So I survived Blake’s work party. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I enjoyed myself, but I will say that everyone was very nice to me and I was fed well. Honestly, it was actually pretty mellow, almost to the point of boring. All we did – which was totally fine by me – was sit in a corner and eat food. Madison developed a crush on Blake’s boss’ son so she went back & forth between upstairs where we were and downstairs where the kids were being a total creeper (she gets that from me). That was the most entertaining part of the evening.

There were some babies, which I ignored, and they ignored me. And of course there were kids, which I ignored too. We had brief interactions with Blake’s coworkers but they sorta stuck together and ignored us for the most part. I met everyone of course, but with a couple of exceptions, I couldn’t tell you any of their names or what they were wearing. I know that Anthony, the fake Korean, brought the fucking AMAZING Korean BBQ that us Crittendens devoured like it was going out of style. I know Mandy, the hostess, made the butter chicken that was pretty good too, as well as the turkey which was also delicious. We brought mashed potatoes with cheese on top and these potatoes too which weren’t very good because Blake left the peels on. Lesson learned. (Also Pinterest is awesome because that’s where I got the recipe.) With lots of butter they would have been pretty good but we didn’t think to bring any and I didn’t want to ask for some.

When we got there, Blake made me a very weak Crown Royal & Coke Zero which I sipped on for about 45 minutes before my guts started hurting so I made him get rid of it and I just drank Coke Zero for the rest of the evening.

We left around 10pm, I think, and I was craving beef like crazy so we stopped off at Burger King on the way home where I get some kind of crazy super beef burger with just ketchup, none of that crap they pile on, and I ATE THE HELL OUT OF IT. But, as is often the case when we get food on the way home, I started falling asleep while I was eating it but I did finish it when we got inside and then we went to bed. Or at least I did, I can’t remember if Blake went to bed when I did or not.

Anyway, I survived. The party was tolerable. Now that I’ve gotten it over with, I don’t have to go to any work functions ever again unless I really really want to (which would probably never happen). So yeah…

But one thing I did want to share is my eye makeup for the evening. Usually I’m really shy when it comes to makeup because honestly? I don’t know what to do with half of it. I buy a lot of it though, because it’s pretty, and I think I’ll wear it one day, but then I never do. I decided, after watching Hedwig and the Angry Inch and hanging out with Jen last weekend, that life’s too damn short to just let it sit in my makeup bag untouched. I’m going to LEARN how to use it, godammit! So Jen showed me how to use eyeliner last weekend and I applied my knew knowledge to last night’s look. I’m warning you in advance that I apparently suck at taking pictures of my own eyes, but it looked good, trust me.

Left: HiP by L’Oreal eyeshadow
Right: Super old Revlon eyeshadow

This Revlon stuff I have is literally from grade 10, so it’s like…17 years old.
It used to be shimmery but now it’s just plain white BUT I like it because it STAYS PUT.
It doesn’t gather in the crease of the eye during the course of a night and you only need a little bit to get full coverage.

This stuff is so cool.
It’s black liquid liner with flecks of silver in it.
I think it’s a CDN brand.

Silver solid eyeliner.
Also a CDN brand I’m pretty sure.

I got this 2 Halloweens ago but never knew what to do with it until now.

Step 1: White eyeshadow over the whole lid
Step 2: Silver shadow on top of that, thickly, because the silver on its own doesn’t show up very strongly.
Step 3: Black liquid liner along the top lash line
Step 4: Curl lashes.
Step 5: Use Maybelline’s “The Falsies” mascara, 2 coats (I really wish I had an eyelash brush!)
Step 6: Put the silver liner under the lower lash line.
Step 7: Put lots & lots of glitter eyeliner on top of the silver liner.

And that’s pretty much it.

What I did do was stick a Q-Tip in my mouth to wet it and then I used it to remove any eyeliner from the very inner corners of my eyes because I tend to wipe gunk from there constantly and I didn’t want to smear anything.

So that’s what I did.
Jen would be so proud.

Speaking of Jen, when she was here last weekend she put purple and turquoise streaks in Madison’s hair and then she used her razor thingy to cut it. I think it looks really good (Jen’s in hair school right now, she finishes in March).

Here you can see some of her streaks:

And the cut:

God she looks like me in these pics. o_O

Poor kid.

I have a whole whack of posts to make today, so bear with me. This one just covers the party, I’ve got at least two more posts to go. (And and just so I’m not making a separate entry just for this, no I haven’t heard back from my brother yet. I’m betting I won’t.) I think I’m gonna pee, grab another drink, make another post, then go sit on Blake’s chest until he agrees to go to the store to get me croissants and Diet Coke.

I feel like absolute garbage, my stomach is just really really upset. I also haven’t washed my hair in a few days and that’s not helping my mood. I fully intend to have a shower after I make this post later though, so that should make things a little better.

This is the crappiest December ever. I was digging through old Live Journal entries this morning (at 4:30am, which is when I tend to get up these days) and 6 years ago, on December 7th, we had a snow day and a good 3-4 feet of snow. I remember this because my brother was here. My brother who resurfaced yesterday in the form of a wall comment on my Facebook fan page.

When I got the e-mail notification, I was like “wtf?” so I went to look and read it like 5 times without understanding what he was saying because he doesn’t believe in punctuation, but I got the gist of it and just started crying.

If you recall, I haven’t spoken to my brother in 6 years, almost to the day of that Facebook comment. Here’s a journal entry to refresh your memory of that little bit of drama. In fact, and I’m only pointing this out because some people may not know, you can use the tags on my Live Journal to read the whole saga as it happened in real time, if you wanted to.

My brother doesn’t know I was/am sick. My mom wanted to tell him face to face, but that never happened. As far as I’ve been told, my mom hasn’t seen my brother in the flesh for over a year, maybe longer, and hasn’t received an e-mail from him in quite some time either.

