Rejection!

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.

Donna Updates!

In response to school starting again in a week, I've panicked and begun desperately trying to finish things I didn't do this lifetime Summer.  

Below are some preview images to Oh Hell, Donna! issue #1.  They are just snippets and all the inappropriate bits have been cropped out.  This is really only because I've been using the preview images on other sites as well.  

 These are all taken COMPLETELY out of context, so have fun with that. 

 Girl problems, am I right???

And a bonus!  These coming up are from the second issue.  ...I'm nowhere near drawing the second issue out, and the first issue is obviously not even shaded and is missing a couple backgrounds... BUT they are coming along! 
 

 Out of context is the best context.  

EXPRESSIONS ARE FUN TO DRAW


Yay!

This Post Brought to You By: Collaboration!

My Knight and I went to a tiny con this past weekend.  BadCon at UAlbany.  It was not a "bad con" but there was hardly anyone there.  I'm hoping to help out with spreading the word next year.  Still, we sold some things and met some people and saw some friends.  Mostly, we sat around doodling together.  This was like a dream date for me, as it turns out.

My Knight, Rob, draws people as potatoes.  They show up in his webcomic on occasion here:   http://www.unmedicatedcomic.com/
and he'll draw people at cons as potatoes.  I was highly entertained by this, so I decided to draw him as a potato.  ...But it didn't wind up as cute as his do.

Also, everything scanned for this had gotten a little wet because A. it was raining afterwards and B. we had a spill.  The spill was entertaining in it's own right because while our drawings got a little wet, everything else on the table was saved by the tablecloth itself. 

Since part of that looked like a face, my Knight drew the spill:

...I need a better editing program for my scanner so you kids can see these better. 

To give you an idea of the kinds of stuff sold at these events, we sell art prints, sometimes T-shirts, key chains and assorted body parts:

"Give someone the finger!"  Get it??

At one point, we took two words, put them together and then saw what we each came up with.  First was fish-apple:

His:

Mine (Which I think wound up more frog-like than fish-like.  ...Or maybe just sick):

Then came centipede and barrel.
His:

Mine:

and another try:

I also attempted to show the difference between antennae and penises.  ...I don't remember why.  But here they are:

Now, to conclude, I'm going to express how head over heels I am for this guy.

I don't do outside.

I just don't.

I think of the outside world and I think of the "tweezers" my mom has handed me when I wanted to pluck my eyebrows, knowing those things are for plucking off bugs and out splinters and other horrible outside things.

Seriously.  The fuck are these things?


I'm allergic to outside.  Literally.  Grass makes me itchy and red.

YET I went out by his family's house so he could show me where he spent his childhood days, by rusty pieces of metal and now overgrown thorns... And even with a busted hip from before then and even while stressed out of my mind and ridden with silent panic attacks, I still managed to have a good time.

Why?

Because he was with me.

...Also some of the plants did neat things like this:

Twisty and there's that curl thing at the bottom. 

Because I really never go outside, knowing that I do have some pretty amazingly bad allergies, when I do go outside, I feel a little like a kid in a bubble.  I'm stupefied by the beauty of it all, and TERRIFIED by any little prick of anything at all. 
I used to run into the woods as a kid and climb trees.  I'd walk over rocks and not complain when I got wet in a creek. 
Then 12 years old happened and the learned-the-hard-way-knowledge of what an allergen can do kind of ruined my life and ended what bit of a childhood I had. 

I'd like to go back to being that kid.  I'm not as brave as I used to be, but maybe with the help of my Knight, I'll get there. 

...that being said, I really DO have allergies, so it can't be all the time anyway. 
Still, worth a shot once in a while, yeah?

Knight in Pinstripes

I find myself dating someone who "gets it" and this is unique for me.
I'd mentioned him briefly in my last post.  We've been officially dating for a little over three weeks now.  We've known each other longer than that and we've known of each other much longer than that still.

It's been a while since a post because everything is so busy.  Cons, conferences, presentations…  And my knight. 
He doesn't stifle my creativity though.  Not at all.  He is my partner and a friend as well as a romantic interest.

…

Of course, I'm terrified. 
And then I am incredibly calm and everything is natural…
and then I'm terrified because I'm calm.
And thankfully, he is patient.  He is actually patient and kind.

I often want to bond with the wrong people, so I'm thankful that my Knight is actually a nice guy, while also having a brain in his head. 

This is what he looks like in my mind, and I think he looks this way to himself as well:

See, if you've been paying attention to this blog, you know a little about my not-really-love life over the past few years.  This had left me paranoid and afraid to let go.

My Knight just accepts this without question, which makes me let my guard down more easily. 
It's refreshing.

Generally, my intersections with people… 
Well, here is an example:

Today's youth. 
Keep in mind, I was actively drawing when Pant-ception showed up in my peripheral vision. 

"Do you draw?" He asked.
"What?" I responded, unsure if he was speaking to me.
"Sorry.  ….Do you draw?" He asked again.
"Uhhh…"  I looked at my drawing, trying to figure out what I had missed.  "Yes.  Yes I do draw."
"Cool," he said, "I draw too."
I put my pencil down, eager to be an inspiration to today's youth.  "Yeah?" I said, "What do you like to draw?"
He mumbled out, "People. … graffiti.  Lots of stuff."  He said nothing else.  I waited, but that was it.
"…" I blinked.  "That works."
That was the end of it.  This was oddly a typical conversation between strangers and myself. 

But my Knight is different. He is a fan of my work just as I am of his.  He is on my level in every way.  Well, he is more energetic than I am, and that is for the best.

That was all too sappy, so to end, El Chupacockbra: