Survivor

It is the most beautiful day outside! There is not a single cloud in the sky. I guess everything is back to normal now. The trains were back up and running this morning.

Here's a picture outside my front window which I have been sitting and staring out of for a total of about 30 hours this weekend. If you can see that guy out there, he is always on his porch, and I am always looking at him.


Yesterday wasn't quite a hurricane but the winds were still really high, and he was out there with a leaf blower, blowing the leaves off his porch. Just let that image sit around in your mind for a while, it's beautiful.

Anyway here's another page to my comic.

I thought hurricane season was over.

Here I am preparing for my very first hurricane. The subways are shut down and everyone's just sort of waiting for the storm now. I went shopping for supplies yesterday, since I was due for groceries anyway, and wanted to stock up on storm necessities like toilet paper and wine. There was a line out the door to get into Trader Joe's and a separate, longer line to get into the neighboring Trader Joe's Wine Shop. My coworker and I split up and it was madness. Trader Joe's in Manhattan is a clusterfuck on a good day so I wanted to die the entire time I was in there, but I wanted the whole disaster riot experience. Some of the shelves were empty, but it was like, the chips and the juice and the cookies shelves. You know, supplies.

We've got bottled water and food and candles and flashlights and toothpaste. I'm looking forward to just holing up here for the weekend. I downloaded some tv shows to watch, and I plan on getting some drawing done. We have a nice big window in the living room to watch the storm from, and to get pulverized by flying debris from.


I love sitting at this window and watching all my neighbors walk by. One time I saw a little boy walking his dog in the rain, crouched over, holding an umbrella over his dog instead of himself. Are you kidding me? Most adorable thing ever?

I figured I would do a post about my neighborhood, in case the hurricane destroys it and I live in a rubble pit on Monday. (On Monday I will do a post about my rubble pit).


The second floor is ours. The two giant SUVs belong to our landlord.

We live in Astoria, Queens, and we completely love it. We're a block from one of the main streets, Steinway, and if you go up a block from our apartment, the street is almost entirely hookah bars. If you go down one block, there is an overwhelming amount of discount mattress stores.

There are also a crazy amount of these little coin operated rides.


These are what I pass on my 10 minute walk to the train. I see kids on these rides ALL THE TIME. It took me a few days to get pictures of all of them because there is always a kid on them. I hope they'll survive the storm! (Both the kids and the rides, I guess.)

I also pass this restaurant.


And this night club.


And these sassy doctors at the Astoria Fashion Palace.


And Jake and Elwood at Astoria Optical.



It's pretty good.

Yeah!

Lyin'

Do you remember the lion story? Well it's back to being all I can think about. I think this is going to work this way. I have it mostly drawn out, it's gonna be 16 pages. I know I'm going to have to go back in and tweak the grays because I've got like 90% grays next to 95% grays and that is never going to print or even be visible on anyone's screen but mine.

Let me know if it doesn't make sense, my challenge is to tell the story first without relying on the words, because I am in love with the words and it's never good to be in love with anything you make because it will ALWAYS HURT YOU.

This might be happening???

Page 1 of 16???

air repair

The end of July brought a doozy of a heat wave to New York. Temperatures were over a hundred and everyone was miserable, and I spent it working at an air conditioning repair company.

The place was a small family company, and by family company I mean everyone there hated each other and screamed at each other all day long. They all had thick Brooklyn accents and called each other fucking morons about 3 times an hour. Any time I heard any of them talk to a customer on the phone they slammed the receiver down afterward and said, "Idiot." I was in heaven.

On Monday I was filling in for this girl who was on vacation, and they asked me to stay and help out during the heat. I came back on Tuesday and met the girl back from vacation, who I was supposed to be helping out by answering the phones. She got mad.



So they told me to go sit in the other room and "Chill out for a bit."

I went and sat in that room at a desk with no computer. I hadn't brought a book or anything and I didn't feel like drawing. So I just sat there for about an hour while everyone yelled at each other. The phone would ring and I would make an attempt to pick it up before the other girl did, but I was feeling pretty dejected.



After a while I think they forgot about me and I got bored so I decided I was going to answer the phone no matter what.



This ended up working out ok. I didn't know what to tell anyone who called so I just wrote down what they said in a notebook and told them I'd call them back. I never called anyone back. I wanted to call them back, but when I took my notebook around to the people in the office, no one knew the answers to anything. When was a technician going to such and such address? Can we install this? Something something service contract?

At first I thought I was just bad a taking notes, but it turns out the company just didn't know what the hell was going on, ever, at all. There was no order for how the technitions made visits. The main boss's son decided who was going where, and he just did whatever.

All I could do was tell anyone who called that I had no idea when someone would get there and that I would try and find out and I would call them back when I knew. Then I just waited in fear for them to call back to yell at me.



This went on for 2 and a half weeks.

The phones would stop ringing in the afternoon so they set me up with some bills to enter into the computer and a stack of past due invoices to follow up on. That was horrible, but at least I got to practice my polite but firm voice, which I practice at every opportunity. Most of it ended up just whoever the accounts payable contact was, they'd since been fired or something, so I was just tracking down someone new to fax it too. I like detective stuff like that.

They set me up in some lady's office to enter the bills, and she had this little gem on her desk. Yep.



But then last week it was some guy's birthday in the shop and she brought in a cake from a bakery. A BAKERY. So she can't be all bad.

I was wondering where you'd buy something like that so I tried to find it online, and came across it in this calalogue, next to a forest nymph.

museum day

I finally got around to seeing the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met today. I only had to wait in line for and hour and a half, which is a steal. When I got to things like this, I almost always end up being more interested in the people than what I originally went there to look at. It was so crowded in the exhibition space and people were touching me on all sides and it was pretty hard to concentrate.

There was this one girl in front of me who was live blogging the exhibition. It was the second room and she was already composing a post about it. Because I have no concept or interest in privacy, and also because I was smashed up so close to her by the crowd, I read her post over her shoulder. It was all like, "The beauty and the wonder and the magic that I have come across in the Alexander McQueen exhibit is astonishing and earth shaking or something. I am so glad this man got to live for a brief time to give this world this whatever." Like she seriously wrote like that. If I could have punched her by rollng my eyes I would have. Here's an idea, maybe take 5 minutes to look around and be overwhelmed by all the majesty that is affecting you so much right now. If you can blog about it while you're right in the middle of it, it can't be that great. A sercurity guard asked her to put her phone away and she kept it out, and then I was glaring at her so hard because I hate it when people don't listen to security guards.

Then for a while I was behind this other lady who was repeating the audio commentary back to everyone around her. I liked her because I hadn't bought the audio guide and I love those things. Then she got too engrossed and stopped narrating so I moved on to this old grandma ad grandpa. The grandma was going "Hey how about this one" to every thing and the grandpa was going "Hah!" to everything. There was this one dress that was very beautiful and it looked probably the most like a normal dress out of anything else there, and the grandma was like, "Well what about this one, this one is very nice" and the grandpa looked at it, and gets kind of upset. "The skirt is too short! Not unless it's for a teenage girl or something! It needs to be a few inches longer. Then it would be nice. UGH!" So close. Also the skirt went down to the knee.

If you want to know what the hell I've been doing this past month: New York has been having a heat wave, and I've been working at an air conditioner repair company. Not even joking. Also we were apartment searching. So many hells. More on that junk tomorrow.