I e-mailed him and literally just said “Hey what’s up? How are you?” and left it at that. If he replies, which he may not since all he has is his phone, I’m not sure I’m even going to tell him about being sick. I think he won’t understand the gravity of what the situation was, how fucked up I am now physically, and I think that’ll just upset me. Honestly, I kinda feel it’s just none of his business. I realize that’s weird to say when I’ve been chronicling the whole thing on a website read by strangers (so to speak) but the way I see it is that he’s free to read this website too, nothin’ stopping him. I’m not going to type out the whole story again just for him.

But I think mostly I’m just afraid that he won’t care and that he’ll hurt me. :o(

Oh also, I deleted his message from my fan page because I didn’t want trolls and yahoos calling his cell phone or e-mailing him. I wrote down his e-mail address and phone number in case I ever need it, but I don’t think I ever will.

So that’s what’s happening with that. Fun fun drama drama.

Tomorrow night is Blake’s work Xmas party and I really really don’t want to go but Blake really really wants me to. He said that if I don’t go to work functions for like, 5 years and then all of a sudden I go to one, it’ll be weirder and more awkward than if I just go this time and get it over with so I guess that’s what I’m going to do. Blake says if I go this year then I don’t have to go to any other work functions ever again so I guess I’ll just suck it up and go.  He also said that if I want to leave after 5 minutes, that’s okay, so we’ll see how things go. I’ll be bringing the iPad and I fully intend to find myself a corner to hide in so I can screw around on Facebook or something until it’s over. I don’t want Blake to like, drag me around meeting people or anything like that but I’m guessing he will because that’s what you do at parties and Blake’s like, this extroverted social butterfly who really wants me to meet his work people.

So whatever, I guess I have to go.

I guess the good news is that he doesn’t work in Barrie anymore so it won’t be a party full of soccer moms talking about potty training and snack time. Most of Blake’s co-workers don’t even have kids. Why do I care whether or not they have kids? Because nothing is as boring to me as hearing about people’s kids unless they are exceptional in some way and let’s face it, most of them aren’t, yet parents brag like they are. I write about my kids here but you’re welcome to not read it, walk away, you can’t do that so much face to face. Plus I write this for me, not you. The only thing more boring than hearing about people’s kids is their dreams, followed by their jobs unless they do something exceptional, which is hardly ever the case. And all of these people do computer crap for a telecom, I don’t understand, don’t want to understand and couldn’t care less. (Although I get the sense that these guys aren’t the type to bore you with details about their jobs. Plus they have to take a shot if they do.)

Anyway, I’d rather go to the dentist than go to this thing but…such is love.

I’m having a shitty day. I’m in a shitty mood. I think I’m going to step away from the keyboard and go have a nap.

I was going to post a picture of my boobs but it occurred to me that some of you may be reading from work so I decided not to. I’ll post them on my site some other time. If that sentence confused you, it’s because I’m x-posting this to Live Journal where the action really takes place as far as comments and discussion. I’m also x-posting this to Camwhores, where there are all kinds of boobies, including the pic I decided not to post.

Now that that’s been said…

It was a pretty ho hum weekend.

On Saturday, Blake and I planted and hung our cucumbers. The system is really weird, you don’t water the dirt directly, there’s a reservoir at the top with these moisture-sucking strips that go down and rest on the dirt and over time the moisture-sucking strips water the dirt. And then on the side of each bag, there’s a slot for a moisture stick which tells you if the dirt is wet enough. Despite the fact that the dirt is wet enough on all the bags, two of the three aren’t doing so well, as you can see:

I think it has less to do with the moisture of the dirt and more to do with the fact that when I was pulling the vines through the hole at the bottom, blindly, I snapped them. I don’t know if the plant will compensate for that or not but next year we’re planting these things a LOT earlier than we did this year so the plants are still small and easier to stick through the hole. I wanted so long this time partially because I’m lazy and kept forgetting but also because I wanted the roots to be nice and thick so they wouldn’t fall apart when I tried to put the plants through the hole. I don’t think that’s a good strategy though so next year we’ll do it differently.

Also this weekend, I did my fingernails TWICE. On Friday I actually got up like, 3 hours before my alarm so I started work 2 hours early which meant I got done at 4pm instead of 6pm.  As soon as work was finished, I put in Burlesque (shut up) and started working on my nails. I spent HOURS on them. Then I decided to get drunk and play cards with Blake and when I was trying to pick cards up, my nail polish kinda shifted. It didn’t chip because it was still a little mushy, it just kinda slid. That made me very upset because I’d spent so much time on them so Blake helped me remove all the polish and I tried again on Saturday, however by Sunday evening, the polish had chipped already so I decided “fuck this” and I’m just not messing around with fingernail polish anymore or ever again. We just don’t get along, never have, never will. I’ll still do my toes, I don’t seem to have a problem there, but never my fingers again unless there’s MAYBE some special occasion or something.

Sunday was D&D day. Ronny, Alex & Raymond came over and we played while dining on veggies & dip as our snack and pizza for our dinner. It took us like, 4 hours or something to finish one encounter because we’re all n00bs and we still have no idea what we’re doing. Blake’s doing well being our DM, it’s the rest of us who suck because we don’t know our spells and abilities or when to do what etc. We’re still having a good time with it though and believe it or not we ARE getting faster and better the more we play so continue we shall. I also healed for the first time last night, which was interesting. Sucked that I could only do it twice because I’m only level 1, but still, it was something I never had to do before. Right now we all have 435 XP so I figure within maybe 3 more sessions we should be level 2.

