comic – Page 4 – PretenseSoup

Em oi! #388: The New Guy

Edgar came to live with us close to four weeks ago. I think it will be four weeks tomorrow, actually. It’s actually surprising how much about him has changed since we brought him home:

He will walk on a leash and not freak out.
He will go up and down stairs by himself, although he’s a bit clumsy.
Weighs 46 lbs rather than 42.
Is willing to walk past cars that are parked as well as cars that are turned on but not moving. Still terrified of moving cars though.
We are reasonably sure he is flat-coated retriever and Aussie rather than part Newfie.
I have decided on the best way to draw him. As you can see in the comic above, there was some experimentation.

At first Edgar was very shy and stayed in his crate most of the time, even though we left the door open so he could come and go as he wanted. I think he appreciated having the little cave to hang out in, because re-homing is incredibly stressful and confusing. And that’s for people; imagine how the dogs feel. Anyway, Edgar is a rescue dog and he had spent a lot of his life in to a shelter before entering the foster care system and then coming to us, so we knew that it would take him longer than it took Maya to warm up to us. After all, Maya was 12 weeks when we got her, versus Edgar at six or seven months–much more life to have traumatized him thus far. However, I am happy to report that he is thriving. I drew this follow-up comic to demonstrate Edgar hanging out in the atrium every morning while I eat breakfast:

I’ll file this comic under SF427 .L86 2013 for Animal Culture–Pets–Dogs–Culture and care. Sadly, there was no entry for “doggy personal ads.”

And here’s a photograph of him I took earlier this afternoon:

And a picture of Edgar and Maya playing in the snow:

So the reason we were able to get another dog is that we recently moved to a new house. I think I may have mentioned this before. But the thing is that we have been slowly going through a lot of stuff at the old condo that didn’t get moved, stuff that we should probably throw away so we can get the house on the market. Earlier this evening while doing this, I came across this piece of paper:

If you can’t read, it says, “ทำงานทุกวันและเล่นไม่ได้ทำให้คุณจากคนไม่สนใจ,” which translates as “Working everyday and not playing makes Jack an uninteresting person.” Nowadays I would spell “Jack” as “แจก” rather than “จาก” I guess. But. I wonder what was going on when I made those notes? It also seems to say “Liz Bernstein–another Jew in Asia,” “มหา [maha] Ghosanada,” “CompLit,” and “No one is soverign [sic] in love.”

…It’s probably a good thing I’m finishing my thesis and graduating soon.

I should mention that the novella is due out at the end of the week. It will be available as a PDF and on all major ebook platforms (i.e., Kindle and Nook). So, uh, prepare to spend money on it? It should be pretty awesome. Here, in case you haven’t seen it yet, is the cover.

Em oi! #387: Bad Dog

Proof:

Oof. Remember when I used to have time to blog? Me neither.

Ironically, I finished this drawing almost a month ago, when we were visiting Baltimore. But I didn’t get it posted the week we came back because we were packing for the move, and then we were moving. After the move, first I couldn’t find the sketchbook. Then I found the sketchbook but I didn’t know where my eraser (the one surviving eraser at this point), so I couldn’t finish the sketch. Last night I decided to get my act together.

I’ll file this under: SF429.S63 L86 2013, which stands for:
Animal culture–Pets–Dogs–By breed, A-Z–Shiba dogs.

More comics about the dog here and here.

I ran the Baltimore Running Festival half marathon on the 12th of October. It was fun. I was going to write a race report, but let’s face it: The chances of that happening are kind of slim at this point. I get up every morning at 5:30 to start work on my thesis, then I work out and do actual work, and after all that I have no energy left. So enjoy a few photos from the run:

go pass — My MTA ticket. I <3 public transit.

pre race — Looking skeptical before the race.

