Wednesday, October 23, 2002

Poor Neville





This is my favorite page from the fabulous Edward Gorey picture-book, The Gashlycrumb Tinies; or After the Outing... which you can read in its entirety here. I guess I love it so because ennui is one of the few dangers in this book that I have experienced myself (except for Zillah's doom, which could have been my own)... and I've often wondered if it were possible to die of ennui. It certainly seems so, at times.



In other comic/pen-and-ink news, Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau has turned to portraying the activities of a college-age blogger — making fun of plagiarism, poor punctuation, and banality — and my coworker has been keeping me supplied with clippings. I worry about my life when I find myself identifying with Doonesbury. It's even worse when you realize that you've finally hit the stage of life where Doonesbury seems actually funny, rather than just a mystifying left-wing political tract. Neville's fate creeps closer to me.



I am not into Halloween this year. I don't know why, but the very idea of costumery and faux spookiness just strikes me as futile and insipid. Maybe it's because my blood-sugar is too low from not eating candy (I usually buy several bags of Halloween candy in the beginning of October, then go get several more the day before Halloween because I've eaten it all). Maybe it's because I have simply grown out of such frivolity, that there is no room for enjoying Halloween and comprehending Doonesbury comics in the same life-stage. Maybe it's because, as a drag queen, I get enough of costumes and pretending to be someone else during the rest of the year. Maybe it's just burn-out, like how I burned out on Christmas a few years ago. Maybe it's the Ennui. Whatever it is, I'm just not into it, no matter how many Anne Rice novels I read.



My Sims are progressing apace. I just finished the Finocchii family, a pair of Ancient Roman gentlemen who live in an "authentic" white-marble villa of dizzying elegance at #1 Sim Lane. Next I am going to create the von Lichtemann family, who will live in a Gothic castle at #9. Then, once I get someone living in the rather difficult house at #3 (I think I will call him Sebastian Phroute-Keyck), my first neighborhood on the new PC will be complete! And once complete, I will focus on one family (probably my eponymous Sim, Robert Manners, in the lovely U-shaped Cotswold manor I built from the foundations of the tedious clapboard hovel that comes installed at #6 Sim Lane) and trot him through all the little tasks and entertainments that make a Sim happy and productive. I will also upload the new "album" so you can see them for yourself. When that task proves tedious, I will start my second neighborhood. Since the Deluxe Edition comes with five separate neighborhoods, I can even make an all-girl neighborhood, and maybe even a neighborhood of straights with children! I can expand my mind as I expand my Sims!



Well, I guess that's enough for one day. One of my favorite things about blogging is how you don't really have to have anything important to say, or even something I think is important to say. Just coming up with something to say can be fun and enlightening and truthful. And a year from now, when I am feeling this same way, I can see what I did this time, and how it turned out a couple of days down the road. And maybe someone visiting will feel better that s/he is not alone in the Ennui, the Doonesbury Age, the So Over Halloween State, and/or Sims Obsession. And if nothing else, I can at least provide, for your aesthetic edification, the following:



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