Category: Uncategorized

Let’s talk, for a brief second, about nightmares.

Up until about a month ago, I would have said that I didn’t have nightmares, or perhaps that, if I was having nightmares, at least I couldn’t remember them. It had, at that point, been years since I’d woken up with that unease or tightness around the chest and clouded confusion, and I felt reasonably grateful that, for all that my brain can be a contradictory and messy place at times, at least I wasn’t letting my sleep be ruined by it. And then, I got the new job.

It is, in retrospect, very funny to me that I had nightmares about the new position in the space between accepting the offer and actually starting. There was a four day window — time off that I’d already been scheduled for (part of it a weekend) — between the two things happening, and I was already spending it exhausted and sick, which meant that it was the perfect time for my subconscious to really take pleasure in transmitting what is, looking back, the most specific and shitty nightmares about the new job possible.

Reader, I had nightmares about not filling in spreadsheets properly. Moreover, I had those nightmares for multiple nights in a row.

There’s so much more about my new position to worry about than spreadsheets — there’s so much in life to worry about than spreadsheets — but for some reason, that was the thing that my brain kept coming back to: that I wasn’t updating editorial schedules properly, or that I was inputting the wrong information and ruining things for other people accidentally. Everything was centered around me doing spreadsheets wrong in some way, and that making life difficult for other people.

Only I would have nightmares where it’s not about me being in trouble, but me making things difficult for other people. Now we really know that my subconscious is playing dirty.

Every year, there comes a point at some time in the middle of Spring when I start wishing that it was a little bit warmer, just a little bit, because then it’d be time to sleep with the windows open once again. Portland Springs are mercurial, tricky things that like to pretend to be heating up only to trip into three more weeks of freezing rain, but each and every single year, there’s a time when I think, maybe we’re there, maybe I can start opening the windows now with such eagerness and anticipation that it’s almost tangible.

It’s not simply that fresh air is a wonderful thing, and something that I suspect will make me sleep better in some magical, indefinable and probably not actually true manner, although that’s certainly true. (The reality is, admittedly, that at least the first few times when I open the windows and it’s too early, I sleep worse because at some point I wake up because I’m so cold.) It’s an optimistic belief that sleeping with open windows will leave me more connected to everything happening outside the house, all the birdsong and nature and all the life in general; this sincere hippy-ish thought that has only grown in stature across the past few years.

Here’s the thing, though: I believe this every single year because I forgot how fucking noisy it actually is outside my house. This past weekend was the first few nights the windows were fully open, and it was terrible.

Part of that is because I live on the same block as no less than two bars and a handful of restaurants, which means that the weekend is the time when there’s a lot of shitty music being played very loudly right outside my window. Another part comes from the fact that neighbors, reasonably enamored of the weather, decided to invite friends over for a late-night private party, which meant even more shitty music and loud conversation essentially directly underneath where I was trying to sleep. A third element was the traffic, which included a number of people seemingly trying to recreate Fast and the Furious along the street where I live.

That first night, I was woken repeatedly by a bass drop and resultant cheer, a revving car, screams of recognition for some newcomer to the party, or the like. I’d just be slowly, slowly falling asleep, and then noise. Back awake.

I fell asleep eventually, exhausted and grumpy, only to wake up too few hours later to the sound of birdsong — the very thing I’d been looking forward to for weeks. I groggily opened my eyes and registered what I was hearing as it slowly started to sound correct in my head. “Shut the fuck up,” I whined, pointlessly.

For the first time in a long time, I found myself woken up by a nightmare the other night. I’m not going to share what the nightmare was, because (a) I don’t fully remember everything, and (b) what I do remember was less of the “oh no, a giant monster is hunting me how cartoonishly terrifying” and more of the “that emotional fault line I have in my heart because of relationship trauma is still there and the dream decided to wrench it open again a little bit, just for fun.” Which is to say: not for public consumption, sorry. The reason I mention it isn’t to be a tease for emotional sadists, but to share what it felt like after I woke up.