There was a goodly walk from where we lined up to the starting line, the last bit was uphill. It was a bit confusing. I bet people who actually read their race packet knew about this though.

socks — It’s the Natty Boh man. We’re in B’more, hon.

lake building — I’d been reading _From Hell_, and this building looked strangely like some freemason business.

done — Post-race. I finished in 2:00:07.

Em oi! #385: Terms of Reconciliation

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything (the plot, anyone’s perceptions of graduate school/me) to say that my advisor and I have a somewhat rocky relationship. It consists of him mostly ~~ignoring~~ forgetting about me and me alternately making desperate bids for his affection and raging about his inattentiveness. Super healthy. One learns so much about relationships and professionalism in graduate school. But on the plus side, things are getting better. He finished reading my thesis and made comments on it that were quite helpful. And we did actually have a nice (i.e. productive) conversation about some of my translation’s idiosyncrasies. So things CAN get better.

And I should add that my advisor is a really nice fellow. I’m also acquainted with his wife, who is wonderful, and I don’t wish either of them any ill.

I promise my next comic will not be a meta-mopey grad-school-is-hard feel-sorry-for-myself fest. Probably. We’ll file this one under LB2385 L86 2013b for Theory and practice of education–Higher education–Academic degrees-M.A.

What else can I blog about? I ran a 5k a few weeks ago. Despite my foot injury, I finished in 24:40, good enough for 4th place in my age group. Also, I had a lot of fun running with a family friend for whom it was her second 5k ever!

What else? Plantar fasciitis. It should I guess come as no surprise to anyone who has been on the internet that when you google something and you see five hundred potential cures, none of them work. That seems to be the case with PF. My foot is still about where it was when I posted the last comic several weeks ago.

I’m trying not to get too depressed about it. I have an appointment with a PT in a few weeks and in the meantime I’m still running three times per week. That’s okay. (Ok, it’s not something I’m okay with, but it’s something I have to do.)

I’m actually pretty frustrated and depressed. I’ve had to switch from doing the full marathon in Baltimore to doing the half. In the meantime, I’ve decided to pretend I’m training for a half IM, so I’ve been doing lots of bricks (or at least swim/bike days; it turns out that if you want to do a brick before work you have to get up at 5am).

So my past week looked like this:
Sunday: Swam 3550 yards/Biked 23 miles
Monday: Ran 7 miles (also lifted weights)
Tuesday: Swam 2500 yards/Biked 16 miles
Wednesday: Ran 9 miles, ellipticaled 2 miles (plus lifting and aikido)
Thursday: Swam 2550 yards/Biked 17 miles
Friday: Blerched.

Tomorrow is my long run (about 13 miles), then another brick on Sunday. I’m going to try to push the bike ride a bit longer, maybe to 25-30 miles.

I also bought new insoles and a Strassburg Sock in a desperate attempt to heal myself with placebos.

So that’s me. How have you been, internet?

Em oi! #384: Stages of Thesis

The past two weeks have been a bit stressful. At the beginning of the summer, when it became apparent that I was not going to finish in time to defend at the end of spring term, I set August 9th as my official personal deadline for completing the draft of my thesis. Around the same time, B accepted a role in a play (The Merchant of Venice) that was set to perform the weekend before my deadline, meaning that we had dinner with several relatives that weekend. I also went to the show twice. It was a great performance, but that’s still a loss of time.

We also passed an unhappy personal anniversary on August 3rd. And finally, for reasons that I swear seemed reasonable at the time, we decided to start looking for a house.

Anything else? Yes. I hurt my foot and had to take a week off running at the time I most needed to be able to run.

That’s actually the whole reason I drew this comic. I wanted to blog about my plantar fasciitis.

I’m not really sure what happened. My pet theory is that getting a huge bruise on my shin at Dances with Dirt made me roll in a weird way during aikido the next week. This probably put more strain on my plantar fascia and led to the injury.

