I love the Beatles. I’m not totally familiar with every song they’ve ever done but I really really love the ones I know. I love how, if everything is totally fucked and you just don’t know what to do with your life, your day, your minute, you can turn on the Beatles and just be like, “well whatever, fuck it” and everything will just be absolutely okay.

Is that just me? The Beatles are like, the safest music choice in the world because everyone loves them and the ones who don’t love them are just fucking crazy anyway so fuck those people because you believe with all your heart that “all you need is love”.

And kids love the Beatles too so it’s like, totally a nice, safe, family friendly band but not in a lame way because John Lennon was and will forever be one of the World’s Most Awesome People. Just look at this quote my cousin Haylie posted on Facebook last night or this morning or whenever the hell I checked FB this morning was:

For those who can’t see my images at work because my site’s blocked due to ~*PORNO ADVERTISEMENT*~, this is the quote:

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy”. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” – John Lennon

Feel free to pin that on your Pinterest inspiration boards!

Speaking of Pinterest, I read an article in Forbes this week that said Pinterest is worth $7.7 BILLION. That is fucking crazy. It’s such a simple idea and they have no REVENUE yet so how are they worth that much? Same with Twitter and Instagram. Why are these companies worth so much when they have no revenue? What is their value to investors? What are their investors paying for? I feel like I should know the answer to this, but I don’t. This is like, beyond my knowledge base.

Anyway, I’d link the Forbes article but I tweeted it a few days ago and now I can’t find the link. Google it, it was interesting!

After seeing how much Pinterest was worth and that how “the little guy” means nothing in comparison and therefore my copyright claims are a gnat on the ass of an Elephant I think it’s time to not give a fuck about copyright on the internet. This may seem like a big “no duh” thing for a lot of you reading this but it’s an epiphany I’m just having so ride it out with me.

By someone pinning my art on their Pinterest inspiration board or even their DIY board, all that’s giving me is traffic and, since I think my girls are recognizable, a bit of a name. I don’t think my work is easily FORGED which is different than “copied”. Sure someone could copy my concept and if they’re satisfied with their work in the end then what do I care? That person wasn’t going to buy one of my paintings anyway.Them doing that doesn’t take away my right to make my girls or my rights to my girls’ images or any of those things. And if that person ends up making paintings like my girls for a living, who cares? Do you know how many people there are in the world to buy paintings? Like, a lot. She’s still not infringing on any of my rights. Etc etc etc. See copying is okay. I don’t see any issue with that, all artists do it and anyone who creates anything is an artist. The “truly original” person is a fucking MYTH.

If someone was forging my paintings, that would actually be pretty cool because that would mean I’m successful enough that people would actually care to do that. And that level of infamy is rare. I mean, I’m a normal person. I don’t have a degree in art. Here are the “contemporary” artists that I know of off the top of my head:

- Damien Hirst
- Andy Warhol
- Jackson Pollock (because of the movie)
- Jean Michel Basquiat (because of the movie)
- Frida Khalo (because of the movie)
- Pablo Picasso (because he’s fucking Picasso)

I only know that these are “contemporary” artists because I read that on Wikipedia in the last 6 months. The only one of MY lifetime (so to speak) is Damien Hirst and he only became popular when I was in grade 9 but I’d never even heard of him before 2 months ago.

So that is my “art knowledge”  as a regular, every day person with only a grade 9 education and the ability to use the internet. I think that’s pretty typical, the only real difference is that most people wouldn’t know that any of these people were popular within the last 100 years. Most people have no idea that Michelangelo and Picasso were of totally different eras (and I’m not talking about you guys, I’m talking about the average person in my town who also doesn’t know what a “blog” is).

That’s SIX PEOPLE in the last HUNDRED YEARS who I KNOW OF who have made any kind of money making art for a living in their lifetimes. Again, do you know how many people there are in the WORLD? Like over 6 billion. Do you know how many of them make art? Like, tons. Yet in a hundred fucking years, I can only name 6 who didn’t starve as a result. Does that make me ignorant? Absolutely. But can you also see why people are so afraid to try and be an artist and live their passions? This is why there are all these workshops by Willowing and Suzi Blu and all the people in the book I’m reading that really boil down to the same mantra: you are an artist. Have no shame in that.

Blake calls me utilitarian. And I am. But he also gets upset with me because I can’t relax and just BE. I have to be doing something productive or I feel completely unsuccessful and then that makes me feel like shit. Selling a painting is the BEST feeling in the world for me. Selling a painting means that what I do with my time isn’t completely worthless. And that makes me feel good because I’m utilitarian.

Pre-going crazy, I had no trouble whatsoever calling myself an artist and using my imagination. Post-going nuts I became afraid of my imagination and also of what people thought of me and I had a hard time calling myself an artist because “artist” was a fancy way of saying “unemployed”. That’s where Suzi Blu came in. I saw her videos on YouTube, encouraging me to be silly and funny and weird and quirky and an ARTIST and that was exactly the encouragement I needed. I could trust my medication so that I didn’t need to be afraid of my imagination anymore and this confident woman with the less-than-perfect-teeth-but-still-beautiful was practically shrieking at me and thousands of others on YouTube that it was a-okay to call yourself an artist and yes, you can make a living from doing this. Suzi Blu practically invented the art of the online art workshop via Ning that so many other artists have copied in the last few years. If you want to make a living by being an artist, is the message from Suzi and the mixed media artists online like her, then be a teacher. because “slinging paintings” as Suzi called it one night in chat, is not the way to go about it. That route is HARD. You have to have gallery representation and you have to kiss a lot of ass.

Or do you…?

How has the internet changed that dynamic or how is it changing that dynamic? I have galleries on my site, right here, where you can see my entire oeuvre and I can guarantee that more people are looking at those than I would get at any gallery in Toronto so why would I bother with a gallery in Toronto, especially when they would take 50% of my money for that privilege? I mean, in the age of the internet, who’s really doing all the work here, the artist or the gallery? The artist, if they want to stay authentic (that means writing your own tweets and updating your own Facebook fan page – there’s no reason a gallery should be doing that).

#Hashtag Gallery, the brand new gallery I’ve been watching for the past couple of weeks, tweeted the other day something to the effect of, “which local artists would you like to see at #Hashtag Gallery?” and I said something like, “why would you want local artists when your gallery is named after a component of the internet? you have the whole internet!” To which they replied “good point” and rephrased the question. They’re super green, but they’re learning. I really wish they’d get a goddamn website up though; you’re named after a major component of internet life and you don’t even have a website? Come on, shit or get off the pot. I still maintain that if your gallery is getting more foot traffic than your website, you’re doing something wrong.

The Square Foot Show signups started yesterday. It’s $20 to enter and you can submit up to 3 pieces, each 12 inches by 12 inches, and they’ll put your work up at AWOL Gallery in Toronto along with 600 other artists. You have to get your signup in SOON because space is limited and this year is their 10th anniversary.

I don’t know whether or not I should do this because it’s $20 and I’m slowly but surely learning the value of a dollar. You have to proce your work for $255, which would be totally fine by me because that’s what I charge for a 12 x 12 inch painting anyway (with shipping), but the gallery takes 50% of your money if you sell anything so I can’t figure out what the point is to doing this. To get “exposure”? Again, I don’t need “exposure”. I have a website. 3,000 people per month come look at it. The Square Foot Show isn’t going to compete with that. It’s not like they show your name with your painting or anything, people buy it purely on whether they like how it looks or what it says. I kinda like that aspect of it, I just don’t like parting with 50% of my money when it’s going to cost me so much to be in it. ($20 to enter, $15 to park at the event, $10 in gas, a day to prepare to go, a night to actually go to the gala, $25 to have dinner out if just Blake and I go.)

So I dunno. My mom thinks I should do it. She thinks she might want to do it. I’ll do it if she does it, I guess, then we can all go to the gala together and that would be worth it for me, but I don’t think I’ll do it any other way. Another benefit of doing it is to put it on my resume because the more gallery showings you have on your resume, the better your chances of getting a grant are.

I got turned down, again, for the OAC grant this year, which is no surprise and I’m actually glad I didn’t get it because I’m not doing my girls anymore and that was my entire artist statement. And if you don’t do what is in your artist statement within a year of receiving the grant, you have to give the grant back. I would hate to have to do girls when I wouldn’t want to just to get some money. I mean, I would have done it because $5,000 is a lot of money, but I wouldn’t be very happy about it at all.

That’s why I don’t think I’ll be applying next year. We’ll see how things go when the time comes around to do it and where I am artistically, but I think I’m still trying to figure out who I am right now and what to paint as a result and I don’t think I’ll have that figured out until after Squam and after Squam is too late to make enough pieces to enter for grant purposes. But we’ll see how it goes.

Getting sick and almost dying really messed with my world views and I feel like I’m on really shaky ground right now because I don’t know for sure how I feel about certain things. When you realize just how short life really is (and how long and condensed at the same time), I think it’s natural to need a while to figure things out.

The last thing I have to talk about, because I have to start work in like, 42 minutes, is the fact that the kids and I signed up for The Sketchbook Project 2013 and I think that’s pretty awesome. I’ve decided to (really this time) not treat my art supplies as being “precious” and I’m going to give them access to everything I have for their sketchbooks just to see what they’ll come up with. I know Wes has big platypi plans for the cover of his sketchbook and he’s been practicing in his *other* sketchbook in the time between signing up until the books actually arrive, but Madison has been quiet about her plans. If she has any. *I* certainly do not have a plan for mine.

I sent in my Sketchbook Limited Edition sketchbook a couple of weeks ago. I think I did a fucking great job on it, considering what I’m going through artistically right now. I think you guys are gonna really like it when it’s digitized. :oD

Tomorrow we’re going geocaching I think, after Blake goes to hot yoga for the first time. He’s got all next week off of work and he plans on going to hot yoga every day since the membership was like “$X for unlimited classes for the 1st month”. He’s gonna get even hotter and sexier when he starts doing hot yoga and then I’m gonna look like a fat, old goat herder beside him. :o( He just gets sexier by the moment though, even preparing for his venture into hot yoga. I mean, check this out:

That is Blake at the grocery store with his stylish new headband for hot yoga for all the soccer moms to drool over. In the background is Shaun/Sean/Shawn, our favourite Foodland employee.

