I’m not bothering to update you on my groceries this week. There’s still some left, but I’ve lost interest enough that it is too much work to take it out of its various places and put it on my counter to take a picture. You’ll all get over it, I am sure.

But this month, I have brought you a random comic strip I wrote at work one night that would have been forgotten if I’d not bothered to put it online, as well as one of the very first comedical stories I ever wrote for the Internet. That one predates Contains2 by a bit. I think I first did it up as an email to Marq when I was bored one time.

It got me thinking about other stories I’ve made over the years that aren’t as lucky to have made it online. I don’t mean what’s left of the Contains2 stories that I’ve just not got around to bringing here yet, I mean the stuff that is well and truly gone and I don’t even have notes to salvage it. Granted most of these stories I, obviously, can’t remember, but there are a few that I do have faint traces of in my brain and I figure I should note them before I lose even that.

The earliest I recall was, I believe, in grade 2. We were assigned to make little illustrated books with a story in them and I can remember that my story combined Egyptian elements with cat people. Basically, what I am saying is that it was a Thundercats ripoff. Apart from that I can’t remember anything. I do know that my report card that year made an oblique reference to it saying that I didn’t adequately explain things in my stories, that I took for granted that people would know what I was talking about if I knew it. Stupid little me. Similarly I wrote a prose story in grade 5 that borrowed liberally from the plot of King’s Quest V. Plagiarism. It’s the easiest way for kids to write stories.

Also during my elementary years I remember a desire to make a Christmas movie and that I wanted a sort of Advent Calendar motif to open and close scenes. I was apparently deep. It was meant to end with a snowball fight, I think, and I remember getting in trouble when we started throwing snowballs to “practice”. Stupid little me. We also wrote a skit about bullying once and performed it at a school assembly. I’d love to find out someone got that on film, but I doubt it.

Around grade five and six, I guess, was about when I started getting into comics as well and it is no surprise that that is when I started making comics as well. I did a lot of the old fold-a-bunch-of-sheets-in-half-and-you-have-a-book style comics, including one about a superhero called Zappo which I don’t still have, but I do remember enough about the character that someday I hope to give him a home. Perhaps my other biggest comic effort was a couple sheets full of different comic strips with different themes, as if I were trying to create a whole Comics Page in a newspaper. I remember only two of the strips and one of them, I think, I will recreate for this site sometime. The other was a two panel bit with a Native American man sitting crosslegged on the floor/ground. The first panel he said “How” and in the second panel he said “ya doing?”

Sometime in either late elementary or early junior high I wrote just a couple of pages, pure description no story, about a family living in a house that was so empty people kept assuming nobody lived there and putting up for sale signs. I never did finish it, I don’t think, but I remember it impressing the parents and teacher types who read it.

In grade 7, I think, for an art class project I created a comic strip about a superhero called Dog-Thing. I got an excellent grade on that thing, the teacher wasn’t even willing to write my grade on the thing because he didn’t want to ruin it. Naturally I lost it at some point. Stupid little me. For years I assumed I would never see Dog-Thing again, but while the strip is indubitably gone I did eventually find a sketch of the main character. That means I can use him again! I haven’t got around to revealing it yet, but Dog-Thing is a retired founding member of the Team of Superheroes.

Around the junior high years I also created Little Choy. Now I can hardly call these “stories” but innumerable images of Little Choy insulting anyone willing to speak near him have been drawn on school desks and in text books over the years that I will never see again. Luckily every one of them is pretty much exactly the same.

For a grade 11 English class we had to write something and as I recall I did. I wrote something about an office being shot up by criminals or terrorists or something. Nowadays that might raise some alarm bells or something, but this was at least a year before the Columbine thing, so all I got was a comment from the teacher about how I use way more paragraph breaks than necessary and the teacher mused that usually he had to tell people the opposite. I’ve always bucked trends, I guess. I still tend to like smaller paragraphs better. And I guess part of the reason that writing that story didn’t make me look insane was because, as I recall, it was about a guy who encounters one of the criminal terrorists and while they can hear shooting coming from other parts of the building he actually talked the criminal terrorist into stopping.

Grade 12, I don’t even remember for sure which class it was, but this was after the point where I’d stopped actively trying in school, so on some exam I was taking I did what I could and then turned it over and wrote a story about a squirrel detective on the back. As I recall it involved some sort of mystery in a casino tree. I think there was a rabbit bouncer possibly? I really wish I still had this one. It sounds messed up.

Anyway, as I said, that’s just the stories I remember enough to know I don’t remember or have notes about. Who knows how many stories I’ve written that have faded into nothingness? I guess we’ll never know.

Unless Time Travel!

