And there’s only 20 min. or so of good material so far.

Editing audio down is actually pretty fun, and the sound quality’s pretty awesome. I had my headphones plugged into my computer and I could hear the softer conversations in the movie quite well. That really came in handy when it came to making choices on where to cut based on our reactions, especially when we started riffing on some of the dialogue.

I’m going to work on it again tonight, and hope that I’ll be done tonight. Then, after that, I have to write my The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest review, and then I think I’m gonna start working the second part of my NYCC review.

It’s good to be working on the GeekingOutAbout.com website again.

Now, if only I could start writing up my new Smut Peddler story idea…

My birthday two days ago was pretty awesome. I celebrated it by waking up to a ton of celebratory messages on Facebook which kept coming throughout the day from friends, former high school classmates, networking contacts, and readers of the blog I finally started which I hope will be a corner piece in my wee publishing empire. I worked non-stop at the day job and was able have a great dinner with my boyfriend.

Yesterday, I had a bad day at work, and all the communication techniques I’ve been learning in therapy failed me. Only my best friend was able to help me make sense of things, and I woke up to the news that one of my boss’ clients suffered a tragic loss earlier this summer and we didn’t even realize it.

On the positive side, I haven’t had a cigarette in about six months, since my aunt died. (I wonder if you’ve met her over there in that other plane of existence.) I also cut my hair really, really short and will blog about that once I ship the pony tail of hair off to Pantene Beautiful Lengths, which I will do today.

That’s what days are like now. Some days are really awesome, some days are not. My group of friends is smaller and more localized, but I do still try and keep in touch with the friends I met when I first met you. Hell, I made it up to Toronto for a subdued DexCon, and I even edited a book for your husband, and doing that and working on the blog was and is one of the most fun things I’ve done with my professional aspirations. Baby steps, I know…

I hope that I’ll have more that I can tell you about next year.

Miss you, a lot,
Trisha Lynn

Of course, there’s still some things I need to fix here with regards to reorganizing things into new categories, but I figure I’ll try and do that before I make the next big update.

If you can, please donate to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve got fantastic hair: it’s thick, grows well, and can be pretty damn shiny when I remember to leave the conditioner in for at least two minutes. If you don’t believe me, take a gander below:

With spring and the East Coast summer swelter around the corner, I would really like to cut my hair after a friend’s wedding in early April is over. My original plan was to either hit up Supercuts on my way home from work one day or to find a salon in New York City that offers premium prices or free haircuts for people who are donating—Crops for Girls, I’m looking at you—and then just get my hair did. Then, I noticed this e-Newsletter from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society talking about their new program and website: Totally Baldacious.

Looking through the website, it sounded like the perfect program for someone like me who isn’t personally motivated enough to train for a marathon or a triathlon but wants to help raise money for research.

I contacted the organizers who said that while a lot of the focus was for the program’s initial launch in February, anyone can sign up and be a “Baldie in Training” at any time. I’ve already got the hair to cut off, I already know when I want to cut it off, but my biggest question is: How much could I raise from my friends and family?

This is what I’m thinking:

If I set the bar low at $10 a person, it would take 25 people to get me to a $250 goal and that sounds reasonable. I could go in, chop off 8 to 10 inches (I think it’s closer to 8 in a pony tail at the base of my neck), get a cute A-line bob, and be done with it.

At the $500 level, I’d take my hair a bit shorter, probably do something cheekbone length. Maybe even do something faux-hipster-like where it was very short in back and on the sides but longer on top. If I had product, I could just zhujh (sp?) it every morning until it starts to get longer, and be done with it.

And if I reached a goal of $1,000, then I’d (gulp) shave off all of my hair. Maybe not completely down to the skin, but very, very short, as in half of a centimeter long all around.

