gs_silva

"Do you have your costume yet?" Jon asks Maurice.

"Probably just the spider mask," Maurice figures.

From off-screen, Ella howls, "Noooo, no spider mask, Arzy! Be a mummy instead!" His friends call him Arzy because it's short for Arzamastsev.

But Maurice doesn't want a high-effort costume.

Ella howls again. "My bat dress! It doesn't fit! It musta shrunk. Can Cathy take it out for me?" She's holding a fancy, lacy black dress with sleeves so big they look like bat wings when the wearer raises her arms. It has appeared before.

"Take it out? Is that possible?" Maurice wonders.

"Or I can lend it to her," Ella muses.

"Is there a way we can attach our Clapper to some fun lights for my party?" Ella asks Cathy and Maurice. The newlywed couple is apparently still cooking meals for the group at Ella's house. And why not? Ella has a better kitchen and she actually shops for groceries, and doesn't have to carry them up 3 flights of stairs. And she doesn't cook. Maurice started while he was employed as Jon's home health aide and was trying to pass the time while stuck in the Sievers' house all day. It's an easy way for me to draw the characters hanging out together.

Maurice replies, "Ask my downstairs neighbor if you can borrow his rave lights. Cathy's good friends with him."

Cathy brings Ella to Owen and Sammy's apartment. Owen answers the door and Ella introduces herself. "So, I'm throwing a party the day before Halloween, and Cathy says you own some lights?" she asks Owen.

"They're bolted to the wall," says Owen, frowning and glancing over his shoulder. "I don't think we can get them off." Suddenly he brightens. "You could have your party here!"

"My brother's disabled," says Ella. "He'll have trouble with all these stairs."

"Oh! Is he that athlete guy? I've seen him around!" says Owen.

The girls enter the apartment, where Ella looks around, remarking, "Yup, he's around and around, but not up and down."

Sammy is on the other side of the room, reaching toward a large boxy device perched high up in the corner. "Hey Owen, I think I can get it! We just need power tools."

***

Yeah, I took another break from the daily comic. I've definitely been busy, and am still lagging behind on some very high priority tasks. Caregiving, my graphic novel, supporting my friends in crisis, tax prep... I really don't want to fund genocide, violence, corruption, and all the numerous other terrible things my tax money is going to. I'm trying to do small things to help my community, but it can be hard to coordinate, and to scrape up the energy to take on more tasks. I've started going to the gym, progressing very slowly to avoid wrecking myself, and it puts my energy levels for important daily tasks back a bit. The sad thing is that I can't build up stamina due to my health conditions, so I'm not sure what I'm doing this for. Honestly, my main motivation is that it's just a quiet place to read my book. The book I'm reading is funny and interesting, and it's helping my ability to follow conversational French quite a lot. But I never pick it up at home. I have eleventy-twelve other things I need to do at home.

Playing ketchup with the daily comics.

I'll summarize.

Jon and Maurice arrive at Jon's flat. Jon sits down to rest and Maurice crawls under the lamp table to install The Clapper. But when he tries to trigger it, he can't. (He also can't strum his guitar. Jon suggests playing with his teeth, like Hendrix.)

Ella and Cathy arrive, and Ella excitedly announce that Cathy is ready for her driver's license exam! She claps! The lamp goes on. And off. Jon is annoyed and embarrassed - in case you're too young to remember, The Clapper and other As Seen On TV products were roundly used as punchlines, and Jon is struggling with his pride right now.

Cathy lights up and Ella looks at her mischievously. Oh yes, they have the same idea! "Rumba!" shouts Ella. Cathy corrects her: "Flamenco."

Maurice holds his guitar up to his face and makes a sickly "twang" noise.

But he still has to go to his gig. Cathy comes with, and claims a table. Maurice rips the arm brace off and puts it on Cathy's table. "I didn't want to take it off in front of Jon," he explains, "because he was already grumpy."

Patreon link here.

January was a challenge. February is a challenge. Sorry for the delay/rush. Mardi Gras and Lunar New Year are both on the 17th this year, and I haven't done a dang thing to prepare for either one. I haven't even dug out the paper lanterns yet. So far behind. So little energy. All my energy gets eaten up by demands as soon as I can scrounge any up.

And the art's been pretty bad = sometimes I can draw quickly, but lately I haven't been able to. The one exception has been this Patreon post where I was drawing my characters in ballroom dance poses. I explain a little more in the post.

