“emotions”
55 posts under this tag.
A weird happening today, a phone call, has got me paralyzed and deep in soul-searching. In my rambling thoughts I remembered Dragon Ball, my all-time favorite story as a child. You know, one of the most magical things of this most magical anime, perhaps even its central theme, is how almost every enemy, minor or major, eventually becomes part of the gang, a friend and perhaps even a wife or a husband—there’s Oolong, Yajirobe, Tenshinhan, Chaozu, Kuririn, Android 18, the Ox King, Yamcha, Piccolo, Vegeta, Majin Buu, and even Mr. Satan, but I’m sure I’m forgetting many.
What’s more, practically every character is presented mysteriously and ominously at first (or at times)— Dragon Ball’s is a world where one is always wary of The Other, where circumstances always conspire to cast It in a menacing light, and yet one where there’s always camaraderie, friendship, humor, and sometimes even love underneath it all. A world where appearances deceive, where enemies are future friends waiting to be made. What a naive, beautiful idea.
Let’s see if it works.
Update March 8, 2007: It worked!
Time’s wheel has turned and there are tulips by my screen againELZR. Sad tulips, these. But still as beautiful.
I need a father who’s a role model, not some horny geek boy who’s gonna spray his shorts whenever I bring a girlfriend home from school.
Alan Ball, American BeautyIMDB
They say that as you grow old you should stop idealizing your parents. Grow out of seeing them as mighty heroes and realize they’re flawed human beings like everyone. And it’s true. And it’s good advice. But it’s a pretty big world out there. And it has its heroes. And there must be at least some of them who have kids. There are.
If I have always within me this silly joy that cares little for justifications. If welded to me is this naive faith in people, in reason, in conversation, in love, in truth—in human possibilities. If I’ve never lacked wonder. If I’m so unfettered I’ve always lived in the future. If I believe in me. If I never look back. If I dare.
It’s because of my parents. I’m thankful. Tonight. Tomorrow.
Excuse’s user testing went so well I decided to improve it. The original strip had color but it was somehow so distracting that black and white looked better. Then I found about the burn tool in a Photoshop tutorial I chanced on. What a difference it made! There’s a lot more focus! Much better outlines. (No doubt about it, learning Photoshop would be one of the best investments of my time…)
I think the changes are for the better. And so, it’s time for phase 2 of the plan: the metacomic. Print the comic on hard paper and carry it in your pocket, tote, whatever. Next time you’re bored in the subway, bus, wherever, show it to your right-hand neighbor (in the absence of a right-hand neighbor, feel free to substitute your left-hand one). Let it be your excuse. Report on what happened. :)
It was a very simple idea—a girl and a boy, in the subway—and yet actually drawing it was a nightmare. There are any number of things I would do different for my next webcomic. I guess that means the effort was worth it: much was learned.
So, again, the idea is a girl and a boy in the subway (I used this Flickr photo to “remember” the subway). None of them can muster the courage to speak to each other, none of them can come up with a clever excuse for starting the conversation. Until the girl realizes there’s no bad excuse for meeting someone. And that is her excuse. That’s it.
Reminds me a lot of an elevator sign I scrawled years ago.
The problem with abandoning a blog is not the lost posts but the lost sequence. I’ve learned so much these last weeks and yet written so little that what I’ll now post may or may not make sense but will undoubtedly feel broken and out of place. Alas, I have lost the path that took me here and while I’ll try to mention it tangentially it will only be a pale sketch of what it really was. The emotions have cooled and forgotten are most of the shameful and silly detours, dead-ends, and retracings that led me to today. Which is a shame, because they were so much anguished fun.
So I apologize. But this blog is back on track. On steroids and with several weeks of bulging backlog. Après cet post-ci, le deluge.
Of late (and not a minute too late, some will say), I’ve been studying tact. Here are two nice anecdotes I’ve stumbled on.
Charles Schwab was passing through one of his steel mills one day at noon when he came across some of his employees smoking. Immediately above their heads was a sign that said “No Smoking.” Did Schwab point to the sign and say, “Can’t you read?” Oh, no not Schwab. He walked over to the men, handed each one a cigar, and said, “I’ll appreciate it, boys, if you will smoke these on the outside.” They knew that he knew that they had broken a rule—and they admired him because he said nothing about it and gave them a little present and made them feel important. Couldn’t keep from loving a man like that, could you?
Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends And Influence PeopleAM
While he was prime minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill once hosted a posh state dinner, attended by dignitaries from around the world. At one point, he was taken aside by the head butler, who quietly informed him that Lady So-and-so had been observed stealing a silver salt-shaker and placing it in her purse. “How do you suggest this matter be handled?” asked the butler.
“Leave it to me,” replied Churchill. The prime minister then made his way across the room, pausing along the way to pick up the matching pepper shaker from the dinner table. He stepped up to Lady So-and-so, took her by the arm, and guided her out of earshot of the other guests. Then he pulled the pepper shaker from his pocket and showed it to the woman. “My dear lady,” he said in a guilty-sounding voice, “I think we’ve been seen! Perhaps we’d better both put them back!”
Winston Churchill (You can find more anecdotes from him here and here. I can’t, for the life of me, find again that article where I read this anecdote first. After hours and hours of frustration, I found this version, which I think is the one that best approaches the one that originally captivated me, in this bizarre religious tract.)
Do you know more?
When I was 8 years old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died. The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother’s living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father’s Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle’s station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.
Dear old Grandma June. A compelling lack of evidence for any sort of Higher Power may have steered my mind toward atheism, but she put the heathen in my heart.
<insert wry, sad smile here>
 Something made me cry in Harriet Brown’s One Spoonful at a Time —a long, personal story on anorexia from last week’s New York Times. I’ve been unbelievably emotional these days but blame it rather on it being a superbly written account (“The rough days were predictable only in the sense that they kept coming.”) by an extremely intelligent, rational, and honest mother trying to cure her daughter’s anorexia —and that it manages to be a fairly deep, scientific intro into the eating disorder (“Anorexia is one of the deadliest psychiatric diseases; it’s estimated that up to 15 percent of anorexics die, from suicide or complications related to starvation. About a third may make some improvement but are still dominated by their obsession with food. Many become depressed or anxious, and some develop substance-abuse problems, like alcoholism. Almost half never marry.”) while still being punctuated at every paragraph with raw, emotional portraits of desperation (“I woke with my heart pounding, full of rage and hatred for Not-Kitty, the demon who lived on air, who wore my daughter’s face and spoke with her voice.”) and hope.
In what is to date my longest translation I’ve put the story into Spanish: Una Cucharada a la vez. Please pass it along to someone who might need to read it.
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