Luann by Greg Evans and Karen Evans for May 27, 2012

First find the floor!

Who’s that blonde? I seem to remember seeing her somewhere.

It’s hopeless. Move into a new home and start afresh!

they make trash bins (or in my case, dumpsters) for this sort of situation. In fact, renting a piece of (smaller) heavy equipment might not be out of line…

If you’ve ever mowed your lawn and found a car (or cleaned your room and found a dresser), you might be a redneck!

You first need to CLEAN your room, Luann!

Hey, that looks like my bedroom. Who said you could take a picture of it.

You said it luckylouie.

Okay 1st thing is “Letting Go”. A Lot of that stuff that You think is important to You, AIN’T. So get Boxes or garbage bags and either DONATE a LOT of THAT stuff to Charity (Goodwill, Salvation Army: Mom and Dad could use the tax deduction and will LOVE You for it) Or THROW the REST if that stuff away!

And from Now On Read Your Magazines and Newspapers On Line and Save a Tree. (Delta will LOVE You for THAT!)

Remember:

“SCREW the MIRTH! SAVE the EARTH!!”

Or SOMETHING Like THAT….,

Then PAINT!!!

I spy…. a polk-a-dot bra!!!

Where’s Waldo?

Poor Puddles, perpetually perplexed.

There’s always a catch!

Luann and Bernice! Long time no see!!

It finally rebelled and flew the coop.

Anybody notice and get any implications from the unmatched slippers in the first panel?

I think Luann’s room looks better the way it is…but then, I’m a guy.

The last year my son lived at home we moved into a smaller place. He was engaged and started replacing his single young guy furniture with “married” stuff – like a bigger bed. The furniture overwhelmed the available space. You could barely move and he tended to get around by crawling across the bed. The upside – when he got married and moved out, the carpet was in perfect condition.

For some Stuff=Security. Though Luann’s room just looks like a teenagers.

hmm, high heels and teddy bears, such a combo (not to mention the rest of the mess) has to be from a teenager!

Don’t get excited. This is just a weekend visit.

The goal is, apparently, to have mismatched slippers at the end of the bed…

Looks like my room. I don’t need a maid; I need an archeologist.

Goal meet Reality. .where’s the magic wand to change Reality to Goal? (Dont get mom, she will just toss everything out the door)

I found the dresser! Do I win a prize?

Step one: clean up bedroom first.

Could someone who knows tell me: back when GoComics was Comics.com, did “Luann” get a large number of (non-troll) comments, compared to other widely read strips?

My bedroom has the exact same visual impact as Luann’s, except that my stuff reflects me being 35 yrs older. Over the years I’ve seen it happen where good friends will stage a kind of intervention. Bernice and Delta could gear up like they do for environmental clean-up and sweep through this mess in 30 minutes!

Only 45 comments? You guys are slipping! :-D

Don’t take offense, I’m teasing you all.

Hoarding (among MANY other ways of life) is not a disease. Nor were you born with it..It’s a choice..Time to rethink your choices LuLu…

Actually it’s my garage that needs the decluttering. There hasn’t been room for a car in there for years, It’s a double garage. Glad it isn’t a triple.

Years ago a friend of a friend had a huge collection of 78rpm records which due to its weight fell through the floor into the crawl space below his house. Good thing there were no people living below him. They might have suffered record smashing injuries.

Oddly enough, the first major troll flameout wasn’t on “9CWL” (which had to close its boards or have Brooke McEldowney sue and/or walk) or “Luann”, but on “Arlo & Janis”. Normally it’s a pretty innocuous strip, but it attracted – if not an outright troll – then the most humorless bitch on the face of the earth, who was not going to let an arc dealing with a single mother dating the college-age son of the main characters go unattacked. .And in the middle of her deleting the comments of everyone she didn’t like or who disagreed with her, and threatening to sue all of us for libel in teh British courts, someone actually posted about how crazy the posters were on Luann, because they’d fight about anything! .It was the opposite of the grass being greener – I guess on a comic site everyone thinks it’s always nutso and unbalanced on some other board.

