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I'm in Arizona right now, just for the day. I'm wearing a fantastic and preposterous mumu of my mother's while I do my laundry. Today I have eaten two Odwalla bars, a bag of dry apricots, and a bag of popcorn. My sister: "What are you eating?" Me: "Pop-Secret!" My sister: "Why? Just tell me what you're eating already!" Me: "I'm telling you, I'm eating Pop-Secret!"

I just got back yesterday from muscular dystrophy camp; probably the best camp I've been to since '02, mostly because I had the luck to be placed with an this 8-year old boy who was an angel-child and did nothing but laugh and play all day. Even on wednesday when he got food-poisoning so badly that we had to rush to the bathroom every hour so he could poop his guts out right in front of me, he was joking and cheerful and bore the situation with great equanimity. Him: "You're dorky, Eleanor, but I don't mind. I like you."

Tomorrow my sister and I are heading to Atlanta to meet up with Drew and then we'll fly off to England together join my parents in their tromping around the south of England. My sister graduated from highschool last year and my poor Mom was having some empty-nest related blues so we thought a family trip together was in order. The fact that Drew's coming is a new twist- our family vacations usually deteriorate into chaos pretty quickly, so we'll see whether the addition of a outside party will make things better or worse. He's being an awfully good sport about it. I would probably balk if I were in his shoes.

I hope you all are happy and well. I am. I have a long week behind me and a long week ahead, so today I'm going to do nothing but nap.

I finally thought of another okay short story idea. One lousy idea, but it was hard in coming, and hopefully now I can cling to it like a little life-raft that can carry me over the bad stuff until I finish the story and the life raft melts away.

It's spring here, and it's beautiful beyond compare. Drew and I went to an art opening last night for a friend of mine from the Co-op who does pottery. It was a two-person show and for the grand finale they had a cup-throwing contest. In 15 minutes they threw something like 30 cups each. They were in fancy clothes and they got all sweaty and covered in clay. There were tons of people and everyone was yelling and cheering and it was very hot.

Hope everyone is well. Lots of love.

DON'T CLICK ON THIS LINK, unless you want to see a picture of a guy with nails growing out all over his hands like gloves that will make you feel like you're going to lose it.

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/03/missionary_enco.html

I'm only posting the up because I'm assuming most of you have seen it already, as it is on Jim Woodring's blog. I saw the link about 3 weeks ago on Boing Boing and since then have been desperately trying not to pick at the memory of it, like a huge, crunchy scab that you can't help but pick at.

Michelle very nicely brought to my attention that I had a tiny review in Giant Robot this month. I was pretty pleased, even though it's an oddly straightforward review and contains ....'spoilers'.

I like the enthusiastic, 'happy ending!'

Also I found this teeny, tiny picture with some tiny, tiny pixels in the background that with my eagle eye I was able to recognize as my Dinosaur Party toys! hee hee

I went to a $3-$5-suggested-donation-but-free-if-you-can't-afford-it "Gentle Yoga" class yesterday, in a desperate uncharacteristic move to balance out my bizarrely careening moodswings a little. It was in a snooty hipster-complex, and since I arrived half and hour early I had all that time to think about how much I was going to loath it. I don't know why I have such a huge allergy to newage/yuppie/hippy activities- perhaps because I dabbled in them myself in my preteens, or because of the oft-elitist attitudes, or the prevalent self-rightiousness. Anyway, allergy or no, you cannot beat $3-$5-suggested-donation-but-free-if-you-can't-afford-it so there I was.

Anyway, it was actually really rad. The teacher was this not-at-all-obnoxious ancient old guy with a big grey beard and a soothing voice and we mostly did breathing exercises and I left feeling ten sorts of Pretty Great. Plus there were no young blonds in spandex makin' me feel like a chump. So, I guess back again on monday, or if I can wake up at 5 am (which I probably can't), tomorrow.

Later that day we went to the library to work and I fell asleep with my face down in a study carrel for an hour and a half. Then we went out to eat for the first time in a month (except for take out from The Taco Stand once, which I think kind of doesn't count) to Cali 'n' Titos and ate some fried plantains. I'm trying to have better posture so I can breath in a healthier way. Things are okay.