Anyway, I have a million personal e-mails to go through so I’d better get on that before I have to start working on work e-mails. I hope you all had a fantastic April 20th yesterday and an even better 21st!

PS. I wrote this in an e-mail to Charlie yesterday, what do you guys think?

Y’know. I kind of envy your career. Not like, what you actually *do* for a living but the pace, the responsibility, the ability to manage underlings, the travel…if I wasn’t married with kids, I would probably have a job like that. Advertising was a lot like that but with less travel and I really enjoyed that. I want “projects”, dammit. That’s kinda why I think I want to start doing small commissions.

I think I want to paint in as many styles as I’m capable of to see how I really make art because I’m honestly not sure how I make art. I don’t think I have a signature style or themes or anything. I guess I “sort of” did with my girls, but that was more a marketing thing than an art thing, I think. I’m not saying that they weren’t or aren’t art, I just mean that they’re more decoration than “art” art.

I just think maybe doing commissions would open me up a little bit. Blake says they’re a bad idea because I’m terrible at deadlines and I end up hating what I do in the end (not the product but the process) but I think I’ve kind of evolved a little bit since the last time I took on a commission type project and I see art differently than I used to. I don’t really see it as a “commission” but as a collaboration. Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol had students and assistants doing the grunt work *for them* and they both also took/take commissions. I bet there’s a ton more examples of famous painters taking commissions.

I also think it’s a good way to practice techniques without it being “work”. (Like Suzi Blu had us make a grid on a piece of paper and draw eyes in each square. I did this for 10 pages. That was WORK and very very boring. Totally effective in the end, but still work.)

So what do you think? Would YOU commission me?

So I’m pretty sure I mentioned the whole geocaching thing, right? I’m gonna recap in case I didn’t:

Madison is a resource hog. She occupies 90% of our family time and prefers to think of herself as an only child most of the time. She is definitely her mother’s daughter in that she is an absolute attention whore. As a result, Wes doesn’t get as much of our time as we would like for him to have, Blake in particular.

Wes’ “thing” is video games. None of us are really hardcore gamers and I don’t play at all so we can’t really spend time with him doing that. His other “thing” is Pokemon, which none of us can really relate to and even that he’s slowly growing out of (thank god).

The other thing is that over the summer, while the kids were playing “grandparent bingo” and I was in the hospital, the kids got spoiled with food a lot we think and Wes’ weight shot up like a rocket. He was, as they say, a porker. He’s been doing Wii Fit and watching what he eats and he’s lost most of the weight he gained over the summer and since we wanted to encourage more of that and being active, Blake and he started going on “adventures” down the many trails near our house and in Barrie.

After a day of going down these trails and taking pictures and stuff, they came home and Blake said something like, “I wish these adventures could be more interactive” because Wes wasn’t as engaged as Blake would have liked. That’s when I said, “Um, why don’t you try geocaching?” and then Blake called me a genius, which I am, and that’s how they got started.

Blake just downloaded a GPS app for his phone and they’ve been using that on Saturdays while I’m working my long (9 hour) shift.

While it’s Blake and Wes’ “thing” to do together, Madison, at Wes’ request, has been invited to come along – at least to the local caches they’ve been doing. The original plan was that if Blake and Wes were going to be driving out of town to cache, Madison would stay home but now that we’ve made it a family thing, she and I are welcome to come and we’re going to do it on Sundays because that’s one of my days off.

Wait, before I go any further, I guess I should explain what geocaching IS for those who don’t know: Geocaching is when someone hides a “cache”, usually a camouflaged container of some sort, in public, usually in the woods or in nature, and you find it by using the GPS coordinates of the item. Inside the cache is always a logbook to sign your name (like a guestbook), sometimes a pencil to do so and the bigger caches (which are harder to hide) have items in them like dollar store toys, flashlights, coins, semi-precious gems (like amethyst or quartz) and stuff like that. When you find a cache that has stuff in it, you can swap items out that are equal or greater than the value of the item you are taking.

Some caches are really simple, like a small container hooked to the backside of a tree that only contains a logbook (although finding one of those micro caches in a pine tree can be pretty tricky, I’m told), some have really elaborate puzzles to get to them with codes and stuff and some of the caches themselves, like the containers, are really elaborate which I’ll show you next week because on Sunday we’re going after one called “Wonderball” that is just fucking amazingly well done.

More info can be found here.

Wes is having the time of his life with geocaching. He’s pretty much stopped talking about Pokemon and now all he talks about is geocaching (but we had some issues in the beginning with that, with him having to keep the locations of all the caches secret from his friends). Because he’s having so much fun with it and Madison and Blake are too, when I sold my painting “Sunny Rays” over the weekend, I used the funds to buy them a GPS unit and I took them out for dinner (just to McDonald’s, nothing fancy) after we were caching on Sunday. The reason I bought a stand-alone GPS unit is because using GPS on your phone drains the batteries like crazy (like, we’re talking in 2 hours kinda crazy and you don’t want to be stuck in the woods without a phone – none of us know how to make smoke signals!) and phone GPS isn’t precise enough to place caches, which is what *I* really want to do.

But before we place caches, we have to find a lot more to see how they’re done. I think Blake and the kids have found 23 caches and I’ve only found 3 because I just started on Sunday.

The other thing with geocaching you can do is TRACKABLES. These are items that have codes on them that you input into the Geocaching.com website and you can see how far they’ve traveled. These items are called Travel Bugs, Geocoins, or Geopatches. The geocaching bug has hit me HARD so I bought 4 trackables: a Travel Bug decal for our car, a Canadian Travel Bug that I haven’t activated yet, a trackable patch for my bag and one for Blake and the kids’ geocaching bag.

This is what the Travel Bug on our car looks like and this is what the Canadian one looks like (it’s like a dog tag, in fact you CAN get trackable dog tags!).

For the car one, if you see it “in the wild” you would either take a picture of it or write down the tracking number and when you got home, you would go to Geocaching.com and log that you saw it. Then your entry would be added to the Travel Bug’s log and it would be counted toward its mileage.  Same with the patches on our bags.

With dog tag Travel Bugs and Geocoins, they usually have a goal. Like, say the goal for the Travel Bug was to reach all 50 states. I would put it in my cache here in Ontario and with it, there would be a note that says what its goal is and probably a checkbox with all 50 states on it so when it reaches that state, the person can tick it off so there won’t be any duplicate trips. I’m honestly not too sure what happens when it reaches its final destination, like if it somehow finds its way back to the original cache or keeps traveling or what. I *think* it just keeps traveling.

Oh and usually a Travel Bug dog tag is attached to something else, like a stuffed animal or a keychain or something like that.

This is where you guys come in though: I’ve decided that I want my Canadian Travel Bug to start its journey in Utopia, Ontario (which is where I wish we could live) and have it travel to as many oddly named places as possible, such as Zephyr, Ontario; Snowball Corners, Ontario; Egypt, Ontario; Ragged Ass Road (I forget where that is but it’s in Canada somewhere, it’s also an album title but I forget which band); Moose Factory, Ontario; Kalamazoo, Militiagan; Hell, Militiagan etc etc etc. But the thing is, I don’t know the names of all the weird towns and places in North America, let alone the world and while I don’t need the names of ALL of them, I’d like to include a bunch of examples in my Travel Bug’s info sheet that goes with it. So! If any of you guys know of any strangely named places, PLEASE leave me a comment so I can include it!

And this is what we’re going to attach our Canadian Travel Bug to: A USB thingy! The idea was Blake’s and what people would do is that when they found the Travel Bug, they would upload their photo to the Travel Bug’s log on Geocaching.com but also to the USB thingy so the next person who finds it would see the photos on the USB thingy and  do the same.  Also we would put the instructions/info sheet ON the USB thingy as a .txt file (or maybe a PDF so they can’t edit it?) and that way the two parts would never get lost.

I think that is definitely going to be in the very first cache we hide, which we can now do since I bought the GPS device.

I have no idea how to actually do the geocaching though, like how to get the files to my phone and then how to open them and run them. So far Blake’s done all that. Adding to the confusion is how to work the GPS unit. We just got it yesterday and so far only Blake’s played with it so I’m not sure how it works. We also had to register it to a premium Geocaching.com account so we registered it to Blake’s since his is for him and Wes and this is really their activity. Madison has her own account and so do I, but only Blake and I have premium accounts.

Last Saturday there was a geocachers meeting at Steeler’s which is a restaurant in our town. Blake said there were a lot of people there, like maybe 40, and obviously he and the kids went. Then in June there’s another meeting for adults only in Barrie that Blake and I are going to (at another restaurant) and also in June, there’s a Spring Fling in Midland, about 20 mins North of us, and they’re expecting like, 700 people. We all plan to attend that one.

There are 2 caches that I know of within 5 minutes of our house. One is in Heritage Park (and I know approximately where it is) and one is in the park across the street from us but I have no idea where it is, I just know what it looks like because Blake told me.  My goal is to be able to find those 2 caches on my own, which will be a very layered experience:

- Wash hair.
- Get dressed.
- Locate socks.
- Figure out how to download the geocaching file to my phone.
- Put all my junk in my bag.
- Go outside.
- Walk to the park.
- Figure out how to work the GPS.
- Walk around like a lunatic following the arrow to the cache. 
- Find cache.
- Log cache.
- Come home.

OH! And some caches are called “letterbox caches”  and they’re a whole other thing. In a letterbox cache, there’s a rubber stamp, usually hand-carved, and a marker, like a Crayola marker. You rub the marker onto the stamp and then you stamp your letterbox book. Think of it like an autograph book except for stamps from caches! How cool is THAT?

I found an old journal that I’d never use for actual journaling to use as my letterbox book for stamps. I may swap it out for a different one though because I don’t like that it has lines on it and I haven’t used it yet so there’s no issue in not using it and getting a different one.

I’m pretty sure that our first cache is going to be legendary! I want us to have a crazy container of some sort. I want us to have clues leading up to it, like a puzzle (Blake and Wes will be good at that part). I want it to be a letterbox hybrid and I’ll carve the stamp myself since I have stamp carving tools, I just have to get a lino block because I don’t think I have any kicking around anymore. The cache will be chock full of SWAG and finally, it will contain our Canadian USB Travel Bug.

I AM STOKED.