After D&D, Raymond went home because he hadn’t slept in over 24 hours, Ronny and Alex played video games with Wes, I removed nail polish and I don’t know what Blake and Madison did (Blake helped me get the polish off my right hand at one point), then we watched the season finale of Game of Thrones. I’ll avoid talking about that in case people haven’t seen it yet but I’d avoid the comments on Live Journal if you haven’t seen it yet because I have a feeling it’ll be discussed. I really want to read the books now, which I think about a million people are also thinking.

My Lush order should be here any day now. They ship UPS so the mail strike we currently have shouldn’t affect the delivery but it WILL affect the delivery of the nail stamps I bought and that Eryn wants me to use on her next weekend for graduation the week after. This is what I ordered from Lush. 10 of them because they’re limited edition. I think I’m doing better with money considering that’s all I bought and I also put almost my whole paycheque on my Visa a few days ago. If I do that one more time, the Visa should be almost paid off just in time for my vacation. Ha!

I’m still having a really hard time with this holiday business. I mean, the fact that it’s costing us a LOT of money, half my paycheque, for me to have this holiday time really bothers me. I don’t have ill will toward my bosses or anything, it’s just that in my family you don’t take holidays. If you can make money, you do it. You don’t do things to lose money. I don’t think my mother, my grandmother or my grandfather have ever had a vacation in their lives because it would have been unpaid time off, which is what I’m doing the first week of July. I’m trying not to think about it but yesterday Alex asked me if I was looking forward to my holidays and I just started crying because no, no I’m not. I’m afraid that while I’m on holiday all I’ll be able to think about is money. But, it’s either take this vacation time or burn out and I can’t afford to burn out so holidays it is.

I plan on doing a lot of painting on my holidays. Painting and the beach. (Send vibes of a heat wave up here, please!) And I have to see my shrink to discuss the fact that I’m basically not okay right now, not at all. Possibly adjust my meds. Ask about “weight loss agents”, which were briefly discussed at metabolic clinic. I also plan to use the treadmill a lot when I’m on holidays and read. I give up on my shoes, they just keep giving me a really painful blister on my heel, so I’m going to use it in bare feet. Some studies say that’s better for you and some studies say it’s bad for you, so I’ve decided I don’t care and that’s just how I’m going to do it. I would lose weight if I could eat eggs for breakfast every day but I just don’t have the time to cook them with this job, let alone eat them, and even when I make diet kwish (diet cheese, broccoli and or onions, ham – you need the cheese or the egg dries out) and don’t have lunch I still don’t lose weight. They have to be 3 eggs over easy with 2 pieces of toast for it to work its magic and I just don’t have time for that. And you may think that’s ridiculous that it has to be that precise, but that’s what worked and variations do not work for whatever reason so it is what it is.

Admittedly my diet has been a little stupid for the last few weeks because I’m on the “Fuck It Diet”, which was invented by Margaret Cho. I see it. I eat it. Fuck it. But even when I was doing metabolic clinic and my diet was perfect and I was keeping a food journal and everything, I only lost 2-5 lbs that I gained the next week, that I’d lose the week after etc etc etc. In other words, I didn’t lose anything. I did the treadmill daily, 30-40 minutes, for 3 weeks and didn’t lose one single pound.  Didn’t gain any either. I was rollerskating, albeit not as long, but still, nothing. I do yoga once a week. I’m not inactive. Something just isn’t right with my body so I’m going to ask my shrink for “weight loss agents”, which I don’t even know what they are but I’m assuming maybe thyroid medication or something. I think my thyroid’s fine though, so I dunno. All I know is that my metabolism is still fucked from the risperidone and I want answers.

This week Charlie suggested I buy a bikini for my holidays and I just cried. 3 years ago I was wearing bikinis. Now I’m Shamu. I’m 45 lbs heavier than I should be and that’s a problem.

Anyway, enough of that, it upsets me.

My yellow begonia is basically dead and I don’t know why. The plant itself is alive and seemingly healthy but it doesn’t have any flowers. The orange one had about half the flowers it did when I bought it and again, I don’t know why. The yellow one was in partial shade, which the little stick they came with said is fine, while the orange one was in full sun so now I’ve hung the yellow one in full sun and put the orange one in the railing beneath it rather than hanging either of them on the hook on the other side of the house. You can’t really see what’s hung there anyway so whatever, I just wish I knew what was wrong with them. I’ve been dead-heading the dead flowers like you’re supposed to so I dunno.

My ears have taken to the earrings fully and completely and the holes aren’t weeping at all anymore. So yay! I’m even contemplating getting them pierced again. And then maybe again. And again. Do you think it would be better to do that one at a time or should I get all the holes I want pierced at once. I figure one at a time is probably better because if it gets infected I can treat it and it’ll probably be fine but if I do them all at once, if one gets infected, the rest probably will too and that would be a hard infection to get rid of. So one at a time is probably best, right? I don’t even know where you get ears pierced anymore. When I had mine done originally when I was like, 6, it was done at a jewelry store. In fact, the first one hurt so bad that I wouldn’t let them do the second one until some time later when the kids at school made fun of me for only having one earring. And then they both got infected too often so I took them out and left them out. That’s why I was so surprised the holes hadn’t grown over and I could get these new earrings in smooth as silk, I didn’t have to push through grown over skin or anything, they just slid right in .

I’m babbling, this is probably a really boring post. To be perfectly honest, I just have a lot in my head right now and it needs to come OUT.