Please please tell me one of my all-time favorite cartoonists has not decided to throw away her beautiful art style

http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=104323

AAUUUGHGHGHGH IT LOOKS LIKE A AIRLINE SAFETY CARD
I was so excited about this book but now I'm really worried

We had waffles, veggie sausage and scrambled eggs for dinner last night, a feast fit for kings. Breakfast is a lot more delicious when you get over being squeemish and go ahead and slather syrup over EVERYTHING.

I've decided to cut down on the number of websites I obsessively visit. Boing boing, I love you, but my knowing about a particularly clever wrist watch designed to look like a space ship from 18th century engravings that will tell you the time, weather, and give you tips on the stock market just isn't vital to my health and happiness. I don't really need to hear about some chick in Russia who's modded her cell phone to tell unlimited knock-knock jokes in 6 different languages. And of all the news in the world it makes no sense for me to only hear the latest on copyright law.

Yeesh. I haven't listened to the actual news in something like two months. For all I know not one single Iraqi father of six has had his head drilled full of holes in that time. In fact, maybe while I was not listening to the news, the war got way better and everyone is getting along and Darfur suddenly is filled with rainbows and butterflies and they've all decided to make friends and have a pizza party and global warming has magically slowed, and started to ease itself into a gentle reverse. It's easy to half-way think these things if no one is telling you otherwise and the weather outside is so beautiful and your house is filled with light and warmth and kittens and you have enough syrup to cover your entire plate in a slop of warm, delicious, wonderful goo.

I just finished up with the major part of my latest big project, so today's the get-back-to-normal day. Wake up on time, clean the house, maybe do some sketchbooking for the first time in a month. Last night we went to lifedrawing and the model was a tough-looking hipster chick with gigantic tits. All my drawings came out kind of bad and I blame it on her top-heaviness. I'm used to drawing girls with big asses.

I haven't posted for about a month and we haven't done much this last month except stay home and draw. Harvey got fixed, and I worked myself up into a bit of a fit about it, but he didn't even seem to notice that anything was missing. We went to a fun concert where Devlin DJed (wearing a wrestling mask) and Drew and I were kind of awed by his badass-ness. Drew's beer making is going excellently well- he's already started his second batch. We found an Indian grocery store that has cheap, delicious microwave food. Someone in Italy stole Drew's identity and took $700 out of his Wacovia account in Rome but we got it all back.

No depression since Christmas except for occasional bursts mid-day that Drew and I have been calling "Afternoonsies". Does anyone else have this problem? Does it have something to do with blood sugar? It hits about 5 hours after I wake up, no matter when I wake up. Weird. But luckily brief and manageable.

Hope everyone is well. I miss you all.

Max (Clotfelter) came and visited thursday-friday and we had a lot of fun. We went to the Wuxtry and made burritos and drank beer and drew a little bit. It feels good to have friends over. We hadn't really seen Max for a long time (maybe three years!?) so it was cool to spend time with him again. I got a little bit emotional about it.

Drew got all his beer brewing stuff and spent yesterday sterilizing everything and boiling up five gallons of wort in a huge pot. It smelled incredibly strong and thick and humid, and it was evocative of so many things that I couldn't place them all. Tamales and cat-food were two of them. I hope the final result doesn't taste like tamales and cat food. Now Drew is fretful because it's sitting in its fermentation bucket and it hasn't started bubbling yet. So we'll see if our first wort-hope is a disaster. Our whole house smells kind of funky now.

So Scott McCloud and family came rolling through Athens yesterday. Scott's wife was sick, so just Scott and his two daughters Sky and Winter came over and hung out, and then we all went to The Grit. They're on a year-long Tour of America, living in hotels and hanging out with cartoonists while Scott does lectures, and considering that they're halfway through already they're still getting along incredibly well. They're the cheerfullest most talkative family ever! It was an extremely easy evening for super-shy people like Drew and myself. Winter (who is about 8?) kept blowing my mind with her Nintendo DS, which is about 50 times more high-tec than anything I was aware kids have nowadays (In NintenDogs you can use a bubblewand where you blow bubbles by actually BLOWING ON THE SCREEN).

