And we're back...

Ok, so it took me two weeks, (and one day,) but the latest issue is finally up. It's a double parter too and we finally get to find out what type of animal Alex is.
It would have gone up last night, but for the fact that it was the birthday of an old housemate of mine. I sent him a text to wish him happy birthday as he now lives up north, only to find out he was actually back for the weekend, so drinks were in order. After an evening of drinking, I got home after 1am, slightly worse for wear and decided it was probably best if I didn't work on the comic in that state.
My last post was one of my philosophical ones, albeit with a slightly negative slant, which was brought on by a bad case of the blues, which itself was brought on by my current situation.
Anyway, I'm feeling slightly better and doing the comic had a lot to do with that as I find it really satisfying to complete a strip and see it go up online.
I'm definitely going to carry on with the comic, because there are so many benefits to it: a sense of pride that I get from completing a strip as well as from being proud of sticking with it, the peace I get while drawing it and many others. Really the only downside to drawing the strip is that during inking, my elbows seize up and I have to take regular breaks to unlock them, but it's a small price to pay.
Otherwise, I'm still busy at work and trying to reassemble some form of social life in the wake of my returning to singledom. I'm going back to my martial arts class this week, (missed that for a couple of weeks too,) I've started to lose weight again and generally things are looking like they have an upward vector, even if the gradient isn't too taxing just yet.
Umm... I guess that's it for now. Enjoy the double issue (unless you're Sam, in which case you won't be reading it, but you will be reading this. Hi Sam.).
Bye.

Where's the damn strip?

Sorry there hasn't been a new episode of Exotic Soup for a couple of weeks - I've been ridiculously busy at work. We've been moving premises and I've been responsible for setting up all the IT for the new site. We've bought all new servers so I've had to plan and set up an IT infrastructure from scratch, which is something I've never done before.

The weekend just gone was my first day off in 3 weeks and I've been working long hours, so it's been difficult to find time. In fact the only reason I got a strip online a couple of weeks ago is because I already had it drawn and scanned so I just needed to upload it. I should've done a strip last weekend but I needed the time just to relax and catch up on some sleep!

In addition to this, my girlfriend and I sadly called it a day last week. She has a new job in a different city and between the distance and both our busy schedules it became apparent that we would not be able to spend much time together - if any, for the next 6 months or so, so we decided to just be friends. As far as break ups go, it was all very amicable and we're still good friends so you could call it easy, but break ups are never easy so this last week has been hard.

I promise I'll have one up for this week and we will finally find out what type of animal Alex is! Stay tuned.

A little dinosaur!

As always there are things I'm happy with about this week's strip and things I think I could have done better. For example, I've just remembered that I ruled one of the panel borders too long and didn't fix it in Photoshop. That's going to bug me now but I'm going to leave it as a reminder to tidy up my work for future.
Drawing a strip is a weird kind of process. I start out with the pencils and sometimes leave things a bit rough if I know what I want to do and sometimes tighten the pencils up so I have a definite line to follow while inking. Then you ink it and almost always it comes out a little different than you expected. Sometimes better, sometimes worse and sometimes just different.
Usually the dialogue will change right up to the point where I write it onto the finished panels. If I think something can be said more succinctly or if a line is the slightest bit ambiguous, I'll reword it.
It's a very organic process, much as I hate to use that amazingly pretentious term, but it fits.
Anyway, I have to thank my Mum for the 'little dinosaur' quote regarding Alex, which if you've read the strip over at web comics nation you'll see I have done.
I was going to do a double issue this week, to celebrate getting to double figures, but time was a factor and also because I already have next week's strip drawn, (actually it was the first strip I drew, but more on that next week,) and it looks like I'm going to be working thte next couple of weekends, (I'll be going to work today for a few hours shortly,) so I can just post the strip without having to worry about it this weekend.
I think that's about it for now, time is against me this week.
Enjoy this week's strip - Ka-spoot!

