Joshua

“It’s hard for me to read Weirdo and a lot of those magazines; it’s always depressing for me to read these guys writing about how they’re so depressed and they can’t get laid. After a while, it really gets on my nerves. There’s something about it that makes me think it’s just this club of really fucked-up dudes [laughs] — Weirdo especially — and after a while, I just didn’t want to read it any more. I was not interested in that viewpoint; it just made me feel bad and made me feel that these were people I didn’t ever want to know.”
― Lynda Barry

“Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves or looked like we were playing by ourselves.

I believe a kid who is playing is not alone. There is something brought alive during play, and this something, when played, seems to play back.

If playing isn't happiness or fun, if it is something which may lead to those things or to something else entirely, not being able to play is a misery. No one stopped me from playing when I was alone, but there were times when I wasn't able to, though I wanted to--there were times when nothing played back. Writers call it 'writer's block'. For kids there are other names for that feeling, though kids don't usually know them.

Fairy tales and myths are often about this very thing. They begin sometimes with this very situation: a dead kingdom. Its residents all turned to stone. It's a good way to say it, that something alive is gone. The television eased the problem by presenting channels to an ever-lively world I could watch, though it couldn't watch me back, not that it would see much if it could. A girl made of stone facing a flickering light, 45 years later a woman made of stone doing the same thing.

In a myth or a fairy tale one doesn't restore the kingdom by passivity, nor can it be done by force. It can't be done by logic or thought. It can't be done by logic or thought. So how can it be done?

Monsters and dangerous tasks seem to be part of it. Courage and terror and failure or what seems like failure, and then hopelessness and the approach of death convincingly. The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad it's there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isn't dead.”
― Lynda Barry, What It Is

“That was my favorite line: I'll drink less when things get better.”
― Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story

“I can barely forgive myself for the time when I negged Billy from my improv troupe onstage. He said, “I have a gift for you,” and my first instinct was to say, “No you don’t.” The scene died right then and there. See what happens when I try to nurture something? I know it seems dramatic to relate destroying an improv scene to possibly destroying a child’s life, but improv and child rearing are not so different. Both are jobs that people volunteer for and complain about endlessly, and they bore everyone around them as they talk about the process.”
― Jen Kirkman, I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales From a Happy Life Without Kids