Sky and Winter also did a video Winterview interview with us, so maybe that will be online someday and you can see me and Drew act like stodgy old morons. Hopefully they'll leave in the footage of Winter playing with the toy theater I made. In the course of her 30 second drama the Joey-looking character kidnapped two of the Winter Coat babies, fed them to the villain character, and then asked the villain to marry him. Then they 'Made Out'.

Scott is weirdly hip. Also he knows a ton about old radio dramas, so we spent a lot of time talking about The Goon Show and Firesign Theater. Plus, he says he privately plays a game where he tries to match up cartoonists with their musician equivalents (Craig Thompson and Sufjan Stevens, for example). He says I'm the Joanna Newsom of comics (except for the being a famous genius part, obviously). This is rad because I love Joanna Newsom, but also worrisome because she's almost unbearably affected, and only manages to be good because it's obvious that she's insane.

Anyway, when I read Understanding Comics thirteen years ago I probably never would have guessed that someday the author's family would be hanging out at my house and his teenage daughter would accidently make our toilet overflow and our bathroom would be filling up with water while I desperately misused our plunger. Life is pretty strange.

Last night I also did my shift at the Co-Op. My worst nightmare came true and Lisa the aerobics instructor showed up (buying a $4 bottle of tea of whatever) with that 'why-don't-you-come-to-my-class-anymore' look in her eye. I rattled off my knee saga to her while wondering how many times she's heard the same story before. Also one of the girls who works in back came up and said "Eleanor, do you know who Sarah Vowell is? I was just thinking, you sound just like her!"

Now, Sarah Vowell's voice is weird. She's on This American Life a lot, and she played Violet in The Incredibles. I've never been a big fan of my voice, but this was a giant shock for me. I kind of think of myself as a nervously-mannish dyke-y girl, and this Joanna Newsom/Sara Vowell stuff is dorkiness that's coming from an entirely different direction- far more mousy and twee. I guess I'm going to have to re-evaluate my self-image.

Excitingly for me, Drew and I have been working on a kids comic together! I've been worrying a lot about money, as our savings dwindle and I kick myself for every crappy job I've turned down and the prospect of any magical contracts suddenly appearing seems less and less realistic. I will probably just have to go out and get a job soon, which I figured was probably going to happen eventually. But, in the meantime, Drew and I are going to try and pitch this strip around to see if we can make any cash off it. Working with Drew is the raddist. We both did a bunch of sketches of the heroine until we came up with something that is a complete amalgam of our styles (with some Joann Sfar thrown in because we're both kind of obsessed with him). The premise is pretty fun, too. I'll post up pictures sometime!

I should have been posting up more because I'm leaving out some other fun stuff, like everyone being super nice and coming over for my birthday party, which includes cute baby anecdotes, and going to another life drawing session where the old-man-model handed out business cards that said '"Barefoot" Bill Pacer' on them and told us, "I don't mind photography." And the beer from ancient shipwreaked yeasts we drank that tasted like acid throw-up mixed with shoe leather and cough medicine. Oh well. Maybe another day.

Yesterday I went and worked outside at the bakery near our house and it was pretty nice. There was a vague bad smell that was whiffing around and it took me two whole hours to recognize it as dog pee. I was inordinately proud of figuring that out.

Today I was thinking about going to some kind of Athens-wide MLK day themed volunteer day which I think was supposed to mostly involve pulling up kudzu. I didn't go because I'm lazy and kind of cowardly. What if someone had tried to be friendly to me? Oh yeah, supposedly that would have been the point of going.

I had a dream about a pretty young mother who gave money to a homeless man and then the man followed her to a secluded area and attacked her. Obviously there is a rabidly conservative part of my brain I've been denying all my life and it's now trying to extoll it's republican agenda through my dreams. If I start having nightmares about Al-Qaeda and illegal immigrants then I'll be really worried.

I worked nine hours straight on coloring an illo I was trying to do for a portfolio piece yesterday, and although there are totally things about it I like, I just never managed to pull it into something professional looking. I give up. I have more important things I should be doing anyway. What a waste of a couple days work.

Feh.

Drew made awesome burritos last night. His burritos are probably the best burritos ever. I'm not joking about this.

