Y’know…I’m not gonna name any names or be specific in this comment but a “retrospective” art show is not where an emerging artist puts up all of his or her previously unsold or unseen work. An “emerging” artist could be emerging for like, 10 years but unless their work has been seen and exhibited somewhere (and a website is debatable), it’s not a “retrospective”. A retrospective, and maybe this is just my own definition, I dunno, is when an established artist looks back at his or her oeuvre in a gallery setting (or a website because I still think websites are just as valid as galleries) and you can see the progression of their work throughout the years.

I won’t say what prompted the above paragraph because I don’t want to seem “catty” but I still wanted to put my opinion on the subject out there. Y’know, like, for the record.

Speaking of art, Gwenn Seemel, who I know I’ve posted about before, tweeted this vlog she posted a while back about the secret to being an artist. I thought her theory was pretty interesting and the fact that someone was THAT condescending to her is one of the very many reasons I don’t like leaving the house.

When I was at Steph the Geek’s wedding reception, lined up to get some food, there was this old guy in front of me who was really chatty. He asked what I did for a living and I said I was an artist. Or maybe I said I was a painter. I forget now how he phrased the question but after I answered him, he asked like, “what media?” or something like that and I was caught so off-guard because I don’t really HAVE a media or at least I didn’t really think I did at the time, I’d never given it much thought, so I answered “acrylic?” and he had nothing to say to that so he kinda just turned slowly back around and started talking to the person in front of him. It was really really weird. I felt like I gave the wrong answer, like was he offended that I didn’t say “oil?” Is there some kind of media snobbery I’m not aware of?

Anyway, the answer now would be “mixed media”, which is probably more confusing. He should have said like, “what do you paint?” and I guess I’d have an answer for that, I’d say “I paint pretty girls” – except I’m not really doing that anymore so I don’t think I’d really have an answer if someone asked. I don’t think most people know what to say when you tell them you’re an artist because it’s hard to define an artist’s success. Like, if you say you’re a computer engineer for Telus, people know right off the bat that you are employed, that you make a living doing what it is you do even if they don’t understand what you do and they can (more or less) gauge your level of intelligence based on your job title. With an artist, all of that information is open-ended and finding a successful artist, one who makes a living from their art, particularly a GOOD living, is a pretty rare thing. And it’s rude to ask anyone if they’re successful or not so people – I think, anyway – assume you’re not successful. Or that you make a meager living. No one wants to see the dreamers thrive. People want to rip off their wings and stomp them into the mud.

Unless you’re me. I’m very lucky in that I have this whole community of people who seem to want to see me succeed. I only really kinda figured this out today, but for every person who’s a dickweed to me in person, there are 10 people  (maybe more!) online who would love to have me over for tea. I need to remember that I think. I think I need to like, have that knowledge be active in my brain at all times.

I think that’s why Twitter is such a necessity for me leaving the house. If there’s an awkward situation or if I’m freaking out, I’ve got 140 characters to reach out to someone and that friends list is like, 150 people who are all mostly active, so someone will be around. And if not someone on my friends list then maybe one of the other 1200 people who have me on *their* friends list might have something important to say. You never know!  It’s just a good feeling knowing that all these people are out there and that, for the most part, they’re wishing me well. They’re on my side.

This week I’ve kinda been out of it. Just sort of in a daze. I’ve decided to start reading my Live Journal, which I’ve had for 11 years, from the very beginning for a possible project and mostly it’s been bumming me out. I see entries like this and I’m just like…what happened to me? I used to have it all together. I used to have all the answers (and I was right!) I used to be a functioning person. I used to be intelligent.

The psychiatric drugs I’m on make it very difficult to function. They make my memory practically evaporate, I simply can’t remember a damn thing and I feel like since I’ve been on them, my IQ has dropped at least 20 points. I actually feel dumber for having taken them. I need them because without them I’m a manic mess, not taking them isn’t an option, but I wish they didn’t affect my brain the way they do.

Like when I finish a book, I immediately forget everything I just read. I hate that about myself. My memory used to be so good and now it’s just crap and I seriously worry if I’m not looking at early onset Alzheimer’s. It’s that bad.

I don’t want to switch meds. I don’t want to go through all that again because that was hell and the ones I’m on now work.  I can trust them, which is a very big thing. I just wish there was a way to make my memory better. Does that ginko shit really work?

~*I’ll be honest, I actually started this post last night while I was working but work was so crazy that I didn’t have a chance to finish it so I’m picking it up this morning and unfortunately I feel like I’ve lost the flow. I’m sorry.*~

I wonder if this feeling of being dumber than I was 11 years ago has to do with not leaving the house or doing anything all that stimulating very often. I don’t know what would be “stimulating” though, like I don’t think going on a trip to a museum is the answer. I think I need day to day interactions with normal people which is the exact thing I’ve spent the last decade trying to avoid.

Right now I’m reading a book, which is actually a workbook technically, called Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel By Changing the Way You Think. It’s apparently THE workbook they use at the mental health centre I go to when they do group cognitive behavioural therapy classes (which I can’t do because Blake would have to take time off from work to get me there) and it could be the key to making me better. I think if I had some better thinking skills and maybe some better social skills, I’d feel more confident and going out wouldn’t be such a big deal.