When I ordered the Travel Bugs and the patches, I also ordered a little capsule-like container to use to hide a small cache somewhere but I wanted a green one and since they only had black ones, the lady sent me a free mini capsule in the green so now we have TWO containers to use as mini and micro caches!  I have some teeny tiny little gemstones that I can use for the bigger of the two.

So that’s what us Crittendens have been up to.

Yesterday I walked to Heritage Park by myself and I stayed there for about 5 minutes. It was cold and I wore my Shape Ups shoes which was a terrible idea because my legs hurt by the time I got home but I survived and Blake got me an apple danish at the bakery for my efforts. It was delicious. Know why? Mennonites.

Oh wait, I lied. Blake starts “hot yoga” on Sunday and I signed me and the kids up for The Sketchbook Project 2013.

And that’s all I have to say.

I couldn’t go to the gallery opening last night. Just could not bring myself to do it. It was downtown Toronto, I had to shave my legs and armpits and wash my hair and put on clothes that weren’t trackpants and a Pixies t-shirt. Just couldn’t do it.

Instead, we went on a little adventure to Stouffville to get pizza. The best pizza in Canada. (I like NYC pizza best, but Stouffville Pizza is definitely 2nd.) Stouffville is about an hour and a half away and it’s where we used to live. It’s also where I grew up and where my grama still lives.

I was absolutely STARVING by the time we got there so we went to Stouffville Pizza first to  order, then Blake went to the convenience store beside Stouffville Pizza where he found Black Cherry and Pomegranate Jones Soda Zilch, which you would never find up here, and also 4 bags of Fizzy Skittles which we’ve been looking for EVERYWHERE but I’m scared they’re not making them anymore, then we went to the bank to get some money to pay for the pizza.

This is Stouffville Pizza, my idea of heaven:

It’s just a guy, in a room, making pizzas for the past 35 years. I forget his name but it’s the same guy, as always, just standing back there making his amazing pizzas. Here’s a crappy cell phone pic of mine, which was ham and mushroom:

That is a serious fucking pizza.

Once we got our pizza, we went to the park to eat it but it was too cold outside so we ended up eating it while parked at the park and talking about how much the town had changed. But it was weird because it was an organic change that I didn’t find strange at all, unlike the first time we went back about 4 years ago for pizza on Mothers’ Day.

We talked about how we wished we could live there again but how it’s way too expensive so we can’t. Then we talked about maybe moving to Aurora but then we went to Starbucks in Aurora afterward and it’s just a bunch of crazy strip malls now so that was out. Plus it’s expensive there too.

We talked about maybe moving to Uxbridge but then we run the risk of running into my ex’s family which would be a very bad thing for all of us.

So we don’t know where to go, not that we have the money to go anywhere but here. I only want to move once more in our lives so it’s got to be the right house in the right town or it’s not happening.

So I didn’t go to the opening and I don’t know how it went or anything like that. The gallery is called #Hashtag Gallery and it’s at 801 Dundas, Toronto. I didn’t know anyone in the show but I shared 5 mutual friends with the co-owner, which is part of why I was going to go. Their site’s not up. I think it’s a bunch of kids doing this and I didn’t feel like I had a place there. I didn’t want to be the old person at the young person event, especially when I wasn’t showing my work there and I didn’t really know anyone. My friends Mike and Lou were going but I don’t really talk to them all that often so it’s not like I would have hung out with them comfortably. I didn’t want to cling to them either and make them uncomfortable. I dunno, I just didn’t feel very welcome so I didn’t go. I’m not sure how I feel about that.  I’m not sure if I regret it or not.

We had a good time on our date in Stouffville, so I dunno. I dunno if we made the right decision. I kinda think we did. It would have been “cooler” to say “oh I went to an opening last night” but I’m just not that cool I guess.

Blake and I had a  talk in bed when we got home about two things: Phil & Lisa and my agoraphobia.

He thinks I went about the whole Phil & Lisa thing wrongly and that I shouldn’t have lashed out at Lisa when I was really mad at Phil. He’s probably right but they are two sides of the same coin and what’s done is done. I don’t feel like I should apologize to Lisa because I never lied, I just told the truth in a public forum. I will never apologize for telling the truth and I will never apologize for talking to my audience and friends about what’s going on in my life and my head, however small that audience may be.

Blake thinks I should defriend all of the people connected to Phil and Lisa on my Facebook so I don’t see any family pictures and stuff like that because it just hurts my feelings to know that even if none of this ever went down, I still wouldn’t be a part of their family. He’s probably right about that too but at the same time, I don’t want to be the one who defriends people like that, it’s just not what I do, but…I think it’s the only way to go. I don’t have a father anymore. I never really did. He certainly didn’t give a shit about me when I was born and he definitely didn’t give a shit about me when I was dying either, so what’s the point in having this person in my life if all he does is hurt and disappoint me? Out of sight, out of mind, right?

When we moved to Elmvale, I stopped having anything to do with my step-dad for a bunch of reasons I won’t get into again unless I’m asked to, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. He was a way bigger part of my life than Phil has ever been and it was easy to break ties with him. Why do I get the sense that it’s going to really hurt to break ties with Phil completely? I think it needs to be done though. I’m not sure how I’m going to do it, if I’m just going to quietly defriend him on Facebook (and the rest of his friends/family members that I have on there) and pretend they don’t exist or if I should e-mail him and just say “this is it, buddy”. But if I do that, then that leaves room for a response, which I don’t think I’ll ever get and I think it would bother me not to get one.

So I think I should just defriend him and the family and quietly detach myself from them all. Like castrating a bull in the olden days, they would tie an elastic band around the bull’s nutsack and wait until they fell off due to lack of blood supply.

A while ago, this was posted on Facebook, I think by my mother and I guess it’s going to be my new philosophy for Phil:

I don’t think he’s ever going to get his mind “right” when it comes to me but it would be a nice surprise if he did. And I guess I’ll just leave it at that.

Our talk about agoraphobia was really frustrating. He just doesn’t understand how hard it is for me to do certain things, he has no empathy or sympathy or whatever (I don’t really know the difference). He thinks I should just be able to go out and do stuff. He thinks I should just go take a walk to two houses down like it’s nothing but I CAN’T ASSHOLE. It’s not NOTHING it’s a very big SOMETHING. And he thinks that I should just be able to jump in the car and go to the grocery store. But I CAN’T DO THAT. I don’t WANT to do that.

It’s just so frustrating because on one hand I wish I could just jump in the car and have adventures but on the other hand, I’m convinced there’s nothing in this world left for me to see, nothing local anyway, so what’s the point? Where am I going to go? Nowhere, that’s where. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to see. The only thing I can do is go to the grocery store to buy food I don’t even need because I’m getting too fat or the post office to get bills. YAY. Big fucking YAY. What is the point of that?

There’s not a chance in hell I can back out of our driveway during the day with all the cars going too fast on our road and the post office isn’t open at night for me to get packages (which I really hate – when I lived in Uxbridge I got my mail in “super boxes” where if you had a package, they would leave you a key for the big box at the bottom of the free-standing PO box tower and that was GREAT. Dealing with the post office people is bullshit.) which is the only thing I would care about getting anyway. And I can’t get a lot of packages on foot, plus the post office is too far away for walking.

I dunno, I just can’t do it. Sometimes I think I can and then reality sets in and I just can’t do it and no one understands. NO ONE. Blake pretends to understand, but he doesn’t, really, or he’d have a different approach than making fun of me and trying to bully me into leaving the house.

Maybe Squam will change things. Squam is a very very scary prospect for me. I’m going to have to put on my big girl panties for Squam. Not only am I terrified of the actually getting there part (what if the car breaks down 10 hours from home? what if the GPS is wrong and we get lost?), I’m terrified of what’s going to happen once we get there. It helps that Belinda’s going to be there because at least we’ll know someone (well, my mom won’t but I think she’ll like Belinda, it’s hard not to like Belinda) but we’re staying in a HUGE cabin with like, 30 different people or something like that, practically the whole retreat happens in our cabin.

What if we don’t get there in time to get a good room near a bathroom or with its own bathroom? I’m really scared that we’re going to get there last. None of us (me, my mom, Belinda) are taking the same classes, so I’m going to be all alone in the classes I’m in and I’m going to feel like a total outsider because I’ve been reading this book called Creative Pilgrimage by Jenny Doh of Somerset Studio fame, and it’s this book my friend Alan got me where she writes about Squam and all the major US art retreats and the teachers who teach at them. A lot of the women in the book (they’re all women) are Squam teachers so I’m learning a lot about the camp while reading this book. And it’s making me absolutely terrified of going.

I mean, let’s face it, we all knew this was going to happen. That I would sign up for this thing and then freak out completely. Last week I paid the last of my balance so I’m now paid in full and there’s no turning back. In the Creative Pilgrimage book, I was reading about a Squam teacher (forgetting the name now, it’s in the bedroom) who makes her students do like, breathing exercises and physical shaking out of bad juju and shit like that and I’m just laying there in bed thinking “thank god that’s not my teacher” because I’m not really a joiner or a participator and that’s part of what makes Squam so scary to me because you really do have to be a joiner or a participator for this and that’s not me at ALL. I’m the jerk who makes fun of the joiners and participators!

I’m worried about lugging all of my mixed media crap through the woods for my 2nd day class. I’m not very strong and I’m supposed to bring a lot of stuff. I’m worried about my 1st day’s class because that’s the photography one and I really don’t understand photography AT ALL. So many people, like Blake and Katie (who wrote me this super long detailed e-mail about it), have tried to explain f.stop and aperture and shutter speed and all this DSLR shit and I just cannot remember any of it or apply any of it. I’m also worried that my camera isn’t good enough for the class because it’s too old. If I can’t make studpily large prints out of the pictures then I don’t see the point in taking them. I need to have that option whether I’m going to actually do it or not. My point-and-shoot camera has more megapixels than the Rebel. By like, a lot. I don’t have a big enough memory card.