So Drew has been talkin' the talk about trying to make his own beer. At first I was like, "that sounds like a lot of work." Then, I thought about how much more environmentally groovy it would be (reuse our own bottles, no transportation etc) and the fact that we would probably save over $200 dollars a year on beer money, and I got pretty into the idea. THEN I started thinking about how we could MAKE OUR OWN LABELS, and now I'm so excited about the whole process that Drew won't let me talk about label designs any more because, as he very reasonably points out, we haven't even bought the supplies yet let alone made a drinkable batch of beer.

Night before last I had all these nightmarish dreams about running around desperately trying to find a toilet so I could take a dump. But when I woke up it turned out I didn't need to take a dump at all. What the hell.

Yesterday Drew and I had a tiny adventure going to our first Athens life drawing class yesterday. The adventure was driving around the UGA campus during rush hour looking for parking with bad directions from google maps. But when we finally made it there, an hour late, it was really fun and we did some good drawing of a pleasingly chubby dreadlocked girl with a belly button ring. On our way home we imagined a Venn diagram of people with dreadlocks, people with belly button rings, and people who are nude models, and the frequent overlapping of all three.

It is hugely awesome that there's this public life drawing thing in Athens. It's only $3 for a whole three hours.

Worked at Daily on tuesday which was fun. I saw a girl with beard!!! I don't think I've ever seen a girl with a beard before. She came in with her girlfriend and they were talking about how they wanted to become crazy cat ladies when they got old. It was a real beard, with big sideburns and then a goatee thing going on. Do I want a beard? Maybe I want a beard.

Monday we went to the Y again, and oh my goodness the hilarity. I went to my Cardio Jam class and it was all the same older ladies and dudes like always, but rather than bouncy, rubbery Lisa, the instructor was an extremely cool, extremely good looking young black guy. (Drew and I call him "Blace".) "Blace" looked like he had just stepped out of a Justin Timberlake video- "My Love", to be specific, which he then, extremely seriously, tried to teach us a full dance routine for. I felt bad for him right away. He had obviously worked hard on his lesson plan, and he wasn't imaging a class of old people used to "Right kick, left kick, sa----shay" who couldn't physically do some of the moves he was trying to teach (like leaping around 360 degrees in the air) and looked kind of offended by some of the others (that thing where you put your hands in front of your chest and bump it out really fast). "Blace" was super nice and patient, but also kind of desperate, with a sort of "uh oh" look in his eyes when he had made us repeat a simple set of moves 10 times and we still weren't getting it right.

Need I mention I was one of the worst in the class? Dancing is probably what I am the most terrible at in the world, and although I thought the whole situation was pretty funny it still is pretty rough to have look like an idiot in front of a super attractive member of the opposite sex. At the end of the class he had us split into four groups of five and perform in front of the rest of the class and boy oh boy, I haven't felt that particular lurch in my stomach since I was 16. If you are ever feeling like maybe you have too much self-esteem, figure out what you are worst at and then do it in front of a hot guy/girl. It will instantly make you feel like a giant piece of cheese. Unfortunately, high self-esteem isn't one of my most major problems, and feeling like a piece of cheese wasn't high on my list of things to do. Sigh.

When I came out of class Drew said "Did you look at the schedule? Did you know they had changed this hour from Cardio Jam to Hip Hop Dance Lessons?" I hadn't seen the schedule, and apparently none of the other equally shell-shocked looking old ladies in the class had either. That made me feel really bad for "Blace", because I bet he was imagining a class of sassy and dissolute-but-ready-to-become-somthing-special-with-just-a-little-elbow-grease 17 year olds who he could train into an ultra-elite break-dance group and next thing you know they'd be going to competitions in New York and LA. Instead he got stuck with a bunch of alternately giggly and sullen 40-75 year olds who kept raising their hands and saying "Excuse me? Some of us have bad knees."

Speaking of bad knees, with just the minor amount of jumping and hopping involved with my Y adventures my knees are on the fritz. So much for that exercise plan.