After swimming seven miles per week for two weeks, I finally saw my sports medicine guy last Monday (the 5th) and got a diagnosis. The sheet the guy gave me said “limit running,” but not no running, so with the help of a pair of orthotics, I’ve been running about every other day since then, a total of maybe 30 miles last week. (That figure includes time on the elliptical, though.)

I can’t tell if my foot is doing better than it was last Sunday. I did just spend seven and a half hours over the past three days at an aikido seminar (my present to myself for finishing the thesis) and it didn’t fall off. Conversely though, it doesn’t feel amazing after all that. The weather changing a lot today was a confounding factor too.

I am trying to put into practice some of the zen techniques I learned at my seminar, but it’s hard. I have difficulty just relaxing and waiting until I get better. (Obviously, right? Because I am still running.) I think the problem is, you can’t just force yourself to be calm. You can’t force yourself to find enlightenment.

But, as they say, you can clean up your room. You can open the window and sit. And when the breeze comes through, you can notice it.

So I will clean up my room. Not just so I can sit, but because we have to sell the condo now.

This is wandering a bit. I hurt my foot but I finished my thesis. Yay.

I’ll file this one under LB2385 L86 2013 for Theory and practice of education–Higher education–Academic degrees-M.A..

Em oi! #383: Ask a Librarian

I should note that when this happened, I was just walking around Memorial to return a book. The lady who stopped me probably didn’t realize who she was asking when she stopped me. During the same trip I also helped a former coworker figure out how to use a scanner, so I was all over helping people. Yesss!

I was thinking the other day how nice it would be to wear a hijab sometimes.

So when I was in about 8th grade, I got this truly awful haircut.* She just basically cut my hair straight across and I think chopped some layers in, which made it sort of triangular. She also didn’t give me any advice about products I could use to make it behave. As a result, I was teased pretty regularly about this for the rest of the year, or at least that’s what it felt like. Between that and a hundred other bad haircuts I have had the fucks beaten out of me when it comes to my appearance. I give basically no fucks what people think of how I look now. Sometimes I get to the gym before I actually look at my face in the mirror and notice that my hair (owing to the amazing humidity) is going to eleven.

The one exception to my zero fucks policy comes from work. I want to look at least a little bit professional for work. And with the humidity as high as it has been lately, that has been a challenge. But women who wear hijabs don’t have to worry about that. They just look super together all the time.

It might also be handy if I were the type of person who got shouted at on the street. But I’m not.** I don’t exactly know why–I’ve always considered that I’m not that attractive, and now I’m kind of out of the age range for being shouted at, but also I tend to walk like I’m going to stab anyone who talks to me (my friends politely say I’m a bit intimidating to approach). So maybe that’s it.

Anyway, it turns out that if you ask a librarian an open-ended question like “Where are the books?” you may get more of a reply than you anticipated.

We’ll file this one under PN56.L48 L86 2013 for Literature (general)–Theory. Philosophy. Esthetics–Relation to and treatment of special elements, problems, and subjects–Other special–Topics, A-Z–Libraries.

If you missed my last comic about Hamlet and existentialism (it came out the same day DOMA came down, so no one saw it), it’s here. Since I wrote it, I got a sort of remote talking to about modern dress Shakespeare, and also B and I went to see Joss Whedon’s lovely new version of Much Ado about Nothing. So I will try to write a bit more of my thoughts about that. I will say my opinion has been softened somewhat. I’m not totally convinced, but I’m willing to be convinced.

I have a marathon coming up at the end of the week. Bread consumption is up. Circus consumption remains the same. The weird aches and pains that come with tapering are coming and going. Other than that I’m tired and don’t have much to say, so here are some pictures of Mom’s kittens. Click to embiggen if desired.

* It turns out that many hairdressers don’t really know how to cut curly hair. I believe this is a remnant of racism in hairdresser training, because consider who typically has naturally curly hair: the Irish, Jews, and African Americans. Of course, the woman who cut my hair would never admit that she had no idea what she was doing. I got my first really good haircut about a year and a half ago. (That excludes the times my friends helped me out by buzzing it.)

