There's a scene early in Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel where Takashi Shimura opens a door for ventilation, starts to walk away, then, noticing the door's starting to shut itself, goes back and opens it again. He does this a few times before he can finally rig it to stay open. That's so me. I have a tendency to chew on problems until I reach a resolution, which has put me at odds with people who prefer to avoid addressing issues. But I think it served me well last night, when I redrew the last panel of a page over and over between around midnight and 4am. Until I got it right. It was one of those things that looks so simple, and no-one's going to notice it, but I fucking mastered the motherfucker. I won't spoil what it is for you, but I will say it involved drawing something I've noticed most comic book artists avoid roughly a 100% of the time, though I've noticed people working in animation don't seem to have any trouble with it.
For some reason I can't really figure out, I woke up at around noon after falling asleep at around 8am, and couldn't get back to sleep until 2:30pm. I started thinking about a guy I knew on Live Journal formerly named Watermelontail--St. Sisyphus brought him up to me again recently. He's brought him up to me several times for reasons I've never been able to determine. Watermelontail actually seems to be a touchy subject with a lot of people and I can't quite figure out why. I have a feeling there's a big piece of the puzzle I'm missing.
After Sisyphus had mentioned the guy to me several times, I friended him for a while and almost immediately regretted it when I saw he was one of those people who used his blog to write a story serial in. Most people aren't very good writers, and I don't like to sugar-coat my criticisms or encourage people who'd probably be better off discouraged. But at the same time, I don't want to be randomly rude to some guy, so I didn't read any of his creative writing posts. I felt a little awkward in the position, though. When I eventually did read a couple of his shorter things, mainly poems, I couldn't find anything in them that particularly interested me, but I still didn't say anything. Really, the guy wasn't much of a blip on my radar. He kind of just took up space on my friends list, but it's not like he was a bother.
I think the first time I felt any kind of irritation towards him was when I mentioned to Sonya that I thought his writing was kind of boring and unimaginative and this happened to coincide with her becoming very cold towards me. Of course, I still don't know why she stopped talking to me, but Watermelontail became the centre of one of my theories. I didn't really know why, though, she'd be so sensitive about him--he wasn't even on her friends list at the time. But afterwards, I noticed she began showering him with attention, particularly his writing, which seemed to me as boring and unimaginative as ever. I guess she disagreed with me about his work, but it seemed as though there was something far more personal in it for her that caused or exacerbated a rift between us that I still don't quite understand.
Then I started to notice one or two instances where something Watermelontail said seemed to reflect things I'd said to Sonya in private e-mail. Around the same time, I found out that Watermelontail was using my name for a character in an online role playing community. I guess I ought to have found this flattering, but combined with his apparent knowledge of things I'd thought I was saying just to Sonya I started to wonder who the fuck this guy was and why he was so far into my business. He went from being a guy I barely noticed to someone who actively skeeved me out, maybe more than he really deserved. I mean, maybe he didn't ask Sonya to tell him things about me, but I also kind of resented the fact that he might have a better idea of why Sonya stopped talking to me than I did. So when he took me off his friends list after my blow up on Sonya's journal at the end of 2007, I definitely felt like it was good riddance. But, still, I barely knew the guy and he seems to be friends with a lot of my friends, so I wonder if I dislike him a lot more than he really deserves and I definitely wonder about his significance to Sonya and possibly other people. I even remember Caitlin mentioning how she'd "finally" met him at Reader Con, even though I could barely remember them interacting much at all. I guess the fellow's really special in some way I can't see and which some people maybe resent me for not seeing.
So. To whom it may concern; sorry.
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