And also, this teacher that I’m having for the photography class does “spirit sessions” (that’s what the class is called) and part of the class is that she’s going to do “spirit portraits” of us. I *hate* having my picture taken. I am SO uncomfortable in front of the camera and it shows in the pictures (unless I’m taking the picture, but even then, in recent years, I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with it). I *hate* my smile. I *hate* my teeth. I *hate* my face and the stupid expressions I make. Yet when a camera’s in front of me, I can’t help but grin like a retarded moron from the middle ages and the pictures are never pretty. Also the class starts at something like 7am so I’m going to have to wake up at 6am to do my makeup and stuff IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WOODS at an event I was kind of looking forward to not having  to impress anyone with my looks but at the SAME TIME I really do want my portrait taken to commemorate my putting on my big girl panties and having this experience so I’m totally fucked!

And then my concern with my 2nd day class, which is a mixed media painting class, is that I won’t create anything I like and that I’ll waste my time. My friend Alan also sent me that teacher’s book, called Painted Pages, which I’ve been slowly reading and luckily, I think I like her, but I don’t want to create artwork like she does and looking at the materials list for her class, it appears as though we’re going to be learning techniques to learn how to make paintings like hers. I don’t know how to put those techniques together to make something that’s mine. I guess that’s the entire point of taking the class though, right? So I’m going to have to get over that. I’ve just been reading her book and thinking that none of what she says applies to anything I would do in my own painting. I realize, however, that I’m supposed to be there to learn new things and that I need to be open to those things, but that is extremely hard for me. I’m not traditionally a person who is easy to teach anything. I’m a self-taught person. I learn my own way.

All of this, I know, is just negative self-talk and that everything’s going to be fine and that I’m going to have a great time. I’m just worried as all fuck that it’s going to be negative and being so far away from home, I’m not going to be able to escape if I need to. Especially not in a cabin with 30 other people. I don’t know how I’m going to get any alone time.

Oh and another thing, I’m going to have to get my passport and I don’t even know where to start with that. Like where do I get one and what do I have to do? I think it’s $80 to get one and I never factored that into my expenses, so I don’t even know where I’m going to get the money to pay for that.

I just feel lost in my life right now. I had this big scary thing happen to me this summer and I don’t think I’ve dealt with it AT ALL. I’ve convinced myself that there’s nothing to deal with. It happened. I’m okay now. Life is short so live it. The end. Is it okay that that’s all there really is to it for me? I feel like I didn’t really even go through anything because I don’t remember so much of it. My mom and Blake and my kids, THEY went through something, I just slept. Then I had to relearn how to walk. Then I had to deal with this wound on my stomach for months and months and months and nurses coming to the house every other day. That sucks, but at least I’m not dead, right?

On one hand, I feel like I have to be missing something, something essential that I have to work through. On the other hand, I really feel like there’s nothing TO work through because what happened didn’t really happen to ME, it happened to the people around me. It’s hard to explain.

All I know is that I’ve come to understand how many years I have left in this world and that I need to pack as much into one day as I can. It’s not okay to “waste” days. I’ve felt that way all my life, but I feel it especially strongly now that I almost died. Today I’ve done nothing except sleep, eat Fizzy Skittles and leftover pizza and write this post and I think that’s completely unacceptable because it’s a waste of a day. I don’t know what else I can do to make this day “count” but I’ll figure something out. I’ll probably paint forget-me-nots which are STILL not done. (I’m about 3/4 of the way finished but I’m using discontinued paint so I have to be really conservative with it and that’s very difficult when doing dot flowers.) I’ll probably watch a movie. Those things are not wastes of days. Those are downloading very important pieces of information that I’ll then translate into artwork. Or a post. Or whatever. As long as I’m downloading and learning and absorbing new things every day, they are not wasteful days. As long as I do something productive every day, I can justify living.

I was going to say that maybe after Blake gets home from work, we’ll go for a walk along the trail to the park down the street but if I start doing dot flowers, which I plan to start when I’m finished this post, I can’t stop because I can’t waste paint by letting it dry on my palette while I go somewhere. Blake would say that’s an excuse, but it’s not. Like I said, the paint I’m using is discontinued and I can’t get any more of it so what I have is what I have and I’m going to need every drop to finish these flowers.

And now I’m just babbling so I’m going to stop writing now. I hope I didn’t sound too whiny today, I just have a lot on my mind and I’m worried about like, EVERYTHING right now. Squam is 5 months away so I shouldn’t be worrying this early but I can’t help it. Oh and another thing about Squam is that I don’t really have roaming on my phone plan (and can’t get it without getting a ridiculously expensive plan) so I can’t really use Twitter the whole time I’m there and that’s going to practically kill me because Twitter’s like, my agoraphobia helpline. :o(

Anyway, as per usual, if you’d like to help me out financially with my great Squam adventure, that would be greatly appreciated. I still need money for gas for my mom and my passport and art supplies and food etc. The whole list is on that page, minus the passport because like I said, I forgot to factor that in when I was making the list of expenses. Oops. Despite my being extremely worried about going and what that entails, I’m also really really excited about all the new things I’m going to experience while I’m there and maybe the new friends I might make and also spending time with my mom and of course, finally meeting Belinda.

Okay I’m going now, but I’ll leave you with these two awesome things.

1. Christians “Protest” Gay Pride With Apologetic Signs

2. A Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Square

That’s it. Peace oot.

So guess what? As it turns out, I’ve actually been painting embryos this whole time and not fetuses. Well, sort of. I looked it up this morning and what I paint are humans that are about 10-12 weeks old from the date of the mother’s last menstrual period, so 8-10 weeks gestation. Technically this places them between the embryonic and fetal stages.

I thought this pic was pretty neat, it’s an 8 week old embryo taken from an ectopic pregnancy. I found it on Wikipedia:

I thought that was pretty cool. I’ve been collecting pictures of embryos for years and pasting them in my sketchbooks (thinking they were fetuses, d’oh) but I think the one above is my favourite. I wish my printer was better so it would have printed clearly but I gots what I gots. I don’t know why I like embryos so much, I just do. I think they’re super cute with their giant foreheads and big bellies. I also like how they symbolize different things – vastly different things – for different people.

Last night I finished reading How To Get Ideas by Jack Foster and I wanted to share two parts with you because I thought they were pretty good.

“George Ade was a prolific writer in the early part of this century. I once read an interview of his mother by a man who was not an admirer of her son’s work, and he was indelicate enough to ask her about George’s alleged capricious style and wobbly structure and shallow characterizations.

Finally Mrs/ Ade had enough/ “Oh I know that many people can write better than George does,” she said. “But George does.”

“George does.”

It’s one of the finest things anybody’s ever said.

In two words it crystallizes what happens with so many people (me included), namely: They get an idea, they tell some people about it, the people all say, “Wow, that’s great!” and then they go on to something else and never do anything about the idea they told people about.

I think the reason is: “Wow, that’s great!” is reward enough. It gives you that nice warm glow that comes from knowing you got a really good idea, that everybody thinks you’re a whiz.

But if nothing else happens with your idea, if it doesn’t help someone, if it doesn’t save or fix or create something, if it doesn’t make something better or solve some problem, what good is it really?“

And then he goes on to say that you shouldn’t tell people your ideas or you shouldn’t let “Wow, that’s great!” be enough, which I think is really fucking smart. I am absolutely horrible for this. I blog about my ideas all the time and then it’s like once I talk about them, the magic is gone and then all I’m left with is *work*. I hate work! Everyone hates work! (If you believe that “work” is anything that isn’t fun.) If I don’t tell you guys my idea and I just do it, the whole time I’m making something, I think “wait till they see this! They’re going to love it!” and that fuels my creation of the whatever it is. (And then when no one comments, I feel like shit, but that’s a whole other thing.) The key though, is not to tell and I am a terrible secret keeper if it’s my own secret. I want to tell everyone everything and I’m pretty sure, as Jack Foster believes, that hurts me in the long run.

So I’m not going to blog about my ideas anymore (in full) or my paintings until they’re finished as much as that’s going to pain me.

Here’s another thing in the book:

“More often than not,” Bud said, “people don’t fail; they stop trying.“

That’s me too. Lately I’ve been kinda bitching and moaning in real life about how “everything’s been done” but then at the same time saying “everything hasn’t been done, everyone says that and then someone does something new so why can’t that be me?” but then I don’t do the legwork. I don’t actively sit there and try to think up ideas. Then again, I never have. The book says you should do that but that’s just not my process. I’m getting off track though; the book says that people stop trying and this week I’ve stopped trying on so many counts it’s ridiculous.

First, until today, I didn’t do anything actively to throw myself into being an idea factory. The book says, and I agree because I’ve been doing it my whole life, that in order to get ideas you should pick a subject and immerse yourself in it, become an expert at it and then forget about it and do something else. The key though, is to DO SOMETHING ELSE. Don’t just sit there and do nothing. DO SOMETHING. And then the idea will just come to you while you’re doing something else. That’s how I get 99% of my ideas and it’s also a scientifically proven method, according to the book.

Second, on Monday I started painting the forget-me-nots on “Menopause” and then Blake wanted to go to Wal*Mart so  I had to stop and that broke my flow and I never got back to it. Then, to make matters worse, I blogged about “Menopause” prematurely (look, I’m doing it again!) and now I feel like all the magic is gone out of it and all I’m left with is the tedious task of all these goddamn forget-me-nots. I also posted pics of it on Camwhores on Tuesday or yesterday (I forget), so now that community’s already seen it and it won’t be a surprise when I post it.

I started making a process video of the making of “Menopause” but due to the feedback I got on my self portrait one, I’m worried that since “Menopause” is such a huge piece that’s taken weeks to create that the video will be too long and people will find most of its making too tedious. I think I should make it anyway and if people don’t want to watch it theyh have that option, but it’s not really a huge motivator to continue.

Then today…ugh, today…we’re supposed to go to a gallery opening tonight and I really don’t want to go. I would rather stay home and paint. But, this specific gallery, which I’ll get into in more detail after the opening I’m sure, could be a place for me to show my work in the future so I kinda feel like if I want to go that route with my work, this is my only chance to get my foot in the door somewhere. Also, if the curators are sincere in their naming of the gallery and what the gallery’s supposedly all about, then it IS the right place for my work, if they want it. I have to see what they’re hanging tonight to know for sure, so that means washing my face and hair and putting on actual clothes that don’t have elastic waistbands and leaving the house which I am absolutely loathe to do. It helps that I’m going to know 2 or 3 other people who are going, but not a whole lot. I’m also worried about drinking because they seem really unorganized and they said there will be beer and wine for sale but I don’t drink either and would really like a bottle of water or a diet Coke. I don’t know if that’ll be an option (it should be, but like I said, they seem really disorganized). I also don’t know if there’s going to be food there so should we eat beforehand? I’m also afraid of looking like shit. And what to wear. And what bag to bring. And all that shit that goes along with being me and being agoraphobic etc etc etc. I don’t want to go, but I have to go.