Hope you're all hanging in there and finding some bright spots in life to help keep your heads up. Or maybe you're even living the life of Riley and everything's coming up roses! That'd be great!

Maurice is checking out the stock of arm braces. He holds one up to his extended right arm and muses, "This one might fit."

"Are you getting a back brace too?" Jon asks, standing next to him on crutches. "You should, or else you're going to throw it out again and again."

"I don't have the money," Maurice says.

"So you're going to suffer through?" Jon asks. "Will that save you money?"

"Fine, I'll get a little one," Maurice says, perusing the store shelves once more. He notices Jon wander off. "Whatcha looking at?"

Pardon my bad rendering of Jon here. I said at the beginning that I'd take care and never be sloppy about drawing him, because he has a different center of balance than us non-crutch-using people, and it's not always intuitive to find it. But that was before I started a daily webcomic! "Just browsing," Jon says.

Maurice starts browsing too, and lights up in excitement. "Is that The Clapper? Hah!"

"Yeah, haha!" Jon laughs along with him. "They carry all sorts of dumb things here."

"Wait..." says Maurice. "This is a medical supply store. So the Clapper is a medical supply."

"No shit, Sherlock," Jon replies icily.

***

In 1990, we were all used to being inundated with infomercials, and we mocked them and joked about them, and most of us didn't give them any real thought beyond that. The Clapper at least had a very old lady in the ad. Those ads rarely had content indicating their target audience, and that's because the philosophy is that if you market to wealthy, young, pretty people, the rest of your clientele will fall in line behind them. And back in 1990, we didn't think about every demographic all the time. It was definitely a societal weakness of the time.

The Snuggie turned that awareness around, but the Snuggie was introduced in 2006 or so, so that means Maurice is actually well ahead of the curve.

I'm so tired I cannot think of the words to describe how tired I am.

Going to bed. It's noon. I don't care.

Cathy is walking down the stairs of her fourth-story apartment when Owen and Seth come out of their apartment and see her in the stairwell. Owen greets her: "Hey, friend! Mon amie! I was just telling Seth we should see what our neighbors are up to. Hang out sometime. Uh... have some café! If you have some time, we have coffee on right now!"

Cathy looks concerned. She holds up her left hand to show Owen her wedding ring and says, "But, I'm married! Look!"

Seth puts an arm around Owen. "It's okay!" he tells Cathy. "We're only les amis!"

"Ah, good!" replies Cathy.

***

I guess they only know two words in French: friends and coffee. They probably took Spanish in school. If so, they'll be able to learn a few more words.

I'm having a little crisis about Owen and Seth right now. They're old, old characters, dating back to probably 1988, but I don't remember any of their character development. I should give them new character development! They appear in the book only for one scene, so I didn't do much about it then. But now they're back, so I should round them out and turn them into real people again.

***

I have a lot to say about the goings-on in the USA right now, but I don't even know where to start. One thing I can do to help myself through it is to admit that it's affecting me. I don't just have anxiety and dread over nothing. Last time I had a doctor's appointment, the nurse asked me if I had any anxiety or depression. It was just an item on her checklist, but we ended up talking for a while about the state of the world. Well, the effects of the state of the world on regular people. I might read more global news than she does, but I didn't need to get into the conflict between Cambodia and Thailand to be understood, even though that's weighing on me. I love both Cambodia and Thailand. To me, that would be like Boston and New York getting into a military conflict. To them, it's a flare-up of centuries-old tensions that will surely flare up again and again. To me, it's two locations in the same region, both beautiful in their own ways.

But now I'm watching the federal government vs. Minneapolis, so I guess my analogy doesn't sound quite as ridiculous as it should. Who's next? I'm sure we won't have to wait long to see the next WTF.

We finally meet Christine! She's one of the core group of Alien Romance friends, but she fast-tracked her bachelor's in 3 years and now she's starting med school in Boston. Priyanka is her roommate and the only BU character I've invented so far, but I'll have to invent more. I'd be open to crowdsourcing new characters. Who do you picture would attend med school in Boston in 1990? I have an initial concept for another female student who is a huge hockey fan, and drags Christine in with her because Christine finds her attractive and wants to have something in common with her. Whether Christine will be in another F/F romance arc remains to be seen. In this time period, bisexual students were taking more liberties than they'd been able to previously. But there was still a general belief that bisexuality didn't exist, and that if you picked one 'side' and then dabbled in the other, you were 'cheating' - even if it was nobody's business and you didn't actually have anyone to 'cheat' on.