Like I think back to when it was just Madison and I in the apartment in Uxbridge. I would leave the house every single day. I would put her in her stroller, we would go into my mom’s store, say “hi”, get her mail keys, walk up to the post office which was just as far away as the post office is here, check the mail, pick up any packages, cross the street with the stroller (which I would never do now for fear the the stroller or my bags breaking in the middle of the road – not that I have a stroller, but you know what I mean), go into Presents Presents Presents which is this AMAZING little gift shop that has the absolute best stuff ever in it (probably my favourite store) WITH THE STROLLER (it’s a very small store and you had to go up a little step to get in the door), look around, I would usually buy something small for Madison, not every day obviously because we were on welfare and I couldn’t afford that, but often, and I’d talk to the shop owner whose name I’m forgetting, then we would leave. Then I would go into the IGA (grocery store) 2 or 3 doors down and I would buy a basket’s worth of groceries because that’s how much I could carry on the back of the stroller, that’s how much I could afford, and I only had a bar fridge at home so it could only hold that many groceries in it at one time, then we would cross the road at the light, cross the other road at the other light and walk home. Then we’d go back up to our apartment, put the groceries away, and then we’d go back downstairs to my mom’s store to give her her mail and I’d hang out down there usually for most of the afternoon. In doing so, I would interact with my mom’s friends and customers the whole time.

This scenario would never in a million years happen today but I think of it often because I think that’s when I’ve been the happiest in my life. That needs to change. NOW needs to be the happiest in my life and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be. I have a bomb assed job with fantastic hours that leaves me lots of time every day to do anything I want to, I’m not rich but I have enough money to leave the house with, my kids are old enough that they can stay home by themselves and really, they’re not going to do anything too crazy in public to make me nervous, there’s no reason for that. They’re nice, polite and courteous kids. While I’m not in the best shape, I know that physically I can walk to the post office. I’m capable of it. I hate exercise and I was a sloth in my former life but I need to get back to how it was when I lived in Uxbridge and walked everywhere: them’s just the breaks, lady. Walking is just how it’s done. I know I’m capable of all this, it’s just that I feel like there’s a big rock in my head preventing me from doing it. Hopefully this book will help me move that rock out of the way so I can live again.

So if I’ve been quiet, that’s what I’ve been up to. I’m reading Mind Over Mood, The Blogess’ memoir which I forget the title of and my own Live Journal from the very beginning. This doesn’t leave much room for art, but that’s okay because I think I need to like, chill for a while when it comes to that. I think I need to “download” as much information and stimuli as possible, let it simmer in my brain for a while like brain stew and then I’m sure I’ll become a creative genius who leaves the house ALL THE TIME.

I am playing with a painting idea that’s of Blake. I see him in my mind with his crazy hair and he’s NAKED and jizzing RAINBOWS. But I haven’t thought of how the rest of the painting is going to be yet. It’s just an image in my mind that I think I need to make reality. I have a Post-It on my desk that says “MAKE BLAKE JIZZ RAINBOWS” which, if anything, I’m probably going to have framed because  I like it.

I want one of those portfolio things with a handle. Like this. I’ve been painting a lot on watercolour paper and I have nowhere to put any of it, so if I had one of those, I could put the paintings in there and slide that between my desk and the couch. I have no money whatsoever to put toward that purchase though because The Sketchbook Project for 3 people and then 2 premium Geocaching.com accounts tapped my ass out.

Speaking of geocaching…y’know, honestly, I’m not sure if I’m going to blog about geocaching because really, I don’t think it’s that interesting. It’s fun, it’s good exercise and it’s funny like, at the time, but in retrospect, when I try to write about it, none of it seems all that funny or interesting from an outside perspective.

I mean, last weekend we went after a big cache called “WONDERBALL” in Utopia that I’d found on Geocaching.com because I was curious to see what caches there were in Utopia since I think that’s where I’m going to launch our Canadian USB Travel Bug.

Y’know what? I’m not even going to write about it. I’ll just post the pictures. The video….well, it really sucks and I don’t want to edit it so I’m not going to. Long story short, we were in the FUCKING WOOD y’all, getting eaten alive by bugs and having to cross rivers on logs and shit because Blake sucks at trailblazing.  Also, we ran into two ladies on our way into the conservation area who were on mountain bikes and they asked if we were geoaching, to which Blake said “yes” and they gave us a huge hint into decoding Wonderball. Without that piece of information, we would have gotten there and we wouldn’t have been able to open the cache! Apparently to GET that piece of information, you’re supposed to e-mail a Central Ontario Ceocachers member before you go out and they’ll give it to you. We didn’t know that because apparently researching caches is for amateurs.

Anyway, here are the pics:

Pussy willows!

Me and Madison crossing the river.
(Pic by Alex)

WONDERBALL!!!!
You had to make the letters and numbers match up with a code word & then it would open.
It was a letterbox hybrid cache, not just a puzzle cache, so we all stamped our books the best we could with the Sharpie marker I’d brought (I’m going to start carrying around a stamp pad) and we were on our merry way.

Wes, rumpusing.

This one was called “Don’t Cut the Red Wire” and it was complicated.
I’m not totally sure what they did to get the co-ordinates to the final cache.

