Going Out

I'm finally OK enough to go out of the house on dates! It's been a while and I really missed it. We tried going out a few weeks ago and it really exhausted the hell out of me. We went out last night to check out this new Mediterranean restaurant and it went really well. The food was OK, but the best thing is I felt good all throughout.

At home it really hasn't been a problem. I've been working steadily for a while and right now I'm inking Secret Empire over Leinil Yu. We started with issue #4. I don't know how long we'll be on the book and how many issues we will do.

The other weekend my dad celebrated his 80th birthday! Amazingly, he's still very strong. He's still actually working, teaching at the St. Peter's Seminary. Here he is surrounded by some of his students:

I'm really grateful for these guys because they've been very generous about donating blood for my benefit over the last year. One thing I haven't mentioned yet about my pneumonia was that it really wreaked havoc with my hemoglobin and platelet, both of which dropped dramatically during that time. I needed blood transfusions and these seminarians stepped up and went to the hospital to donate what they could. I'm very thankful to them for having done this. I'm glad dad invited them all to his birthday celebration.

Right now I'm pretty much back to how I was before I got sick and it just feels great. The first thing I'll be doing publicly is to give a talk here at the Komikero Komiks Museum for the National Book Development Board's National Book Stop Tour. I'm glad they chose the museum as the venue of one of their stops so when they invited me to talk, I didn't hesitate. It won't be so difficult for me because it's practically next door and it's an opportunity to talk about komiks, which I love to do, but I have painfully little opportunity to do so lately. This will be on Satuday, April 8 around 2 pm or so. I really am looking forward to that.

Hoping I Make Sense

Me reading this many years from now I hope I'm making sense. It's probably cliche to say that everyday is a struggle, but it's so true for me. The thing that divides those who last and those who fall by the wayside really is will power. Sometimes even something as simple as getting up from bed. Sometimes it's something more simple, like just moving your arm can be a struggle. But you move your arm. You get up from bed. And you just keep going. Your mind has to be stronger than your body. You need to use your mind to blot out the aches and pains and weaknesses and just. keep. going. The last few months have been like this. But I feel a whole lot better now than I did last January. End of January and early February was perhaps the worst. In the middle of all that I just had to keep going.

The bigger struggle is going back to being creative. Sometimes all your effort goes into just surviving that you just have no time or energy to think of creative things. I think I've done the surviving thing so now I have to get into creating. And I think it's about time.