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Summer in the Desert

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Serves you right for wearing a fur coat.

Serves you right for wearing a fur coat.

This is more or less a true story, as long as you accept the premise that I have such a deep personal understanding of my cat that I understand the precise meanings of her vocalizations. Fairly certain this translation is accurate. The only thing that I’ve exaggerated is the size of the lemon tree and its proximity to the pool. Everyone knows you can’t plant trees that close to an in-ground pool.

It’s hard not to feel sorry for someone who has to walk around in a heavy black coat in the desert summer, but at the same time, she also has the option of hanging out in the air conditioning and waiting until the sun goes down to hang out outside. I get that she wants to be near me, but given her typical feline disdain for swimming, it’s hard to see why. Like, we don’t have to be together all the time (that you’re awake), Cat. When I’m doing stuff you don’t like, such as hanging out in the sun or submerging my body in water, you’re not required to join me. It’s your choice, meaning it’s really not cool for you to complain about it the whole time.

Fortunately for desert cats, there are always cool tile floors upon which to splay ones furry limbs.

For the record, the cat is perfectly capable of swimming. I once saw her swim the entire length of the pool to get away from a another cat that was threatening her. So she could totally jump in and join me instead of whining about it.

Anyway, this comic took about 5 hours to draw, and it among the best ones I’ve done so far. I’ve come a decent way in a year and a half. Maybe I will be ready for my next big project when the script is finished, hopefully in August.

Depression Socks

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Not pictured: Decompression Socks. Two styles available--"Scuba accident" and "Lying on the couch watching Netflix after Sunday brunch with the extended family"

Not pictured: Decompression Socks. Two styles available–“Scuba accident” and “Lying on the couch watching Netflix after Sunday brunch with the extended family”

I honestly couldn’t tell you where this stuff comes from. I mean, like most creatives, I suffer from depression, but that doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Socks are extremely meaningful to me. My grandfather was a hosier–he sold socks and underwear–and when I was little we regularly received shipments of same. My grandfather retired when I was in elementary school, and the stream of undergarments dried up. I don’t think my mother realized how often little kids require new socks and underwear, because for the rest of grade school I never felt that I had sufficient.

As an adult, naturally, I overcompensate in the other direction: 5 overstuffed drawers full of socks and underwear.

Dragon Comics 109

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Seriously, Dragon isn't ever even wearing pants.

Seriously, Dragon isn’t ever even wearing any pants to begin with.

Two things: first of all, it’s problematic when discourse surrounding gender focuses on genitals, because obviously, there is no other situation wherein reasonable people consider it polite to speculate about the appearance of a stranger’s pubic region; and second, it’s dangerous when gender dictates activities, areas of expression, and appearance, because limiting behavior means limiting freedom.

Dragon is more genderqueer than I am, but some of the worst reflections of my childhood come to me when I see kids shoved this way or that, told not to be who they are. My whole life I’ve bristled at the suggestion that my lack of a Y chromosome should mean that I’m meant to be demure, modest, or deferential. I have none of those qualities, and whenever I see a Buzzfeed list with a title like “69 Things All 80s/90s Girls Remember,” I never remember any of those things, despite being, ostensibly, a “girl” in the 80s and 90s. Between the ages of 5 and 15, the suggestion that I put on a dress for any reason would inspire a screaming match between my mother and me. People were constantly telling me to do things I couldn’t do, like lower my voice and act like a lady.

It’s taken a long time to come to a place of comfort with my gender expression and acceptance of my physical body, but I don’t forget how hard it was to get here, and my journey was much easier than others’.

So, however you feel about people being transgendered in any way, try to separate your feelings about it from the feelings of the person living it. Other people should get to do what they like with their bodies. The way you feel about their face, or their hair, or their pubic region has no bearing on their autonomy to live in a way that’s comfortable to them. You don’t get to tell other people how to be themselves.

And seriously, stop judging people’s genitals. Just stop.

Dragon Comics 107

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If you've been paying attention, you've noticed that the appropriate pronoun for Dragon is "dragon."

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve noticed that the appropriate pronoun for Dragon is “dragon.”

