Three bloody things

Today I’ve been mostly thinking about being French. Primarily because I’m finding it very difficult to draw myself wearing a beret. For some reason (though most likely my rubbish drawing skills) it keeps coming out as either a baguette or a low slung halo.

I’m having a hard time letting go of being French.

For those not following the narrative: I used to have a French birth father who wanted to marry my mother when she told him she was pregnant but my birth mother turned him down and this is what I’ve always believed until I found out through my half-sister who is my birth mother’s daughter by a different man that my father was in fact Armenian and my birth mother then died of cancer after which I found out that in addition to not being half French my father fucked off as soon as he knew my mother was pregnant. Confused? You won’t be after this post.

If you’ve never watched Soap then you’re too young to read this blog.

It doesn’t really help that my aforementioned half-sister Ingrid decided, after a run-in with a particularly obnoxious French man earlier this year, to confess to me her extreme dislike of the French. This was couched in ‘aren’t you glad you aren’t..,’ terms and I instantly felt sucker punched and pissed off. The 11 year old me lives strong and just isn’t ready yet to hang up her beret.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Stick Figure
This weekend I did at least begin my transition into brilliant graphic novelist. I base my brilliance on having filled 3 sketch pad pages with stick figures in action and some loosely interpreted drawings of my parents, my brother and myself. You may at this point be visualizing 4 stick figures of descending height holding hands in front of a ‘house’ (a square with a triangle on top and a chimney emitting curly smoke). Yup, one drawing down, a few thousand to go.

Went to a great panel on Saturday at Staple! the small press expo for comic geek people. It was all about autobio comics, which stands for autobiographical comics rather than a form of sexual asphyxia which is what first came to mind for me. As it often does.

The panelists talked a lot about the line between being honest and truthful and risking the privacy and possible wrath of those you’re depicting. Fortunately for me, of the 3 main protagonists in my story, one is dead and the other two have no clue who I am (extra reader points if you got the alzheimers reference).

International WOMEN’S Day
Yes it was yesterday but it doesn’t bloody matter because the point is that it’s called International Women’s Day, not International Ladies Day. Why not? Because we’re women for fuck’s sake. Some people already know that I loathe the term ‘ladies’, it just makes me cringe. I find it especially vile when women address each other as ladies, I get this all the time in emails at work and I just wonder what bloody century we’re living in. It’s condescending and old-fashioned though perhaps you need it when you’re sending out your ridiculous invitation to the Pampering Pink Pussies night in aid of the local cat shelter. ‘Because we all want to feel fresh as a kitten down there, am I right ladies?’.

Cue lots of hand-wringing over feminism vs femininity and oh this PC stuff is going too far again. What’s so fucking wrong with just addressing us as women? When did women become a dirty word? And if you don’t like women (the word, not in a serial killer way) then addressing a group of us as ‘everyone’ or ‘all of you’ is just fine. I’ll happily call you a twat regardless of your gender.