So, I'm packing. I leave in ten hours. I'm packing and I thought I was being pretty economical, but I still seem to have no space for anything that isn't pants.
Motherfscker.
I will be arriving in Dallas at 8pm on the 24th. From then on, I have no idea what I'm doing, but hopefully it involves eating turkey. Turkey, Lucky Charms, quality Mexican food and a visit to the Rothko Chapel and I'll be a pretty happy tourist.
Anyway, must dash. Packing to do, email to send, and art to finish. Wish me luck. Pray I don't get insert-horrible-things-happen-in-the-states-example-here.
I shall attempt to contact you all on the other side of the Pacific.
I haven't been anywhere or doing anything interesting. I believe at one point I was playing World of Warcraft, an abhorrent chore I had up until last month managed to avoid. Every post on this journal begins with an apology regarding my tardiness. That was one right there.
Apparently I am going to Texas. The one they have in the Americas. I am not quite sure exactly where it is, staring for too long at that god-forsaken country makes me break out in hives. But rumour has it that it will be cold. I remain unamused by the Northern Hemisphere's trickery.
Six (perhaps!) weeks over Christmas and New Year, Grace, her Mother and I will be in Texas, making sure not to mess with it. Recently Grace and I traveled to the middle of nowhere for my sister's wedding, and I got to show her off to my country-bred relatives. Now she's preparing to do the same with me. I feel my four-hour travel was a lot more efficient than her proposed seventy-two, but it's not every day a man is given the opportunity to endure below-freezing temperatures to hang out in Denny's with a bunch of Republicans. Alright, let me correct that. It's not every day for a man who doesn't already live in the states. And I don't, so it isn't.
Keep up!
Grace and her Mother are going to visit relatives. I am going to tag along, and to experience the horror of US air security. I can't take my bottled hair products in my carry-on luggage? Uh oh! Crazy! Zing! Once I get a single air security madness anecdote, my stand-up career will no doubt take off, just like the plane that inadvertently lead to my conceiving that joke. Or something.. I understand they don't even give you the tiny bag of peanuts anymore.. is that also a security thing? Crazy!
So I have about two weeks before we leave, and before then I have to figure out exactly what it is that people do for pants in freezing conditions. Do you wear some sort of extra pair over the top of your regular pair, or something beneath, or what? The worst I've ever seen in this country was minus one Centigrade, which I understand is still boiling water temperature in Fahrenheit. The coldest day I can remember in my recent history involved my Icelandic friend wearing shorts and calling me the Nordic equivalent of a pussy. I'm not sure he said exactly, but I bet it was full of umlauts.
I have a cubic metre of clothing at the foot of my bed, none of it mine, all of it belonging to Grace. I am tempted to pounce, I repeat POUNCE, upon the pile, rolling about in it like a happy kitten. I will NOT do this, however, in case she has some kind of system employed to organise her garments. I don't know what it could be, perhaps she's got some kind of co-ordinate thing going on in there, our meager human minds will never be able to fathom it. I'm just sayin'. It looks soft, and I have to resist an urge.
Urges I cannot resist, however, relate to flaming leather-clad skeletal avengers on motorcycles, in this case Ghostrider. The trailer occasionally plays in the periphery of my shopping experiences, and I look at that thing and know in my heart that it cannot be a good film, that Marvel Comics has almost without exception ruined all of their franchises in cellulose (and the one they did do justice to? Well, it's now a little bit ruined as a comic. Everything I love is dead! Hooray!) and I shouldn't get my hopes up. but Christdammit, it's a movie about a skeleton, on fire, riding a motorcycle. NAME ME ONE OF MANKIND'S OTHER ACHIEVEMENTS THAT COMES CLOSE TO TOPPING THAT.
I once submitted the idea that skeletons doing anything is always great and funny. Grace pointed out that in reality, skeletons doing anything would be quite awful, and possibly terrifying. It's the surgical precision of her logic that practically COMPELS me to marry her.
I think I'm into the fourth week of my unemployment, having carefully used my newfound free time to almost finish a videogame I don't rate particularly highly. the only thing I've taken from this brief foray into self-discovery is that I should not be allowed to manage my own time. Perhaps this won't be a problem for too much longer; The money is beginning to run out. I could probably go another month if I cut down on frivolous purchases, unfortunately I'm capable of convincing myself I need fur-lined turntables or a wind-up refrigerator with alarming success. I told my friends at the start of all this that I would get another job when the money ran out; I probably should have realised that eventually, I'd actually have to do just what I said.
