My Knight and I were talking about what our anxiety looks like, assuming it has been personified into some kind of horrible creature.
We very quickly came up with this:
It was quick because, well, OF COURSE it looks like that.
Now, on good days, there are people who can ignore the anxiety monster.
I've never been so good at that, so while he isn't the most threatening thing in the world to me, (these days) he can still be super creepy.
Like...
Really.
Though, for the most part, he's just kind of annoying.
He is annoying in the way that he does shit like this:
He is the opposite of helpful.
He also enjoys SCREAMING in the middle of the night.
Normally I'd give some advice on how to deal with the anxiety monster.
I usually try to use these kinds of posts to offer some helpful hints on how to avoid the ball of stress I had become in my life.
Unfortunately, I haven't quite figured out how to get rid of this guy.
Ugh.
The following blog entry is a collaboration between Bad Grey Matter and Tight Rope Noose. Together, we are Team Manticore!
We'll go back and forth a bit to tell bits of the story, and the illustrations from each of us will go...wherever they make sense to go. Not necessarily by the person who said it. Ready? Go!
What a weekend!
RP: We started by attending an event at Bard College. Neil Gaiman and Art Spiegelman had a conversation on stage in front of the audience, and if you don’t know why that was awesome then you don’t know the people I’m talking about. Neil Gaiman read from his version of Hansel and Gretel. They talked about the history of comics as it related to their lives. And MAD magazine. Very awesome.
RG: It was nice to see some similarities between my own background and theirs. Hearing talk of that grim relation that you don't have as many family members in your tree as you would have pre- WWII because your family is Jewish, the fact that the first thing I read in its entirety by myself was a Batman comic, and, like Rob said, MAD magazine, was all incredibly uplifting for me.
RP: Then we headed out to Pennsylvania from there. It was a dark and rainy night, so that was fun to drive in. The best part was an hour away from our destination, when a fog straight out of a horror movie surrounded everything in sight. It was like The Mist plus The Fog plus Silent Hill. This slowed us down considerably, and 20 minutes into it we saw our first “Warning: Heavy Fog” sign. That was super helpful because before that I had thought I had driven into the smoking section of America. No wait, I knew it was fog. The sign didn’t help at all.
RG: Rob started making siren noises like Silent Hill. It actually creeped me out, which is silly. We couldn't see ANYTHING on either side, so I kept wondering if we were going to fall off an edge and die in a ditch somewhere, but Rob was pretty skillful about not doing so.
RP: It was about 2:30 AM when I started having the sleep deprived hallucinations. The combination of being up since 7am Friday, plus the fog, plus the discomfort of lengthy stretches on the road started to take its toll. I was so glad when we got off of the highway and pulled into our hotel.
RG: See, I'm used to MY sleep deprived hallucinations. Faces in the trees? Wave at them like old friends. Little white creatures in the distance? Just don't look right at them. They hate that.
RP:….Until we go into the hotel. The man on duty was laying on the lobby couch with his shoes off. After opening the door he checked us in, asking if we were part of the dance crew (We were not) and started to show us to our room.
RG: Technically speaking, he looked at ME and said, "Oh, you're with the dancing group. One of the dancers." It felt like he was telling me I was a stripper. Turns out there WAS a dancing group at the con, but they were a small part of it. I guess they were the only other people who bothered to check into this Hell hole.
RP: Along the way we marveled at the general disrepair of the facilities. The yellow grime on the door hinges, the chipped paint at the corners, the dinginess of the rug, the dead plants in the hallway. But so far it was shared space, so if the room was nice we could deal with it.
RG: No, no. You don't understand. It's not like there was one dead hanging plant in a bucket or something. There was a giant row of dead plants along a wall on the floor. Someone had taken the time to set this whole thing up to look EXTRA fancy, so when no one took care of it, it was extra horrible.
RP: NOPE. We opened the door to the room to find out it wasn’t even put together. The bed was disassembled against the wall.
RG: He made me stand there with the door open. Just… stand there like a doorstop. Like, of course that was my purpose. I'm just a dancing girl. I hold doors.
RP: The man looked at us and said “You can’t sleep here, right?” This was said as an earnest question. As if we were OK with a room without a bed. We were not.
RG: On the way to figuring out if there was a room ready at all, he had asked us to follow him and leave our bags. We declined. While he was gone, we took the time to murmur to each other about possibly waking up in a bathtub of ice with no kidneys and how grimy that tub would probably be. We started planning our escape.
RP: He went and swapped the keys and then took us outside and around the building to a somehow even shadier motel-looking section of the supposed hotel.
RG: Oh... Oh so shady.
RP: We entered the room. Again, chaos. Exposed wires came out of the floor and wall, the gunk built up on the surfaces of the furniture. It looked like a drug motel, and probably was.
RG: Like Rob said, the journey when the man came back took us outside the building, up and down a bunch of steps. He kept asking where we were parked, as though our answer would magically change. I began to panic, then stifle the panic, back and forth. I assumed that this was actually fine, and that my crazy-ass was just blowing it out of proportion. My brain is so wrong that I honestly have trouble telling what is really bad versus just my head. This is why I have Rob.