After that we were pretty tired out so we called it a day and we went to South St. Burger Co. for dinner and then we came home. As far as I’m aware, it was a good time had by all. (The pics would have been better except that I’d just thrown my camera in my bag without checking to see if the battery was okay. It wasn’t, it was dead. :o()

I think from now on though, we need to research caches better because we would have been completely fucked if we didn’t magically run into those ladies. I also think we need more practice with the GPS unit because Blake had us going through THE FUCKING WOODS, like, the undergrowth was so dense it was ridiculous and I have never been so glad for glasses in my life because we were getting hit in the face with branches and stuff.

Anyway, it was fun.

So yesterday while I was working, I suddenly craved sushi like crazy so I called Blake, who was at the mall in Newmarket getting Madison a strapless bra for her grad dress and shampoo & conditioner for us at Lush, where I knew there was this little sushi hut but he suggested he get it from this place in Barrie that Alex recommended. So that’s what he did. I told him I was okay with pretty much anything as long as it didn’t involve fish or fruit.

He brought me home some sort of cucumber rolls, which were okay and these AMAZING FUCKING YAM TEMPURA ROLLS that I’m absolutely dying for. They have YAMS which I don’t even know what that IS that are deep fried in tempura in the middle with seaweed crap and rice (obviously). They are DELICIOUS.

And the thing is, I realized, that I don’t have to eat a whole order of sushi in one sitting because it’s not like it’ll go bad super fast. And I can’t eat two orders of sushi all by myself anyway. So my plan for today is to eat more of that sushi (because Blake had to go to Barrie to get a part so he can fix the kitchen sink), watch last week’s episode of Mad Men that I feel asleep through, and then read more of my book. Then tonight during Game of Thrones and Mad Men, I think I might start my portrait of Blake. We’ll see what happens.

Okay, time to eat. I hope you’re having a wonderful day!

I need a passport to go to Squam so today is the day I’m going to get the pictures done and have the form signed by my guarantor. I haaaaate having my picture taken, especially since I can’t keep a straight face to save my life and you have to be straight-faced for passport photos…and my hair looks super crappy due to it all falling out when I was sick. At least I washed it today haha

Here’s me today, all done up (btw, I *love* this sweater):

Speaking of bad hair, Blake is obviously coming with me to do the passport thing but guess what else we’re doing? He’s applying for Canadian citizenship! When approved, that means he’ll be able to vote in the US *and* Canada! Cool, eh? EH?

Anyway, I just wanted to update with my goofy pics to get it out of my system. As you were.

So I’m a really insecure, jealous person. Blake is the most important person in my world, the absolute most important thing and the idea of him not being with me or straying or me not having his full attention GUTS ME. Some Christians describe Hell as the “absence of God”, well I describe Hell as the “absence of Blake”. It’s probably completely unhealthy to be this enamored by, in love and completely obsessed with one person but I am and I make no apologies for it and that’s just the way it is.

And hot yoga has had me become a raging psychopath.

As I’ve mentioned before, Blake’s been depressed. He didn’t come back from our situation this summer a whole person so I told him he needed to go talk to someone about that. A professional. He needed to find the joy in life again. My surgeon suggested Moshka yoga to both of us at one point and then his new shrink suggested he do the same thing. Alone. By himself. Without me.

Moshka yoga is just your basic Hatha and Vinyasa yoga done in a 105 degree F room. It’s apparently a Canadian invention, which is no wonder because it’s so goddamn cold here for half the year, and it’s very hot and sweaty and steamy and you have to have a shower after you do it. And you have to do it without a shirt on if you’re a guy and like, a sports bra if you’re a girl. And this makes me crazy.

The mere idea of a glistening Blake in a hot, steamy room with all these in shape soccer moms and housewives who alllll tend to love his curls and who seem to hit on him all the time makes me fucking insane. The idea of him GETTING NAKED somewhere in public makes me really really uncomfortable.

I just picture the absolute worst case scenario, that he’ll find some hot housewife with an ass of steel and an athletic yoga body and they get all sweaty together at yoga and then they shower off together after she goes down on him in the locker room and this is my imagination gone mental and gone to that dark place I have deep in the middle of my brain.

I know I should trust him and I do, I just don’t trust THEM. And he’s so nice, I don’t know if I trust him to first, KNOW if someone’s being a cougar and secondly to nip in in the bud before it goes anywhere because let’s face it, that shit is flattering! And he’s going to get all in shape and that’s just going to make it that much worse. And he’s going to be all hot and in shape and I’m going to be his fat little ugly sidekick where people wonder what in the hell he’s doing with an ugly troll like me.

:o(

So all day Monday I was having a coronary over this pretty much and we decided that yesterday I would come with him to hot yoga to see what it was like because I was picturing this sleazy, sweaty meat market vibe but as it turns out, it’s not like that at all and I probably want to do it as soon as I’m able to. They let me peek in the window a couple of times so I could see what everyone was doing and since the lights are dimmed, I couldn’t see everything but I recognized all of the poses they were doing so I’m confident that I could do it. (If I could lay on my stomach.)

So I think I’m okay with it now and that as soon as I’m able to, I want to do it too. Blake would have to do it twice a week though because the one day is supposed to just be about him, it’s supposed to be a solo activity, the second class would be with me. And I don’t care how sweaty I get, there’s not a chance in hell I’m showering in a locker room.

Part of why I’m okay with him going to hot yoga is because yesterday he had his wedding ring tattooed to his finger. You can wear a ring during hot yoga (or any yoga really) so this fixes that scenario.