You know what’s weird? Like eleven years ago or whatever, I graduated from high school with and Honours English credit, right? At that time, I did not know which words were nouns and which were verbs. This is a true fact. I’m confident that at some point in elementary school I learned it long enough to pass a test, but it did not stick with me and I apparently never needed to know it again as far as school was concerned. Somewhere in the decade since then I figured it would be worth knowing and learned about nouns and verbs. Obviously everyone keeps learning after they leave school because really, it’s not like you can stop learning. I’ve learned so much more than I ever knew about geography and history and science since school ended, but that’s the sort of thing I’d expect to have to keep learning. But verbs and nouns? That’s pretty basic stuff. There are many basic things I did not learn from school.

People often assume that I am smart. This has been the case for as long as I can remember. I suppose this is because I share many characteristics of the kind of people who are smart. I was generally quiet and I showed up for classes. I’ve always had a decent vocabulary. I can remember being pretty good at spelling too, with some exceptions (like words with “ie” or “ei” which still mess me up regularly). I’ve liked reading and writing as long as I can remember and, probably, I was generally more interested in what we were learning than many of the other kids in my classes. More than one teacher said something to the effect of “You’re a bright kid, but you don’t apply yourself.”

I am not smart. Inevitably, people find contention when I say that, so I’ll explain. I just know enough stuff that I can be called “bright” is all and certainly the marks I got in school back me up on this. I was full-on average grade-wise. But that, people assured me, was because I didn’t apply myself. I don’t think this is wholly the case. From decades of being inside my face, I consider myself the world’s foremost expert on how PDRs’ brains work. I know that my brain is not as fast as some other peoples’. One of the complaints my parents regularly received on those parent-teacher nights was that I didn’t participate in class all that much. I blame this on my slow brain. I actually have memories of being aware, as a child, that the teacher had finished asking a question and other hands were going up and I still didn’t know what the question was. My brain was not done processing and other kids were already going at it. While I don’t actually have any experience thinking with someone else’s brain (yet), I have had people tell me that they can have a thought come to them in an instant, but thoughts come to me in sentences. “Oh, so koalas have two thumbs on each hand,” I might think to myself, but if I don’t finish the mental sentence I either have to start over or I lose the thought. To process a new idea like that takes me just about as long as it would to say it aloud to myself. I did not have time to repeat everything a teacher said back to myself and then join a conversation. Also, I am a slow reader. That’s something people never seem to believe just because I go through a lot of books. But that’s more because of how much time I spend reading than how quickly I do it. If you ever get a chance to hear me read something out loud you’ll notice about a sentence’s worth of decent oration and then I start tripping over words, reversing their order usually, or else I have to pause and reorient myself.

I do not say this as though being not exceptionally smart is a bad thing. I don’t mind it. I’ve long since accepted that I not quick-witted. Some people, when I try to explain it to them, are all “But you are smart” probably because they think I’m being too negative when I’m “actually a pretty bright guy”, but they are missing the entire point of what I am trying to say. I just think slowly. This is not me being woeful. This is me describing my thought process.

Lack of mental alacrity aside, I love to learn. I don’t know how much school ever really helped me with that, though. Certainly I think my teachers did good jobs for the most part. I don’t blame them for my not knowing nouns from verbs. It isn’t actually a teacher’s job to make sure a student learns things, it is a teacher’s job to make sure students pass tests. Ideally they can do both, but this is not always the case, as I am living proof. I’ve always hated tests. There I am trying to learn something and a test comes along and says “PROVE THAT YOU ARE LEARNING!” and if I can’t prove I’m learning, well people don’t like that. And that’s all school really is about. You just have to satisfy the requirements that are set up and then you get a sheet that says “THIS IS PROOF THAT THAT GUY LEARNED” and it didn’t matter how much actual learning was involved. So I just did enough to do that. I remember in the very High School Honours English class that I mentioned above we were given some book and each assigned a chapter to do a report on. There must have been about thirty chapters in it, enough for every student. I was assigned chapter eleven. I read only eleven chapters of that book. Enough to do my assignment and get out of there. I don’t even remember what the book was, something by a local writer, I think, about an island where things kept washing up and wacky times ensued, I guess. I’d probably read it now.

I became very good at cheating on tests, by the way. On occasion, if I was sitting next to someone I knew, I could tell them ahead of time that I would be copying off of them, but they still couldn’t tell. I’ve got peripheral vision like a housefly over here. And I know how to change a phrase or realign a math equation so it does not look like the one I copied from. One of the best moves is starting one way, then making a mistake and get correcting it. Erase just enough to show that you did something but “rethought” it and it looked like you were thinking, y’know? I do not remember even once being caught cheating. It isn’t that I cheated on every assignment or anything, though. I did my work and tried hard and I stayed after school for help regularly. It was on the tests that I cheated, because they were how I had to prove I was learning and because, as mentioned above, I’m not that smart I needed help proving that.

