Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
I am, famously, terrible at taking compliments.
I used to believe this was part of my societal make-up purely from coming from Scotland, a country where it’s far more accepted — and arguably more fun — to take the piss out of yourself as a defense mechanism than to boast of your accomplishments… or, really, acknowledge them in any real manner, outside of a noncommittal shrug and attempt to quickly change the subject. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that’s a significant factor in the who I ended up being today, because how could it not…? However. However.
I’ve had conversations with other people from Scotland, and elsewhere in the UK, about our inability to take compliments, and how we navigate it; I’ve also had conversations with a number of Americans about the same subject, and the ways in which the British method — essentially, just deny everything and pretend that whoever said the complimentary thing is objectively wrong — might actually be rude when you really think about it. And through all of this, I kept thinking one thing: there are some compliments I’m actually okay with.
Specifically, they’re compliments about things that come second nature to me; things that I don’t even think of as being worth noting, never mind complimenting. I am, for whatever reason, good at liveblogging or livetweeting events; I’ve been complimented on that many times, most recently at Emerald City Comic-Con earlier this month, and when that happens, I find myself surprisingly able to say thank you, and move on. No dissembling or argument; I just acknowledge it and say thank you.
What’s the difference? I’m unsure. Is it that if I don’t try, I don’t feel self-conscious if something notices me? Perhaps, but that just makes me embarrassed to consider. Maybe that’s more of the Scottishness that I hadn’t thought about coming out.
As you read this, I’m likely hurtling through the air. Actually, maybe not; time zones are hard. I think I might actually have landed in the UK by the time you’re reading this…? Well, I definitely will if you’re reading it an hour or so after it’s published. Go with me here — this is far from an exact science.
(I say that, but the passage of time and time zones are, strictly speaking, a pretty exact science. So it goes.)
My point being: I’m in the UK for the next week and a half for work — well, the first half of the trip is all for work, and it’s also the entire reason there’s a trip to the UK at all. I’m covering Star Wars Celebration, a four-day event in London that’ll be filled to the brim with all things Star Wars; I did the same show in Chicago four years ago for THR, and it feels especially weird to be back doing it again for Popverse in an entirely different country. The more things change, I guess…?
The second half of the trip is seeing family — and introducing Chloe to my family in person for the first time, as well as introducing Chloe to Scotland for the first time, too. It’s my first time back there in over a decade, and it’s far too fast for my liking; we basically leave two days after arriving, and so won’t get to see… well, anyone outside of my family, most likely. (Sorry, anyone reading this who hoped to see us.)
I’m excited to go to the UK again, and pre-emptively exhausted by the travel and the work and the constant movement while we’re there. It feels suitable to feel conflicted about going home again. Ask me how I feel about the whole thing when I’m back, though.
The dog has been particularly reactive to the outside world, lately. He’s an anxious dog at the best of times, but in the Spring and Summer, that gets almost incomparably worse because there’s so much activity outside and almost every noise he hears makes him panic. The worst noise of all, it turns out, is the sound of ladders being set up or taken down; whenever that happens anywhere near the house — by which I mean, honestly, anywhere within a one block radius, because dogs have really good hearing — he goes into full-on, running-around-the-house freak-out mode. He runs throughout all the rooms, barking and sounding the alarm: there are ladders close by. We should watch out and be prepared for invasion.
I mention all of this not to make fun of the dog, although there’s no small amount of humor to the whole thing; instead, I bring it up because there’s an unexpected side-effect of dealing with all of this, which is: now I have found myself surprisingly reactive to sounds around the house.
That’s not to say that I’m also running around the house sounding alerts at the smallest provocation (nor that I’d even be tempted to do such a thing; it sounds like far too much work, for one thing), but I can’t deny that my ears perk up when I recognize particular sounds outside the house — especially ladders, it’s true — and I find myself tensing, waiting for the dog to run through and bark in alarm. I feel as if my hearing has ended up being supercharged by the whole thing, much to my amusement, making me wonder both what other sense is going to start failing to balance our this newly enhanced hearing, and also whether this background awareness of everything around me is what it feels like to be Daredevil from Marvel comics.
It’s a cliche to say that people become like their dogs the longer they’re together, I know; I just didn’t think it would happen like this.
