Tag Archives: mental health

by

the character you’ve been waiting for–and the cover reveal!

Hi everyone, thanks for sticking with me through this month-long tour of the characters of Sam’s Town, my zombie apocalypse novel releasing…any day now! My fantastic cover artist, Mike Nair, has finished his work, and it looks great! I’m going to show it to you at the end of the post, but if you’re too excited to wait, go ahead and scroll down now (Sam and I would just appreciate if you came back here and read the rest afterward).

Today I want to tell you about Sam, who is both the protagonist of my novel and, to a great extent, my concept of what a good (though flawed) man looks like. Forgive me while I get sappy for a second: I was telling a friend the other day that all this character development I did over the past couple of years–for Adrian, Joe, and Frankie too, but mainly for Sam–helped me to figure out what I was looking for in a man I would want to marry. And right around the time I finished writing my novel this past summer, I met a man like that in real life. My boyfriend, Jordan (who I hope is reading this), has many of Sam’s best qualities–his loyalty, his intelligence, and most of all, his gentleness.

But enough about my personal life. What can I tell you about Sam Larson without taxing your patience with an unusually long post? He’s the writer and illustrator of a web comic called The Adventures of Sparky the Sidekick. He loves movies and will watch just about anything, but some of his favorites are the Godfather trilogy and George Romero’s zombie classics (the latter of which serves him well now that he’s living in a world where zombies actually exist). He’s a good cook who specializes in Italian food, though he doesn’t show off that skill very often. He hates conflict. He likes to feel useful. He struggles with depression. He’s smart and persistent, which makes him good at problem-solving. (In the novel, he tinkers with a vending machine until he figures out how to open it without a key. Which reminds me of another fact about Sam–he loves Coca-Cola.) He has a gift for making other people feel calm, which makes him the perfect counterpart to his frenzied best friend Adrian. He has these enormous pale blue eyes (just like his mother’s) that are always making people ask him if he’s okay, which he finds incredibly frustrating. He constantly underrates himself. He’s stronger than he thinks, physically and mentally, as the circumstances of the novel force him to discover.

Here are some fun facts about Sam:

  • I imagined a version of this character years ago, when I was in high school. His name was Sparky (like the aforementioned sidekick). You can read about the evolution of Sam in this post.
  • I once wrote a post about Mr. (Fred) Rogers in the voice of Sam.
  • Just like I gave some of my random quirks to Adrian and Ramona, I endowed Sam with this (understandable, I think) phobia that I have: He hates to watch people using intravenous needles in movies or TV. Stabbing a zombie in the head, fine. Shooting up heroin or getting an IV, no thank you. He has to look away.

And here are the first two paragraphs of my novel, in which we meet the title character:

You could tell by his apartment that Sam Larson lived alone. There were always a few dishes in the sink and a few pencils and sketchpads sitting around, and there was a sag in the middle of the couch where he usually sat. Sam worked from home, mostly. He taught an occasional art class or appeared at a comic book convention (his name was never high on the billing), but mostly he sat in his apartment and made comics. That was how he liked it.

On the last Friday night in July, Sam made spaghetti carbonara and ate a plate of it.  Then he turned on his epic movie scores station on Pandora and started drawing.  He was working on an installment of The Adventures of Sparky the Sidekick, his superhero web comic that capitalized on the ironic potential of foregrounding the affable best friend and downplaying the character who would normally be the hero.  Sam’s fans—they were few but loyal and willing to express their loyalty with their money—loved Sparky because he was witty and long-suffering and always came out okay in the end, despite all the crap he deflected away from his rather useless best friend.  But none of his fans knew that Sam drew Sparky as a version of himself—a short, round guy with straw-yellow hair and big washed-out-blue eyes that were always making people ask if he was okay.

And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for: Here’s the cover of Sam’s Town! What’s your favorite part about it? I’ll pass your feedback along to the artist!

cover

Stay tuned for the official release announcement!

by

my best Friend

I promise I’m not turning this into a Friends blog, but I also promised that I would write an occasional Friends post while working my way through all ten seasons for the first time, so now that I’m finished with Season One and a few episodes into Two, I thought I’d share some of my observations thus far.

