- 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.

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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.

My head is killing me, my glands are swollen, my throat is sore and my eyes are burning with fever so I know I’m getting sick and I should get some sleep, especially since I have to work tomorrow (oh yeah, I work weekends now, which I’m absolutely not thrilled about, but adjusting…) but this article really got me thinking about my own blogging habits, especially since Madison learned CSS today and is creating a site of her own. (And no, I’m not telling you where it is, although some of you may have a pretty good idea and I’m pretty sure it’s Googleable. If you find it, please be respectful and remember that she’s 12, okay?)

So these Mormon ladies who blog…they have impressively designed sites and take really nice pictures (well, a few of them do, a few in the article not so much) and it’s all very aesthetic and I’m really really jealous of this. Hell, I’m jealous of non-Mormon ladies who blog and have all of those elements too because I don’t.

In the beginning, when I blogged on a website I created myself with a mix of hand-coding and Dreamweaver, with graphics I created myself in Photoshop (I was especially proud of my SunnySlut.com burlesque design that I was going to link in this post but apparently the index.html page is missing so all that’s there now is a useless index full of eBay crap my friend Nicole asked me to host in 2001), but blogging that way was difficult, especially since I was updating the site and Live Journal at the same time, eventually getting a paid Live Journal account so I could embed it into my site with javascript that never worked properly with comments and then finally I gave up because I was doing 5x the work fixing code instead of actually writing and living my life and that was when I made the move to WordPress (2007). WordPress themes are CSS and I don’t know CSS and I don’t have the time to learn CSS (but I wish I did) or the mental aptitude for retaining such nerdery so I rely on Blake’s skills to shape this blog into…what it is, which is extremely bare bones, yet functional, while I use a premade theme on my Live Journal, which gets a billion more comments and conversations on it than my WordPress blog ever does. (WordPress blog = SunnyCrittenden.com.)

Which brings me to the next thing: my site (blog, whatever) apparently gets on average about 2500 unique visitors, if I’m reading the Google Analytics correctly, so why the fuck aren’t any of them commenting here? The only comments I really get are from casual passers-by or ladies I know from art circles who come here every few months and catch up on my adventures in bursts. And the trolls of course, but they’re useless – yet dedicated! my biggest fans! – whose comments I don’t let come through because they’re just trying to negatively affect me. Admittedly, sometimes it works, but i still won’t give them what they want, which is attention, which I also suppose I’m giving them now. *sigh*

Moving right along…

So I’ve been doing this blog thing for a decade. And a lot of people have been following my antics for that long and I think that’s sort of a weird accomplishment. It kind of pisses me off to see these hipster mommy bloggers, Mormon or otherwise, get featured in things like Salon articles or The Huffington Post or the New York times and all these other places when there are so many of us who have been doing this longer and (I’m not necessarily including myself here), better. In the comments of the Salon article I linked, there are a lot of people saying that the Mormon ladies’ blogs are glossed over and not true portrayals of their lives and after reading a few of them tonight for a while, I think I’m going to have to agree, whereas myself and the ladies I chill with, we show the good, the bad and the ugly, right along with the joyous events and happy things (another confession: I know in the past I’ve been very negative in my writing because I was depressed, don’t forget that I’m A) a human being and B) a mentally ill human being). I think out of all of the lady bloggers I know, I’m probably the biggest over-sharer of the bunch.

DON’T GET ME WRONG: I am NOT complaining that I haven’t been recognized by legitimate mass media or anything of the kind, it just bugs me that old schoolers, SUCH AS myself, get passed over for web 2.0ers. Y’know? Like all these YouTube “celebrities” have their own fucking Wikipedia articles that no one argues should be taken down because none of them have really “done” anything, yet my friend Steph the Geek’s Wikipedia article was taken down several times because people complained it was a vanity article when in fact, she’s done a HELL of a lot more than these YouTube brats. Cam culture is actually this huge, sort of integral thing within internet history, yet the only camgirls I know, the forebears of YouTube itself, who have their own Wikipedia articles are Jennifer Ringley, Ana Voog and Steph the Geek (who, as I said, had to fight to keep her article up, see the discussion of it to know what I’m talking about.) And for the love of kittens, I am NOT complaining here that I don’t have a Wikipedia article so please do not even go down that road. I have done NOTHING to merit such a thing and it bugs me when people in the past have suggested I have. My only real claim to fame, so to speak, is that…fuck, I don’t even know. I don’t really think I have one, to be perfectly honest.

