comic for 2/13/13

[d murphy]

it's cheap candy day eve eve. over the next two days candy will be prohibitively expensive. but come friday it will be awesomely cheap.

[Nikki]

Jennifer makes me want to hug her because she's just so alone. *sigh*

Also, I appreciate the current storyline, with Lindsay, for multiple reasons.

One-
I got diagnosed a year ago with a condition called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. It's a genetic connective tissue disorder, has six recognized subtypes, most of which are passed dominantly (mine included). It comes with a hefty dose of chronic pain, dislocations, subluxations, high medication tolerance, as well as truly excellent contortions and a body that doesn't reflect a bit of this (one characteristic is smooth skin. Another is a tendency for women with the condition to appear younger than they are. Plus it comes with a high metabolism and excessive adrenaline production that only increases that metabolism, so until I was 16 I was legally supposed to ride in a booster seat due to my weight). Pregnancy would end up causing me a lot of problems (like, bed rest for the entire second half of it) as well as likely being a dangerous, difficult birth and the probability of passing this on to a child (that's the hardest one to come to terms with...I can't imagine ever facing a child and telling them that I knew they had a coin-flip chance at a lifetime of pain, and I decided to flip the coin). I'm gay, so the situation doesn't have a lot of bearing on my life, but it's still good to see someone with a disability being portrayed.

And

Two-
I *LOVE* that Lindsay has an attitude. That she actually gets angry. We have a view around disabilities that can be harmful. "The only disability in life is a bad attitude!", implying that if you can't climb that mountain, or go to college, or work a 9-to-5 job, it's cause of a bad attitude. "Inspiration porn" is so widespread that there was a term invented. It refers to all the photos you see of a person with a disability doing the same stuff other people do, but with a fancy inspirational message, because somehow someone in a wheelchair going bowling is more inspirational than an able-bodied person doing the same thing. Inspirational is what people do, not what they are. Someone who wins a Nobel Prize is inspirational, no matter what they look like. But people with disabilities so often hear it brushed aside, in the form of "Oh, I couldn't do it if I were you! I wouldn't be able to live like that!" and it hurts, because it assumes that we shouldn't think our lives our worth living. It puts our base state as "suicidal" and praises us for not killing ourselves.
Nobody likes seeing an angry disabled person. If you have a disability (or if you're disadvantaged from the norm of straight white middle-class male in some way, such as non-white, poor, non-straight, or non-male) then you have to be polite about it, gracious, an inspiration to others. I joke about my issues and I spread awareness where I can, and I save my anger and tears for the safety of my room, because I know that being angry at people for using "cripple" to refer to them with a broken leg or whatnot won't help me. I don't get to be me. I have to be anyone with a disability, because for many people, I'm the only person of that description that they actually know.

So someone with a disability who is unabashedly pissed about how she's treated, the stereotypes about her, and the way society treats her...I wanna do the fist-pump thing from the credits of The Breakfast Club.

[Nikki]

Also, I get paid on Friday. I will be grabbing cheap candy at the store on Friday or Saturday. Everyone thinks that the 14th is meant to be Single Appreciation Day and Valentine's Day, all in one. I keep having to correct them. The 14th is Valentine's, when couples get to buy overpriced sugar for each other. The 15th is Single Appreciation Day, sometimes known as Cheap Candy Day.

[nepats79]

I'm still trying to figure out what's motivating Jennifer. Part of me thinks she feels obligated to have her child as a way of atoning for the child her sister never had. Another part of me thinks she's punishing herself for botching her sister's abortion. On top of this, she doesn't get along particularly well with her parents AT ALL, yet she still feels obligated to look after their welfare. I just don't get why she does anything she does.

[d murphy]

thanks nikki. i really appreciate what you said. i hate the implication that people who have disabilities aren't allowed to have normal emotions. everyone has emotions. so with lindsay i wanted to have a character who was allowed to show a wide range of them.

as for jennifer she has a lot of guilt, and it's really hard to turn one's back on one's parents, even when they're somewhat insane. there's still some backstory on her past that may clarify things, particularly in recent comics there's been a lot more focus on jennifer's relationship with her mother than her father which may better explain her attitudes when the comic starts involving him a bit more.