Here’s Blake getting his tattoo:

That’s it. Just a black band.

Since he was getting his tattoo, I decided to get a tattoo too but what I wanted was so small it almost wasn’t worth their minimum fee so I asked them if I could get TWO small ones for that price and they said no, but they would only charge me 1/2 price for the 2nd tattoo. That sounded good to me since I wouldn’t have the courage (or the money since I’d just gotten paid) to do this any time soon and the two tattoos I got, I’ve wanted for a really long time.

Here’s me getting both of them:

It’s a weird angle, but the one on the left is a black star.

The one on the left is how I sign my name and I wanted it done in “my” colours. I gave him my business card to colour match. I’ve wanted it on my writing hand ever since my 30th birthday but I never had the money or courage to get it done. I actually wanted it in the crook between my thumb and forefinger so it would be where I rest a pen, but I guess it would wear off really easily there so I decided to get it more in the center of my hand but still near where I originally wanted it.

The black star is to remind me of my roots. Black Star was the name of the very first chat room I ever went into (on Compuserve in Dec. 1997 when I got my first computer) and where I met my first internet friends who taught me how to basically use the internet and how to interact online. If it weren’t for Black Star, this site wouldn’t exist and I would probably be living a very different, very unhappy life. It was the people in that chat room who made being pregnant at 19 and scared out of my mind because I was in an abusive relationship with no one to talk to okay by throwing me a virtual baby shower with cake and balloons and presents. A friend I met in that room came to my apartment and brought me dinner from 5 hours away after Madison was born. She also helped me financially when I threw Rob out and we changed the locks on my apartment because I had no way to feed my kid without him. That room helped me pick up the pieces after that.

Eventually Compuserve dissolved Black Star so we all moved to the 18+ area, to a room called “Married & Flirting” which didn’t describe most of us so I’m not sure why we hijacked that room but we did and that’s how I met Chris, who was one of the best things to ever happen in my life and we remain friends to this day.

Anyway, Black Star is very special to me and I’ve wanted this tattoo for about 14 years so I went and finally got it.

I figure, I’m not going to have a bellybutton to pierce anymore, so I might as well acquire a few new tattoos.

And that was my yesterday. I’ll post about our geocaching adventure on Sunday another time. It was…an adventure.

That title is from a Mother Mother song called “The Stand”.

Anyway, I love “shuffle”, because that song was followed by Bob Marley and that was awesome because it’s Sunday and I love Bob Marley on sunny Sunday mornings. I realize that by the time you’re reading this it’s not going to be morning but for me, it’s only 12:40-ish as I’m writing this right now and that’s like morning for me because I pretty much got out of bed, made sure Madison was busy and didn’t need anything, realized Blake was at hot yoga and would be for like, another hour I think, the coast was clear to sneak a bowl before we go geocaching in the afternoon with Alex.

Ronny hurt his back a few days ago :o(. So he’s probably not coming but Alex said she would and that is awesome because trampsing through the bush with Alex today with the sun shining and the kids being excited to find “WONDERBALL” the awesomest cache I think near us that we’re going to have found so far  today is exactly what I want to do when I’m coming down from the giant bowl of whatever the fuck I smoked this morning was.  Does that make sense? I hope so because whatever the hell this is, it’s good stuff. You only need a tiny bit to get completely fucked up and the high lasts a long time. I have no idea how it was grown or created or whatever. I don’t watch Weeds anymore so I’m unclear as to where my pot came from, I’m not a weed nerd who knows like, every type of sativa silvanus whateverus was ever hydroponically created vs the natural shit coming out of places like Mexico where they grow it in fucking fields or something right?

Anyway, it was 4/20 2 days ago, we got some, it’s awesome. It’s awesome because you only have to smoke a tiny bit and everything is just great. I’m in a fantastic mood, I’m listening to good music, I’m warm in only a t-shirt, I’m sitting cross legged in my chair listening to Mother Mother again (“Ghosting” this time, excellent song). The furnace is on but it’s not annoying like I find it most of the time. The dogs are passed out somewhere, not needing attention. I have zero responsibility right now except to feed myself, but I will and when I do it’s going to be two Eggo waffles with a LOT of margarine and about a half a cup of real Maple Fucking Syrup.

Know why? Blake and the kids went to the Elmvale Maple Syrup Festival on Saturday and  got us TWO giant bottles of Real Fucking Maple Syrup (which would be an awesome brand of maple syrup if a maple syrup farmer had the balls to print the labels LOL). One is considered “dark” maple syrup and one is considered “light” maple syrup and I think the difference is how long they “cook” it for because all maple syrup is, is boiled down tree sap right? At least that’s, I’m pretty positive, how my Aunt Betty and Uncle Bill always made it, I don’t remember them ever adding anything else to it, they’d just pour the sap into this big huge VAT type metal container that had a flame under it, like a fire, and that boiled the sap. I remember my Aunt Betty once boiling sap on the stove for like, “instant” maple syrup and I think that’s how Blake’s friend Charissa does it, I mean, tapping trees is easy if you have a lot of them.

