And to think, some people act like cunts over a 1.5 inch square shitty inkjet printout of their art appearing in a free art journaling tutorial…

Buttercup is an independent e-zine for persons seeking a female-focused atmosphere that celebrates diversity, individuality and creativity.
We launched September 1st!
Come join the party!

Lori-AnneCrittenden.com
A Simpler Time Facebook group
(updated more often than her site)

“Each day, 1,000 young people under the age of 18 become new regular, daily smokers, and almost 90 percent of all smokers began at or before their 18th birthday…”

“I know; I was one of these teenagers. And so I know how difficult it can be to break this habit when it’s been with you for a long time.”

- President Barack Obama

Read the article here.

In some ways I had a very good childhood. In most it was bad, very bad, but as time passes I find myself able to appreciate certain aspects of it more than I used to or see things in ways I’d never considered before.

This post is very hard for me to write, there’s an Ativan under my tongue as I type these words, I kind of feel like barfing and I already cried a little, but I think it’s got to come out anyway.

If you’ve followed my blog for any great length of time then you will know that I was the result of a teenage pregnancy which set the stage for one of the most fucked up lives imaginable. I think this was just fate. I used to blame people and get angry and sad but now I just accept and do my best to “live in the now” on the advice of my brother who’s a total prick, who I haven’t seen in 3 years and who I often wonder if I’ll ever see again. And I’m not sad when I think that the answer to that question is most likely “no”.

My life, up until this point, has been both tragic and charmed and now, at the age of 30, I appreciate the richness of both ends of the spectrum and everything in between. When I try to visualize my life, when I think about painting my life, I think of a pencil drawing of a girl in the corner of a cell with a barred window, sitting in a sunbeam, hugging her tucked up legs. Her hair covers her face, which is mostly buried in her knees. Perched on the window sill is a black and yellow wild canary. That’s been my life.

But enough with the dramatics. This post is about my dad, of which I have, or rather had, two. And one of them is going to be here in about 3 hours to replace my broken bay window so I’ve got to hurry this along.

When I was a baby something happened – I don’t really know what and at this point I don’t care – and my biological father, then 17ish and known as “Phip” disappeared. He reappeared once when I was about 2 or 3, the only childhood memory I have of him, but that was it until I found him on my own when I was 12 – but that’s a whole other story.

When I was 5, my mother met a man named Ken Cox whose father was a friend of the family (I think?) and who worked with our neighbour Mike in his father’s industrial waste management business, I guess you’d call it. From what I understand, they picked up scrap from de Havilland in Toronto, which is where they made airplanes, most notably the Dash 8. I wasn’t really all that involved with their courtship. I remember Ken coming over to my grandma’s, where my mom and I lived, for dinner once but that’s pretty much the extent of my memories until the wedding.

In the beginning things were pretty okay. I had a dad and I thought that was great. Then my brother was born and I was pushed away a bit, but no more than any other first-born when the second one comes along. At the time we were living in a small one bedroom apartment above my grandpa’s carpet store, across the street from the town clock that gonged every hour, on the hour.

But then my mom opened her paint & wallpaper store and not too long after that we moved into our first house, which is when the trouble began and my parents started to not get along (which is putting it mildly). The truth is, we could barely afford the house and because we didn’t have a washer and dryer, every Saturday my dad, my brother and I  would have to go to the laundromat. For whatever reason we stopped going to the laundromat closest to our house, we went to the one in the town we used to live in and in the town we used to live in was an infamous flea market and while our laundry was either washing or drying, my dad would take us to the flea market and he would buy all kinds of toys for my brother but none for me. And when I asked why, he would say it was because I got spoiled enough by my grandparents and my brother didn’t. This is why I have a massive complex about everything my kids get being equal.

Anyway…despite the fact that my dad would be a walking, talking, sandy vagina most of the time because my parents were on the verge of divorce, he was who I was closest to and the one thing we had in common was our love for TV and movies which started in the very beginning when we lived in the apartment and he would watch Saturday morning cartoons with me and then in the afternoon while folding laundry, we would watch old Conan and kung-fu movies, which I guess at the time weren’t really that old. He was the one who lobbied for me to stay up past my bedtime to watch Alf, which I loved.

Well, over the years a lot of shit happened. After the separation (my parents weren’t legally divorce until my daughter was 3 months old) my dad and I stayed close but he was so bitter about my mom that it was hard to be his daughter as he was pretty much the president of the He Man Woman Haters Club and while it was becoming quite evident that he favoured my brother, being his biological child who lived with him, he still invited me over every Friday night to eat subs from Mr. Sub, which back then had THE BEST finely shredded lettuce, and to watch The X-Files. (By this time I was 15 and living on my own, I’m totally glossing over timelines here.)