When I was younger, I remember waking up from nightmares and just essentially shrugging internally, turning back over and falling back to sleep. “That was annoying,” I’d more or less think, and then immediately move on. Apparently, that’s a skill I’ve lost. Instead, I lay there in existential turmoil, replaying what little bits I could remember of the dream as the memory decayed and fell apart around me. Worse yet, I had that moment of uncertainty whether or not what I’d dreamed was actually a dream or a memory in the half-awake haze, and spent an worryingly long time (it felt like) going, but that didn’t really happen, did it? It couldn’t have, but maybe it did. Did that happen? and dealing with a kind-of pre-emptive follow-through of how I’d feel if it had, in fact, been real.

During all of this, I was very aware of the stillness of everything around me — the lack of any noise or movement even outside the window, as if the entire world was lying there beside me, around me, stuck in that same uncertainty about what was real and what wasn’t, and what would happen next regardless. I was unmoving on the bed, in fear of what I’d just felt and what I’d hopefully imagined-as-opposed-to-remembered, and everything else seemed just as frozen as I was.

I thought to myself, it was really just a dream, it didn’t happen and no-one said any of that and I thought to myself, I wish I could just turn over and go back to sleep, but I’m not even feeling tired anymore, my brain won’t stop and it’s still the middle of the night. And then, I closed my eyes for a second and it was hours later, full sun outside and I’d forgotten even more details about the thing that seemed so all-encompassing what felt like just a minute before.

If there’s a takeaway to be found in the weird batch of April movies, it’s that Shane Black does really good buddy comedies. (I put The Nice Guys on, on a whim, and immediately thought, “Oh, I need to rewatch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang next.” That was not the wrong idea.) Oh, and also, No Hard Feelings was far more enjoyable than I’d expected — everything from Immaculate onwards was watched during an 8-day stretch of work with no days off, and I needed things to distract me. Please note that they kind of got dumber as the time went on. (The Fern Brady stand-up special is really great, though; I’m a big fan of her’s, I admit.)

I cannot tell you why this happened, but it really looks like I read a bunch of comics in April. I’m not entirely sure how true that really is, because for some of the month, I was reading a lot of crossovers, instead of runs of one single title, but… well, take a look at the number for yourself, and know that I got over the 100 mark before the middle of the month arrived.