** I’m actually a bit puzzled by this phenomenon, because I’ve read a lot of accounts from women who are. The best story I can muster is that when I was in Italy in 2003 someone shouted “bella!” at me. (Probably ironically?) Oh, the other day I was out running and a guy driving a truck shouted “woo.” I was at mile 9 of 10 and kind of dying, and also he was about a block down the street, so he could have been shouting at someone else.

Em oi! #381: First as Farce

“Philosophy does not solve problems. The duty of philosophy is not to solve problems but to ridify problems–to show how what we experience as a problem is a false problem.” –Slavoj Žižek, Zizek! (dir. Astra Taylor, 2005)

I have been busy getting to know Slavoj Žižek. He is an interesting guy–looks like someone’s weird uncle, keeps his socks in his kitchen, talks about popular culture, and is extremely funny. It seems as though American intellectuals are in love with him because he hates Americans and he is very well spoken. Also he once wrote the text for an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog (NSFW).

The thing is, I’d guess, none of them read his actual philosophy, which tends to be very concerned with Hegel and Lacan. Which leads me to the question: Why is everyone in Continental Philosophy so obsessed with Hegel?

I will file this under N84.L86 2013, for Visual arts–Theory. Philosophy. Aesthetics of the visual arts–Theory. Philosophy. Apparently Žižek is not yet famous enough to have his own LCC number. (I just checked–Chomsky has one, but it’s Z8168.18, a bibliography heading).

I wanted to write a bit about the Syttende Mai 20-miler and the Ice Age 50k–my last two races. But it’s already 22:30 and I’m pretty tired and I have to get up early tomorrow. So for now, enjoy this awesome panorama Bryan took of me finishing the Syttende Mai. I’ll write something up later in the week.

Bryan took this awesome series of me finishing the race.

Em oi! #380: The 50k

My friend Tiffany requested a comic about my 50k experiences. This is more or less accurate.

This is the thing about exercise: It doesn’t exactly get less painful as you do more of it. Well, on a practical level, the delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS) can get a bit less, but whatever you’re doing–running, lifting weights, swimming–it will still feel hard. Today I was at the gym and I squatted 125 lbs for reps, which is the most I’ve ever done. I’m nearly at my goal of squatting my body weight. (Ironically, before I got serious about lifting and put on 5 lbs of muscle in my back/shoulders, that was my weight.) And the thing is, it feels really hard to do that. About as hard as it felt when I was just starting to do squats and using just the bar (45 lbs). But now I can do the higher weight and not get broken in half. Running is similar. My feet still hurt like they did when I did my first marathon (or first 5k, I think). But I go farther.

The Mad City 50k, which is the race depicted here, is always a good time. A lot of friends of mine are on the committee that puts it together, but even before I’d met them I’d done the race and learned what a great event it is. And it’s nice to feel like I know a large number of the people I’m running next to and the volunteers who are hanging out.

The race consists of five 10k loops of the Arboritum. My plan was to do the first three loops at a consistent but conservative pace, then try to pick it up for the last two. Instead, I went at a good clip, finishing in just about one hour (9:45 pace) for the first 10k, then 58:27 and 58:39 (9:24 and 9:26 pace) for the next two laps. I kept falling in with the lead woman runner and her pacers, who were at times clocking close to an 8:30 pace. Whoops.

I knew the fourth lap would be the toughest, mentally speaking. This was also when my stomach decided to act up and I started getting all kinds of cramps. Eventually I stopped to use the restroom, which helped a bit but slowed me down some. Eating some potato chips also helped–maybe I needed some salt? I finished the fourth lap in 1:09:42, an 11:13 pace. Ouch.

The talking backward thing, by the way, has its origins here. I think I listened to this song a day or two before the race. SO there you go.