The problems I see, so far, are thus:

While my boss wouldn’t blink if I came into the office one day with chin-length hair or even cheekbone length hair, I think she might say something if I waltzed in with a bald or nearly bald head. Oddly today, one of the more fashionable girls in the office saw me walking past and asked if I was growing out my hair to donate it. I floated this very idea and my concern past her, and she said that I should just woman up and ask my boss if it would be okay. So there’s at least one vote of confidence… but then again, this other girl also doesn’t pay my salary and/or keep me employed.

The other thing I’m concerned about is that the girlfriend of one of my other friends was a “Team in Training” member and as her girlfriend’s donation goal date was nearing, they realized that if they didn’t reach their goal, they would have to make up the difference themselves. Now, I understand that there’s a “cost” to do the marathon and race training, but there shouldn’t be much of a cost to have people give them money in exchange for you cutting or having your own hair cut, right? Methinks it’s time to read the small print again… and since there’s nothing on the website saying that I’d have to make up the difference (so far) there’s one hurdle down.

Notice that my own vanity is not a concern to me… I think. I’m currently single and likely to stay that way for a while, so any person who expresses a romantic interest in me right now would just have to deal with having a girlfriend with very short hair because the idea of both helping a woman going through chemo or a child whose medical condition prevents them from growing any hair on their head at all with a human hair wig and helping raise money to research cures and more effective treatments for leukemia and lymphoma is just too irresistible to me.

Notice that I’m also assuming that I will even reach the $1,000 donation goal. But then again, I’m almost always attempting to prepare for worst case scenarios; this is the legacy I’ve inherited from an over-protective mother. Judging from the other “Baldie in Training” or “Dyer in Training” (because the less gutsy option is to pledge to dye your hair) site, even my $250 goal is pretty ambitious. However, I am lucky enough to know several people whose generosity knows no bounds and/or are just mischievous enough to nudge the total higher if it meant that I’d have to shave my head.

I guess the only way I can know for certain how my boss would react is to just bloody ask her. I mean, there’s nothing in my work contract that says I can’t be almost bald while answering phones or writing up market reports. I don’t think I’d feel less professional if I had a fuzzy head for a few months (but I’d end up spending a lot of time rubbing my own head after the initial buzz).

I think what I’m looking for in this blog entry is some validation that I am doing a good thing and that even broaching the subject with my employer is worth asking the question.

So I ask again: How much would you pay to see me with a bald head?

UPDATE: First off, a URL linking problem and a comment on my LiveJournal made me realize that this entry may sound like I was demanding that people pay money for me to shave my head when I was really only wanting to know if it was worth it to even attempt to ask my boss. I know that money is tight everywhere and that when one is deciding how to spend their money, it doesn’t help to be pressured or guilted into it. For that, I apologize.

Also, I ended up emailing my boss earlier on Sunday and apparently, there’s a dress code for the office which implies that “business casual” doesn’t include “shaved heads for women who are doing so to raise money for charity.” There’s another option where one can dye their hair to raise money, so I think I’ll do that instead and just aim for the $250 goal with my goal being a bright (but natural-ish looking) red.

Thanks for the feedback, and I’ll be posting the link to my Baldacious donation page soon.

A lot’s happened since you died. I finally tipped over into being an agnostic and have been going through a lot of intense therapy. I really wish you could have been here to rant at when I lost some friends because of my behavior because you were always awesome at getting me to see the funny side of things or to commiserate with.

Ever since I changed jobs and pared down the list of people whose LiveJournals I read, I’ve been spending a whole lot of time in my head and I think about you now and then. Most often, I think about the vow I made to make each day of my life better because it’s one more day I have that you don’t, to say “Yes, and…” to more opportunities, and the promise I made when I turned 31 to make you proud of me wherever you are.

That last part? I’m not entirely there yet, and I am also wondering if it’s something I should give up on because I don’t see in myself the kind of near-universal compassion, friendliness, and acceptance that surrounded you. The fact that you still liked me despite the faults I am learning that I have still astounds me, and I wonder if I’ll ever find another female friend like you again.

