Category: Uncategorized

One of the things that kept this past New York trip interesting was the fact that, try as I might, as exhausted as I may have been, I only managed to sleep past 5am once that entire week. (Surely, I reasoned, I should be sleeping in, in that 5am EST is just 2am PST, and yet.) In theory, I know that I should have spent that time reading something fun, watching shitty television, or some similarly mindless endeavor to keep myself from waking up too fully or testing my brain, and yet what I actually did every single time it happened was immediately get up to start working for the next hour before I went out and got myself some breakfast from the Starbucks around the corner from the hotel as soon as it opened.

Across the course of the week, I discovered the following things about this accidental routine:

1. 6am is an ideal time to go for a walk around New York, especially in October. The sun’s not up, the people are just starting to walk around for the day, and you get to see a lot of businesses set their shit up each morning. There’s a lot of hosing down the sidewalk and people singing loudly as they do so.
2. There are good “walking around New York at 6am” songs and there are bad “walking around New York at 6am” songs. I listened to a bunch of French hip-hop during those walks. (My hotel was just off 42nd Street, which is perpetually lit up by neon signs and an oddly wonderful thing to experience at that time of the morning when accompanied by French hip-hop; I recommend it to you all.)
3. Inexplicably, there were always people from my company up and around at that time of the morning. Every single morning. Even the morning when the show wasn’t happening and there was no last-minute prep to be done, I ran into someone outside who was waiting for a car to head off into the morning. Perhaps the most surreal example of this was running into the same person just before I got to my hotel room the night before, and then immediately as soon as I left the hotel the next morning; in both cases, she was on a journey between the hotel and the convention center.

As I’m writing this, I’m on the plane back from New York, unsurprisingly utterly exhausted, and also hoping against hope to get a full night’s sleep for the first time in eight days. Surely it has to happen eventually.

To say the New York trip was not what I expected would not be entirely correct, as I’m pretty sure that there was no point before I got on that plane where I thought it would be anything less than “a lot of work” and “very stressful.” That said, it was so much more work, and so much more stressful than I think I’d been imagining, to the point where I worked… maybe 16 hours every single damn day of the trip? Okay, wait, that’s not true; five of the days. I was traveling for the other two. For those days, I worked something closer to 4 through 6, depending.

(It really was a lot of work, for reasons that I’m not going to share publicly.)

The worst day was definitely Thursday, the first “full” day of New York Comic Con, purely for the fact that it was the day where every single techical difficulty hit us full in the face and we had to get ways around them by hook or by crook. How do you do a liveblog when you have no internet connection? Let me tell you, that was definitely a question I had to ask myself, which might give you an idea of how the day went.

Actually, no; here’s the ideal illustration of how the day really went: at one point, I realized that I didn’t know where my phone was. I could remember the last time I had it, and that was maybe half an hour earlier, and thinking about it, I realized two things: (1) my phone had fallen out of my pocket in a convention room holding a few hundred people, and (2) there was a very good chance I would never see my phone again. Which, you know, would not be great for any number of reasons.

Still, I went back to the panel room, thinking, the panel’s not been done for that long, it’s probably on the ground where I was, and I climbed around on my hands and knees only to find absolutely no phone. It was at this point where I realized how stressful that day really was, because upon realizing that I had really, actually, lost my phone, my first thought was, well, this is still only the third or fourth worst thing that’s happening right now.

For what it’s worth, it turned out someone in the room had already found the phone, so when I went to ask if the A/V team could keep an eye out in case anyone hands anything in, they simply handed me my phone and said, “this is probably yours.”

If only all the other problems of the weekend had such simple solutions.

As you read this, I’m in New York for New York Comic Con 2024. I’m actually writing this weeks earlier, knowing (a) at the time you read this, I will be so busy with the show itself that I couldn’t even consider writing a post here, and (b) that I’ve already been working on things for the show for so long that I don’t call it New York Comic Con (or even NYCC) anymore, but New York Comic Con 2024, because that’s the terminology I use at work.

New York Comic Con is a show that takes up a large percentage of my work year, because it’s the biggest show in North America, but also because it’s the biggest show Popverse does every year; it’s the one that takes the most planning and organization, and the one that comes with the most pressure to get it right. It’s also the one with the most moving parts, which also means it’s the one with the most potential for things to go wrong; to absolutely no-one’s surprise, I started having stress dreams about this show about a month before it started, simply because that’s the way my brain works.

