Author: Graeme McMillan

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It Puts A Great Big Smile on Somebody’s Face

The end of the year gets complicated, I’ve always thought. Not in a bad or difficult way, I hasten to add; while there are bad and difficult memories attached to this time of year — ones that have always been bad since the inciting incident, and ones that have turned bad over time like a fruit left out on the counter — I’m still very much a fan of the holiday season and everything it represents overall. But still. Things get complicated.

It’s a scheduling thing, really. I was in Brazil — or en route, for part of it — for a week, and because of that, I feel like I lost the only quiet time between Thanksgiving and Christmas between the trip and the last-minute scramble of planning for it. Everything else feels so filled with stuff in one way or another that, even though it’s good stuff, can feel overwhelming and exhausting. After all, Christmas is around the corner, then the end of the year. There’s stuff to do, things to prepare. Who can stop when all of this needs to be done…?

(That it’s difficult to be Christmassy in São Paulo figures in, too. Every now and then, I’d see a Christmas tree or some kind of decoration and it would be jarring to remember, oh, yeah, it’s December, isn’t it?)

This feeling is complicated by my belief that this year saw Thanksgiving sneak up unexpectedly when no-one was paying attention, although I know that’s really just how busy my November ended up being by accident; nonetheless, I feel like I got busy with stuff and then, bam, there it was somehow. To be fair, that’s been a lot of 2019 for me. Things seeming to happen when I’ve not been paying attention.

Anyway, we’re in the final couple of weeks of the year already, and this is when things get complicated. Work shifts gears as the daily grind adds Best Of lists and retrospectives and looks ahead; gift-buying and socializing get added to the everyday to-do lists, and the seasonal viewing and listening start to take hold. (Something I wanted to start earlier, but Brazil got in the way, gloriously.) None of this is bad stuff, and I’m not complaining. I’m just jetlagged still, somehow, and mentally scrambling to arrive in the actual moment.

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And If My Mind’s Somewhere Else, You Won’t Be Able To Tell

There are two certainties for me about a work trip, I’ve come to realize after this past year of travel. (I’ve been to Chicago, San Diego, New York and now, São Paulo, where I’m actually writing this; I’m back by the time you’re reading it. I’m the inevitably jetlagged one moaning in the corner.) The first is, I always end up packing more clothes than I actually need, no matter what. The second is, I always end up working more than I intended.

I was sure I’d licked the first problem on this trip; as I packed in an admittedly hurried state the night before I left, I literally counted out clothes, mentally matching them to the length of the trip. “I’ll be gone seven days,” I reasoned, “so I’ll need seven days’ worth of clothes.” And then I counted them into my case. What I didn’t realize until midway through this trip, though, is that that’s not actually true: I have two overnight trips, so I really only needed five days’ worth of clothes. I tried so hard, but not hard enough.

The second thing is more of my hope crashing against the harsh shores of reality, I suspect. I imagined this trip having more downtime, with evenings I could explore the city and lazy mornings as I prepared for the show. Not so much — I went three full days before I could take any kind of serious break, just because I had deadlines on top of deadlines. (Being a freelancer means that, just because you take a trip for one of your gigs, you still have to hit deadlines for the others, even if they usually take up half a day at a time.)

The same thing happened in New York, as well, to an extent. Before the trip, I had visions of being able to spend time with Chloe on long walks through the city in the fall, or spending time with the friends I only see at shows. Nope; instead, I ended up working 12-18 hour days on every single day of the trip.

On this trip, there’s been a saving grace: Each morning since the second day, I’ve been wandering through the streets on a dérive, something I’m sure I’ve written about here before. It’s walking around with no plan and no map, and allowing the surroundings to tell you what you need to know about where you are. (It’s something from Situationist theory that dug itself deep into my head when I was in my early twenties, and I’ve done it every chance I’ve gotten when I travel to new spaces; I went to art school, so sue me.)

The early morning walks, as short as they are, are my time. No deadlines, no nothing except me, music in my ears — on this trip, oddly, music from 20 years ago for some inexplicable reason: a lot of Ben Folds Five and Supergrass. I don’t know why — and the city. They’ve kept me sane on this trip, giving me something of my own during a period where the rest of the experience belongs to other people. I’ve even got my choice of what to wear during them, as it turns out.

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All Over The World Is How I Feel Right Now

Unexpectedly, I didn’t feel as if I’d really arrived in Brazil until the second day I was there. I’m unsure if it was jet lag or general exhaustion — I didn’t manage to sleep between Tuesday morning and Wednesday night, and spent almost every moment of that either traveling or working, which was as overwhelming as it sounds — but the end of the first day in São Paulo saw me essentially collapsing into sleep, too dizzy to be able to focus my eyes and minutes away from getting up to be sick after making the mistake of drinking water from the tap because I was so dehydrated. Everything felt surreal and skew wiff; I knew I wasn’t home, but it didn’t really feel like I was anywhere, if that makes sense.

