2407 Socky Feet.

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You know, I didn’t intend for these to be numbered pages. The plan was to make these some kind of extra thing, like the onlyfans riff, but I’ve been so stressed that I messed up and started numbering them like normal. It doesn’t matter because this can fit basically anywhere, but it was unintentional. I can write my way through accidents because my style is basically structured riffing most of the time anyway. It’s not something I realized was a talent for a long time, but at some point I noticed that not everyone can do it. That makes it valuable. On some level at any rate.
It’s something I can do because as a kid I was always trying to predict the actions of other people. Always trying to protect myself from people by anticipating their attacks. I would think about all the various things a person might do, or say, and how to react to them. Hundreds of millions of situations over the course of my life. What do you do if the person at the post office is mean? How do you act if someone makes fun of you? If a friend suddenly betrays you how do you protect yourself? If they do this, I do this, if they do that I do this. I say this, they say that, I say this…
I can do it so fast now I barely even think about it. I don’t know if it’s maladaptive behavior, or just the way I decided to cope with things. It’s why I always have something mean to say. Learning to spot someone’s deepest insecurities so you can hit back harder if they hit you first. Then you learn to strike first so they can’t hit you at all. Of course, no matter how good you are at guessing what someone might do, there’s still a chance you’ll be wrong, but you remove the element of chance by choosing for them. It become proactive instead of reactive. You make the choice, you have control… You shut the door first do someone can’t shut it on you. Then, many years later, you’re alone in a room drawing pictures for strangers.

I saw someone I hadn’t seen in years. A passing acquaintance from school. At one point they said that everyone was terrified of me because I could dress people down so quickly. To them I was the bully, but from my perspective they were. It’s no wonder humans fight all the time. It’s very difficult being sentient.

What isn’t difficult is supporting me on Patreon. Well, it’s not super difficult. It can be trying at times… Okay, it’s not the most difficult thing to use Patreon, but I don’t have verifiably better options at present. Anyway, please consider supporting my work. I’m too old to start over.

17 Comments

I’m living proof that it’s not too hard to donate using Patreon. I figured it out! Then I had a cookie.

Jackie, your description of your backstory is haunting. I hope things are going better for you these days. Being alone in a room drawing for strangers is a sad lens, but an equally valid lens is that you are using the Internet to make many strangers a bit happier. In my opinion, your comic is a treasure. I’m still reading it after lo these many years. You have made these imaginary characters come to life for me… I’m invested.

Even your little throwaway comics like this current one-off storyline are enjoyable. Keep up the good work, and try to enjoy yourself as much as you can.

Jackie, you have to keep reminding us that your “filler” strips are filler, because we your readers just consume them as if they were normal ones.

“I hope things are going better for you these days. Being alone in a room drawing for strangers is a sad lens, but an equally valid lens is that you are using the Internet to make many strangers a bit happier.”

– Ha, no!! :-D Actually it is only labeled as ‘sad’ by an unhealthily extravert-praising culture. The Inter-net maybe the tool for intraverts to connect. You know, those people who did not suffer that much staying at home, who can be fine by themselves, or who are sometimes socially awkward (back at a socially or morally awkward society), who have found internal refuge from external misgivings, and often have more stuff going on within than from outside – like around half the population. The only tragic part is that the mainstreamed story does not fit.

Being in a room by yourself drawing can be super peaceful and meaningful.
Most important mental stuff is created in deep engrossment and contemplation leads to happiness long-term.
But beware, it’s not like the mind cannot chatter out as own enemy. So, an escape is shutting it off at times or making peace with it.

As a punchline, it was good though.
Sometimes, firing off a creative retort that noone gets at first and comes at them like a bumerang is more wickedly fascinating than holding up the emotional safety net for the insecure, and might actually be a service long-term, if it challenges in right direction and they manage to grow over it, like salty-sweet tastes it attacks you first and insults your dignity, but then can be oddly fulfilling deep down. Then again, it can fail badly, and you end up scarring the person, back.

That’s not to say, that one could not cyber-bully from a room if one wanted to.

It is quite humbling to hear your story how to prepare and guard against bullying and avoid having past hurts inflicted again. I’m sorry to hear the circumstances that led to it. Though the coping you developed seems quite useful in itself and again was protective, and you even turned it into a pro-social behavior long term. like tough love.