This is me not trying. This is me giving up. And I need to snap the fuck out of it before I make myself insane. I need to stop writing this post, absorb everything I learned about embryos today and paint some goddamn forget-me-nots until it’s time to get ready.

So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll probably be on Twitter for most of the day if anyone cares and also I’ve been using my Facebook page a lot more lately so hit me up there too, if you want!

My friend Mike just introduced me to Grimes so I’m going to introduce her to you. She’s 24, Canadian and her sound is called “post Internet” because it’s such a mashup of different genres (although I suppose electronic pop would be the most appropriate).

Here is the song “Oblivion” from her album Visions, which dropped in February:

Here’s her video for “Vanessa” from the album, I have no idea because I think it was a single:

Here she is live in 2011, very cool imo:

I’m obsessed, she just so fucking cool. She doesn’t want to be cool, yet she so totally is:

I’m just kind of in awe because it never occurred to me before that someone would be able to make this kind of music, like, on purpose. Her songs are intentional, these are not just happy accidents. In this interview she talks about how she writes the lyrics to make sense to her but so that she’s the only person who knows what they are. Despite most of her lyrics being indiscernible her songs convey complex emotions:

I haven’t listened to all of Visions yet (it’s downloading – for free on SoulSeek due to some nice person-  I’m sure she would approve) but I’m hooked and I’m pretty bummed that she’s playing a massive tour in Europe right now and won’t be back in Canada until the mid-summer.

Here’s another good interview and another one from Vogue. And of course, Wikipedia with all its sources. Oh and obviously she has a website but there’s not much on it.

You’re welcome. :o)

Hi.

I’m posting THIS so I don’t lose the link. It’s a short story called The Yellow Wallpaper by a writer named Charlotte Perkins Gilman and it was written in 1892. It’s considered an important piece of feminist literature but never having read any feminist literature, I’ve never read it. Blake’s told me the concept of it a million times though and I plan on referencing it in an upcoming painting, so I suppose it’s about time I read it.

Speaking of reading, this article on the Goatse phenomenon is fantastic and I must thank Joey for posting it on Facebook because I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a long read but, I think, definitely worth the effort. I will not never in my life forget the name “Kirk Johnson” and I’m glad to know that he is not, in fact, deceased. (Stile is quoted a lot in the article and they talk about E/N a tiny bit too, if those are selling points for you.)

I’m listening to Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers right now and it’s very distracting because I keep singing instead of typing. “Swing the Mood” is probably in my top 5 favourite albums of all time. I just went on Amazon to see if they had any other albums and they really didn’t do anything beyond this album it seems, probably because they couldn’t get the commercial rights to all of the songs they mixed. Even on this album, all of the Elvis parts are sung by an impersonator for that reason. Actually a lot of the stuff is redone for that reason it seems. Interesting.

Anyway, there were/are great and I love this album like no other. I know the entire thing by heart. A little known fact about me is that I know the words to an impressive (for my age) amount of music from the 50s and 60s because growing up all my mom listened to in her store was an oldies station (1050 CHUM AM I’ll have you know) and then when I lived with my ex’s family as a teenager, there was a radio station that did Saturday night oldies (in fact, they still might – I should look into that because that was great) and all summer we’d sit on the back deck and drink until the oldies were over at about 3am. I would actually much rather listen to music of that era than anything created in present day because with an oldies station, I’ll probably like 90% of what they play but with anything modern, I’ll probably only like 20%.

When the Jive Bunny album came out, our library had the album so I took it out for a week and took it over to my grama’s house because she had a tapedeck with two decks so you could record one tape onto another and she was the only person I knew who had a stereo that could do that. Well, she loved the album too because this was all the music of her youth of course and I remember her trying to teach me how to swing dance in her kitchen. I think I would have been about 11. (She wasn’t always evil.)

I think it might have been Chalibear who sent me this album on CD a long long time ago from my wishlist but it’s been so long now that I forget. Either way, it’s one that sits on a shelf on my desk as opposed to being buried in my bedroom closet.

Here’s the video for “Swing the Mood”. I just rewatched it and the album version is a LOT different, using the actual vocals for most of the songs and just better mixed in general:

Another facet of my early exposure to early top 40 was that my step-dad was obsessed with The Everly Brothers. I probably know every word to every song they ever did as a result and I actually think that he liked them so much, now that I’ve kinda peeked through what they were really about and watched some videos, because it was probably one of the only kinds of SUPER HARDCORE ROCK ‘N’ ROLL he was allowed to listen to as a kid because his parents were super strict and super assholes who ruled all 6 kids with an iron fist.

I’m getting way off topic though…not that I actually had a topic.

So Blake and I stayed up late last night in bed talking about art well past our bedtimes. I can sleep during the day after my shift so I was okay but he was up late the night before with little sleep because he was on call and his work had “the biggest release of the year” over the long weekend and of course things broke, so he was exhausted but I’ve come to learn that it’s best to get him when he’s exhausted because that’s when he has the best ideas. (He’s going to murder me for saying that but to be fair, it’s not like I do it on purpose, it just ends up that way.)

We hammered out a lot of ideas and I think I have found my direction for the next painting. I can’t see beyond that one and I still have my last one to finish (and one I’m making for myself) but we basically decided that I don’t add enough detail. The metaphor (?) he gave me was the cow jumping over the moon. If you just draw a picture of a cow, there’s no story, there’s nowhere for the viewer to go, but if you draw the picture of the cow over the moon, even if you only change that one little detail, the scene and therefore the story, changes.

With “Me, two.“, there’s a story but I didn’t put in enough detail for the average viewer to really understand everything I meant. When I posted it my friend Jeck said that there was too much negative space and my response to that at the time was that was what was intended and that’s true, but the viewer is left to their own devices as far as understanding why I did that and they’re probably not going to come to the correct conclusion. (That painting is supposed to be a natural miscarriage and something that “just happens”, hence the plain blue sky background.)

Even with “Menarche“, my background is less than apparent. A little more is going on but still not a story, not a communication. I don’t think that needs to have a story or anything like that but I think maybe I leave too much to interpretation when I’m perfectly capable of doing so much more and there’s really no excuse not to except that I get excited and want to share before the idea is fully finished.

I’ll let the cat out of the bag (not that it was some kind of big surprise or anything) that the painting I’m working on that goes along with “Menarche” is “Menopause” and while “Menarche”‘s background is pure, white daisies, “Menopause”‘s (how the hell do I make that punctuation work, technically?) is forget-me-nots, using the exact same method, just changing the colours. That’s what I like best about them, I think.

I’m not really happy with “Menopause” and I can’t figure out how to fix it. I used the crackle paste for the myometrium and it’s white, so when I did a wash of “Terra Cotta Coral”, which is my default myometrium colour, it looks really coral or salmon instead of pink and if I paint it with straight paint, I’ll lose the crackle effect. I did a wash of “brown iron oxide” over top of it to tone down the orange tones but it didn’t do much to help. I may do another wash of that before I call it finished just to see what happens. I think I can only get away with one more before I’ll lose the crackle effect. Honestly, I just can’t wait for that painting to be done already. I had the idea to do it before “Menarche” so I feel like I’ve been working on it for months when it’s really only been about a week and a half. Really all I have to do is finish the forget-me-nots, which I’ll probably do today, do the final wash, varnish it and call it a day.

Doing about a million tiny dot flowers on a 30 x 30 inch piece of work is not my idea of fun anymore. My arms are killing me because you have to hover right above the panel to do them while holding your palette in your other hand and it takes every single muscle you have to do it properly, there’s nothing to lean on or you’ll fuck up your flowers because they’re fresh blobs of paint and you have to go at it with military precision or you’ll paint yourself into a very uncomfortable corner.

The painting I’m going to be doing after “Menopause” is also going to have dot flowers, but not as many of them.

Onto other things…

So what the fuck is going on in Wisconsin, eh? Ain’t that some sexist bullshit? Here are some quotes that SHOULD  piss you right off and turn you into an insta-feminist if you don’t already identify as one:

“Whatever gaps exist, he insists, stem from women’s decision to prioritize childrearing over their careers. “Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.””

“Nor, he argued, does its conclusion take into account other factors, like “goals in life. You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious. To attribute everything to a so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.””

I want to light this fucking asshole on fire. This is another thing Blake and I talked about in depth last night because I never really understood wage discrimination or wage parity or whatever it’s actually called. He said that it’s fucked up because (well, partly because) say a man and a woman start at the same job at the same place making the same amount of money. The woman after a year, goes on maternity leave. In Canada, that’s for a whole year (or you can split it up between husband and wife 6 months/6 months because we’re awesome like that). So in that year, say the dude gets a $5,000 raise. The woman doesn’t get the same raise because she’s not there and when she starts back after maternity leave, it’s kinda like she’s starting back at square one. Say she goes on maternity leave again, that’s two setbacks while her male counterpart is still in the field getting promotions and raises. Another thing is that cpmpanies may not want to hire women of childbearing age *because* it’s assumed they’re going to go on mat leave which costs the company money. I don’t know what the solution to that is. I don’t think women deserve raises and promotions when they’re not there, but there shouldn’t be this crazy wage gap either.

Another thing Blake said was that when women go in for a job interview, they often lowball themselves because they have low self-worth whereas men are often full of themselves so they highball. A company is probably going to hire the woman who will work just as hard and do the same job for $10k less than the man. That causes wage disparity.

That one we can fix. We can raise girls to have high self-esteem and self-worth and hopefully close that part of the gap within the next generation or two, but we can’t work on closing that aspect while creating fucking LAWS that widen the gap in other areas like we see happening in the US right now.

There’s this author that I like named Cathrynne M. Valente who wrote these two books called The Orphan’s Tales Volume I and Volume II. They’re these award-winning fairy tales that all flow into one another and they are fucking fantastic. I loved them. In fact, that reminds me, Madison would probably like them. I highly recommend them.

