The new regime is working well so far. Most mornings this week I have been able to get up at 6:30, go for a run, check in with Wii Fit, shower, meditate, have breakfast, and generally get organized for the day before logging in to work at 8:30.
I am connected to the internet all day but apart from some podcasts and cryptic remarks that people make on Twitter, I don’t follow much news. I know that there was some rioting in England this week and that various persons were tut-tutting about the welfare state and the opportunistic chavs and so forth, but to me it is like a flashback to thirty years ago in Thatcher’s Britain, filled with unemployed and angry youth, the problem then much as it is now: the economy. If only the angry British youth of today were smashing the windows of the banks and brokers that are truly responsible for their situation, rather than corner shops and electronics dealers.
My use of Google plus and its related tools continues more or less successfully, though it is a little disappointing that the adoption rate has slowed significantly after the first couple of weeks; unless of course people just aren’t adding me to their circles, which is certainly possible. I am using Facebook less and less all the time and rarely open Twitter now, since I get both of their feeds in G+, so that makes me happy. Which is actually sad, I suppose.
Tonight is the opening night for the show of Shakespeare-themed sketch comedy that a bunch of us are doing as part of Theatre on the Edge. I am fortunate to be in an SCTV sketch, a well-known Wayne & Shuster sketch, and a scene from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead with Nicole. It’s shaping up to be a good show, so get out to 112 Princess tonight or Sunday at 7:30 and check it out.
When not working or rehearsing, I have been sorting through boxes of old junk, separating it into things to keep, things to give to charity, and things to throw away. For a guy whose philosophy espouses not clinging to material objects, I sure do have a lot of old shit that I have been hanging on to for no good reason; just sentimentality and in some cases, maintaining a fiction of past happiness. So, I am trying to be unsentimental now, limiting certain types of keepsakes to just one banker’s box.
A nice side effect of this archaeology is finding stuff that I had completely forgotten about, like a nice note from the late DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz, thanking me for a drawing I sent him after the passing of Gil Kane and encouraging me in my own comics work at the time. Schwartz and Kane and I had a mutual female friend who has worked as a writer in various media, though not comics that I am aware of, and she was one of the “Juliettes”, a companion for Julie at SF cons who helped him get around, went to dinner with him and so on. Apparently some people used to raise their eyebrows about these ladies at the time, but my friend assured me that these were completely nonsexual escorts, giving Julie some much needed assistance at insane fan events and giving the women in question access to one of the grand old men of the business and his contacts.
Seeing the letter reminded me of the recent brouhaha about women in comics, DC in particular. In retrospect Julie and his companions seem like a paternalistic arrangement to be sure, but if it helped encourage young women to work in comics, I can think of worse outcomes. In a way it strikes me as similar to the many mentorship and apprenticeship-based reality shows that are now on television. Meanwhile, the best assessment of the issue I have seen so far came from Meredith Gran, who has a perfect solution for getting women into comics: pay them.
Finally, a plug for a podcast I started listening to this week: Michael Ian Black and his Ed co-star Tom Cavanaugh meet every week to eat and discuss snacks, with some digression. Funny stuff.
You are so much better at self-discipline than I am. Could you do my discipline too? Wait… that doesn’t sound right.
Sounds about right to me!