I woke up today at 1:30pm and I was amazed when my eyes adjusted enough for me to look at the clock. I got up at 8am on Sunday, for some ungodly reason, and last night I ended up staying awake until around 3:30am because someone on a forum I go to started a thread about this A&E show called Hoarders, which I’d never heard of and it sounded interesting so I (stupidly) decided to start watching episodes on Ninja Video.

Also last night, I wrote one of my articles for Buttercup, called “So This Is Xmas“, all about why I hate this particular holiday and it left me emotionally ravaged. I know I’ve told the story as to why I hate Xmas on my site before and last night I promised myself that this would be the last time I open that wound ever again because afterward, I was a complete mess. (Mom, if you’re reading this, you probably wanna skip that article. You know what it’s about and I really mean it when I say it’s the last time it’s going to be brought up.) It’s strange how something that happened so long ago can leave me a a crumpled mess on the floor wanting to throw up more than half a lifetime later.

Anyway, that’s what I did last night.

There are a couple of arty things that have been topics of discussion lately and I figure now’s as good a time as any to talk about them. The first is that some friends of mine have asked me if I’ll ever start making videos on YouTube, specifically art tutorial videos and vlogs and the answer to that is quite simply “no”. There are millions of art tutorials already on YouTube, I suck at video editing software and have no intentions of improvement in that area and I just don’t want to. Vlogs? Why? I already have a blog and write quite well, thank you, so I don’t see the point of sitting in front of a camera essentially talking to myself and saying everything I’m saying here only a hell of a lot less eloquently. No thank you. One person said that there’s no difference between recording a vlog and doing a streaming show at Camwhores and I guess that person has never been to Camwhores before or seen any of my shows. Yes, there is similarity in the fact that you’re in front of a camera, but that’s where the similarity ends. At Camwhores, there are people watching you and talking to you, it’s live and to me, that’s a lot less awkward than sitting in my office talking to myself about the weather.  Plus, there’s no editing to be done and only a select audience is going to be viewing it after it’s been recorded and put in the archives. So it’s completely different and no, I won’t be making art tutorials or vlogs for YouTube in the new year. I may do little videos of my finished paintings so people can see how they sparkle (which we’ve found impossible to photograph), but that’s about the extent of it.

The other thing I’ve been asked recently is if I’ll do a tutorial on how I do backgrounds and the answer to that one is “sure”. If people want to know how, as it appears they do, then the next time I make a painting (which should be in the new year, unless I become inspired before then) I’ll take photos of the process and whip up a tutorial on all that goes into the background. It’s actually extremely easy, as long as you’ve got the right products and I think the end result is pretty cool. So that’s something I plan on working on in the new year.

Since I have nothing to read right now, I dug out these back issues I ordered last year of a magazine called Artful Blogging. Yes, even I was amazed that such a publication existed. Basically, last year someone suggested that I write a piece about my blog for the magazine so I ordered the back issues to see what it was all about and then someone else told me to “let them come to you”, so I kind of put the idea out of my mind. Then last week when I was looking for something on one of my bookshelves that I haven’t read yet, I found them and started reading. Long story short, I don’t think I want to be in this magazine and the suggestion of me being in it is actually kind of laughable because I so wouldn’t fit in. This magazine is not for people who say “fuck” a lot, it’s for people who inspire and make friends through their blogs and network and all kinds of other flowery “uplifting” bullshit. And while yes, I’ve done all of the above with my blog (or more to the point, my Live Journal) and I’ve had mine longer than any of the people in at least the first two issues of the magazine, I’ve done so with a hell of a lot more edge than the women profiled (and they’re all women) and this magazine doesn’t appear to be the place for that. I’m going to read all of the issues I have, even though every article is practically the same, and then I’m going to forget it exists again because it’s, well, boring. Hopefully I get some new books for Xmas.

And with that, I think I’m off to my Sims Bunker since I have to write a review for the expansion next week and I still haven’t been to Egypt.

My 11-year-old daughter is running around the house wearing a furry Santa hat because today is the Santa Claus parade and the sight of it is making me seethe.

I hate Xmas.

