I should have done this earlier this week but I got distracted by various things, such as sleep, food, and Resident Evil 5.
This past weekend was Portland’s sixth annual Stumptown Comics Fest held in a small exhibit hall in NE Portland, nearby the Lloyd Center Mall. I’m no comics expert by any means nor a convention connosieur, but I’d say it was a blast. As far as comic book related conventions go, I’ve only been to one other. That was last year at San Diego Comic Con, which is pretty much the mother of them all. Comparing the two conventions is like comparing a dorm room to Buckingham Palace. Buckingham Palace is a place everyone knows about and visits for the big names and history and energy. A dorm room is small, cramped, and is potentially full of friendly people you can get to know easily. That’s what I think Comics Fest was. It’s not high energy but it was personal. It was full of self published artists just trying to get people to know and see their stuff. Unlike Comic Con, it’s not full of corporate booths. In fact, I think the whole exhibit hall was the size of two or three of the bigger exhibits in Comic Con, maybe one if you could find the right one (there were definitely some big ass exhibit lots).
But since Comic Con is huge you’d almost think that it’s be an omnibus of entertainment. That’s actually what I thought before I went to SCF. The problem with a huge venue is that it actually dissuades the little guy. You don’t see many webcomic guys there short of Penny Arcade and PvP Online. You don’t see many upcoming talents selling their limited run screen printed comics. They just get lost in this huge wave of exhibitors or get shoved in the corner where there’s little to no traffic despite the exorbitant prices to get a booth spot at all.
Stumptown Comics Fest is so much influenced by Portland’s art scene and community, it’s hard to imagine it being any way else. It makes so much sense, it’s funny that I didn’t really know what to expect before I went when it should have been so obvious.
The most important thing I learned at SCF is fully understanding the person behind the art. It’s so easy to look at something and judge it on its own without thinking about the fact that a living breathing person not so much unlike me that I can hang out with (like at a party or a pier on the river) actually sat down and pour their time and soul into a piece of entertainment/art that I sit down and read. It’s really inspiring. It makes me want to get into art again. If there’s one thing about me relating to hobbies and arts is that I’m pretty non-committal. Meeting people with such passion for the art and the community really makes me want to work hard at a craft and produce a piece of work I can really call my own and that I can show people and be proud of.
I feel old.
I was visiting my alma-mater yesterday. (Saying that makes me feel old.) The new freshmen were coming in, their last day with their parents, their first day as free adults. I was there to get free food, a noble endeavor, of course. All the new students are young, naive, unscarred by the rigors of college and the real world. I thought back to when I was a freshman. I thought about how it was five years ago. I remember how big the school felt. I felt the anxiety of being in a new place surrounded by new people in the same boat I was. Five years. That’s longer than I’d been in one place/school in my life. It was a long time ago. I’m a different person now. Then I realized, these kids, they were in 8th grade when I started college. They were born in 1990. Jesus Christ. I felt like I needed a walking stick.
So much can change in five years. So much I could have done but didn’t. So much I did do that I wish I didn’t. It’s weird. I kinda envy these kids. But at the same time, I don’t really want to go back to all the petty problems, all the silly deadlines, silly naive people. I miss one thing over all, above seeing my friends all the time (I can deal with that), above being able to stay up all night and have people around doing the exact same thing, and that is the carefree life that was college life. No parents, no worries about bills/rent, no worrying about getting a job or sleeping at a reasonable hour instead of playing video games all night. If life got tough, just drop a class. No big deal. Things were so simple. That’s what I miss the most.
But at least I don’t have to worry about writing silly 10 page papers on topics I care nothing about. There’s the bright side.
For most of the last 5 years, I’ve been having weird sleep hours. I’m usually up late, past 2 or 3AM on average, waking up any time between 10AM and 4PM depending on when I go to bed or if I have class or not. Being unemployed as I am, this hadn’t changed for a while. It actually got worse for a while. Let us establish that I’m not a morning person whatsoever. I’m a creature of the night. I like night time. I like being up. That’s just how I am. However, for the past week and a half, I’ve had this uncanny and uncontrollable ability of waking up before dawn and not being able to go back to sleep. It started last Friday night when I went to bed at a reasonable hour (let’s say 1AM). I woke up on Saturday at 6AM. The next night I went to bed around 12AM and woke up at 5AM. This has really messed up my day. I don’t know what to do in the mornings. I’m not used to being up in the early mornings so I’ve been wasting a lot of time. I get tired in the later afternoon and sometimes nap (which doesn’t at all help my sleep at night). Plus I usually work out in the evenings, which has pretty much gone out the window.