Robert and Mary Jessica had a baptism for Tommy yesterday, and Drew and I went and tried to pretend to be ordinary people with nice clothes and stuff. After the baptism we went to MJ's folk's house and ate sandwiches and watched a tape about trains, boats, and the like. Mary Jessica's little nephew would say "Train! Boat! Car!" whenever one came on, and even when he bumped his head and was crying his eyes out he stayed focussed, saying "T-train! Oooowaaahhhh! C-car! Gwaaooooo!!!"
Also he absentmindedly cuddled up on Drew's lap, more seeming to think of him as a piece of furniture than another person. Later we went to Mandy and Devlin's and their dog Fruitbat did the same thing. Everyone likes Drew.

Tommy is very fat and pink. He's pretty extraordinarily cute.

Drew and I had our late-christmas yesterday- we re-created the Christmas spirit completely, with heck of Christmas music and presents and hot cocoa and riling ourselves up etc. I used Drew's big present as an excuse to make a doll I had wanted to anyway, and it came out pretty good. Drew gave me lots of comics and an alligator that holds a scubby thing in his mouth, and I gave him a truncated Netflix subscription (only 2 movies a month for 4 months... I know that's kind of skimpy) and a pretentious book about fancy beers. It was really nice.

Other: worked at Daily, and it was nice. Went to Cardio Jam, which was still astonishingly embarrassing. Drew made authentic and delicious Pad Thai. We watched Hitchcock's Notorious, which was really good, but I got so scared by the super-tense ending that I had to run out of the room and just peek around the door, saying my little movie-mantra, "They're only actors... it's just a film... " Then after the scary part that was it, it was over, bang, boom, no happy kiss or satisfying train going into a tunnel. I spent the rest of the night ten sorts of wired, and wondering what kind of disorder I must have that I can't understand the difference between movies and reality. And it wasn't like we were watching Saw or whatever psych-horror film the kids are into these days. It was just a mild old Hitchcock movie from the fifties. Yeesh.

We went to a New Year's party at Robert and Mary Jessica's last night, and set off about two billion fireworks. Robert and Devlin do not fuck around when it comes to fireworks: they both seemed to have massive stockpiles which we didn't even get halfway through. Was it the first time Drew and I have spent New Years together? We went home and drank a bottle of Beaujolais and played Katamari. My big New Year's resolution is to start raising tilapia.

Please, all my friends and loved ones, take good care of your minds and your bodies in 2007. Work hard to stay as healthy and strong as you can.

For Christmas my folks got me a whittling knife -called a "Carvin' Jack"- and it arrived in the mail yesterday. Oh boy! This is a very exciting pocket knife, with a very sharp whittling blade and five different types of gouges. Plus it smells real good and greasy. I carved most of yesterday and the knife was so sharp my thumb doesn't even hurt.

Also for you folks who are into this sort of thing, you should check out a recent Fresh Air where Terry Gross interviews Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian and also Thom Yorke. Stuart Murdoch is maybe a little bit too awesome seeming, and Thom Yorke is about 25% prickish - 75% fine (as one would expect). She also interviewed Andre 3000 (which we haven't heard yet). I am a pretty big Terry Gross fan. I dig her odd sultry-yet-sexless thing.

http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=13

I'm back at home in Athens now and ready to fall back into the schedule of waking, drawing, walking, eating, sleeping. Christmas break was pretty fun. It's good to see my family and friends. But it's good to be home too.

I'm now sort-of scrambling to get ready for 2nd Christmas, the oddly manufactured solution to me and Drew's not having Real Christmas together. We've scheduled 2nd Christmas for January 6th.

Yesterday Drew and I walked along Milledge to Jittery Joe's and had a fun time looking at all the frats and sororities, no longer hidden by any greenery, sometimes featuring the crumby white dregs of past TPings, strangely awkward in their oddball unbalanced southern regality. Lots of pillars, too-high porches, circular windows, stained glass, unexpected doorways, and the ubiquitous and somehow embarrassing old-folksy white rocking chairs, probably mostly used for puking on and shaky midnight make-outs. There were lots of good smells too- wood fires, mouldering leaves, fried chicken, candles.

Other: a dude repeatedly barfing in the bathroom at The Grill while we ate late Thursday, Harvey's disturbing puberty possibly adding to the house's catty funk, a bird pooping on Drew's shirt, good pasta for dinner, a mournful young christmas-scooter-recipient rolling back and forth on the sidewalk in front of our house. Things are good. I hope everyone is well.