This story arc has been brewing almost since the beginning of the comic, which is why it has never happened, in 107 comics, that Dragon has been referred to with a gender pronoun.. For a while it seemed like I was going to chicken out and not go with it, but it’s been on my mind for a long time. As is true for most of my comics, I have some person stuff to work out. The time is right. Everyone’s talking about gender right now. Of course, some of us have been talking about it for decades, but now your granny is talking about it.

To start, I think most open-minded human beings can admit that gender behavior occurs along a spectrum. We really meet comparatively few men who, say, don’t think puppies and kitties are adorable. We rarely find women embracing the quality of weakness. And since gender is expressed through choices and behavior, if its expression takes place on a continuum, then gender itself can’t truly be a binary either. You could describe it as a quaternity (one, the other, both, neither) but even that doesn’t get at the nuances of who we feel like inside.

Little kids are taught the binary, which leads some of us to hide the parts that don’t fit, or else to be become saddled with derogatory tags. But why does a kid’s gender matter? We don’t want kids pairing off and mating in our society, and we no longer force adults into rigid gender roles for their entire lives to reinforce a social order for which they must begin relentlessly training at a young age. So, frankly, why should we care about little kids’ gender at all? Why shouldn’t we let them be who they feel they are?

Nothing to Report

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I have no new art to upload today; the new design isn’t quite finished yet. The last bits are the hardest. Basically what I have to share with you is this:

Time flies.

Time flies.

Yes, an entire year since I started this blog, although I was doing the art bit for a few months before that. In some ways the blog has superseded the art, but I’m trying to get away from that, probably by changing the blog schedule as soon as I figure out the new plan. The blog is still a useful tool for me, and I have 130 followers, 98% of whom are total strangers who liked my work well enough to follow me. Thanks for caring. Tell your friends.

Other than that, all I have is a hilarious article about The Savage Sword of Conan coming out Tuesday morning. For a long time I’d thought about writing something in the style of articles from Cracked or Buzzfeed, sarcastic and mocking but also loving and full of admiration. I love these books, which transport me to the sort of world I loved as a child, even though the adult me can’t help but unpack the insane messages it contains. The thing is, yes, Conan does something that’s worth joking about, but it does that thing incredibly well.

I could probably write another article from a feminist perspective and tell the story in a very different way, but maybe simply pointing out the ridiculous can be just as effective as dissecting and analyzing it.

My Memorial Day Post

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You'll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You'll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go.

You’ll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You’ll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go.

If all goes according to plan, when this little drawing goes live, I will be way, way, WAY off the grid, far away from any sort of amenity that features running water. This is a shame, because, while I love nature, I am also fairly dependent on those running water features and am uncertain how I will do without them. At least without the most necessary one. However, we will be next to a lake, so there will be *some* options.

Camping is not a big one in my repertoire. I’ve gone a handful of times, but always to a campsite with bathrooms and fire pits and such. I don’t have any camping skills, except for the ability to cook gourmet meals over an open fire. That’s actually the reason I don’t have any camping skills: I would always be so busy cooking that other people were required to pitch my tent, &c. It’s another one of my super privileges. No one has ever even considered that I should learn to pitch a tent. It was always assumed that someone else would do it for me, because I was cooking a 3-course meal over an open flame in the dark. That’s just how I roll.

We’re not even going to pitch a tent: we’ve got a futon jammed into the back of a Honda Element. I have a decent expectation for us being more or less comfortable there. It should be dark; even the moon is just a bitty sliver this weekend. It should be quiet; there will most likely be very few people around, if any.

Well, if this site is never updated again, you’ll know why. I’m lost in the wilderness and have possibly been eaten by a bear.

The birds I’ve drawn are just fanciful birds. The balloon and the feather/leaf thing are me working with light. The balloon seems to have come out pretty well, for what it’s meant to be. For the feather, I was messing around trying to draw an iridescent effect. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than I could have done before I drew the blue morpho butterfly. The quote above is from Dr. Seuss’s Oh! The Places You’ll Go!, which I read every year to kindergarteners the penultimate week of school. It’s summer break already around here, which is a good time for adults to stop and take stock.

Oh! Also, I finally wrote a kids’ book review for Best Children’s Books, a site I haven’t posted on in more than a year: Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. Read it! Then click on the Amazon link!

Anyway, I’ll be in the desert.

These Things Happen

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What? It's not like we don't share the same kingdom.

What? It’s not like we don’t share the same kingdom.