Anyway, she also wrote this post on Live Journal yesterday about the War on Women happening in the US (THAT IS ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HAPPENING DON’T EVEN DENY IT) that’s also well worth reading. If I could make that link flash and blink and appear 10 feet tall, I would, because you have to read it. I cannot stand it when I hear women say things like “I’m not a feminist, but…” or “I don’t call myself a feminist because it’s such a dirty word”. It drives me up the fucking wall. (Hey I wonder if that phrase comes from The Yellow Wallpaper…) The word “feminist” is something that you, as a person, define in your day to day life. It is the RADICAL NOTION that women are people too. I argue this constantly. It’s nothing more, nothing less. Yes, it encompasses other issues, like gender issues or race issues, a lot of the time, but that’s as it should be. Women, gay people, people of colour, people with mental illness, people with physical handicaps etc etc etc, we are all minorities and if we don’t stand up for each other and become a vocal MAJORITY nothing would ever get done and we’d still be stuck in the fucking dark ages.

Blake told me last night that something truly disturbing came out of Madison’s mouth a little while back that is really getting under my skin today as a result of Cathrynne’s post and the fact that, AS A FEMINIST USHERING IN ANOTHER GENERATION OF WOMAN I should be vigilant about things like this, but I guess Blake and Madison were talking about politics or something and Blake asked her what she would do if she were called to vote on a law that was good for the majority of people, but bad or discriminatory for a small amount of people, like gay people. Wanna know her answer? “Well I just wouldn’t vote.” OMG HOLY SHIT WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS CHILD AND HOW DO I CHANGE IT BEFORE SHE IS OF VOTING AGE? YES I AM YELLING I AM ANGRY. I feel like we’re parenting failures because she said this vile thing. Blake has been talking to her about women’s issues and gender issues and gay rights since she was 4 years old, why is she so…I dunno what the word is, wishy washy maybe? She has opinions but she’s too afraid to voice them. She has strong feelings about right and wrong but she doesn’t assert herself. She has low self-worth. She’s a people-pleaser. I don’t get it. Where have we gone wrong and like I said, how do we fix it?

Don’t get me wrong, I love my daughter and for the most part I love who she is becoming but I wish she was more like me and my mother and even my grandmother who were/are all feminists just by being. It’s like, we have all these strong, mostly independent women generation after generation and then there’s Madison who’s like, the weakest link in this respect. We went backwards. Why? Is it because sexism in her life is not overt? Hell, it’s not even really overt in MY life so it’s not like she sees me having any great feminist battles like my mom and grama had.

For those new to the group, my grandmother (my mother’s mother) has owned a furniture store for most of her life. Not even most of her adult life, she started working in her father’s furniture store when she was a kid and then opened her own when she got married. Back then, women didn’t do this. But you don’t tell a Crittenden woman that she can’t do something (unless she’s Madison).

My mother had me when she was 15 years old. She had to fight to get her high school diploma because in 1979 the school wouldn’t allow her to be pregnant and attend. She had to write her exams in a janitor’s closet. But she still graduated, with the help of a tutor she’s still friends with to this day, and teachers who worked with her, despite the school’s rules and she’s been an independent business-owner since day 1, first with her wallpaper store and now with her art business. She is the most goddamn stubborn, opinionated woman I have ever met and I’m glad I grew up with that.

Feminism was never a topic of discussion in my life growing up, it was just a fact of life. Crittenden men don’t last long. They die, they get divorced, Blake was brave in taking my last name, let me tell ya. It’s the women who are the trunk of our family tree.

So with Madison is her lack of WHATEVER just because she’s been talked at instead of shown by example? Like, for example, the books she reads, we deconstruct those in this house like crazy and point out how the main characters are or aren’t good role models or good feminists. Most of the time they are though so I’m thinking that maybe there’s less sexism in her life so it just doesn’t register with her? And I think that’s a problem. That makes people lazy. That’s how bullshit like what’s happening in Wisconsin happens! How do I convince my daughter that her voice matters and is important?

I am going to be on her after school like a fly on shit now that I know she said what she said because to me that is absolutely unacceptable. I don’t know what I’m going to say but I’m going to be showing her Cathrynne’s post and going from there.

It kinda bugs me that Oprah has never really used her voice and influence to come out and say that, “yes, I am a feminist” and put a newer face on it. And if she did, I must have missed that episode.

Speaking of Oprah, my mom and I go to see her next Monday. My mom posted on Facebook on Sunday (I think) that she watched the Oprah’s Lifeclass Tour that morning when they were doing it from Radio City Music Hall and that by the end of it she was bawling. To be honest, I don’t really like Oprah’s Lifeclass because I find all that so-called inspirational stuff to be really boring and after watching a bit of the St. Louis Lifeclass Tour last night I’m wondering what the hell I signed on for. I like Oprah, I may even love Oprah (how can you not love Oprah? the woman’s a saint), but the rest of them like that Bishop guy and Deepak Chopra (especially Deepak Chopra) are just going to drive me nuts, I’m pretty sure. I am no longer a spiritual person. There is nothing guiding my life except me. I don’t care to hear otherwise. Science saved my life, not prayers (but thanks for them all the same, I mean, while I don’t believe in that stuff I don’t think it can hurt).

The other thing I’m worried about is that it’s going to be a lot like going to the Leafs game and I’m really worried that I won’t be able to do it and I know my mom won’t want to go alone. Plus, it’s not like I’m going to know beforehand if I can handle the crowd or not, I won’t know until we’re there. And my mom’s hardly sympathetic to my situation either, she’s of the “ull yourself up by the bootstraps” kind of person so if I’m having trouble being there, she’s probably not going to be of much help. I really should have gotten 3 tickets so Blake could have come and I’m wondering if maybe there are scalpers there we could pick up a third ticket so he could come. I know he doesn’t want to come with us, he doesn’t want to touch this thing with a 10 foot pole, but I really want to be there and I’m scared I won’t be able to do it without him.

Some feminist role model I am. I can’t even leave my fucking house.

Anyway, so my mom said on Sunday that the Lifeclass Tour, which is what we’re going to, had her in tears so last night we went to Wal*Mart so I could buy waterproof eyeliner and a smaller purse because they aren’t allowing big bags into the event and I currently use a laptop bag to haul my crap around. The purse I got is okay, I guess. It’s pretty…old person bag…but I didn’t really have a whole lot to choose from. It’s plain black faux leather with two pockets at the front that do up with silver buckles and then on the inside there’s a main part and a little zip up pocket for tampons and lipstick. It has visible white stitching. It’s the pursiest purse I’ve ever owned, I think and it’s definitely NOT me at all AND it cost me thirty goddamn dollars. At Wal*Mart! I wanted to get a new wallet too because mine sucks but that’ll have to wait for another paycheque because those were like, $30 too. Highway robbery.

The waterproof eyeliner I got is by Hard Candy, which is a brand I’m not familiar with but they had some pretty neat stuff. Like glitter pencil eyeliner in a million different colours (I got pinky purple, turquoise and silver, mostly for Madison to use next year when she’s in high school) and this neat face illuminator stuff that I didn’t get because I was on a pretty tight budget. I did get a new thing of mascara because I haven’t had a new one in a year and I think you’re supposed to replace that stuff every 6 months or something. HOWEVER, when I got home and opened the package, I realized that I got non-waterproof stuff so I’m going to save the one I had before for Oprah-like ocassions and use the non-waterproof one for every day use. I got Maybelline’s The Falsies mascara in case anyone cares because I really like it and it’s only like, $6 at Wal*Mart. I also got a tube of Maybelline’s new 10 Hour Super Stay Stain Gloss because it looked pretty cool and it really is. The stuff is totally a gloss but it does not budge. I put some on last night when I got home and slept with it on and here it is the next day and it still looks more or less the way it did when I put it on, just faded. Highly recommended if you like a gloss look with the staying power of a lipstick. I think next paycheque I’m going to try their new 24 Hour Lipstick since the gloss stuff is so good.

Hard Candy doesn’t test on animals according to their packaging but I don’t know about Maybelline. I know for a fact that L’Oreal tests on animals and while I really like their products, I’m trying to find alternatives for that reason.

I also got ponytail holders because mine all get lost. I usually use itty bitty ones because my hair’s so thin, like ones that slip on my fingers, but they didn’t have those so I had to get bigger ones. Oddly, Wal*Mart had a really small selection of hairbands which is another thing I went in for because I only own one of those and it’s leopard print and it looks pretty stupid.

In other news, I gained 3 lbs according to Wii Fat last night and I’m not buying that crap about body fluctuations because  I have a stomach flu (again) and I just took the mother of all shits right before I weighed myself so if anything i should have been DOWN some weight, but no, I gained  lbs.  This really sucks because as a family we’ve been tracking calories with MyFitnessPal and it says I’m only supposed to be eating about 1200 calories a day. Then at the end of the day when you’re finished logging, it says “if every day were like today, you’d weigh blah blah blah in 5 weeks” and the majority of the time I’m right at or just a little above the 1200 calorie mark so it’s been saying that I should be 128 lbs or so instead of the 135 I am. I’m supposed to be losing weight with this thing, not gaining. BUT as Blake pointed out, counting calories has slowed my weight gain considerably so that’s a good thing. I’m okay with being 135 lbs, I don’t mind being a healthy weight or even a little bit overweight but I can’t go over that without having a serious hit to my self-esteem and my surgeon really doesn’t want me to gain any more. I guess we’ll see how things go. I’m going to give it another month of calorie counting alone and trying to do better with coming under my 1200 (or at least not going over) and if I gain any more weight aft6er that then I guess I’ll be forced to use the dreadmill. It’s just such a goddamn waste of time, I can’t even stand it. I do not, in the slightest, take even an ounce of pleasure from physical activity. I was probably a sloth in my past life. I liked yoga though, but that’s not really an option for me right now and I never lost any weight doing it.

Okay I think that’s all I’ve got for today (as if that’s not enough) and I think I need to go have breakfast because I’m sick and haven’t eaten yet today and then finish this goddamn painting.

THE END.

