My name is Toby Fee. I live in Eugene, Oregon where I’m a student at the University of Oregon studying mainly art. I produce a monthly newspaper called The Bell that is not available online.
some of this information is now out of date, 5/18/2010
The photos I drew from for this strip come from the awesome weblog Dooce.com by Heather Armstrong
According to the internet rats can get a disease called Toxoplasmosa Gondii which causes them to lose their fear of cats. Go figure.
The hardest part of doing The Bell is the moment I finish an issue. Layout happens in the dead of night. It’s 3AM, I’m watching the first copy come off the printer (generally with f***ed up print margins, natch), and while I should be thrilled or even relieved I’m just tired. The whole day afterward I’m giving people copies and they’re reading and enjoying and I should be happy but instead I’m tired.
Anhedonia, a fancy term I picked up from Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, makes it very difficult to act as I should around The Bell. Criticism is hard to take, I can’t enter into a dialogue without feeling that everyone is apathetic to my work, and that people just take copies out of politeness.
By the time I’ve recovered, it’s time to work on the next issue, and there’s no time in between to luxuriate in being done, nor am I very excited to distribute copies.
Whoooo! That’s enough with the kvetching. It is also at those tired moments that I realize how good it feels to be doing something. I don’t have to tear down the work of others to feel good about my own, I don’t have to comment or rip off classics to do something I feel is worthwhile, all I have to do is keep working and bang, I’m an artist.
The sad part is that I had to try like five times to get a screen capture of this because I kept screwing up and dying. It's weird, though, I don't know what's changed but these early Nintendo games seemed so hard when I was 10, now it's effortless, and every death is just a mild frustration. Maybe it's just my point of view that's changed.
An ex-girlfriend of mine once made cheese in our refrigerator. Bookish, she was exactly the sort of person you’d want stranded on a desert island with you to teach you all about compasses and wind currents and what it is you’d done to make her so angry just now. So the process of making cheese from a gallon of milk involved straining and I think some heating but it basically amounted to leaving milk in the refrigerator for several weeks past its out date. The result was a sort of crumbly chevre.
Since then I’ve been a lot more brave about dairy products. Coming in to work tonight I discovered that all I had to eat for the next six hours was a bag of xylose (the fat man’s trying to lose weight, I know, funny), five York peppermint patties (which I hate), and a tub of cottage cheese that had been knocking around the basket of my bike for a few days.
I am not by nature a gross person. I do not eat with my hands or burp in public, so it’s a little hard to admit that I have just now finished a pound of cottage cheese that expired five days ago and has, since that time, been kept at room temperature.
I’ve got a slight tingling on my tongue, and I’m wondering if the computer lab might be my last visual memory before a lifetime of blindness.
Still it’s better than York peppermint patties.
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