Throwback: How to Become a Monster

I don't usually hang onto old things. In fact, I get kind of a buzz from deleting things or throwing them away. When I go through my closet and bag up old clothes for Goodwill, I have to make sure I tie the bags shut immediately, or else my mom will go through them and put clothes back in my closet when I'm not around (she says I get rid of things prematurely, and sometimes she's right. Now I only have one pair of Wal-Mart khakis to spill turkey juice on at work).

Anyway, despite my tendency to throw things away, I saved one post from my old blog before I deleted the whole thing. I've re-posted it below, an illustration of what can happen when you try to give everyone your time at once. Also, speaking of throwbacks (and monsters), here's a notebook doodle from 12th grade:

We were talking about Watergate in AP US History, so I tried to draw Richard Nixon.
Then I drew a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Anyway, here's my post from last fall, "How to Become a Monster":

The secret is to spread yourself thin. Really thin. Like the last blob of peanut butter, scraped from the sides of the jar and spread on the last crust of bread in your kitchen because grocery shopping, despite man's considerable need for food, is not a high priority in your weekly schedule. This will remove the buffer of tolerance, patience, and empathy between you and your fellow humans, because these things will be sprinkled over so many commitments that when the day comes where someone pushes just one of your buttons, you will react like a kicked rattlesnake. Even when a friend tiptoes into your dark, smoky dragon-cave, and innocently asks for that last spare minute you keep tucked in the coil of your scaly tail, you will expectorate fire at their face and burn any bridges of kindness or mutual understanding between your two souls. If you've achieved these results, congratulations. You've become a monster. If you're unhappy with this transformation, good luck. You could try sticking a knife in the peanut butter jar of your heart, scraping out any bits of tolerance, patience, or empathy still stuck to its walls, and using it to glue Popsicle sticks together for a replacement bridge between you and the person whose face you just incinerated (hopefully they've a jar or two of forgiveness in the cupboard of their soul). But it’s so much easier being a monster.

Writing as a Life Line

Lately I've been thinking about art, especially writing, as a life preserver--tossed out to save the individual from drowning in the sea of generality. I recently heard a famous author (pretty sure it was Clyde Edgerton) basically say that one of the great things about writing is that it allows you to focus on an individual person's experience, and that this was especially refreshing in today's generalized world. Ever since, my mind's frequently wandered to this idea in the shower.

If you can call 21st century culture "generalized," it might be because of what Neil Postman called "information glut" (if you haven't read Amusing Ourselves to Death, I'll weep bitter tears until you do). Rather than getting fully invested in only one or two stories at a time, we get bombarded with bits and pieces of thousands of stories every day. Instead of a long letter from a close friend or family member, we see hundreds of short "tweets" or "statuses," often from people we barely know or don't know at all. As a result, we tend to just skim the surfaces of human experience, seeing only the short blips of information people make public on the Internet, and these blips often follow mass trends, such as the most popular hash tags on Twitter.

Sometimes it feels like a similar thing is happening to Hollywood movies. It's not enough to explore the struggles of one or two people; the rest of humanity has to get involved (example: you can't just have a child battling an illness--it's gotta turn into a global pandemic). That's why I love films like Life of Pi. On one hand, it's a grand, visual spectacle, but it's also an intensely personal, intimate journey of a boy and his tiger.

That's enough, inner film nerd...anyway, I don't wanna pick on technology too much. As Postman also explains, new media both "giveth" and "taketh away." The Internet may overload us with useless information, but it's also the world's biggest library of useful information. And social media allows people to organize, share stories, and solve problems on a mind-blowing scale (when they're not posting cat memes, of course). But a constant flow of stimuli and distractions can also make a person lose touch with the smaller, deeper, more internal experiences of life, and forget the subtle differences that make each of us unique. This is why writing is more important than ever. Through their work, writers can cut straight through the mass culture and focus on the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of one specific person.

By now you're probably thinking, "okay Laura, let's get to the cartoons," and I don't blame you. So I'm gonna get off my soap box for a minute and offer a visual aid:

On the left, we have all of humanity. On the right, we have a guy named Mike. Mike is somewhere in that big blob o' people on the left, but it's hard to really see him unless he's magnified. Writing could be that magnifying glass. If you wrote a story about Mike, you could delve as deep into his character as you wanted.  Maybe you could explain why he wears that t-shirt with a bird on it, and why that bird looks like a marijuana leaf (my poor drawing skills are not an acceptable answer). If Mike were a real person and you wanted to write a compelling article about him, you'd have to really get to know him instead of just looking at him or sifting through his Instagram photos. Basically, the point I've been trying to make through all this babbling is:

Writing helps you see below the surface. It lets you discover hidden truths about life and people.

In fact, art in general does the same thing. In the words of Marcel Marceau, "Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees."

On a related note, I recently read Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Talk about an intimate story. In a huge body of water, on a planet with billions of people, there's just one man versus a fish. No one else is involved in his battle to catch it, and that makes it all the more powerful. It isn't a blockbuster about humanity's war against giant blue marlin, nor does the old man have a smart phone to tweet about his adventure ("Finally hooked that giant marlin. Gonna need a bigger boat lol. #gonefishin #awesome").

Since this was a really text-heavy post, I'm gonna leave you tonight with a sketch of a couple characters I created a while back. They're named Kimmy and Kristin, ages 11 and 16, respectively, and hopefully they'll star in their own series someday.