I remember growing up in Stouffville, which was a pretty big town, like its down town core, when you’re like, I dunno, in grade 3. I think to Wes, Elmvale feels like a big place because it takes “so long” to walk anywhere and he hates having to walk home from school. I understand where he’s coming from because I used to think the same thing when I was in grade 3 and lived in Stouffville when it was small. Anyway I’m straying from my point; when I used to walk home from school when I lived in Stouffville in grade 3, there were people who were tapping trees in their front yards all throughout the neighbourhood we walked home from school through. We didn’t live in that neigbourhood, that’s just where I got babysat, but you would never see tapped maple trees in a front yard in most subdivisions anymore. I don’t even know what kind of trees they plant in the front yards of subdivisions anymore but it’s always just 1. And is it a maple tree? Probably not the right kind to make good maple syrup, if it is. Back when they were planning the neighbourhoods that were in Stouffville when I grew up, they planned the houses AROUND the trees so everyone would have nice big, mature maple trees, the good kind that our country up here had just EVERYWHERE naturally, I think anyway. And I think that’s awesome. It’s too bad subdivisions now, unless they’re really expensive, are clear cut and then replanted so people can’t enjoy them in their lifetimes. Again, unless you’re like, Oprah rich and can have full grown trees shipped in. (If you live in an area they can live in.)

Anyway, it would have probably have been beneficial for me to go to the Maple Syrup Festival with Blake and the kids but I had to work yesterday and I like to have some time to myself before starting my 9 hour shift. I know 9 hours is only 1 hour more than a “normal” workday but right now a “normal” workday, doing what I do, is really really hard (especially when you’re on the kind of drugs I’m on for my health issues). You are stuck in a chair all day, the e-mails come in faster than you can conceive of doing anything artistic so all you can do is maybe follow Twitter since it’s slow on a Saturday night most of the time, maybe follow a conversation on AIM on a Saturday night but the only two people I talk to on the weekends on AIM are work people and they have lives so they don’t always have the time to talk to me. Anyway, my job is like, high attention because certain things are big deals on weekends and I can’t slip up because a big slip up could cost our company a lot of money down the line and believe it or not, I take my job pretty damn seriously because I know what it feels like to not HAVE a job and being able to work from home and be with my family and stay ahead financially is a huge thing in this life, not just this economy where a lot of people don’t even have jobs, and being able to work on a schedule that’s really really good for me – that’s a blessing. So I take my job really seriously. Plus, I actually really like my bosses and I actually really care about the people I work with. It’s all good. :o)

Now Jay-Z is on. Now Beck. “Loser”, how appropriate for my current state of mind. Have you ever really listened to the words of this song? What was HE on when HE made this song or is this just a byproduct of $cientology?

It’s 1:19pm. “My time is a piece of wax, falling on a termite, who’s choking on the splinters”. Genius or insane? “Get crazy with the Cheez-Whiz”? I love it, I don’t know why I love it but I do. That’s the anthem of a generation, not “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.

And while I’m harshing on the 90s, we watched SNL last night with Daniel Radcliffe and while I think he did a good job, for the most part SNL seems to be like…cool mostly for telling square 20-somethings what’s cool. Lana Del Rey? Um what was that obnoxious band I saw again on Ellen, oh yeah “Karmin”. omg what? They were terrible! I can’t even remember right now what other stuff I’ve seen on SNL recently because it’s mostly just mediocre (except for last night’s) with bits of Kristin Whig and Bill Hader thrown in. I don’t even know the names of anyone else on the show right now except for those two and Keenan Thompson who’s been on the show too long.  I realize all the sketches can’t be gems since they write these sketches, I think, in a very short period of time and ideas, solid ones, don’t just happen because they need to happen, that’s not how ideas work.

There was this cache I found on geocaching.com sort of near us, at least on the way to Barrie. It’s apparently a “book cache”, which isn’t an official category of cache as defined by the site, but I think it’s a good idea and I found a couple of books, including the How To Get Ideas book I was reading last week, that would be good for a kind of cache like that but the cache itself is apparently in bad condition if it’s even there at all at this point because now that everyone knows it’s ruined just by reading the comments, no one’s going to go out and look for it. Well, the way I see it is, it probably got ruined because of moisture because the comments say that the contents are moldy. Well, books + moisture = mold. So it could have been the container or it could have been that someone didn’t CLOSE the container properly. So I wonder what the container was and if it’s something that IS watertight, like an ammo box or something, and someone just didn’t close it properly, then I say we go out there and get a free ammo box so we can replace the cache and keep it as a book cache because Blake and I think that’s a good idea. The guy who placed it has placed a few caches in the area but hasn’t seemed to have maintained them, or an internet presence, in over a year. So who knows, maybe he got sick? Or maybe he died?

I LOVE METALLICA.

I think we’ll wait and talk to some of the pros at this big event in Midland in June to do anything about it to see what the actual protocol of doing something like that is (the cache is apparently exposed now due to logging in the area too, so the cache location may have to be moved). I don’t know the official channels on geocaching.com you have to go through to do something like this. It’s just a thought we had.

Wow, so this post was a little all over the place haha. To wrap up, because Wes is home and I still have to eat my waffles and it’s like, 1:40-ish and Blake should be home soon; weed is controversial, music is awesome, maple syrup is awesome and I know an awful lot about it so I hope by Blake and the kids going to the Maple Syrup Festival, they learned a little bit about maple syrup too. Alex is awesome. I am awesome. You are awesome. Have a fantastic Sunday. :o)

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 don’t really know what to write except I feel like writing about agoraphobia because right now I’m doing anything to avoid completing my “agoraphobia sticks“. I have my Post-Its with my “”missions” on my desk, ready to go. Blake found me a jar and washed it out. On Sunday we walked to Charlie’s Bargains and bought more tongue depressors because I had more missions than sticks. I have everything I need. That is except for…courage.

