March 23
Sunday was lost to doing taxes, or at least that’s what it felt like — we started doing them after breakfast, and aside from a break for lunch, finished them around 6:30 in the evening. It’s not that our taxes are extremely complicated, but with two freelancers and everything else that’s involved in our lives every year, it all takes awhile to get everything down properly. It’s the same every year; we think that we’re prepared, but before too long, we’re both looking at our screens and at our paperwork with a sense of what is actually going on? and wondering whether there’s some easier way to do everything that we’d somehow missed (Spoilers: There’s not.)
By the time the evening rolled around, there really was a sense of the day having gone missing, somehow. Twilight was coming! Where did the day go? Why do I have this stress headache? Where has all our money gone? Truly, tax day is the best day of the year, he lied.
March 22
Unlike weekdays, when I wake up and immediately work, my weekend mornings are far more relaxed; I check the Internet, read some and slowly come to terms with the notion that there’s a day ahead. It’s a special time that I’ve come to appreciate deeply, something that’s just mine, in a way that just doesn’t happen during the rest of the week. That’s either a sign that I should carve out more time for myself during the week, or sleep in later on weekends.
Here is the thing about it all, the thing that makes me squirm with shame: I don’t want to say his name; I’m not going to. Not out of fear of him. No, he’s not who makes my throat close up, my muscles clench till they cramp, my breath come up short. He just reminds me of him, the reason for so much of my silence.
Here is the other thing about it, the one that should make you worry: no one but me and my close friends told him to stop. Not when he was harassing me, not when he was harassing countless other women. He was just “talking” with some probably fake comics fans on the internet.
Banging The Pre-Order Drum Again
Quick bang of the drum for PRE-ORDERING YOUR COMICS. I’m going to get specific on the Big Two here, but it applies across the board.
If you shop through a physical retailer – i.e., if you don’t buy your comics through a digital service and read them through your tablet or whatever without interacting with a human vendor at all – it’s PRETTY VITAL that you let your retailer know what you’re buying early, so they’ve got a chance to take that into account when they make their orders.
With Secret Wars and Convergence coming up, and things getting a little crazy, retailers are going to have a harder time predicting what people are going to want – your information could really help them. So if you see the hype or solicits for something and think, “yeah, I quite fancy that, when it rolls around I’ll get it” – don’t wait! If it’s going to be a definite sale for someone, let that someone know early, so they can order a copy they know will sell. Don’t expect a copy to magically be there for you, because if a retailer’s underestimated the demand, it might not be. And then nobody’s happy.
So PRE-ORDER!
March 21
For all that we decided that no-one would ever need math after school, we never foresaw the new world of website logins which ask simple math questions to check that you’re not, say, some kind of spamming, hacking bot looking to cause trouble. Just to log in here each day, I find myself humiliated by the fact that I inevitably have to second-guess myself when faced with something as easy as 8×4=? or, worse, 7x?=42.
It’s not that I don’t know the answers, or get them wrong; it’s that I don’t get them right immediately, without any thought. Clearly, I should have paid more attention at school.
March 20
An overwhelming day, where everything took too long, and everything felt like it was hidden behind at least one roadblock of one kind of another. I look back at this week with this dazed sense of “What happened?” It’s as if huge chunks of time are missing, and yet here we are, at the end of the week and exhausted. How did this week even happen?