I’m babbling, I know. I’m sick and I’m having “racing thoughts” and I totally forgot what the point of this post was.

I do know that it involved what I like to call a “site overhaul” that I’m hoping  to execute sometime in March with Blake’s help and possibly my friend Charlie’s excellent banner-making skills. The colours will probably remain the same because they are my colours and the “feel” probably won’t change, but I’m hoping to add more graphical elements and a better comment system. (Blake’s going to hate that I just said the latter because he spent a long time making the comments system I have now…) The reason I don’t have a more graphic website, as in a website with more graphics, is because I don’t know how to add them myself, which is another thing I’m hoping to remedy. For example, my sidebars are ALL text and the reason they are all text is because that’s all I know how to do. In my WordPress control panel, I have menus and buttons and shit that allow me to add links and things to my sidebars but in WordPress, I would have no idea how to add a .png in the sidebar that links to something. When my sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project gets digitized, I will have my own link on the project’s site where you can see it and where you can see my bio and pictures of my other work and things like that, so when that goes live, I would like to have in one of my sidebars a graphic from The Sketchbook Project (they are free and available), which I can link to that. Without having to ask Blake to do it.

I guess this is a resolution of sorts, to be more independent with my own…is it work? I’ve always sort of considered it work but at the same time it’s absolutely compulsive at this point so it’s just BEING. THIS RIGHT HERE is how I function, how I process my own thoughts. I absolutely cannot imagine my life without this outlet.

I don’t know if I’ve ever acknowledged this out loud, so I’m going to do so now: I think a BIG reason as to why I became a housebound agoraphobe (currently in recovery) is because on these here internets, at least in the places I frequent, I’m somewhat of a big fish. Meatside, not so much. On the internets, I have a lot of control over the environment and the interactions I have. Meatside, not so much, everything’s completely unpredictable and most of it is beyond your control. I hate that. On the internet, you can think before you speak/type (although I basically DON’T *grin*) but meatside every human interaction tends to be completely awkward, or at least that’s been my experience.

OH, y’know what? I made a phone call on Friday. To most people this is not a big deal in the slightest, people make phone calls every day, right? Well I don’t. i think the last conversation I had on a phone was with Alex maybe 2 months ago. The time before that was with Alex maybe 6 months prior to the last one. Basically the only person I talk to on the phone is Blake and I don’t even like to do that, especially now that he has his new job, which, by the way, I fucking hate because he’s not as accessible as he used to be and he’s a lot more stressed out/snippy.

And I’m totally straying from the point I was going to make in the paragraph previous to the last one, but I’ll get there eventually.

Friday I called my mom. See, I was supposed to mail my sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project on Friday because that was the deadline. I bribed Madison with Lush products to get home after school as soon as possible to run my sketchbook down to the post office before 4:30pm so it would be postmarked on time and I would have an extra half day to put the final touches on it. Since parts of my book got ruined, I was stressing hardcore Friday morning. I woke up at 6:15am because I could smell smoke in the house, as if someone had had a cigarette in my kitchen despite the fact that neither Blake nor I smoke anymore, but as it turned out there was a rogue pistachio that fell from the top cupboard into the bottom of the stove’s element and that caught on fire when Blake was making his coffee before work. I was glad though, that I was up early because I start work at 10am usually and being up so early meant that I could put arms on my girls in the sketchbook and have them be totally dry by the time Madison was to run like a crazy kid to the post office with my precious precious sketchbook.

By 9am I was stressing over this fucking sketchbook because it wasn’t perfect anymore but when I went to the project’s website to get the address I was supposed to mail it to, I saw that they extended the deadline to MONDAY. OH DEAR SWEET BABY JESUS WHO I DON’T EVEN BELIEVE IN, I was SO relieved. I knew my mom was stressed out about it too because we’d been talking about in on Facebook all week (she and a bunch of her friends were all doing it too) so I posted the link to the page that had the extended deadline on Facebook so my mom would see it but then I was afraid she wouldn’t see it in time and would mail her sketchbook out anyway, so I called her in her new home with John, where she’s been living for 2 years (or maybe 1? I dunno) and where I’d never called before. And we talked for about an hour, which is the longest conversation I’ve had on the phone in YEARS. Literally. It would have been longer but I was already half an hour “late” for work (the bosses don’t REALLY care what time I start, as long as I do the amount of hours I’m supposed to during the day so it was no big deal) so I cut it “short”.