Thoughts on Thirties

No one ever tells you about your thirties. It's the decade of your life you are least prepared for. As a kid you have school, so you know what your life is going to be until you're 16 at which point you become old enough to have sex and you figure that having sex will keep you occupied for at least a year. Chances are it's more likely that trying to have sex as opposed to actually having the sex will form the larger part of your year, at which point you'll be old enough to drive and cruise around looking for girls/boys to attempt to have sex with. Then you look forward to 18. You'll officially be an adult - old enough to vote and most importantly, old enough to drink and there's a good chance that you'll have met someone willing to have sex with you and actually done it by this point. 19 is pretty much just more of the same and then you hit 20. So you're no longer a teenager, but that's no problem; you're still young and cool, it just means that you're no longer a kid and are now a fully sophisticated adult who may have had sex on a number of occasions, possibly with several partners by now. 21 is a milestone birthday for some reason, even though it's more of the same and then the next big one after that is when life begins at 40.

Only it's not. As you hit 25 and 26, something starts to creep in at the back of your mind. 27, 28... and then at 29 it hits you. The next big one isn't 40, it's 30 and no one has told you about it. You start to panic - you don't want to turn 30. What happens? You know at 40 you are out of touch with the kids and have to start wearing cardigans or jumpers or something, but what happens at 30? Do you start buying knitwear but not putting it on yet, stocking up in preparation? Do you wear it indoors but change into something cool to go out in? Do you still go out?

There's no guidance for you anywhere. Music is aimed at either teens or if it's more serious stuff, your parents. T.V. is the same - programs-a-plenty for kids, teens, twenty-somethings and generations older than you, but what for thirty year-olds? Even the programs with 30-something stars are trying to pass them off as 20-somethings. (Friends anyone?)

One of the reasons no one has told you about being 30 is that it's very different for our generation to our parents'. By the time my father was 30, I was 3. By the time my mother was 30, I was 8. They had grown up and been adults for a while by then. They'd got married, had jobs - careers even, and had kids. By the time I was 30, I'd just got a job in the field I now work in - the first steps into my career.

I didn't want to turn 30. I was enjoying my 20's nicely, thank you very much. I was getting to grips with a few things, growing up gradually but not rushing into anything in particular. True, by my mid 20's I had noticed a few grey hairs in my beard and my male pattern baldness was settled in, but I was still young and I had time. When 30 crept up onto the immediate horizon I got the fear pretty badly. I felt I should know what the hell was going on in my life. I should have achieved more by now. Shouldn't I be a fully fledged adult by this point? What do I do for fun now? Am I having a mid life crisis at 29? If so does that mean I'll only live to be 58? Did I leave the iron on?

I'll break it down for you. I'm 32 now, so I can speak with a little experience about being a thirtysomething.
Here's the bad news:

• There is nothing really that caters for your age group. No specific music, T.V., films, or pastime's of any sort.
• As a thirtysomething, you may experience moments of, "why have I not got my life more sorted than this at my age?"
• You may still live in a shared house, or even worse, with your parents - which you definitely didn't think you would be doing by now.
• You may notice the first signs of aging: grey hairs, the appearance of wrinkles, baldness for men, slightly less perkiness in the breasts for women. Ironically you may also find that you still get greasy skin and spots from time to time, which you had previously thought would be long behind you.
• You are already starting to notice you are out of touch with the kids and may even find yourself complaining about them.

Here's the good news:

• Although there's nothing specifically catered towards your age bracket, you are at a nice age where you can do pretty much anything and not look too out of place. You can go to pubs, clubs, bowling alleys, restaurants, parks... wherever and no one will bat an eyelid.
• Your musical and film tastes etc, won't so much change as just develop and branch out, but you'll still like most of the stuff you did when you were 20.
• You're at a good age, where you can hang out and talk to 20 somethings and have plenty to talk about without coming off as 'the creepy older person that hangs around with younger people', but also can hold your own in a room full of 40 or even 50 somethings. In a room full of 20 and 40 somethings, you can act as a bridge to the generation gap and talk to everyone.
  