I’m listening to Adele’s album 21 which I’ve had for a long time but never really listened to in its entirety until today. I’ve gotta say, it’s leaving me less than inspired. This is old fogey music. American Idol crap. I like “Rolling in the Deep” of course and I like whatever the second song on the album is, but the rest is like…Whitney Houston-esque garbage. This is adult contemporary, middle age “safe” music, the likes of which you find on easy listening stations and is TOTALLY ABSOLUTELY 100% NOT MY THING AT ALL. I love her voice and I really really wanted to like her but this is just…blah. Rainy day wallpaper. Blah.

So anyway yesterday I finished another self-portrait:

Self Portrait #2
12 x 16 inch mixed media on watercolour paper

The jewel-as-trache-scar was Charlie’s idea. It was a good idea so I used it.

Right now I’m working on my second 30 x 30 inch panel and a 12 x 12 inch wood panel. The 30 x 30 is the one with crackle paste on it and if I’d have known via Golden’s site how crackle paste really worked instead of relying on the instructions on the jar, I would have done a much thicker layer so I would have achieved bigger cracks. As it is, I can’t really afford any more crackle paste and the cracks are very small. I guess I’m going to try working with the cracks that I have now by applying a wash of colour with the idea of the watery colour gathering in the cracks but if that doesn’t look right I guess I have no other choice but to buy more crackle paste because it’s really important for the piece to be super duper cracky. Deep, fissure-like cracks is what I need, like a dry desert floor. I’m going to need to get one of those things that I don’t know the name of…one of those things that artists use that looks like a little flat trowel. Maybe it is called a trowel, I don’t know, but I need one whatever they’re called, if I’m to apply a second, thicker coat of crackle paste.

The really shitty part of this situation is that I’m probably going to have to either sand or scrape off the layer of crackle paste that’s there already, which also means that I can kiss my flawless basecoat goodbye. Not good when I’m using a discontinued colour and I only have one bottle left. WOE IS ME. #firstworldartistproblems

The 12 x 12 inch wood panel I’m working on is actually something called “gessoboard” which is *like* a wood panel but it uses that compressed, cardboardy fake wood that they make office furniture and cheap shelves out of and it’s primed professionally with gesso for a super smooth surface. Paint just glides on these fuckers. This is my first time using one and I’ve gotta say I’m a fan. The problem is that they’re pretty pricey, $18 + tax for a 12 x 12 when I can get 3 canvases of the same size for about the same price. But they are soooo nice and I can use my triple thick gloss glaze varnish on them without the fear of it cracking if mishandled. It probably wouldn’t work as well to glue heavy stuff on like the watercolour paper I use for my girls, but it’s PERFECT for flaming, glittering uteri. ;o)

So the absolute worst thing for me is a lack of ideas. It is not my natural state AT ALL and these days, while productive, I feel like I’m in a big of a creative rut. I realize that probably doesn’t make any sense since I’ve been posting lots of artwork but for the most part, these are all old ideas that I’m pulling out of my sketchbook and making real, I’m not really coming up with anything new.

So, I’ve been reading this book that I’ve actually had for years, since I was in college, called “How To Get Ideas” by Jack Foster and it’s a really simple book with a lot of good ideas like, how to look at things and really see them, doing morning pages (essentially), giving yourself deadlines and the space to come up with terrible ideas because sometimes terrible ideas are actually really good ones and this part really struck me:

“”And idea is delicate,” said Charles Brower, the head of an advertising agency. “It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.” 

I think this is why many people seem bereft of ideas. 

They’ve run into too many sneers and yawns, they’re heard to many quips. And so they’ve said the heck with it and don’t even try to come up with ideas any more.

The fear of rejection shuts down their idea factories.”

When I was in night school for copywriting, my first copywriting class, my teacher said the same thing, that you can’t be negative in any way during a brainstorming session because if you are, people will clam up and not want to stick their necks out with terrible yet potentially genius ideas.

I can’t really say that this has ever been my experience though. This part of the book is 100% me:

“I used to teach a three-day seminar on advertising in Chicago. One of the assignments I gave each student was to create, overnight, an outdoor board for a Swiss Army knife. Most of the students would come in the next morning with the required billboard, but several of them would say that they worked for hours and couldn’t come up with anything. This happened three years in a row. 

The fourth year I tried something different. Instead of asking for just one billboard, I asked each student to create at least ten billboards for a Swiss Army knife. And instead of giving them all night, I told them they had to do it during their lunch hour. 

After lunch everybody had at least ten ideas. Many had more. One student had 25. 

I came to realize that when faced with a problem most people look for the one right solution because that’s the way they were brought up. All through school they had to answer multiple-choice and true-or-false questions, questions that only had one right answer. And so they assume that all questions and problems are like that. And when they can’t find a solution that looks perfect they give up. 

But most problems aren’t like exam questions in school. Most problems have many solutions. And as soon as I forced my students to realize that, they found those solutions.”

That is me to a tee. (T?) I am afraid of bad ideas. I think that everything that tumbles out of my brain should be genius and I tend to think things are “precious”, even ideas. I’ve written before about how I’ve been trying to overcome my art supplies and projects as being “precious” but I think I need to do the same thing with ideas too or else I’m going to make myself insane. I have to allow myself to come up with 100 terrible ideas because within those 100 terrible ideas, there could be 1 or 2 really good ones.

Or maybe even none.

But I won’t know unless I try and it’s actually a HELL of a lot more difficult for me than I thought it would be. I’m known for being really creative, creativity is what I’ve got, but for someone who supposedly has a creative mind, ideas sure are hard to come by when I get in ruts like this. They’re rare, but they happen.

And the book addresses ruts. The reason they happen is because of repetition and I think that’s definitely true in my case. I don’t leave the house. I watch the same movies over and over again. I listen to the same music over and over again. I go to the same stores over and over again (Michael’s and Curry’s). There is little to no surprises in my life unless you want to count catastrophe and you would think that I’d have some residual “stuff” to work out because of everything that happened this summer but I honestly don’t think I do. Besides, I’m not sure what a pancreas even looks like or necessarily where it’s located. And I’m not good at drawing bodies so my wound is kind of out of the question. Maybe I’ll go there some day but right now, I don’t think, is the time. Plus, since I don’t really remember anything that happened, I don’t have a whole lot to work with.

Anyway, that’s where my head is today. I only have 2 & a half more hours left of work and then I plan on coming up with terrible ideas for the next 2 days that I have off.

Tomorrow I’m going to be making a honey spiral ham with potatoes, corn on the cob and asparagus but it’s just going to be us so there will be lots and lots of leftovers.

OH! GET THIS! So on Facebook I’m friends with one of my father’s sisters and Lisa tagged a picture of her daughter on her photography business’ fan page. So I went to the picture because I didn’t even know this kid existed (I barely know this aunt) and in the album is pics of Phil’s brother’s daughter too. This leads me to believe that there was some sort of family get together recently which is interesting because Phil never gets together with his family because they don’t really talk. But this is the exact type of thing, like my own grandfather’s FUNERAL, that I wouldn’t have been invited to. Lisa’s pissed off that I didn’t want to invite them to our anniversary party, for legitimate reasons, yet it’s PERFECTLY FINE to not include me in my own grandfather’s FUNERAL or ANY family reunions. How the fuck does that work?

Just something that occurred to me yesterday while I was clicking around on Facebook.

Oh and for those who were concerned, Ana Voog is home from the hospital and is okay. She’d been withdrawing from an antidepressant which caused suicidal tendencies and she ground up Xanax in a coffee grinder and tried to OD. Then she ran away from the house at some point and the cops had dogs out looking for her. She also had a gun and she shot a gazebo. That’s all she’s really said about it other than the fact that her shrink was going to be retiring but changed her mind so Ana can still see her and I guess she had to go in front of the courts and prove that she wasn’t a drug addict and didn’t need rehab or something. I dunno, the series of events wasn’t crystal clear. All I know is that I’m extremely happy that she’s okay and that she now has a new lease on life.

Happy Zombie Jesus Celebration!

Okay so I love Damien Hirst. I think he’s a super asshole  and I also kinda hate him but I really love and respect his work.
He’s having a retrospective at the Tate gallery and you can see the whole thing online
FOR ONE WEEK ONLY
and it is the coolest thing EVER!

CLICK HERE FOR ADMITTANCE! 

There are interactive videos explaining the work all throughout the show and close up pictures and stuff and it is fantastic!

Thanks, Perlorians for the link!

“O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.“

Not one single ant on my desk today. GREAT SUCCESS! I WON THE WAR! In your FACE Nature!

Now that that’s out  of the way, I bring you (finally) “Menarche”.

Menarche (pronounced “men-ar-kee”, like “men-o-paws”) is a girl’s first menstrual period, which occurs usually around age 13 (that’s the global average).  This painting was inspired by Madison’s menarche experience and not my own. Mine was very negative because it happened very early (age 9) and I didn’t know what was going on, my Aunt Heather had to tell me and since I didn’t want to tell my parents, she provided the pads (I also used my mom’s o.b. tampons sometimes when I was about 11).  Like many girls who started young, I thought there was something very wrong with me when I noticed the spots of bright red blood in my underbums. And that’s the thing with menarche, usually the blood is bright red as opposed to the brownish blood you get as you age.

Yes, that’s glitter.

With Madison’s menarche, I was ready for it having had such a negative experience with my own. I started telling her about periods when she was about 4 years old and the dialogue continues to this day. When Madison came to me one day last year (luckily it was *before* I went into the hospital, I believe it was April) and told me that she thought she was having her first period, I asked her to come into the bathroom and show me her underwear. Lo and behold, there was bright red blood in the crotch of her panties, so I gave her some disposable pads to use and called Blake to pick up more on his way home from work.

That day, I think I made a friends-only or filtered Live Journal post about the event because somehow my friend Deanna knew about it and she contacted me to ask if she could go halves on a Lunapads teen kit for Madison, which I accepted and which Madison has been using ever since. Lunapads are reusable menstrual pads and I think they’re amazing. Since switching to Lunapads myself, I haven’t had any yeast infections which I used to get all the time.

I love my Lunapads and (not that I’m getting periods these days because of medication/being sick) would never give them up, but Madison came to me last night and asked if she could switch to either disposable pads or tampons and while I didn’t tell her this, I was really disappointed in her decision because I thought with starting her off with Lunapads to begin with, I was starting her off “right” and that she would always be period positive and she IS period positive, she just sees it as a fact of life and deals with it but she finds the Lunapads bulky and she thinks disposable pads would be less bulky. She’s absolutely wrong of course, and I told her that, so that’s when she asked about tampons.