As I grew older though, so did he, but where I grew wiser he grew more and more bitter about my mother. He was like a rabid dog who, even 10 years after the fact, simply could not let it go. It didn’t matter that they’d been separated longer than they’d been married, my mother was the biggest whorebag slut who ever walked the face of the Earth and he wished her every plague and gory death you could ever think of, which he thought of a lot and explained in glorious detail. That one life event consumed his entire being and the older I got, the more I reminded him of her and the crueler to me he became.

The final straw was when my son was born and I was in the hospital. It was about 3 minutes after I’d given birth when the phone in my room rang and my mother answered it. It was my dad. She informed him that it was a healthy baby boy, gave him the length & weight and told him his name and was completely civil about it. My dad apparently asked to speak to me but at the time I was birthing the placenta so I was kind of busy and my mom said I’d call him back.

Well, that was the beginning of the end. For whatever reason, he held it against me that my mother answered the phone and made me pay for it at every opportunity. It was tradition, due to the separation, that every year at Christmas we had Christmas morning and afternoon with my dad where we had dinner, then Christmas evening at my grandma’s for dessert and presents (mom’s mom) and then we’d sleep over at my mom’s to have Boxing Day brunch and presents with her the next day.

On my son’s first Christmas he was crawling age and we (me, my kids, my husband) went to my dad’s on Christmas morning like tradition dictated and we opened presents. But something was amiss. There was not a single present under the tree for my son. And when presents were finished and we were all hanging out i the kitchen while my dad worked on Christmas dinner, when my son crawled over to him, my dad stepped over him like he was an old dog, while at the same time lavishing praises and having conversations with my daughter. Basically, he refused to even acknowledge my son’s presence and purposely left a BABY, his GRANDSON out of his holiday gift giving.

To make a long story short it wasn’t too long after that that my dad and I parted ways and we haven’t spoken since. It’s been 6 years and with the way he is, I doubt I’ll ever see or speak to him again, although I do live in fear of a death bed reunion and I wonder all the time if, when that happens, I’ll go to him or not. Most days I think not.

But here I go writing about my bummer of a childhood again, which I promised myself a few years ago I was going to stop doing and that’s not what I intended this most to really be about. The fact of the matter is, this man was the only dad I knew for most of my childhood and despite the fact that he’s a rotten cervix and I have no intentions of ever speaking to him again, it’s still sort of automatic to think of him in certain situations. There are triggers.

For example, today I found out that they’re remaking “V”, which for you young’uns was a few mini-series and a TV series about an reptilian alien race that ate rats who were secretly trying to take over the planet to use humans for food and to steal our water. Well, even though I was probably WAY too young to watch it, I watched it with my dad and when I learned of the remake – which I’m hoping will be Battlestar Galactica good, but I’m not holding my breath – I instantly wanted to tell my dad and found myself sort of sad that I couldn’t. I want to know what he thinks of this remake. When the remake comes out I want to know his thoughts on it.

When Blake and Wes and I went to the drive-in last weekend and saw Star Trek, I was an emotional mess both because the movie was a masterpiece but also because I watched the reruns of the original series with my dad and I remember so well him telling me that the most amazing part of that show was the fact that everything in it would one day be a reality. And he was right, sort of. I mean, cell phones were invented because of Star Trek and I wonder all the time what he thinks about that.

And I wonder, since we were both really into the X-Files, what he thinks of the show Fringe, which is basically an X-Files/Sliders rip-off/hybrid, the latter of which we were also into. And does he watch LOST? What does he think of that and if he does watch it, did he enjoy Cloverfield as much as I did? (I saw Cloverfield TWICE in the theatre! The only movie I’ve ever watched twice in a theatre! I’m agoraphobic, I don’t go to theatres!)

Probably an embarrassing fact, but my dad was REALLY into Beverly Hills 90210 when it aired. I remember one day coming home from choir practice (you heard me, shut up! it was CHURCH choir too, so fuck off!) and 90210 just coming on and I went to say something and he was like, “Shut up! 90210’s on and I’ve been following it since the beginning, tell me later!” and me thinking that was SO funny. So naturally I wonder if he watches the new 90210 and of course, what he thinks about it. I bet he hates it, but at the same time, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out that he never misses an episode of Gossip Girl.

