Could I make any more posts today? This is the last one, I swear.

This morning at about 5am, I realized I hadn’t checked the mail since Thursday so I decided since I was up, I’d drive to the post office, which – if you’ve been reading along – has been the bulk of my immersion therapy this month, both to get me going somewhere by myself and to get me more comfortable behind the wheel.

Well last night I decided to step it up a level and bring someone with me, so Lucky came with me. I wasn’t sure how he’d be in the car, especially without Hoover there and especially because during his last ride in the car with me (to Hunstville, so a 2 hour drive) he threw up everywhere, but Blake and I had discussed it a few days ago and he said that if Lucky puked in the car I could wake him up in the middle of the night to go clean it up. So with that in mind, we were good to go.

It wasn’t until Lucky and I were coming back from the post office, after deeming our trip a success and this dog for the first time fulfilling his purpose as an “emotional support animal” which is why I got him, I picked him out for this purpose, I finally allowed myself to get excited about the possibility of actually winning one of the 50 Nissan Cubes up for grabs in the Hypercube contest. Suddenly my new life with Lucky and the Cube and the adventures we would have were all laid out in front of me and it felt good.

Obviously it’s more than possible that I’m not going to win, but there’s a decent chance that I will win too and that’s what Lucky and I are going to think about as we drive to the post office and back next week.

Oh, thoughts. Thoughts thoughts thoughts thoughts thoughts. So many of them.

First things first, I’ve been absolutely anxiety-ridden for the past two weeks and have popped more than 3 times the Ativan I normally do. What’s stressing me out? Here’s the list (because I like making lists):

- DRAMA. Mind you it’s drama I’m barely involved in but drama in general puts my stomach in knots.

- Getting these paintings done and done perfectly. The fact is, I need money almost as badly as I need to get these ideas onto canvas because without money a lot of my immersion therapy/”Plan: Sunny needs a Life” goals and ideas are impossible. I’m not saying that art isn’t a venue for stress relief, it is, I’m just extra worried about this series of paintings because I’m SO proud of the ideas behind them that I’m totally stressed out about them being perfect, especially because in a couple of cases I’m using techniques I’ve never used before. Right now I’m working on two paintings, which are about 2/3 finished but have been slow going. They’re almost ready to be varnished though, or at least they should be by Monday if I keep up this pace. Most of the time I do “in progress” shots when I’m working on stuff, but these ones are just too special.

- This Hypercube contest will be the death of me. Over the weekend the French winners were selected (but we don’t know who they are yet) and apparently next week the English contestants are going to be judged and I’m paranoid about my site/blog being interesting enough. I don’t know if they’re just going to click on the links I had in my canvas or if they’re going to be going a little more in-depth and actually read my site, but in case they do, I want some decent content up…but at the same time, I’ve never edited my content to be anything other than what it is. This is just my life, I write about it as it unfolds and if it’s an interesting week, it’s an interesting week, if it’s not, it’s just not. And often what I think is interesting is completely boring to other people and vice-versa so I don’t even know what to do next week with the idea of these people who could radically change my life and the life of my family potentially perusing my blog.

- Madison turned 11.

- I’ve been a busy girl during the past couple of weeks and I’ve been going far beyond my comfort zone with this immersion therapy thing. Take a look:

See the 29th there? I have to have lunch in a public place with my caseworker. yes Blake’s going to be there with me and it’s a familiar restaurant, but still, it’s not something I’m comfortable with and I’m not exactly looking forward to.

- June 4th I have my appointment with the endometriosis specialist in Toronto and I’m terrified of what he’s going to say. As I’ve written before, I’m cool with laser surgery, I’m cool with being on the birth control pill for a year straight WITH THE UNDERSTANDING that if it turns me into a psychotic, suicidal bitch as birth control pills have been known to make me, I can switch pills under the care of my family doctor. I’m also cool with the whole full hysterectomy deal, but again, as I’ve said before, only if I can take that shit home with me in a jar. People laugh when I say or type this, but I am absolutely serious and I’m worried this doctor will suggest hysterectomy but say no to letting me keep my bits externally. I’m just tired of fighting doctors over my wishes and this goddamn disease. This guy’s apparently good though, so I guess we’ll see what happens.

- Mystery project that I’m half working on and I’m far from ready to talk about because I’m not even sure it’s going to happen. As of this blog post, I’m leaning towards no, but I could wake up inspired tomorrow so who knows? Trying to MAKE it happen, though, is stressing me out.

