January: Week Four (Patreon)

Sunday, January 22

Hoisting the Tig out of the shirt drawer. Her little arm all jutting out as she resists. She likes to nest in there, digging up the folded shirts, leaving carnage in her wake. Such a goblin. (She takes after my side of the family)

Monday, January 23

I finished my next short comic! I’m actually kind of proud of it? The writing and the page layouts, I mean. Less happy with the inconsistency of my drawings, but eh, whatcanyado? Get better, I guess. (UPDATE: This one) One of my goals last year was to make a minicomic and, no, that did not happen. The original idea was to make something brand new, just to go in a little copy-shop produced stapled pamphlet. At this point, though, I have more than enough material from my Patreon comics to make a full little booklet of them. Do I even have a working copy of inDesign anymore? I used to physically assemble my pages, first shrinking the original black and white comic pages down to half their size on a public copy machine, then taping them down onto another sheet of paper, laying them out in an unscrupulous order so that they’d have the correct page numbers when folded and stapled (by hand) into booklets. More than one copy out there has my literal blood on it from paper-cutting myself while assembling them (I’d circle the stain and write a note explaining it to the future buyer. I like to think it increased the value of my $2 zines although in hindsight I guess that technically made it a biohazard and also gross). I still have those taped-up mastercopies, down in my archive of high school-made comics in the basement. Kids these days, man. They just line up their digitally painted pages in sequential order in a PDF, upload it to a website, and then a box of full-color, glossy, foil-stamped, square-bound booklets comes back. Did you even really make a comic if you didn’t leave at least a little of your blood on the page? (Yes, of course you did. I’m just an almost-middle-age crone who is grasping for any crumb of validation that her work still counts among the next generation of cartoonists who grew up painting on screens and amassing audiences of tens of thousands or even millions before they could get their driving learner’s permit.)

Tuesday, January 24

I cooked! It was edible, but I would have sent that zucchini fettuccine back if I’d ordered it at a restaurant. Grainy texture and too… wet. But! Edible!!!

Wednesday, January 25

A neighbor put out these two homemade oddly tall wooden towers onto the sidewalk with a “Free!” sign, along with an L-shaped desk and some other bits and bobs. This was, like, a couple months ago, not recently. They’re very unusual, with a triangle base and stem, and an askew rectangle platform at the top with little triangle guardrails on each side. Obviously they would be perfect (purrfect) Tig Towers, so we scooped them up before any of the other neighbors could get their hands on these awkward, un-aesthetic pillars. Later on Matt found out from the neighbor that they had been built as stereo stands, which explains a lot. Tig loves her towers. She watches the neighborhood through the window while perched on them, all alert like a little lioness, and she takes hella naps on them (she’s doing that right! now!) and she screams at us from on high to feed her even though she knows that she doesn’t get dinner until 5:30pm, just like every day. My little queen, judging us all from her throne above the unwashed commoners (Matt and me).

Thursday, January 26

Barf. Today. Uhg. Barf.

Nothing actually bad happened. I’m just, like, my brain is soup. I’m getting some work done, but not nearly as much as I could if I just… woke up. Got my rear in gear. C’mon, Erika. You can do better. Get it together.

Friday, January 27

Once again, forgot to take my photo, but I DID draw this little going-away gift for the friend I met on the bus earlier this month. She’s moving away in just a few more days, first traveling to Costa Rica for six weeks and then moving to a town four hours away from Portland. We’re both bummed that we only got a month’s worth of hangouts in before she’s gone, but ah well, at least we got to have that much at all! We could have so easily never had our tiny interaction on the bus when the door didn’t open properly, then walked those two blocks together on our way to our homes that night, and just continued to live on the same street, one-and-half blocks away from each other, without ever having crossed paths at all.

Saturday, January 28

Yesterday was Very Social. I caught up with a former neighbor who I haven’t seen in years and, while it was lovely, I was so drained from it that I fell asleep for three hours on the couch when I got home. Later that evening, Matt and I went climbing with my Bus Friend, who had some stuff she needed to get into storage before she leaves on her big trip. I volunteered to ferry her boxes from the place she’s been staying (one-and-a-half blocks down the street from me) over to the storage unit, so that’s what we did today. We had a three hour hangout drinking our fancy caffeinated drinks (coffee for her, boba for me), which was lovely, but when I got home I took another three hour nap on the couch. I’m writing this post-nap on the couch, still cocooned in my blanket and face still greasy from a good hard sleep.

I’m sad. Blue-sad.

I’m blue from the physical drain of socializing, I’m blue from the impending loss of a friend who lives conviently close enough for spontaneous short walks up to the neighborhood shops for last minute dinner items, I’m blue from the Vague Life Stuff I keep annoyingly alluding to without explaining, I’m blue from disappointing myself with my underwhelming productivity, I’m blue for feeling blue in the first place.

It’s fine. It’s healthy. It’s part of the human experience. We couldn’t appreciate those rosy moments if we didn’t have the blue ones to keep us counterbalanced. I feel blue now so I’ll feel rosy later. Just another day in the human experience.