Category: Uncategorized

When I say that I haven’t really used Facebook in a long time, it’s worth putting that into context: the last update I made there prior to last week was noting my divorce had been finalized back in early 2019; my profile picture and cover photo hadn’t been updated since 2015. It was that last fact that brought me to the platform last week, along with the fact that I had time for such things thanks to my holiday break from work.

It was actually a passing comment from Chloe that put the idea in my head weeks earlier, with the two of us comparing how rarely we used the platform; we’d been discussing how best to reach comic creators we didn’t know for work, and I mentioned that my Popverse editor had suggested social media introductions as first moves. Try Facebook for some of the older creators maybe, I suggested. Facebook? You haven’t used that in years, she said, you still have a Grumpy Cat picture as your cover photo.

It was true, I did; a graphic in support of the Marriage Equality Act, which had become law some seven years prior. Maybe it was time for a change after all, I reasoned.

That said, I didn’t do anything about it until I had to take a selfie for my passport application weeks later. Something about the unsmiling, purposefully flat expression — you’re not allowed to smile in passport photos, in case you didn’t know — amused me, so I made it sepia toned quickly and threw it up as my first update to Facebook in years, letting the platform see my beard for the first time. It started getting liked immediately, to my mild horror, with someone comparing it to a “Stalin look.” Suddenly, I remembered why I hadn’t posted anything there in years, and regretted the slight return, as understated as it actually was.

Now that it’s almost over, it feels fair to say that 2022 has been a strange, and at times nearly overwhelmingly difficult, year. It’s different in that from last year, which felt shockingly, breathtakingly oppressive in its determination to remove things — jobs and income, in particular — and see how I’d fare; this year has seen a lot of good mixed in with the bad, adding up to a dizzying, confusing experience where I’ve found myself uncertain about how I was feeling in any given moment, and whether I was unhappy, or simply overworked and exhausted and just ungrateful for things I should really appreciate given my experience in 2021.

There’s been much I purposefully haven’t written about here, for an army of reasons: it’s felt too personal to share, or too fresh to re-examine, or not-just-my-story-to-share. Almost all of that has been, if not negative, then at least Not Really Good, and the kind of thing that leaves me contemplative and a little unsteady. There was one week at the start of the summer in particular that feels fictional to recount, now, filled with things piling on top of each other that simply shouldn’t occur next to each other, yet did. 2022 has felt, at times, like a lesson in extremes and how much we can bear at any given time.

As I look ahead to the next twelve months, I find myself unable to imagine what lies in wait in a way that feels different than usual. My tradition at this time of year, even in the shittiest years, has been to imagine the last year as something I was leaving behind and starting fresh with something new. 2022 refuses to go out the way, I feel. There’s a sense inside me that the flux and uncertainty about the world is going to continue into 2023, as if the story of the year isn’t finished with me yet. When midnight rolls around on December 31, it feels as if the message is less Happy New Year and more To Be Continued…

Well,the holidays weren’t what we expected.

To be fair, as you’re reading this, we’re still in the middle of the holidays — it’s Boxing Day, although the rest of the world doesn’t really follow that British tradition, in my experience — and I’m writing this even earlier, on December 23rd. (Secrets behind the blog!) But, already I can tell: this is very much not going to be the Christmas we were hoping for.

This became obvious yesterday, as I write, when we found out that Chloe’s grandparents, who were going to be visiting for the week, were stranded in Chicago after flights were grounded because of weather. That was the start of the day, literally a message Chloe got as soon as she woke up, and before too long it was followed by the news that they wouldn’t be able to get here at all for Christmas, with the airline refusing to rebook flights until after the holiday. In fact, they were almost stranded in Chicago for a few days, with no chance to return home until the very end of the day (9pm their time; they’d been there something like 13 or 14 hours by that point) and every piece of news unclear or quickly contradicted to that point.

As our plans imploded due to weather in Chicago — really, what were we going to do, now that all the, “we can do this with Grammy and Grandad” ideas were suddenly out the window? — the weather in Portland decided that there was no point going above freezing at all, which is a problem in a house with heating and insulation as bad as this one. Blankets, layers, and hot water bottles became a must as it quickly became clear that going outside to do groceries might be a significant undertaking, while last-minute gift shopping could be a luxury we couldn’t afford.

It’s been, as I’ve said before, an odd year and an odd December to date. Perhaps a strange, weird Christmas is what comes of all of this. Tis the season.

Yeah, I’ve been more quiet than I’d have liked over the last month again, and at a time of the year when I’m usually much more vocal about the joys of the season. In my slight defense, a significant reason for that has been my undertaking a daily Advent Calendar series for Popverse that ate up a really sizable portion of my time for the first two or so weeks of the month, so… maybe I’ve actually been as verbose as usual, just elsewhere…?