I keep putting off doing the sticks because once I do the sticks, I’ll have to do them. And now that I’ve involved all of you (thanks for the addresses, keep ‘em coming!), if I don’t do them, there will be disappointment. If I don’t get better there will be disappointment. I always get the sense that people think I should get over it already. “Why isn’t Sunny better? Why can’t she just go for a walk?” I wish I had an answer to those questions but all I really have is a long list of excuses.

Like today, I can’t go out today (despite having nothing better to do) because I already left the house today and I can’t do too many things in one day or I get really tired and unhappy. Plus it’s cold outside. I can’t go outside when it’s cold.

When we first moved here, on the first day of school, I took Wes and Hoover, who we’d just gotten the day before, and we met Madison after school because there was no bus that went past our house. And I had the worst panic attack I’ve ever had in my life. It was so bad that I called my mom because I thought I was having a stroke. Half my body went numb, including my tongue, I went blind in one eye and my chest was pounding out of my heart. I called Blake to come home and when he did, we went top the hospital where they ran all kinds of tests on me and deduced that I wasn’t having a stroke but that I’d had a really sever panic attack. That was the last time I tried picking Madison up from school and as a result, we had to find an alternative way for Madison to get to and from school because again, there was no bus.

Down the street lived (she may still live there, I have no idea) this woman named Lisa who had 2 kids who went to the same school, Justin and Alicia, and she was going to have Justin walk Madison home from school while Blake would drive her to school in the morning. This arrangement was fine, except that Lisa, more often than not, would pick the kids up from school and just drive them home. That was okay, but it was hard to explain to this extroverted woman why I didn’t leave the house. She didn’t understand but was nice enough to work with me anyway and in explaining to other people why I never left the house, she said to me that she told them that I “get cold” and changed the topic. I thought that was very interesting and very nice of her. She only lived about 6 houses up from us but she offered many times to drive me to and from my house to have coffee or for her to do my hair (she was a hair dresser and had a salon in her basement). I declined because we had nothing in common but I’ve found that her attitude toward me is the same as just about everyone I’ve met in this town. They don’t understand why I don’t leave the house, they just know that I don’t and they’ll work with me.

Another example is when Blake and the kids went to Militiagan for Uncle John’s funeral. The grocery store knows I don’t leave the house by myself and they said that if I needed anything to call them up and they would deliver it. They don’t deliver. This is not a service they offer. But Blake is so friendly to everyone and talks to everyone and we’re very good customers so they offered.

Another example is that the one time when I did leave the house, I decided the pharmacy would be my goal because if I freaked out, they would understand because they obviously fill my prescriptions so they probably have a really good idea as to what my deal is.

When I got there, the old many behind the counter made such a huge deal that I had come there and that I’d done it by myself that I’ve only been back a few times since, with Blake. He just freaked me out, like he told everyone in the store I was there and they all practically cheered. I know they were just being nice but that’s not what I need. That’s detrimental to the process.

I think I’m in a better place right now to deal with something like that and I don’t think it’ll happen again, but those are just examples of how supportive the community I live in is. These are just the kinds of people you encounter here, so what am I so afraid of?

I don’t know. My shrink asked me to try and put it into words a couple of years ago and I just couldn’t. I made a list of the things I was afraid of but she didn’t seem very impressed by it.

When I’m out in the world by myself, my mind races. It’s like it goes into overdrive and everything gets hyper-analyzed. When I’m out in the world with Blake, I kind of trust him to do that for me. Something I noticed on Sunday when we walked to Charlie’s Bargains is that when we crossed the street, I just walked right through the street without stopping because Blake didn’t stop. I didn’t even look to see if any cars were coming because I trusted Blake to check and stop if there were any cars coming but because he didn’t stop, I automatically assumed there were no cars and I just walked across the intersection without even thinking until after the fact. When we’re in public together, I’m barely even cognizant of the things around us, I have tunnel vision on Blake and I trust him to keep me out of danger and as long as I focus on him, I don’t hyper-analyze the things around me. This also means I miss a lot though, I think.

About a month ago we were in Michael’s and they have an aisle there that’s all cake baking and decorating stuff that I’d never been down. Since it was an artist date and the whole point was to expose myself to new parts of the store, I went down this aisle and I marveled at all the crazy things there are now to decorate cakes. Mid-aisle, I saw something very interesting and shouted loud enough for other people in the store to hear me, “HOLY FUCK, EDIBLE GLITTER!” Blake thought this was really funny buy I was actually kind of mortified and wanted to cry. When I’m out in public with him, I’m just absolutely oblivious to just about everything around me so without him, it’s like I’m a walking raw nerve. I have to be hyper aware in order to protect myself.

But protect myself from what? I live in the friendliest town in the world, what is there to be afraid of? What danger is there, really?

