Sunday, May 28, 2017

Thoughts on the Side

Ever hear the sound of your own voice? It’s rather annoying, isn’t it? That’s how I feel whenever I go back and read some of my rants and comics. While I’m actually quite proud of much of the work I’ve done on my comic and various ramblings, there are certain desultory prose that I regard as cringe-worthy. I imagine today’s scribbling on my digital palimpsest will evoke that same sense of mortified embarrassment in a week or so.

Just so you know, the jokes on the left are taken from various friends, coworkers, emails, and occasionally other websites. While I do rewrite many of them to correct grammar, or ensure that the actual punchline lands at the end of the joke, or that the joke is consistently told in the past tense, or that silly ethic pronunciations are re-written in plain English because I refuse to do the voices… OK, you get the idea… The point is, the jokes aren’t mine. I do my best to edit them as appropriate, but I also try to keep out of it as much as possible.

As for the stuff that shows up on the right, well that is mine, and that’s where the cringe factor comes in. Many times I go back and read things I’ve written only to realize I’m reading the accidental diary of a morose clown. Oh my god! Do I really sound like that? It’s like realizing your fly was down during a semi-formal event.

Thankfully, no one I know IRL is reading any of this. Even though it’s not a secret to my coworkers, friends, and family that I run this JOTD and comic, none of them would ever bother to visit this site. Except for the times I’ve used my phone to show off a comic I made, none of them have actually seen it, and they usually dismiss it as something I made using an app or copied from something else. Seriously?! At first glance, do you actually think my comic was created on an iPad using an app developed by someone else? What’s worse, I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not!

I suppose that’s the underlying reason why I write stuff like this. It’s the reason I renamed the comic to “Pathos in the Plumbing”. Among all my family, friends, and coworkers, none of them actually care about my hobbies and interests, and when you look at it like that. it’s kind of comically sad. I live inside a monkey sphere that insulates me from people I might actually have things in common with. Writing about it is basically a kind of therapy to deal with that fact.

Pax,

-f2x