- Cammity Jane. For those just tuning in, Cammity Jane is a fictional blog project I started in 2006 and never finished, that a few months ago I had planned to bring back (which I did) and work on. Well, then the Hypercube contest happened and Cammity Jane got pushed back until after that was over and now that Hypercube is almost over, it’s time to start thinking about Cammity Jane again but the thing is, my enthusiasm for the project has waned since I first thought of bringing it back. I don’t want to bring it back only to abandon it again and I fear that I may end up doing that. So I’ve been thinking about that a lot over the last few days and I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Chances are I’m going to re-blog everything I had up the first time around, but without the promise of finishing it at this point in time. Cammity Jane is so hard for me because it’s like an iceberg. What you guys see or have seen is only the very smallest percentage of what Cammity Jane is to me. It’s not just a story of this girl with HIV to me – I mean yes, that’s what Cammity Jane is right now – but she’s only one in a series of stories, she’s the first, she sets the stage for everything else I’ve got scribbled in notebooks. Did you know that the town she goes to called Utopia is a real town in Ontario? And that I’ve mapped out and drawn my fictionalized version of it meticulously several times in notebooks similar to Tolkein’s maps of Middle Earth? (Although not quite as map-like.) Cammity Jane is a big deal to me and I worry constantly about fucking it up, or rather, fucking up the experience for the reader.

So that’s why I’ve been a little “on edge” the past couple of weeks. It’s so easy for people to think that I just sit in my house all day and screw around on the internet and live this boring life, but there’s an awful lot going on in my world at any given time. Just because I don’t have a 9-5 or do the groceries or have art shows or whatever the hell it is people with “lives” do, it doesn’t mean I don’t have stress and pressures. In fact because most of my stress and pressures are self-imposed, I’d say they’re probably worse because they’re inescapable.

Anyway, for the last two weeks, I’ve pretty much been in a constant state of wanting to throw up.

At the same time, I’m terribly excited. I may have my very own car soon, a COOL car and a FREE one! One I would have won and let’s face it, winning feels good! (Or so I’ve heard.) I’m going to have these paintings finished soon and they’re going to look amazing and I think someone out there is going to want to buy them. Despite the fact that I have to go out to get it, I get to have restaurant lunch on Friday! And as much as I’m stressed out about all things immersion therapy and I’m having too many experiences at once…I’m making progress. I’m ahead of schedule.

Tomorrow Blake’s going to help me weed the garden and then we’re going to plant several POUNDS of beautiful cosmos and bachelor’s button and sunflower seeds that are going to be the envy of everyone on the street come August. Did you know that some people take walks up this far just to see my garden when it’s at its best? I don’t have the means this year and probably not even next year either, but one day I hope to give them more to see. I want a buddha’s head out there. I want my mom’s boyfriend’s teapot birdhouses and suncatchers hanging from the tree. I want hummingbird feeders and hanging baskets. I want our new window to be fixed up properly (we need to paint and buy new shutters.) So many things.

And also? The series of paintings I’m working on right now is of 4 paintings and if I sell all 4 I should have enough money to fix up my studio/office the way I want to with money left over to mail people things, buy my kids some new clothes and do “immersion therapy stuff” like go to the fabric store or go out for lunch with or without the kids and in our town or in the next town, depending on the status of our vehicular situation.

Good stuff is happening all over the place and there’s more good stuff to come, I just have to ride this period of anxiety out. I think once the Hypercube contest is officially over, whether I win or not, a lot of it will dissipate and I should be put out of my misery in that regard by the end of the month.

Soon the kids will be out of school, which is a bittersweet thing for me. Them being out of school limits my immersion therapy options because going places WITH them is on the very high end of the spectrum of things I’m not currently able to do. That’s something I have to work up to and realistically I only have a month to work up to that and I kinda don’t foresee me getting there. So, once the kids are out of school, immersion therapy grinds to a slow crawl as I’ll only be able to do things in the middle of the night and all there is to do in the middle of the night is go to the corner store (where I don’t need anything) or check the mail. There’s a 24-hour Wal*Mart about half an hour away but I don’t think I’ll be at that level of “okayness” until the fall.

