It’s TMOPMO Tuesday! (Click on image to read full size)
I wrote this comic when Olde English first got hired to make comedy videos for the now defunct Super Deluxe. (I like to think they went under solely because they gave us an obscene amount of money which we didn’t deserve, which put them at a deficit no amount of Jack Link’s Beef Jerky ads could ameliorate. (Double parentheses: Similarly, the year we went to Aspen for the HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival was the last of the festival’s existence, and it’s fun to think we killed that too. (Last parentheses, I swear: When we got hired by ChangeToWin to make three Anti-McCain videos — only one of which they ended up using — we told them proudly, “We want to do for John McCain what we did for Super Deluxe and the Aspen Comedy Festival!”)))
This has always been one of my favorite TMOPMO strips, mostly because of Lisa’s stellar illustration/coloring (check out the lovingly detailed illustration of her future boyfriend in panel five), but also because it describes two feelings that are constants in my life, things that I am in fact feeling right now:
1) The crippling fear that Nothing Good Lasts. I’m right now working a job I love — I’m teaching Bay Area high school kids how to write plays. It’s rewarding, and enriching, and immediate — it’s certainly better than my last job which was Not Having A Job. But more than just beating the hell out of sitting at Starbucks each day, banging my head against my keyboard, trying to write things I’m not sure anybody will ever see, more than that, I actively enjoy it. It’s the first time in a long time that I would describe my happiness as more than just the absence of sadness.
And yet, these feelings of warmth make me nervous. I get self-conscious when I’m happy, like it isn’t a good look, like I’m wearing a suit a couple sizes too big. People call me on the phone and they say, how are you, and I try to play it down, not because I don’t think they’d be happy for me, but because I don’t want to look foolish when it all comes crashing down around me, which I’m so sure it will. (See above parentheticals.)
2) I ate too much candy. I don’t know why I never learn.