I hate the trees, I hate the lights, I hate the garlands, I hate the mistletoe, I hate the eggnog, I hate the holly, I hate the fat man and his 9 goddamn reindeer (yeah you heard me, 9), I hate the ornaments, I hate the stockings, I hate the elves, I hate the music, I really hate the carolers, although I haven’t seen any since I was a kid, I hate the fact that we have to do so much traveling to just get through the goddamn holiday, I hate the commercialism, I hate going broke just because I’m “supposed to” and because people buy me shit so I have to do the same (people should just give me stuff, dammit), I hate pictures of children on Santa’s lap, I hate tinsel…I hate Xmas so much that I refuse to even spell it properly. There is only one thing I like about Xmas, but we’ll get to that at the end.

So I guess the big question is, why do I hate Xmas? Well come sit ’round the fire, children, do I have a story for you.

I was 11 and my mom was picking me up from a sleepover at a friend’s house, which was uncharacteristic of her. Also uncharacteristic was the mood she was in. It was a good one. There hadn’t been a good mood in my house for a very long time due to the fact that my mom and step-dad fought nearly every day and were already sleeping in separate beds. Oh, by the way, it was a few weeks before Xmas.

So I asked my mom why she picked me up and she said it was because she was already getting in the truck to go somewhere. “Where?” I asked and she replied playfully, “Xmas shopping, and no you can’t come!”

Well obviously this meant she was going Xmas shopping for gifts for me and when she dropped me off at home, I spent the morning fantasizing about all of the wonderful things my mother was buying for me at that precise moment.

Then my (step-) dad came home and things got awkward because he & I had had a fight the night before. He sat me down in the living room chair while he sat on an ottoman and he explained to me that he and my mom were probably going to split up because, among other things, he suspected my mom was having an affair with Keith, the husband of the husband and wife duo who were their best friends, Keith and Sue. Keith also happened to be my mother’s best friend since grade 8. My dad said he didn’t have any proof that this was happening, but that both he and Sue suspected it and that both he and Sue had been talking about leaving their marriages because of it.

I took this all in stride. I thought about all the nights we spent at Keith and Sue’s house, where my parents would go to play Uno on Saturday nights in the kitchen while I watched their two kids and my brother in the living room. The flirting that I had seen going on between both couples had not been imagined and now my dad was telling me that my mother had acted on it. Truthfully, I wasn’t all that surprised by the revelation and I secretly wondered if my dad hadn’t slept with Sue.

So after this heart to heart with my dad, we hugged and he said that he’d still be my dad no matter what happened (because he was the only dad I knew) and we cried a little bit and then he had to leave to go get my 5-year-old brother who had been spending the weekend with my dad’s sister and her kids in the next town over.

After he left I kind of just sat in the living room chair and absorbed all I’d been told. Then I decided to go to the kitchen to get something to eat. I was halfway through making a sandwich when my dad burst through the back door and told me to get my shit on NOW. I asked why and he said he couldn’t tell me why. But I asked again, as I was getting my coat and boots on and he just said, “I’m going to show you how your mother really is,” and then we got in the car.

In the car he told me that he’d been driving down the road, on his way to get my brother, when he saw my mom’s truck in the middle of the parking lot of a large grocery store and that’s where we were going. I didn’t really understand what he was saying, but we held hands all the way to the grocery store, where we pulled in around the back of the building where we were hidden but could still see my mom’s truck parked all alone. I asked why her truck was there and why it was the only one in the parking lot and my dad just said, “the parking lot was probably full when she left it there”.

The next thing I knew, Sue shows up in her car and my dad flashed his lights at her so she pulled in behind us. My dad told me to get in the backseat, Sue opened the passenger side door, shoved her two kids ages like, 5 and 3, in the backseat with me and that’s when my dad and Sue started talking. And now that I think about it, it wasn’t even talking, it was flat out freaking out. Sue was in a state and I still didn’t really know what the fuck was going on.

So I asked.

One of them, or both of them, explained to me that what we were sitting here waiting to see was if Keith’s truck would pull into the parking lot to drop my mom off at her truck and then it clicked. We were going to catch my mom and Keith having an affair, like concrete proof. This was a showdown.

I was suddenly terrified and all I could do was cry. I was so scared about what was going to happen next that I definitely went into a state of shock.

We waited and waited and waited. It got dark. And then lo & behold, Keith’s truck pulls into the parking lot and parks beside my mom’s truck. Sue yelled to my dad, “Get them Ken! Before she gets out! Go go go!” and my dad hit the gas, placing his car right in front of both my mom and Keith’s.