Grace and I saw Buck 65 play on Sunday night. It was, at least in the case of Grace's sister, a life changing experience. For me it was just the delivery of a promise I figure he'd wordlessly made with me, he rocked live. There was a lot of love in the room, and I felt he and I shared a special connection. He was sick, I was sick, we were two hip peas in a pod. i was up the front of the audience and throughout the performance I just wanted to reach up and hand him a kleenex. He needed it badly, I could tell, but I didn't know whether that would break some secret concert rule, so I didn't. Maybe he suffered needlessly all night, or maybe I saved myself some trouble, we'll never know.
I'm going now, to take sandwiches to the parking lot where my girlfriend works.
Superman Returns was probably about as much a good movie as X-Men 3 was a vile abomination delivered unto the art of cinema, and I am glad it arrived. It was good stuff, fun stuff, not surprisingly awesome or anything, but good good good. This is not the Citizen Kane of the Superhero film, a notion that defies all odds by even existing.
They probably could have removed that kid from the plot and shaved a mean thirty minutes off the film, mind you.
To celebrate the watching of a movie, I spent sixty dollars in a comic shop. I, who have no income, have an expensive habit. It's a lot like being an alcoholic, except instead of finding yourself losing furniture to breakage and gaining street signs and road safety cones you just need a lot of shelf space. So really, it's not like any kind of alcoholism they tell you about in AA meetings. If I really want to stick with this alcohol metaphor, it's probably closer to being an obsessive wine collector with repeated, spectacular poor taste.
See? This is my problem with this blog, the documentary cannot keep up with the pace of my life anymore. I didn't even get around to telling you about the life-altering job-switch, and how amazing it was to be a secret subversive in a soulless corporate world, and now I'm out again. And you'll totally miss the significance of QUITTING the job to focus my energy back on the art.
You have missed it all.
So to recap, if I may, because we all know how terribly dull these journally-blog things are: I quit my nerve-wracking yet partially satisfying part-time job tutoring grade school kids the gentle art of enunciation. Then I became a government employee, a phone-jockey and paper pusher for the Queensland Department of Education, where I quickly found my free time dissolve away into nothing. The money was nice though. I'd quit drinking by that stage, suddenly finding myself to be the wealthiest person I knew. Six months later I transferred into the Human Resources department, and had handed in my resignation by Friday afternoon. I'm unemployed right now, but I get to wear blue jeans during the day again so I count this as a win.
Hello. It's been a while. I've written those two short sentences in this thing so many times now it's forming into my own personal journal cliche, isn't it? But yes. Hello. You may not remember me. My name's Lee, I once spent a great deal of time and effort considering myself an Animator. Then animation turned into something where amazingly hirsute celebrity animals passed wind while referencing the Matrix, which lead to me reassessing my chosen career path. I decided I would rather spend the rest of my life fruitlessly devising a way to eat my own face than work in the industry as it has become. Le sigh.
I quit my lucrative though unfulfilling data-entry job to focus on my comics. Ways in which I have spent my first week, post-resignation: playing em-em-oh-arr-pee-gees. I am a fool and a scoundrel. I am now a twenty-fourth level fool and scoundrel, at that.
I get plus two to flippancy.
I will tell you more later. Now I must go make polenta with roasted balsamic tomatoes to impress my girlfriend into making out with me.
I don't read your posts enough, I'm sorry. I know I'm a horrible person, there's a lot more evidence of that on this side of the monitor, believe me. But i'm also a somewhat aggravated geek at the moment, last week I spent my workday writing a thousand word email to a friend on why DC Comics' big editorial shift was in fact designed to turn it into Marvel Comics. He disagreed strongly, so I called him up at work and told him to eat a dick. The point I was getting at was that today I was reading through the archived journal entries I hadn't read yet, and noticed zeitgoat interviewing ninjawookie. Reading "Why are they copying Marvel?" in question two made me thrust my finger at the screen while I shouted "YES! YES! I KNEW I WASN'T THE ONLY ONE WHO SAW IT!" triumphantly to no-one. Thank you, Ronnie, for vindicating me.