Today I’m going to talk about you in therapy. I’m going to talk about why I’m still pissed off that you’re dead, how I feel like a failure because I don’t think I’ve done enough to honor your memory, how I’m finally as old now as you once were because my birthday will always be two days before the anniversary of your death, and how next year (if nothing catastrophic happens) I’m finally going to be older than you.

Anyway, I love you still, and I miss you a lot.

Take care, love,
Trisha Lynn

And in a way, I agree.

For years, Carla has been nominated for an Eisner but had never won. Part of me thinks that her nomination and subsequent win this year was a “gimme” by the Eisner judges for all the years she didn’t win and I guess I’m okay with that.

When you consider that she is mostly only publishing her work online so that she can get more interest for the print graphic novel volumes and Solstrand’s dissatisfaction that the work shown on both mostly “unfinished” pencils both at her site and at the Image Comics subsidiary site Shadowline, I guess I can see why he and others were a little miffed that it beat out other more finished works with better, more web-user friendly navigable sites.

It’s hard for me to speak out against her too harshly, though, because I was staying at Carla’s house the weekend I not only found out that Kelly was dying but she was the first person to hug and console me when I awoke the next morning to learn from Kelly’s husband that she’d died.

I remember that I had woken up earlier than everyone else in the house around 6 am, even if I’d been up the night before working on getting materials ready for the Small Press Expo. The first thing I did was check my email because comments to my LiveJournal get sent to me there, and a reply to my entry about Kelly’s forthcoming death mentioned that she’d passed already. I was in shock for quite some time, and then Carla came into the computer room to see how I was doing. I remember her hugging me hard, all warmth and consolation, and my instant thought that she gave great “mommy” hugs. I’ve spoken before of how difficult that weekend was for me, but Carla’s simple hospitality made it easier to bear… as did a lot of alcohol at the post-Ignatz award ceremony.

Since that weekend four years ago, I haven’t talked to Carla since and part of me regrets that. The good thing is that she has a Facebook account and her email address hasn’t changed. The better part is that she’s still working on Finder, and now that her children are older and the website’s gotten a facelift, maybe she’d want to collaborate with me on getting Smut Peddler back on track, too?

I can only hope that I can get “the band” back together again.

In April, I was talking with a friend in Houston, Texas named Corey with whom I’ve kept in sporadic contact for about eight years. We were having a catch-up conversation when he mentioned that his father had finally succumbed to the cancer that he’d been suffering through for at least a year.

That’s just one more person who has been claimed by “this fucking disease” as another friend of mine whose father died about a year before Kelly did said at her wake. Corey and I compare notes on our therapy process often, but I’d say he’s way further down on the atheism scale than I am. He’s angry, and hurt, and alone, and it hurt me to know that he’s been doing all this hurting by himself.

So when he said that with a little bit of the money he and his sister had gotten from his inheritance, he wanted to fly me down to visit him over the Memorial Day weekend, how could I say no?

I had another, perhaps more ulterior, motive in taking six days to leave New York City and travel to Texas. It has been a very long time since I’ve taken a vacation longer than four days that hasn’t been related to family, work, anime conventions, or all three at once and I wanted to be a little selfish for once. The day job is alternately frustrating and rewarding, and I knew that I needed to be able to recharge my emotional reserves enough to face a long summer season of slow sales, made even slower by this weakened economy.

And finally, after Kelly died and after I decided to stop working for anime conventions, I also decided that I wasn’t going to say to a friend, “Oh, we should hang out again sometime” and not do something about it. As I wrote in the very first entry to this blog, because I decided to wait until their house was finished, I didn’t get to see Kelly happier in Washington state than she had been when she was living in California. I am glad and grateful that I can say that I did get a chance to speak to her on the phone before she died and that I did get to tell her that I loved her—

—but I still regret not making the plans (or saving the money) to go and visit when I could and vowed that I would do both the very next time that opportunity arose. So it was with a very light heart that I boarded a plane the Wednesday before Memorial Day weekend to fly first to Austin where I’d stay with another friend for two days before driving to Houston.

