Personal Digest Saturday: April 29 – May 5

Life news this week: 

• Saturday I had a pretty chill day, with some housework and some ukulele practice and a little video-making session.
  
• Sunday Sarah and David came over and we all went to breakfast at Keke's, and then they took me to Barnes and Noble to spend my late birthday gift (a gift certificate!). I went in there like "oh I'm not looking for anything in particular" and left with six new books. :/ After they left, I did my music recordings and then my mom took me shopping and I helped her with her tax things and we ate rice together.
  
• Monday I wrote my first Pitch Wars Mentee a feedback letter about his latest book. After I got home I went right back out to buy cosplay clothes at Target (moderately successful), and then when I got home Jeaux invited me out for impromptu quesadillas so I did that too. I was really tired upon returning home so I conked out early.
  
• Tuesday I sent a plant to a co-worker who's in the hospital, went home, and finished my Ruby doodle which turned out pretty cute but had uncomplicated lighting. Also did a little laundry since I didn't get any done Sunday.
  
• Wednesday I had some intense work on a package delivery for the office, and then rode the bus home through some scary rain that mysteriously wasn't targeting my destination. Jeaux and I got our bikes and ate at Glory Days. Kind of wasn't a great experience though. We also listened to Night Vale and I fell asleep after he left.
  
• Thursday I wrote a letter to Corinne and played with my Access database at work. I barely escaped a bout of rain that chased me home and started falling about three minutes after I walked in the door. Wow! I ate eggs and mushrooms and talked to Victor on the phone.
  
• Friday a cartoon event called "StevenBomb 6" began--it's premiering on television next week, but if you had the network's app on your phone, you could watch all the episodes early. Yikes! Jeaux and I made plans to watch it together which meant I had to survive in the world for my entire workday knowing they were out there and I hadn't seen them. Horrible huh? I know, the torture I endure. After helping my work team with a PowerPoint presentation they ended up not even really being able to give, I left on the bus and met Jeaux at his house. He made me fake chicken nuggets and bought french fries, and we hung out and watched a bunch of new cartoons and and we were very happy. I went home and posted my webcomic and that's all.

Reading progress:

• Finished this week: Nothing this week!
• Currently reading: The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman.

New singing performances:

This week I performed "It's Over, Isn't It" by Rebecca Sugar (from Steven Universe). I've played this on ukulele before but now this is just a piano karaoke version, and I could concentrate on the singing more!

 

New drawings: 

Steven and Ruby have burned themselves out.
(I'm sure Ruby's wife is somewhere nearby chillin'.)

Webcomic Negative One Issue 0625: "Quiet."






New videos:

My latest writing video is about chasing the dream. It's not necessary to put a time limit on success or measure it by ability to live off your art.



My latest unlisted ukulele video is "Dear Old Dad" from Steven Universe. Sorry, it's awkward because it's a duet between a teenage boy and his dad and I am neither a teenage boy nor a dad.



New photos:

My Steven Universe shirt collection is big.

Jeaux cooked fake chicken nuggets and got fries for our cartoon marathon.

Some items I've gotten for my Stevonnie cosplay, which I'll do in August.

Social Media counts:
 
YouTube subscribers: 5,309 for swankivy (2 new), 637 for JulieSondra (lost 1). Twitter followers: 861 for swankivy (3 new), 1,330 for JulieSondra (no change). Facebook: 292 friends (1 new, friends with Michael) and 206 followers (lost 1) for swankivy, 652 likes for JulieSondra (2 new), 55 likes for Negative One (no change), 125 likes for So You Write (no change). Tumblr followers: 2,480 (lost 3). Instagram followers: 112 (lost 1).

Someone to take care of you

I won't elaborate too much on the rest of this interaction, but once upon a time, some extremely bizarre man contacted me with some kind of language tangle that he had mistaken for a reasoned perspective. The initial contact included such gems as opinions on trans people's gender-affirming surgery counting as "mutilation" and thoughts on how the decrease in the number of churches has probably caused the increase in violent crimes in the nation (and no one's noticed and no one's talking about it!!!). But when I engaged with this fellow confused about his message and why he'd sent it to me, he also offered the following judgment:

"As an asexual person who will not marry or reproduce, you're irresponsible, because you surely have no plan for supporting yourself when you're old."

