(no subject)

I didn't sleep much last night. I got to worrying about my father. I failed to reach the person I was supposed to telephone about him yesterday, to make arrangements at the place he is living and discuss his health and care; I'll talk to them today, but I felt terrible about not calling earlier. I tried to phone him, and he didn't answer his phone, which worried me, too. I know worrying doesn't help. There's no reason he should be hanging around his room anyway.

I can't help worrying about him, and that brings on all my confused feelings about him - that mixture of anger, resentment and guilt. I can't resolve these things but I can't help wanting to. I want to love, like and respect my father... if only because he is my father. I just don't seem to be able to find the way.

I've heard it said that we pick our parents. I don't believe it, but it's the kind of idea that sticks in the head and becomes part of these complicated and contradictory feelings. Was it a trade-off? a great relationship with my mother, at the price of a painful, troubled relationship with my father?

Somewhere inside I'm still the little girl who wished her father wasn't so different from all the other fathers. Perhaps if I could understand his problem, I could come to terms with mine.

Another wonderful occasion...

To msdaccxx:




May your year be filled with everything you want it to be filled with. May you be happy, healthy and creative!

Whiteout...

I read a wonderful graphic novel: Whiteout by Greg Rucka. I see it was nominated for the Eisner Award in 1999 - did it win? It's drawn by Steve Leiber, whose work I don't remember seeing before.

It feels like a Euroean comic. Black and white, realistic, with the kind of murder mystery/thriller plot more normally found in prose novels, not comics.

It's a murder mystery set in Antarctica. I can't recall coming across such a thing before - in any medium. It did bring back memories of reading Ice Station Zebra at the cottage when I was fourteen, caught up in a frigid Arctic adventure on a sweltering Ontario day. As in that book, the cold is almost a character in itself - it's certainly a weapon. This was a good contrast to the recent Spider-Man story I read by Paul Jenkins, where at a wind chill of fifty below characters are throwing snowballs. At those temperatures, snow is like powder - you can't pack it. It rang false.

Nothing in Whiteout rang false.

The protagonist is a U.S. Marshal, Carrie Stetko, who surely faces obstacles that most U.S. Marshalls would never encounter. I liked the way Rucka writes about women as protagonists, with neither falseness nor condescension. Rucka was a bit of an unknown quantity as a writer for me , despite all that he has written - I'll certainly look for his work again.

If you want to have a look at the comic, you can see several interior pages here.

Batman... British style

glockgal, who has the good taste to like John Constantine, posted a link to this. I think it's hilarious.

I thought it was Superman that John Byrne was rewriting as a British variant. I guess real life has pre-empted him.