The Big Three Oh

I’ll be doing a blog post all about the wedding (that happened) and the move (also happened) soon enough. 

I thought I’d start with this.

See, I turned thirty on November 17^th. 

My dad likes to say, “You can’t trust anyone over thirty, or people who work for the government.” 

I’m both.   

He’s kidding, but I started to think about how different thirty is now than it was in the 60s.  

Mostly, I just don’t feel like an adult yet.  I don’t think that has much to do with my age though.

I like that I can still enjoy what I’ve always enjoyed. 

Gaze upon my Bat-Belts!  This isn't even half of them.  

I wear these to work.  No one cares!  Or notices. 

I like that I can play.

I’m proud that I HAVE come as far as I have, regardless of trauma from all directions for so long.

That being said, I still have a long way to go.  I’m aware of that.  

I know there are things I still don’t like about myself, and those awful things are going to be the hardest to overcome. 

I’m happy with my body now, and my confidence is so much better than ever before.

I’ve learned to stand up for myself, though I still struggle with that from time to time…

I’m eating better and better every day, while still being careful about my allergies. 

I can BE careful without it ruling my life, even when I'm scared.  

…and that’s just really cool.

Still though, there are so many times where my imagination takes over and goes from “being creative” to a true sign of the mental illness I’ve faced for so many years.  

The dark, mirrors…  I’m actually terrified of a lot of things to an incredibly embarrassing degree.  

I’m thirty now, and I still take the whole Bloody Mary thing too seriously.  It’s another level of sad.

Now it’s a matter of not wanting to see the endless darkness that may or may not reflect something that I just can’t perceive when the lights are out…

I already told you about the time as a kid where I left a bathroom like the little chicken I am during the era of Spice Girls and pogs.  

(As a side note, we were doing a dance thing in a PE class once, and I was elected to be Scary Spice as I was the darkest one with curly hair.  That’s how bleached white our fucking middle school was.  Fuck.  Sure.  “Close enough.”  …  These days, I would take it all as a compliment, though I’m not sure how she would have felt being played by a Slavic Jew.  Really, I wanted to be Posh anyway.)

Seriously though.   

Under the bed was scary enough that I just put my bed straight onto the floor to avoid having an under-the-bed at all.   

The closet…  Ugh.  Especially when the door was just slightly open?  

All the way open or all the way closed.  That’s what it had to be.

My sister solved this problem for me by simply tearing the doors off of my closet in a fit of unbridled and seemingly entirely random rage.

Doors slightly open at all, ever…  For whatever reason, my brain immediately goes to, “Yeah, but what’s looking in?”  

Why is there ANYTHING looking in?  What??

Walking to the bathroom at night encompasses all of these things in some way or another, especially that first mirror-in-the-dark bit. 

This was all before the food thing became… a thing.

The worms and ants almost-phobia may have to do with the hidden nature of them, just as the dark poses for everything else.  

And yet again…

Ants though…  They’re like the Borg. 

And worms like maggots, eat the dead.

Realizing I’m very much alive, am I just afraid I’ll find out the hard way?  I’m more afraid of my own reflection in the dark than seeing someone other than myself…  Maybe it’s all existential.  

Fear and phobias are interesting things when they start to rule your life.

I was always super anxious about everything, but I very rarely expressed this openly.  I felt like a had to keep myself with a steely expression for my family, so that no one would know that I was scared or in any pain.  

That may have been a fear too.  I didn’t want to be a burden, and I didn’t want them to feel bad.  

So… I just pretended I was fine for as long as I could.

This led to weirdly humiliating moments, because it translated as being shy when I wouldn’t just speak up and say, “This is really shitty.”  

Good example? 

That time I had a mat in my hair. 

Why my parents didn’t just take a fucking scissors to my hair is beyond me.  It was in the back and under all my other hair.  No one would have noticed.

The whole thing was kind of my own fault anyway because I didn’t want anyone to touch my head.  

I was little then…  Elementary school I guess?   

And my head was an unruly mess of curls and tangles.   

Dad would (jokingly?) chant, “Rip tear!  Rip tear!” as he tried to brush my hair.   

I have since learned to either start from the bottom 

or just cut it all off.

So there we were at the hair stylist. 

The lady gathered everyone around to see. 

So, there I was, SURROUNDED by random people staring at my head.

“IT’S A PERFECT DRED!” she kept saying.  

I did not do this on purpose.  I mean, good to know, but having all those people stare and touch me, and have to sit there in silence pretending I wasn’t scared and embarrassed…  

Ugh. 

You know what?  I’m exhausted enough, let’s stick to the hair for a minute. 

Lemme tell you ‘bout my hair. 

I found my first single grey hair in middle school.   

Since this was the era of being called “Witch Girl” and being made fun of anyway, I decided to be how I wanted to be.  

Fuck ‘em.

I’d rather be poked at for things I choose than the things I have no control over.  

Cue my Rogue-style blonde chunk right in the front of my head.  

This was then blue for a while, various shades of “strawberry”, and green for a very short while.   

It’s hard to keep green without it becoming a variety of snots.

Eventually, I dyed the underside of my hair red, so when it was up in a half-ponytail you could see it… 

I very rarely did that though.

Finally, there was the black and red stripes. 

“Make it look like it’s bleeding.” 

When that proved too hard to maintain, straight red or maroon happened.

There were some mishaps, such as the orange frizz…  

  

And some disappointments.  

 “We have… semi demi purple?  It’ll wash out in a day or two.”  

I have since stopped dying my hair due to a combination of fear, lack of funds, lack of time, and straight up laziness. 

I have a few more grey hairs now though. 

You know.

Cause I’m thirty.

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.

Snow Day

Looking out the window today, I am reminded that…

I have always hated the snow.

Mostly, I only looked forward to snow when there was enough to keep me from standing outside neck deep in it, waiting for the bus. 
 

Now, don't say to me, "Then why live here???"

I have lived in the harsh desert lands as well. 
Didn't work out.

I like it here.  I do. 

I also think the snow is very pretty. 

And not liking to be in the snow, even as a child, certainly didn't stop my friends from outright forcing me to have a good time in the white, Wintery muck. 

I did, indeed, have a good time.

…Once in a while. 

Even in high school, we used a recycling bin:
 

Created snow-bricks:
 

And used said bricks of snow to make a very intense snow-fort:
 

It was around this time that it occurred to me that growing up didn't have to mean no longer having fun or being imaginative. 

Being inventive is what makes life interesting. 

After two nose bleeds, literal blood, sweat, and tears went into making that damn fort.
 

There were also many times before and after that day where R rated snow people were created.
 

Still, none of these memories, precious as they are, can convince me that going outside in the snow is better than sitting cozy inside, watching the snow from a window instead. 

Happy snow day, to those who have it today.