This was the only thing this jackass said to me that really made me think.

Not in the way he believes me made me think, but I digress.

Mostly, what I thought was I can't believe marriage and children is considered an old-age plan. Especially marriage! Theoretically, you are going to get old at around the same time as your spouse, and if one of you needs to be "taken care of," what happens when/if the other one needs that help too? It's amazing to me that this fellow thought he'd rubbed a trump card in my face by stating that I was screwing myself over by not getting married because no one would be there to take care of me when I'm old.

If I can take a nice sharp turn into straight-up feminist commentary for a moment, let me say that this is a typically male perspective, unfortunately. Men in our culture do frequently see women as their caretakers (of them, of their children, of their home), while they are "providers." So it isn't that surprising to me that this guy thinks getting married is partly so he can be assured a caretaker when he's old. Women do typically outlive men by a pretty large margin. So when guys like him say "someone to take care of you when you're old," he's really thinking "a woman will take care of me when I'm old." Who takes care of her? How is this a good insurance policy if you're banking on becoming infirm but you have no way of knowing who it will happen to first and whether the other will be in any state to do the caretaking when it happens?

But. Furthermore. You can argue that when someone marries you and says some variation of "in sickness and in health," they are indeed agreeing to become your caretaker if you are able to care for yourself at the time of marriage but later can no longer care for yourself. But children? They agree to no such thing. They don't agree to take care of their parents the way their parents "agreed" to take care of them when they created them. It's not part of the deal.

I would argue that it's nice, and maybe to some extent expected. I plan to take some kind of active role in caring for my parents (and am already doing so for my mother where she needs it, but she doesn't need active daily care--just help with some things). It's a tad "ungrateful" (to use a word I hate) to figure it's fine for your parents to raise you and then you don't help them when they need you to return the favor, but the difference there is consent--your parents participated explicitly in creating you and your parents are, by law, responsible for you and obligated to provide for you until the age of majority. There is no such law to obligate children to care for their parents. And I don't believe having children as a strategy to obtain old-age care is very sound. If you want security and relative assurance that you'll receive what you expect, you'll do much better if you start a fund for it.

The guy who offered me this condescending perspective was almost smug about it--he gave me this I bet you haven't thought of this fatal flaw in your lifestyle attitude throughout the barely lucid scrawl of his rant. But I'd argue that if your plan for old age is "get married and have kids," it's not sound at all. As mentioned, you don't know if your spouse will need you before you need them, and you don't have any guarantee that any children you have won't need long-term care if they're born or later become disabled. Far from being the ass-covering strategy this jerk portrayed it as, getting married and having kids is what everything in life is: fraught with unexpected outcomes. How dare this ignorant person grinningly assign me a failure to cover my bases?

As an unmarried woman with no kids, I have no one else to support and no one depending on me, and no legal obligations to provide for anyone. I am therefore quite well equipped to create my own savings and future plan for retirement and old-age support. I'm actively doing that, actually. The fact that this guy could sneeringly evaluate my situation as dangerously poor planning without even asking me (and that he thought it was his business!) speaks far more to his own failure to consider options than it does to my supposed failure to secure my future.

Getting married and/or having kids isn't a path to obtaining old-age care. And not being married and/or having no kids isn't a sign that you've been lax in planning your life.

 

Wednesday Factoid: Used to Like

Today's Wednesday Factoid is: Have you ever felt embarrassed by things you used to like?

Tough question. For the most part, the answer's a pretty solid "no"--I frequently still like things if I ever liked them, and don't see any point in feeling shame if someone else thinks what I like isn't cool. But there are also numerous things I liked in my childhood that I see huuuuge problems with now (or that I saw problems with then but still enjoyed), and I know the difference between liking something while accepting it's problematic and feeling like I have to deny that it's problematic.