My mom was in the passenger side of Keith’s truck and she had her hands behind her head and her eyes were closed. Keith leaned over and hit the lock on my mom’s side of the truck and I guess he hit his too because Sue tried to yank open his door to beat the crap out of him but she couldn’t get it open so she resorted to banging her fists on the hood of the truck and screaming at him instead.

My dad just kind of stood there in the parking lot with his hands over his face. I think he was crying. I mean, don’t get me wrong here, their marriage was definitely over by this point, this was just the nail in the coffin, but I still think the reality of it hit him really hard and to this day he’s never recovered.

I was so angry. I walked over to my mom’s side of the truck and I kicked the door as hard as I could and I remember screaming “why?” I kicked the door again. My mother just sat there and didn’t even look at me, she just looked straight ahead, not even a single tear. There were no Xmas presents in the truck, just a napkin on the dashboard from a Marriott hotel.

I don’t remember getting back in my dad’s car but we did, leaving Sue still screaming at Keith while her two little kids stood in the parking lot and screamed too. He started driving toward the town my Aunt lived in and we held hands all the way there, too. We didn’t say much, I mean, what was there to say? I just cried.

When we got to my Aunt’s, where my brother was, I just sat on her couch in a daze while my dad explained to her what had gone down. I don’t really remember if my brother came home with us or if he stayed at my Aunt’s, but my dad and I went home and that night my mother never came home. I don’t know where she stayed. I do know that the next day she went to work and all day she got calls from all of Sue’s friends calling her a homewrecker and every other name in the book. My dad let me stay home from school.

That night my mother did come home and the fighting began. My dad was (obviously) pissed off about the affair, she was pissed off that I was there to witness the evidence. I stayed upstairs in my room, listening at the grate in the floor while they screamed at each other. I remember my dad saying “I’m going to go up there and tell her everything,” and my mom screaming, “oh do you want me to go up there and tell her how you wanted the four of us to fuck on the floor like dogs?” The fighting and screaming lasted all night, I just cried. I don’t think anyone came into my room to see if I was okay because I remember putting myself to sleep.

After that, things were obviously tense in our household. My dad was sleeping with my brother in his bed, like he’d been doing for months, while my mom slept in the “marital bed”. They’d go to work, come home, my mom would lock herself in her room while my dad, my brother and I would eat dinner and watch TV in the living room. The silence was deafening and being kind of a loner kid, I had absolutely no one to talk to about any of this.

For some idiotic reason, my parents decided to try and have “one last Xmas together for the kids” and it was so phony and so strained that I actually liked it better when they were screaming at each other. At least that was honest.

My dad moved out soon after to sleep on my Aunt’s couch. I went to school. My brother went to daycare. My mom opened and closed her store. Dinner was eaten in silence and my life would never be the same.

That’s why I hate Xmas. It was Xmas when my entire world fell apart, things never got better (with each subsequent Xmas my parents made it worse and worse between the announcement of Keith moving in to the yearly fighting about who got us kids when to the blatant use of my brother and I as weapons) it has tainted the holiday for me for the last 19 years and I don’t see my attitude changing any time soon.

There is no moral to this story, there is no lesson. If you see one, please, show it to me, because I’ve been trying to figure it all out for more than half my life.

But that one thing? That one thing that I actually like about Xmas that I promised you would be at the end of this article? Kevin Blood Wilson. Merry fucking Xmas.

Oooooh what a week it’s been.

First of all, I’m menstruating, which is always fun and because I’m menstruating I’m taking insane amounts of codeine which has made me extremely constipated and I know that’s probably TMI but I don’t fucking care. The stool softeners? They are ineffective and I’m cranky because I literally have something up my ass. Aren’t you glad I shared?

Also making me cranky is the fact that my site has been down for a lot of this week and while that’s not really a huge deal since I x-post everything to Live Journal anyway and haven’t had a whole lot to say, it really sucks because my e-mail is on the same server as my site, so when my site’s down, it probably means I have no e-mail either. So my apologies if you’ve left comments on LJ or have sent me e-mail this week and I haven’t replied, I haven’t been getting my LJ notifications (obviously) and while I’ve been trying my best, it’s hard to remember who I’ve replied to and where so again, I’m sorry. Some people have asked about my host as they’ve seen me bitching about this all week on Twitter and I’m hosted by my friend Kevin, who is the co-owner of Camwhores.com, and he hosts me for free so I try not to complain. It’s not his fault the server took a shit this week and I know he’s been working extra hard trying to fix it, so when I complain, I’m not complaining about my hosting provider, Kevin is great and I love him, I’m just bitching because I’m bitching.