The second day was much better. It wasn’t just that I had slept, although that helped considerably. I woke up and worked, because that’s the job, literally. But after I’d hit the deadline that was looming scarily in front of me, I did the thing I’d wanted to do since landing and hadn’t had the chance: I went on a dérive, wandering through the streets around the hotel with no plan or direction (Well, a mild plan to go get some breakfast, it’s true). Basically, I walked out the door to give in and let the city tell me what it was like.

The city is… I don’t know what to say. (I’m writing this while still here, so I don’t have the necessary perspective yet, that’s true.) The city is alive. And at once more green and more urban than I expected. It feels as if it’s been put together haphazardly, in the best way possible; the layout, the types of buildings, the uses for the buildings, all seem to have little rhyme or reason to it.

There’s a lot of traffic, and a lot of noise in general. There’s a street, a few blocks over, where it seems as if everyone walks their dogs. There are lots of tiny little storefronts within a few blocks, selling almost everything you could want, open onto streets filled with people and newsstands, God, I love the newsstands here, filled with newspapers and magazines and comics. It makes the city feel like a place obsessed with reading. How better to win my heart?

I’m writing this literally midway through the trip, and I feel grounded here now, but also… comfortable…? This despite not knowing Portuguese and basically reduced to communicating via hand gestures and goodwill. I needed a day to arrive properly, but now that I’m here, I feel like the world has opened up to me again. That alone makes the 18-hour travel worthwhile.

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The Morning Found Us Miles Away

As you read this, I’m in Brazil, as odd as that might seem.

I’m actually writing this a couple of weeks prior, and to give you an idea of how quickly and last-minute this came together, it’s literally only just been decided that I will, in fact, be going to Brazil and my travel and lodgings still aren’t anywhere near finalized as I type. A week ago, this was nothing more than a vague off-handed mention at the end of a workday.

As that might suggest, it’s a work trip. Of course it is; even I am not scattered enough to try and book myself a vacation — what would be my first vacation in years — at the very last moment, leaving the U.S. at the start of the holiday season that I love so much to spend some time in weather that’s expected to be 80-odd degrees and humid as hell. Instead, it’s a work trip to cover a comic book convention in Sao Paulo, which seems surreal and unlikely enough that it felt impossible to resist.

Nonetheless, I feel compelled to confess that I did almost resist it, and that I am feeling curiously cautious about international travel for the first time in… almost a decade, at this point…? That can’t be right, but it’s certainly about seven or eight years, I think. It’s definitely been far more than a decade since I was in a country that wasn’t the U.S. or the U.K.

The prospect is as nervewracking as it is exciting, which feels like a sign of age as much as anything else: I won’t be able to speak the language! How (where, when) do you exchange currency these days? What is it going to be like working during all of this?!?

By the time you read this, I’ll be working some of those details out (I hope) and will be enjoying the trip (I also hope). One way or another, expect more on this subject when it’s all over.

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Last Month Of The Year

It’s December again, a fact that feels particularly hard won this year. (It’s been a good year, just one filled with trials and effort on a number of fronts; thankfully, I’ve been able to face it with loved ones and friends, and that makes a big difference.) The final month of the year has always, for me, held some magical resonance. I buy into the Christmas thing a lot, if not entirely, and in my head, it starts as soon as December does.

Helping that considerably are advent calendars. I can’t not do advent calendars at this time of year; it’s been a tradition since I was a kid. I remember distinctly that they would be hung right beside the front door of the house I grew up in, with door-opening duties shared, round robin-style, by myself and my sisters. We’d open the doors on the calendar as we left for school when the month began, and as it got closer to Christmas and therefore more seasonal and exciting, I’d become more and more impatient and start opening the doors when I came downstairs every morning. (Only when it was my turn, of course.)

My favorite advent calendars, to this day, are the ones with chocolate inside. It’s that small bit of sweetness that appears at the wrong time of the day — I think we can all agree that chocolate is a second half of the day treat, right? — that thrilled me then and thrills me now, and makes any advent calendar seem that little bit more magical. (Now, with added snacks is a hard thing to disagree with, surely.) But, no matter what, I’m happy opening cardboard doors daily for a month to countdown to a day off and some goodwill and, yes, some presents, too.

Last year, the start of December saw me move, and start to try to settle into what is now somewhere I genuinely consider a home, instead of a house. We got here with truckloads of boxes and nowhere near enough furniture, and everything seem scattered and unsettled and unfinished for weeks. But there was an advent calendar, and despite everything else, doors were opened, as the countdown to the big day took place. It was a tradition unbroken since I was a child, and something that proved to be grounding and peaceful even when the rest of the world was unpacking and unsure.

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Maybe 40 Hours A Week Is Enough

Traditionally, I don’t like to take time away from work.

I mean, that’s not entirely accurate; it’s more that I don’t feel comfortable doing that for a number of reasons — really, just a big one called insecurity surrounding my sense of self-worth and a misguided belief that I can become more valuable as a person if I simply just work harder, but I go to therapy for a reason, thank you very much — but it’s certainly true that, historically, I don’t tend to take time off if I can help it. It makes me uncomfortable, antsy. I feel as if there’s something I should be doing instead.