So while the kids being home kind of messes up my therapy, summer is also the time when I do most of my reading and since my birthday, books and magazines have been piling up on my dresser, most of which I’m extremely eager to get to. One of my most joyful activities in the summer is making a  large salad of local veggies, crisp romaine lettuce, crunchy cucumbers, sweet cherry tomatoes, spicy radishes, stringy celery and tiny cubes of marble cheese, maybe with a few slivers of apple thrown in the way my mom used to do it and eat while I either catch up online with shows I missed during the fall & winter (I want to watch The Tudors, re-watch V and possibly How I Met Your Mother, which I’ve never seen) or read until the wee hours of the morning.

Spring and summer are my seasons, this is the best part of the year! So maybe I should just suck it up, paint, read, play with my kids and be happy. Right?

Today is the very last day for Hypercube voting and you only have until NOON to get your votes in for Blake & I so for your convenience, here are our handy dandy canvas links!

~*Sunny | Blake*~

I just want to thank each and every one of you who have been voting for us this whole time. Thanks to you, we’re both going to finish in the top 20, which is pretty fricken good when you consider that there are 498 (give or take) other entrants!

Honestly, I’m relieved that things are finally coming to a close. What comes next? Well, nothing for 5 days (as far as I know), then the judges go over all of the canvases from the 20th to the 25th and then they announce the winners “mid-June”. I’d like to say that this is over, but I’m going to be paranoid about the judges being on my site and having good blog posts up when they ARE so I’ve still got another 10 days or so of stress. But, like I said on my canvas, all I can do is be myself and hope that’s enough.

So, without further ado, here’s the last batch of fansigns and again, thank you all so much!

Belinda from Indiana made me a painting!

Katie and Oscar think that “Sunny with a cube is greater than a lonely sad cube with no Sunny.”

Patrick from California is on board with team Sunny!

Ronny from Michigan thinks I need a Cube!

Mischief has a message…

From Camille in Virginia.

Also from Camille in Virginia.

Thank you so much to everyone who sent in fansigns!
I ended up with 54 of them and you can see them all HERE if interested!

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

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

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

I’m just sayin’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now if only I had the time.

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

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

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

I think Mandy’s request is clear!

(Made by Dave in Arcata, California!)

Here are our handy dandy Hypercube audition page links for your voting convenience!

Sunny | Blake

THANK YOU!!!
<3

So, there are only 3 & a half more days left of voting for the Hypercube contest as voting ends Friday at NOON.

Here are our handy dandy Hypercube audition page links for your voting convenience!

Sunny | Blake

Blake uploaded his new canvas last night while I have to find the energy to pretty much re-do my canvas so it looks less sloppy. Or at least that’s the plan. If I get it done, I get it done, if I don’t, I don’t. To me it’s the text that matters and I only plan on adding one sentence to what I have on there already and it’s just a minor perfectionist thing. The application we had to use to make our canvases is so buggy that my text and pictures didn’t format properly once I saved them and submitted them for approval and I think possibly the reason for that was because the more layers you have on your canvas, the more it tends to screw up. Yesterday while having a nap, I had a dream about my canvas and I found a way to minimize the amount of layers used. Again, if it gets done, it gets done, if not, then oh well. I’m not going to kill myself worrying about it.

Since people have asked, here’s how the rest of the contest plays out as far as I’m aware:

• voting ends at noon on Friday, May 15th
• judging takes place May 20th-25th
• winners are notified either May 29th or mid-June (there are conflicting dates on the site) and if you’re a winner you have 10 days to complete, sign and send back the paper work
• if you’re a winner, you get your car mid-July

Truthfully, I can’t wait for this thing to be over or at least for it to be more or less out of my hands as to what happens. I want my life back!

Between immersion therapy stuff, my new caseworker and this contest, everything else in my life has fallen behind. I still have four paintings to complete over the next month or so so I can AFFORD to do immersion therapy stuff and my pile of things to read is turning into more of a mountain. I’m 3 issues behind on Today’s Parent, I’ve got this month’s NYLON and BUST magazines to read, plus I still have to finish Edgar Sawtelle, read The Watchmen, start on Anne Rice’s latest Jesus book, read The Secret Life of Bees so I can finally watch the movie and read the entire Sookie Stackhouse series.  Oh and Alex dropped off The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins a couple of weeks ago so that’s on the pile now too. I did finish Y: The Last Man books 4 & 5 this weekend though, so at least those are now off my desk.

Ronny lent me Ren & Stimpy seasons 1 & 2 (the only good ones imo), which have been sitting on my desk for at least a month & a half and I haven’t even touched them yet. Jesse lent me the last two seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and he keeps getting mad at me because I haven’t watched “the one episode” yet. (I don’t know which one.)