Despite all of this, it’s something I look forward to each and every year because I get to go to New York. Even now, there’s something genuinely magical about the city to me — if anything, the magic has grown from the first time I visited (26 years ago now, shockingly; I really am old), filled with awe and entirely unsure how it happened. Now, I have decades of memories in the city that decorate the landscape, each as odd and oddly meaningful as another, even if they’re simply of walking back to a hotel with a particular song in my ear after a day’s work. It’s become a city full of memories and ghosts, which feels entirely right for New York.

So, think of me as I do the job and don’t sleep enough, and enjoy some great food and some terrible food, and some great terrible food. I might be busy, I might be stressed, but if nothing else, I am still in one of my favorite places in the world.

I had the thought occur, recently, when thinking about my 50th birthday — it just happened! I’m old now! — that, now that I’m past my first half-century, that I’m firmly in the second half of my life. That thought was then immediately followed by my brain going, well, it’s not really that likely that you’re going to live until 100 statistically, and then I got very, very depressed.

It’s not the realization that I’ve probably been in the “second half of my life” for at least a decade or so already, as much as that’s an oddly sobering thought. (I wonder, if I’d had that realization when I turned 40, if it would have changed anything about me? Would I have become a different person in some strange attempt to “live life to the fullest”? Perhaps we’ll see now that I’m here, now.) Instead, it’s the even more sobering realization that my parents didn’t live that far into their 60s, which means that if my life follows their trajectory, I’m actually inside the last 20 years or so of my life.

To be fair, neither of my parents were especially healthy, and my mother didn’t die of natural causes, anyway. (Complications from surgery, in case you’re wondering.) I would like to think that, as unhealthy as I may be, maybe, I am still healthier than either of them and try to make better choices, and so perhaps I’ll have a lifespan closer to my grandmother, who made it all the way to 80 before dying in another accident that leaves me suspicious of the bad luck of my family in later years.

But still; I suddenly am aware that, for whatever reason, my family traditionally hasn’t been especially long-lived, a fact that’s hovered around the back of my head for some years and now sits front and center with a new sense of urgency following this landmark birthday.

Maybe it really is time for me to start looking after my health more.

I was explaining to a friend the other week that, when the year started, I was all too aware that I’d be turning 50 soon. In January, it felt like something I was amazingly, unstoppably conscious of, as if there was a countdown in my head that I couldn’t stop listening to — a biological clock of some kind, if you will. This is the year, it told me, look at the number, this is the one where you hit that half-century mark, this is something you need to be conscious of at all points all year.

At some point, that entirely disappeared from my head. Life happened, and other things got in the way of me thinking about my birthday. (If you think about this year alone, I’ve been to multiple conventions, interviewed-for and got a promotion at work, and then had to adapt to that, in addition to everything else.) That is, really, how it’s supposed to be, I suspect; you take care of the everything that you have to as it’s happening and the larger anxiety about your birthday slips into the background. But here I am, just a week or so away from it happening now, and I’m wondering: should I have done more to celebrate, or even prepare for, turning 50?

There’s a practical answer to the preparation bit, at least; I almost certainly should have scheduled more doctors appointments, to make sure everything is in working order. (I am appallingly bad at that, in part because some subconscious part of me doesn’t want to know in case something is wrong. Ignorance is bliss, after all.) But otherwise, I find myself thinking about the self-conscious things I thought back in January about this being the year I learn a musical instrument, or publish zines, or whatever, to make a new mark on the world, and wondering when I was supposed to find time to do any of those things.

My 50th birthday will, I suspect, come and pass in a blur of deadlines and real world obligations, and then I’ll wonder what happened. (Well, I’ll probably wonder that after New York Comic Con, which is just a week or so later, and sure to take up all my brain in the meantime.) Somehow, that feels curiously fitting.

I can’t get this idea out of my head, so I’m putting it here as a form of exorcism.

For reasons that I honestly can’t explain beyond simple accidental masochism, I’ve been re-reading a bunch of Geoff Johns comics lately; you know this if you look at my lists of the comics I’ve been reading every month. One of the things I’ve noticed that he unfailingly does is concentrate on making the subtext text in almost everything he writes, but in a very specific format. It isn’t just that he’ll make sure that the subtext is made very, very clear to everyone reading the comic, but that he’ll almost certainly have a character say the subtext out loud in such a way that is, almost without fail, either a complaint or a wistful comment about a problem that doesn’t really exist.