That includes definitely the idiots (!!) around us and how bad they had it coming and failed to manage, for sure. Everyone in their own peculiar, funny disastrous way. And then our sorry selves how we did not manage to lift them out of the closed mindset.
In the end, the true strength resides in coming back, eventually making peace, breaking the cycle, when the time feels safe enough – and seeing our past selves for the fools we were. Entertaining, balling, struggling fools. On a larger scale, evolution will crunch us anyway, but not yet this time, we have huddled into our niches.

I’ve heard it said that an introvert is an extrovert who has been socially abused as a child.

At first, it bothered me. I was fine. I’ve never really fit in, and I never let it bother me. Not getting along with a lot of people is rather different from being socially abused. The people who I went to school with weren’t always nice, but most weren’t particularly mean, and those few who were were particularly mean with everyone and it didn’t seem to bother them.

But given time to think about it, all of the thoughts of school that came up when I considered that focused on my third and later schools. Prior to the fourth grade, those memories didn’t come up.

There was nothing wrong with the kids in the second school I went to. Sleepy Hollow Elemetary School was easily the best education experience I had. I didn’t have any best friend when I went there, because nobody was mean, everyone was friendly enough to be considered a best friend. I didn’t have any best friend when I went there because I was too withdrawn to really have a real friend.

Why was that?

Well, there was a school I went to before that. In that school, I had a first grade teacher who normally graded on a curve and made a point of explaining to the kids a reason why she didn’t. A reason that wasn’t “I’m too bad at math to do a histogram of the grades”, and wasn’t “Well, I just don’t know what a curve is, so I do a linear shift instead, and I don’t know what an outlier is, so I keep those in.”

A reason that had my first name and last name and the words “perfect score”. That shouldn’t have been that uncommon, but she wasn’t particularly good at her job and her class was probably a bit more populated with kids with ADHD than she’d been prepared for by her education, and that threw that into sharp relief.

That wasn’t what set the kids against me. The year before that, I asked our teacher when we were going to start learning about the alphabet, which was on display right above the chalkboard. It was a week in and she hadn’t mentioned it and it just felt like it was going to be forever before we’d get to reading at that rate. I don’t remember exactly what her response was, but I do remember that’s when some of the kids started chasing me at recess and pummeling me the one time I let them catch me. That had at least been good training for the first grade, when pretty much the whole class got in on it, in response to the bad grades they got that were supposedly my fault.

But even that wasn’t the start of it. There had been a preschool before that. There weren’t any particular events that I could remember from preschool that caused my classmates to reject me. They just did.

As far as “idiots” go, it’s been said that the last point in time that any one person could know all humanity had discovered was early in the Renaissance. But when I asked about that further, it turned out the person they had in mind knew virtually nothing about China and its discoveries that hadn’t made it to Europe, and of course they knew nothing of the New World, as it hadn’t been discovered yet. Most of Africa south of the Sahara was only known along the coastline. It’s also probably notable that there was much that had been learned in ancient Rome and Greece and Middle Eastern countries that had been forgotten and not rediscovered yet.

These days, we generate more information than had existed in written text at that point in time multiple times a day. In the face of that insurmountable mountain of possible knowledge that humanity ostensibly knows about, we are all idiots.

I’m a computer programmer with almost 30 years of industrial experience. I am the go to guy for every strange problem my team at work encounters, and I can at least decipher every programming language we’ve encountered and needed to have deciphered. Once upon a time, I was fairly good at math, having tested into a class called double honors second semester calculus. (They renamed it to honors calculus the next year, naming the previous honors calculus class “advanced calculus”.) However, these days, I don’t remember who Stokes or Green were or what their theorems were about. I have been told that I adequately applied one of them given the situation it was supposed to handle, but I don’t remember which of them it was or what the situation was.

I am relatively bad at cooking. I can take a package of pre-mixed vegetables from the freezer and stir-fry them, but that’s about as advanced as I get in the kitchen. I cannot do my own taxes. I’ve only gotten into one accident in about two decades of living in the greater Boston area, though I’ll admit a significant portion of that is from not driving when I didn’t need to.

I have a special interests in autism spectrum, depression, Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, and Multiple Sclerosis. I am by no means approaching a psychologist or medical school junior level of any of those, but I’m not bad for a layman.