This is totally fucked up, I know, but it’s also why I see a shrink once a month, but that phone call mentally exhausted me. Like, I needed to recover from it. One meatside (so to speak) social interaction messes with me and if I have too many “things” in one day, I can’t deal so I freak out completely and need extra psychiatric medication and lots and lots of “quiet time” to come down from it. I’m strong as an ox in some respects, but a fragile flower in others. I also get obsessed with time and I have no scope of how long things take because I’ve been homebound for so long, but that’s probably best saved for another post.

So back to my whole “I’m basically an internet addict” thing. As I’ve mentione din previous posts, I’ve been using Foursquare as an immersion therapy tool, the goal of which is to rank on the leaderboards against my friends and to earn stupid badges that are not even real. It’s dumb, I know, but it works and the people who follow me on Twitter (and now Facebook) seem to like following me around as I check in places. (Although not everyone is happy about it, I know Alex filters Fourquare posts out of her Twitter feed.) Foursquare is the ENTIRE reason I spent most of my first paycheque on a $700 smartphone, which probably sounds absolutely insane to most people, but you have to factor in the fact that I *am* somewhat insane and everyone told me that I should spend my first paycheque, being my first paycheque EVER, frivolously, so I did. And I saw it as both a tool for combating agoraphobia, but also as a means to take my internet friends with me wherever I went. No matter where I was, I could read Live Journal and comment, I could check my e-mail accounts, I could even watch the naked ladies uploading cam pics on Camwhores.com from a hospital emergency room when Alex’s brother lost HIS mind. (Which is still lost by the way, but that’s a whole other post and not really my story to tell so if Alex writes about it publicly I’ll just link that if anyone cares about the rest of that story.) Now that the internet was portable, I felt more empowered to leave the house because if anything awkward happened or whatever, I could tweet about it and have 5 people tell me it’s okay or give me a pat on the back for getting through it. The phone also has the most obnoxious alarm ever created which is necessary for me to get to work on time. My phone isn’t just a phone, it’s a tool of survival. Flame me all you want for being materialistic in this regard but keep in mind that prior to this year, the most I left the house was maybe, MAYBE once a month, now it’s usually every 4 days. I still can’t go anywhere by myself, but I think once life circumstances change (long story) things will improve in that area.

Having said that, a new hair salon opened up down the street from me and I’m considering, now that I’m being forced to take a 2 hour break from work every day so I can work on weekends *grumble*, having professionals dye and cut my hairs from now on as opposed to good ol’ L’Oreal Blondissmes and a prayer. Oh yeah, and letting a 12 year old cut my hair and giving me “layers”…I’ve been thinking about this for weeks but I don’t know the salon’s name or phone number and they’re too new to be Googleable or in the phone book so until I have that name and number, nothing can happen but I don’t know how to obtain that information. I supposed I could ask Madison to write it down on her way home from school. My point though, is that I’m taking steps and if I don’t do it  my way, it’ll never happen at all so people have no place to give me flack about it. (Not that anyone IS at the moment, I’m just being pre-emptive.)

By the way, my head is KILLING me and I should be sleeping. I’m not sure I can though. :o/

So these things, plus a billion more, are what’s keeping me up right now. I probably sound manic, but I’m not, just overly thoughtful and rambly and sick. It just kills me that these “Mormon mommy bloggers” are getting like, 50+ comments on each post they make and I wonder what kind of traffic they get or why that’s happening while my blog (not including posts x-posted to Live Journal) gets maybe one comment every 4 posts. Is it maybe because their blogs are connected to a network of churchy folk and mine is sort of in limbo? Like really, who IS my audience? At this point I have absolutely no idea who I’m writing this all for. I mean, myself obviously, although I don’t re-read my own posts, and Blake reads most of it and I think my mom does too and a few “internet friends” do, but for the most part, I have no fucking clue who you people are. And I’d like to, so tell me dammit. Tell me who you are. I can tell my IPs where people live, but that’s so little information as to who a person is and what their deal is and why they’re reading that I don’t even bother to look them up anymore. Live Journal people I mostly know because they of course have LJs too and at least half of them actually use them beyond reading purposes.

