When Madison gets home from school, I’m going to be shaving my head again. I don’t want to but I don’t really feel that I have a choice. My hair has been steadily falling out since August and it’s gotten to the point where it is so sparse, it just looks terrible and I don’t want to look terrible at Touched By Fire next Thursday.

Last night after my shower, Blake was brushing my hair because I have a hard time getting all the knots out so he does it for me most of the time, and when he was finished, there was so much hair all over me that I had to change my shirt. That ball of hair above the clippers is what came out of my brush last night and that’s how much comes out every time I wash my hair. Blake tries to hide it from me, which I appreciate, but there’s no hiding from what I’ve got going on on top of my head these days, it just looks awful.

The hair that I have left looks scraggly and this week I was going to have my friend Jen come cut it (she’s in hair school) but there really isn’t enough to cut and I don’t think there would be any way to make what I have left look good. What I have left looks really dry and frizzy, even though it isn’t. It just looks that way because of how little there is and how fine my hair is to begin with. My roots are about 4 inches long but I’ve been afraid to dye my hair in case more of it fell out (I’m naturally blonde, just not THIS blonde…).

Since so much has fallen out, I’m just giving up and shaving it off. There’s no saving what I have left. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, but today’s the day because I’m feeling brave. I’m going to videotape the process but I’m not sure if I’ll put it online or not. It depends on how much I cry. (I’m an ugly cryer.)

So that’s what’s happening today.

“And you don’t know how it feels,
You don’t know how it feels,
No you don’t know how it feels,
To be meeeeeeeeeee.”

- Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

 So I’ve heard from Jen. Actually, let me back up a bit…On the suggestion of a couple of friends on Live Journal, I sent Jen the link to the post on Live Journal that was a duplicate of the one you’re reading now. I did this on Facebook. You can read the comments on the LJ post here, if interested. I chose to link her to that version of the post because that’s where most of the people were commenting, including my IRL best friend, Alex, whose life would also be affected by any decision I made in regards to this.

In the comments, my friend Charlie (woodoo24) and I exchanged these words with regards to simply sending her the link to the post:

Charlie:  Meh…do you want a bunch of internet people jumping in her shit?

Sunny: Well, yes and no. Does she deserve that? Yes. Does she also deserve to tell her side of the story? Yes. Are we going to be friends at the end of this? I doubt it. But I think she deserves to know, especially considering that the last communication said something like “I know you hate me for some reason…”, indicating that she doesn’t know why we haven’t spoken in 2 years.

I dunno. I just dunno. People will only jump her shit if she lets them. She can read the post and talk to me privately afterward.

So I gave her the option to message me privately, which she did this evening. Because she took the option to message me privately, I’m going to extend that courtesy by not posting what she said on my site because if she wanted it on here, she would have commented.

Without going into too much detail, she confessed wholeheartedly to the guinea pig and really made no effort to pass the buck onto anyone else. She did say that her life had spiraled down pretty far by that point (which is true), with Carolyn being in the driver’s side and Jen in the back. When Carolyn said she knew what to do, Jen believed her because Jen was very much Carolyn’s follower. Knowing Jen’s personality, I believe this. At the same time, she was in the midst of breaking up with Jesse who may or may not have been already beginning his relationship with Patricia at the time (their roommate at the time, who Jesse is now engaged to), she was in massive debt and amassing more and more every time she turned around and as I said, things were tailspinning out of control.

That is NOT an excuse. That is an explanation. There is no excuse for what she did, which she recognizes, but what’s done is done and as long as she knows that what she and Carolyn did was majorly fucked up, I can accept the heartfelt apology she gave, not punish her for the rest of her life and be friends again.

YOU may not understand this, that’s okay, you don’t have to, but the message I got from Jen tonight was from a changed person and I believe her when she says it was never her intent to hurt the guinea pig. As she pointed out: “I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 12, I am now volunteering for Greenpeace, I climbed the CN tower earlier this year to raise money for The World Wildlife Fund.” This is not the profile of an animal abuser and I never thought she was one, I just thought this one incident was fucked up and until now, something I couldn’t forgive. But enough time has passed and as I said, she’s grown as a person since then (the old Jen would have blamed everything under the sun but herself), so I think slowly but surely we’re going to get back on track to being friends again. Like I said in my original post, I think that’s going to have to happen slowly though, because I have to be sure she’s not just putting on an act or lying to me or whatever. I have a pretty good bullshit detector and in the past I’ve let a lot of things slide with her, so that’s something *I’m* going to have to work on for this friendship to work.

I haven’t messaged her back yet, so she may see this post before I do, but she was “sick to [her] stomach” by all of your comments on both of the other posts so I think we’ve been successful in teaching her a lesson. Maybe it wasn’t our job to teach a lesson though, but maybe more like…we sent a message. And I think we have to be happy with that because I don’t think she’ll be irresponsible with a pet ever again – at least not while she’s friends with me. Oh and I’m happy to report that, “that puppy that Jesse and I got together is my entire world, she never goes without anything, she has a great home, she’s well trained, well groomed and the happiest little creature ever.“

I think everyone is deserving of a 2nd chance, but it’s conditional. They have to have learned something or grown from it and it appears as though Jen’s done both. Granted, what she did was monumentally stupid and yes, unforgivable for some people, but time can heal most wounds eventually and I think that’s where I am right now.

