Em oi! #307: That’s Not My Name

They call me 'hell' /They call me 'Stacey' /They call me 'her' /They call me 'Jane'

This one has an odd layout, but I’m pleased by the art.

I don’t mean to sound mean to anyone who has referred to me as “Mrs. Metrish” or to those who gave us gifts addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Bryan Metrish.”  I understand the intention, I do.  It’s just a personal problem of mine, and I’ve had it ever since my mother taught me to formally address envelopes.  I feel like it eclipses the woman in some way, and while I’m happy to be married and view changing my name as an expansion of my identity, I am not into feeling like I’ve been erased in some way.

Emily Post is telling me I’m a bit wrong, by the way – it should be “Mr. Bryan Metrish and Ms. Emily Metrish” if I prefer Ms.  All right, there you go.  In business situations, Ms. is default unless you know for a fact the woman prefers Mrs.  And now you know my feelings on that.

I have spent some time working with the Library of Congress subject headings list and assigned the following subject heading and call numbers to this entry:

Subject headings: Married women–Names
Married women–Legal status, laws, etc.–United States–Names.

Call number: KF521.L8 2010

I will try to tag all my entries with a call number. I hope this will help.

B and I are off to the Bahamas on a cruise tomorrow.  Yay.

Em oi!#306: That Foucault Guy

There is some sort of philosopher threesome joke to be made here, but I ain't doin' it.

I drew this comic on Sunday, but it took me until today to actually get it colored and uploaded (I inked it on St. Patrick’s Day, hence the date).  It is probably no surprise that I am busy since we are getting married in approximately 48 hours.

I might have a comic up Saturday morning, and then one more before we head out on our honeymoon next week.  We’ll see.  Right now, I should really go sleep or something.

Oh, about my 5k last Sunday: my goal going in was to finish in 24:00.  Instead, I finished in 22:57 (7:24 per mile pace), good enough for 9th in my age group and 15th among women.  I thought I was pretty hot shit, but then I passed a seven year old in the last two blocks, so clearly not that cool.  You can click here to check out some incredibly hilarious photos of me in the final stretch.  If I look kind of unhappy or like I’m going to throw up, that’s pretty accurate to how I was feeling at the time (didn’t barf, though).  You can see the seven year old in the background.

I guess I’m actually pretty pleased that I finished before he did.  It beats the alternative, anyway.

#305: How I Feel About Writing

Bryan’s comment about this was hilarious.  Unfortunately, it’s also unprintable, especially because my mom reads this comic.

Hi, Mom!

I am getting married in a week.  And I have some homework about using controlled Medical Subject Headings (MeSh) to search PubMed/Medline.  Everything is so exciting.  I think I spent a hundred dollars today and 70 of it was on wedding stuff.  The rest was on running stuff, mostly for Bryan – socks and S! Caps and gels (those are for me, I’m training for a 20-miler in May).  I hate shopping.

5k tomorrow.  If it goes well, perhaps I will write something about it.

#304: The Meaning of Wife (book review)

Once I was reading an interview with Daniel Defert about Foucault’s last days, and he said this:

Deux jours après l’enterrement, j’entre dans un café, je croise un journaliste que je connaissais un peu. Il me regarde, absolument sidéré. Comme un objet d’effroi. Je comprends son regard. Je découvre, là, brutalement, que j’étais, à Paris, la seule personne dont on pouvait penser qu’elle avait le sida. Foucault mort du sida, j’avais donc le sida. Je découvre le sida, dans le face-à-face avec quelqu’un. Et c’est là que je comprends que je vais être obligé de faire un test, car autrement je n’arriverai pas à soutenir cette confrontation en permanence.

Two days after the burial [i.e. of Foucault], I went into a cafe, I met a journalist who I knew a bit.  He looked at me, absolutely flabbergasted.  Like an object of terror.  I understood his look.  I discovered, there, brutally, that I was, to Paris, the only person of whom it was possible to think she had AIDS. Foucault died of AIDS, I therefore also had AIDS.  I discovered AIDS, in the face to face encounter with someone.  And this made me understand that I was obligated to take a test, because otherwise I would never reach a place where I could withstand this confrontation permanently.

(My poor, idiomatic translation and bolding. The source is hereLibé, 2004.)

