Random Erik

Blizzard has a lot to answer for. For those of you not in the geeky know, Blizzard publishes the Warcraft series of games including World of Warcraft, the massively multi-player time vacuum. You know how it is (well, some of you know how it is): You sign on “just for a little bit” to finish some quests and kill some of those annoying pansy Alliance players. The creepy little elves and nasty nasty humans, death to them all.

Four hours later, when the bladder has filled up, you consider getting up. “How desperate am I,” you ask. “Another half an hour? Can I find a place to hide where one of those creepy, nasty, smelly, deviate Alliance players won’t find me and slaughter me while I answer nature’s call?”. Each and every one of us can relate to that, I’m sure.

Anyway, I think the comic speaks for itself. It’s a good thing that all the good stuff has been invented and created by now, because if Isaac Newton or Jonas Salk or William Shakespeare were able to sign on to World of Warcraft, our world (the real one) would be a very different place.

See you online. And if you’re one of those dirty double-dealing scumbag Alliance players, you better hope you see me first. For the Horde!!

Second place. Not too bad, really. 18 classes over 7 days, and that’s accounting for my zero classes on Saturday. So an average of 3 classes a day. It’s little wonder that I’m exhausted. If you haven’t read my previous blog on this, you may better understand what I’m talking about by reading that one first.

There were no more fart- and hippie-laden Yoga classes. I don’t know if the other Yoga classes are better than the one I took since I didn’t bother showing up for any more. I have no other horrible yet funny stories of that magnitude for the rest of the week. There was a cycle spin class with a heavy metal soundtrack, played to a volume that left my ears ringing (and no, it’s not just because I’m getting older… this was the crap from my teenage years and the volume was extreme to the point that the loose folds in my clothing were bouncing to the bass vibrations). Then there was the retro class which turned out to be step aerobics. The gym performed an act of sheer genius for that one by snatching an instructor straight out of 1986. The technology involved must have been awesome, and I hope to see it used for the betterment of mankind. The only things lacking were leg warmers and a side pony-tail.

But I made it through both of those classes: No walking out, no hideous odors, no terrible readings from mushy “spiritual” books.

The final party was okay, and Maggie and I had a good time talking with some of the people we’d met over the week. Some of those actual connections I had hoped for, and that made me happy. They served tacos and margaritas, though I wisely avoided the latter having learned that tequila and I don’t get along. I guess you do get just a bit smarter as you age.

And they announced the winners.

The women made a very strong showing, and a woman I’d seen in almost every class I took came in third for her gender with 9 classes more than I managed. The overall women’s winner wasn’t there to accept her prize as she was TAKING A CLASS!!! Now that’s an in your face.

The men were pathetic by comparison. Our winner did very well, with around 30 classes. I met him the day before the finale, and he had already established an unbridgeable gap in our numbers. Then he went all out on the last day and added seven more to his total. The fact that I came in second with 18 shows how poorly our sex performed. Though I’d seen very few men in the classes, I kept thinking that they must be in secret Y chromosome classes not open to my type of guy. Maybe most men were just too busy pumping iron to do something as girly as taking exercise classes.

So what did I win for my glorious silver-medal performance? Nothing. The winners got big gift certificates to a nice local restaurant. Bupkus for me and my fellow also-rans. Not even a t-shirt or a free smoothie at the gym’s smoothie bar. Not even a keychain. While I know that they were under no obligation to reward me, I still felt a bit dejected by this turn of events. When the British call someone “mean,” they are saying the person is a cheapskate. Somehow, being rewarded for my performance with only a quick mention of my name seemed mean to me, in both the British and American senses.

But Maggie is proud of me, I’m proud of me and coming in second felt like a real accomplishment after my weekend crisis of faith. So that’s it. No real moral, just an exhausting experience that showed me I can still hack it, physically speaking.

And here is my class card, though I scanned it earlier in the week so it shows far fewer courses completed than it did when I turned it in. Just for the historical record, you understand.

The card, halfway through the contest

Sometimes I can be, well, stubborn. Once upon a time I won a bar bet involving 10 pound dumbbells. Why there were ten pound dumbbells in the bar and who brought them I’m still a bit unclear on. I think we were making fun of the guy who had them, which is what led to the bet.

Simply stated, it was an endurance thing: Hold your arm straight out with the elbow locked, dumbbell in your fist, and see who can stand it the longest. After a minute, it started to hurt. One of the guys dropped out. Two minutes, and another dropout, leaving two of us. Three minutes and my arm was starting to burn. Four minutes and I wanted to give up. But I wasn’t going to give. The stubborn thing had kicked in. The other guy gave at 5 minutes. I held it beyond him for a slow, painful and utterly pointless count of 20. An “in your face,” I guess. The sad thing is, I think the prize for winning was not having to buy the next round. Oh yeah, a prize up there with winning the lottery, oh yeah.

