Week 29

Hi friends and new subscribers of which there were a few this week! Welcome. My name is Stacy and I make a new comic every week and post something I have learned.

In December I’m making an advent comic, with one or two panels every day leading up to Christmas. The comic itself is not particularly Christmassy other than I feel like it’s probably building towards a heartwarming place rather than a disturbing or sad place or something.

That reminds me, I’m yet to watch a single Christmas movie this year. How disappointing.

I’m posting panels day by day on Notes but rounding up the whole comic here week by week so you can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Thanks for reading and please share if you enjoy! Also, I’m overseas and trying to post this on my phone so apologies if there’s any formatting issues.

All will be resolved next week!

This Week I Learned…

How to be a wet blanket. I’m on holiday in Phuket with a bunch of friends for their 40th birthday celebrations. Most people who have kids have left theirs at home, but our son is too small for that, so he is here too, preventing us from doing many fun things like zip-lining and horror-themed escape rooms.

But there is a pool, and we are spending a lot of time floating in it. It reminded me of a fact I learned recently, I think while watching QI: that humans can’t sense wetness. That is, human skin cells don’t have any kind of wetness receptors. Instead, we feel the sensation of wetness using secondary factors. Your brain creates the sense of wetness using things like temperature, texture, and pressure.

It comes to the same thing, but it’s a learned series of complex interpretations rather than something inbuilt. And it can be tricked, like when you wear a latex glove and put your hand in water and you swear your hand is wet even though it’s not. Or when you can’t tell if hanging laundry is wet or just cold.

Anyway, I decided to share this fact with some friends in the pool and they instantly all wanted to argue with it and pick it apart and wilfully misinterpret what I was saying so they could call more people over to be like, “Hey everyone, this idiot doesn’t think wetness exists.” And so even though I was just trying to share a morsel of trivia, I ended up feeling backed into having to defend it with my life, and then endure mockery for the rest of the week whenever I said something like, “Damn, my towel is still wet.” They would say, “OH REALLY, HOW CAN YOU TELL?”

And then I would pretend to be grumpy. Or was I really grumpy? It’s a fine line. But sometimes, to facilitate other people’s fun, you have to be the wet blanket, even if you can’t say for sure how wet you are.

---

Thanks to all the people who sent lovely messages last week when I talked about my Yiayia. They were heartwarming to receive and much appreciated. When I was in Perth, we were taking turns sharing nice memories of her, and one image that came to mind was the way she would put a glass of water next to my bed when I slept over. She would cover that glass with cling film—whether to protect against flying insects or spillage or for some other reason I don’t know—but it meant that every so often I would wake in the middle of the night and reach for that glass and, forgetting the barrier, touch my lips to the plastic film, the cool water lapping against the prophylactic.