I was re-reading The Flash: Rebirth the other week — a comic where the first issue is just filled with characters essentially looking out at the reader and saying, and this is my relationship with the Flash before he shows up and also looks out at the reader to say, and here is my dilemma that I will be addressing throughout this series, and this is how it connects to the readers’ own feelings about me as a fictional construct — and my brain went, ‘I wonder if someone who can do such a thing could create a Geoff Johns mad-libs where an entire comic could be constructed basically by filling in some well-paced gaps?’

This thought then immediately switched to, imagine if Geoff Johns was writing a reboot of The Flintstones and I could see the first page horrifically clearly without any further thought.

It would be essentially one big image of the town of Bedrock, with an all-too-detailed, quasi-realistic bird-like dinosaur squawking in the foreground, against a backdrop of cavemen moving things out of huts. The dinosaur, an update of the idea of dinosaur-as-radio or whatever, would be talking about how Bedrock has been hit by a wave of layoffs and everyone is being forced to move out of the city because of impending meteor warnings. Everything would be in muted, dull colors, and look very depressing.

A relatively small panel is inset into the bottom of the page, showing the tired, downset eyes of Fred Flintstone — again, far too realistic in terms of depiction — as he looks off-panel. A caption, relaying Fred’s innermost thoughts, is at the bottom right of the panel. It simply reads, “It’s hard being a modern stone-age family.”

I didn’t actually realize what was going on until it had been going on for awhile, unfortunately; I was talking to someone at work about the fact that all of us seemed to be operating under less than optimal circumstances lately and I wrote something like, “we all just seemed a little burned out,” at which point my brain went, oh, that’s it. You’re burned out. That’s what this is.

I had, to this point, been operating for a few weeks wondering why I was failing to have the same joie de vivre (which I have likely misspelled) that I normally had; I’d been feeling sluggish both in terms of feeling physically tired, but also emotionally under the weather, with everything feeling that little bit less exciting or even interesting than it usually did. I’d been ascribing a lot of this to the fact that, just weeks earlier, I’d had COVID and it takes time to get over that — something that is still true, it should be noted — but, nonetheless, had also been wondering why I’d failed to spring back as quickly as I had the first time I’d had the virus. Was this a stronger case? Was it just that I’m four years older?

The truth is, I realized when talking to my work colleague, I was burned out — a state that, in my mild defense, I’d practically trained myself out of recognizing back when I was a freelancer. It’s not that freelancers can’t get burned out — they do, and often — but that being burned out didn’t help when it came to meeting deadlines and paying bills. At some point relatively early in my freelance career, I convinced myself that because it didn’t “matter” on some practical level if I was burned out, then I simply wouldn’t accept that I could be burned out. There’s that entirely-healthy attitude I had back then.

Looking back on it with older, fresher eyes: of course I was burned out. I’d moved through three separate highly stressful work periods without a break, during which time I’d also attended San Diego Comic-Con and had COVID for a week. in addition to navigating whatever home life had been throwing at me at any given moment. (That list included the kid coming back from his summer away, and getting him ready for school, in addition to pet nonsense and other stuff.) How could anyone not be burned out, after all that?

The realization was something that allowed me to feel smug, for all of… a minute or so? After that, there was the inevitable follow-up question: how are you supposed to recover from being burned out when you have no less than two separate conventions to attend and report on for work in a two week period?

I have, it feels like, lost the ability to get a good night’s sleep.

This is a problem, of course, but it’s one I’m not entirely sure how I’m supposed to fix. I am doing the right things, in terms of going to bed at a reasonable time and trying to decompress my head by reading a little before turning out the light and settling in for the night. It’s not as if I even have trouble falling asleep, because even that I feel as if I’d be able to address in some form or another. Instead, I fall asleep almost immediately, and I don’t wake up until the next morning. It’s just that… I don’t feel particularly well-rested.