I’ve been surprised by how smart the humor is and by my unexpected liking for all the main characters. I’ve been frustrated by the failures the show gets itself into because it’s trying to be two things: both a snappy, hilarious, almost sketch-based comedy and a realistic dramedy with relatable characters. Sometimes the combination just doesn’t work. For example, the running joke about how critical Monica’s mother is toward her (and how gamely Monica, though annoyed, puts up with this) is really off-putting to me. I think it would be a funny SNL sketch, but there’s no way this relationship would look this way in real life. In general, I dislike all the parents I’ve met so far; though I appreciate that the show portrays young adults having relationships with their parents, I feel like the parent characters are mostly guest-star vehicles who come across as less mature than their kids, who aren’t terribly mature themselves. An extreme eye-rolling example: the one where Joey’s mom is not only okay with his dad having an affair but actually tells him to go back to his mistress because he’s supposedly (or “supposably,” as Joey would say) easier to live with when he’s got a woman on the side. Please. But on a more positive note regarding guest stars and secondary characters, I really liked Phoebe’s sweet physicist boyfriend David (played by Hank Azaria), and I’m looking forward to seeing more of him when he gets back from Minsk.

The funniest gag I’ve seen on Friends so far? While I laugh out loud almost every episode, for this, I have to go with the scene in which Chandler convinces Joey to use “Joseph Stalin” as his stage name. (Joey, later: “Apparently there’s already a Josef Stalin. You’d think you’d have known that.”)

And this brings me to the main topic of my post today: Chandler. I really like him, and I think I’m a lot like him. I started to realize this last night when I watched The One Where Heckles Dies, early in Season Two. Mr. Heckles, the cranky downstairs neighbor, dies and leaves all his possessions–basically a pile of hoarder junk–to “the loud girls upstairs” (Monica and Rachel). While the gang is going through his stuff, Chandler starts to realize he resembles Heckles not only in harmless ways, such as the geeky clubs he belonged to in high school, but also in more serious ones, like the petty criticisms he comes up with as excuses to break up with women. He starts to worry that he will die alone like Heckles and resolves to change his ways. Although this awakening is played for laughs like nearly everything on Friends (as it should be–the show gets clunky when it tries to be serious), while watching it, I felt a strong sadness and empathy for Chandler.

Because, you see, I’ve broken up with guys for stupid reasons. I worry about driving people away with my critical spirit–not just potential romantic partners, but potential friends and other potentially important people. I have a fear of commitment (which, on Friends, is portrayed as a male trait but I think is more related to personality than gender). And do I use humor as a coping mechanism? Have you read this blog? (See, I even emphasize words like Chandler.) If the blog isn’t enough to convince you, my students and colleagues think I’m hilarious because I go straight to humor when I’m feeling uncomfortable or don’t know how to present myself to new people. It’s also a great way to keep people at arm’s length (back to that fear of commitment).

The show typically offers pretty realistic, if overly simplified, psychological reasons for why the characters do the things they do (kind of like that jerk psychiatrist Phoebe dated for one episode), and the reason given for why Chandler does all the things in the above paragraph is that his parents got divorced when he was a kid. That didn’t happen to me, so there must be some other reason why I have trouble getting close to people, and this blog is not the place to explore it. In fact, I’m going to stop here before this gets too personal. Did I make you laugh? Good. That’s what I do.

 

by

because I know you care what I think about Avengers: Endgame

Dare I add my voice to the swirling conversation? I dare. This isn’t a true review, just a list of some of my observations. There may be some spoilers–if you can figure out what I’m talking about.

I liked the movie! I didn’t fall asleep, and that’s no small feat when we’re talking about a three-hour movie that, for me, started at 7:00 pm. Although some of the most scene-stealing characters (Peter Parker, Peter Quill, Peter…no, I think that’s all the Peters) were among the disappeared (N.B. Did this scenario remind anyone else of the TV series The Leftovers?), this allowed some former background characters to step forward, and they carried this responsibility well. I’m thinking in particular of Don Cheadle’s character, whose relationship to Tony Stark I have given up trying to remember, like a lot of things in this cinematic universe. (Sorry, folks. I never claimed to be a true card-carrying Marvel geek.)

I didn’t understand why all the infinity stones came to Ironman in the end. Please do not reply to this post and mansplain it to me. If I really wanted to know, I’m sure I could choose from many different mansplaining websites and YouTube videos. But I don’t really need to know. It’s enough for me that the stones did come to him. It made sense with Tony Stark’s character arc (which was quite moving), and besides, I trust that Dr. Strange knew what was going on. Because of Dumbledore, I have a lot of experience trusting wizards even when I don’t understand their plans.