1. Avengers, Inc. #4
2. Marvel Super-Heroes: Secret Wars – Battleworld #2
3. X-Force (2019) #48
4. Immortal X-Men #18
5. Fall of the House of X #s 1-2
6. Timeless (2023) #1
7. Sensational She-Hulk (2023) #3
8. Justice League International (1989) #s 56-57
9. Action Comics (1938) #675-676
10. Superman: The Man of Steel (1991) #10-11
11. Superman (1987) #66-67
12. Adventures of Superman (1987) #489-490
13. Justice League America (1987) #s 52-54
14. Justice League Europe (1989) #29
15. Justice League America (1987) #s 55-56
16. Justice League Europe (1989) #30-32
17. Superman ‘78 #s 1-6
18. Superman ‘78: The Metal Curtain #s 1-6
19. Green Arrow (2023) #11
20. Justice League America (1987) #s 57-60
21. Justice League Europe (1989) #33-35
22. Justice League America Annual (1987) #9
23. Justice League America (1987) #s 61-77
24. Star Trek: Day of Blood #1
25. Star Trek (2022) #s 11-12
26. Star Trek: Defiant #s 6-7
27. Star Trek: Shaxs’ Best Day #1
28. Justice League America (1987) #s 78-83
29. Guy Gardner #15
30. Justice League America (1987) #s 84-85
31. Justice League America Annual (1987) #7
32. Justice League Quarterly #s 4-8
33. Justice League International (1989) #s 58-60
34. Justice League International (1989) #s 61-62
35. Star Trek: The Motion Picture – Echoes #s 2-4
36. Justice League America (1987) #s 86-88
37. Justice League America (1987) #89
38. Justice League Task Force #13
39. Justice League International (1989) #s 63-65
40. Total Justice #s 1-2
41. Justice League America (1987) #s 90-92
42. Justice League Task Force #14
43. Justice League International (1989) #s 66
44. Total Justice #3
45. Justice League America (1987) # 93
46. Justice League Task Force #16
47. Justice League International (1989) #s 68
48. Extreme Justice #s 0, 1-4
49. Marvel Feature (1971) #s 11-12
50. Marvel Two-in-One (1974) #1
51. Void Rivals #8
52. Supergirl (1996) #s 1-10
53. 2001: A Space Odyssey #s 2-7
54. Extreme Justice #s 5-15
55. Transformers (2023) #7
56. Extreme Justice #s 16-18
57. World’s Finest Comics #s 215-216
58. Rise of the Powers of X #s 1-2
59. Captain America (2023) #5
60. Fantastic Four (2022) #15
61. Uncanny X-Men (1963) #s 1-2
62. Justice League of America (1960) #144
63. Justice League (2018) #1
64. Uncanny X-Men (1963) #s 3-6
65. Superman: The Man of Steel #s 35-36
66. Hardware (1993) #s 17-18
67. Superboy (1993) #s 6-7
68. Icon (1993) #s 15-16
69. Steel (1994) #s 6-7
70. Blood Syndicate #s 16-17
71. Static #14
72. Superman: The Man of Steel #37
73. Superman (1987) #93
74. Action Comics (1938) #703
75. Adventures of Superman (1987) #516
76. Superman: The Man of Steel #0
77. Superman (1987) #0
78. Action Comics (1938) #0
79. Adventures of Superman (1987) #0
80. DC’s Spring Breakout #1
81. Superman: The Man of Steel #38-40
82. Superman (1987) #94-96
83. Action Comics (1938) #704-705
84. Adventures of Superman (1987) #517-519
85. Superboy (1993) #s 1-5
86. Zero Hour #s 4-3 (Series counts down)
87. Zero Hour #s 2-0
88. Superboy (1993) #s 0, 8-9
89. Superman (1987) #s 41-42
90. Adventures of Superman (1987) #s 464-465
91. Action Comics (1938) #s 651-652
92. Superman (1987) #s 49-50
93. Adventures of Superman (1987) #472
94. Action Comics (1938) #659
95. Superman: The Doomsday Wars #s 1-3
96. Green Lantern (1990) #s 48-50
97. Green Lantern (1990) #s 42-43
98. Green Lantern (1990) #s 1-3
99. Thanos (2023) #2
100. Doctor Strange (2023) #11
101. Guy Gardner: Warrior #s 18-21
102. The Flash 2024 Annual #1
103. Nightwing 2024 Annual #1
104. Superman: House of Brainiac Special #1
105. Harley Quinn 2024 Annual #1
106. The Penguin #9
107. The Flash (2023) #8
108. Green Lantern (1990) #s 4-8
109. Superman: The Man of Steel #s 41-44
110. Superman (1987) #s 97-100
111. Action Comics (1938) #s 706-709
112. Adventures of Superman (1987) #s 520-522
113. Adventures of Superman (1987) #s 523-525
114. Action Comics (1938) #s 710-711
115. Superman: The Man of Steel #s 45-46
116. Superman (1987) #s 101-102