By the end of high school and my one failure of a year of university I was so tired of it. I didn’t care about having proof that I learned stuff. What do I care who knows I learned stuff? Of course I realize that the point of diplomas and such has to do with getting jobs to people who deserve them and stuff, but I have never, since childhood, wanted a life where I was defined by my job (But that’s another discussion entirely. For more information see every time I have ever mentioned my job on the Internet ever). Seriously, I just liked learning stuff. Having to prove that I was learning all the time really got in the way of that. Of the six courses I took in university, I passed one. That was it for me and school.

Sometimes when I meet someone who was an adult who knew me as a child they’ll assume I’ve gone on to scholarly things and are surprised to hear that I have not. It was just expected of me. Three times in recent months and many more times before it, people have mentioned how I should go back to school. And I think I would, really. Even hating it as I did, I miss it now. And there is my dilemma. I don’t want to have to go back to sweating over whether I’m getting marks high enough to be allowed to continue learning. Left to my own devices learning is probably far less efficient, but it is so much easier.

Oh, also, I totally can’t afford it. Very much I can’t afford to go back to school. Another dilemma solved by lack of money.

I just saw two people running up the street carrying yoga mats. What kind of society are we living in where people need to rush to a relaxing thing like yoga. Shame on everybody.

Anyway, since I haven’t really got much else to say, now is as good a time as any to mention that Kiiip, Marq and Yours Truly are planning on going to a Science Fiction Convention later this month. I don’t know if this is something that has been happening every year and I just never noticed or if this is the first time we’ve had one in Halifax since my childhood. Either way I will be at this one, and I will be too poor to afford anything. But I might see Chekov. So that’s pretty awesome.

So when I was a kid I saw a UFO. It was when I was walking to school one day, probably this was around 1990 or so. As UFO sightings go, it is really on the boring side of the scale. I have tried to represent it as best I can recall in the three panels above which depict it as it flies in front of a cloud. As you can see, it’s just kinda blue and white. The exact blue of the sky and the exact white of the cloud. Because of that it really seems more like atmospheric phenomena than alien spacecraft, but hopefully that is just what they want us to think.

Haiku!

Boring UFO.
Probably not aliens.
I am still your friend.

So that is my UFO story. Not much, but it’s all I got, so I’d thought I’d add it to the Book of PDR on this similarly nice day. Of course, now that I’m not nine, a nice day like this doesn’t make for a nice UFO-spottin’ walk to school. Nowadays it means a sweltering apartment where the heat wakes me up after four hours and I just can’t get back to sleep. Oh how times change.

So anyway, while I am sure that the universe is big enough that alien life must be out there, they haven’t visited me yet. When they do, I’ll put in a good word for the rest of you.

So far being not at work is already feelin’ fine. I’ve gotten many errands done quicker than I usually do. And it’s only Saturday morning! Sweet. Let’s see if I can’t do something worthwhile with the time yet to come.

Of course, I’ve also got to waste some time. With that in mind we got Joust for the NES. I can’t say I’m any better at games than I ever was, but at least I’m playing a classic.

The only really pitfall of my time off is that my computer has betrayed me. Well, betrayed me is kind of a strong word. It implies my computer used to be on my side. My computers have always been about rolling their own way. I can hitch a ride and get some benefits from it, but they don’t really care if I’m doing well or not. This particular laptop had been doing strange things such as constantly turning the volume to maximum, making the letter “b” appear for no reason when I hit enter, insert, delete, right shift or the arrow keys and occasionally turns off its own ability to pick up wireless. Troublesome, but I was used to it.

But now it has all changed! Now it is constantly turning the volume to minimum, making the letter “c” appear for no reason when I hit enter, insert, delete, right shift or the arrow keys and occasionally turns off its own ability to pick up wireless. The primary problem with this is that, when my volume is maxed out, I can still listen to it. When it is minimal I can not. I have had music to play me to sleep since listening to the radio as a child and though I can sleep without it, I am convinced that I don’t sleep as well. I wake up feeling bad when I don’t have music as I fall asleep. I don’t know why, but it seems to be backed up. Also, without volume, watching the Daily Show and Colbert becomes pretty hard.

As for the change from letter “b” to letter “c”, that just freaks me out because I can almost imagine reasons why those buttons might accidentally write one letter, but for it to suddenly switch letters it just hurts my brain.

Computers, man. They’re complicated.

Apparently these problems are not uncommon with my particular make of laptop. I’m not about to open my laptop up and pull a plug any time soon as one dude suggests, but man I would like to. I just fear I would kill the computer in the process.

Anyway, later.