• You may not think you have your life sorted, but actually it might be more sorted than you think when you look at it. Do you have a job? A career even? A car? A partner or in a serious relationship? A home? The fact is that even if you said 'no' to all of those, chances are you know what you want and where you are going better than ever before. You know your own mind better than ever before and are less afraid to speak your opinion than ever before. You are more yourself than you have ever previously been and if you think back, your probably more comfortable in your own skin now than ever before, so you are more confident too. That's huge.
• You are taken seriously as an adult by the world at large. Every now and again you get called 'young man' or 'young lady' by someone older, but it's usually someone over 60 at least and you actually take it as a compliment now. People of 50 and below talk to you like a person instead of a child and include you in conversations, even asking you your opinion on things, which you actually have to offer now.
• You have some really good friends that have been with you for a long time. You think of them differently to people that you hang out with, either from work or even socially. Your friends are the ones that have stuck by you throughout and you may or may not live close to them any more, but you keep in touch and you would jump in the car if they needed anything and you know they would do the same for you.
  

Basically you are more grounded, sorted and know your own mind more. You don't have to answer to as many people any more - maybe just your boss and your partner (but if your relationship is an adult one, then it's more equal give and take than previous ones.).

So far I've really enjoyed being a 30-something. I never really saw the American series of that name in the late 80's, early 90's, whenever it was, but it looked like it applied to my parents' generation more than mine from what I saw. Most of them were married, some had kids and nearly all of them wore jumpers or Laura Ashley dresses. Me? I wear jeans, t-shirts, trainers and hoodies with skateboarding logos on them, as well as beanies or caps to keep my bald head warm. My girlfriend says I dress like a teenager, but she's 29 and scared of turning 30, so what does she know? I've tried to tell her it will be cool, but she's going to have to find out for herself. Maybe going through the fear and coming out the other side with a feeling of, "Oh. Really? That was it?" is something we have to go through like a right of passage. To paraphrase the mighty Morpheus: "No one can tell you what being 30 is like, you have to experience it for yourself..."

Smoking - am I a dumbass or what?

When I was a kid, I hated my mother's smoking habit. Back then, every once in a while she would ask me to go to the shop to get her some cigarettes & quite often I would refuse, even if she sweetened the deal with a little money in it for me to buy whatever I wanted to. Sometimes I'd buckle & go, not because of the money - I would usually buy comics with the money rather than sweets, as I've never had a particularly sweet tooth, but rather because she would cajole me into it by pleading & then whining and I would eventually go in order to have a quiet life.
I would lecture her on the dangers of smoking, what it would do to her and plead with her to stop. I think I even hid her pack once or twice and maybe put a pack in the bin once.

Then, at the age of 16 I crossed the line which made me into a hypocrite, I took up smoking. To this day I still don't know why. I was working in a chip shop and the owner used to say, "go have a fag break," to which I used to reply, "but I don't smoke!" and he'd reply, "yeah I know, just go have a break." in a slightly exasperated tone.

For some reason one day he said it & I though, "Hell with it! If I'm going to have a fag break, I might as well have a fag!" and asked one of the other girls who worked there for one. I expected to do the usual, light-inhale-hack-choke-never smoke again, type of thing but instead I lit it, inhaled without incident and proceeded to smoke up to 20 a day for the next five years. Then one day when I was 21, I was walking home smoking and I thought, "I'm really not enjoying this anymore. It tastes like shit." I put it out and decided to quit as suddenly as I decided to start.

I decided I needed a gimmick to help me quit as I had tried before without success. I decided to leave one cigarette in a packet on top of my T.V. and the thinking behind this was that I still had one left, so I didn't have an excuse to go buy another packet, avoiding the "I'll quit after I've finished this packet," problem. Secondly, I only had to resist one fag - not as hard as resisting lots of imagined cigarettes when you don't have any. I had the fallback of having one there at the ready if I wanted one and all I had to do was not smoke it.

This worked for me and I quit smoking for the next 8 years. Then at 29, several events happened that turned my life as I knew it upside down, the main one being that I was dumped by my long term girlfriend who I'd spent the last 11 years with. After that happened I decided on a new start, so I moved cities. Between the move, trying to find a job, getting over the end of a long relationship and adapting to single life, I started smoking again. After 8 years without a cigarette I broke and have been smoking ever since. I did quit again for 6 weeks at one point but otherwise I've been smoking anything up to about 20 a day again.