And speaking of my site, in the last 30 days I’ve had almost 3,000 unique visitors , which is actually a record since I began keeping stats just over a year ago. So hello new people! My name is Sunny and I’m not nearly as whiny or insane as I probably sound in this post. If you’d like to know more about me, there’s a page for that and while I update my site usually once a week or so, I update my Live Journal just about every day so if you’re bored, you might want to check that out too. Anonymous comments are turned off on my Live Journal because some people are pricks and while comments are moderated on my site, I’ll approve and reply to just about all of them as long as you’re not being an asshole. I’m done with giving assholes a forum, there are an infinite number of sites on the internet to be an asshole on, take The Forum [NSFW] for example, and I just don’t need to put up with them here.

Anyway…

This week Blake and I watched the movie Precious, but Blake reviewed it for Buttercup and his article will be going up tonight at around 1am so I won’t say anything about it other than I liked it and I agree with Blake’s assessment of the film.

Also this week I worked on my ATCs a bit and just about had a coronary because I spent hours and hours and hours meticulously drawing and shading miniature versions of my girls and then I used a Micron Pigma pen (02) to outline their mouths and noses so I’d be able to see them after I painted their faces with a flesh colour. I do this on my regular sized girls every time and didn’t figure it would be a problem. BUT IT WAS. A HUGE problem. I went to paint their faces with the flesh colour and the ink fucking RAN! That has never happened to me before and these pens are supposed to be waterproof and archival so WTF? So I stopped painting faces with the second girl and decided to let the ink “cure” over night and when I tried painting their faces the next day, everything was totally fine. I ruined 2 of 8, which sucks because I worked really hard on them, but at least I didn’t ruin the whole batch. Currently they’re still sitting on my desk with freshly painted eyes and faces awaiting hair colour and dresses. Truthfully, I haven’t kept working on them because I got distracted by another project…

This other project…well, I don’t really want to talk about it too much because I always do that (I suck at keeping things secret) and because I always do that and give too much away, I self-sabotage and never finish anything. Here’s the gist: I had a dream on Monday that was so vivid and so surreal that as soon as my eyes opened I flew out of bed and just began writing down every detail I could remember. Then that afternoon I fleshed it out a bit more and when Blake got home I showed him my scrawls to see what he thought and he thought it was brilliant, which was reassuring because I never know if my ideas are brilliant or stupid.  I thought about the story over the next couple of days, slightly intimidated by it but Blake threatened that if I didn’t write it, he would, and he wouldn’t do as good of a job as I would because I saw it all unfold in front of my eyes in the dream and for some reason, I think this is a story that needs to be told. I think it’s a story that’s never been told before, but then again, I’m not exactly well read so I could be talking out my ass there. Anyway, yesterday I actually started writing the thing and somehow, in the span of a couple of hours, I had 10 pages typed out, today I added 4 more and this story, that was only supposed to be a “short story” is turning into a novella. Honestly, I don’t know where it’s coming from but it’s a refreshing feeling and I’m enjoying the writing process more than I’ve enjoyed writing in a long time. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it when it’s done, but I’m trying not to worry about that and just fucking write the thing.

So often I sabotage myself by, like I said, explaining a project so much on here that I feel like I’ve completed the project or that just having the idea “out there” is enough for me. And I often get caught up in my fear of success. As much as people accuse me of being an attention whore, the opposite is actually true. I fear the spotlight like nobody’s business and when it comes to creative work, writing in particular, I fear criticism and thus I don’t often put very much out for critics. Even as I write this story, there’s this little negative voice in the back of my head telling me how much it sucks or how implausible the story is or how flimsy my characters are and all kinds of wonderful things like that. And it’s one thing for my own inner critic to say these things, but it’s a whole other thing for other people to say them. Since I’ve never really put anything out there for that kind of scrutiny (and yes, I realize that I put myself “out there” constantly with my site and my cam and all that, this is different) I don’t know how I’d deal with it and a fear of the unknown suddenly surfaces.