So that was what stuck with me, reading about Defert and Foucault lo these many years later: the terrifying isolation he must have felt and the silent oppressive stares he was met with, walking into a cafe one morning in Paris.  Defert has remained an object of passing interest ever since (as opposed to a footnote to a philosopher whose work I enjoy).

About The Meaning of Wife: A Provocative Look at Women and Marriage in the Twenty-first Century by Anne Kingston: fantastic book, wish it had gone farther into the 21st C (she wrote it before the onset of desperate housewives and the massive multiparenting Duggars/Jon and Kate Plus Eight (or is it Jon minus nine?)/the Octomom phenomena began, which saddens).  Also, not really much about LGBT marriage, sadly, except to say lesbians were cool at the end of the 20th century.  Bleh.  At any rate, perhaps not the book to read three weeks before you get married, since it rather makes one think that success may lie in staying single.  (It’s like a terrible article I read somewhere that pointed out that famous women writers typically had 0-1 child instead of 2+, as if having 2+ kids would prevent success or something?  Even with a room of one’s own?)  At any rate, am still getting married, so I’ll let you know re the success thing.

#303: Playing it Safe

The idea of language being a kind of veil between you and reality is discussed by Nietzsche in “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense.” Foucault talks about language and reality in most of his books. The one that comes to mind is The Birth of the Clinic, mostly because he talks about doctors trying to create language without ambiguities – that is, when a doctor says of a patient that “he has broken such-and-so bone,” there shouldn’t be room for interpretation.

Derrida had something to say on the subject, but who the hell knows what it is.

If I ever start a new comic it will be called “Angry Philosophers.” Heh.

This comic is for B, because he likes innocuous things that curse. He read this and said, “This isn’t a reaction to last week or anything.”

Emily: “Nope.”

I can laugh at myself a little.

Em oi! #302: Fun with the Future In-Laws

DELETED.

This actually happened because B has the wonderful tendency to say exactly the most awkward thing in a given situation.  It’s awesome, usually leads to hilarity.  We have been snickering up our sleeves about this one all week.

This comic took a long time to draw, and then a long time to scan.  I need to draw them smaller, I guess – my scanner is too small for big big comics.

I will just say that this one was miscalculated.  It may seem disingenuous to wish I had more feedback and then delete a comic which receives feedback.  But since I don’t really think anyone reads this, I’m just going to try to make myself happy.

Em oi! #301: The Groupies

Happy Tet/Chinese New Year, Happy Valentine’s Day and Happy President’s Day.

I was thinking about how many times over the past three years (I started Em oi! in 2007, believe it or not) I have thought that a particular comic would be my last, or that it wasn’t worth doing and that I would quit.  The answer is – a number of times.  Maybe every six months since I came home from Asia (that would be August of 2007).  At this point it seems clear to me that Em oi! is never going to be big like Pictures for Sad Children or Hark! A Vagrant! People enjoy it, mostly if they know me, but they don’t send it to their friends, twitter about it, do whatever it is that makes some comics famous and other comics failures.

I guess I’ve come to terms with that by now, mostly.  When I draw the comic, it’s because I genuinely enjoy drawing the comic, and the small amount of feedback I get makes me happy enough.  But since I’m now doing this for me and not because I’m going to become famous, you may be seeing larger gaps between updates.  Juggling school, two jobs, planning a wedding, and trying to finish my novel IN ADDITION to drawing the comic is becoming too much some weeks.  I’m sorry; I know there are a lot of people out there who find this entertaining (I assume there are, anyway – some silent minority).

So, thanks for reading.  We’ll see how it goes for the next three hundred.

#300: The Unbearable Chainess of Being

Alternate title: "Yes, Your Chai-ness."When I told B I was doing this, what he actually said was, “You don’t have to lie, it’s okay.”

“I’m not lying!  I’m really going to do it!”

“Uh-huh.  Why don’t you just get more sleep?”

As of right now, I have had a cup of chai and no coffee (it’s about 15:30).  I am mostly awake (running in the cold helps), but I have a headache.  We’ll see how it goes.

Also: 300 comics.  I’m not sure if I’m thrilled or vaguely horrified.  Probably both.  What have I done? I keep asking myself.  What have I done?