We didn’t go up North for Father’s Day this year because we weren’t invited, which I found…interesting. I was glad because I didn’t want to go up there but at the same time, I can’t help but wonder why we weren’t invited in the first place. I don’t think I’ve done anything to offend anyone or anything like that so I dunno. Last year my mom got pissed at me for going up there so I’m kinda glad I didn’t have to deal with her in regards to this this year. Why did she get  pissed off? I dunno, she gets pissed off at me for no reason all the time, especially when it comes to Mother’s and Father’s Days. No matter what I do, she’s gonna get pissed off at me both of those days so I’ve stopped wondering why. My absentee prick of a brother can get away with sending an e-mail and be the next coming of Christ but I’m expected (I think) to jump through hoops for love and approval. I don’t get it and I no longer care. Both of my parents from now on are just gonna have to be happy with me writing on their Facebook walls because Mother’s and Father’s Days are now about Blake and I and no one else. I’m not going to sit there feeling like shit on a day that’s supposed to be about ME because I’m the mother. Phil doesn’t even call his father on Father’s Day so it’s unfair and hypocritical to expect me to call him, especially when I’m mentally ill and only use the phone to talk to Blake or for emergencies. And I’m still annoyed with his little lecture about me not calling him “dad” but calling him Phil instead because that’s his name. He’s never been my dad so let’s not go down that road. Let’s not forget that half of his friends and acquaintances don’t even know I exist. And my mother…well if she wants to spend her Mother’s Day being pissed off and catering to her own mother’s whims and dealing with sister aggro, so be it, but leave me out of it. Nothing I do is good enough so I’m just not going to do anything anymore.

And that’s all I have to say about that except that they’re both probably reading this so it should be considered “notice”. If they’re not then I guess we’ll deal with it next year.

Strangely, my mother-in-law was the most gracious of our parents this year and for that I am thankful.

Madison is such a weird kid. Do you know what she’s reading right now? BELOVED by Toni Morrison. Or maybe she’s done now. Either way, I thought it was an odd choice for a 13-year-old and she totally chose it for herself and put it on her birthday wishlist, it’s not like it was suggested reading or anything.  She’s also been reading Stephen King, but I don’t find that weird at all. I started reading Stephen King (It) in grade 1 so I actually think she’s a little late on that one.

She’s kind of flush with books at the moment, but as soon as she’s not, I want her to read The Handmaid’s Tale (which I’m re-reading right now), Middlesex, Water For Elephants, The Virgin Suicides and so many other books that I have sitting on my shelf just waiting to be read. I want to blow her mind with literature. Maybe then she’ll realize that what I’m working on, Cammity Jane, is absolute crap. It bothers me how good she thinks that is because I know it’s not and that’s not me putting myself down, that’s just a fact. It’s fluff, it’s not literature by any stretch of the imagination. I think the primary audience for it is young adults, so it’s good that she likes it as much as she does because she’s my target I think, but I feel like it should be beneath her. She should be smarter than that.

Bleh.

Okay I think I’ve ranted and raved and wasted enough of your time. I think I’m out of things to discuss. Please go to my site and take a look at the two images I posted. Here’s the first one, here’s the second one. Thanks.

PS. I am 15 days smoke-free.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Help RAPS win $25,000!

My friend Phaedie loses one of her friends at least once a week. That’s because she works for a high-capacity cat sanctuary in Richmond, British Columbia, run by the Richmond Animal Protection Society, and unfortunately feline leukemia and feline AIDS is a part of the job, especially when dealing with such close quarters.

To keep cats out of shelters, people need to spay and neuter their pets and that’s what RAPS is aiming to do with Pepsi Canada’s Refresh Project contest. Their aim, with the $25,000 to be won, is to help low-income families spay, neuter and vaccinate their pets in order to help curb the already problematic business of sick, unwanted pets.

So how can you help? It’s easy. Click here and vote. You can sign in using Facebook connect so it really does only take 2 clicks and you’d be making a world of difference for animals and their people. Plus you’d be making Phaedie and I incredibly happy.

We need to try and get them to #1 or #2 as only the top 2 spots receive funding. Currently they’re in 3rd place, so we need to make a solid push to get then into 2nd! I know people don’t have money to give to every charity that comes their way, but if you’d normally be clicking on Farmville crops anyway, please use your mouse-fingers for this as well and help make a difference in the world. Thanks.

The contest voting is until June 30th, it’s a daily vote and I’ll be posting every few days to remind you to vote in case you forget.

For some ungodly reason, I woke up at 6am thinking of ghosts of the pasts. Now it’s almost 7 and I’m unable to go back to sleep, but that’s okay because I’ve got all day to do that – pending the kids let me.

I don’t know why, but I woke up thinking about my dad. My “dad” is not to be confused with Phil. My “dad” is Ken, the man my mother married when I was 5 and the father of my only brother. During the last couple of days, I’ve been thinking about both of them fairly heavily and I keep wondering why that is. I haven’t spoken to my dad since late 2003 and my brother since late 2005. In recent years, my mother’s been reluctant to tell me anything about my brother, so I’ve all but written him off.

For those new to Sunnyland, I’m an only child. I have 3 siblings, but I’m an only child for all intents and purposes. My mom and Ken separated when I was 11 and my brother was 5 and my brother went to live with my dad while I stayed with my mom and thus, we were raised in completely different ways in completely different households with very little overlap until I moved in with my dad briefly when I was 15. And of course my sisters are 26 and 30 years younger than me.

My dad was/is a very bitter man who can hold grudges and hatred in his heart indefinitely. It’s a long story that I’m not going to retell today, but long story short, at the end of my parents’ marriage my mother had an affair and even though their marriage was over long before that happened, my dad remained bitter about that fact until the day I stopped speaking to him and throughout my brother’s entire life, my dad poisoned him against my mother in order to punish her for doing that to him. Or at least that’s what I think his motivation was. Now my brother’s just as fucked up, hateful and bitter as my dad is, especially towards my mother.