RP: We closed the door and used the room phone to call the Hotel where the Convention was actually taking place. We had hoped to save a few dollars by getting a cheaper room, but not at this price! Luckily they still had rooms available and we quickly threw our bags back in the car, turned in the room key and left.
RG: Even just waiting for Rob to get back to the room, I looked every lock and sat on the bed, half afraid to touch anything. Dear god. What if it was covered in jizz or something?? I was so thankful when he returned for me. We ran to the car and I debated if we had just escaped from another King novel.
RP: The man tried to ask what was wrong, why were we leaving and I simply stated I would send them a list. I am still considering writing the chain office, since previously I have had good luck with that company's line of hotels, but after this location, I will probably not frequent them again.
RG: I had furiously texted my mother, much to her chagrin. On some level, I just wanted her to know what had happened, just in case she never heard from me again.
RP: We get to the hotel (again) and luckily it is a very nice building, high windows with well cleaned treatments and a giant brass fireplace. A man who was dressed like the sun checked us in, and surprisingly (and despite what was told to us by the convention earlier in the planning stages) the cost for this nice hotel was the same price as the fleabag shit-hole we had just come from! Score.
RG: There were chandeliers and real wallpaper, and yes, the largest of men in the brightest of yellow shirts greeted us with open doors.
RP: We essentially collapse immediately after setting our alarms, we had to setup our booth to be ready by 10am, and at this point it is 4am. We will have to man that booth until 7pm on however much sleep we can get.
RG: *cry* After awkwardly fighting panic just to sleep, I slept rather well.
RP: Except for being moved over a space (and losing the critical corner-zone) everything went smoothly on day one.
RG: So many people had beards and baseball caps! Is that a PA thing or something?
RP: We were seated next to Red Adept Publishing, cool authors all competing to see who could get the most votes for their genre. They also ran a great panel about it.
RG: The writers were a lot of fun. We're all internet friends now. :)
RP: People. Love. Cats. Rowyn’s stuffed cats are a huge hit and we pretty much immediately sell out of the large ones.
RG: My guess is that because I had a niche there, that was why they sold so quickly? I don't even know. Earrings and pins weren't bad either, but we went to sell prints. Rob's free comic went like hot cakes though, I will say.
And here are some shots of what our table actually looked like:
All in all, we had a great time!
We've been making our rounds this year for conventions, and in a couple of weeks, Team Manticore (Bad Grey Matter and Tight Rope Noose) will be at THIS one!
Table V12!
Come see me!
I'll have prints, cats, NEW prints of Donna stuff, some pins, earrings... STUFF.
Show me some love!
Today, I'm going to tell you the tale of one of the very few typical-of-pretty-much-everyone's-childhood stories I have.
Bee stings.
My first (and so far only) was completely avoidable and I can absolutely blame it on my older sister.
No, but like... Seriously.
Okay, not really, but I'll tell you how it all went down.
First off, my sister is almost eight years older than I am, so when I was a kid, I automatically looked up to her and wanted to do as she said, regardless of whether or not that was a good decision.
I have since learned.
Many years ago, my family was stopping by a little shop that opens in the Summer for hotdogs, ice cream, and the like.
I was looking forward to these things.
Instead, I got this.
We were standing at the top of a hill:
Now, most children do want to roll down hills.
I understand this.
I was not most children.
So, to begin with, I really just did not want to do the normal-child thing of rolling down the hill.
Grass is dirty, worms freaked me out, sometimes grass made me itchy (which got worse with age), I feared rolling right into traffic... and so on.
With some coaxing, I (for whatever reason) was convinced that doing this thing was actually a proper plan.
Much like her frustration when I was not a fluent English speaker at two years old, all she wanted was to have me experience an authentic childhood thing.
All I wanted was ice cream.
So, I roll, like any other child would have done.
And, of course, I roll over a bee.
You know, despite the literal pain in my ass, I remember being very concerned about the bee.
I pictured a bee-crime scene and I wondered if his bee family would miss him.
Perhaps they'd send the bee-bulance, but it would "bee" of no use.
I had killed him.
With my butt.
We rushed home for an embarrassing round of "Here, hold that chair while Mommy takes a tweezer to your ass,"
And I resigned myself to a life inside, forever, because screw the outside world and its hills.
In case you are on the edge of your seat wondering, yes.
Yes, I totally did get some ice cream.
Let's take a moment to talk about rejection.
It sounds like a dirty, horrible, hurtful thing, but it's really just a very formal way of saying "no."
Sometimes, these rejections are done in weird ways.
For example, I was once broken up with by a man I was not dating.
I had been effectively stalking his housemate and sort of using him to do it.
WOW that sounded really bad, all typed out.
Well, it's not really incorrect, so we'll keep it.
I did legitimately want to start a friendship with this guy anyway.
Then I learned why I shouldn't.
With no advances, with no mention of feelings, with complete and total base-line friendship, he still got concerned that he was leading me on.
Leading me on to what?
Do so many people really assume attraction when someone is just being friendly?
Yep.
