damabupuk

In response to the inclusion of Marvel Entertainment on a list of companies that support SOPA.

Dear Marvel Comics,
In 1961, with the publication of Fantastic Four #1, your company revolutionized the comic book medium. Artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko defined artistic styles that continue to reverberate into the present day. In the 1970s, comics like Howard the Duck and Man-Thing offered scathing and intelligent critiques of the problems of the United States and the world. In the eighties and nineties, Claremont's X-Men took on such issues as homosexuality and South African apartheid in moving and challenging ways. In the early 2000s, your company threw off the shackles of the Comics Code Authority, and demonstrated that comics could be a mature, intelligent, and self-regulated medium.
Imagine, then, my dismay, when I saw your company listed as one that supports the proposed, draconian Stop Online Piracy Act. That a company so steeped in, and adept at, revolutionary art could support something that will destroy the most important revolution in modern human history is unthinkable to me. And all in the name of profit. People who download your comics illegally will not go to a comic store and buy them if SOPA is passed. They will simply not read comics. Your support of this act will punish both those who get your comics illegally, and those who get them legally, such as myself. The internet is not a marketing and sales tool. It is a tool of communication. Such a tool can certainly be used for sales, but that is not its sole function, nor should your company treat it as such. In the last 20 years, the world has become a smaller place, thanks to the internet. Parts of the world that had little to no contact for most of human history are now joined by communities of like-minded individuals. The internet has made it possible for us to understand just how alike we really all are. And to understand just how different as well, and how wonderful that difference is.
I understand that your parent company, Disney, is also a supporter of this act. It is my fervent hope that this is the only reason that your company is on such a deplorable list. I urge you, whomever may be the person to make such decisions, to rescind your support of SOPA. It will fundamentally alter, for the worse, one of the most important advances in human history. Rest assured that, should this act be passed, and your name remain on the list of supporters, Marvel Comics will lose my business forever. I have read your comics since I was 10 years old. I am an avid collector, and my first collected comic was Transformers #1, published by your company in 1984. However, I will have no qualms ceasing to give you business if you contribute to this destruction of the evolution of human beings.
I will be posting this letter on Facebook, and on my personal blogs, and anywhere else I think that it might impact your customers. Your support of SOPA is terrible, and, whomever this might reach in your company, you should be ashamed of your participation.

Sincerely, and with much gratitude for the amazing stories and characters you have given me over the years,

Tom Miller.

The trouble is, I don't really have any other places that I can post things with relative anonymity. The fact that I've neglected this blog for so long sort of allows that.

I'm not sure what to do, but my father-in-law is becoming quite vocally anti-Islam. He's buying into all the rhetoric that paints the religion as invasive and violent, and keeps coming at them from a particularly Christian point of view, the irony of which I'm sure he doesn't see.

And he keeps sending me these emails that have to do with his new (?) point of view. I didn't mind so much when it was the paranoid health emails, or the big business conspiracy emails. But the recent ones are really hateful, and I find them upsetting.

Really, I wouldn't care if he held these views quietly. I acknowledge every person's right to believe what they want. But beliefs are personal, not public, and I find his sharing of his beliefs troubling. What I find most troubling is that I no longer feel comfortable leaving Sage alone with him. I would hate for Sage to be exposed to that sort of rhetoric. Add to this the fact that my sister-in-law and niece live in the same house with my in-laws. I would hate to think that my niece has been exposed to such vitriol.

But what do I do? I asked Tara to talk to her sister, just to give her a heads up, but I really feel like I ought to say something. I need for him to understand that I won't have my son around someone who publicly feels this way. But that would be catastrophic to the family, and I'm not sure I have the right to do that.

I have been a vegetarian for almost 15 years now. I made this choice as a moral one, a stance against the repugnant way I perceived the animals we eat were being treated. I do not believe it is right to kill. Ever.

Now, you can give me the argument that eating vegetables is killing, so I suppose my opposition to killing is limited to animal life. You'll have to forgive me that. I don't think I would have lasted very long eating only processed foods.

The thing about vegetarians is that we often suffer from deficiencies of various vitamins and minerals that are most often found in meat diets.

I found out today, after a blood test, that I am suffering a vitamin B12 deficiency. The long and short of such a deficiency is that it can cause madness, and in some cases, death. I cannot tell you what a relief this revelation was. For the last few years I have indeed felt like I was losing my mind. I couldn't keep a positive thought in my head, constantly dwelling on the things in my past that bring me only guilt and shame. Whenever I achieved any accolade, won an award or got a good mark, I couldn't hold onto the good feeling. I have never felt I was good enough. Not for a long time, anyway. And, intellectually, I understood that I was doing well, and that my life is wonderful, and that I am lucky to have all that I do. But emotionally, all I felt was despair. Tara and I wondered if I was beginning to suffer some kind of clinical depression (which I suppose I am). Then I went to the doctor about some physical problems I've been having, and he said he thought it was all stress-related. He did some blood work, and a week later I was back and diagnosed with a B12 deficiency.