“In some jurisdictions, at least, hoarding IS seen as a possible manifestation of mental illness. In my area, if a Luann living alone with a room like that was 61 rather than 16, social workers would be investigating if not hauling her away.”.The age dependency of the diagnosis shows the falsness of the diagnosis. On the other hand, Luann has plenty of other symptoms showing she isn’t completely sane. We just like her..Many of my relatives are two bubbles off level, but I still like them — in part because they are so interesting..I’m the sanest one in the family, so you can imagine how interesting it is.

It depends on whether you want to consider mental illness a disease or not – some people think that if it doesn’t involve some sort of disruption or failure of cells, tissues and organs, it’s not a disease. Others disagree, because while an illness might not be detectable on a cellular level, or even the result of cellular disruption, the results of the behavior it manifests are as just as damaging as any cancer..It would be nice to think we know everything about the brain from the cellular level up, but we don’t. If brain disease were the same as mental illness, then psychiatry wouldn’t need to exist and would have been absorbed into neurology long ago.

isn’t that how many empty rooms start. all organized and clean and empty, becomes a disaster zone. perfect example of the law of entropy. laziness, complanency, procrastination, and collecting of stupid stuff are the causes. i mean does one really have to have a calendar from 1970?

How many years of old issues of GLitZ magazine do you suppose are in that room?

Rest easy – you didn’t miss a thing. Calvin & Hobbes were gone by ‘95, Bloom County by ’89, which was before comics.com and internet commentary got rolling. Prior to that, you had to send a letter to a newspaper if you had something to say , and if you were lucky it was passed on to the cartoonist – - who took one look and dived under the desk, crying “Save me from these lunatics, I write for normal people!” .IIRC “Outland” used to be on this site, I’m pretty sure there was a board for it, but that’s about it.

Is OCD a disease? I think my compulsion to this (that I am now doing) is a result of it. How many of us here are in this boat? Help! (TIC).

The AMA sees alcoholism as a disease. There’s definitely evidence of a genetic predisposition to it, as well as a genetic inability through a lack of enzmes to process it chemically, which leads to changes in the brain, physical dependence on it, and multiple organ damage. .Some critics just say it’s a choice to drink to excess and a disease can’t be cured by force of will. The failure of “controlled drinking” is used as a argument against that, that no alcoholic can resume drinking, any more than a diabetic can resume consuming a box of candy a day..But if you actually believe that John Nash was able to cope with his schizophrenia through sheer force of will, I’m not sure what camp that puts you in.

What is a disease? Are there disorders of the human mind or body which do not qualify as diseases? As near as I can tell having a disease just means something’s wrong with you. It can have varying levels of seriousness – from minor nuisance to death. Varying levels of treatment – from taking an aspirin tomultiple organ transplants. Again: What is a disease?

Given that societal and environmental factors can change a lot in a short time, seeing evidence of a history of alcoholism in families over decades argues it has a genetic component. When you have kids who come from alcoholic families who were adopted, and yet still turn out to be alcoholics, that also argues a genetic predisposition..About cancer – it takes balls to poison yourself deliberately and live with the results, so yes, “courageous” is definitely the word. Until you see it day to day, you have no idea how hard it can be to keep living and go back for more surgery or chemo, rather than just give up and be at peace. . Some people actually do choose not to fight. My uncle developed brain cancer and did…absolutely nothing about it. No chemo, no surgery, he just refused to do anything, and it wasn’t because he didn’t believe he had it, or because the cancer had induced dementia, either.

It’s been well over an hour now and nobody has stuck his neck out to answer the question: What is a disease? Until we can answer that question I see no point in debating whether or not alcoholism or any other disorder is a disease or not.