But there’s a dark side to all of this as well. My fear is that he doesn’t enjoy anything anymore. The last time I spoke to my brother he told me my dad was working nights at the warehouse and I assumed that as a result of that he was missing the best TV had to offer. I fear that all he does is work, then sleep, then eat, then smoke, then go to work, repeat. I fear that he has no joy in his life. He was already on his way to that fate by the time I left him, he was a bitter shell of a person.

I usually attribute my artistic tendencies to my mother, who’s an artist, but truthfully, it probably had more to do with my dad who was, to put it mildly, naturally gifted. When I was really little, he used to airbrush cars and metal. I remember this old hood of a car that used to be behind my grandparents’ garage that had an airbrushed green scary looking octopus on it that he did. He also painted my grandma’s delivery van for her furniture store.

Most of my early childhood after my parents got married, involved going for drives after work or on weekends, on unpaved backroads in the country to photograph old barns that my dad would then draw in pointillism absolutely perfectly. When my mom opened her wallpaper store, they framed a few of his drawing and they sold right away. My mom bought him a drawing table and these really expensive pens with superfine nibs and he drew for a while, mostly fantasy creatures and aliens inspired by Heavy Metal magazine and Jim Henson, but after my parents separated he didn’t really draw again no matter how much my brother and I begged him because his skill was truly amazing. My mom will probably hate me for saying this, but out of the two of them, I’d say he had the upper hand when it came to art. It just came naturally to him and he had this massive imagination evident in both his art and his storytelling (usually scary stories).

But he stopped doing it. It was one more thing that used to be joy in his life that he didn’t let slip away but he actively pushed it away just as he pushed me away just as he pushed his family away and every other thing that gave him joy besides Wiser’s Deluxe whiskey and Craven A cigarettes.

I often wonder if he’s online. I wonder if he’s reading this right now. I wonder if he thinks about me and wishes he could relive childhood curiosities with me like V or Star Trek. I guess I’ll never know.

It’s funny though. I spent a good portion of my childhood wondering almost the exact same kinda stuff about my biological father, who, as I said, will be here in a couple of hours to fix my bay window, and now it’s flipped, like an hourglass, sand running down the time until…well, the end of Ken I suppose.

Some days I picture a future where he and I laugh about the things I did as a kid and everything’s okay and the sun’s in the sky. But most of the time I picture a frail, cancer-ridden old man in a hospital bed telling me he’s sorry. Or worse, telling me he’s not.

And that’s all I’ve got in me. Happy Monday.

Edited to add the V trailer, it’s beneath the cut.

(more…)

I just drove to the post office and back all by myself. You have no idea what a big deal that is.

I had to take Ativan to do it, but I did it.
Unfortunately there was no mail for me but I sent mail to other people!
I wish I still had my PO box so I could just post my address and people could send me mail again but it was $130 or so per year, due right around Xmas, and I just couldn’t do it anymore. Bummer. :o(

Not that I’m begging for gifts or anything? But if anyone wanted to send me mail, my wishlist is a good option. Or if you just wanted to send me a letter, you could e-mail me (Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com) and if you promise me you’re not a stalker freak, I’ll probably give you my address.

I’m just sayin’.

Depending on how many letters I get, if any, I can’t promise I’ll write anything spectacular back, but I’ll do my best to send you a Sunnyland post-tard.

I realized something this weekend. It’s May 24 weekend! That means I can plant my seeds.
People, I have 2lbs EACH of cosmos and bachelor’s buttons to plant. This year’s garden is going to be spectacular.

I was just looking at my Keep Off the Lawn galleries and man my friends and my garden make me so happy. As much as the weather sucked, my Keep Off the Lawn party was probably one of the best times of my life.

This weekend is also Madison’s 11th birthday.
Blake’s taking her and a friend to see the new Zac Efron movie, which I strongly object to because it’s worthless Disney type teeny bopper crap but the other kid’s already seen Monsters Vs. Aliens so 17 Again it is!

On Thursday Phil aka my dad, is coming with his buddy Tim and they’re going to rip out my bay window (the big one on the left side of the house, see it?) because it’s fubar and they’re going to be replacing it with a spiffy new window that OPENS and is a couple of feet off the ground so there’s no way Lucky could break it again. Plus? It’ll have like a shelf thing which means I’ll finally have a place to put plants. That makes me happy.

Today Blake bought a lawnmower.
It’s sitting in a box in my office.

Also, do you know how amazing my husband is? Okay we have Rogers homephone, cable and internet and Bell’s been nagging us and nagging us to come back to them, but I keep saying no because I don’t want their shitty DSL. I am not a DSL fan. Everyone I know with DSL has had problems with it whereas everyone I know with cable has been fine, aside from a few people who want to download more than they’re capped for but you’re gonna get that with DSL too anyway.

