After slaving away at various overdue tasks I felt I'd been sufficiently productive on Sunday to reward myself (rewards at the end of the day aren't really a good incentive system for someone who never feels they've quite done enough, but until I finish rethinking my reward strategies it'll have to do). So I caught the tail end of the Alternative Press Expo. This time I wore enough black and an appropriate style of shirt; last year I wore a green shirt and felt like a freak. Really, you never saw such a crowd for fauxhawks / tats / black glasses frames / emo shirt art / fuschia, black, or bleached hair / scruffy jeans / striped stockings / blackblackblack. But beyond the uniforms, much good art was on display.

There's a lot to be said for showing up late on the second day, since a number of people discount their wares just so they don't have to cart things home. Booth staff get jaded and giddy, which makes for amusing conversations. For whatever reasons, the booths offered fewer indie crafts this year than last, not just the crappy crafts but the polished work. Too bad -- I'd been looking forward to the repurposed chachkes & books.

For once I had a tiny bit of money to spend. Here's what I scored -- as usual, I went indie:

- 70 Japanese Gestures (not a comic, but an actual how-to book)
- a new Harvey Pekar collection, Another Day
- The first two in a series called Jobnik, a comic by a woman Israeli leftie ex-soldier living in Vancouver
- Lavapunch, a collection of stories on the theme of "action figures"
- Grave Yarns, an EC-style horror comic by Hal Robins (of "Ask Dr. Hal" fame), signed by the author. If you like EC comics I highly recommend this one. It even has a "Good lord!" "Choke" in it.
- Toupydoops, by Kevin McShane (handed to me for free as I left)
- A four-pack of minis by Esther Pearl Watson, who does the Unlovable back-of-the-book comic for Bust
- Prime Cut, the collection of Jose Cabrera's Crying Macho Man
- A three-pack of minis called Icecreamlandia
- Four-pack of collected minis called Sour Milk Sea

Then a couple of 80%-off snapshot-sized artworks by Mary Patterson of Fishchild Studio, and a few more tiny arty things (an Altoids box-sized blank book, a couple of buttons).

Serendipity: I saw someone from the dance community there, not the one of the three blond accordion/piano players who's a comics fan, but the black-haired bookstore worker (whose daughter had a booth there), and I got his commitment to work on Pressing Event #1 in a position I've been trying to fill for weeks. Back on home turf, I went to dinner at our favorite local Thai restaurant. The woman clearing away my plate saw me with the Pekar collection and started talking to me "because you're reading manga." In the process of explaining that Pekar isn't manga I learned that she's a science-fiction writer who's publishing novelettes in Analog, and her husband is an experimental composer who put foil on his wheelchair spokes and made music by electronically parsing the light patterns from the wheels. She just helps out in the restaurant once a week. We had a great time talking when she wasn't bussing tables. This proves that a) science-fiction stories continue to be titanic money-makers, and b) you really never know about people.