Septimus Spider

“What are you saying, Septimus?”

Click here for Mrs. Spider!

Guam Learns from The Learning Channel

New Page: OutTakes

Check out our new page of OUTTAKES and extras from our silliest comics! New updates every day!

Playground Rowdiness

Holiday PSA: A Gift for 2013

Holiday Conversations, Pt. 4

Holiday PSA: Safe Travels

Guam’s Great (Inner) Escape

Guam’s Reality TV Show to End All Reality TV Shows

Talking Nonsense

A Trip Out East

First day, First photo.

There are still people on this planet who believe Evolution is a lie.

Sometimes you need to ignore the stares.

Sometimes you need to find a safe place.

As usual we didn’t behave like typical vacationers. It’s way more fun our way.

Us at Hopewell Rocks, New Brunswick, 2012.

Aerobics Spider

Letter to Myself

Spin for Yourself

Looking-Glass Spider

Freudian Spider Ponders Mental Health

Freudian Spider Crawls In & Out of My Life

We have had many fuzzy friends on the balcony of our New Space, but this spider is the largest yet! For those who are interested, these and all other photos are shot on a Canon G9.

Guam Bullies, Gets Bullied

These comics are inspired by recent events in New York, by which an elderly bus monitor was bullied by some seventh graders. Instead of doing her job or alerting the bus driver, Karen Klein allowed herself to be videotaped and tormented for almost 10 minutes, and when the video went viral, a crowd of do-gooders decided to raise a $667,000 for this “poor woman” to retire. Everyone across the country claims, “Nice story,” but the reality is: Klein rejects apologies from the “bullies,” accepts an absurd amount of money without thinking twice, sees a YEAR-LONG SUSPENSION as just punishment, and allows minors to face a life-time of harassment both in real life and online. They will never live it down; worse, they probably haven’t learned much from the situation other than that they are worthless and without hope of rehabilitation. Sunflower Skins does not condone bullying or any type of harassment, nor do we think that the seventh graders should go without punishment for verbal abuse; however we feel that the onslaught of outrage against these kids, ostracising them to the point of alienation, is completely disproportionate—especially from an adult who should have known how to handle the situation better from the start. Suspension for extreme misconduct on school grounds or during school-related activities (eg. on a school bus) is a legitimate response, but removing these kids from their social and academic lives for an entire year is obscene. Karen Klein shouldn’t accept that money, or maybe she should and donate all of it to local youth mental health services. Her “adult” actions in retaliation against a group of minors sicken us. Don’t make an example of these kids just to appease your own conscience; bullying roots reach far deeper than this Band-Aid.

Mental Health Matters, Part Three: What Have We Learned?

Presenting part three of our series, this time an honest list of things I’ve learned about mental health and wish to share with my readers. Please note that I am not a psychologist, but I have spent well over 10 years dealing with serious depression and its side-effects; I feel confident in the following wisdom because most of it was introduced to me by doctors, therapists, and family who had undergone treatment themselves.

1. Recovery from a serious depression works best when you use the triad-process to heal both body and mind:
   1. Therapy with a mental health professional for the mental and the emotional.
   2. An inquiry into medication for the physical (and the mental too), as well as renewed attention to diet, sleep, and exercise.
   3. Extra attention to TLC—tender loving care, by which you heed your most basic needs and reward yourself often. At this point you must respect the little things. Furthermore:

2. The Little Things. When I let go of my inhibitions and gain perspective, I know that life, in its most intimate, personal sense, creates its own meaning only through our daily moments of pleasure and insight. As Timothy Findley wrote, Pay Attention.
3. Thanks to my first therapist, Cathy, for this little rhyme; as cheeky as it may sound, it holds true and brings much peaceful understanding: Friends are for a Reason, a Season, or a Lifetime.
4. You have no control over other people’s thoughts and actions; you can only control yourself. When someone does something outrageous or offensive, realize that you cannot stop their character but instead must gauge an effective and appropriate response on your behalf.
5. A panic attack will always end. Regardless of the attack’s intensity, remind yourself that it will not last forever and that you still have control. Some steps to calming your amygdala:
   1. Learn how to deep-breathe properly. Breathe in through your nose and with your diaphragm, filling up to your belly button with tension; breathe out with your mouth and release all those worries straight through the top of your head, leaving your body refreshed and cleansed. Practise deep-breathing before sleep and when you feel anxious; beginning your morning with a meditation routine can limit anxiety throughout the day.
   2. There are various ways to cope with panic attacks that seem to snowball out of control, where everything seems dangerous and no light appears. One of my favourite mental exercises is to count backward from 20 and with each number fully recall, verbally if necessary, a positive, safe memory. Chances are you won’t get beyond 16 without having spent so much energy focused on your new task that your body responds to control rather than panic.
   3. Use your senses to stabilize yourself; focus on five specific things you can hear, five things that you can feel, etc.
   4. Use the power of imagination to overcome current circumstances; by mentally placing yourself somewhere comfortable and safe, and re-envisioning your behaviour in that environment, your body will naturally begin to relax.
6. It is important to have a safe zone, a place where you can truly feel vulnerable enough explore difficult feelings and intense memories. Create a place where you are comfortable and can have leisure time too, nurturing your most basic needs to feel safe and taken care of; take good care of yourself and your need for personal space.
7. Family is what you make it; blood ties shouldn’t take precedence over good personal and relational care. Too often a sense of guilt or obligation to protect family members hinders your own progress, so surround yourself with a family of your own choosing, relatives and friends who support the decision to seek mental healing.
8. Knowing what you don’t want is a good place to start. For some people life has become so dark that it’s difficult to envision anything desirable or attainable; happiness is not even an imaginable option. It’s at this point, however, that you can take the brave first step toward change: acknowledging that you don’t want to be depressed anymore.
9. If your first or even your second experience with a mental health worker is unpleasant, don’t be so discouraged that you lose hope in the system. There is somebody out there who wants to help you, and the effort to find him or her will be worth the reward.
10. What matters, matters; what is, is. Peace comes with finally accepting whatever it is that you truly desire—that which you do not want to live without—and the time & space circumstances which created your early being. From that point you can move forward & grow.

Mental Health Matters, Part Two: Hunger Strike

As promised, part two of our series, a short poem about anorexia. Being skinny is a dream that too many people believe will solve the deep sadness; many members of my family, including myself, and too many friends have struggled with that belief as well. May you find hope beyond self-harm. For free books about bulimia, please see Feed The Whales.

Mental Health Matters, Part One: city heat

As part of May as Mental Health Month Sunflower Skins presents some notes from personal experience. Monday’s fragment focuses on social anxiety and personal needs, both from yourself–TLC–and from others; Wednesday’s poem will address eating disorders; and finally on Friday I have a list of some things that I’ve learned about Mental Health and wish to share.

Toys Playing with Toys

Guam Explores Her Spatial Imagination

Guam “Helps” Feed the Whales

These books are for Shock Stock 2012! Free! Also we’ll be taking a bunch out east this summer and then more down to Florida next winter. So many whales, so many places to feed! Blub blub, my friends.

Vote Harvey Dent

Grounded Like a Seed in the Dirt

 

Experiment 15: Means of Survival

Incidentally, cork sales were up due to deuterium figures sliding, which meant that May’s cork-and-pipecleaner-reindeer keepsakes weren’t as abundant this year, nor as affordable. The rest of the Christmas stock remained the same, as it always did, Yes, I always tried to keep my prices reasonable, but now one of her most prized items, the one all the neighbourhood kids bought each year for their parents and grandparents alike, was not as available as it had been in the past; O they’re still just a beautiful—so cute! and lively! May shakes her head a bit, amends Lifelike! Their spindly legs and googly eyes—they sometimes look as though they’re about to leap off the table, Flying Santa’s sleigh! And then there’s the accompanying mini-sleighs, made with heavy paper and wire, dotted with glitter, ribbon for reins—May’s so proud of this, as she is with every season’s best seller: Spring’s handmade robin’s nest with tiny, bright eggs, and a hand-painted bird house for the pompom-and-pipecleaner Mother Robin; Summer’s sunhats, decorated with ribbons of all colours and false flowers; Fall’s dried-leaf, ironed tissue-paper placemats in orange, brown, and green. Often her seasonal stock was different each year—she’d been here a lot of years—but these four items were a constant. My customers depend on me! May worries a lot. Especially after Anthony, creepy that he is, told her that something about hydrogen levels drying up cork the way the sponges we paint with dry up if we don’t use them—I haven’t painted with sponges in a while, haven’t I? Or with potato shapes either.

“May! What are you doing? You’re off in space again, y’old grandma, worrying about getting enough cork to make enough reindeer to please enough of the neighbourhood urchin. Doesn’t that seem a little, I dunno, stupid to you?”

Nurse Morrison leads away Anthony, and she turns her head around to smile blandly at May—who, startled and taken aback, twists some red pipecleaner around her finger and wonders if it’s possible to rehydrate cork.