I’m not entirely sure how to describe what I spent the last week or so doing, outside of the usual everyday “work and eating and cleaning just to get through the day” existence. The phrase “Taking care of business” is both apt and descriptive, but also sounds like the kind of euphemism preferred by shitty trailers for shitty movies from the 1980s to refer to some romantic and/or sexual congress that will ultimately fail to happen for reasons that are, apparently, hilarious and touching.
And yet, I have been taking care of business: I’ve had to book flights and hotels for the upcoming UK trip — which included actually sitting down and working out where and when said flights and hotels need to be, and how expensive that would be without breaking the bank (spoilers, I failed that last part; international travel is not cheap, friends.) — as well as work out just what the fuck I was going to do about taxes this year after the surprise retirement of my accountant after something like a decade of faithful service. That’s not including various behind-the-scenes elements of my job that also include reimbursements and travel plans and the like. I’ve been planning the important plans; I really, genuinely have been taking care of something that could easily and deservedly be called “the business.”
It’s been exhausting.
Here’s the thing; I am very bad at doing these things. Or, more correctly, I’m very good at doing them but none of it comes naturally. I don’t have the important mix of macro and micro focuses such things need to work properly, at least in the measures necessary to do it right; I get hung up on the strangest details and have to unplug my head after awhile because I start thinking like a journalist — “why is this the case, let me follow this thread” — instead of, you know, just completing the task. As a result, everything takes a little bit longer to finish than it probably should, but there’s an upside: everything else I accomplish while distracting myself from the task at hand.
(That sounds like a joke, but it’s not; in avoiding finishing taxes, I managed to clean a bathroom and the kitchen, sweep the stairs and the entire first floor, and take out the trash and the recycling. Would that I could be so productive on other occasions.
I tell you all of this because, as I type this, I have finished everything that’s been hanging over me for… the past couple of months or so…? I can’t quite believe it’s true, but I take comfort in one horrifying fact: there’s going to be more to deal with almost as soon as I finish this sentence. That’s how it works, these days.
I’m still thinking about The Last Black Man in San Francisco a few weeks after watching it for the first time. (Yes, it took me a long time; I’d repeatedly think about it, and then think to myself, maybe it’s going to be too heavy and depressing, I’m going to watch something lighter and save that for when I’m in the mood, and then talk myself out of it using that logic even in the times when I was in the mood. So it goes.)
What I keep thinking about isn’t the sense of… removed nostalgia, if that’s even a thing, that it evoked in me. I would recognize general locations or even specific doorways throughout the entire thing with a sense of, “I know where that is!” that was immediately followed by the feeling that I had been a different me when I was in the city, at a very different time in my life. It was as if I was experiencing someone else’s nostalgia and recollection entirely, at times.
Instead, what’s staying with me is the feeling of the movie; a sense that I found myself reading as a mixture of wistfulness, frustration, and lack of direction — perhaps a better way to put it is, a sense of anticipation for something to happen. Throughout the whole movie, the two central characters, Jimmy and Mont, are simmering with tension and an impatience that I fully recognized and felt in my bones at roughly the same age as the characters themselves: an ache that there was something important and meaningful just out of their reach that they couldn’t quite understand or explain in any real detail.
Perhaps the wistfulness I detected in the movie isn’t really there, and instead came from me watching from the point of view I have today: for all that those feelings hurt and burned at the time, I find myself looking back envious at the energy it offered, and the hunger for experience and possibility that came from those days.
The movie was beautiful, and meaningful in ways that I can’t verbalize just yet. Instead, I keep thinking about it, and wanting to unfold it further in my mind.
I am used to the idea of “con crash” — that period after a convention where, basically, your body decides that it’s time to stop and maybe have a little enforced rest for awhile; that’s almost certainly the case after the first convention of the year, when your body is in something approaching shock at having just gone through it all for the first time in awhile, or after a particularly heavy or busy convention. It’s not a bad thing, per se; it’s just this blip in health as if a breaker has been triggered and your body needs you to sit down for a bit.
Friends, whatever happened last week was con crash times a million. I’m not entirely sure what happened — I tested negative for COVID, although others I was around during Emerald City Comic Con weren’t so lucky — but I was basically knocked out for a week or so, as my body decided that it was time to just stop. I had the fever, I had the headache, I had the dizziness and the stuffiness of both the nose and the throat. I had it all, and I wasn’t the only one: not only were other people in this here house sick too (Because of me? I genuinely have no idea, in part because it didn’t feel as if I even had enough time to infect anyone before they got sick too), but so were other people in my work.