But right now all the story is, is 14 pages on my MacBook that no one’s seen but Blake and until it’s finished, that’s all it will be.

This week I also taught Wayne & Judy how to use Facebook, to the best of my ability. Right now they can’t afford internet but they have a wireless card in their computer so Blake built a booster on our wireless router and set them up with the password for the network so they have internet…some of the time. Most of the time they don’t get a signal, but this week they’ve actually had a strong signal for some reason and thus, they’ve been calling me every day to show them how to do things on the Facebook accounts I set up for them last week. Today Judy was asking me how to play FarmVille because a few of her friends sent her FarmVille gifts and since I have that application blocked on my own Facebook, I didn’t really know what to tell her. She also called me yesterday afternoon to tell me that she figured out how to comment on people’s status messages, which I thought was cute because she was so proud of herself for figuring it out.

This weekend I plan on going over there and if they have a strong enough signal, I’m going to set them up with FireFox, add all of the bookmark tabs that they’ll ever need and delete their shortcuts for Internet Explorer altogether. Yes, I realize Chrome is the new big thing but I haven’t used it myself yet and I want them to quit clicking on stupid pop up ads that tell them they have a virus, causing them to freak out and call me. Oh and I changed all of their homepages (they have 3 profiles on Windows, one for Wayne, one for Judy and one for Courtney) to Google so now how they get to Facebook is by typing “www.Facebook.com” INTO Google and going to the first search result. *headdesk* I don’t really blame them though, their Internet Explorer has/had so many toolbars on it for some reason that it had 3 possible inputs for a url and no doubt they chose the wrong one many many times. I got rid of the Ask Jeeves one, but since I don’t use IE and haven’t in many many years, I wasn’t sure how to get rid of the others and it’s difficult to tweak anything when they’re over your shoulder asking what you’re doing every 30 seconds. So, setting them up with FireFox and breaking their IE habit seems like the best thing to do. I also set them up with Gmail accounts and I’m going to try and get them in the habit of checking their e-mail as often as they check their Facebook so they understand how Facebook’s e-mail notifications work. Instead of Google, I’ll probably make Gmail their homepages for that reason.

I’m not a very patient person and my patience in teaching them how to use the internet is surprising even myself.

This week I got a call from the mental health clinic saying that they wanted to set me up with an appointment for another doctor who I think is a nutritionist or something. Are nutritionists doctors? This woman has “Dr.” in front of her last name and she runs a metabolic sumpin-er-other clinic where I see my shrink and I requested to get in on that when a spot opened up because the meds they had me on has slowed down my metabolism and while I’m still eating my eggs every day to help boost my metabolism, progress has been slow and this clinic is all about how to switch your metabolism around and lose weight. Apparently it’s 6 or 8 weeks and it’s in a group setting (oh yay) once a week in the afternoons. I’m assuming the new group starts in the new year and my appointment with this new doctor is on the 29th.

Before I called them back, I checked with Blake to make sure he was okay with using his days off to take me to this thing and he was, so I called and made the appointment with the new doctor. I guess she’ll like, assess me or something, I have no idea. Maybe there’s even a chance I can’t get into the clinic because I’m not fat enough. I don’t know how these things work.

And speaking of mental health…since some folks have been asking…no I have not been driving anywhere. I have not been doing my immersion therapy. I have not been checking the mail. I have also been neglecting my light therapy and had a really bad day earlier this week, so starting Monday the lightbox is going back on my desk and I’m going to start using it again. As for immersion therapy…I’m just done with it. I don’t even care anymore. I can go places, like with Blake or even with Judy, and be okay. I haven’t had a panic attack in public since the spring and I think I’ve made all the progress I’m going to make right now. I have zero desire to drive the car, in fact I hate the car and the mere thought of driving, so fuck it, I’m done. Maybe I’ll pick it up again in the spring, maybe I won’t. I’ve decided that in the end it simply doesn’t matter and that I’m fine where I am. So that’s that.

Anyway, this is a really long fucking post about basically nothing so I’m going to end it here and get back to work on my story.

Well said, my friend.

(HugNation was raided by 4chan today, which is the context of the above video. For the full archive, click here.)