(no subject)

[avram]

Got my latest Amazon order — two CDs (Ben Folds Five by the Ben Folds Five, and Rockin’ the Suburbs by Ben Folds working solo) and a couple of Michel Gagné books (Insanely Twisted Rabbits and Frenzied Fauna). The Gagné books are full of just the sort of weird critters I used to draw when I was a kid, only much more accomplished; Gagné’s something like the artist I ought to have grown up into if I’d stuck with it all those years.

Comments

*chuckle*

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

I have Gange's _The Mystery of He_ -and- the Ben Folds Five album. Looks like we still have stuff in common these days. ;) As for the art thang, no point in beating yourself up about it. I've come to realize that for years now I've been beating myself up about one thing or another only to realize this. Beating myself up has never made me do any of the things I was beating myself up for not doing. It's never made me better when I felt I should be better or do more. It's only made me feel crappy, depressed, and unhappy.

So I'm trying a more gentle approach from now (but old habits do die hard), cause clearly the beating myself up tactic -isn't- working. ;)

Re: *chuckle*

[avram]

Oh, this wasn’t beating myself up. Beating myself up is stuff like the “I Suck” post on the 6th, or when I wake up in the afternoon today and realize that I’m still making excuses rather than going to the gym, and that I haven’t gotten <classified> anywhere near finalized in sketch form, as I’d been meaning to do last week.

Or when I realize that it’s 4 PM on a Sunday and I’m still not dressed, and I’m just wasting time on the damn computer!

Having stuff in common

[avram]

I don't know where you got the idea that we don't have stuff in common. (More on this in my current dead-tree letter.)

Re: Having stuff in common

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

I get this from the many conversations or things I've read from you over the years in which you tell me about games that you're playing in (which are unlike any games I've ever played in, and I haven't gamed in about 5 years or so) and all the books that you talk about that I've either never read or don't think I would really like if I did.

I did really like Finder, but I really didn't like the creepy comic book about being in the Workplace thang. That really disturbed and upset me on an elemental level. So I guess it seems to me that our tastes have somewhat diverged over the years and then suddenly you refer to stuff that I 1) actually know what you're talking about and 2) like. ;) I generally don't come out and make a point of saying that I am unfamiliar with what you're talking about or don't like it cause that's either not really the point or it's kind of rude. ;) Anywho ...

Re: Having stuff in common

[avram]

Well, that’s one of the things friends are supposed to do, expand each others’ horizons. I don’t expect to like everything all my friends like, but I figure that I’ll like some of it, so if they expose me to enough stuff I’ll still wind up finding stuff I like that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Lisa, my oldest friend, who I’ve known for almost 25 years, is a big fan of James Joyce. I’ve never read a page of Joyce in my life, and don’t expect to anytime soon, and if I do read any it’ll likely be something like Dubliners, and not the stuff Lisa really gets off on like Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. She and her boyfriend mnemex are always talking about things they’re into that I’m not, or am only marginally interested in, like fencing or the SCA or filking (the last of which is nowadays a very marginal pursuit of mine; it used to be more of one), but I don’t for a moment think of them as people I don’t have much in common with. Chris, who I’ve been dating for over a decade, is way into baseball, which I don’t care a whit for, and has barely read any comics ever (not even Watchmen) nor played any RPGs (she tried it once and didn’t like it), but I don’t think of her as someone I don’t have much in common with. And Lisa, Josh, and Chris don’t think of Kevin and I as someone they don’t have much in common with when we go on at length about all the weird comics we read that they’ve never heard of.

The workplace comic, Through the Habitrails (by Jeff Nicholson, who currently does Colonia — you knew that, right?), is supposed to be creepy (though “Kafkaesque” is the descriptor that comes to my mind). Parts of it were originally published in the horror comics anthology Taboo, and I thought they were the scariest thing in there. This is one of those basic personality things, I think. In my experience, some people just don’t like reading about negative experiences (and the types of experiences vary; some people are fine with physical horror but can’t take psychological, for example), while others are capable of mentally encapsulating the experience as fiction and maintaining psychological distance from it. In my case, I was slaving away at Sir Speedy when I read “It’s Not Your Juice” the first part of Habitrails to see print, about the guy getting something in the mail that gives him “juice” (a creative charge), and then having the juice literally tapped away over the course of the workday, leaving him with none for his own projects, I thrummed like a tuning fork someone had just hit. Yes, that’s it, that’s it exactly I thought. I think reading that comic may have contributed to my quitting that awful job.