117. Superboy (1993) #s 10-19
118. Steel (1994) #s 1-5, 8, 0
119. World’s Finest Comics #221
120. Superboy (1993) #s 20-24
121. 2000 AD Progs 2377-2379
122. Superboy (1993) #s 25-30
123. Aliens: Colonial Marines #s 1-2
124. New Year’s Evil: Gog #1
125. Superboy (1993) #s 49-56
126. Marvel Two-in-One (1974) #s 2-3
127. Daredevil (1964) #s 110-112
128. Superboy (1993) #s 57-65
129. Ultimate Spider-Man (2024) #s 1-2
130. Wolverine (2020) #41
131. Avengers (2023) #9
132. Superboy (1993) #s 66-69
133. Marvel Two-in-One (1974) #4
134. The Power of Shazam! (1994 OGN)
135. The Power of Shazam! (1995) #1
136. Superman: The Man of Tomorrow #1
137. Action Comics (1938) #712
138. Superman: The Man of Steel #s 47-49
139. Superman (1987) #s 103-105
140. Adventures of Superman (1987) #s 526-528
141. Superman: The Man of Tomorrow #2
142. Action Comics (1938) #s 713-715
143. The Nice House on the Lake #s 1-12
144. Superman: The Man of Steel #50
145. Superman (1987) #106
146. Adventures of Superman (1987) #529
147. Action Comics (1938) #716
148. Sensational She-Hulk (2023) #4
149. Thunderbolts (2023) #2
150. Superman: The Man of Steel #s 51-52
151. Superman (1987) #s 106-107
152. Adventures of Superman (1987) #s 529-530
153. Superman: The Man of Tomorrow #3
154. Action Comics (1938) #s 716
155. Batman (2016) #147
156. Birds of Prey (2023) #9
157. Avengers West Coast #s 63-65
158. Aliens: Colonial Marines #s 3-10
159. Aliens: Salvation
160. Avengers West Coast #s 66-69
161. Superman: The Man of Steel #s 53-55
162. Superman (1987) #s 108-111
163. Adventures of Superman (1987) #s 531-534
164. Superman: The Man of Tomorrow #4
165. Action Comics (1938) #s 717-721
166. The Spirit (1977 Kitchen Sink series) #30
167. Superboy (1993) #s 70-74
168. 2000 AD Prog 2380
169. Batman and the Outsiders (1983) #s 1-4
170. The Brave and The Bold (1955) #s 194, 200
171. Batman Special (1984) #1
172. Batman Family #1
173. X-Men (2021) #30
174. Daredevil (2023) #5
175. Batman and the Outsiders (1983) #s 5-10
176. Batman and the Outsiders Annual (1984) #1
177. Superboy (1993) #s 75-79
178. Avengers: Twilight #2
179. The Invincible Iron Man (2022) #14
180. Seven Soldiers: The Bulleteer #4
181. Superboy (1993) #s 83-84
182. Batman and Robin (2023) #9
183. Green Lantern (2023) #11
184. Superboy (1993) #s 85-89
185. Absolute Power Free Comic Book Day 2024 Edition #1
186. Superman: The Man of Steel #s 56-57
187. Superman (1987) #s 112-113
188. Adventures of Superman (1987) #535
189. Superman: The Man of Tomorrow #5
190. Action Comics (1938) #722
191. Shazam (2023) #11
192. Suicide Squad: Dream Team #3
193. Adventures of Superman (1987) #s 536-538
194. Action Comics (1938) #s 723-725
195. Superman: The Man of Steel #s 58-60
196. Superman (1987) #s 114-116
197. Superman: The Man of Tomorrow #6
198. Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong #6
199. Duke #5
200. Avengers West Coast #s 70-74
201. Adventures of Superman (1987) #s 539-540
202. Action Comics (1938) #s 726-727
203. Superman: The Man of Steel #s 61-62
204. Superman (1987) #s 117-118
205. Superman: The Wedding Album #1
206. Cobra Commander #4
207. Dick Tracy (2024) #1
208. G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #s 25-34
209. Adventures of Superman (1987) #541
210. Action Comics (1938) #728
211. Superman: The Man of Steel #63
212. Birds of Prey (1999) #s 56-59 (First Gail Simone issues)
213. Space Ghost (2024) #1
214. Secret Six (2006) #1
215. Superman (1987) #s 119-120
216. Adventures of Superman (1987) #542-543
217. Action Comics (1938) #730
218. Superman: The Man of Steel #64-65
219. Superman: The Man of Tomorrow #7
220. Excalibur (2004) #s 1-4
221. X-Force (2019) #48
222. Action Comics (1938) #1065
223. Superman (2023) #14
224. The Immortal Thor #6
225. Resurrection of Magneto #1
226. Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #27
227. Titans (2023) #11
228. Wonder Woman (2023) #9
229. The Mirage
230. The Maze Agency (2023) #1