I have less of a problem with disposable tampons than I do with disposable pads because tampons, as long as they don’t have an applicator, are nowhere near as bad for the environment as pads are with their plastic liners. Tampons, essentially, are just cotton. They still take a really long time to break down in the environment, but not nearly as long as a disposable pad. My issue with tampons though, is that they cause irritation and for me, they caused bladder and yeast infections roughly every 3 months, not to mention the fact that they made the pain from endometriosis that much worse.

Madison doesn’t have bad cramps or endometriosis so that’s less of an issue, but I did tell her that if she wanted to use tampons, I would be okay with her using o.b. tampons without an applicator as long as she promised to never flush them down the toilet, that they were disposed of properly and that she promised me that she would be very careful about leaving them in too long. The only caveat was that she would have to buy them herself with her own allowance because we already bought her perfectly good Lunapads, disposable tampons are not a necessity they are a luxury.

Having said that, I did offer her another solution: we would buy her a DivaCup. A DivaCup, being an insertable, has all the benefits of a tampon but none of the risks and none of the environmental impact. It is a cup that you put deep inside your vagina which collects the menstrual blood and then when it’s time to change it, you carefully pull it out, empty the blood in the toilet or sink, rinse it and re-insert it. As an added benefit, the DivaCup has no risk of Toxic Shock Syndrome, or yeast infections and you only have to empty it every 12 hours so she wouldn’t have to empty it at school, whereas with tampons they should be changed every 4 hours. The DivaCup is also only $34.99 whereas a box of tampons is like, $9 or $10 with tax and you may need more than one box per period. I believe the DivaCup is supposed to last 10 years so compare 3 or 4 DivaCups per lifetime vs a lifetime of tampons and financially the DivaCup is the obvious winner. Healthwise the DivaCup is the obvious winner. Environmentally the DivaCup is the obvious winner. Conveniencewise the DivaCup is the obviously winner. Obviously, she chose the DivaCup option and one will be purchased for her soon.

While initially I was disappointed in her wanting to use disposables from now on, I’m proud of her for not being squicked out about a few tablespoons of period blood and choosing the DivaCup instead of disposable anythings. This shows me that I did start her off in the right direction, even if it were a direction I hadn’t really anticipated. (I didn’t think she’d be comfortable with insertables for quite a while. She’s turning 14 in May.)

So that was last night’s period conversation with Madison. She didn’t want me to name this painting “Madison’s Menarche” but she said I could post all that I just did just to explain why I painted it the way I did. I just wanted it to be bright and shiny and sparkly and happy and “new” feeling, like the beginning of a brand new woman should be.

“Menarche” will be available for sale on my site soon.

Like I’m pretty sure I mentioned earlier in the making of this painting, it’s actually one in a pair but I haven’t even started working on the other one yet so there won’t be pics of it for quite a while. As I also think I said before, it’s going to involve crackle paste though, which I’ve never used before and I’m kind of geeked about.

In other art news, yesterday I edited video I took of me drawing a few weeks ago but I don’t really like how it turned out. The angle is all wrong. The reason I bothered editing it is to show that taping myself drawing or painting “right side up” is pretty much impossible because with that angle, you can’t see what I’m doing because I’m right handed. The only way I could show you how I draw or paint from the left side is if I had the camera around my neck because I work sideways or at a sideways angle all the time and to work straight up and down would feel completely unnatural to me and I doubt I could do it. Anyway, here’s the video:

I kinda think I like making process videos. It’s interesting for me to watch myself because I don’t even really think about what I do, I just do it. I also think, maybe, that a person might be more likely to buy a painting if they can see the process by which it was made. Do you think that might be true too? That’s another reason why I was taking pictures of myself holding finished paintings (which I forgot to do with “Menarche”, oops), it’s like…proof that I made it or something, like a signature. Especially since 1/4 of the time I make something, I forget to sign my name before varnishing and then it’s too late.

I was really good at advertising and marketing when I was in college, probably at the top, or pretty damn close to the top of my class. The guy who thought he was at the top had like, this fucked up rivalry with me that always annoyed me because I’m not really a competitive person, my philosophy is that we’re all in this together and the more we get together, together, together, the more we get together the happier we’ll be. Anyway, he took me out for breakfast this one time and was like “how come you can never come to class yet be so damn good?” and the only answer I had was – well first, that I actually wasn’t that good – that it might just be instinct. The problem though, is that I have extremely low self-esteem with most things, my own work in particular, and I find it incredibly difficult to market myself.  And then I think, because I have such low self-esteem probably, that since I’m unable to market myself well, maybe I wasn’t so great in college either. But then I think of that breakfast and think that no, I’m just crazy and have low self-esteem. I’m also on a lot of drugs and haven’t flexed my advertising muscle in well over a decade so I’m just not the shark I once was. In fact, I can’t remember a single thing from college because I just stopped caring about advertising all together. I know good when I see it and I can make good when I want to, but don’t ask me what the tenets of marketing are because all you’d get from me is a blank stare because that shit’s boring. Instinct is where it’s at.

Anyway…

Today was a dressing change day and I took a pic of my wound for you guys since I haven’t done that since February:

As you can see, there are only 3 little areas left to heal, the two smaller ones are about the size of dimes and the middle part is about the size of a toonie. After those spots are healed, I’m still probably going to have to have a covering over the scar tissue because it’s brand new tissue and as a result it’s very very fragile. Even having it brushing against my clothing would likely reopen the wound.

And I think that’s really all I had to say in this update. Madison got her grad dress today and it is absolutely gorgeous but she’s forbidden me from showing you pictures of it and the only other thing I wanted to share was this article about Madonna’s Truth or Dare, which is out on Blu Ray as of yesterday I believe and which also happens to be on my wishlist if any generous third parties were interested in buying it for me. :o)

That’s all the poop that’s fit to scoop, enjoy the video and have a wonderful evening!

PS. My Oprah tickets came today! That’s the other thing I meant to mention! On the back of them it says you can’t bring STICKS! GLAD I READ THE BACK! BOY WOULD MY FACE HAVE BEEN RED IF I’D HAVE BROUGHT MY STICK!

~*PLEASE DONATE SO I CAN GO TO ART CAMP!*~
I’m 72% toward my goal and could really use your support! 

Ugh. My head hurts and I feel sick. All weekend I was sick as a dog with massive diarrhea and just general weakness and ickiness and all the rest that comes with stomach flus (flues?). That’s not why I feel like crap right now though. I feel like crap now because I just ate an assorted sub from Mr. Sub and sometimes when I eat those I feel sick afterward. I get them because for a small one, it’s only 290 calories which ain’t too shabby for a lunch. They *are* high in salt though so I try not to get them very often because that’s not good for my kidneys. I did get a root beer to go with it but that was like, almost 300 calories so I opted not to drink it and I’ll give it to the kids as a treat after school.

Sunday was Wild Rumpus Day. I felt like crap so I didn’t do any rumpussing but I did wear my fluffy horns all day and Blake and the kids dressed up and went a-rumpussing in the field across the road from our house. They took Hoover Dog with them and Lucky whined and cried the whole time they were gone.

Here are some pics of Blake and the kids with their ears on:

Madison is wearing a kitty cat hat that Chali made, Blake is wearing his uncle John’s hat with ears he cut off of a stuffed horse and Wes is wearing the wolf hat I got him for Xmas.

He’s so handsome. I just want to fuck the stuffing right out of his guts.

While they were rumpussing, I made a painting. Actually, I started the painting Friday night but didn’t finish it until Sunday. It’s a self-portrait and if you know me at all, it should be pretty self-explanatory.

It is 12 x 16 inches, acrylic and cardboard on watercolour paper.
You can have it for $300, just e-mail me if interested.
More pictures can be found HERE.

I made a video of the making of this painting but I’ve got to admit, it’s pretty terrible. Blake says it’s fine but I think it goes too fast and since it took me 4 hours to save the damn thing, I didn’t want to go back and slow it down further. Movie Maker is an awful program, I’ve decided. Is there anything out there that’s better? (Don’t say iMovie, I use a PC.) When I was working on editing the video, I thought I was missing huge chunks of video because I guess in preview mode, like while you’re working on something, it only shows you SOME of the video. All day I was pissed off because I thought the Flips I was using to make it had failed to record huge chunks of time when in fact it was this awful program not showing me everything. I didn’t realize this was happening until I reviewed the saved video a few minutes ago.

I wish I had an actual video camera or at least an SLR that recorded video. It was really hard to record myself painting because the Flips only have 1 hour and 45 minute – 2 hour batteries (one has an hour & 45 min, the other is 2 hours) and they take that long to charge so I would have to take pretty long breaks while the Flips recharged (I wonder A) if you can use regular rechargeable batteries in them and B) how big their hard drives are) and that really cramped my style. My digital camera only takes 10 minute clips so that was out of the question and if I had the Digital Rebel that takes video (which is on my wishlist *cough*), I could just leave it set up on my desk and turn it off if I needed a break or needed to wait for paint to dry or whatever and recharging batteries wouldn’t be such a hassle. I have a feeling that the hard drives on the Flips are pretty small since they’re only designed to take an hour and a half’s worth of video. If I had the new Rebel that wouldn’t be a problem because I’d have a 32 gig memory card which could fit the entire video.

Anyway, here’s my shitty attempt at a process video:

In other news, this Mexican drug lord thanked all the presidents of my lifetime for his billions of dollars due to the “war on drugs”. He’s responsible for about 30,000 deaths in Mexico since 2006 (I believe was the statistic), but he is the 701st richest man on Earth, according to Forbes magazine. Thanks to Zombie Bunny for the link. If this isn’t proof that the whole “war on drugs” thing is a fucking sham, nothing is. I don’t know if I think *everything* should be legal, because where do you draw the line and who’s to say Xanax isn’t recreational for some people? Big pharma, like them or not, need prescription money to make medical breakthroughs.

Anyway…I have nothing else to say and it’s pretty much my bedtime, so hopefully you like the video and if you do, maybe I’ll do more. (But I think if I do more, I’ll have to use licence-free music. Anyone have any leads on what I could use?)

~*PLEASE DONATE SO I CAN GO TO ART CAMP!*~
I’m 72% toward my goal and could really use your support!