That said, I’ve struggled to be as festive as I’d want to be this year for all manner of reasons, both real and imaginary. The month has sped past far quicker than I would’ve wanted, and I feel as if I haven’t really had the time to indulge in the usual festivities (pun maybe intended): I’ve barely listened to Christmas music, and I feel like I came to the traditional playlist of holiday movies a week or so later than usual. I didn’t even manage to get Christmas Cards printed to send out in time, despite drawing the card for the first time in years before the end of November. What was I doing with all that time? (Working, for much of it, is an answer.)

In a way, this feels entirely appropriate for the 2022 holiday season. It’s been an odd year, that has at times felt overwhelming with things happening and at others, as if time itself was getting distorted by outside events and expectations from external forces. This past month has felt like all of that on a loop, for reasons I couldn’t fully comprehend, but the upshot of that is that I’ve been ignoring this site, again, in order to focus on the important things like “my loved ones” and “staying employed.”

It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say, I promise; and, as I head into some time off — my first Christmas vacation time that isn’t just “not getting paid and I’m a freelancer oh no” in more than a decade! — I’m going to try to find some time to say it. For real, this time.

If there’s a surprise gift that keeps giving when it comes to being a full-time staff writer for a website after ~13 years of being a freelancer, it’s that I have paid holidays and paid time-off for the first time in a long time. I am, I confess, unsure quite what to do with this new and wonderful experience.

It’s not as if I didn’t know this was part of the whole deal; I mean, I was paying attention to the job offer, and can read, I promise. It’s simply that my brain sped past that when weighing up the pros and cons of taking the gig, in favor of things like “a guaranteed wage every month that is unlikely to fluctuate wildly through no fault of my own” and “health benefits, no really, health benefits, can you imagine?” All of this was happening at the beginning of the summer, far enough away from everything bar July 4 (and even then, it was going to take effect after then), so holidays and what they’d mean for me just wasn’t something even vaguely on my radar.

Now, of course, things are different: not only am I about to get to take Thanksgiving off without being thankful for losing the money that I could be making otherwise for the first time in… well, 13 years, I guess, but I’m also facing down the start of the holiday season knowing that I get to take basically half of the month off at the end because Chloe’s family are in town and, again, I don’t have to worry about losing money as a result. On the one hand, I feel somewhat shocked at this turn of events; on the other, I feel as if I’ve accidentally slipped into a far more cultured, kind world that doesn’t punish me for wanting a life outside of “content creation.”

That said, the problem with full time jobs is that they find whole other ways to punish you, but that’s neither here nor there right now…

I disappeared from here before New York Comic Con — and truth be told, the convention exhaustion is no small reason why I got so overwhelmed and stopped posting here — which meant that I didn’t share my dual excitement and terror about returning to the city that never fucking sleeps please God just shut up already for the first time in three years. It was something I was both breathlessly excited about, and endlessly nervous about, at the same time.

I love New York. It’s not just a trademarked t-shirt slogan, but the actual truth; I have such happy memories in that city, and there’s an energy and feel to it that genuinely can’t be matched by anywhere else in the world that I’ve visited. (London comes close, maybe, but that’s something else in its own right, another city locked in memory from another part of my life altogether.) New York is one of those rare places that I can close my eyes and picture myself in almost immediately, entirely — the architecture, the busyness, the crush and the noise.

But, again: the crush and the noise. The busyness. It had been three years since I was last there, and they were Pandemic Years, quieter and more withdrawn than most. The prospect of being in New York in COVID times was a scary one, just from the idea of all those crowds, never mind the mental math of surely I’ll get sick this time — math that’s just permanent in my head now — and everything else. As exciting as it was to imagine returning to the city, I was genuinely worried that it wouldn’t end well.

Looking back now, I feel as if my nervousness was misplaced, at least to the degree that the city didn’t feel any more or less dangerous than any of the other cities I’ve visited this year; while there was certainly some worry about COVID during the trip, that arguably had more to do with individual choices rather than an entire city, per se. I’m glad I got back there, even if I wish it had been a different trip for other reasons.

I’ve been feeling self-conscious over my disappearance from here again, lately. I managed to keep up a relatively regular, three-times-a-week schedule for years, and then… I just didn’t. And I’ve been feeling anxious about it, to no small degree; anxious enough to stop myself from returning, if nothing else. I’m a professional writer, after all — words are my business — so what happened? How did I manage to stop writing for myself for six weeks, or however long it was since I’ve last been here…?

The truth is, I start to get tired of the words. Being a staff writer for Popverse is a wonderful thing, but it’s also a heavier work schedule than I’ve had in years — as a freelancer, I’d shaped my week into four work days pretty deliberately, and now I’m doing five days a week from 8am through 5pm — with a weekly (in theory) Wired column on top of that. For much of the time, it was Wired that I let slide — there’s about five or six columns I just didn’t even pitch, because my brain was too full of Popverse stuff — but the combination of guilt over missed deadlines and remembering how well Wired pays kicked in and brought me back into that fold… but it meant that something else had to go. So, the blog went dark.

