The rest of the weekend after the reunion? Quiet, generally. I drove home and realized that I needed water and sugar, which the Coca-Cola Corporation was only too ready to provide. Once home, I realized how tired I was, and how tired I was going to stay until Sunday.
So I chilled out with Amy, partook of the hair of the dog, and finished reading Epileptic, a really fine comic by a French cartoonist about living with a brother who has severe epilepsy. It’s an awfully challenging book (about 350 pages, by the way), because David B. doesn’t actually represent anyone in a sympathetic light, except perhaps his little sister. In general, his parents pursue any half-baked cure they can find for his brother, including magnetism, macrobiotics, spiritualism, and other mystic forms. David B.’s “character” (it’s portrayed as autobiographical) concludes at one point that his brother ‘chooses’ epilepsy, and that he uses his disease as a way to avoid life.
Challenging, like I say, because it’s clear the brother’s not in control of his disease at all, but that he’s also not simply a victim of it. Simultaneously, ‘David B.’ plunges deeply into cartooning and storytelling in an attempt to translate his life and his reactions to his brother’s disease. It’s quite compelling, astonishingly drawn, and has a narrative flow that I found absolutely confounding. If you can read comics — and I know plenty of people who simply can’t read them, instead focusing only on the words — you should read this one.
Sunday was going to be a football day, but we kept bailing on games. We left the Jets/Patriots so we could hit a Linens & Things to pick up a new shower rod/curtain setup; we gave up on the Saints/Steelers (Amy knew better about the Saints than I did); and we were too tired to stick with the Bears/Giants. So it was a bits-and-pieces day, but at least we succeeded in dismantling the sliding-panel shower door and replacing it with the curtain.
We’re planning to redo the bathroom once I get a couple of other things squared away (dangerous trees in the yard are getting cut down this week, and I’m getting a plumber in to assess everything that’s wrong with the pipes in this place) and the holiday bonuses are sorted out. In fact, I got all outdoors-ish on Sunday morning, taking down some dead branches, bringing the summer-stuff inside, and wielding that electric chainsaw of mine willy-nilly. Except for the willy-nilly part, which has bad connotations when associated with a chainsaw.
Anyway, the upshot was that I got some of the yard cleared, got rid of the impossible-to-keep-clean shower door, and finished reading a good comic, while also trying to write up the reunion during my free minutes. And that was the weekend.
Monday: now that was a different story. We had an off-site editorial meeting to discuss internet strategy for our magazines. It was at the same location as the sales meeting I attended back in September, but people weren’t, um, “resting their eyes” during this meeting.
Actually, the meeting helped me understand an important difference between editorial and sales personnel. When the online sales meeting wrapped up, the salesmen all headed to the building’s scary bar, where they got a little shikker. When Monday’s meeting finished, the editors were happy enough to get a free lunch out of the deal, and everyone just headed back to the office.
But I got some good ideas for things we can do on the magazine’s website, and also had some thoughts about the redesign for this blog, and the overall site, which still needs to be constructed. If I can get far enough ahead on the 400-page issue of the magazine I’m working on, I’ll take some time off during Thanksgiving week and try to put together the new look-and-feel for this site.
Because that’s supposed to be my idea of fun.