So last night a Bell rep calls and talks to Blake for like, 40 minutes. He gets off the phone and says “we should switch to Bell because…” and I said “NO.” And he’s like, “But it’s 17% faster and we’ll save…” and I said “NO.” And I didn’t even want to talk about it.

So today Blake goes to the Rogers store, tells them the deal Bell was going to giveus and not only did he talk them into giving us a BETTER deal than Bell was offering, but he flirted with the gay dude behind the counter and ended up scoring us a PVR for free which he picks up tomorrow. I don’t really know what I’ll do with a PVR, I’ve never really wanted a PVR, but now we’re going to have one and it’s free, so yay! Maybe now I can actually watch The Office again. (I haven’t been watching it since they have it on at the same time as Grey’s Anatomy now and time shifting doesn’t seem to help me.)

Also today, Blake picked me up a package from Curry’s and I’m now officially out of money. Flat broke. Between my Curry’s order and renewing CamgirlUnion.org for another year even though I’m never gonna use it for anything, I’m now flat broke. And I have all of these wonderful ideas in my head to paint and sell to you guys and make some money so I can do things like meet my caseworker at the restaurant down the street like she suggested and have lunch (because eating in public is one of my “things”) or walk downtown and go to the dollar store or the fabric store or buy myself flowers because GODAMMIT I DESERVE THEM etcetera but I’m so wrapped up in this Hypercube contest, as I said yesterday, that I haven’t had time to actually WORK.

Soon though. Soon I can get my office in order and clean my desk and get back to work.

But my Curry’s order. Guess what I got? Okay you won’t guess, but here’s what I got:

• A set of 4 Pitt pens in black, which are waterproof, smudge-proof, extremely lightfast and they use indian ink
• Two Prismacolour Premier fine line markers which are archival, acid-free and lightfast
• Three Sakura Pigma Micron pens, in black and in various sizes which are archival, waterproof and fadeproof
• And finally, I bought a small jar of Golden Crackle Paste just to try it out

I don’t really know what I’m going to do with the pens yet, I just decided that it was time for me to have proper archival pens to even just sign my name on paintings with, if not to use in paintings themselves. I watched a video by Lisa Cole a few days ago (can’t find the link to it now, but she was making like, craters on the moon) but I was inspired by her use of ink in some of her paintings and wanted to see what I could do with them.

Now if only I had the time.

Well lovelies, it’s 5:00am and my back is absolutely killing me from sitting in this chair at the computer 18+ hours a day lately, so I’m going to go sleep and allow my muscles to relax for at least 8 hours. Please, for the love of god, give me 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep instead of the 4 hours I’ve been getting every night lately.

Anyway, I’ll see you guys tomorrow and I’ll talk to a lot of you on Twitter!

Don’t forget to vote! Only 2.5 days left!
Sunny | Blake
THANK YOU!

I think Mandy’s request is clear!

So apparently when you make a transaction via PayPal, you only have 45 days to dispute it. They only tell you this AFTER you’ve put in a dispute request. So “boooo” to that. Here’s what I sent them, which was denied, but which I’m glad there’s still a record of it at PayPal at the very least, which I’m sure will be taken into consideration should anyone else have the need to ask for a refund:

I signed up for Suzi Blu’s online “Be Divine Goddess Workshop” in Nov. ‘08, which was supposed to run for 10 or 12 weeks. It is now almost June, it has still not concluded and now, according to her new business plan ( http://suziblu.typepad.com/a_lovely_dream/2009/05/suzi-365-day-26.html ), she wants us to pay a $10 yearly membership fee to her NEW site in order to continue taking the class which she has now dubbed as “ongoing” with no end date in sight. I’m sick of waiting for this class to be over, it was not as advertised, it has been neglected and now she wants to charge me more money to keep taking it?

I would like a full refund so I can cut my losses, end my relationship with her site and its shoddy, neglected workshops that promise things she doesn’t deliver but keeps changing to save her own ass anyway and be done with all things Suzi Blu. I feel that I have been strung along by this woman long enough (almost 6 months for a 10 week class!), that the class was not as advertised and I deserve full repayment of my workshop fee ($55 US) as a result.

I didn’t have 6 months to spare, I had 10 or 12 weeks. I don’t think it’s fair that I should have to wait even longer for the videos required for this class to conclude and I certainly don’t feel it’s fair that I should have to pay more money now because she’s decided to change and extend the class on a whim. Even if she were to put up the rest of the class videos within the next 24 hours, it would be too little too late as I’ve wasted enough time. I’ve been a PayPal customer since 2001 and this is the first time and hopefully the last, that I’ll ever have to request a refund from a fraudulent vendor. And I can guarantee it’ll be the last time I request a refund from this one.