Ahhhhhhhhhh so much media to consume and not enough time! Although really? I have all the time in the world, especially once school’s finished and it’s officially summer, but I hate stuff piling up like this, especially the paintings because I need those for income.

So yeah, way ready for this contest to be over so my life can go back to normal. And of course, I can’t make a post about the contest without posting fansigns so here are two. :o)

I inexplicably woke up at 4:30am and couldn’t get back to sleep, so my plan is to have lunch and then nap for the rest of the afternoon. Then when I wake up I’ll either make the other post I planned on maing today or work on my canvas. Either way, I’ve got shit to do so I better get on track.

A huge thanks to everyone who’s been helping us with this contest. Blake & I really really appreciate it. We couldn’t do it without you. <3

Votes have reset! Here are our handy dandy Hypercube audition page links for your convenience!

Sunny | Blake

Yoko Ritona from…Portland, Oregon has something she’d like to say!

PS. Star Trek was so good it brought me to tears. I LOVED it.
It’s almost 7am, now I sleep.

I vote for this girl every goddamn day and this is just one of the many reasons why. God I love this contest. ROFL Thanks to this contest, I like, have Canadian friends now it’s crazy. CRAZY I TELLZ YA! Here are some of their Twitter names and canvas links in case you felt inclined to vote for them too!

@gunandagirl – From Saskatchewan
@heartsandclefs – From Saskatchewan
@thaPHLASH – From Quebec
@JDollin – From Toronto
@sandbarmark – From Prince Edward Island (ask him about “Anne”! He loves that!)
@Tylersdaytoday – From Toronto-ish?
@mariapetersen – From British Columbia
@qubicmx – From Alberta
@annakarenine – From Quebec
@willeagle – From Toronto
@BeCircle – From Toronto
@MichelSavoie – From…I’m actually not even sure where!
@Cube_Man – From Thornhill, Ontario
@mackb1991 – From Alberta
@savvari – From Toronto
@PhilKnudson – From London, Ontario
@NashvilleLotus – From Peterborough, Ontario
@theMediaman3 – From Toronto
@capsulecom – From Toronto
@mindzai – From Markham, Ontario
@lw81 – From Hamilton, Ontario

But most importantly, vote for US, @4bit4 & @SunnyCrittenden for the next 8 days because we’re awesome! Thank you!

It’s a new day! Votes have reset! Here are our handy dandy Hypercube audition page links for your convenience!

Sunny | Blake

Not sure what I’m talking about? Well Nissan’s giving away 50 2009 Cubes  (that’s a funny looking , asymmetrical car) and my husband Blake & I are each one of the lucky 500 contestants, chosen out of 7,000 entries, to audition to win one! Voting accounts for 20% of your overall score so we need you, dear internet, to register at Hypercube.ca and vote for us every day for the next 8 & a half days! (Voting closes at noon on May 15th.)

If you read my audition canvas, you’ll see why winning one of these vehicles is so important to me and how it could truly change my life, but what you won’t see on either of our canvases is why we’re each hoping to win a Cube.

While we have our selfish reasons for it (ie. wanting to be “the Cube family”, like the “Hummer people” in our town, me wanting my own car so I can finally get my life back (even though I could make a life for myself anywhere and on foot if I tried hard enough), it really boils down to two things:

1. Our family car isn’t going to last much longer and we can’t afford to replace it.
2. It sucks being a (busy) one car family when you live in a little town in the middle of nowhere.

Our current family car is a formerly new Chevy Cavalier I financed in 2001 for the sole reason that Chevy were the only ones willing to finance me without a co-signer and actually had a car with payments I could afford. My car before that, my first car, was a 1990 Beretta, oddly the same colour as our current car,  that gave me so much trouble and cost me so much money that I gave up on it and gladly sold it to a friend for $500.

My point here, is that I’ve never had a “foreign” vehicle. I was brought up to buy American and support our neighbours to the south. No one in 5 generations of my family (to my knowledge) has ever owned a vehicle that wasn’t American, except for that unfortunate silver Honda hatchback my ex-step-dad married into the family with in the 80′s, that he ultimately traded in for a light blue (Chevy, I think) crew-cab truck.