Experiment 12: The Sickly Smile

I laugh [staged and practiced], I smile [perfectly]. I shoot witty one-liners [stolen from obscure movies and lyrics (but no one here will know that)]. A specially crafted monster of attention. What’s bred in bone [what has been taught] and [what is obeyed]. I am such a good girl. I tell the right stories with all the important, heavy pauses [dramatic exaggeration reels in the audience and pulls on their precious heart-strings (barf)]. Sometimes the lights make me sick and I’m led offset to rest up [I am such a diva and have learned to take advantage of hypochondriac and psychosomatic indulgences] meaning: [impressions and pressures, inside my head and all around me (infecting everyone else, but I think I might be the only one who realizes it)]. I lie on the couch with my head in my mother’s lap [her hand holding a cool cloth to my forehead]. My knees are arched up [and anybody who walked by could see up my dress (heavy, poofy, flowery dress), see my white tights with the little hearts stitched in them (hot and unnecessary)]. I don’t care, cannot care, about anything right now. The lights are everywhere [so bright], their glare is what I will remember most. For some reason my father walks into the greenroom and starts taking pictures of us on the couch [flashes of light], emphasizing the pounding [put a little girl in a box and play her a recording of a jack hammer (at deafening volumes)]. My mother shoos him away [with a hiss and a glare], asks what she can do for me [always asking what she can do]. I have another four or five hours to go. I must put on my face again. Stand up straight and ask sweet questions instead of complaining [I do complain a lot, I’ll admit (but I get away with it)], I even convince myself [so dramatic]. I go to the sink and I wash my face [cold water against hot skin]. My mother brushes my hair a bit [long, blonde, done up in braids and bows (triggers)]. We return to the set, the lights on me [the miraculous] and my mother [the brave]. The audience is on the edge of their seats [bleachers] because that’s the cue [look excited]. We tell the story [again], play the video [again], broadcast my history [bodily, emotionally, unconsciously (unintentionally wounding / creating a monster)]. And smile [perfectly] through all of it [even all these years later].

Sketches, Experiment 10: Eating Wisdom

EATING WISDOM

At the ripe age of thirteen, full of spunk and fever, I once pronounced a curse of death upon my grandmother for making me come home early from a party. She didn’t approve of “the young people drinking.” That seems so many years ago, but I can remember her expression exactly, her no-nonsense, I-can-dish-it-right-back remark:

“Honey, you’re dying as soon as you’re born. Get used to it.”

What strikes me now is not the idea that life is a struggle or that our journeys are ending as soon as they’re beginning or whatever. It’s her attitude in the last part. Become familiar with your mortality—and your chance for error and injury and dishonesty. Get to know and understand your transgressions. Accept them.

In my first high school science class that fall I learned that adaptability is one of the nine characteristics of living things. To adapt despite the weather, to turn wherever there’s sunlight.

Purple bruised wound. Accept the ability to adapt to this shitty world? Why would I want to live through this?

My grandmother’s curse has come true: she’s dead and underground by now. I am standing here in my kitchen, looking at a vase of flowers. There were a lot of people at the funeral, but the church still seemed empty. My cat jumps onto the table and sniffs at the irises and baby’s breath, debating the possibility of eating some.

You try so many ways to get around the chaos, but you keep coming back to the same realization, that once upon a time, the chaos that balanced you.

Eat your words, baby girl. Tell yourself it will be alright and continually adapt to the infinite changes. Never stop changing. And in that, be constant.

Sketches, Experiment 9: Violet

VIOLET

An impromptu thunderstorm; I didn’t think it would come until tomorrow. The day, so humid and sticky, bellyaching. Threats all afternoon. The air, heavy, my eyelids lowered.

Rain in patterns, on and off; bright and dark, back and forth like my mood.

Smoky eyes. My body languid, smooth. I’ve come down to the basement to take refuge from the heat. Lightening strikes somewhere, but the thunder, it’s still far off. I have yet to feel the heart of it.

My evening out, hair frizzed and untamed. Cannot conquer. But enticing nonetheless. I sit down on the cool floor. Amongst boxes of wonderful, forgotten nights when I had some company with whom to share this hot, hot heat.

I listen to the rain and study the shape of my leg, the curve of the shoe; all colours reflected in empty bottles of vodka. A flash of light and my body rumbles. Already my dress is wet with sweat, stuck to my skin. Imagine the lightening striking my skin. What colours it would make. Sounds I hear like shifting glass, and water on the streets, pounding, pounding.

What difference would it make if I were sober?

The crack of lightening and thunder and gold glitter in my eyes, feel violent, feel like a million fucking bulbs have blown apart the sky and at last brought peace to the swaying, happy house.