Thank you for your continued excellent customer service, it is my hope that you can resolve this matter promptly.

S. Crittenden

While they said it was an indisputable claim due to the 45 day rule, I still e-mailed them and explained that the entire reason for the dispute in the first place was because what was supposed to be a 2 month class stretched into 6…and beyond! 45 days ago she was still giving promises and making excuses which I, and others, were gullible enough to believe and here we are, in May, with the class still not finished, with cheap “guided meditation” videos thrown in (one continuous image with her guiding us through a meditation, a video that would literally take 10 minutes to make) to appease everyone as “extras” that were never supposed to be part of the class and now a whole new policy being thrown up because Suzi’s thrown a tantrum.

And if she bans me for this before the class concludes? I’ll contact PayPal again and have that on record as well. I paid for something, she hasn’t delivered, in fact she’s changed what that “something” is a couple of times and thus, I deserve a full refund. Service was not as advertised. Vendor has not delivered. End of story.

So I guess we’ll see what happens. Honestly, I just want my $55 back (although I highly doubt I’ll get it) so I can delete all of the “Be Divine” class materials I have so far and pretend it never happened, rather than wait around for a class to end that she’s just announced today is never going to end. I mean the entire reason I haven’t left the community yet, even though I’ve wanted to since MARCH, is because I keep waiting for this damn class to end so I have a full set of course materials which I PAID FOR. If I pay for something, even if it’s a crappy something, I want it or I want my money back, plain & simple.

Anyway, that’s enough headache for today. I’ve got shit to do. I’ll edit this post once I hear back from PayPal and not that I expect anyone to go through with it, but if you’re disenchanted with the way Suzi’s goddess class has been handled I suggest you make a transaction dispute with PayPal. You probably won’t get your money back, but it’ll be on her record and taken into consideration if there are any future disputes. And who knows? Maybe if a few of us do it, PayPal will take notice and refund our money anyway. I dunno. At the very least, this post’ll look great in a Google search won’t it?

So yeah, I’m done.

Edit: HAHAHA My bad. It was supposed to be a 5 week course. I just went & checked. What a joke.

Edit #2: “So someone from this class notified paypal and said they are not happy with their product and want a refund. But they never asked me first. What is a girl to do? Its been past 45 days I cant even give a refund.” – Suzi Blu

Whatever. As I said, I never expected a refund, but I did expect Suzi’s snark, which I find laughable. Just how predictable can she be? I just wanted this info out there so it was on record with PayPal and this post would eventually show up in a Google search of her name so people would know what they’re really getting into when they sign up for a Suzi Blu workshop: excuses excuses excuses.

And for added Google goodness: Suzi Blu! Suzi Blu! Suzi Blu! Suzi Blu! Suzi Blu! Suzi Blu! Suzi Blu! :o)

Edit #3: Magically she now says, via a video in the goddess workshop area (posted just after she would have gotten the e-mail from PayPal about this transaction dispute), that the last video will be up tomorrow. That means after I download it I can quit her Ning and I’ll never have to see or hear about Suzi Blu and her constant stream of internet drama ever again. Hooray!

Edit #4! A letter from PayPal:

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

Hello Sarah, I understand what you have gone through and I apologize for
any inconvenience. The issue that you have is something that I have
handled before and I will do my best to provide you possible options
that will help us resolve this issue. If I understand you correctly,
your concern is about case PP-700-261-909.

A deferred complaint is a complaint that is not actively investigated by
PayPal because the user hasn’t followed the guidelines for filing a
dispute.

Disputes are defined as deferred when:

* A Non receipt complaint is filed more than 45 days after the
transaction date.
* A Not-as-described complaint is filed more than 45 days after the
transaction date.
* A Not-as-described complaint is filed within 45 days after the
transaction date but only qualifies for the PayPal Buyer Complaint
Policy.

Note that a deferred complaint will be noted in the seller’s account and
that PayPal may decide to start an investigation into a deferred
complaint at a later stage. [That's what I was goin' for. Consider me satisfied.]

To view the specific terms and conditions, click the “Legal Agreement”
link located at the bottom of any PayPal webpage and click “User
Agreement”.

You may want to consider trying to recover your funds outside of PayPal
using other methods.

For example, you may want to consider filing a report with your local
police department or filing a complaint with the Internet Crime
Complaint Center (IC3).

IC3 is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau
of Justice Assistance and the National White Collar Crime Center. They
review and evaluate complaints and refer the information to the
appropriate local, state, or federal agency.