A few months ago, a few months in a row, my site became unaccessible mid-month because I was reaching my allotted bandwidth usage, which was a first. I asked Kevin, my good friend and site host, why this was suddenly happening and he said that it appeared as though people were going through my gallery a lot. He raised my bandwidth usage so these outages wouldn’t happen anymore, but it made me wonder why suddenly apparently a lot of people or at least more than “usual” were going trhough my gallery which really only exists because I don’t have or use ftp software. I upload things to the gallery to link in posts and that’s literally the only reason it exists. It seems to me that the only real motivation for going through my gallery would be to get to know me better which would appear to mean that maybe either new people were coming to the site who were unfamiliar with my, uh, work, or old people were…I don’t even know. Anyone got a theory as to why this might be happening? Because I haven’t the foggiest idea and found it very peculiar. Truthfully though, I haven’t looked at my Google Analytics in a long time because the stats really weren’t that interesting anymore. Hardly anyone links me because of my Camwhores connection and unpredictability/lack of filters, particularly when it comes to FUCKING language. I know a ton of girls with sites, a lot of whom I consider good friends, but my site doesn’t fit in with theirs because most of them are porn or pay-for-porn sites and their customers/viewers don’t wanna read my shit, they just want to see tits. And sometimes I show tits, which means my more straight-laces blog friends don’t link me either because their readers only want safe for work content, so I’m kinda fucked as far as linkage. Y’know what my primary source of traffic is? Steak and Blowjob Day because I wrote a stupid article about sucking cock in like, 2002, that apparently is very helpful. My site has very little to do with sex anymore and it 95% safe for work, but I keep that article and the ones like it up because those seem to be the crowd-pleaser and are a good place to put my Camwhores affiliate links.

The reason I bring up links is because links are where traffic comes from, traditionally, yet my traffic is all mostly independent; people coming here directly from my url, presumably bookmarked. I find this baffling. WHy are they so quiet? SPEAK UP! New blood comes from Steak & Blowjob Day and Camwhores and they’re not exactly looking for fairies, angels and mermaids, pictures of kids, videos of Blake doing stupid things and 4,000 word blog posts about basically nothing so I’n guessing most of them don’t stick around. HOWEVER, these people have to be the ones going through my galleries and eating up my bandwidth so WTF?

I just find it all very confusing. Nothing I do is linear or even all that explainable and I think I’ve always been clear about the fact that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing on these here internets. Not a whole lot of what I do is really all that intentional and as I mentioned, most of it is compulsive.

~*A FEW DEEP BREATHS & AN ATIVAN LATER*~

Usually I don’t kill myself like this trying to figure it all out, I just let it BE and most of the time I’m okay like that, but nights like tonight I just want it all explained to me. I want to know who these people reading are and why they’re reading. Maybe if I knew that I could make this a better experience for them but maybe they all remain silent because they don’t want to interrupt or make me change a thing. I have no idea. Maybe they’re shy? Maybe they hate my crude comments system? WOuld it be better if people had to register to post on my site? Like have an account? Because I think that’s possible with WordPress…somehow. Like if people could post using their Facebook accounts or their openIDs or whatnot, maybe I’d get more comments? (Does this sound like I’m begging for comments? I hope not because that’s not what I’m going for here, I’m just trying to figure out why, if so many people read my crap on any given day, they are so damn quiet. What are they thinking? Why don’t they make contact? Am I an alien being viewed from the outside of a glass bubble or what?) I just wish I had some help understanding it all. Comments, maybe introductions, would help me understand it all but no matter how many times I’ve mentioned this phenomenon, nothing ever changes. The explanations don’t come.

OH! I KNOW! E-mail me! Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com Make the subject line something topical though, like “HEY SUNNY, READ THIS!” because I delete most e-mails from people I don’t know without opening it because I don’t use anti-virus software and I’m paranoid about spam and viruses. Kevin or someone told me once that some of these e-mails I get are like “tester” e-mails where the person or company or bot or whatever that sent it would know if I clicked on it to open it or not and if I did, they would know that subject lines like that work so they’d use them on other people more often so I delete most e-mails that are suspect without opening them for that reason. Now that I’ve written that out, it sounds like someone probably fed me a line of bullshit and now that I think about it, I’ve no doubt deleted e-mails from real people who read my site. The key, I think, to getting me to open a piece of e-mail that’s legit is to use my name in the subject line or something. If anyone felt inclined yet doesn’t want to “share with the class” in the comments, totally feel free to e-mail me. I went through a phase a while back where I was getting a TON of e-mail, mostly from horny guys who had seen me naked, so I stopped replying for quite a long time to discourage e-mail, but I think I’m in a place where I’m ready and eager to begin receiving it again.

