This is an ex journal.

Originally uploaded for cjq, but since it's uploaded, feel free to kope =p
1. Dont Make Me a Target
2. The Ghost of You Lingers
3. You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb
4. Dont You Evah
5. Rhthm & Soul
6. Eddies Ragga
7. The Underdog
8. My Little Japanese Cigarette Case
9. Finer Feelings
10. Black Like Me

This is the last strip of Calvin and Hobbes published in dec 1995, and I love it because it is full of bright optimism, joyful happiness and shinning hope for the future, feelings which I'm not really experiencing right now, but something I would like everyone I love to have all the same. Oh well, happy holidays!

It is a commonplace that there is no loneliness like that of one who finds himself alone in a crowd; novelists repeat it; the pathos is undeniable; and now, since the case of Miss V., I at least have come to believe it. Such a story as hers and her sister’s – but it is characteristic that in writing of them one name seems instinctively to do for both – indeed one might mention a dozen such sisters in one breath. Such a story is scarcely possible except in London. In the country there would have been the butcher or the postman or the parson’s wife; but in a highly civilized town the civilities of human life are narrowed to the least possible space. The butcher drops his meat down the area; the postman shoves his letter into the box, and the parson’s wife has been known to hurl the pastoral missives through the same convenient breach: no time, they all repeat, must be wasted. So, through the meat remain uneaten, the letters unread, and the pastoral comments disobeyed, no one is any the wiser; until there comes a day when these functionaries tacitly conclude that no. 16 or 23 need be attended to no longer. They skip it, on their rounds, and poor Miss J. or Miss V. drops out of the close knit chain of human life; and is skipped by everyone and for ever.

The ease with which such a fate befalls you suggests that it is really necessary to assert yourself in order to prevent yourself from being skipped; how could you ever come to life again if the butcher the postman and the policeman made up their minds to ignore you? It is a terrible fate; I think I will knock over a chair at this moment; now the lodger beneath knows that I am alive at any rate.

But to return to the mysterious case of Miss V., in which initial, be it understood is concealed the person also of Miss Janet V,: it is hardly necessary to split one letter into two parts.

They have been gliding about London for some fifteen years; you were to find them in certain drawing-rooms or picture galleries, and when you said, ‘Oh how d’you do Miss V.’ as though you have been in the habit of meeting her every day of your life, she would answer, “Isn’t it a pleasant day,” or “What bad weather we are having” and then you moved on and she seemed to melt into some armchair or chest or drawers. At any rate you thought no more of her until she detached herself from the furniture in a year’s time perhaps, and the same things were said over again.

A tie of blood - or whatever the fluid was that ran in Miss V.’s veins – made it my particular fate to run against her – or pass through her or dissipate her, whatever the phrase may be – more constantly perhaps than nay other person, until this little performance became almost a habit. No party or concert or gallery seemed quite complete unless the familiar grey shadow was part of it; and when, some time ago, she ceased to haunt my path, I knew vaguely that something was missing. I will not exaggerate and say that I knew that she was missing; but there is no insincerity in using the neuter form.

Thus in a crowded room I began to find myself gazing round in nameless dissatisfaction; no, everyone seemed to be there – but surely there was something lacking in furniture or curtains – or was it that a print was moved from the wall?

Then one morning early, wakening at dawn indeed, I cried aloud, Mary V. Mary V!! It was the first time, I am sure that anyone had ever cried her name with such conviction; generally it seemed a colourless epithet, used merely to round a period. But my voice did not as I half expected, summon the person or semblance of Miss V. before me: the room remained vague. All day long my own cry echoed in my brain; till I made certain that at some street corner or another I should come across her as usual, and see her fade away, and be satisfied. Still, she came not; and I think I was discontented. At any rate the strange fantastic plan came into my head as I lay awake at night, a mere whim at first, which grew serious and exciting by degrees, that I would go and call on Marry V. in person.

O how mad and odd and amusing it seemed, now that I thought of it! – to trace down the shadow, to see where she lived and if she lived, and talk to her as though she were a person like the rest of us!

Consider how it would seem to set out in an omnibus to visit the shadow of a blue bell in Kew Gardens, when the sun stands halfway down the sky! Or to catch the down from a dandelion! at midnight in a Surrey meadow. Yet it was a much more fantastic expedition than any of these I proposed; and as I put on my clothes to start I laughed and laughed to think that such substantial preparation was needed for my task. Boots and hat for Mary V.! It seemed incredibly incongruous.

At length I reached the flat where she lived, and on the signboard I found it stated ambiguously – like the rest of us – that she was both out and in. At her door, high up in the topmost storey of the building, I knocked and rang, and waited and scrutinized, no one came; and I began to wonder if shadows could die, and how one buried them; when the door was gently opened by a maid. Mary V. had been ill for two months; she had died yesterday morning, at the very hour when I called her name. So I shall never meet her shadow anymore.

-Virginia Woolf