Well, the fact that I have virtually no social skills could be a bit of a problem. Like, I just don’t know how to interact with people. If someone was rude to me, I’d probably cry because I wouldn’t know what else to do. There’s a lady at the post office who’s really bitchy and unfriendly and I’m scared I’m going to run into her if I go there. She works there, it’s not like she’s just some lady. What if my stick says to buy stamps? The post office is hard because it’s a layered experience. First I have to walk there and that’s hard because A) I don’t walk anywhere and I’m pretty out of shape. The post office is about 1.5km from our house. B) I might encounter people on the way there. C) The mean mail lady might be working. D) I may encounter people at the post office. (Plus there’s the prepwork beforehand, such as getting dressed, washing my hair and generally looking presentable.) The way BACK from the post office isn’t so scary because A) I already achieved the goal of getting TO the post office so I won. B) If I can get TO the post office, I can get back. C) Pending nothing bad happened, I’ll be in a good mood and I’ll feel confident that I’d be able to deal with anyone I might encounter on the way home.

Actually, now that I think about it, all of the things on my “medium” list and above are layered that way.

So that’s the biggest thing I think: dealing with people or potentially dealing with people. I’m not afraid of places, I’m afraid of people. I don’t know why I’m afraid of people or what started it, but I am. I don’t know how to make things any easier. I firmly believe that the world would rather hug you than hurt you and I live in the kind of place I do so what is my problem? My do I let this irrational fear of people basically ruin my life?

I used to be so confident. I used to be so unafraid of anything, fierce even, a lioness. Now I’m a house mouse.

I don’t know how to fix this.

So I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this or not, but a while ago, like maybe 2 months ago, Blake was looking for an activity he could do with Wes so they could spend some time together without Madison (Madison is a resource hog and thinks she’s an only child, so Wes doesn’t get as much attention as she demands), just the two of them, and they started going on “adventures”. These “adventures” were just walking along trails near our house or in Barrie but something was missing from them, Blake said, so I suggested that they start geocaching.

So that’s what they’ve been doing on Saturdays while I work. So far they’ve been bringing Madison with them, but when they venture outside of our town to find caches in other areas, they’ll be leaving her at home.

This morning they went to a breakfast with all the other geocachers in the area and met a lot of new people, learned a lot of new terms and found a whole whack of new caches that were all linked together specifically for the event. Apparently in June, in Midland which is about 20 minutes North of us, the whole geocachers of Ontario or something like that are having some sort of festival type thing with games and stuff like that and I guess there will be about 700 people there. Obviously Blake and the kids plan to attend.

At the meet this morning, they met a couple who had a “travel bug” on their car, so Blake came home and logged that he saw it, which I thought was pretty cool. Apparently the whole idea of travel bugs is that they, well, travel! So you would get one of these and put it in a cache and when the person finds it, they will see a note or something that says “I want to get this travel bug to Italy” and that person might think “hey I have a cousin in Italy” and send it to them and then you can track your travel bug’s progress on the Geocaching.com website.  I thought they were pretty neat.

Since they do it while I’m working, I haven’t seen any caches yet myself, except the ones that they’ve taken pics of to show me, but when they start creating caches, I plan to be fully involved. But I think that’s a ways off. :o/ At the meet today, the people who were really really REALLY involved in geocaching said that to place caches, it’s preferred that you have an actual GPS unit or whatever instead of using GPS on your phone because I guess the GPS on a GPS thing is more accurate than a phone. We can’t afford a GPS unit though but Blake’s thinking maybe for Xmas next year or something. It sucks to have to wait that long to place caches though because I think that’s the fun part. I’d rather make things for people to find than find things. Oh well, I guess we’ll have to wait. I have a million ideas for caches though, I just don’t know where to place them yet. Anyone else out there geocachers?

There are a LOT of caches in our town and a ton of them in Barrie too, mostly placed by the same few people. I think Blake and the kids have found around 20 of them so far.

So y’know how Blake and I had a talk about my agoraphobia the other night? I got thinking about it and I’ve decided to make something similar to the “date night jar” that I posted about a while back, but for agoraphobia. I would paint tongue depressors different colours by level of difficulty and write “missions” on them and then when I was feeling brave, I would pick one based on my level of bravery and do what the stick says.

I figure there will be 4 levels of difficulty: easy, medium, hard and black.

I started making lists today of things I could do and tomorrow I’ll start making the sticks. I also have to find a jar. Here is some of what I have so far:

There are very few places to go in this town because it’s so small. There are 3 parks in town, one across the street from us that I’m not including in my lists because our neighbours would wonder what I’m doing over there by myself and that would drive me bonkers so that’s not an option, one down the street about 2 or 3 blocks away with a pavilion and picnic tables and a concert stage called Heritage park and another one that’s connected to the one down the street by the Trans-Canada Trail called Bishop park. These parks are going to feature prominently in my “easy” and “medium” columns because they’re not too far away and during the day, during the week, there wouldn’t be too many people around.

Then in town there is a dollar store that I’ve never been to and a coffee shop called Coffee Time (it’s a chain) that I’ve only ever been in once.  Those will be in the “hard” to “black” categories with the grocery store and the post office in the “medium” to “hard” side of things.  I also have the flower shop on the list, which is almost outside of town, and that’s on the “black” list and the challenge is just to get flowers. I have another challenge to get flowers from the grocery store but that’s on the “medium” list.