Long story short, I need to fix my routine to accommodate this new occurrence. I still haven’t figured out why it’s happening, but I find that it’s somewhat of a blessing, somewhat of a curse. I sleep more regularly now but I don’t know if I’m really getting enough sleep anymore. I used to be able to sleep ten hours a day whenever, now I can’t even get back to sleep in the mornings. Weird thing is, when I take a nap and wake up a few hours later, I could easily fall back asleep again, but I don’t because it’d mess me up even more.
This morning was interesting, though. I had a dream where I woke up around 9AM and was surprised that I broke the “curse” despite going to bed before midnight (if I go to bed at 5AM, 9AM is when I would wake up now). I soon actually woke up from this dream and checked the clock. It was 5:30AM. I was not happy. Fortunately, I was actually able to fall back asleep and wake up around 8AM. Perhaps I’m actually making some progress.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about things. I do that a lot, in case you didn’t know. Today I found a site that talks about the different personalities from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (personality test). I took that test about a month ago and it turns out I’m an INFP, which is somewhat rare in our society. Incidentally, most great writers are also INFP. That’s kinda interesting. What is it about INFPs that make us more apt at writing? I don’t necessarily consider myself a great writer but I’m working on it. I’d like to be a good writer. The site’s description of my personality type told me a lot of things about myself that I don’t like, and a lot that’s fascinating and interesting, most of it was dead on. It’s scary to me how close it was to how I actually am. It tells me a lot about why I do act the way I do, but the most important part was it told me a lot about my strengths, which isn’t something that I always knew but was never able to concretely describe them. Interestingly enough, the description also talks about how INFPs have a hard time figuring out their strengths.
I still don’t know what I want to do with my future, but that site helped me realize more and more that I want to do something different, something creative. I want to express myself. I want to describe the world through my eyes with my words. The hard part is following through without much experience. How does one just write for a living? Don’t you need a portfolio of some type? Just write. Keep writing. Rewrite. That’s how it’s done. I just wish I had started sooner, and I had something to show for myself. It’s the story of my life. I guess we all have to start somewhere.
I think I figured out something last night while trying to get to sleep. For as long as I can remember, I’ve half-assed every important thing in my life that I didn’t feel like dealing with. I go the extra mile for friends and stuff but for school, work, working out, eating right, etc. I’ve half-assed it (with exceptions, of course). I never knew why. So I was laying around thinking about the job search, which I vastly underestimated how anxiety inducing it would be, and I realized that I really don’t like doing my best and giving my all because I’m afraid of getting hurt and rejected. Same reason why I never made a website in years past. I didn’t want to put myself out there and be proud of what I do only to get shat on by the outside world.
It’s been the same with girls, school, whatever. But you know what? It’s a bullshit way of thinking. I can’t live in my own world thinking everything will be okay without doing anything like I did when I was younger. I need to stop sabotaging my own life and future. I have to stand on my own and find out what I am good at, work on things I’m less adept at, generally make myself a better person. Then and only then will I be happy and comfortable with who I am and thus become someone that other people are happy to be with.
Over the last few years, especially in the last few months, I’ve been noticing something about the relationships between people and how fragile they really are. I’ve more and more realized how important contact is in keeping people tied together. Sure, you can say that the internet ties us together but it’s so easy to just have small talk conversations to people you’d normally talk to more deeply in person. It’s somewhat saddening that people we think we made good connections to in a context will so easily lose contact with you after being apart. I thought when I left Taiwan last year, I’d keep in touch with the new friends I made there but I rarely talk to them, and sometimes when I get around to messaging them on Facebook or whatever, they never reply. When I left Japan I was thinking of keeping more in touch with my host family but I got lazy and never made the effort.
Losing connections with someone doesn’t even have to be through distance. It’s so easy for a relationship to go from friendly and comfortable to awkward. For example, if you avoid someone for a week just because you don’t feel like dealing with them, it could easily become a habit. People tend to keep the status quo. If they break the silence they may feel the need to explain themselves and are embarrassed for acting that way in the first place so they’ll just continue to avoid that which makes them anxious, when it could very well be not a big deal at all.
I feel kinda sad how easy it is for relationships to deteriorate, despite nothing bad actually happening and despite both side having generally positive feelings about each other. But I guess that’s just how life works. You have to try to make things work or else we’ll all fall victim to group think.