To learn about identity theft, fraud prevention and purchase protection,
click the “Security Center” link on any PayPal webpage and go to the
“Buying Safely” column.

We appreciate your patience and understanding regarding this matter, and
wish you continued success on PayPal.

Sincerely,
Alexander
PayPal, an eBay Company

Edit #5! So I guess I won’t be getting that last goddess video as promised even though I PAID FOR IT.Beware kids! This is the kind of unprofessionalism you’re dealing with when it comes to Suzi Blu!

You have been banned from Mixed Media With Suzi Blu

Sorry, Sunny, you can not access Mixed Media With Suzi Blu as you have been banned. If you think you’ve been banned in error, you can contact the administrator.

Edit #6 (05/25/09):

Dear Sarah Crittenden :

This message is in regard to your complaint submitted on 5/7/2009 5:31:40 PM against Suzi Blu. Your complaint was assigned ID 7862040.

The Bureau has decided to close this complaint and consider it unresolved. You have indicated that the company’s response to the complaint does not settle the matter, and the BBB has determined that the company’s response does not adequately address all the issues or make a good faith effort to resolve the dispute.

Please feel free to contact us with any further questions.

Regards,

Michael Sedio
The Better Business Bureau

Do you ever have those days where you just don’t feel like you fit in anywhere? I’m having one of those. You see, I’m an artist, or at least I try to be but a year ago I wasn’t much of one because I was afraid to use my imagination. Literally.

You see (and I’ve told this story a million times before, so those who have heard it bear with me) what lead to my bipolar disorder diagnosis was psychosis where I lost complete touch with reality, had to be hospitalized and given heavy doses of anti-psychotics for 10 days. Even after those 10 days, I just wasn’t “right in the head”, as they say. It took the anti-psychotics about a month to set me right.

It was the scariest fucking thing in the world and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

At the same time, I was hyper-creative during psychosis and super happy, psychosis for me was much like being stuck in my imagination which was fine for the first couple of weeks and then it got scary. Really really fucking scary.

It wouldn’t be until I my shrink and I found the right medications and the right doses where I felt okay to create again and to use my imagination. It was almost 3 years after I was hospitalized.

Where I found my inspiration to create was YouTube. On YouTube there was Suzi Blu and Willowing and the two of them made videos on how to art journal or draw faces and feeling good about yourself in general. So, when Suzi Blu started her Ning.com community and offered a class called “Les Petite Dolls”, I was right there to sign up and that’s when I started creating again. I made friends in this community, including Suzi Blu, and as far as I’ve been able to tell, that’s the whole point of having a Ning community. That’s why you have a friends list kind of like Live Journal.

Through the course though, I discovered other artist communities on Ning, namely Willowing’s, then Milliande’s and finally Gary Reef’s.

Well, I’m not interested in taking any more online art classes right now, namely because I don’t have the time for them, nor can I afford them, but I joined these communities anyway as a lot of my friends from Suzi’s Ning seemed to overlap within these other sites.

But I didn’t last very long in Milliande’s community because…well, I don’t know how to say this in a nice way even though I mean it in a nice way but Milliande’s community was a little too wishy washy for me. I respect what they’re doing over there, but I like a little edge, I’m not always prone to making “safe” art and that community is clearly meant for women who smile and menstruate quietly. Honestly, it reminded me of a nunnery.

And that’s cool. Obviously some people enjoy that and they enjoy their community and like I said, that’s totally cool, but it’s not really my scene. So I left Milliande’s community. I never even got to the point of filling out my profile and uploading a userpic. (Although I do follow Milliande on YouTube, she’s very creative and an incredibly nice person. I just don’t fit in with the community that surrounds her.)

So then I joined Willowing’s community because someone over there had made a post about how to convert files from the classes we were all taking between all of these artists into a format that could be put on your iPod and after that I stuck around and watched people chat and read some of the threads and Willowing’s built a nice little community there. But still…it’s a community that focuses on “whimsical art”, which again, is totally cool and I do whimsical art sometimes too, but I can only take seeing so much of it before I want to rebel and paint a coat hanger abortion.

Also, I was totally on board with Willowing and I watched her videos on YouTube but then recently in one video she did something in a painting that I consider cheap and sinful and it just kind of soured me on learning from her. And again, I’m not trying to bash anyone here, I think Willowing is a lovely woman and I like her a lot – she’s genuine, real and caring and I love that about her – I just didn’t like one thing she did and I’m picky so it bothered me. I don’t even want to say what it was because I don’t want to argue about it with anyone. It was just something I would never do in a million years because I think it’s tacky and more importantly not acid-free, not archival and not fade resistant. And it was something that could have just as easily been done with paint, but she cut corners and I hate that.