Christine is in a further bind because she agreed not to break up with Ren before they parted ways. Ren considers her his long-distance girlfriend (but in an open relationship), and Christine doesn't want to torpedo that agreement. But it means that she'll have to explain it to any potential partner, or she'll have to lie to them.

All right! Time for the transcription.

Christine, who is very tall and has a pixie cut and wears a dress shirt and slacks, and Priyanka, who is somewhat shorter and has luxurious black hair and a long skirt, walk by a poster advertising "Richard Baird, MD, Guest Lecturer."

"This guest lecturer is one of the top in his field!" Priya says excitedly.

"And it's one of my favorite topics," Christine adds. "Underserved patients!"

In the lecture hall, Priya leads them down the aisle. "I want to sit in the front so I can hear well," she explains.

"Sounds good!" Christine says.

They sit, and Dr. Baird comes out. "Good morning! I'm Dr. Richard Baird, oncology secialist at Auburn Medical Center. A lot of new faces, I'm happy to see. I've been giving lectures here for 17 years, and it's great seeing how our student body changes with the times. Ah! Young lady in front! Where are you from?"

Priya looks surprised. "Me? I'm... I'm from India."

"Interesting! Boston must be quite a shock to you," Dr. Baird says, gazing down at her from the podium. "We'll be covering some challenging material in this lecture, so if you need any help, I'm sure the gentleman sitting beside you would be accommodating."

As the Dr. Baird begins his lecture, Priya and Christine look to Priya's left, where there's only a row of empty seats. Priya whispers in confusion, "...there's nobody sitting beside me."

***

I have many things to say about life, but taking the time to type it all out isn't convenient at the moment. Stick a pin in that, and hopefully I'll have a chance to get it all out later, although I really should spend all my free time doing more touchup on my graphic novel.

Commentary, woo!

Jon is on the floor with a band around one of his legs, exercising. I apologize for my hack job of the human figure here. My friend helped me look for reference photos of people doing resistance band exercises on the floor, but none of them were of paraplegics, and the photos of paraplegics all involved the wheelchair or at least an assistant. Jon is alone down there. Cathy is on the couch, reading a magazine. Maybe a copy of France-Amérique, to ease the headache of having to learn English by immersion all the time.

Ella and Maurice are coming out of Ella's bedroom. "Are you talking about me in there?" Jon asks, looking up from the floor.

"Of course! Whatever else in the world is there to talk about?" replies Ella, as Jon hmphs at her. Then she notices what he's doing. "HEY! Are those my pantyhose?"

"They have the right amount of give," Jon says.

And Maurice, leaning against the wall in the hall, says as an aside, "And take, apparently."

Maurice used to work for Jon as Jon's home health aide. He was the target of Jon's alpha tendencies day after day for a year. Now he's free and not obligated to bite his tongue every time he has something snarky to say to Jon, but they're actually close friends now and have worked out the power imbalance between them... sort of. They still have some work to do. It's a whole process.

***

I'm going back to doing long commentaries, plus narration. Is this annoying to people who have been with me awhile? I know I can just tell new readers to go read all my archives, but I tend to assume they won't bother to.

I can start putting it under a cut if people prefer. Let me know. I'm feeling my way through this whole presentation process.

This covers a lot of context very lightly. I was thinking of waiting until tomorrow so I could type it all out, but you know what, it's fine. It's cool. No context for you. I'll only post the translation to the one line in French:

"Music transcends language, and I'm sick to death of you all yammering on in English."

I like the word 'jacasser'. I finally got to use it.

Cathy's song is nonsense. There's no translation. She's just uttering random speechlike syllables. (I figure somebody would ask about that.)

Oh yeah, the Patreon link in case anyone wants it.

We've hardly seen the ravers who live in the apartment below Maurice, Ren, and Cathy. Many years ago, Owen and Seth were significant supporting characters and personal friends of the alien gang. They'd come to study group and parties and such. I almost wrote them out of the story altogether, but now I feel like it's time to bring them back in. They do have one major scene, where they find a bedraggled and frantic Cathy on their front stoop and invite her in for a shower.

They hold raves in their home. Where is the landlord in all this? Who knows!

My daily comic strip (sometimes delayed, because I have a lot of stuff going on and I have CFS/ME so the fatigue hits me hard sometimes) appears here and on my Patreon page where you can see additional commentary for free. Sometimes. Not today. It's the same commentary today.