Potato Salad and Human Nature

I once heard someone say that human beings are inherently optimistic. It's an interesting thought, considering that humans also find new things to complain about constantly. Actually, I can't say that this is true of humans in general, but it seems to be an all-too-common trait of American culture these days. In fact, sometimes it seems like how well-off someone is is directly proportional to how much they complain.

For example, a couple weeks ago, I'm standing in line at this fancy-pants deli (the kind with imported water in its drink coolers) in an upscale neighborhood, when this woman walks up to the counter to get the potato salad she ordered. She then gives the guy working the counter a ten-minute speech about the absence of celery in the potato salad and how potato salad really should have celery in it.

Another example: I met this girl in college last year who was planning her wedding. She constantly complained about how stressful it was and how it was driving her crazy. I complain all the time about stupid stuff myself, but still...it was all I could do to keep from grabbing her by the shoulders, staring her dead in the face, and saying: "Look. You're 21 years old, and you've already found the person you want to bleed, sweat, and cry with for the rest of your life (supposedly). People have fought for that kind of love throughout mankind's existence, throughout art and literature, and now you've got it. If you're seriously gonna throw a fit over flowers or invitations, you need to rethink the reason for this wedding."

Sorry, that got really preachy really fast (I was watching this wedding show with my mom and got mad because the brides were annoying). Anyway, another ironic quirk of supposedly optimistic humans is how we tend to settle comfortably into being miserable. In fact, even David Wong of Cracked.com agrees that misery is comfortable (for more, read his Cracked article "Six Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person). The way I see it, misery is kinda like this old arm chair I once saw next to a beach house that probably belonged to a bunch of frat boys. On its cushion rested a cardboard sign that said "FREE."

It stinks. It's got holes. It's stained with beer and potato chip grease. Who knows what unholy organisms lurk within its stitching? But you know what? It's darn comfy. It's still got big soft cushions for your back and butt.  Once you sit in it, you sink until you feel like you'll never get out of it. Misery is quite similar. You don't usually have to do very much to be unhappy, and that makes it comfortable (and free), in a way. On the other hand, as the opening title of The Thief of Bagdad (1924) states, "Happiness must be earned." There's a reason they call it the "pursuit" of happiness. Being truly happy often requires doing lots of stuff (much of which I haven't done yet), and even enduring some misery in the process. However, this is misery in motion. It's not the dull, stagnant kind of pain. It's the pain that comes with trying to do epic things. Like the feeling of being thrown through a window after you karate chop a ninja warlord (and make the glass shatter in cool slow motion). I really wish I could say I've done that.

If you're reading this, thanks for listening to me think out loud, as usual. Now get out of that frat boy chair and go karate chop a ninja warlord, if it makes you happy.
  

Face to Face

For starters, life got in the way of my doodling this week, so I apologize for the lack of cartoons in this post. Here's a picture of my dog's nose instead:

Raisintoast

Anyway, this past week, my moods have been pretty similar to summer weather in North Carolina. Imagine opening your curtains to a beautiful sunny morning. As the warm light hits your grinning face, you think: today, I'm gonna finish that book. Today, I'm gonna write that screenplay. Today, I'm gonna go swimming in my new string bikini 'cuz I'm comfortable with mah body, yo (disclaimer: I've never owned a string bikini). Then, in the afternoon, just as you're about to head for the pool so the world can admire your fleshy awesomeness, the thunderstorm hits. Hail stones pelt your head as you run back inside to spend the rest of the day in your small, dark bedroom-cave staring up at the stalactites of disenchantment.

I figured my emotional state had something to do with loneliness. My hometown, despite being fairly close to several metropolitan areas, is becoming like one of those remote mountain villages, full of youngsters who dream of escaping to the "big city." Thus, most of my friends have moved away. Fortunately though, one of my best friends still lives nearby, and last Saturday the two of us went to visit a another friend from high school at the cafe where she worked. The place was a cozy wooden hideaway, complete with arm chairs and shelves full of homemade muffins and natural peanut butter. The three of us talked over coffee and cinnamon rolls for a good two hours, and at one point the shop handyman paid us a visit. He was a soft-spoken, forty-something Mexican guy with a motorcycle helmet and many tattoos (he seemed especially proud of "La Virgen" on his chest). He told us stories of fights in Mexico, including one involving a man called El Ruso (the Russian), which left a few scars on his hand. After he left, my friends and I spent the rest of the afternoon discussing everything from life goals to jobs to romantic misadventures. The visit didn't completely cure my mood swings, but I felt a lot better when I got home.

The afternoon made me realize the value of face-to-face communication, something that's easily forgotten in today's social media-crazed world. There's something really comforting about actually sitting down with someone and hearing them tell a story, rather than instant messaging them. I think it's being able to see the human behind the words, to look into someone's eyes instead of a computer screen. You also experience the  added color of the person's speech and mannerisms that gets lost in type. Sometimes I wonder if things like Facebook are actually hurting our ability to make new friends, in a way. The Internet isn't always the best place to strike up a conversation with a stranger, and we're so connected to our group of close friends all the time that it feels less and less necessary to expand our socialization out in the world. Instead, we tend to stay somewhat closed off, missing everything around us while we text or tweet on our phones. I know because I'm guilty of this myself.

That about wraps up my speech for tonight. Tune in Friday to see me discuss human nature and potato salad.