With that bit of sourness said, Willowing must be an excellent teacher because I saw the student gallery from her first class and just about everyone created beautiful pieces that they should be proud of. If you’re looking to do art journaling, you should consider signing up for her next class which begins June 8th.

So, it was obvious I didn’t really fit in with Willowing’s crowd either, although I’m still a member there, so off I went to Gary Reef’s Ning community to see what was happening there. Well, a LOT is happening there. His is the smallest of the communities I’ve talked about here, but next to Milliande’s, his is probably the most active. In fact, his is so active, I have a hard time keeping up.

First and foremost, I dig Gary. Certain folks had spoken badly of him lto me before I joined his community and none of the things I’d heard have turned out to be true. He’s a nice guy who genuinely loves art – all kinds of art – and his community is run sort of like what I imagine art school to be like. There are monthly challenges, which is where I can’t keep up, like last month for example, was Georgia O’Keefe month and the challenge was to paint like her. Before that it was…crap, I forget. A dude.  Klimt! That’s it!

This month, as I understand it, the challenge is simply to create art every day for 30 days. It should also be noted that Gary teaches classes too, but unlike Suzi and Willowing, he purposely goes for smaller classes because he wants to give his students more one on one time. This is another reason I dig Gary Reef, he doesn’t appear to really be doing this for the money and as I understand it, he’s already a somewhat  recognized artist in the “art world” so he’s not really doing it for the fame either. He’s just doing it, as far as I can tell, because he loves art and he’s a social guy. And that’s awesome!

However…as I said, I can’t keep up with the challenges. I simply do not have the time. They were all doing an artist trading card exchange that I really wanted to be a part of, but again, I couldn’t find the time because of this Hypercube contest. I tried to keep up with the blogs and make friends but aside from the people I already knew from the other communities, I didn’t really feel welcome. I uploaded one painting, the “5 O’Clock Abortion” one (because I thought they’d dig it with Gary & Suzi being basically mortal enemies and that painting was kind of a rip on what Suzi was doing at the time with her “Rodeo Girl” workshop) and where it got rated 4.5 stars by like, 250 people on Suzi’s Ning, it got voted like a 2.5 on Gary’s. Not that I care about ratings necessarily, but it seemed…snobby. And then I got looking around the forums in the community and some of the conversations that were happening were, well, snobby! Like art snobby. And I’m just not into that. I find those conversations amusing, but I don’t want to be a part of them.

While I like Gary and I kinda like his community, I just find it way too intense for me. I want to participate, but I feel like I have to have a PhD in art history to participate in the conversations…and I consider myself very much an outsider artist in that, I know fuckall about art history, I know fuckall about “the masters”, I’ve never been to a museum in my life, I only know like, 5 famous paintings and maybe the same amount of famous painters and to be honest, I kinda want to stay ignorant because I don’t want all of these things that have already been done to influence what I’m doing. (Not that what I do is all that original.) Maybe that’s a bad attitude, I don’t know, but I didn’t go to art school for a reason and Gary’s community feels like art school and I don’t fit in.

So where does that leave me? Well, there’s still Suzi Blu’s Ning right? Well…not so fast. This afternoon my friend Marylin and I sent out a mass e-mail to all of the friends we’d made on Suzi’s Ning over the past (almost) year (50+ for Marylin, 70+ for me) – using Ning’s feature to do so – trying to get support for me with this Hypercube contest, particularly because the contest is about being creative and in my case, that means ART but also because the friends I’ve made there know all about my agoraphobia and my plans to start immersion therapy in the spring and I thought they’d appreciate the update. Also, other women on the site send out mass e-mails to people constantly pimping out their blogs, Etsy shops, giveaways on their websites and hell, in March, my friend KY Kelly sent out a mass e-mail asking her friends to vote for “Shutter Sisters” in a contest where they could win $50,000 for a dream project – and these “Shutter Sisters” weren’t even a part of our community! And no one said ONE WORD about that. I even voted for them and know others did too!

But, several hours after Marylin and I sent out our messages, to OUR FRIENDS about something important that would change my life and the life of my family for the better, Suzi sent out an e-mail to all members of the community saying that we were only allowed to send messages to our friends if it was about one of her classes or about art.