Just a silly little comic. The teddy bear thing was a *bit* off color; it may come around a bit later. But here’s a small sketch of a blossoming friendship based on mutual interests.

We have a little date tree like this in the front yard and the dates are getting closer to harvest time. They’re really better if you go in early in the spring and cut half the dates off; it allows the other dates to get bigger. Otherwise you end up with a million tiny dates that are 90% pit. Maybe tomorrow I’ll cull some of them. They need to be dried for a bit after harvesting, but fortunately, the desert atmosphere is perfect for this. You can just lay the strands of dates down on the porch and eat new dates in a few days.

Dragon Comics 103

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Yellow and blue make green, red and yellow make orange...

Yellow and blue make green, red and yellow make orange…

We used to have a concept book about color when we were kids, one with transparent pages that stacked up to reveal different colored animals. There were a bunch of creatures, all in different colors; the ones you saw depended on which pages you looked at and also which direction you looked. That always fascinated me. So that’s a basic visual gag.

This comic is also about The Man’s remarkable ability to fall asleep at any time, anywhere. I have seen him fall asleep in the space of 45 seconds. I have seen him sleep with small children sitting on top of him. I have seen him sleep on the ground. I have seen him fall sleep even though he’s only been up a few hours and slept 8 hours the night before. His happy ability to nap inspires insane jealousy in me, the chronic insomniac.

Anyway, It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve drawn a comic but it was fun to get back.

Dragon Comics 98

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Not all who wander are lost. But some percentage of those who wander are lost. And it's probably not a small percentage either.

Not all who wander are lost. But some percentage of those who wander are lost. And it’s probably not a small percentage either.

Getting lost in the woods is a way of life.

Antioch College, where I earned my psych degree, faces a 500-acre nature preserve, Glen Helen, which a lot of people consider a sort of hotbed of magic. Whether it is or isn’t, I spent a lot of time wandering around there, getting deliberately lost so I could find my way out again. As a result, I know those woods very well, well enough to walk around them in the dark and know where I am. You could probably drop me in them now, almost 20 years later, and I wouldn’t have any trouble getting out again.

I used this same technique to learn how to navigate in Chicago when I moved there after college. Even though I grew up in the north suburbs, we rarely visited the city, and when we did it was typically to very specific destinations, usually with detailed instructions. When I lived there as an adult and got irritated with the traffic, I would simply find some other way. Yes, I got ridiculously lost all the time, but after a couple months, that didn’t happen anyway. When I thought I was lost, I would suddenly realize that I had been lost in this exact place before. All I had to do then was remember how I found my way out the previous time.

This was before GPS, of course,

Now I have The Man, whose sense of direction is unerring, except for this one time that the VA prescribed him a very powerful headache medication and he became disoriented in an IKEA parking lot. Typically, though, he can look at a map and recall all the salient features, even in a city he’s never visited before. Seriously, I’ve probably flown into Miami-Dade Airport over 30 times in my life, and the idea of renting a car and driving myself out of there is terrifying. The Man not only tackled this task with no anxiety, he also refused to pay extra for the SunPass and managed to drive us all over the state without ever once getting on a toll road. He can drive from my dad’s cousin’s in Coral Gables to my mom’s sister’s in Boca Raton without even thinking about it. At least that’s how it looks. He does have GPS, so I could be wrong about the extent of his abilities.

Dragon Comics 97

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How about just a postcard, maybe?

How about just a postcard, maybe?

Souvenirs get expensive actually. I used to bring the kids things, but they already own so many things. New things that were actually in my budget (and I go away at least 4 times a year) just ended up in already existing piles of things, forgotten minutes after they were received. Postcards, though…postcards I approve of. You can get lot of postcards for a little bit of money (it’s a good idea to travel with your own stamps, though: touristy places are usually out, and it’s not always easy to get to a post office) and it’s always nice to get real mail, especially when you’re a kid and no one sends you mail.

I have pretty much every postcard anyone’s ever sent me, which is a decent number of postcards, but, being mere scraps of paper, they still fit in a single milk crate, with room left over for another couple of decades of postcards. I imagine that I’ll want them toward the end of my life. Every once in a while I dig through them for a bit, but mostly it’s nice to just have a box of tangible proof that people think of you from time to time.