Way too many comments to read-just clean the room

@JimT8:I know the feeling. There was a time where I liked to save football cards. You remember those topps trading cards? I remember having a Mean Joe Green card and wouldnt you know it My grandmother hated football and kept telling me dont waste my time on those things. After about 15 years later I found out it was worth a cosiderable amount of money. I never forgave her for that. To this day I still wonder if thats the reason why people save certain things like that. Also I used to save the old wheat pennies and again she cashed those in and again I found out each penny was going up in value every so often,

OK everyone have a safe holiday.

That’s not really an apt analogy – what sort of pain is involved in wearing a parachute? .A better one would be choosing to stay in a crashing airplane or jump into a threshing machine. You’ll lose limbs, it will hurt, it won’t be pretty, but you’ll live – now decide. So yes, it would still take courage to choose the latter.

At least her bed HAS a headboard (the goal does not= BAD)

Again,when the “do this” will be painful to go through, will leave you scarred, maimed or with a quality of life that is markedly reduced from the one you have now, as in not being able to eat, or perhaps speak, or being in pain in any number of ways, it’s really not so simple – or easy – to keep on going without having intestinal fortitude. And many die anyway, which you haven’t added in. .Nero had a wonderful punishment for embezzlers – the criminal would be tied to a stake, only an outstretched arm would be free and coated in pitch, and a fire would be lighted underneath. If he could stand to let the arm be burned away, he could live. If the pain was impossible and he pulled his arm back, he’d died quickly in the fire. What’s the “heroic” choice, there?.That’s like saying someone who’s now paralyzed from the neck down isn’t really courageous because of course they have no option but to live. Many choose to live that way, some decide they have no quality of life, and enough is enough.

I think that perhaps you’ve never known anyone who actually went through this. If you’re simply thinking that’s how you’d handle it if you got cancer and it wouldn’t be such a big deal, well, you really can’t be think it’s that effortless until it happens to you. I sincerely hope it never does. But if you have been there, you would realize that there are many types of courage, and not all heroics are big and loud.

Would alcoholism qualify as a disease using this definition? (I’m better at asking questions than answering them).

I’m all for that definition – it covers eveything from anorexia to hayfever!

Stop the presses – Alert the media – Notify AA – & the AMA -GoComics Luannuverse has determined that:ALCOHOLISM IS A DISEASE

To me ‘brave, heroic, courageous’ describes acts that are performed for others without any particular benefit to oneself while incurring great risk for oneself.

This is where we’re sticking, in how we each define ‘brave, heroic, courageous’. Courage is defined as the ability to confront fear, pain, danger, uncertainty, or intimidation. Nowhere does it say that it must be done out of selflessness. That’s a nice side benefit, but it can’t always be a qualifier. .See, I think actually fighting for your life, as in any other fight where to lose means you die, requires courage. At some point, you need to be brave to push past despair, fear and hopelessness, and courage or bravery is what helps you do that – THAT is its very defintion. By your definition, any woman who fights off a rapist isn’t brave, because it only benefits her. Any man who fights back and defends himself from a murderer isn’t courageous, because he’s only saving his own life. Every abused child who reports an adult who hurt him isn’t heroic, because it’s actually in his own interest not to be abused any more. .I think you’re wrong. Courage is about not surrendering, and if it’s a personal battle, rather than one that benefits another, that still doesn’t negate the heroism involved.

There’s a vibrator on the floor, just below Puddles.

. . said, “Also tough, MB, if one argues that inclination to alcoholism ‘runs in families’; is it social, or genetic?? ".Genetic. .A study was done of children of alcoholics adopted into other families, not knowing their original families..Those coming from alcoholic families tended toward alcoholism themselves if they drank alcohol at all. Those coming from nonalcoholic families had no higher tendency to become alcoholics whether the adopters were or not. Those who didn’t drink at all obviously never became alcoholics..Alcoholics, we are told by those who have studied such things, tend to process alcohol differently at the cellular level from social drinkers. The ones who “can hold their liquor” are more likely to become alcoholics..This makes it look like there is most likely a variation in a gene or two which makes the difference and if so, a genetic test could be developed which would allow people to know in advance whether or not it would be relatively safe for them to imbibe.