Well, for me that was the last draw. In the winter Suzi dismantled all of the groups people were participating in, essentially destroying the community that was forming on her Ning (honestly, I forget why now) so now there’s not much of a community there anymore aside from the blogs and in the mass e-mail she sent today, which was definitely slanted towards me, she said “I invite u to start your own ning and make videos of yourselves and share your life everyday. Then u can tell your people whatever you want!” The “share your life everyday [sic]” bit, I’m pretty sure, was referring to the blog post I made in the community about how my immersion therapy was going, which Marylin and I linked to in our mass e-mails. So I guess I would interpret that as we’re not supposed to be sharing our lives in our blogs on her site either, only class or art related things.

Suzi’s Ning has been going downhill since early winter and personally, I’ve only been sticking around to get to the end of the “Be Divine” class which seems to be taking forever to conclude. (It started in November and was only supposed to be like a 10 or 12 week course!) I paid good money for that class, I am a student of that class and I’m going to download all of the videos and course materials that I paid for or I’m going to e-mail PayPal for a refund. I have no intentions of taking any more classes from her because I just don’t agree with some of the things she does,  I don’t feel I have anything else to learn from her and there’s little to no community left, so I guess there’s no reason for me to stick around there either. And now I’m not even allowed to send a message to all of my friends there – using Ning’s “send a message to all friends” function to do so – to say goodbye when the “Be Divine” class is over and I leave.

So where does that leave me? Well that leaves me without a Ning community to be a part of. As I said above, I like Gary Reef’s and Willowing’s communities, but at the same time, I feel so burned by my experience with Suzi Blu’s community that I’m reluctant to go in there and make friends and really try to be a part of things. My preference would be to hang with Gary’s crowd, but I just don’t feel like Gary’s crowd wants anything to do with me. Some people were welcoming, but I got the chills from others.

So I guess I’ll just be a lone wolf from now on. I did just fine before without all of these Ning people, I’ll be just fine afterward, I guess. (Although taking a class from Willowing, should she do another that focuses on faces and bodies and animals, isn’t out of the question. I just have no interest in art journaling.)

Some people during the course of this past year have asked me if *I* was planning on starting a Ning community – because quietly, beside Twitter, Ning has become an in thing – and some have even suggested that doing so would be a good idea…but I don’t want to. I don’t have the time to maintain one, for starters, and also, I have nothing to really offer. I’m not qualified to teach a class in anything, I don’t know art history or anything like that. And when people suggested it, they meant a community built around me, like the community of folks I have on Live Journal, but if I already have a community based around my Live Journal and Twitter and Facebook and this site (although the comments don’t really reflect that, bastards!) then what the hell do I need a Ning for?

I dunno. I’m just a little bit sad tonight. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong in Suzi’s community, I just thought I was sending a message to the people who have requested my friendship and with whom I’ve made  connections with. Rather than message them all one at a time, I messaged them all at the same time…which Ning has a function for. I used it as it’s intended and as far as I knew about Suzi’s community guidelines, I wasn’t doing anything wrong because I wasn’t promoting anything that competed with what Suzi does.

But then again, she’s known for changing the rules without warning, so who even knows what’s right or wrong in that community anymore.

Again, I dunno. As I said, I’m fine with being the lone wolf, but I’ve been the lone wolf for most of my life and I really wanted to find a place where creative people would accept me for me and bring me into the fold. But I don’t think I’m going to find that on Ning. I put my toes in the water of several communities, as I said, and it didn’t work out so I guess there’s nothing left for me to do but paint my heart out and keep to myself over here. And who knows? Maybe I’m the asshole here. Maybe I’m the problem and these communities are just fine & dandy. It’s hard to say.

Anyway, sorry for the bummer post. I’ll leave you with pictures of Princess Pixel sneaking a drink from my brush basin last night. (The side she’s drinking from is clean water, the other side is painty water.)

PS. When I make posts on my site, most of the time, unless the post is really picture intensive, I cross-post it to Live Journal and that’s generally where the comments are posted and the conversations take place. I really only post things to my site to either save my Live Journal friends from having 20 million pictures on their friends page and so people who don’t have Live Journals have a place to post comments as well. (My Live Journal is set so that anonymous folks can’t post comments and people who do have Live Journals but who aren’t on my friends list, their comments are screened and I post them manually. This is due to past trolling behaviour.)

http://bio-bak.nl/

The craziest website I think I’ve ever seen.
I think it’s the dude’s resume?
I dunno, but I spent 45 minutes on it.
Now THAT is creativity.
The rest of us are HACKS.

I haven’t had time to edit my own pics and write my own post yet, but my mom just sent me this blog post about A Simpler Time’s booth that was posted on Saturday, so check it out if you’re interested!

(Image ©Liberty Post 2009)