I liked some insipid things as a kid. As a little child I loved Woody Woodpecker and The Smurfs, but when I was in elementary school I think I must've been obsessed with Popples for something like two full years. And let me tell you something. Popples? Is embarrassingly awful when I look at it now. It's clearly one of those 80s cartoons created to sell toys, the plots are pretty much all the same, and the characters are annoying--every single one of them is annoying. I think I liked the idea of secret intelligent creatures that kids kept hidden from their parents, but other than that the cartoon show itself wasn't super entertaining to me even then. I think what I liked most about it was that I noticed a bunch of patterns in the character designs and I liked documenting them. Did you know there are three large Popples and three middle-sized ones and three small ones? Did you know there's one boy and two girls in each of those size groups? Did you know there's a predictable pattern that dictates what color their ears are in relation to the puffball on their tails? It's true man. And even though there's not a lot redeemable about the franchise on any level I care about now, I obviously am not embarrassed about liking it if I have all my Pocket Popples on a shelf in my bedroom as a woman pushing forty.

Man I loved those toys

I guess we develop embarrassment about things we used to like because they stop being cool (but I never had that issue) or because we recognize something about that thing that we didn't recognize back then which makes us like it less. For me, the latter is probably the closest I've had to being embarrassed about what I used to like: there were some books and movies I enjoyed that I found out later included racist perspectives I didn't catch, sexist attitudes that didn't make me uncomfortable enough to stop consuming the media, or portrayals of people with disabilities that were inspiration porn or harmful inaccurate perspectives that I didn't have the perspective to avoid falling for.

But what's interesting is that people just straight-up expect you to be embarrassed of your former self over a lot of things. Like, how common is it for us to look at the hairstyles and fashions of yesteryear and straight-up laugh at what used to look cool to us? I think that's really weird actually. It's a little funny for me to look at, say, photos from my middle school years and remember that that's really how people dressed, but once it's far enough in the past we start to romanticize it in many cases. I'm not embarrassed at all that I liked puffy paint sweaters and Swatch watches, all right? We all did.

Look, I rocked that perm.

 

Personal Digest Saturday: April 22 – April 28

Life news this week: 

• Saturday was very productive. I packed my bag for Drink and Draw, adjusted a karaoke performance to share with my Amino folks, did laundry, and read a bunch of a graphic novel. Also did all the blogging and talked to my first Pitch Wars mentee on Skype for a while. Belle took me to the event and I got my webcomic drawing and some fan art done. I was too tired at home afterwards to get anything done though. :(
  
• Sunday I finished reading the graphic novel quickly because my friends Eric and Robbie were doing a podcast on it and I was supposed to be on it. I did the podcast discussion, and all that plus karaoke and ukulele recordings. (I was in an Alanis Morissette mood, I guess.) Then I drew more fanart to celebrate my cartoon blog hitting 700 followers, and I opened some packages I ordered. Some of my cosplay clothes are here. :) I didn't do the dishes 'cause lazy.
  
• Monday I worked on a couple letters at work and had to watch an engineering training video. After, I finished my fan art from the night before, actually did the dishes, and cleaned up around the house a bit.
  
• Tuesday was Many Meetings Day. We were actually supposed to have three meetings but it actually became two. We had a brainstorming meeting for a project we got shortlisted on, and then later we had our usual office meeting. I got to eat Jimmy John's sandwiches. :) Mom came over later and we just hung out instead of going shopping. We ate some tater tots and watched music videos. I doodled a little but didn't finish the drawings.
  
• Wednesday I missed the bus, but it was slow and caught at a light and I had my bike, so I rode past it and picked it up at its next stop! Ain't I a tricky one. I chatted online with a friend and didn't have much excitement at the office. Weird things happened at the bus stop on Wednesday: two women were complimenting my butt and commenting on my clothes, and then a dude came in discussing his enema, and then another dude came in and ranted about divorcing his wife because she "wants to be a feminist" and is having sex with "some black dude." Yikes. I left the bus stop to stand somewhere else and got a compliment on my Steven Universe shirt, haha. I met Jeaux and we ate at WOW Burger and got the #3 SU comic, which we read together. I posted some comic reviews after he left but I was super tired.
  