When I work a comic convention, it puts me in a particular mindset that’s difficult to explain; the best (or, at least, easiest for other people to understand) way to describe it is that I hyperfocus on the work at the expense of nearly everything else: I go where the work demands, I work until it’s over, and that becomes my primary focus over, basically, everything else. It’s as if my brain goes, oh, this is a work trip? Okay, so we’re all about the work and that’s it.

From an employer point of view, that probably sounds like a dream, but on a practical level, it’s not ideal; without fail, my sleep cycle gets screwy because all of a sudden I’m sleeping odd hours without meaning to — waking up earlier than I’d like because my subconscious feels as if there’s something I should be alert for and working on — and my diet similarly goes to shit, because I put off meals until my body is yelling at me to eat, because I tell myself that I can eat after this next thing, and there’s always a next thing. My hyperfocus is so narrow that the necessities unfortunately drop off a little.

I’m sharing this because, this past weekend, I’ve been doing something new: working a convention from home. On the one hand, that’s not entirely new because I’ve reported on conventions I’ve not been at before in a more limited capacity, but this time, it was a more intense, more intentional effort: I was editing and acting as back-up writer for the team at Chicago’s C2E2 all weekend, and tasked with a bunch of things that made it very much a “working the con for real, just from somewhere else” experience… and I found that, despite being home, my body and head went into exactly the same routine, and suddenly I’m working 12 hour days and not eating enough and only sleeping 6 hours a night at most despite trying otherwise.

I’m sure this is a habit I have to break, somehow; it’s not good to feel as tired as this even while working from home for a three-day stretch, nor is it particularly good to decompress my brain by watching Anyone But You or No Hard Feelings while collapsed on a couch because, sure, glossy romantic comedies feel like a good idea right now over anything more intellectually stimulating. (Reading, curiously enough, goes by the wayside for anything other than work during cons; one day, I’ll work out why. That said, No Hard Feelings was actually great…?) Objectively, this is not a “good time,” and yet…

I don’t know, maybe this is Stockholm Syndrome talking (Con-home Syndrome, in this case, for those who love puns?), but there’s something oddly reassuring to me that the experience transferred like this. It reaffirms that it’s conventions that do this to me, not travel, per se; that it’s hyperfocus because of work, and not an unease about being unmoored away from traditional comforts.

As a workaholic, I feel that’s easier to deal with, more acceptable, than the idea that I lose all reality when I travel, considering almost all of my travel in recent years — by which I mean the last decade, shockingly — has been related to work in some way or another. Having such a “con” experience while home is, in its own sick way, a sign that if I ever manage to have a vacation again, it might not be such a meandering mess.

There’s something to be said about accentuating the positive, I think to myself as I also ponder how tired I am.

There was a point, a lifetime ago, when I realized that the me inside my head and the me in the real world looked very different. This is, literally, decades in the past — I was in art school at the time, and spending every second week drawing a comic strip in which I appeared as a character alongside my best friend of the time, and the two of us had managed to get our self-caricatures down to, if not a fine art, then at least a practiced one due to all the practice we’d had. (The drawing, after all, was merely there as a support to the writing, despite the fact we were both art students.)

But then… I changed the way I looked, not thinking about what that would mean for the strip.

When the strip started, I had a beard and, midway through its run, I shaved it off. (I feared I looked too old, too hippy-ish with it; this was the Britpop era, after all, and hippies were decidedly not in back then.) I remember thinking as I did so that I’d no longer have the scribble at the bottom of my cartoon face, but beyond that, not giving the strip any choice… until people started telling me that I didn’t look like myself anymore.

They were right; I’d not realized — because I didn’t look at my own reflection closely, I suppose — that the shape I believed my face was had been the outgrowth of my unkempt beard, and that the blockhead I’d been drawing didn’t actually match my naked chin, after all. The me I’d been drawing was… well, nothing like me at all.

Upon realizing this, I initially felt self-conscious about it: How could I not have noticed? and Did I not know what I actually looked like? What kind of artist am I? Looking back now, it feels like an important lesson in a need to keep checking in on myself that I entirely missed the point of, in the flush of youth. After all, why keep track of how you’re doing when there’s a new Blur single to fall in love with…?

So, I put together a resume for a thing recently. (By the time you read this, either it will have happened, or I’ll know that it’s not happening; either way, I’ll probably be okay with not calling it “a thing” anymore, but right now as I type this, it’s best to be vague so as to not jinx anything.) It’s always a strange, sobering experience putting together a resume, in large part because… well, they always feel like they tell an entirely different story than my lived experience.

That’s not an admission that I’m lying on a resume, I quickly want to point out. The discovery that my old university has no records of my MA degree because information from that period was lost due to an accident, and knowing that I have no copy of that degree after moving countries, made me almost take that off the resume because I was so self-conscious about the idea that I couldn’t back up a claim; that’s how awkward I am about the idea of making sure everything on my resume is factual and honest.

What I mean, though, is that resumes seem sequential and ordered in a way that life just isn’t, in my experience: the story it tells is that you did this thing, and that automatically led to the next, and then the next. You learned skills in such a way that feels intentional and purposeful in an attempt to get to some imaginary next level, or new position career-wise, whereas the reality is that things just happened and suddenly you’d picked up all these abilities because you needed to, just to do the thing in the first place.