He took me aside in a convenience store to politely tell me, "Look, I like you a lot, and I do find you attractive, but you just aren't my type, you know? I'm really sorry. This isn't going to work out."
He waited for my response, which was just kind of a face of blank confusion.
I think I maybe was supposed to cry or something?
I was so confused that I just kind of blinked at him until my eyebrow slowly went up.
"Maybe he's practicing for someone else and I just missed that part of the conversation" I thought to myself.
Eventually, I just said, "okay" and that was that.
We didn't hang out after that day.
I'm sure he thinks it was because I was heartbroken, but really, I just didn't want to accidentally "lead him on" by…
Standing there.
I don't know.
Don't get me wrong, I've had plenty of real rejections in my life, but I hardly ever openly tried enough to require one.
I've even been stood up.
More than once.
The thing is, with relationships, I had a tendency to wait around for Mr. or Ms. Perfect and when neither showed up, I'd just go to a person who was nice enough, even if I wasn't attracted to him.
This is a terrible plan and it never ended well.
Often, the guys turned out to be not-so-nice either.
Eventually, I stopped that, (after everything went to Hell a few years ago) and I grabbed the butt of my Knight in an effort to not be shy about it.
(He was wearing pants. I'm not sure why I didn't illustrate it that way.)
Okay, so I went from one side of the spectrum to the other, but it worked, so shut up.
When I was a kid, I didn't take rejection well, but I was also TERRIBLE at talking to people, which makes me wonder if half the people who rejected me even had any idea that they had done so.
Getting called a "failed experiment" by a girl is an interesting thing, but somehow didn't make me cry as much as all the "I'll totally dance with you" and then NEVER coming up to me at all.
Did I ever go up to them after the initial asking?
Nope.
Goes both ways.
Sometimes "rejection" is what we make up in our own heads.
Even in my happy relationship now, he and I were both so messed up from previous endeavors that we spent the first half a year (or more) worried that the other was just leading us on.
We referred to this as "Carrie-ing," and I can pretty much describe the fear I've had for most of my life this way.
Seriously, our own minds can be horrible friends to us.
Sometimes though, rejection comes in the form of little pieces of paper.
I am proud to say that out of high school, I applied to seven art schools and got into eight (not that you can tell by this blog).
However, that number evened out when I went for an interview AFTER getting an initial acceptance letter for a school that was specifically for cartoonists.
They liked me a lot, which is why they sent that letter before the actual in-face interview.
Then, they asked if I only wanted to be a cartoonist, and the answer is really no.
I want to draw, but I also write, sculpt, and all kinds of things.
It was suggested that I'd probably be happier getting a more rounded art degree, but that I could always go there again if I changed my mind.
THEN they sent a rejection letter.
Seriously.
I have one of each from this school.
Kay.
More recently, I was up for an interview for an internship.
I was really excited/terrified.
She emailed me exactly twenty four hours before the interview to apologize a thousand times and explain that they found someone.
Weird excuses were made, which made me think none of it was her choice.
In such an email, is it really so hard to just say, "The position has been filled" and leave it at that?
I get that she apparently wanted to keep that interview, and I'm bummed that I have to keep looking, but for reals.
Partly because of how it was written, it felt a little like I was the nerdy kid at school who had landed a date to prom with the head cheerleader, only for her to last-minute tell me she's going with my friend instead.
"Like, OMG! I am so, so sorry, but Billy has a reaaalllly nice car, so…"
Poop.
So.
Fine.
Now, a surefire way for me to want to reject someone else is the misspelling of my name.
This is a digital age where everyone is emailing all the time.
There is ZERO reason to misspell a name when it was just right in front of you a moment ago.
Hell, copy/paste if you have to.
I'll never know.
On social media, saying my name in a formal way is just creepy, because if I already know a person in real life, and that person is messaging me on a private only-me thing…
You really don't have to make it a formal letter to explain that you are writing to only me.
If you're someone I don't actually know in real life, that's fine.
Otherwise, stop that.
If someone does do that, I wish this could also be the kind of person who looks at the message to see how my name is spelled, or remembers me enough from previous encounters to spell it correctly.
I imagine the person typing along, thinking, "Oh, jeez… Um… Screw it, I'll just make it up. I can't be assed to read the message she just sent!"
And you know?
Sometimes, a little wrong is fine.
Seriously.
So long as it's basically the same name, awesome.
There are lots of spellings to everything.
But, see...
Then there are cases like this one time...
Okay, my email is after my comic, Deddrie.com.
My EMAIL is not my name.
I signed an email -RG recently.
'Cause, you know, these are my initials.
The response I got?
"Hello, Debbie" …
The fuck is the Debbie? I mean, I know it's a name, but it isn't mine.
This means she not only ignored the signature, but then ALSO misread my email address, and then CONTINUED doing it, no matter how I signed emails after that, and how many emails she sent to me.
After this incident, with a completely different person in a completely different situation, I not only stated my full name in the body of the email, but I signed it with my full first name.
I got this strange butchered thing that has never been a name ever.
The first couple of letters were okay…
And then it just became strange and phonetically completely different.
Why?
WHY???
REJECTED.