I hope...I pray...that this is the thing that is wrong with me. I have felt like I was losing my mind. And for someone who prides himself on his mind, this is terrifying. It was like the thing I value most about myself was betraying me. I have felt such despair.

I am on B12 pills now. I don't know how long the recovery process is likely to take. I have to go back to the doctor in three months to have my levels checked. The upshot is that I have hope now. There may be something wrong with me, but now I might know what it is.

I hope.

Every time I see bad grammar in a Facebook update, I want to comment on it with a correction.


Every.

Goddamn.

Time.

Every now and again, money makes me want to hang my head in my hands and weep.

I have risen from the dead.

Well over a year since I last posted. Those of you who may have read this journal with any regularity probably thought I was finally abducted by aliens.

Or just found something better to do.

I do feel bad though. I've neglected this journal, and it got me through some seriously weird times in my life. Most of which actually happened.

I have felt, of late, that my mental health is on the wane, and my physical health has sucked for about a year now. I'm pretty sure I have an ulcer, and the horrible gastro-intestinal feelings I have every day are wearing away at my patience and sanity. Not to worry. I've made an appointment with my doctor, so he can sit me down, yet again, and tell me "Tom, you've got to learn to relax." The trouble is, I couldn't find that course listed in the undergrad calender. Maybe it's a graduate course. (Ha! If my brother is anything to go by, not relaxing is more likely a grad course.) Anyway, I'll get it sorted. This is just a stressful time of the year, you know.

What's weird is that I find the more work I have to do, the more creative I feel. It kind of sucks because I don't have time to do any of that creative stuff with the amount of schoolwork I have. I have felt, for about 2 months, that it's time I wrote a novel. I feel like it might be autobiographical in some ways, though I wonder what in my life could possibly be interesting enough to write a novel about. Perhaps returning to school in the middle of my life. We'll see.

Diesel Wheelchair (that's mine and Joel's band) continues to be a source of noisy peace for me. Our Myspace page is here,but if you're reading this within 2 days of it being posted, wait, because I'm going to update the songs. We've gotten pretty good, if I do say so myself. My techno project, Idiots Of Time And Space has slowed down somewhat (LinkMachineGo!), but that could have something to do with the drastically decreased consumption of marijuana. More on that another time. I'm still processing it.

So, there you go. A live journal entry. What next? I might actually update the Giant Box of Comics? (Really not updated) We'll see. Been awhile, journal. Can't say I've missed you, but it's nice to know you're there to come back to.

Heh. It's been almost half a year, livejournal friends. For that, I do apologize.

So, having been in school for over a year now, I am discovering that white, male, Englishmen have been behind pretty much every crappy thing that's happened over the course of the last 3-400 years. Seriously. We suck.

That said, I was considering today how much I love being a guy. It's an iffy thing to say in today's world. But I do, I love it. I love how it feels to be male, physically, mentally, emotionally. I like having male thoughts. It's great. It's the best. Now, I know, I can't really make that claim, not ever having been female, but that's really beside the point, isn't it? If I didn't feel like being male was the best thing ever, then I'd have likely changed my gender by now. I love being a guy. It makes me happy in ways that I'll never be able to explain to my wife. And I can explain most things to her.

Just something that crossed my mind.

My schedule has changed.

When I was reading meters, and when I was setting posts last summer, I was in bed by 10, and asleep pretty much seconds after that. But my schedule has changed since I went back to school. I just caught myself, as I climbed down the stairs after saying goodnight to Tara, sighing and relaxing and looking forward to the next hour or so. Because this has become my time. I'm not tired, I'm not wired from caffeine (maybe a bit!). It's just that this time of night, from around 10 to midnight, is when I do the things that I put off at other times of day. I'm not saying I couldn't do them earlier. I could, but Tara and Sage are around earlier, and if they're around then I want to be spending time with them. But right now they are tucked away safely in bed, their days are done and they're asleep. I don't want this to sound like I'm free of having to look after them, or anything like that, because that's not it at all. But they're finished with the day now. They've packed it in, got what they could get done done, and gone to sleep, perchance to dream. So now, after they're abed, I get down to doing things that could wait until it was just me.

I don't think it's making as much sense in type as it does in my head. My schedule has changed, I don't need quite as much sleep anymore, and I love having this time to myself.

...but I've finished watching Buffy, and I didn't keep you up to speed. I apologize.

It rocked, pretty much the whole way through. Even the bits that I felt dragged while they were on TV (most of season 6) were really good when viewed as a whole. Damn good show.

But now I'm done that, and BSG is finished, and I'm up to date on Lost. I don't know what to do with all this time.

Finally, after seven years, today I threw out the business documents, receipts, and final general reminders of my comic store. I kept a couple of things: the business license, the first flyer we handed out, the original business proposal. But everything else is gone now. All I have left are the comics, and they're not going anywhere.

It feels pretty good.