Harris O’Malley is a comics artist I’d met in 2004 at the Small Press Expo where we debuted the very first issue of Smut Peddler for which he’d contributed a story. We met again at another comics convention in Arlington, Texas and from then on our friendship was cemented. In-between almost annual trips his family would take to New York City or other comics conventions where we’d meet, Harris would always gloat about how awesome Austin was and by gum, I was going to see it for myself!

At the same time, though, Harris is also someone who’s survived having someone he loved die from cancer, his father about seven years ago. Like me, he was raised in a religious tradition (Episcopalian) but his slide away from organized faith started in a different way. In his own words, these days he’s a “messiah for hire,” but that also mostly means that he’s a Taoist and a ordained Universal Life Church minister and can be hired to perform awesome alternative wedding ceremonies.

And yet, going to visit Harris first reinforced the first lesson I learned from Kelly’s death: although you may be very sad when it happens, when someone you care about dies, you can eventually learn how to live with the loss in a gracious but humorous way.

When I got to Houston, I didn’t have a lot of time to spend with Corey because he had to work most of the weekend. When casting about for ideas of how I could keep myself occupied while he was at work, I remembered another friend I hadn’t seen in ages. Like Kelly, I first met Rod when I was skipping my history classes in college to surf the Internet and create fanfiction stories with other people my age who were in colleges across the country.

At the time, Rod was a computer tech at the University of Houston and was also one of the very few actual Filipino people I considered a friend and not my parents’ friends’ kids or a cousin. We drifted apart once we’d graduated and I moved to New York, but when we spoke on the phone, it was as if not a single one of the over 10 years we’ve known each other had passed. While eating sushi at one of the more upscale places, I asked him how things were with him and that’s when he told me that a beloved cousin of his had died last year at the age of 23 from some weird viral infection.

Like me and perhaps most every other Filipino or Filipino-hyphenate who lives in the U.S., Rod was also raised in the Roman Catholic church, but he still believes in God. It’s been really hard on him and his family, but as he told me some rather funny stories involving him, the other seven pallbearers, and having to perform some acrobatics in order to avoid stepping on other people’s headstones as they took her body to its final resting place, I could see that he’d reached some level of peace about her death, and it really made me curious.

As we stood outside the restaurant with him patiently waiting for me to finish my cigarette, I blurted out, “How is it that you can still believe in God and be a Christian after all that?”

What he said to me is that it helps to not take the Bible as the literal “truth” of what happened in the world, which is a conclusion that I’ve already come to accept. But the rest of it he still believes, the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, the strength of the sacraments.

I asked him for clarification later, and this is what he said:

What the literalists miss the point of—and what the greatest value of the Bible is—is that at the heart of it all, God wants us to be Nice to each other. This is a universal truth, transcending pretty much everything. Be nice to each other, be decent human beings, treat others as you would like to be treated. When you see religion focus on this, and not on the nitpicking about details of tradition, protocol, and such, you can see how positive faith can be.

[My cousin] Jenna, at her young age, managed to come to terms with her faith and had embraced it. And because of it, she managed to make the transition from insecure teenager to kind-hearted, head-sure and foot-strong adult. And in death, it made us feel assured that she had earned her place in a better place.

I remember this quote from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series: “Go then, there are other worlds than these.” Pretty sure she’s in one of them now.

I think this is something I can live with as well.

I hope it can be enough for Corey.

I don’t exactly recall how his rant started, because I was trying very hard not to overhear, especially when he started talking about how New York Governor David Patterson has been trying to introduce a same-sex marriage bill into the state constitution. What followed was the usual rhetoric I hear from homophobic people who call themselves Christians, sprinkled with some truly bizarre comments on how President Obama might be gay, something about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and fellatio…

Really, it was all a blur because inside my head and out loud on Twitter I was trying to decide if I should say something to him.