The last lap I tried to push the pace, but my legs were pretty dead. I was talking to random strangers and to myself, anything to make the miles go by faster. Unlike the last time I did the race, I didn’t meet anyone going my way at my pace. That was unfortunate. I really pushed it over the last mile and a half, passing a bunch of people…most of whom were doing the relay, but a couple of whom were in the 50k. I finished the last lap in 1:02:18 (10:01 pace) to complete the race in 5:09:44, good enough for 5th place among women and (I think) 2nd in my age group.

We’ll file this under GV1065.17.U4 L86 2013 for Recreation. Leisure—Sports—Track and field athletics—Foot racing. Running—Distance running—Marathon running—Special topics, A-Z—Ultramarathons.

Em oi! #379: “Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration…”

Sometimes when I don’t draw for a while, the art comes out looking like I’ve had some kind of weird neurological event. Nothing of the sort here, just lack of ability.

My mom really does say that getting older beats the hell out of the alternatives, by the way, and has for years.

So I turned thirty last week. And, you know, I wondered if I was going to freak out about it. I actually felt like society wanted me to freak out about it. After all, we live during a time in which youth and vitality are valued so highly that there are actresses who haven’t moved their eyebrows in DECADES in an effort to prevent wrinkling. Not being able to look cross or confused is a high price to pay to maintain an unrealistic standard of beauty, isn’t it?

Anyway, I decided after a while that I feel pretty good about myself. Part of it is that, unlike five years ago when the majority of my friends were single twenty-somethings, I now run (literally) with a circle that stretches from twenty-two to mid-sixties. Some of my friends have kids who are my age (or a few years younger, I guess. College age.). That gives one a sense of perspective that isn’t available when all of the people one speaks with have the same anxieties (not finding a job/not getting into grad school, being single forever, dying and getting eaten by wild dogs…). I do see people I know who have kids and just become…I don’t know, the kind of boring grown ups I remember from my childhood, who spend all their time looking stern and shouting and dealing with Serious Things and who have jowls. Ok, basically I am describing the nosy next door neighbor from Bewitched (Gladys was her name?). Poor Gladys, no one would ever believe what she saw going on over at the Steven’s house.

My larger point is that I get to decide who I am and what it means to be the age I am. If I want to keep running marathons when I’m 65, I’m allowed. I don’t have to “act my age,” whatever that means. To paraphrase one of my mother’s other sayings, “I may be getting older, but I refuse to grow up.”

File this under PR830.A394 L86 2013 for English literature–History of English literature–Prose–By form–Prose fiction. The novel–Special topics–Other special topics, A-Z–Aging.

I will get to my race reports for the last two races (a 50k and a 20k) plus my discussion of free will a bit later in the week, I hope. Now that I have a job demanding 40 hours/week of my attention, PLUS my thesis, I have a bit less time than I’d like for blogging. But that will get better eventually. I hope.

Em oi! #378: Tiny Robots

I drew this two weeks ago when I had just run a twenty-miler. The following Saturday I ran 21. And yesterday, I ran a marathon. This comic continues its relevance to my life. We’ll file this under
GV1065.17.T56 L86 2013 for Recreation. Leisure—Sports—Track and field athletics—Foot racing. Running—Distance running—Marathon running—Special topics, A-Z—Tiny robots.

I finished the Trailbreaker Marathon in 4:08:43, 7th in my age group. I ran the whole race with a woman from Minneapolis named Shannon, which made the whole thing seem rather quick. (Well okay, not exactly quick–it was still four hours. But it was quite tolerable.) The race course was very flat, with the exception of one rather long and gradual hill. I actually welcomed this on the way back (it was an out-and-back course) because it gave my legs something to think about.

emily shannon and bill

My stomach, which has occasionally caused me grief on long runs before, stayed quiet. I thought I might be able to do a 4:15, but Shannon was on track for a bit of a faster race (her PR is about 30 minutes faster than mine), and I decided I wanted to keep running with her because she was quite entertaining to talk to. The aid stations were a bit irregularly spaced, which made my gel-every-six-miles strategy a bit tricky (I like to take my gels with water and had forgotten my water bottle) but I survived. It sprinkled a bit but then it stopped. I don’t know. It was a race that went very well, so there’s not that much to remark on. Here’s a photo of me, Shannon, and a fellow named Bill who did the first half of the race with us.

