New Yorker Rejects #13

My vet school graduation year was 2013. No matter how rational people in the medical profession pretend to be, there's plenty of healthy superstition. So naturally the faculty would look at my class and ask themselves, "Are they gonna be trouble?"

I am incredibly grateful that instead of leaning into our dark fate, my class embraced the curse and dared a number to do it's worst. We said "foo" to fate and made award-winning rap videos about zoonotic intestinal parasites. And we called our media-production executive team (a slight exaggeration) Triskaidekaphilia.

It means love of the number thirteen.

I'm a triskaidekaphile. It means I love my fate, whatever it happens to be. I'm not gonna claim that this was an original idea (I think I stole it from Marcus Aurelius, who stole it from Senna, who stole it from some ancient Greek guy named Todd-iopoulous or something like that). But I am gonna say that it's helped me through many challenges in my life. So many that I can't imagine going through anything challenging again without it.

Which was why–which was why!–when I got the email reply from The New Yorker on my thirteenth batch of submissions, it felt like fate was finally smiling back!

I had been rejected! But it was a personalized rejection!

Four uniquely tailored letters to lead off this form email was the sip from an oasis, the jolt of caffeine, the flushing of the oxygen tank that I needed to keep going. My efforts to climb the Mt. Everest of cartooning were not going unheeded.

The void had answered back!

You can imagine my excitement! The unfamiliar words that caught my hopeful attention just before realizing that it was still a rejection email. Nearly a half- second of rapturous joy!

But then, like it does, life knocked me back on my ass.

That's okay, that's life's job. Like, my job is a veterinarian, and Sasquatch's job is to hide, and we can't get too upset if nobody gives us enough validation for it.

It's our job to get our own validation. It's our job to be smart, capable, grown-up modern humans. And to stop worrying so much about what other people think!

And, you know, putting a lot of work into something like these New Yorker cartoons has taught me a valuable lesson in humility. Success in the world of comedy is hard. You fall flat on your face a lot, apparently.

You have to put your faith in ideas so ridiculous they seem insane. But you have to take risks, believe in yourself...

Now having said that, it depends on who you are. Some individuals have a knack for landing on their feet.

And hey, just because The New Yorker isn't buying my cartoons (yet), doesn't mean they're not worth bringing into the world. No less an august institution than the American Veterinary Medical Association gave me a microphone and two hours of convention time this past summer to teach a cartoon-drawing course to veterinarians, so maybe there is a way to force humor into healthcare.

All I know is–

Hold on, my kids just interrupted me. Excuse me for a moment. This seemed like it was really getting going, but now I gotta take a minute to:

<break up a fight/wipe someone's butt/clean up a spill/brush someone's teeth/apologize to another parent/apologize to a teacher/go find my kid/pay for minor property damage/apologize to the principle/argue about appropriate amounts of ketchup/etc.>

Phew! They're finally asleep. I love my kids, but I have to say that it's hard to get a lot of work done when they're around.

It must be like this for lots of professions.

Did I say profession? What I'm doing here at Sasquatch Paw is not a profession. It makes no money, and it is hard to explain on a LinkedIn profile–therefore it = "not profession".

The honest truth is, it's a waste of time. And so are cartoons, and so are a million other things I do day-to-day and mostly feel guilty about. But for some reason (probably the curse of the number thirteen) I continue to write and draw and think the way that I do.

And although I am 100% convinced that it's a waste of time, that only makes it more appealing.

Because, look–I went to vet school for answers, and I got many of them. But you can only trust science so far, and then you need to listen to something a little bit less certain.

Call it superstition, call it luck (call it Susan if you like) but that subliminal little voice that says do the hard thing, go up the mountain doesn't have to have a great reason. That voice just calls out to the people who can hear it, the triskaidekaphiles who listen. We recognize our fates in the shape of something ridiculous like a duck playing the saxophone, we shake our fists in the air and shout "I love you anyway!!!"

We had to love the number thirteen. We wouldn't have made it this far without it. If our unalterable destiny was to end up like this–well then, I hope we did the right thing.

Or maybe I don't have all the answers.