This all came back up this week. Our gym announced “Hell Week”, a contest involving taking the most classes over the period of a week. Cycling courses, running courses, abs workouts, kickboxing, yoga, pilates and more fun of that variety. Something in my brain twisted. I was gonna do it. Not only that, I was gonna win. I worked out the maximum number of courses I could take, planned a strategy and steeled myself for the ordeal.

Okay, day 1 started badly. A 6 a.m. cycling class, the first class of the contest, went on without me. I couldn’t sleep the night before, and when the time rolled around, I really needed to stay in bed. That’s okay, I made the noon cycling and was still off to a strong start. Pilates that evening was great, as was an X-Factor class (lots of running in odd ways) and an abs class (15 minutes of actual hell).

Friday started at 6:30, cycling again. I hurried home, walked the dog, and went back for Hatha Flow Yoga. Here’s where things started to go South. We started by sitting cross-legged, our eyes closed, and had a… reading. An odd reading about finding your guru and some story about a woman who’s kid got locked in a hotel room. She decided to lie on the floor and touch his fingers through the gap beneath the door rather than doing the sensible thing and getting the hotel staff to just open the damn door. The moral was pretty muddy, and ended with the line “it’s not enough, and yet it is”. The kind of nonsensical hippy crap that I can’t bear, especially after living among hippies during and after college. I wanted to scream “It is or it isn’t: that kind of statement is just spiritual and intellectual laziness!”. I held my tongue.

I should have held my breath. As we started the actual workout, someone in the room began emitting a strong, sulfurous stream of gasses. And I found it hard to hold plank, as an elbow injury earlier in the year still isn’t completely healed. As the instructor started quickly calling out yoga terms without acknowledging any beginners who didn’t know what she was talking about, and as another jet of flatulence became apparent, I fled the room. I’ve got nothing against Yoga, but this teacher had obviously eaten too much granola.

Still, I managed three classes that day. Today, I intended to do three as well. I’ve done zero. Tomorrow, I’ll probably do one, maybe two, or maybe even zero.

The stubborness has slipped. A serious session of self-examination took its place. Why was I doing this? Very few people seemed to be competing, so I felt I had a strong chance if I kept up the pace. But I was a bit sore, and I realized that this contest would require most of my time for several days to come. I honestly wanted to go to the farmer’s market with Maggie and Storm (the lovely and perfect Golden Retriever) instead of pushing my body to its limits. I wanted to stop obsessing about schedules and endurance. So I let go.

Why had I wanted to do this?

Partly, I think, because I was never athletic as a kid and was always teased about my lack of ability in gym class. Now that I’m older, I’m more active than most of my peers. Was it time for another “in your face”, perhaps?

Partly because I’m feeling really down about myself. I’ve had trouble looking in the mirror lately: My idea of what I look like and the face in the mirror are too different. A recent “Good Lord, I’m ugly” episode left me shaken by its intensity. Maybe I could get that muscular stomach to make up for my face?

And partly (and maybe mostly) because I felt the need to be part of something. Something to pull me from the sense of isolation that’s been growing for a while now. Fitting in has never been something that’s come easily to me. Too geeky for the average person, to “normal” for the geeks. Shy about calling people up to do things. That sort of thing. Going to all the classes, proving myself the strongest, seeing the other contestants regularly… it seemed like a connection.

But I knew it wasn’t, not really. After the contest was over, there would be no real continuity to the achievement. This morning, it all started to feel empty. I’m glad that I’ve achieved what I have, but continuing at my initial level of intensity no longer makes sense, at least not to me.

I’m still going to some classes, I’m still going to attend the party at the end of the week and see if I get a small consolation prize. But there’s not going to be a stubborn “in your face.” I’ll settle for a drink and an evening of socializing in the company of my wife. Maybe it’s not enough, but it is enough… oh forget it, even after all this, I can’t swallow that. Instead, I’ll let you know how it all ends.

When exactly did my love for Japanese entertainment begin? I’ve thought about that a lot this year, as I’ve worked on comics and felt the influence of Manga in general (and Osamu Tezuka in particular) on my art. And as I taught Drawing for Japanese Animation to teenagers. And as I travelled to Dallas to attend A-Kon to talk with other artists and geek out in the movie rooms. And as I watched my Netflix queue fill up with Anime.

Anyway, I’ve thought about it a lot this year.

Last week I began working on a comics story for a class I’m taking, and decided to go with an old folktale. I remembered the story of The Magic Teakettle from a book of Japanese folktales, a book that I read when quite young and if memory serves belonged to my brother. There was an image of a half-teakettle/half-badger dancing on a tightrope while holding a parasol and waving a fan (perhaps the first openly gay character in my literary experience). I loved that story. An early exposure to a Japanese tale, and one that I remember pretty clearly even now. I looked up the story on the Web to clarify a few points, but it was mostly there in my head already. But I studiously avoided trying to find that picture. I want to do something that’s my own.