Again, the problem isn’t that I’m not getting enough sleep, although I could almost certainly go for more. I’m getting maybe… seven hours or so a night? Maybe closer to eight on some nights. That doesn’t feel like I’m running at a deficit, especially compared with my historical averages. (When I was a kid and entirely invincible, as kids are, I could manage on four or five and still feel fine the next day. Ah, those were the days…) It’s simply that I do not, for whatever reason, feel as if I’ve actually slept when I wake up in the morning.

The reasonable answer about what’s happening is probably connected with the amount of stress I’m feeling lately — the job is filled with things to utterly dominate my mind and refuse to let go, unfortunately, and that’s been the case since the beginning of June; that’s an entire quarter of a year, almost! — but, despite what G.I. Joe once told us, knowing isn’t half the battle. It doesn’t really do anything for the sense of exhaustion I’ve taken to permanently wearing around my shoulders, like the fur of a shittily-designed fantasy warrior.

Instead, I find myself yawning by the time it’s 5pm, and my eyes feel heavy around 8. I’m in trouble by the time fall will arrive, if this hasn’t sorted itself out; I’ll hide from the inevitable chill in the air and the darkness outside in the evenings, and fall asleep by accident in front of the television, lulled into unconsciousness by the drone of the latest episode of a reality show and unable to properly relax for the same sound quietly nagging in my ears.

It’s funny, looking back and realizing that the term “Doomscrolling” was only invented back in 2020. That’s not to say that 2020 wasn’t a particularly bleak year — the one-two punch of COVID and the election that year were pretty horrific, especially when you factor in all the political upheaval and upset surrounding both — but, when I think about the idea that things started to noticeably go wrong in the world, 2020 feels considerably too late to me.

Instead, I look back to 2016 for that, perhaps obviously. The US election of that year can be pinpointed as a particular level of Bad News; I have very specific, very clear memories of becoming all-too-obsessed with the news especially in the last month or two of that election, as it became increasingly clear that Trump had a very real chance of winning instead of being the joke candidate that people (including me) had initially written him off as being, and that certainly feels like some early form of Doomscrolling.

But it started even earlier than that; that summer saw the Brexit vote in the UK, and there was something there, in seeing the UK (really, England, but the results impacted the entire United Kingdom, so thanks for that) make the stupidest possible choice based on the worst, most xenophobic reasoning, and having a very real sense of, this feels like the start of something very bad.

That feeling of there’s something happening here echoes in my brain right now, with another US election in the offing and complete upheaval in the United Kingdom. Sure, I know that the Tories have been voted out of office (finally!) just a month or so ago, but now we’re faced with a rise of neo-Nazi protests and attacks, and again I find myself worried about what’s going to happen to the US over the next few months. “Doomscrolling” as a term feels too quaint for this feeling, I have to admit; “doom-foreshadowing” or something similar might be more appropriate.

So, funny story: it was COVID after all.

I had convinced myself that it wasn’t, because (a) the home tests said negative, (b) I didn’t feel that sick (or so I kept thinking to myself, as much trying to reassure my own brain as anything else), and (c) COVID would just be really bad, and I didn’t want really bad, in the grand scheme of things. And yet, after going to the doctor at the weekend, the test result came back and… there it was.

To be fair, “there it was” ignores the fact that I actually read the email notification three times, because I had managed to convince myself so well that I was convinced that I’d misread something and there was actually no way I was testing positive. “Oh, maybe it’s just saying that positive was an option,” I thought, as if that was actually something that would be listed under the all-caps heading “RESULT” just for fun. (“Did you know you could test positive for COVID? It’s true!” would be the helpful, jaunty, explanation.)

When it comes down to it, I think I knew the whole time. I hadn’t been sleeping well for a few nights by that point, and when I’d wake up in the middle of the night, my brain was freewheeling like during my last COVID-experience; during the day, my concentration was gone, and I felt perpetually dizzy, outside of all the other (many) physical symptoms, and almost everything felt like a chore that made me generally grumpy to have to deal with. I’d felt like all of this before, even if I’d rather have told myself that it was just con crud and everything would sort itself out the next day, if only I got some sleep.

Of course, by the time I eventually got the diagnosis, it was apparently too late for medication to help. (There’s apparently a deadline starting from the date of first feeling symptoms.) Instead, all I could do — all I’m still doing, as you read this — is relaxing as much as possible and hoping for the speediest recovery possible. Sometimes, it’s 2020 again after all.