T’is the Season

candy inspector

Thing2 is getting ready for Trick-or-Treat (Thing1 has assured me he’s too old to go begging for candy – we should just lay it at his feet). Thing2 decided to be Jack Frost this year, and is promising to deliver snow (he can do that you know).  The S-word is prohibited in this house before November 1, so he relented and just sent us a wicked cold morning.

Dickens once wrote (not necessarily about Halloween) that it was at this time of year that want is most keenly felt.  What I want to do is pass out candy on Halloween.  It’s a ritual I miss each year because we live in the middle of the woods. Our town’s topography sends us to the nearby big city of Arlington Vermont( population 2647-whoops make that 2648), and it’s amazingly good at discouraging would-be beggars from showing up on our doorstep looking for candy.

I’ve made sure we have plenty of candy on hand – just in case.  I’m prepared to setup a self-serve candy bowl.  I’ve even decorated a “Take More, It’s Really Healthy” sign in case cute little tots come while we’re not there.

I feel still deprived, but hope, unlike my diet, springs eternal.  Of course, if no one shows up, I’ll have to find something to do with all that candy.

 

Just Loose

cannon

I don’t know about you, but as my forties roar on, my glasses are getting thicker, my body parts are growing wider and closer to the floor, and my hobbies more eccentric (according to my kids my dust collection is going to get me a Nobel prize for eccentricity or at least a one-way ticket to a commitment hearing).

It’s tragic.  Really.

So you’ll forgive me for being tempted, when, haphazardly choosing a writing group pledge pin with text and graphics that were only contrasty enough for my deteriorating eyes to read the word ‘Loose’ in the dim light, I felt compelled to  tell everyone I met that day that I’m loose.

In all fairness there was a cannon on the button (Loose Cannon), but it was too late by the time I saw it.

Because I really am loose.

My hair and clothes are loose – especially where the top button of my jeans is.  My job is even looser – I work in an online chatroom.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  You’re wondering if all those people clicking online after a racy late night TV chat ad on late night TV know that the naughty typist on the other end of the line is really a sea monster?  I’m going to stick up for the ad clickers and guess that they have some idea, but they’re not chatting with this one.

Before I force anyone to google the email for the Society for Internet Decency and Niceness, perhaps I should explain that, while I’m great at pushing buttons, I’m actually your friendly neighborhood tech support sea monster.  As I’m sure you’re aware, the list of things that sound dirty but aren’t is exhaustive:

1. Can I watch (when seeing what’s going on with a user’s software)?

2. Can you restart your iPad?

Okay, not that many things.  But I can dream.

And I need to dream.  Heck, we all need to dream, to have that chance to be shot at the stars. And to dream, I need to keep it loose.

AHH AAAAAAAHH AHHH AAAAHHH ahhhh

tarzan girl

“You have a dark side,” a friend said to me.

Other friends have said it, and they are right to a certain degree.

It’s not that I seek out the darkness or that my life is miserable.  It’s that the special gift of living with bipolar is that even when life is in complete perfect order, there’s a veil hovering, waiting to fall.

Sometimes it’s just dark tulle.  Other times it’s a freaking burkha, constricting  and smothering even the most creative impulses.

Summer the veil didn’t just lift – it was shredded. It was space exploration.  It was an age of discovery as I rebooted a cartoon I’d started over a year ago but had not fed very well.  Stumbling over a way to marry two avocations – doodles and documents – that had been staring me in the face for quite some time gave me something completely unexpected.

I’m not the class clown. In group settings I can never find the right words, so when cartoon feedback came in saying I was funny (people who had never seen my face even),  I was shocked, shocked I tell you.

I won’t lie.  Flattery works on me.  It worked enough to get me to commit to a toon a day just to increase the odds of getting an ego-boosting email (I also love tooning in and dropping housework).

And as it happens, committing yourself to daily creative toon-foolery is a great way to avoid having yourself committed (I can ‘t predict what the kids will do on that score).   Finding the funny moments on an upswing is like finding grass in a haystack.  It’s a little harder finding the funny going the other way, but committing to it even once a day turns out to be a great coping mechanism.

It’s a less permanent but still powerful prozac that ironically sometimes finds a more interesting funny.  And it’s helped me find something else.

“You’ve found your voice,” a recent email from a toon reader read, and, like my friends, she was right too.