2019 – PretenseSoup

Em oi! #441: O Christmas Tree

So: true story about the political situation here in Wisconsin. My actual sequence of thoughts about this:

This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of.
Calling it a “holiday tree” doesn’t make me as a non-Christian feel more included. It’s a tree used to celebrate a Christian holiday. Why do we even have one at the capital?
(After some research) Huh! Actually, the history of Christmas trees is not as straightforwardly Christian as I assumed. The pagan aspect is actually pretty neat.
This is still the stupidest thing I have ever heard of.

Hey Robin Vos, I have an offer, on behalf of the liberals of Wisconsin: If we let you call it a Christmas tree, could you pass some bills to decarbonize the economy, make electric cars easier to buy, maybe add in some incentives for all the farmers to feed their cows seaweed to reduce methane emissions?

That idiocy aside, I hope you’re all having a good winter holiday season, whichever you choose to celebrate–Yalda, Hanukkah, Christmas, Yule, Saturnalia, Kwanzaa… I’m sure I’m missing a few.

We opted not to do a Christmas card this year; after an autumn beset by illness (mine and that of others, culminating in spending ten hours throwing up last week from a norovirus), I opted to put my limited energy toward other projects (good news is I finished draft #2 of my new novella and it has gone to my beta reader). However I have greatly enjoyed all the cards I’ve received from you all! Hopefully next year we’ll get our acts together in time and I’ll have something to send out.

Side note on the comic: The tree in the sixth panel is growing out of a skull because in some traditions, the wood that the cross was made from came from a tree grown from seeds of the tree of knowledge that were planted on Adam’s grave (reference the Golden Legend if you’re curious about this). There was originally text discussing this, but it was cut for space. This is already a really long and wordy comic. Also, sorry for all the typos etc. I swear I remember how to read and write.

We’ll file this one under GT4989 L86 2019, for Manners and customs (General)–Customs relative to public and social life–Festivals. Holidays–Special days and periods of time–Christmas–Special customs–Christmas trees.

Relevant previous comic, if you’re interested: #392: Such Truth.

Final note, a new weird little poem/microfic got published at SlippageLit.

Updates

It has been a long time since the last comic I posted. This was not intentional–I had some health things come up in September, and then when I was recovered (mentally, really) and ready to draw again a bunch of other stuff happened, as is its wont–I went to operas, I parented, I stayed out too late, I took the dogs for a jog, I started seriously editing my new novella, I watched a bunch of episodes of The Good Place and read a couple of 900-page fantasy novels, and then just when it seemed I still had time to make my goal of one comic per month, it was suddenly nearly the end of November.

Whoops.

So this is an update to say, hey, I’m still alive, but I’m not going to be posting another comic right this instant. I have a few in the queue. Hopefully soon.

In the meantime, a bunch of my prose poems have been published. I’ve slowly been adding these to my bibliography section up top, but in the meantime you can check these out (note that most are only available in hard copy):

“Deluge,” Ink and Nebula (Summer 2019): http://inkandnebula.com/eh-lupton.html.

“Huaraches” and “Deflation,” Not One of Us, no. 62 (2019): pp. 24, 50.

“Before the Fall,” “Prediction Space,” and “After the Fall,” Poet Lore vol. 114, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2019): pp. I don’t know, I haven’t gotten my copy yet.

Can’t see it now, but soon:

“Now We Are Free” at The House of Zolo’s Journal of Speculative Literature, vol. 1 (1/1/20): p. who knows, it’s probably not paginated yet.

At least one other forthcoming.

Before I go, here’s my new and improved head shot. Sometime I’m going to get an actual photographer to take one.

Portrait of the author as someone who has finally managed to take a selfie without doing that weird thing with her chin.

Em oi! #440: Dreamland

I feel the need to begin with the disclaimer that Hal has been sleeping through the night for more than a year now. The thing is that ~~babies~~ toddlers are loud sleepers–I often wake up briefly in the middle of the night, readjust my pillow, maybe put on an extra layer of t-shirt or take one off depending on whether I’m warm or cold. H tends to wake up, fuss briefly, and then pass out again. We don’t usually get all the way out the door before he goes quiet, but it does happen sometimes.

I noticed early in the Hal years on that when you’re wandering in and out of the bedroom at odd times of the night, you can occasionally catch your partner at certain points in their sleep cycle where weird reactions are more likely. I’m actually really good at this. The most extreme example of this is the time when, returning to our bedroom at about 3:30am, I managed to startle B and he leapt all the way out of bed with a resounding kiai and assumed a fighting stance, all without really attaining consciousness. (It’s hilarious now to think about; at the time, I just stepped backward and closed the door between us. About two seconds later I heard, “Huh? Em? Em, are you okay?”)