I've been feeling pretty rough when I've been smoking the last few days and I got to thinking about my stepdad, who started smoking at 15 and who at 60, has got a lung and breathing disorder and has now been told that if he doesn't quit smoking, he won't see 65.
So I've decided to quit again and I didn't smoke yesterday or today. It's been OK but there have been some tough moments. Earlier I came as close to buckling as I have so far but held fast in the end.

I can foresee two problems: One is that I might put on weight. I've heard that smoking is an appetite suppressant and also people eat when they stop smoking because it gives them something else to do with their hands & mouths. Strangely, when I quit about a year or so ago for 6 weeks, I actually lost weight, to the point that I got to my thinnest that I've been as an adult. My trick there was simply to recognise when I felt I wanted to eat and decide whether it was just because of the smoking or if I was genuinely hungry. I made a rule that I was only allowed to eat if I was genuinely hungry and that would be proven if my stomach growled. If my stomach didn't growl, I wasn't really hungry & couldn't have something to eat. I continued this rule for a while after I started smoking again & it served me well. I remember reading that most of the time when you think you want something to eat your body actually is thirsty, so you should drink instead. So whenever I felt like something to eat, I would have a glass of orange juice. If my stomach growled I would eat, but even then I would only eat small portions and stop eating when I still felt a little hungry. This way I would be full after 20 minutes but not overly full and bloated, which is how I used to feel after every meal because I ate until I was full without giving my food time to settle. I started measuring out my food when cooking - not with exact measurements or anything boring and long winded, but instead I got a plate, put some food on it and looked at it on the plate. If it looked like a lot, I took some off. If it looked about right, I cooked it. After a little while my stomach shrank and I was no longer able to even contemplate eating the sort of amounts I used to. I felt pretty good like this and dropped from 15 stone which I was at my heaviest, to 11 & 1/2 stone. I no longer had a round face that to me looked like a potato with a beard, I had a pretty flat stomach & I just generally felt better. Sadly I fell out of this habit a little while back and fell back into bad habits of eating when I wasn't properly hungry and also eating far too much food, which has always been my biggest problem.

The second problem is that it's Monday tomorrow. I've spent the weekend with my girlfriend, who is very supportive and despite really wanting me to stop, (she quit about 3 years ago,) she hasn't nagged me about it and has found many interesting diversions to take my mind off wanting to smoke. Tomorrow I go back to work where pretty much everyone smokes. There's a real community based around going outside for a fag break & there are even one or two of the type of people who sneer at you for wanting to quit. That doesn't bother me so much, as I can always go outside and stand and chat with people without smoking as it will get me used to being around people who do without doing it myself, plus if people want to sneer, that's fine with me. I know that comes from a place of insecurity - it's their way of doing the 'you're not one of us', playground crap. I like to be able to fit in with people, but I do it on my terms. I didn't start smoking because of peer pressure and I'm not going to keep smoking to fit in with other people either. If they don't like that, then that's their problem, not mine. Anyway, the biggest problem will be if I get stressed at work, my normal response is to have a cigarette - not straight away, otherwise I'd spend most of the day outside, smoking, but that release is there for me.

I understand the science behind it, in that smoking doesn't really relax you, rather it increases your heart rate and bocks the production of serotonin in the brain, (the brain's own 'happy drug',) making it harder to feel happy and relaxed when you smoke than when you don't, but to be honest I think you can understand all the scientific explanations in the world but they won't help because smoking is a response to emotional needs. The number of times I've stood smoking and been thinking, "This is essentially poison in a tube, by smoking this I am putting myself at risk of cancer, emphysema, bronchial problems, etc etc, and then taken another drag.

Anyway, I'm doing OK so far, and I'll continue to try to resist temptation, not only of smoking but also of eating when I don't need to and I'll update you as to how I'm getting on.