If I were to win a Cube…well, as I’ve always tended to do when it comes to my family, I’d be marching to the beat of a different drummer and it would be my first foreign car. Are foreign cars better than American ones? I have no idea, I’m not really a “car person”, but I am told they’re cheaper to fix and that’s a major plus to me because of where we are with our Cavalier at the moment.

Y’see, even though it’s only 8 years old, it has over 250,000 km on it due to commuting back & forth from the GTA to Barrie for long and pretty soon repairs are going to start getting expensive. I’m completely honest on this blog, we are broke, we can’t afford expensive repairs (the brakes went in the fall – a $350 repair – and it crippled us to an embarrassing degree, for an embarrassing amount of time) and our car karma – or “carma” as I like to call it, is running out.

What is “carma”, well let me tell you. Have you ever stopped to help a stranger change a flat tire? You gained carma. Have you ever helped someone who’s locked their keys in their car? You gained carma. Have you ever picked up a hitchhiker? More carma. Given a friend a ride? Carma! You get the picture, right?

Well, one day Blake & I, we racked up some serious carma. Behold the hood of our car:

See, Blake and I met over the internet, almost 7 years ago now, thanks to a mutual friend and in the span of 6 months, I got pregnant (planned!), Blake moved up here from Michigan and we got married. Due to the fact I was pregnant and just freshly out of school, I couldn’t work. But the thing was, Blake couldn’t either as he wasn’t a permanent resident of Canada yet, so we risked it and Blake got a job under the table delivering pizza. Long story short we were pretty damn broke and living above my grandmother’s furniture store, unable to even pay her rent because we were so broke.

Well, even though we could barely afford it, one day we looked in the cupboards and what we found in there was so pathetic that there was no way to stretch what we had into another week and spending money on groceries was inevitable.

By this time Wes was born, so despite major wind warnings where trucks were flipping over on highways and stuff, all 4 of us piled into the car and off to the local Sobey’s we went to buy what little food we could afford.

When we came out, there was a lady parked beside us who explained to us that her battery had died and that she’d asked a few people for a boost but no one would oblige. She had been stranded in the parking lot for half an hour. Since we were right beside her and had cables, I loaded the groceries into the car while Blake got set up to give her a boost. The lady was so grateful when her SUV started up and thanked us profusely. As she put her hood down, the wind caught ours and flipped it back against the windshield, causing the curl in the picture above and also cracking our windshield. The lady looked at us and said “awww that’s too bad, I am so sorry” and we just stared in horror. The lady got in her SUV and drove away while Blake bent the hood back into its traditional position and put away our jumper cables. We’ve never been able to afford to have the hood repaired and the windshield is still cracked.

Because of this, however, we banked some serious carma in that, until recently nothing has gone wrong with this car. It’s like the universe knew we couldn’t afford costly repairs and was like “yeah you guys got really screwed with that whole ‘giving a boost thing’, so you get a pass”.

But the thing is, we know our carma is running out. It’s been almost 7 years and as the odometer creeps up there and the car rusts out, there’s not a whole lot we’ll be able to do and the scary part is, once this car craps out, we’re totally screwed as we can’t afford to get a new one.

Now again, I’m not a car person and this is only my second car so I don’t know if these pictures are normal for an 8 year old car, but this is the current state of things and why we need to win at least one Cube, if not two.

Those last two images? We don’t even know what that is but it started on day 1 and will NOT wash off.

We realize we don’t have the worst car in the Hypercube contest, I’ve definitely seen some klunkers on some people’s canvases, but it IS going to crap out soon and that’s going to leave us totally screwed. It is my biggest fear that I’ll win one of these Cubes and re-learn how to drive and get my life back and then in the fall, the Cavalier takes a shit and I have to hand over the keys to my Cube, along with my freedom, over to Blake so he can keep his job.

So that’s why we’re trying to win two.

Plus, I just want to do my share around here. I want to be able to do the groceries so Blake doesn’t have to do it after work, making us have dinner at 8pm. I want to be able to pick up my own prescriptions so Blake doesn’t get in trouble at work for leaving early so he can get there before the pharmacy closes. I want to be able to get the mail for the same reason. I want to be able to drive myself to my doctor’s appointments so Blake doesn’t haveto take a day off work every time I have one. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The fact of the matter is, we have to be a two-car family except with the way our current car is, that’s only going to happen if we both win Cubes. So please, if you’re reading this? Take 30 seconds and vote. Thank you.

Cate from Saskatchewan wants me to win a Cube! Don’t you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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