In the interest of full disclosure, on the Kinsey scale, I come out as mostly heterosexual; however, I’m not going to rule out the possibility that my soulmate could be a woman and I’m not going to deny that I am attracted to certain women. I also have several GLBTQ friends whom I adore and think are some of the most awesome people in the entire world. I urged my family members who are still living in California to vote against Proposition 8 and when I start up the Kielle Foundation, one of the causes it would support would be championing gay rights or helping protect those who are harmed by gay-bashing.

One of the things I have always admired about some of my friends is that they not only talk about the causes they support, they actually go out and do them. I’m thinking most specifically about a friend of mine who is a child protection social worker in Maryland, who wrote this while on a vacation in Toronto with the rest of the other friends I’d met around the time I first met Kelly:

The people around me right now are drinking Moosehead and sangria, listening to music and laughing–laughing so very much. They lean into each other, hugging and touching affectionately. They are, at least for the moment, confident and secure in themselves.

This is a world my children have never experienced. They are just beginning to learn security, safety, stability, the feeling that the person next to you will not harm you.

This is what I want them to have. I want them to grow up into friendship and security, fondness and stability, affection and safety. So when I look around this room, I see what I am fighting for.

I do not fight to solely to minimize damage. I do not fight simply for the cessation of trauma, I fight for the beginning of living. I do not fight simply to stop crying, I fight for laughter to start.

This is real. This is living and laughter and a reason to keep going. This is what makes me go back to my job every day and look my children in the eye and tell them honestly: “It gets better.”

And then I keep fighting to make that true.

People like my friend and like Kelly are some of the reason why I haven’t lost faith in humanity because they live their lives with conviction and truth; to sit in the coffee shop and listen to this man spew his hatred, bigotry, and misinterpretation of what he thinks God thinks and believes and not do anything about it to me was wrong.

So when he was prattling on about how sinful New York City is and how everything is much better in the Midwest where values are clean and wholesome, I turned slightly in my chair to face him and said, “Except for Iowa.”

He started to bluster and without getting out of my chair, I faced him and told him that though yes, this is a free country and he has the right to say what he wants to say, I also had the right to say, “I vehemently disagree with you.”

The funniest part of the whole encounter was the part where he started saying that what I was doing was sinful, as if he assumed that because I don’t think gay people are living sinful lives I must be gay. At that brief moment, I almost wished that I was gay, just so I could deserve that kind of “stinging” rebuke.

After winding down to a close and without any further debate from me, he gathered up his things and flounced out of the store through the back entrance; I picked up my now lukewarm tea to have a sip. After he left, two women who had been sitting at the table on the other side of his commented on how nutty he was, and the woman to whom he’d been ranting was very quick to tell me that she only knew him as a “coffee shop friend” and that he’s a little crazy. As if I couldn’t tell that myself, but it was very nice of her to let me know in her own way that she didn’t agree with him either.

However, the whole encounter has left me with a distaste in my mouth for the kinds of Christians who take the whole Bible as nothing but the complete and utter truth, who cite Scripture and verse when condemning homosexuality without taking the entirety of the Bible into the context of the age in which it was written.

Because if there’s anything that I still cling to when it comes to my former Christianity, it is the notion that “God is love” and that any expression of that love can’t be completely wrong.

I have blog entries to write, thoughts about fiction to post, etcetera, but if you’ve been following my Twitter feed (see link list on right) you can see that I leave the office very late most of the time and have been having home Internet problems and thus can’t write.

However, the ‘tubes have been unclogged, the last of the three people I needed approvals for regarding my big Texas vacation post is getting a chance to look at it again, and tonight! I will be making a guest appearance on the Triple Feature movie podcast along with my editor Gordon McAlpin of the Multiplex webcomic, Joe Dunn creator of Joe Loves Crappy Movies, and our host Tom Brazleton, creator of Theater Hopper. Topics of discussion will include the debated Top 10 Science-Fiction movies list, Moon (short version: It’s freaking amazing!), and other things.

To listen in, sign up using this link, and I’ll see you tonight at 10 pm Eastern!