Putting a resume together feels as if you’re looking at an alternate version of yourself: one that’s more purposeful and filled with intent. One who knows what they’re doing at all times, as opposed to the me typing these words, blundering from one situation to the next with good intentions. What would it be like to be them, I think to myself when I look at my own resume. What would it even be like to talk to them?

If there’s been a running theme in my life over the past few weeks — the past few months, perhaps — it’s that things have just kept happening, and time has sped past without me being fully aware of it. Just the other day, I made some reference to someone that I couldn’t believe that it was the start of April already, to which they gently reminded me that it was actually the middle of April.

Reader, I quietly shuddered.

Is this old age, or the sign of a busy life? The answer could be “both,” of course; certainly, I’ve had a particularly non-stop time of things recently, with the metronome of my life seemingly amped up to “Spider-Man levels,” where it seems to fluctuate between work drama and personal stuff at alarming speed, with something always happening in one of them to occupy my mind. (Not even necessarily bad things, or bad things for me, at least, but just things, and things that need to be acknowledged and addressed by me in some manner.) I fully understand the idea of “The Parker Luck” now, that there actually is balance in my life, it’s just that the balance is “something will always be happening that needs your attention in one part, while everything else backs off.”

The only time this gets to truly be an issue is when, like last week, it involves me getting overworked, specifically. Last week, I worked from 7:30am through 6pm (ish) for a couple of days in a row due to a confluence of events — it wasn’t intended to be that way, but things happened and it was the best course for everyone — and found myself feeling the effects of it for a couple of days afterwards; it wasn’t helped by the fact I was also worried for a friend’s health during this time, and all three added together to lead to a sleepless night between these two days, but I spent the next two days in recovery mode, feeling low-key sick and as if my brain was an overworked muscle.

This too might simply be the result of getting old, of course, but there’s something else that comes with age: recognizing your limits far more easily. On that second night after, I climbed into bed at 9pm and was asleep almost immediately, crashing out for a full nine hours. I can’t control the speed of events around me, but I can at least know when to call it quits for the night and hide under the cover for a bit. That feels like something approaching progress.

But seriously: how is it the middle of the month already?

At some point in what I have taken to relatively unselfconsciously taken to calling my “career”, I became someone who obsessively takes notes, especially during the (increasing) number of meetings and calls that I end up taking on a fairly regular basis. It’s become second nature: if I am on a call of some kind, I’ll end up scribbling away, longhand, in a spiral-bound notebook, as if I was back in school and making sure I had all the important details from a lecture, or whatever.

I’m not entirely sure when this started happening, but it’s fairly clear why, at least: so’s that I could keep track of any and all necessary developments that I’d need to either remember later, whether it’s because I need to do something about them or because I might need to remind someone else to do something about them. (In some cases, it’s simply paranoia about whether or not I might need to know things later; the number of times, especially in my first few months at ReedPop, where I realized I could remember being told a piece of information but couldn’t remember the information itself was… not zero, shall we say.)

There’s only one problem with this new habit: my notes are, very often, indecipherable, even to me.

I don’t mean that in the sense of, “I can’t read them,” because a lifetime of reading comics means that my notes are almost always in ALL CAPS and perfectly legible. What I mean is that, for whatever reason, the words I choose to write in the moment might not have any particular meaning to me even days after I wrote them.

Take, for example, the notes I made from a recent editorial meeting for Popverse:

• STARTING TO WRITE 3RD BOOK
• ESSENTIALLY FLAT MOM
• NEWS IMPORTANT INCREASINGLY
• BREAKOUT
• LIVESTREAMING 1 WEEK???
• DONE AT 7:20

I have no doubt that each of these things meant something at the time. Now, though, I have no idea who is starting to write a third book, or a third book of what. I can make a guess what was “essentially flat” month-on-month, but I might be wrong, and I’m assuming MOM is “month-on-month” and not, you know, mom. (But whose mother is essentially flat?!?) What is the breakout? What is livestreaming in a week — and is that what that note means, or is it something livestreaming for a week? What was done at 7:20? Everything is lost in a haze of bad memory, with these notes just serving to confuse the matter.

Maybe I should just accept that some things are meant to be a mystery, for now and forever.