Actually, here’s what I have so far…

Easy:
- Put some tea in a travel mug and journal at Heritage Park.
- Write a letter at Heritage Park.
- Mail a letter to yourself or someone else. (Send me your address to Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com and maybe I’ll mail a letter to YOU!)
- Photograph 3 different animals.
- Photograph 5 different flowers.
- Pack a lunch and eat it at Heritage Park.
- Get the mail.
- Mail something. (And get the mail.)
- Put some tea in a travel mug and draw pictures at Heritage Park.

 Medium:
- Mail a package to someone.
- Go to the grocery store and buy a croissant.
- Go to the grocery store to buy an apple.
- Go to the grocery store to buy a bag of rice cakes.
- Go to the grocery store to buy a box of Thinsations.
- Go to the grocery store to buy a magazine.
- Go to Mac’s to buy a magazine. (This one is slightly different than getting one from the grocery store because I know everyone at the grocery store and Mac’s is full of strangers and is more fast paced. It’s a convenience store.)
- Walk Lucky down to heritage Park.
- Buy grocery store flowers.
- Pack a lunch and eat it at Bishop Park.
- Buy stamps.
- Go to the pharmacy and buy a card.
- Put some tea in a travel mug and bring a book to Bishop Park.

 Hard:
- Go to the grocery store to buy potato or macaroni salad and eat it at Bishop Park while reading a book.
- Go to the grocery store to buy a sandwich and eat it at Bishop Park with a book.
- Walk to Coffee Time to buy tea.
- Use the ATM @ the bank before going to Coffee Time or the grocery store.
- Walk Lucky down the path to Bishop Park.
- Go to the dollar store and buy $5 worth of stuff to use to make a gift for someone else.
- Get a book from the library.
- Get a movie from the library.
- Go to Clover (convenience store that’s far from my house) and buy a movie. (They have used movies for about $2.99-$4.99)
- Go to the pharmacy and buy a gift for someone.

Black:
- Write a letter at Coffee Time and mail it on the way home.
- Go out for breakfast or lunch.
- Walk to Coffee Time for tea and read a book while you drink it.
- Walk to Coffee Time for tea and journal while you drink it.
- Deposit a cheque.
- Buy flower store flowers.
- Go to 3 Foursquare mayorships.
- Go to the new convenience store (that’s far from my house) and buy a movie.
- Buy a card at the pharmacy, take it to Coffee Time to fill out and mail it on the way home.
- Pick up prescriptions. (I’m not sure if I’m going to put this one on a stick because obviously if I don’t need any rx’s I can’t do this one.)

And that’s all I have so far. I’m welcome to suggestions if anyone has any, although I know it’s hard when you don’t know the layout of the town or what we have here. We are on Google streetview though if you really think you might have some creative ideas! Blake won’t let me post our address though so you’d have to look at the middle of town (Elmvale) and see what we have to get ideas. It’s also hard to really gauge what would be hard or easy for me because it’s hard for me to really describe criteria but if you guys had any ideas, I could list them under whatever category they are. I’m looking for as many ideas and variations as possible, but mostly I’m looking for easy ones to start out with.

I’m also thinking that since the post office plays such a big part in all of this, that maybe you guys could send me mail too? It can’t be all at once though, it would have to be every now and then. Blake said that he’d bring home big packages and Camwhores cheques for me but that he’d leave little packages and letters in the box so that when I pull the stick that says to check the mail, that it’ll be worth my time. That is, assuming someone would actually send me mail. As it is, all I get is coupons and those are NO FUN AT ALL. If you would like to send me mail that I would be able to carry home on foot (so no big packages, but packages that would fit in a laptop bag would be okay) that would be awesome, just e-mail me (Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com) and I’ll send you our address. If anyone wants to start any like, land mail art object exchanges or knows of any, please let me know because I would probably be into that.

I figure once I’m better at leaving the house I can find the local geocaches that are around our house that I can get to on foot using my phone, then if we get a GSP unit thing, I could place them and that would be extra fun because then my kids could find them. Honestly, I’m pretty geeked on the idea of making and placing caches. I would gladly spend an entire paycheque making elaborate caches with neat stuff in them. Like ATCs would be cool to put in them.

Oh another thing is that in the beginning I’m only going to be pulling sticks on days Blake is working from home because that way if I freak out and can’t move (it happens), he can come get me. Or if something bad happens, he can come fix it or whatnot. Or if Lucky takes off on me because he’s the worst mental health support animal in the world, Blake can help me find him.

I’ve tried to end this post about 100 times today – I wrote it while I was working and started it at like, 2pm – and can’t think of anything else to say so I think I’m just goin gto end it here and see if anyone has any ideas for things I could do outside, on foot, with varying degrees of difficulty. I definitely think I’m going to include geocaching in the mix once I know how to do it and figure out how to download the files onto my phone.

Oh, that’s another thing, I have to figure out how to use my phone as an MP3 player. Blake’s going to have to show me how to do that because earphones are people-repellent and that’s a very good thing.

And that’s all I can think of at the moment, so to recap:

- Outing suggestions welcome
- Send me your mailing address! (And if it’s not apparent how I know you, please introduce yourself!)
- E-mail me for our address so you can send ME stuff, which I can then go to the post office and get MYSELF! (And keep in mind that I won’t be checking the mail daily, just when I pull the stick that says to do it, so don’t get mad at me for not acknowledging your letter or whatever right away!)

And I think that’s it. Have a great weekend. I’ll probably update tomorrow when we’re making the sticks.

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.

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.