When my brother came to stay with me for what was supposed to be a couple of weeks over Xmas in 2005, we talked a lot about the past and I tried to set the record straight about his childhood, but he wouldn’t hear any of it. For example, my mom used to routinely send him letters and packages in the mail when she couldn’t actually go see him and my dad would throw them out. I witnessed this with my own eyes but my brother doesn’t believe me. He thinks my dad is this perfect man who can do no wrong because he raised my brother all on his own, with no help from my mother, or at least that’s his perception. What my brother to this day doesn’t realize is that his entire life, even to this day, his father’s used him as a tool, a weapon, against my mother and nothing more. Oh I have no doubt that Ken loves my brother, as much as he’s capable of love, but as I said before, he’s fed the kid venom since he was a toddler and now my brother’s this fucked up 24-year-old kid with no direction and no life outside of his father, from what I understand.

I stopped speaking to my dad when he didn’t get Wes anything for his first Xmas. When I was giving birth to Wes, my dad called my hospital room moments after Wes was born, I was literally still delivering the placenta, so my mother answered the phone and filled him in on what was going on and for some reason, my dad got mad at ME because I forced him to speak to my mother and didn’t speak to him myself. He held this grudge for almost an entire year, refusing to pick up or hold Wes, which I thought was weird, but I never really thought it was a malicious act until that Xmas when everyone got presents but my son. And then after the presents were opened and my dad started making Xmas dinner, we were all in the kitchen shooting the shit and Wes was on the floor crawling around and pulling himself up on my dad’s leg, my dad completely ignored him and at one point even sort of slid Wes across the floor and away from him with his foot. I played nice for the rest of the day but inside I was seething and that was the last time I saw or spoke to  my dad.

I have a theory on why my dad behaved this way toward my son and I think it goes deeper than just being pissed off that my mother answered the phone while I was in the middle of giving birth. You see, when I found out I was pregnant with Wes, this woman my dad got involved with – against my advice – was about to give birth to my dad’s 2nd son whose name I don’t even know.

Her name was Janet and she was only a  few years older than me, known to be one of the town’s biggest sluts and I’m not the kind of person who uses that term as a negative in many instances, but in Janet’s case, it fit. She would go to the local bars, pick guys up, go back to their places, sleep with them and then steal the money from their wallets before taking off like a thief in the night. And this isn’t just rumour, I know this to be fact because Janet used to be my Aunt Heather’s best friend, my Aunt Heather being my dad’s sister, and Janet lived with her for a while at the same time I was living there as well, and Janet used to brag about stealing these men’s money. It was like a second income for her. When she’d find a “rich” one, she’d become his girlfriend long enough for him to buy her things and pay some of her bills, but when the honeymoon period ended, so would teh relationship and she’d move onto the next guy.

Until one day she found herself a man who she thought would take care of her forever. I don’t remember his name, but he had a good job and drove a nice truck and Janet decided she was going to get her hooks into him so she got pregnant. And again, this isn’t just rumour, this is fact. She got pregnant on purpose to trap this man, I was there when she was telling my Aunt Heather all about it. But Janet got a little more than she bargained for in this man, what she didn’t know was that he had a very expensive coke habit and when her daughter was born, he wasn’t even there for it because he was coked out of his mind on their couch. Long story short, the relationship didn’t work out, so Janet went on welfare and laid low with her daughter while she got her shit together and her figure back.

Enter my dad.

My dad has worked at Toshiba, in the warehouse, for eleventy billion years and as a result he gets a lot of vacation days and makes a fair amount of money. And he’d always had a crush on Janet.

I was there, at the coffee shop, the night it all began between my dad & Janet. The flirting was enough to make a person puke. My Aunt Heather was there too and was equally disgusted by the two of them because she knew how Janet was and she didn’t want Janet to get her hooks into my dad. When they started dating, my Aunt Heather and I stopped speaking to either of them for a few months but they didn’t care, they said “fuck you, we’ll do what we want” and even though both of us warned my dad that she’d try & get pregnant to trap him, he didn’t listen. But lo & behold, that’s exactly what happened and when we found out Janet was pregnant, we both rushed to my dad’s side to support him. The relationship was all but over by the time she conceived so the paternity of the child has always been somewhat in question by everyone but my dad, but he never went for the paternity test and ever since the baby was born, he’s been paying $350/month in child support for a child he’s only even seen once. (Things in that regard could be different now, but knowing my dad, I kinda doubt it.)

I think that baby Wes reminded my dad too much of the child he conceived with Janet and he took his anger and frustration out on us for lack of anywhere else to channel it.

During that time, he became even more bitter toward women and painted them all as evil whores, not even making an exception for me, his daughter. All the time, if we disagreed on something, he’d tell me I was just like my mother and he said it with such disgust it was like I was covered in shit simply for having a vagina. To this day, I’ve never met a bigger misogynist and I hang out on one of the most misogynistic forums on the whole internet. Those boys have nothing on Ken and the attitudes I grew up with.

Another reason our relationship began to cool is that one day my dad got a little drunk and called me up to confess things to me that a daughter should probably never know about her dad. Let me preface this part of the story by telling you that my dad and I have always been very open about sex. When I lost my virginity (on his couch), he was the first person I told. When I realized that I couldn’t have an orgasm from sex, he and I discussed the million ways and positions to make it happen. (It never did.)

Well, this one night he called me up and the first thing he told me was that he’d been drinking and then the conversation became this fucked up confessional that I couldn’t tear myself away from. Among the things he told me was that he had this recurring dream about being sexually dominated by another man and sucking his dick and that he wanted to make this dream a reality. I suggested he go to a gay bar and find a guy to hook up with, I even volunteered to go with him to do this, but before we finished that part of the conversation, he was telling me that if he laid on his back in just the right way, with his legs and feet up against the wall, he could suck his own dick and that he liked the taste of his own semen. As I was digesting this little fun fact, he started telling me about how sometimes he would go to the produce section of the grocery store and buy mini cucumbers which he’d take him and put in his ass while he jerked off. I told him toys were safer and he said cucumbers were cheaper and he could throw away the evidence afterward so my brother would never find anything while snooping. After telling me all of this, he told me that if I ever told anyone any of this, he’d deny it all and I’d look stupid, so for the longest time I never told anyone but Blake.