• Thursday I had some e-mail troubles (I hate when e-mail programs erase what you already spent a bunch of time on!!), and I chatted with a friend and was sleepy all day. Drew a little bit, posted pictures on Amino, and had a very slow day.
  
• Friday I finished reading my first Pitch Wars mentee's book but I have to come up with some final notes. Also finished the book I was reading on the bus and wrote reviews. I managed to whip an Access database into shape. Sort of. And then at home I had to do webcomics and ended up crashing.

Articles, Interviews, Mentions:

• The podcast I did with Robbie and Eric has a Facebook Live feed where you can watch us, and you can get the listen version on Handsome Boys Comics Hour's post (it starts at about one hour and five seconds in).
  
• Someone on AVEN discovered they were asexual from reading my book, so that's cool.

Reading progress:

• Finished this week: The Stone Heart by Faith Erin Hicks. Four-star review.
• Finished this week: Steven Universe #3 by Melanie Gillman and Katy Farina. (This is a comic book.) Four-star review. 
• Finished this week: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Five-star review.
• Currently reading: The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman.

New singing performances:

This week I performed "Forgiven" by Alanis Morissette. Watch out: it contains unattractive screaming.

 

New drawings: 

Pearl gets her turn to nap with Steven.
She is a nightlight.

 

A surprise drawing of Sugilite: New outfit concept that I made up! (We don't know what this character looks like right now, but it's different from the last time we saw her, so I'm guessing.)

Webcomic So You Write Issue 71: "Hard Work."

Webcomic Negative One Issue 0624: "Hard on Her."






New videos:

My latest unlisted ukulele video is "Head Over Feet" by Alanis Morissette. It came out all right!



New photos:

I took no photos of interest this week.

Social Media counts:
 
YouTube subscribers: 5,307 for swankivy (lost 9), 638 for JulieSondra (8 new). Twitter followers: 858 for swankivy (3 new), 1,330 for JulieSondra (5 new). Facebook: 291 friends (no change) and 207 followers (no change) for swankivy, 650 likes for JulieSondra (1 new), 55 likes for Negative One (no change), 125 likes for So You Write (lost 2). Tumblr followers: 2,483 (lost 2). Instagram followers: 113 (3 new).

Wednesday Factoid: Favorite Subject

Today's Wednesday Factoid is: What was your favorite school subject when you were in elementary school? What about high school? What subjects did you despise?

English/Reading was generally what I liked best as a kid. Depending on what we were working on, sometimes I liked art or music more, but usually in art or music we were doing something I didn't care about and just kinda found boring. I liked reading or writing time. And if the science class was about something I was really interested in, like the solar system, I ate it up and liked to read the textbook on my own.

On my way to kindergarten

In elementary school I usually really hated social studies. I hated math later in my life, but at this point I didn't mind math, but at that point arithmetic was relatively easy and I was okay at drills. But of course, like most kids who grew up nerdy, PE was probably the worst.

Me in ninth grade with my vocabulary book

In high school I still liked English class more than the others if we had a writing assignment--even if it was just writing about books or analyzing poetry, I was really good at those things and therefore I liked them more. (In my AP English class, one of my teachers was always using my papers as examples!) I also loved chemistry and a very small portion of biology (I enjoyed studying genetics, but pretty much hated all the other stuff), but physics class was the worst. I wasn't good at math but didn't despise it as much as physics. It was still pretty miserable so math was probably my worst subject, but I also hated history, even though I had good teachers. 

But then above and beyond English was always my chorus class in high school. I took chorus every year, sometimes two periods of it because I sang with two different groups (an advanced choir and a show choir). I didn't have to take anything athletic in high school except I guess I took a summer course called Team Sports. And so few people took it that we couldn't even really do any teams, but it was all right.

Overall I tended to like science and English and dislike social studies/history and math. And music and art really depend on what the subject is.

Revenge

Last night I was so sick of my upstairs neighbors being inconsiderately loud at 12:30 in the morning that I washed my dishes loudly and muttered to myself a lot.