I understand that not everyone is going to “get” this and some people may even look down on me from now on because I’ve forgiven her and if that’s the case, so be it. We just have differing philosophies, I guess, different experiences. Like I said in my original post, who here among us hasn’t done something monumentally stupid whether they got caught or not, whether they admit to it or not? Hell, that’s Post Secret’s bread & butter. You can’t tell me you haven’t done something really dumb or mean or cruel and wished for forgiveness, if you haven’t already gotten it. And if you haven’t, well congratulations, you’re better than the rest of us, continue looking down your nose at us from your pedestal in the clouds.

She’s sorry.
She’s learned and grown from what she did.
That’s enough for me.
By tomorrow we will be friends again.

So now that that’s off my chest, guess what? I must have misread the scale when they weighed me in kg at the hospital. I weigh 113lbs according to the Wii Fit. Guess what else? Tonight I had spaghatta nadle for dinner, with domperidone 15 minutes before eating and not only did I keep it down (this being one of my triggery foods) but I didn’t even feel sick afterward. Also I looked domperidone up on Wikipedia a couple of days ago and read about how it can cause lactation, which made me realize where I’d heard the name before: Ana Voog bought some from the internet when she was having trouble breastfeeding her first child.

The domperidone hasn’t been perfect though. On Saturday afternoon I took some and had mini donuts from the fair, followed by fries and gravy and about 2 hours later, I hurled it all back up. I don’t know if I took the drug too late for it to have an effect (Blake brought home the donuts, I took a pill and ate the donuts – well, SOME of the donuts), then I had fries and gravy like, half an hour later or if it was the greasy food itself, which is technically on the bad list. At the same time, tomatoes are on the bad list too and my dinner tonight stayed down just fine. That was the 2nd time I threw up this week. Earlier in the week I barfed up a can of ginger ale, which made absolutely NO sense considering I was drinking half a case of that a day when I was in the hospital and never had any trouble with carbonation before. In fact carbonation, whether it’s ginger ale or a Coke, seems to settle my stomach so wtf? I guess it’s just a mystery.

Okay I think I’m going to go see if Blake wants to watch Who the Fuck is Jackson Pollock? in my office while I work on my sketchbook, which is coming along nicely. I think I may actually have it done by deadline! Imagine that!

Goodnight internets. I hope you still like me tomorrow.

PS. Jen is no longer friends with Carolyn. They haven’t been friends for about a year.

Jen.

I hate to bring this up again, but…

Apparently she’s lost a shit tonne of weight due to not living with Jesse the junk food monger anymore and she’s back in beauty school. Basically she’s got her life back in order.

Here’s the thing: I genuinely miss Jen as a friend. She was a very good friend to me, she just did something that was pretty unforgivable, at least in the version I was told.

It’s been 2 years since I’ve spoken to her and every time Blake runs into her, I agonize over whether or not I should be straight with her and say, “Hey, listen, this is why we’re not friends any more and I don’t know what to do about it because I miss having you as a friend but that’s pretty unforgivable.” At least give her a chance to tell her side of the story.

However, knowing Jen she won’t take any responsibility for what happened. None of it will be her fault. And then we won’t really be anywhere except kinda where we are now, except at least she’d know that I know what happened. Is that better?

The last time I had this conundrum was the end of August, when she reached out to say that she’d been on my site and that she saw I’d been sick and that she was glad I was doing better. That post was previously friends-only, but I made it public for the sake of *this* post. Back then a few friends seemed to think that having a friendship with her again was possible. Others said that what she did was unforgivable, to just send a generic response and leave her in the past. My best friend, Alex, was in the latter group and being my best friend, her opinion carries a lot of weight.

I think about having friends over and how uncomfortable it might be to have Jen and Alex and Ronny in the same room, with all of us knowing what Jen did and I feel like putting this whole thing out of my mind, but Blake keeps running into her in town – it’s inevitable in a town this small – so this question just keeps coming back up: should I let Jen back into my life?

Blake thinks I should, but he doesn’t have the passion for animals that I have and can forgive someone doing something so fucking stupid. He can see where she was coming from.

I think enough time has going by that maybe, just maybe, I could forgive her for what she did, as long as I heard her side of the story. I mean, let’s look at the facts:

- She didn’t clean out the guinea pig’s cage which lead to infected sores on its stomach and it was suffering.
- She didn’t want to take it to the vet because A) she was broke and B) she didn’t want to get charged with animal cruelty (she wouldn’t have been, probably, but I can understand the paranoia, especially in a person who smoked a lot of pot) or be judged as a bad pet owner.
- So, she tried, with the help and support of her friend, to end the animal’s suffering without incriminating herself in any way.