But when my brother was here in 2005 and telling me how he hoped to grow up to be half the man his dad was, I told him about the whole conversation. He of course, called me a liar at first, but then I pointed out that Ken has never been happy with women, any women, and has been perpetually single for most of his life. Isn’t that a little weird for a heterosexual man? And then my brother said that Ken hates gays and I said that’s even more proof that he’s closeted, so many closeted men claim to hate gays and say all kinds of derogatory things towards them to overcompensate for their own feelings. My brother admitted that my theory held a bit of weight but then he said he’d love his dad if he was gay or straight anyway so the conversation didn’t matter, which I agreed with and that was the end of it…until we woke up the next day and my brother blasted me for trying to tarnish his dad’s “good name” by making up lies about him. (As if I could even make up something like that!)

That’s when my brother forbid me from calling Ken my dad anymore. He said, “he’s my dad, not yours, quit saying he is” and that hurt. In all the years my dad and I had fought each other my whole life, the one thing that was never ever said by either of us was “you’re not my dad!” or “you’re not even my daughter!” That was a line we just never crossed and my brother that day crossed it.

Then he started getting racist and violent, punching my walls and calling me a “nigger”, so I grabbed the phone and threatened to call the cops if he didn’t pack his shit up and get the fuck out of my house. At the time I had two handsets for our phone, so I handed him one and said he’d better arrange for a ride because his shit was going to be out in the snow in the next few minutes, so he called a friend, packed his shit up and as he was leaving he apologized for getting violent and scaring my kids and said he’d be back one day. He promised he’d be back. That was the last time I saw him.

I used to ask my mom if she’d heard from my brother and what he was up to and she used to tell me (he was usually unemployed, had a trashy girlfriend, living with Ken and trying to get money out of my mom) but more and more the updates have become less and less, like she’s reluctant to tell me what he’s doing, like it’s none of my business. So I don’t ask anymore.

I’m an only child. *shrug*

Now why the hell this was all in my head at 6 o’clock in the fucking morning is beyond me but I’m glad it’s now been purged and I don’t have to think about them for another year. Maybe since things tend to go down with my family around Xmas, I tend to think about this stuff around this time of year, I dunno.

I worry constantly about the deathbed confessional. Ken is not a healthy man and he’s halfway through his 50s, his own dad died of cancer in his mid-60s. I worry about my brother having to take care of him and watch him die all alone. I worry that I’m going to get a call one day, and I know I will, that Ken is dying and that he may want to see me. I play the scenario in my head all the time as to what I’m gong to do when that time comes. If Ken wants to see me and I don’t go, my brother will never forgive me…but do I care? If Ken doesn’t want to see me, should I go to the funeral? I figure I probably shouldn’t. When the time comes, will I be upset? Will I have regrets? Will he? I think about these things all the time. In fact, I think similar things about my grandmother and aunts & uncles that I no longer speak to all the time too, but this post isn’t about them.

Really what I wonder about the most is…when does life stop being something you have to survive and become something else? For me life has always been about survival and now that it’s not, I feel a little bit lost. Maybe that’s why my brain wanders into the painful past so often, it’s what I know and there’s comfort in that. This life I live now where most of my needs are taken care of, I have all the time in the world to do practically anything I want and everything’s going to be okay? I don’t so much know how to live that life.

But I’m working on figuring it out. One day I’ll find my niche.

And I think this post is done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(more…)

It’s currently 2:18am and I have Gogol Bordello playing pretty loudly and I seem to be in a much better mood that I was yesterday. This is in part to getting a crapload of sleep today, talking to Blake until 5am yesterday morning, internet friends coming through with birthday presents so I don’t feel like a total loser, my friend Raya subsidizing my subscription to the Toronto Star because she’s amazing like that and having a good, productive meeting on a project I’m working on with Suzi Blu and some lovely ladies I’ve met through her Ning community.

Another thing that has helped is that I have my friend Jesse back and last night he and Alex came over and we just hung out, watched trashy TV and Battlestar Galactica and all in all had a grand ol’ time.

Now what I mean by having my friend Jesse “back” is that, of you’ll recall, in September me, him and his now ex-girlfriend Jen had a falling out due to them pissing me off by getting a dog when they weren’t ready to care for one and also got it at what I would consider a backyard breeder instead of a shelter. It’s a long story, but if you’re interested, feel free to dig through my Live Journal archives for August or September and catch up.

This week Jesse and Jen parted ways and he moved back home and as a result, we’ve picked up our friendship pretty much where it left off, minus our mutual love of marijuana and cigarettes. This makes me really happy because right now, I think Jesse and I kinda need each other and I missed that bald motherfucker, so I’m glad he’s in our lives again. Plus, the kids adore him and were happy about the reunion too.

Here are a couple of shots I took last night of my dog Lucky being a total suckface with Alex and Jesse:

(Alex is the girl, Jesse is the…..girly boy.)

I know this “high” is only temporary, it’ll maybe only even last through to tonight, but I’ll take what I can get. Tonight I took advantage of my good mood and extra energy and put the first coat of varnish on Wes’ painting finally. It’ll be dry by tomorrow and I’ll do the second coat and when that’s dry on Monday, I’ll do the final coat of light varnish on the sides and it’ll be ready to hang on his wall.

Anyway, none of this is what I wanted to write about tonight. Tonight I wanted to write about agoraphobia and my plans to overcome it, as prompted by Blake and I’s tearful 5 hour discussion on the matter yesterday. There are so many new people coming to my site these days that I feel like I need to put down some backstory and explain who I used to be and who I am now.