I fantasized that maybe they could hear me slamming dishes around and wondered how they would like dealing with random crashes and thuds and slams and clanks. Even if nothing I do is shaking their house like their furniture-moving, jumping off high places, running in the halls, slamming drawers, and loud music does to mine.

Thing is? I don't really believe in revenge. Because it doesn't feel good and it doesn't work.

I have a big stick that I use to pound on the ceiling whenever they blast music (no idea if it has ever worked). If I wanted to, I could hey, just pound on the ceiling randomly after they go to sleep. Sometimes I'm awake when that happens (and you can always, without a doubt, tell that they are home and awake if they are). Why not give them a taste of their own medicine?

a) Because if I woke them up, they'd be awake, and then they'd make noise and continue to bother me;

b) Because they do not associate my noises with anything they're doing. They are inconsiderate and selfish, but they are not doing it just to mess with my life.

I've complained to the apartment complex at least a dozen times, probably more. The current administration keeps saying they're "trying," but the trying so far seems to have included leaving a note on the door and "giving it a few days" (so what, they'll pick a time to have a family conference to discuss the note and collectively decide to stop being obnoxious?) and also knocking on the door ("they're not answering" *shrug* oh well) and I think someone from there tried to call but was not able to reach anyone.

In other words, they haven't effectively been told they're causing a problem for me, and the people in charge of making it better have acted like it's a problem of doing enough to make me think they're trying, not a problem of doing something that results in actual connection with the people causing the problem and making them recognize that they are causing a problem, and also enforcing consequences.

But they won't do that, because more than likely they think I'm the problem.

I think this because on one of the occasions where the manager was telling me she was "going to try," she suggested that maybe when my lease is up in September, they can move me to an upstairs apartment.

Yeah. Move ME. Because the problem isn't them making noise; it's me being annoyed by it. And, as the manager carefully suggested, I will probably be unhappy below anyone.

You know, because I must just be sensitive about footsteps above me or something. It can't be because a family of at least three adults and two kids and a dog are literally moving furniture so it scrapes against the floor, at least two dozen times a day, and this is not an exaggeration, and I have given them a video capturing their noise with time stamps and dates showing that the upstairs neighbors are making a baffling amount of noise after midnight consistently, but you know, what can they really do if they can't directly observe it, right?

Sleep over at my house. If you can sleep. Try, I dare you.

When the manager said they'd be glad to move me, I made my final decision that I am moving out. I find it unacceptable that their solution would be to move me away from the problem instead of acknowledging that there is a problem and stopping it, and I find it unacceptable that I would be the incredibly inconvenienced person who would reward them for this with more of my money.

So I guess that's a form of punishment, though not revenge. If you won't address my needs even though I've made them more than clear, I'm not going to give you my business anymore. Revenge, though? Not interested. I'm not planning to post scathing reviews on websites. Not planning to leave a passive-aggressive note on my neighbors' door or in my file. If they have a place for me to do so, I will certainly state for the record that the reason I'm moving is almost 100% because I can't deal with the neighbors' noise anymore. I don't care about vengeance or comeuppance or karmic fulfillment--whatever you call delighting in people getting what's coming to them. (Cosmic justice is fun to watch once in a while, but I am not out to help it along.) I don't get any satisfaction from it, and it does not make the world better.

I'm not sure if this is a philosophical post or a rant about my neighbors but I guess I'm just gonna post it.

 

Personal Digest Saturday: April 15 – April 21

Life news this week: 

• Saturday did not see much accomplishment besides blogging and answering some messages (which I had to do from my living room because that was the room in which I could hear the neighbors' noise the least). I am constantly rearranging my sleeping and my everyday existence to be tormented by them as little as possible and no one will help me. This is why I'm moving in September. I just can't take it anymore.
  
• Sunday I did more unnecessary blogging about cartoons, made an asexuality video and two karaoke videos and a ukulele video. Kind of a lot of video-making and music.
  
