One of the many things I’ve abandoned in the past several months was my daily comic strip reading. I would go through about seventy comics or so in a week–some updating daily and some only once a week–and at points the number of strips I read was upwards of eighty or more. Then I got my DS and classes got hectic and I just stopped reading anything on-line including news sites and forums. Hell, I was barely even checking other people’s webpages let alone keeping up on constantly changing content on eighty different sites. So it’s been a while since I’ve done much reading of webcomics. I almost feel that this is part and parcel of my distancing from everything I once did habitually. Hell, reading webcomics actually kept me more up-to-date on what was going on in the world than listening to the radio on the way to work or reading headlines on newspapers as I passed by the stands. (LOTS of the comics I read deal heavily with topics and events in the news and in gossip mills.) The more I’ve been thinking about how reserved I’ve become, the more I wonder if pulling back from webcomics was just another symptom of that.

Starting over the winter break, I began trying to catch back up on comics, weeding out nearly a third of them, realizing that I didn’t miss many of them and therefore didn’t need to keep trying to stay abreast of so many if I wasn’t enjoying all of them that much. Even with smaller numbers of comics to check, the task of re-archiving about sixty comics seemed daunting, and in true depressed fashion and form, I avoided it. The weekend Damien was up, I did get through many more, and as of now, I have only about a dozen that I am not caught up on. I’m still not checking them daily, but it’s far easier to catch up on a week’s worth of strips than strips dating back to late September. Now if only I could catch up on my life where I left it off sometime last year. It’d be interesting to be able to go back and archive all of that mess, but since I was pretty boring and non-responsive, it probably wouldn’t be that interesting. I’d really rather go back just to catch up on stuff that should have been done then but wasn’t getting done. However, I can’t, so here I am.

I sure love reading comics. Reading a lot of these has reminded me of my own writing and art, and I’m starting to get a little bit of my spark back to finish some of my earlier projects, to try and keep up with my life day by day as opposed to avoiding it and pushing it aside for later just because “I can’t handle this right now and/or don’t want to.” Being depressed sucks. I just wish I weren’t such a highly-functioning depressed person. I mean, I wish I were one of those lie-around-all-day or can’t-get-out-of-bed types because then I’d feel justified letting my life go rather than being highly functioning (i.e. going to work, grading papers, doing laundry, etc.) and getting some stuff done but letting random other parts fall by the wayside. Does that make sense? I’m not sure that it’s supposed to. Depression is pretty irrational, or at least, I think it is. I think I’ve forgotten more about depression than is safe for someone who’s so overly prone to it, so I have the unfortunate task of relearning what the hell is going on and what to do about it. Reading comics is a great start. After all, if in an evening I can laugh really hard about some silly, fun, insightful comics even just a few times, it brings up the whole night. Maybe that’s why I had been avoiding comics. I didn’t want to laugh. Well, here’s to laughing again even if it does make my lungs hurt and make me cough really hard until I get a headache. I need to go to the doctor and get a prescription for this lung thing, but other than that, things might just be looking up soon. Comics be praised!