(Mixed In with this is traditional freelancer panic, of course; the feeling that saying no to anything puts my livelihood at risk, which is an obvious no-no.)

My usual disinterest in time off is so usual that three different people have commented on it in the past week, in fact, each expressing something akin to sarcastic concern over how I’d deal with the four-day weekend that comes with the Thanksgiving holiday.

Reader, I craved it. Heading into that break, I felt this intense need, a hunger, for that time off. I almost resented everything that stood in its way, the deadlines and requirements and the everything that traditionally helped me keep working. Even after the holiday itself, I dissembled and found reasons to stop myself from doing work that, in theory, I felt as if I “should” be doing. From out of nowhere, I discovered and embraced the joy of relaxing.

I have feelings about why this should be the case, but I think the truth is simply that I’m at a point in my life where — say this quietly for fear of upsetting people, not least myself — I’m not hiding from my life by working anymore. Indeed, I might even enjoy not working, but instead just living.

It’s a new thing I’m trying, as surprising as it’s going to be to everyone around me. I hope you’ll all be patient with me during this obviously trying time.

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Can’t Somebody See, Yeah

While everyone (including myself; I’m writing this ahead of time) is on Thanksgiving break, here are another couple of weeks’ worth of graphics from the THR weekly newsletter. Remember when that Terminator movie came out, and no-one really noticed?

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We Don’t Need No Education

It’s strange, sometimes, thinking about the things I’ve learned while making a living as a writer. I have no formal training as a journalist — a fact I think is occasionally shockingly obvious — yet I have, somehow, managed to make it as a professional writer for more than a decade by this point. (And as an unprofessional one for years before that; some might claim that I’ve never fully stopped being unprofessional, of course.)

A lot of that is down to luck, as much as anything. I really do have a career that has owed a lot to being in the right place at the right time, and from making connections accidentally, because I thought I was just making friends and then they asked if I’d want to help them with something in exchange for money. The lack of forethought and planning in my career is genuinely impressive, and similarly embarrassing; if my career had a theme song, it’d be Big Star’s “Thank You, Friends” on a loop, with extra emphasis on that “Thank you again!” refrain at the end.

But there’s also been more than my fair share of learning on the job, both through direct and intentional teachings — at Time, I had an amazing editor who taught me all kinds of things, not least of which how to structure and rework thinkpieces so they weren’t just me going “Oh! And!” over and over again — and from picking up on context clues left out by accident in the middle of a conversation.

One of those was a conversation before taking a regular gig at a site, when I learned the definition of shortform web versus longform — of course, this was in itself six or seven years ago by now, and the goal posts have shifted more than a little in that time. But I remember having to mask my feeling of, oh, now I get it, I didn’t know that, thanks when the prospective editor told me that he wanted multiple shortform pieces from me daily, no longer than 400 words. “You tend to write around 600, and that’s just too long for people reading quickly,” he said, a fact that got filed away and sticks in my head when writing professionally even now.

Most of these posts here, by the way, are between 300 and 400 words. Anything longer, and it feels like I’m taking up more time than a random thought deserves.

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It’s Based On A Novel By A Man Named Lear

As genuinely unlikely as it seems to consider, I once almost had a career in television. This was decades ago now, around 1999, when I lived in Aberdeen still and was relatively active on what was becoming the internet that we know it today, an important part of this whole story.

I was on a message board, as it was called at the time, devoted to Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles — “Barbelith,” it was called eventually, although it was “The Nexus” when I signed up; it was the ‘90s — and although I wasn’t very vocal there, scared of seeming stupid beside a bunch of far smarter people sharing their wisdom, it was an important part of my window into the rest of the internet, guiding me to people and places I couldn’t have hoped to have found any other way.

Because of those people and places, and because it was so early in the internet of things that no-one else around me knew this stuff, I gained somewhat of a reputation for being “the internet person.” I was asked to give a talk at the art school I was teaching at, at the time, about the potential of this brave new world (I did, and it was horrible, me stumbling through things I only half knew about awkwardly), and I was asked if I’d consider being on a new TV show to talk about what was hip on this world wide web thing, too.

The invitation came circuitously, I remember that; a friend of a friend was tasked with putting the show together for the local TV station, and I got tapped basically because I was local and, as a novice, would be cheap. I remember being told I would be one of three hosts, and that one of the others would be — dramatic gasp — an American, something seen to be a plus that automatically gave the project a continental cache.

It didn’t go far beyond that, sadly. The project was mothballed for reasons I don’t remember, although I do recall how relieved I was not to have to be on camera when I found out. Every now and then, I wonder what it would’ve been like had the show made it to pilot, or even air. Would I still have left Scotland for the US? Would I have become a writer? Or would I be presenting shows at 3am on Grampian TV, desperate and grateful just to still have a job onscreen…?