• Monday I did some work on a letter for the office and got home relatively early because a co-worker drove me. I drew some doodles, bought some cosplay clothes for a costume I'm planning for summer, practiced my ukulele, and did the subtitles for my latest video.
  
• Tuesday I got more drawings done and did more beta reading for my friend's book. At home I ate a massive quantity of rice for some reason, colored some doodles, and went to bed.
  
• Wednesday was not notable at work. I went to meet Jeaux after and got yet another dude hitting on me at the bus stop trying to find out where I was going and why I didn't want to stop to talk to him. We ate at Pei Wei and I had a good tofu teriyaki bowl. Jeaux and I then went to my place to read the new Steven Universe tie-in book, Keep Beach City Weird, which had arrived in my mailbox that day. We also listened to Night Vale and after he left I wrote a review of the book.
  
• Thursday I had a weird sleep schedule and was very tired at work. That app I downloaded to play with Steven Universe fans featured a couple more of my posts on its front page so now I am up to having it happen nine times in less than a month. Apparently that is unusual. Whee. Did some editing for my friend and finished a book. At the bus stop I finally talked to someone worth talking to, and gave him my e-mail so he could send me a short story he wrote. When I got home I ate dinner and talked to Victor on the phone while drawing comics.
  
• Friday I received supplies and got my notary stuff so I'm officially a notary now. Who wants to get married? Hah. I read the story by the bus stop guy and sent him some thoughts. I found out at lunch that there is going to be a clump of new Steven Universe episodes starting May 8 (the marathon format is called "StevenBomb"; this is StevenBomb #6), so I got excited and sent the promo to Jeaux and Meghan so we could flip out. When I got home I posted my webcomic and prepared some homework for the upcoming Drink and Draw event.

Articles, Interviews, Mentions:

• The Notes Which Do Not Fit mentions my book again in the context of comparing it to another one (and recommending mine instead).
  
• The Asexual Agenda's Linkspam for this week mentions my "Pride" post.

Reading progress:

• Finished this week: Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay. Four-star review.
• Finished this week: Keep Beach City Weird by Matt Burnett and Ben Levin. Four-star review.
• Currently reading: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.

New singing performances:

This week I did two performances. The main one was "Love Like You" by Rebecca Sugar.



But I also wanted to do a duet of a song I'd recorded previously, and I found a partner. My partner is Oaklight, and they're singing the first part while I did the second part and the harmony. It's our duet version of "Here Comes a Thought," also by Rebecca Sugar. 

 

New drawings: 

Next in my series of sleeping Gems is Steven with Amethyst.
I could have done a lot better on this one.

An impromptu doodle of flashback characters hanging out.
Rose Quartz (with the huge curly hair) has a ton of fan art with her and Pearl,
but the other two, Garnet and Amethyst, certainly had special times with her too,
so I wanted to draw that.

Webcomic Negative One Issue 0623: "Matter-of-Fact."






New videos:

My latest asexuality video is Letters to an Asexual #45. This one is about someone's objection that I am probably just too stubborn or too intellectual to want sex. Brilliant.

 

My latest unlisted ukulele video is "Don't Cost Nothin'," which is a song from Steven Universe performed by Steven's dad. It's really cute but it doesn't have an ending (because in the show it fades into a completely different song), so I put an ending on it! Really fun little song though, and I think I got its character down right when I played it, for once.



New photos:

The giant quantity of rice I ate and then fell asleep.

New book, new shirt. I got Keep Beach City Weird and a Lion shirt.

Look, my notary stamp. It's official!

And the haircut comparison photos for April:

Front, February 2014	Front, March 2017
Back, February 2014	Back, April 2017

Social Media counts:
 
YouTube subscribers: 5,306 for swankivy (lost 10), 632 for JulieSondra (2 new). Twitter followers: 856 for swankivy (1 new), 1,327 for JulieSondra (2 new). Facebook: 291 friends (no change) and 207 followers (no change) for swankivy, 649 likes for JulieSondra (no change), 55 likes for Negative One (no change), 126 likes for So You Write (lost 1). Tumblr followers: 2,490 (5 new). Instagram followers: 112 (2 new).