The conversation recorded in comic #440 was somehow related to B’s current obsession with a game called Europa Universalis IV, which involves conquering the world. But sadly it was topped by a conversation we had the other day as I was coming back from the bathroom:

B: (Inaudible) boss.
Em: (Getting into bed) What?
B: Tide pods.
Em: What?
B: Tide pods: The universal currency.

Then he passed out again. I don’t have any explanation for that one.

We’ll file this one under BF1073 S58 L86 2019, for Parapsychology–Sleep. Somnambulism–Special topics, A-Z–Sleep talking.

Em oi! #439: O Magic Talking Skull

I have been working on this one for a loooong time (I found the reference photos of the skull in my phone history from early May, and I think I started drawing it before then (the relevant episode of David Tennant Does a Podcast with came out on April 8th). In the time since I started the comic, I have gotten about ten rejections, so that’s kind of what’s been going on around here. I don’t know if this feeling is at all universal among creative types or not. I guess I kind of hope so.

(Also, footnote, highly recommend the podcast, if that’s not obvious.)

Anyway, this comic demonstrates something I do quite frequently, which is spin out philosophically when I find myself confronted with a problem. Can’t figure out a path to success? = What is success, actually? Yorick (the skull) shuts that down pretty quick, but this happens a lot.

The trope of “I was about to quit and then I found success” seems to happen a lot in literary circles, including for Madeleine L’Engle (I know I’ve read of other major authors having the same thing happen too).

Actual photo of Yorick. She unfortunately doesn’t have very good teeth.

I’m going to file this one under BF175.5.W75 L86 2019, for Psychology–Psychoanalysis–Special topics, A-Z–Writing, because it is about the psychology of the writer, I think.

And that, I think, is all for today. Next time we’ll go back to a style with less pencil where I actually draw panels instead of doing randomly sized drawings on one piece of paper and trying to crop them with my camera. Yes.

Em oi! #438: Snow Kidding

Long time no talk! Astute readers will note that I’ve skipped a number… I actually got involved with another (six-panel comic) that was very funny, but it got a bit overwhelming with the amount of edits it needed and I don’t know. It has been a few years since I had really bad seasonal depression, and–I wouldn’t exactly call this depression, but while I’m normally at the best of times something of a suitcase full of anxiety and neuroses held together by coffee and running, the winter has reduced me to a quivering ball of anxiety with a constant disaster film playing in my head reminding me that all my choices are meaningless because we’re all going to die in twenty years, and ultimately I guess I’m a terrible person for having made said choices (instead of other, different choices? I don’t know).

Talking about it out loud has actually been really helpful in reminding me of the absurdity and irrationality of my thoughts. I guess that’s called reality testing. I’m also trying to sleep more,* taking vitamin D, and sitting in front of my happy light more regularly.

During my off-time, I’ve been doing a figure drawing class, where I’ve learned a lot, like that the way I’ve done shading in this comic is not correct (too many gaps between the strokes). Also, I’ve learned that being in a room with a naked person is awkward. Like–I feel very Midwestern saying this, but it’s weird.

Uh, so also it has snowed a lot. When we were flying back from Alaska a week ago, I mentioned to the Alaska Airlines personnel who were checking us in at the airport that it had just snowed another four inches back home. They said, “Wow, four inches,” and exchanged a look reserved for people who live in a place where they average 75″ of snow per year–about twice what Madison gets (43″). But what I meant was–four inches on top of already “so much snow that our smaller dog can’t make her way around the yard and has resorted to following in the big dog’s wake. And also four inches when my in-laws were watching the kid, and lovely people though they are, we don’t have a snowblower and they’re not prepared to shovel the driveway… (spoiler: it was fine). Right now, looking out the window, there’s about a foot of snow on top of the bird bath to my left, and we’re forecast to get more later this week! Our driveway has turned into basically a trench. We could probably survive an attack from the Hun by sheltering there. We will see the lights along the edges when it all melts. And the snow we couldn’t manage to get up on the top of the piles is forming peninsulae that are making it harder and harder to get either car out, but especially mine because it doesn’t have a backing cam.

Also my garage door froze shut twice (at least; it might be frozen shut now) and my car battery died. I wasn’t going to finish/post this comic because we had a day last week (Friday?) when it was 36 degrees out and I thought that maybe it would all melt, but instead only a little of it did, and then it re-froze, and then Saturday we had freezing rain all day. So in summary, I’m done with this shit. So. Done. So this is maybe catharsis, a little.

Wishing you all an early spring.

File this under BT135 L86 2019 for Doctrinal theology–God–Divine attributes–Individual attributes–Providence. Divine intervention.
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* I sleep like…6.5 to 7 hours per night. Having had a child has 100% fucked up my sleeping. It’s not that he’s waking up; it’s that my sleeping is just not great. I don’t know.