I can understand this chain of thoughts. Was it stupid? Absofuckinglutely.  Was it cruel? No doubt, but here’s my next question: Was the cruelty intentional? I don’t think so. I think that’s the exact opposite thing they were trying to achieve. I think that Jen was presented with a novel scenario by her friend Carolyn who probably said something to the effect of, “I know how to put it to sleep and I know how to get the material to do so and it’ll be totally harmless!”, which would be a very attractive proposition to someone in Jen’s situation.

So was this an act of animal cruelty or an act of having too much faith in your friend? Yes, she neglected the guinea pig, that’s all on her and yes, she knew what she should have done (take it to the vet for treatment, obviously), especially in hindsight, but like I said, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

Who among us hasn’t done something monumentally stupid that you wish you could take back? If she told me that this thing she and Carolyn did was monumentally stupid and she wished she could take it back, would that be enough to forgive her? I’m asking you, the reader, my friends, would that be enough? What if she added that she didn’t speak to or have anything to do with Carolyn anymore? Would that be enough?

I’m thinking that might be enough for me. Maybe. A person grows a lot in 2 years, especially in their 20s, and from Blake’s reports, she has. She’s not the same old, pathologically lying Jen. Or at least that’s the case by the sounds of things.

If we were to have a relationship again though, it would have to start slowly. Like, we’d add each other on Facebook and interact that way for a while. Then she’d come over and we’d go from there.

My big fear in all of this is Alex. Alex not understanding how I could forgive Jen. Alex not wanting to be here if Jen’s here. ALex feeling uncomfortable if Jen’s here. Alex, being my best friend, is my #1 priority and if she says “you’re crazy, she doesn’t deserve our forgiveness” (because it is very much *our* forgiveness, not just *mine*), then that’s it, she doesn’t deserve our forgiveness. End of story.

So I guess that’s where things stand. I think Jen’s side of the guinea pig story is worth hearing and of course posting, since Jesse’s side was posted publicly and then I guess we’d go from there – unless the overwhelming response to this post is that I should continue to ignore her, with Alex’s opinion being about 75% and “other” 25%. (No pressure, Alex…) And of course, opinions on the matter don’t have to be public, you can e-mail me: Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com

And now I think I’m going to stop writing and go work on my sketchbook. Have I mentioned how much I love my Inktense pencils? Because I do. I love them immensely. I want to live in a sexless marriage with them only to have them get fed up with the sexless part and leave me for another woman, but dammit, it would be glorious while it lasted, the art we could create together…*sigh*

Inktense pencils and domperidone. This is my world. This is my life.

I JUST MADE THIS POST PUBLIC.
It was previously “friends only”.
But since I’m no longer friends with Jesse or Jen, I decided there was no reason it should still be “friends only” so there it is in all its horror.

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

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.

Well hello there internets, I’m glad you’re here because I have quite a bit to write about this evening.

First things first, I added a new page to this site under the “People In My World” category, god I’m so productive, I know. I don’t know how I do it either. But seriously, it can get confusing when I start writing about people so I’m trying to write a blurb or two on each person in my world for those moments when you just don’t know who the fuck I’m talking about. It’s taken me, oh, six months to do Jesse & Jen’s paragraphs, but I’m happy with them, so up they went.

In other news, Jen showed up at my house with a box tonight and inside that box was a baby rat. (Yes, another one.) We’ve decided to name her Twinkle (Twink for short) and she’s pretty damn cute. This video is of when we were introducing Twink to Zilla in the bath tub, as suggested by some friends of mine.

So far the introductions are going well, except Zilla dragged Twink from one end of the cage to the other by the scruff of the neck a few times. Twink didn’t seem to be hurt or distressed while this was happening so we just let it happen for a bit before putting them in separate cages for the night. I was thinking that since Twink is a baby, maybe Zilla was thinking of it as her baby; either that or maybe it’s just an establishing dominance thing. Despite having many rats as pets I don’t know all that much about rat behaviour, now that I think about it. I’ve only ever had single rats except for Kurt & Courtney, which I got in grade 9. The unfortunate thing was that in the case of my rats, instead of mating, Courtney really did kill Kurt. He wouldn’t leave her alone and one morning I found him inside their little house, missing a good chunk out of his throat. Ever since then, I only ever had single rats. Lovely story, huh?

I think Zilla & Twink are going to end up getting along fine, they’re already grooming each other, which I’m assuming is a good sign, so on some level they’re already getting along. Still, seperate cages at night for the first little while, I think, just to be on the safe side.

The other thing I wanted to talk about was how awesome my friend Sini is. No matter how low I feel, Sini can always make me feel better with just how awesome she is. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at her YouTube account. :D

Too lazy? Click here for just one of her gems:

There just aren’t any words and that’s why I adore her. :D

Well, it’s time for bed. Happy Tuesday!