I’m still not 100% healthy, even as I write this. (On the same day that you’ll read it, unusually! Who says this isn’t the Mighty Marvel Age of breaking-into-prescheduled-posts-to-update-you-all-on-my-health-or-lack-thereof?) But I’m feeling slightly less insane, slightly less out of sorts and removed from reality after seven days of… well, just an entirely lost week, really. I feel as if I’m stumbling back into the harsh light of The Discourse, uncertain what’s been going on and tensing up to deal with whatever’s just around the corner.
Somehow, comic convention season is upon us again; as you’re reading this, I’m in Seattle for this year’s Emerald City Comic Con, which I’m working as part of the Popverse crew for the second year running. (I say year, but the last one was just August last year; it feels simultaneously far closer and further away than 12 months ago.)
It’s the start of at least four shows for this year: I’m doing ECCC, Star Wars Celebration, San Diego Comic-Con, and New York Comic Con as things currently stand, and there’s potentially more where that came from, depending on how things work out and what the Popverse editors have in mind for me. I’m at once excited and anxious about the prospects of a new con season, which feels like the most appropriate response: happy to see old friends and familiar faces that otherwise I wouldn’t get to see, and worried about the travel and potential for everything to go wrong that always comes with this kind of thing on every single trip. At least I’m starting with one that I can get to by train, so airports aren’t in my immediate future… he writes, a month before a transatlantic flight beckons.
For this show, I’m keeping myself busy: in addition to reporting, writing, and all of the traditional journalism business, I’m also moderating a couple of panels on the Friday afternoon (and one on Saturday, too) and also ideally attending a couple of things that are convention-adjacent that haven’t been around before. If there’s a theme to my work in 2023, it’s a quiet attempt to get better at what I do, and try some things that I don’t normally do, as well. (See also: appearing on video, which others really want me to do more of despite my natural unease.)
I’m writing this ahead of time, before I’m even in Seattle, so we’ll see how it all goes on the day(s), but: it’s a trip, no pun intended, to be back on the circuit again so quickly after it last happened. I already find myself wondering if it’s going to be as good as I hope.
And here we are, in a new month, which means it’s time for me to share another list of comics that I read last month. In terms of reading, it was perhaps more indicative of what my comic reading usually is, in that there’s a bunch in here I was reading or re-reading for work. (The Spider-Man and Kang-related comics, especially.) That I have a job that requires me to read comics remains a mystery and a joy, I have to admit.
Unlike last month, where I published the list before the end of the month, this is the up-to-the-minute, complete February list. This is it, unfortunately.
I’ve started waking up close to 6am every day — just before, maybe ten or fifteen minutes or so — with a dull sense of consciousness nagging at me, preventing me from falling back asleep. There’s no other way to describe it; it’s a different flavor of waking up than mid-night awakening, when it’s easy to slip back under the metaphorical blanket of sleep without a care even after getting up to piss or whatever. At 6 or thereabouts, something in the back of my head whispers, you don’t really want to sleep again. I know you think you do, but I know better and you, my friend, are wrong.
And so, I lie there as the rest of my mind washes up on shore, systems slowly booting up for the rest of the day. I’d like to say that I’m being thoughtful and mindful during this entire time, but that’s not really the case; usually, my conscious mind is in a daze, still, stuttering and fluttering around trying to get started while I look out the window at the marvelous, terrifying silhouette of the overgrown tree directly outside against whatever kind of sky is happening that particular morning. I’m not thinking thinking, not yet; that happens later.
As all of this happens (slowly, it feeds like, although my perspective might be off in that regard), the rest of my body starts to check in: my belly, my bladder, my shoulders, the whole aching, aging shebang. I can tell how hard I slept from whether or not my ear hurts from pushing my head into the pillow all night when I was out, or if I was twisted around to the point where my back hurts. As I’m lying there, wondering what makes this my silent wake up call time each day, my body chimes in as if to say, hey, sleep wasn’t necessarily all it was cracked up to be either.
Sometimes, I stop to think about how easily I used to wake up, how instantaneously it appeared to happen. Othertimes, I marvel at the fact that we make it through the process every single day.