I want to spend the rest of this post talking about Thor because, as you may know from previous posts, he and his world are the only parts of the MCU that I really get into and buy the Blu-Rays of and write conference papers about. First, let me get my dreamboat Loki out of the way–I was actually pretty happy with the cumulative three minutes or so that he appeared in the movie. It was more than I expected. Thor, on the other hand, was not at all what I expected. I thought it was fascinating that the non-human Avenger was the one who basically dealt with a mental health crisis during this film, though his decline into physical sloth and mental inertia was played mostly for laughs. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing–more than half of good comedy is based on the truism that sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. Although I want to be clear that there’s absolutely nothing inherently funny about someone turning to alcohol to deal with grief, guilt, and regret, there’s no harm in audiences chuckling at Thor’s Norwegian bachelor pad shared with his interplanetary bros Korg and Meek. And I loved that we got to visit Dark World-era Asgard and witness Thor’s heartfelt (though, even here, rather funny) conversation with his mother, Frigga, who was always one of my favorite characters in this saga. I also appreciated the fact that when Thor reacquired his hammer, he didn’t immediately turn back into the svelte warrior of the previous films, ripped abs and all. (Though he did suddenly get a complicated braid in his beard when he started channeling lightning during the final battle–not sure how that happened.) I’m glad to see that Thor has taken passage on Starlord’s ship; those two characters (because of their fantastic actors) have wonderful comedic chemistry, and I hope we get to see them in another film.

Well, that’s all I’ve got. I almost hesitate to ask, but I will: What did you think of Avengers: Endgame?

 

by

more musical observations

My posts have been taking a musical turn of late, not necessarily by design. Here are two more semi-profound musings I had about songs this past weekend.

  1. In a post several years ago, I grouped together three movies that came out in 1999 and summarized them all with the famous line from the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” (1998): “You bleed just to know you’re alive.” I found myself thinking about this lyric again while listening to a song from just two years later, “Pinch Me” by the Barenaked Ladies (2000). I realize now that I’ve typed it out that this is a really unfortunate convergence of song title and band name (well, let’s just say a really unfortunate band name, period), but the title simply refers to the song protagonist’s feeling that he is asleep and needs to be (but is not sure if he wants to be) awakened in order to face the real world. (By the way, you may know this song better as the one with the line, “I could hide out under there/I just made you say ‘underwear.’”) The song could be read as a plea from a depressed person who can’t muster the courage to even go outside his door. I have a feeling that many cultural critics read it, along with “Iris,” as an anthem of the malaise of late Gen X-ers and early Millennials—people my own age, who grew up hearing these songs as background music—and perhaps some of them connect this malaise with the sense of entitlement that they are so fond of attributing to people in that age range. I prefer to think of true interpretation of these songs as somewhere in between: they’re not only about people with diagnosable mental health conditions, but neither should they be dismissed as the whines of bored young people who have to manufacture problems in order to help themselves feel validated. I would submit that the world has gotten more overwhelming and that people my age and younger are less equipped to deal with it than those who came before us, and these songs are just evidence of that. I’ll leave you with that to ponder.
  2. Now, something more uplifting. While running on Saturday, I listened to one of my favorite songs of all time, Queen’s “We Are the Champions,” and maybe it was all the adrenaline or the fact that my institution has graduation in less than two weeks, but in any case, I came up with a brief commencement address on the theme of this song. Here it is: Have you ever wondered why we use the term “commencement” for something that we usually talk about as an ending? Also, have you ever wondered why the song says, “We are the champions,” implying that we’ve already won, but then goes on to say, “We’ll keep on fighting to the end?” The answer to both these questions is the same: it’s that the struggle is never over in this life, is it? You’re celebrating the end of college, and indeed you should. You are a champion. But you still face the fight of career, relationships, and just getting through life. You can “go the distance” like Rocky, but then you still have Rocky II, II, IV, IV, and Rocky Balboa and Creed and Creed II—you see what I mean. The Queen song goes on to include several more of these “already and not yet” constructions (to borrow a term from theology): for example, the speaker of the song talks about taking his bows and his curtain calls, but just a few lines later he uses future tense: “I consider it a challenge before the whole human race/And I ain’t gonna lose.” So remember, the fight goes on. But don’t let that discourage you. [And I teach at a Christian college, so this next part applies to my students and is crucial.] Remember that you serve a God who does have time for losers. He gave his life for losers like us, and he makes us champions. The End.