Here are the facts:

• I’ve only gone somewhere by myself twice in the last almost 7 years.
• I used to be an excellent, confident driver, but I stopped driving altogether about 4 years ago.
• I used to be sort of the mascot for a well-known Canadian indie band called Scratching Post and it was my job to run around venues during shows, dancing on chairs and selling t-shirts and albums while wearing panties with the band’s logo, one of the band’s t-shirts and knee high leather shit kickers.
• I used to be an independent single mom going to college at the same time.
• I went to college for ADVERTISING, where everything took planning, was done in groups and you had to present something in front of the class pretty much every day. And I was good at it.
• I used to be a (fairly popular-ish) camgirl, unafraid to bare it all in front of up to 20,000 viewers at a time.
• I used to drive to Toronto every single day, down the 404 to the Don Valley Parkway and then to downtown, all at 120 km/h. On the rare occasion I drive to the store in our tiny town, I get freaked out going 50 km/h, which is the speed limit, so I go 40.
• I used to pay my own bills and handle my own money.
• I have an evil grandmother who used to be our landlord who beat me the fuck down and is definitely part of the reason why I’m so fucked up.
• As much as I love my mother, she plays a big part in my neurosis as well, which stems from her having me when she was 15.
• My biological father abandoned me for good around age 2 or 3, but we have a relationship now. I call him by his first name, Phil, instead of “dad” because it just doesn;t feel right.  I love his wife, Lisa and my two little sisters, Raili who’s almost 4 and Rachael who’s only a few weeks old.
• My mom married when I was 5 or 6 and gave me a step-dad for a while, but he turned out to be creepy and emotionally abusive in the end. I haven’t spoken to him for almost 7 years and don’t plan to ever again.
• I have a brother named Chad who’s 20-something. I haven’t seen or heard from him in about 3 years and don’t expect to.
• I’ve been on my own since I was 15. This was made possible by student welfare.
• I’m a serial monogamist. I’ve been in one seriously abusive relationship, one seriously long distance relationship, one brief “friends with benefits” relationship and then I met my husband Blake.
• I had my daughter at 19 because the only thing I knew I wanted to do with my life was to be a mom and due to endometriosis the possibility of that was slipping away so I took the chance while I still had it.
• Because of endometriosis I’ve had 3 laparoscopies (cautery) and a colonoscopy because they thought I had endometrial deposits in my bowels. (I don’t, thank god.)
• On March 11th of this year I’ll be having my 4th laparoscopy, just to assess the extent of the disease and 3-6 months later I’ll have my 5th scope where they’ll remove the endometrial lesions with a laser.
• I’ve never had a 9-5 job and don’t ever intend to.
• I consider expressing myself through writing and art my job and some people have been following my life online for about 11 years now.

And I think that covers just about everything, although I’m sure some people would probably add to that list.

I get sad a lot, and frustrated, thinking about the fearless, independent person I used to be and the scared, nervous headcase I am now. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve been out of my damn mind since forever and I’m as bipolar as they come, but the agoraphobia is something different. It keeps me not just from living my life, but from having one at all.

Our theory on why it even happened at all is pretty simple. As a child, I took care of myself a lot and survived a lot and then as a teenager, I had to make my own way and take care of myself. And then after that I was a mom and it wasn’t easy and I did it while surviving an extremely abusive, fucked up relationship. After that, it was single mom time and getting through college all by myself. Do you see what might of happened there? The fact was, all throughout my life shit got piled on me and “losing it” was never an option because I was in survival mode. But when I met and married my husband, suddenly there was someone to help me carry these burdens and at the same time, I had a little more headspace to examine the previous 22 years of my life and fully absorb everything that happened. And it fucked me up.

Suddenly Blake could do the groceries, so I didn’t have to. Blake could handle the bills so I didn’t have to. Blake could go out and get take-out food so I didn’t have to. We lived in a very rural area where you had to drive to go anywhere and since Blake either always had the car for work or was willing to acquire the things we need, I never left the house. And after a while it just became easier to stay in the house where I couldn’t get in any trouble, where I couldn’t spend money, where I wouldn’t waste gas, where there didn’t have to be any worry on Blake’s part that I was seeing someone else, where if the car broke down, it wouldn’t be my fault and I wouldn’t have to deal with it. Where I didn’t have to interact with other parents at Sparks or my kid’s teachers, where I didn’t have to go to the birthday parties or school plays.

But back then, it was a choice. Somehow, and I don’t even know how, it stopped being a choice and suddenly the idea of leaving the house was scary. And much to my surprise, one day I realized that I could no longer do it. I remember the day well. Blake had won tickets for us to go see Metallica and on the day of the concert I found myself unable to get dressed and move my feet towards the door, so I sat on our bed and cried instead. It took Blake about 20 minutes to talk me into going, which made us late for the concert so I missed seeing the Deftones. The whole time we were at the show, all I could think about was getting back home and it got to the point where I don’t even remember the show at all except that I was there and didn’t want to be. I know I wore my purple Paul Frank polar bear pajama bottoms and a black tank top though, which is what I’d slept in the night before.

After that, we moved to the town where we live now, called Elmvale, which is very very small and has a population of only 1700 people. To be fair, this town is exactly what I wanted when we were looking to buy our first home, but once we moved and I realized how unlike the locals I was and the fact that I was now 2 hours away from everything and everyone I’ve ever known, the agoraphobia worsened.

Then I had my psychotic break and was hospitalized for 10 days. It would be a year later that I was diagnosed with biploar 1, generalized anxiety and agoraphobia by the shrink at the mental health centre I go to every month. Then came two years of psychiatric medication hell, which I’ve done my best to chronicle both in this blog and my Live Journal.

