find that it was much deeper than it really was. There was another space about as wide as the hallway it was next to, with the shelves containing all the disused stuff my parents owned set against the far wall. Which would have meant they were overlapping the space used by the dining room.
This extra space continued off to the left, then turned right, well outside the space the closet normally occupied. I went in and found new spaces in the house. Slightly dusty, unused spaces, with different wallpaper and trim from the rest of my childhood home. Decor that felt like it was left over from previous inhabitants who had used this hidden apartment that we never knew about. I looked into a room or two and found furniture waiting to be used, shelves with stuff on them. I found myself reminded of a long-ago dream of finding new spaces within my grandmother’s home, which I am pretty sure was a real dream long ago rather than fake deja vu within the dream.
And then the hall I was following opened up into a vast warehouse, full of neatly organized shelves holding… things. Fragments of my parents’ lives and my memories, jumbled up and neatly labeled. Bits of a gothy comic that an unknown female relative drew with someone else’s assistance. Weird signifiers of people related to me who I never met.
I was wandering through this place, marveling at this huge space hidden inside my parents’ house, storing all kinds of vaguely nonsensical things, when I became aware of a generalized hubbub of conversation. There were other people here in this hidden space in my parents’ house. I started trying to chase them out, screaming at them. Gradually they left, until I was deep in the place in a livid rage at the idea of someone about to present an art project made by rearranging things found in this warehouse of weird detritus of the lives my parents lived.
Then I kinda drifted to another dream, of being in a different but familiar-feeling house full of books, with a sinkhole opening up in the grassy floor, but then I woke up.
Earlier I had dreamed of waiting for a bus in the night, which proved to be a small park the size of a city block that was lifted off the ground with wheels barely visible beneath. It ran through the city in streets far too small for it, slipping through wide holes in buildings designed to have just enough ground clearance for the park and its trees to zip through. Eventually it went into one hole and came out over a precipitous drop to a multi-lane road, which everyone else on the park-bus seemed to be expecting – they screamed like people on a roller coaster rather than people in fear of their life. It fell straight down and landed safely; I thought I almost lost my phone but apparently lost a lighter instead.

Happiness Systems

Peggy
November 7, 2016

So regarding that earlier post about me being depressed: afterwards I thought, well, hello winter depression, it’s time to reassemble all the various systems I use to defend myself against you. They’d fallen apart.

Better snacking: I used to mostly snack on the Trader Joe’s “Tempting” trail mix. It had a picture of a couple of pensive cherubs on the label, and it was a tasty blend of peanuts, almonds, cashews, dried cherries, chocolate chips, and peanut butter chips. But then it vanished from the shelves. Recently it started showing up in this new form factor: a bag full of a bunch of little bags. But that just feels like it’s not gonna work with the way I use it; I kept a bag of it on the desk and dipped into it occasionally while working. So today I went down to TJ’s and got some dried cherries, some tiny peanut butter cups, some peanuts, and some almond/cashew/chocolate chips trail mix. Dumped it all into a ziploc bag, put it on my desk, and hell yeah I have my favorite work snacks back again.

I do not maintain that this is by any means the healthiest snack in the world. But I’ve been choosing far worse ways to satisfy that urge of “I am busy doing something and I want a tiny bit of energy-carrying food”; one or two handfuls of this will usually sate that urge without the lingering problems of “what do I do with the rest of this candy bar I guess I’ll eat it before it goes stale” or “did I just eat the whole fucking bag of corn puffs without thinking”.

(Feel free to mock me for thinking this elementary act of food assembly is worth noting. What can I say, I’m pretty useless in the kitchen.)

Better distraction: I’m following too many people on Twitter and that needs fixing. So I made a few “lists” on Twitter. Midway through I realized it sends out notifications of me adding people to these, and quickly made them private. I’m glad I found this out before the one with a snarky name got created.

So that’s better junk food for the body and the brain. More likely to give me a quick hit of whatever I’m picking them up for, more likely to satisfy that urge enough that I am no longer interested in it and can do something that makes me happy. Like drawing comics.

I think it’s also time to switch back to my smallest computer bag. It’s got barely enough room for the computer, a few essentials like my wallet, and not much more. Less weight means I’m more likely to make the choice to take the computer out with me, which means more likely to maybe take it out and sit down and draw. Which is a thing that fairly reliably makes me happier. (I’m really hoping that the forthcoming Wacom Mobile Studio will make drawing as casual as pulling out my sketchbook used to be; the Surface did that pretty well except for the part where it didn’t talk to Illustrator very well, and I found the time I’d spend drawing during any given day going up a lot without any effort.)

hello, depression

Peggy
November 7, 2016

This weekend, I felt like shit. Sore throat, runny nose, I had a cold. So I spent it on the beanbag chair playing video games. I’d been invited to a party but “getting on a bus with a head full of snot for a half hour so I could go sneeze on people who are gathering to try and have some fun” didn’t sound like a good idea for anyone involved.

I got a new one called “Ronin”. It’s a 2d game about a little ninja who runs through side-view office buildings killing lots of little security people on their way to kill the five people who apparently did something terrible to the ninja’s father. The unique selling point that differentiates this game from a zillion other games about agile little people running through side-view environments killing lots of people on their way to kill a few people who did something terrible is that combat happens largely in a turn-based fashion, rather than in realtime, so you get to be a super agile ninja with super reflexes who can leap through a hail of bullets to stab someone in the face. I spent a whole day playing it until like 3AM, and won it, then did a few levels of the New Game+ mode (which starts you with the full toolset of moves you had to unlock over the course of the game, and requires that you kill 100% of the security dudes without letting them raise the alarm, and kill 0% of the occasional non-combatants scattered throughout the levels) before it crashed and I put it down for an indefinite amount of time.

Then I played the recent remake of 2006’s “Ratchet and Clank” which was really amazingly pretty. And I kept on noticing that I could barely tell what was going on in the cutscenes because all the detail added in the course of spiffing up a decade-old PS2 game for the PS4 made every shot a little harder to parse compared to the original’s brightly-colored cartoon characters against contrasting backgrounds; there were multiple times in the first few levels where I felt like I could barely see what was going on because the various robots and aliens shooting at me were the same color as the background. And damn its plot is some convoluted bullshit that’s mostly an excuse to give you more goofy-looking targets to shoot with your goofy guns.

I played that until like 5AM. I’m not sure I enjoyed any of it. I feel no particular desire to replay the whole thing with its hundreds of side missions and things to collect, and yet I want nothing more than to go sit on the living room for another fifteen hours doing exactly that.

Today I got out of bed around 1PM. I’ve been up for about four hours and the fucking sun is already setting. Realizing that makes me feel doomed. (Switching off of daylight savings time isn’t helping this one bit.)

I miss drawing new comics but “printing Rita” still hangs over anything else in a big curtain of guilt. And pushing that forward is a constant churing pool of boredom and stress and guilt. I really hope that this is the last book I have to print myself. It probably isn’t. And that fills me with dread and misery and I just wanna crawl back into bed and sleep until the sun comes back.

Hello, seasonal depression. It’s been a while. I didn’t miss you one fucking bit. If the long-shot chance of Parallax becoming a thing happens, I am moving back to LA and I am never living this far north ever again if I can help it. I need more goddamn sun than Seattle provides, even with the help of my False God.

(I also realize that I have eaten pretty much nothing but junk food for the past few days and should probably eat something vaguely like real food. I should probably change my habits to eat more real food in general. I’d been working on that for a while but I’ve backslid.)