Shannon took the photo, by the way–I stole borrowed it off her Facebook page.

I know that last week I promised I would have an analysis of the free will/determinism problem I posed. But I did a marathon yesterday, and then today I was working on editing my thesis proposal most of the day, so the short of it is that my essay is half written and I have to go to bed now. I will have it completed in a day or two, though, so check back. Same bat time…

Em oi! #377: Sene-can

So I came across Seneca (founder of the Stoics) the other day and immediately realized I was dealing with a kindred spirit. Seneca actually did advocate spending some time every day meditating on what could potentially go wrong in your life, because then if it did go wrong, you’d be psychologically prepared for it. Alain de Botton implies that this philosophy grew out of the fact that Seneca lived among the Roman elites, who were a fairly angry and unstable group from the emperor on down. And I actually do this quite a lot, though I refer to it as “reining in my expectations.” For example, if I had a job interview that went really well, I tell myself that they are not only not going to give me the job, but they will probably come and burn down my house for wasting their time. Then if they actually give me the job (please give me the job–you know who you are), I am surprised and happy, and if they reject me, I am less sad.

Anyway, despite all that, I couldn’t resist making fun of him a little. It could be worse, I guess–Schopenhauer advised his readers to swallow a toad every morning, so that would be the worst thing that happened to them all day…

We’ll file this under B618.L86 2013, for Philosophy (General)—Ancient (600 B.C.-430 A.D.)—Occident—Greco-Roman philosophy—Individual philosophers—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, ca. 4 B.C.-65 A.D.—Biography and memoirs. Criticism and interpretation—General Works.

I should point out that in the time between when I drew this and when I inked it, my hair streak was dyed over (so I could look respectable for job interviews). You can check it out in the below photo, in which I failed to do it and maybe I didn’t even brush it this morning? And also I look a little cranky. (Hah. Take that, Cameron Russell?)

There have been so many good, philosophical articles in the news lately, from the issues of justice and punishment versus rehabilitation raised by the conviction and sentencing of Malik Richmond and Trent Mays, to the question of deciding when someone becomes a person raised by the North Dakota Personhood amendment to all sorts of interesting problems raised by SCOTUS hearing arguments on Proposition 8 and DOMA. But then Bryan posed me a fascinating problem about epistemology and free will, so I’m going to write about that. Actually, I’m going to write down the problem as posed to me now, and then next week I’m going to write about my thoughts on the issue.

Here we go: Bryan doesn’t believe in free will. His proof for this goes thusly:

Bryan is a materialist, which means he believes that there is no mind/brain dichotomy–the mind is just our perception of the workings of the brain. The brain is controlled by various chemicals.
Because the brain is made up of particles, if we really understood the brain (and quantum physics), we could build a computer that could predict what someone is thinking.
So now that we know what someone is thinking, given a set of initial conditions, we can predict someone’s behavior.
Since all choices can be accurately predicted, there is no free will. We are essentially controlled by chemicals. Free will is just an illusion we have because we ourselves don’t entirely understand the workings of our brains. But we might as well live with this illusion, because we can’t build a computer that can predict things like that.

(Bryan, you will have to let me know if I have misconstrued your argument.)

So I have been reading and thinking about quantum physics, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Newcomb’s problem and meta-Newcomb’s problem (even rereading my senior philosophy thesis), and also looking into the works of a lot of theorists from about 1950-present. It has been quite a knotty problem, I will tell you. If you have any comments on it, please feel free to post them in the comments section here, on FB or G+, or email them to me at ehlupton(at)gmail(dot)com. I will try to address any worthwhile opinions I receive.