I’m so sick of telling that story. I’m so sick of telling people that I was the product of a teen pregnancy. I’m tired of telling people about why I was a young mother myself. I’m tired of writing about pretty much everything I’ve just written about and I’ve decided that after this post, I’m never going to write about them again. If you want to know the nitty gritty details, that’s what Live Journal archives are for.

I’ve always said that my agoraphobia felt like I was in a cocoon, that so many fucked up things have happened that I just needed time to rest, regroup and eventually grow and I feel that it’s finally time to turn into a butterfly.

I’m going to be 30 in exactly one week and thus begins a new chapter of my life. Do you know that tonight I found some new wrinkles under my eyes when I smile? I swear they weren’t there a week ago. Even my body is showing signs that it’s time to move on and become a new and improved version of my former self. And while the prospect scares the absolute fucking SHIT out of me, I’m also excited and I feel somewhat fortunate that I have the opportunity to start building my life from scratch, exactly how I want it.

As I mentioned, Blake and I had a long talk about all of this last night, mostly in regards to my insecurities about being productive, having value and contributing to both our family and the world at large.

My immersion therapy begins once the weather starts getting warmer and it begins by walking to the end of our driveway every day to get the paper. Ideally I’m going to adjust my sleep schedule and make it part of my routine to do this around 11am or noon. Then I’m going to read the newspaper while I have some sort of breakfast – BEFORE I check my e-mail, BEFORE I check my Live Journal’s friends list, BEFORE I  hit up Twitter, before I do any of that.

My next step is similar to the above, except my goal is to have some sort of breakfast inside and read the rest of the newspaper on the couch we have under the carport outside. Where people can see me. Where I’m sort of sheltered, but also exposed if anyone were to walk by.

After that, it’s to do all of the above, then do internet stuff, then take Lucky for a walk to the end of the block and back. I may not do this every day, I do have pain often and some days it does rain, especially in the spring, but it’s going to be something that I’m going to do for as long as it takes for it to be no big deal.

Then comes the big step. I walk to the end of the driveway to get the paper, I come inside, I make myself a sandwich and pack it up and put it in my new bag along with the sections of the paper I like the most, my cell phone, my camera, my Nintendo DS, my sketchbook, my journal, my notebook and whatever book I’m reading at the time. (It’s a big bag!) Then I take a deep breath and Lucky and I walk down to the next block where there’s a park with a stage for outdoor music, but at the back of this park, there’s also a path with a river that leads to a bench in the middle of a garden maintained by the town’s horticultural society. The bench has a plaque and is dedicated to someone, but I’ve ony seen it once so I don’t know who. A couple I think, though. It is this bench that I’m going to make my own. It is here where I’m going to lie Lucky up and share my lunch with him while I read the newspaper or do the crossword or sodoku and every day I’m going to try to stay at the bench longer and longer.

But my plans go even further than that. If you go down the path, past the bench, there’s a clearing where the river opens up and there’s a bridge over it. Black squirrels run around everywhere there and the horticultural society plants all kinds of flowers there. If I were to go further along the path, which I don’t plan on doing, I would eventually come to a park for kids, with playground equipment, in a neighbourhood.

It is my intent to not only be okay with doing all of this, but to document it all through pictures and videos and post it all on this very site, because that’s pretty much what I do.

After I come home from these journeys, I intend to watch Oprah and make art and then after dinner edit pictures and video and make my blogs posts. This is how I want my life to go, at least in the beginning.

Once I become more comfortable in being by myself, in public and Lucky’s training (he has separation anxiety and takes off if you leave him alone), I plan on exploring this town a little more and photographing what I can, like the homeless man we have who’s probably the most amazing homeless man you’ve ever seen. Also? There’s this shed behind the hair salon where about 30 stray cats live that all the kids play with on their way home from school. I’ve never seen it myself by my daughter’s told me about it and I wanna see. There’s also a particular alleyway where high school kids like to sneak smokes that in my head sounds like a fabulous place to take pictures.

I would also like to be confident enough to be able to treat myself to lunch in one of our town’s restaurants and maybe even getting to know some of the locals.

In the summer I’m home with the kids and don’t feel comfortable going anywhere with them, so I’m going to take care of my garden, which, as I wrote about earlier this week, I was afraid to do last summer (seeds are coming!) and move my newspaper/breakfast activities to my front porch which is more exposed and prone to neighbour aggro, which is one of my fears.

And that’s about as far as I can see right now. I’m not sure what fall is going to bring, but I would like to be able to go to the post office and the pharmacy to pick up my own packages and drugs so Blake doesn’t have to do it, but I don’t know if I’ll be that comfortable with things yet. We’ll see.

What Blake and I talked about all last night, as I said, are my fears of being productive, having value and contributing to both our family and the world at large. I feel like it’s selfish and unproductive to sit in the park all afternoon and do something leisurely. I feel like it’s selfish to go to a restaurant and have lunch while there’s perfectly good food at home and my kids and husband are brown bagging it. (Even though I’d be using my own money from paintings, it’s not really about money anyway.)  But then Blake pointed out that it’s just as “selfish” and less productive to sit in this house and basically do nothing but bitch about the fact that I can’t leave the house on the internet. Blogging, he says, does contribute to the world at large, he’s seen some of the e-mails I get that basically say that, and he says that me being in a better mood and being inspired is contributing to the betterment of our family and also the betterment of my art and writing.

I asked him what kind of life he envisioned for me one year from now, five years from now, 15 years from now and he said that all he wants for me is to have the adventures I’m prone to having when I actually decide to step out of Sunnyland and grace the real world with my presence. And he thinks that those adventures will only get bigger as I grow, which I agree with.

So, in a nutshell, it’s time to live life and today, I’m kinda psyched about it. Tomorrow I’ll probably be back to being a moody bitch, worried about my birthday and my upcoming surgery, but for tonight I’m okay and I’m going to take full advantage of it.

And with that, I’m off.