But I think my affinity for Japanese pop culture probably originates with after-school television circa 1973. We’d just returned from Germany, where the only television I watched was the Porky Pig show. So when I discovered a white lion cub with black-tipped ears and a catchy theme tune, it was love. Kimba the White Lion, created by seminal Manga and Anime artist Osamu Tezuka, had me hooked with its humor and adventure and heart. I watched Speed Racer, as well, but not with the fervent love I had for the little white lion (I don’t think he was albino, because he had blue eyes).

Warning, a little side note: Perhaps my distaste for the Lion King comes from how blatantly Disney ripped off the show. I won’t try to convince you here, just check this out and decide for yourself. Oh, and there was that Simpson’s joke where a lion appears in the sky to say “I’m proud of you Kimba… I mean, Simba…”. Side note complete.

There was a long period where I paid little attention to Anime and Manga. I had no time for Battle of the Planets, Voltron or the other giant robot stuff of my teenage years (though I did watch Ultraman during the Kimba period). Friends recommended a few Anime films: Ninja Scroll and Vampire Hunter D (the first Vampire Hunter D) are ones I remember watching and not caring for at all. Some of you are gasping at the sacrilege, some of you have never heard of them. But I also discovered the good stuff: Cowboy Bebop, Full Metal Alchemist, Metropolis, and the films of Miyazaki. Check ‘em out, you just might thank me.

Now that I’m drawing again, after a long break in my 20s and early 30s, I find that I’m heavily influenced by Anime. I love the freedom of design over realism, I love the deceptive simplicity, I love the feeling of fun in much of the style. I’m not really drawing in the Anime style, but my style wouldn’t be the same without my heavy exposure to the stuff.

The first drawing I remember doing, and I mean sitting down and really wanting to draw something specific, was Kimba the White Lion. That damn Kimba, as my mother once called him. He was there in the beginning. And it’s nice to look at my latest work and see that he’s still hanging around.

We are truly living in a Golden Age. An age of miracle and wonders. An age of enlightenment and artistic achievement. And I realized it tonight while drinking wine and eating chocolate (oops, “Chocolat”) cake at the Alamo Drafthouse. Lord how I do love Austin.

The Alamo has been doing Saturday morning cartoons every Monday night, a buck to get in or five dollars more for unlimited breakfast cereal. I skipped the cereal: I’m too concerned about fiber content in my cereal now that I’m old, and not even nostalgia will get me eating Lucky Charms, Cookie Crisp or Trix (silly middle-aged guy, Trix are for…). So with a glass of wine in my hand and a big piece of cake for afters, I sat down for a themed show of “spooky” Saturday morning TV from my childhood.

My heavens but the stuff I watched as a kid was bad. Though the shows listed writers, I couldn’t imagine anyone actually creating a script for some of this. The list of animators for each show was very long, and I can only imagine that it was because the individual animators didn’t last for more than a day each, since a brain-damaged marmoset could have turned out most of the work I was seeing. The humor came down to aping whatever adult shows were currently popular (I picked up on Laugh-In and Get Smart as common themes). And the ghosts were still pretty much crooks with the poorly thought-out idea that drawing attention to yourself as a supernatural freak show will scare people away and allow you to get on with your nefarious deeds.

I was very surprised to see that Goober and the Ghost Chasers, a show I remember as being better than average, was particularly bad. Why does the dog turn invisible? I don’t remember. Why does the good looking guy disappear with the attractive girl while the schlub and the dog have most of the adventures? Hmmmmm. Why are the Partridge Family kids involved? Especially Danny? To get a likeness, the Partridge’s are always shown face on, which was the creepiest part of the whole evening.

I don’t really remember the Drac Pack. Terrible, simply terrible. The vampire had Maxwell Smart’s nasal tone and joke book. Then there was a werewolf whose power is to blow big winds (I didn’t see any pigs lurking about) and a southern-accented Frankenstein’s Monster, who seemed to have no powers whatsoever. All led by Big D, who happens to be Count Dracula trying to improve the image of monsters by leading the kids remotely from his coffin.

The rest is a blur of bad animation, worse writing and even worse voice-acting. We watched this stuff? As I may have mentioned, I watch kid’s programming, a lot. And much of it is still truly terrible. Pokemon is an abomination before the Lord, I know. But the current crop puts what I saw tonight to shame: Stuff like Fairly Oddparents, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Spongebob, Kids Next Door and especially The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. I mean, if parents and Right-wing watchdogs understood some of the references in Billy and Mandy, Cartoon Network would be off the air and it’s staff in the stockade. For a kiddie show, it takes as many risks as the Family Guy, and can be every bit as funny to boot. When a cartoon little girl quotes Aleister Crowley, you know you’re in some strange waters.

So we are in a Golden Age of kids programming. We may remember fondly those Saturday morning cartoons of yore, through that gossamer haze of nostalgia and sugar-induced comas. But frankly, they stunk. As an adult, you can enjoy, even laugh out loud at, some of the current crop. Kids today. They don’t know how good they’ve got it.