I gave up my casual tutoring job in favour of a nine-to-five admin position for the Department of Education. It was fun for about a week, pretending to be a real adult, dealing with managers and other departments while conceiving of the most ingenious way to steal office supplies, but eventually the devastation to the soul set in, as anyone who HAS worked in an office before would expect. "Are you enjoying your job?" They asked me initially, visibly surprised by my affirmative answer. "Really?" they'd follow up with, "Are.. are you sure?" I'd reassure them I was fine, all the while remembering the horror associated with my previous job: working with children. "But.. how.. how can this be?" The blood would drain from their face at this point, as they carefully backed out of the room.
Now things are all even-Steven. The job sucks, I hate my life, and wish I were dead.
Still, money is good. I'd heard of money, of course; I'd even been paid in a microscopic facsimile of it in my previous job, but I'd always wanted to see how it could improve my standard of living. Apparently a lot and quite soon. And while money can't actually buy me love, it can buy me any number of wonderful distractions from an emotionally empty life.
I kid.
Grace benefits as well. My first act was to replace her prehistoric mobile phone with a sleek, modern design that actual adheres to the descriptor "mobile". It is often my duty as boyfriend to carry around her phone, wallet and whatnot and whenever I was charged with her old phone I was constantly concerned that any unsolicited jostling on my part would cause her handset to casually crush my own into a hundred thousand tiny fragments. the new one is small and features a river-rafting game. I am a good man.
I get nervous whenever Grace is out at parties and I'm stuck here working. This is not because I don't trust her, it's just that I don't trust anyone else. I'm kept awake some nights with the thought that every man and woman alive is secretly plotting to seduce my girlfriend, and that they're all possibly gathering in seedy pubs to laugh at my expense. In my head, I have many enemies.
The other part of the equation of fear is that Grace gets smashed really quickly. I suspect that merely waving an open bottle of alcohol in an adjacent room is enough to get her tipsy, which is usually when half her friends start goading her on. The other half immediately look at me with wide eyed expressions, gesticulating wildly and mouthing, "Is she alright?" to which I have no real answer. If you fall in the latter category, know that I like you most of all. About four minutes later she adopts a stronger Texan drawl, loses all equilibrium and happily accepts any dare or challenge presented to her. It's quite a show.
Sometimes I can't stop twitching.
Maybe you're wondering why I stopped drinking. It wasn't this. It was more to do with the crazy scary Aborigine guy who tried to seduce me one New Year's eve, and I retaliated by stealthily vomiting on my shoes while no-one, not even myself, was watching. It was a moral victory. When I gave up social binging, I discovered a number of things. Firstly, a lot of people aren't as interesting or as amusing as I thought they were. They definitely weren't as articulate as I remembered. Secondly, booze money can be exchanged for goods and services just as easily as regular money, except there's more of it. My possessions doubled, and my vomit-covered possessions disappeared altogether. That is the equation for success!
So anyway, I'm at home, working on a new comic, and I get a drunken party phonecall from my girlfriend. Our conversation consisted mostly of her sighing, being vague, and finally dismissive. Even though my heart just stopped, my adrenal gland is working twice as efficiently, and I think my body can adjust.
You'd be surprised just how cleverly concealed my neurotic paranoia is. Okay, so all you ever hear from me these days is my paranoiac delusions of a crumbling world, but the people who don't read my brain via the internet think I've got it all together. Let's not tell them, right? I think it's best for everyone this way.
Irrational Relationship Fears! *Fear of my girlfriend leaving me for another man. *Fear of my girlfriend leaving me for a woman. *Fear of my girlfriend leaving me for a woman, and BECOMING a man. *Fear of my girlfriend staying with me, and becoming a man. *Fear of my girlfriend staying with me, and asking me to become a woman. *Fear of my becoming a woman to please my girlfriend, only to have her leave me for a man.
*Fear of my girlfriend finding this update, and murdering me in my sleep.
I should also point out that those poison-dart shooting frogs are even more terrifying than all of these things combined, but I couldn't think of an amusing way to include them in the list. However, now you are at least aware of their spine-tingling abilities. And perhaps you are already aware of their dart-shooting abilities, which are not to be underestimated.