I’ve spent a lot of effort trying to learn to communicate in English better. To be clear, I didn’t say ‘speak’, because that just means getting the words out pronounced reasonably well, and my goal is to get my point across. It’s probably for the best, I have a speech impediment which sometimes causes me to fail that speaking bit fairly badly.

I’ve been using Duolingo for two years to learn Italian, and I’m not through section 2 yet. I’ve not been distracted by the points, I’m just still struggling enough I don’t feel I’m ready to move on. I’m spending far more than the 15 minutes a day they suggest, generally an hour or more, and my streak is around 700. I score well because their scores are based in large part on effort spent not progress made. I have yet to get Duolingo to accept a single spoken thing I’ve said.

In pretty much all other areas, I’m an idiot. I know what sports are, I know that bats are apparently used in baseball, cricket, and whiffleball, football in this country is the game where you carry the ball and in other countries where you kick the ball. Tennis and ping pong are played with rackets, and polo is played on horseback. Baseball and cricket have bases, and so do some other games, but I’m not completely certain how many. Walking around is possibly a sport in Italy, or maybe Duolingo has confused me on that point. (In any event, to walk around is something like passigiare. That might be misspelled, I still get that wrong sometimes.)

At least, I take some comfort in knowing that what Forrest Gump’s mother meant was, “It’s not about how smart you are, but what you do with it.” It’s also possibly important to understand that the other thing she always said was from the perspective of someone who’s illiterate. She maybe seemed like she had her act together, but she didn’t strike me as the sort who would raise a boy who couldn’t read if she could read herself.

From the report of my first day at preschool, I was absolutely an extroverted child who wanted to be everybody’s friend. I still would like to be friends with a lot of people, even though I understand that most of the people in this world want to not be my friend. It’s OK. I can live with that. And being online helps, as I can write these long messages and pretend that someone out there will appreciate them.

And then I hit post comment and don’t look back, because I’ve seen what people say too frequently in response to feel that’s safe.

I think the main thing that makes using Patreon difficult is when the fan has little to no money to give themselves

But of course I grew up alongside modern tech, so the usage itself comes second nature to me

This is one rule that I’ve learned-
Try not to look up a bully(s) that were in your school, from about 4 or more years ago.

I found blog-type sites that mentioned two bullies that I knew…and that was a mistake. Ugh. man.

If you have any amount of conscious, like I do,…you might find that one or more of them now look kind of…very unhappy, or almost friendless, + then you’ll feel like crap for looking them up just to find dirt on them.
“Let sleeping dogs lie”, or some kind of idea like that. Hm.

I do take slight issue with Jon saying Jo’s more quiet than “most girls” instead of “most people”, cause as someone who gets talked over a lot and easily overwhelmed by noise I notice that women both talk over me less /and/ don’t talk as loud as men.
Although maybe this is just an example of Jon’s learned sexism that he hasn’t gotten to unlearning yet, I do know people tend to perceive women as dominating the conversation if they take up an equal portion of it instead of the customary 30%.

So, is Jo supposed to be ashamed of being a “girl” (a particular *kind* of person)? Seems to me that encouraging generic mediocrity is “anti-person”.

But then, I’m neither woke nor politically correct. I prefer to be awake and actually correct.

“How do you act if someone makes fun of you? If a friend suddenly betrays you how do you protect yourself? If they do this, I do this, if they do that I do this. I say this, they say that, I say this…
I can do it so fast now I barely even think about it. I don’t know if it’s maladaptive behavior, or just the way I decided to cope with things.”

That can be maladaptive or beneficial, it depends on what you do with it.

“It’s why I always have something mean to say.”

This is fine.

“Learning to spot someone’s deepest insecurities so you can hit back harder if they hit you first. Then you learn to strike first so they can’t hit you at all.”

This sounds maladaptive.

“Of course, no matter how good you are at guessing what someone might do, there’s still a chance you’ll be wrong, but you remove the element of chance by choosing for them. It become proactive instead of reactive.”

And this is back to being uncertain.

But what I’ve seen you do in the comic is, for the most part, not maladaptive. Verbal Judo or Akido, rather than verbal Karate or Fisticuffs. Don’t attack, just move so that you’re not exposed. Move them so they don’t feel inclined to attack. And with the rest of your words, you move them to a point where they don’t feel as much of a need to attack others either.

Your grandmother was right. You are a Special Angel. If the world had enough people like you, maybe one day we could have peace. Knowing people, it would probably just be one day. But it would be a nice day.

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