It’s been in the back of my mind this entire time, though. Especially in the last week, as Twitter has started to be stripped for parts and people have been talking about returning to blogs en masse. So… here I am, wondering how to find the balance between everything that allows me to keep going without putting too much pressure on myself, or letting myself get tired of the words again.

Expect less regular posting, but continued posting, might be the answer. Shorter posts, more random posts. Or not…? Just know that, even if (when) things go quiet here, I’m wishing I had more words to share.

As soon as it was revealed that she was sick, people were asking me how I felt about the Queen. When she died, people were looking at me expectantly, waiting for some particular statement born of my nationality and whatever that might mean for my feelings towards a 96-year old woman I’d never met. It was a strange experience for a few days there, I have to say.

I don’t have any particularly strong feelings about the monarchy, I’m ashamed to say, beyond feeling as if it’s a ridiculous and outdated institution. That said, that could be said for more than half of what makes up British culture at any given moment, so that’s hardly the most damning criticism; I’m not someone to yell about how corrupt and evil the Royals are because of their connection to colonialism and slavery — and, as social media has shown over the last week or so, there’s certainly a lot who’ll talk about that at length — nor am I someone who romanticizes and makes excuses for the Royals and their behavior because they’re national institutions or whatever, either. They are just particularly expensive wallpaper to me, in a strange way — always there, only occasionally notable if nothing else is happening at the time.

The need others — all American-born, of course — had for me to have a take, an emotional reaction, to the Queen’s death reminded me of the response surrounding Brexit, or earlier, the Scottish Independence vote. This want for me to be at once entertainingly vitriolic and also help them understand what was happening, as if I had a verisimilitude due to where I was born that could help them navigate their own feelings. Alas, I failed them all.

I did think this, though: my parents met the Queen. It was two decades or so ago, and it was at an official event my dad got invited to through his work. There was a list of detailed instructions they received ahead of time, in terms of how to act and behave around Her Majesty, somewhat unsurprisingly, but my favorite was a rule that women’s hats were limited in size so that they wouldn’t overshadow whatever the Queen was wearing on her head that day.

There’s a level of petty there that I think is unintentionally hilarious. Let’s remember that about old Liz, and forget the rest.

“After New York Comic Con, we’ll have done a year’s worth of conventions in four months.”

I was on a call with my editor when he said this, and it’s stuck with me ever since. He’s right, as it turns out; the weird scheduling of comic shows this year — driven in part by late planning and a belief earlier in the year (and late last year, for that matter) that COVID might be a thing of the past by now — meant that a series of big events that would traditionally run from March through October have instead all been squashed into a tiny window between the end of June and the start of October… and I’ve done almost all of them.

(I signed up for my job too late to attend things like Star Wars Celebration or Florida Supercon, as it happens. Everyone else was there, though.)

It’s something that I’ve found particularly useful to keep in mind when I’m feeling tired or run down lately; as I write, there’s another convention happening — D23 Expo, in Anaheim, California — because, of course there is. The way things feel right now, there’s always another convention happening somewhere, and even if I’m not there, I’m working it somehow. I’m not at D23, but I’m part of the support team, writing stories and quick news hits from home connected to what’s being announced.

There’s actually another convention this weekend, right here in town, that I don’t have time to attend… because I’m working as support for the California one. There’s a strange point being made there, I feel, even if I don’t know what that point actually is.

Maybe the point is that I’m not imagining that things feel a little too non-stop right now. There’s a year being squashed into four months, and I’m squashed in there with it, trying to find space to do everything while keeping up with the outside world.

To go from being, essentially, a hermit for two and a half years because of COVID to traveling across the country repeatedly in a five week period was, I’m sure you’ll be able to imagine, a surreal and dizzying experience. Prior to taking on this new gig, I’d eaten a meal outside of my house literally once since everything got locked down; then, I was spending a week in Southern California, followed by ten days home, then a week in Illinois, then another ten days home, then a few days in Washington State. There were things that didn’t get unpacked. There were countless COVID tests being taken.

To make matters more strange, Portland had an impossibly hot summer this year — I suspect this’ll be something that happens every year from now on, sadly — and I live in a house where there’s no air conditioning except for a window unit on the first floor; for most of my time between conventions, everyone in the house was sleeping on couches in the living room because it was the only place in the house cool enough to actually sleep. I’m pretty sure that I spent maybe seven or eight days total in my own bed between the middle of June and last week or so, adding to the feeling that I didn’t really get a lot of home time this summer.

It sounds ridiculous, but I started to think about all the songs I’ve heard about how lonely and shitty touring life is during all of this, as well as imagining myself as a businessman who had to travel nonstop for their job; if there was an alternate reality where I could project myself into having to travel continuously for my job, I’d do so, feeling a mix of frustration and exhaustion that I imagined people in those jobs would feel. I spent the summer wanting to be home, and longing for the calm and stillness I imagined fall will bring. The cool weather, too.