Something else I’ve been debating this week is my address. Now that I have a job, I have the means to get a PO box again, which is, I *think*, $120/year. I haven’t had one for the past couple of years because no one was sending me anything and my only income was from paintings and Camwhores, which doesn’t amount to a whole lot. My painting money allows me to replenish my art supplies and to get Blake & I Starbucks, which is right across the road from Michael’s and Curry’s (which is an art supply store that is having a 25% off canvases sale this weekend that I totally forgot about until now and hopefully I can get there tomorrow because I suddenly feel the urge to paint on irregular sizes canvases rather than square ones…holy tangent…)…and my Camwhores money is only about $20-$50/month and I usually buy my own food with it, like popcorn at the movies when Blake earns free movie passes through his work. My point is that until now, my earnings have been extremely meager and I think there are people out there who want to send me mail. It’s just this feeling I have and without going into details, I do have evidence to support this theory. SO this is why I would want a PO box.

HOWEVER.

I am of the belief that the world would rather hug you than hurt you and a large part of me doesn’t think it would be dangerous or reckless to publish not only my home address on my website but a link to my house on Google Maps so everyone can see the street view not just of where my house is but my whole town, especially if we move to where I want to move, which I happen to think is a very interesting town. My mother-in-law is probably reading this right now and shrieking in her head that this is a horrible idea and that if I do this I’m endangering the lives of my children, which is debatable I suppose; in the past she’s given us/me grief about not editing out our house number when I take pics of the front of the house. I actually DO edit out our house number 95% of the time, but sometimes I forget or I figure no one cares so I just leave it. I mean really, who wants to stalk me anyway?

At the same time, I am really really paranoid about kidnappers and stalkers. I never used to be but then I got this persistent troll whose IP is from Toronto and that made me worry a bit more. If my kids aren’t home by 4pm, I freak the fuck out and have 911 on speed dial because I know time is critical in kidnapping cases. I know Wes wouldn’t be prepared if something happened, meanwhile Madison would be because I’ve drilled it into her head that there are a LOT of strangers who know a LOT about her and that puts her at risk. I think it’s a very slim risk, but it’s still present. She and I have discussed this risk at great length and we’ve come to the conclusion together that yes, the risk is slim, and she’s fine with me sharing things about her anyway as long as she gets final approval (most of the time) and I’m getting off topic again…

So, people of the internet, do you think I should pay for a PO box that may or may not ever get used? Or do you think it’s safe to put my home address, which wouldn’t cost me any money, on my website? Is the Google Maps idea going too far? I should also mention that one of the “Mormon mommy bloggers” has her home address on her website, which I found interesting, and she’s basically doing a whitewashed version of what I’ve been doing for 10 years so…also I haven’t really discussed the address/PO box thing with Blake so I don’t have his take on it yet either. I’m just curious as to what my more internet savvy friends think of this.

And I think that’s the end of my babbling for tonight. If I continue I won’t get up in time to be finished work at a reasonable hour to make it to Curry’s to buy discounted canvases and possibly to go see True Grit AND be home in time for the season premiere of Big Love. If I don’t wake up in absolute misery healthwise…we’ll see.

By the way, this post is 4,854 words long. I think that may be a record. Kudos to your attention spans.

~*Goodnight internets.*~

Might as well start at the beginning.

Xmas Eve day I got up at 7am so I could work from 8am-4pm and that way we’d be able to leave early enough to get up North to my dad and Lisa’s for dinner with my Uncle Paul (Lisa’s brother) and his awesome girlfriend Sandi. Also invited was their friend Timber and his girlfriend Terri and of course my little sisters, Raili (pronounced “Riley”, it’s Finnish) and Rachael would be running around like crazy people.

Sandi made the most delicious lasagna I’ve ever had. It had MUSHROOMS in it! I love mushrooms! Lisa also made us a fantastic caesar salad with real bacon in it from the pigs they raised over the summer. Blake’s salsa was a huge hit, Lisa and Sandi devoured it. There was also shrimp on the table but shrimp is gross so I didn’t have any.

Pictures of Xmas Eve exist, most notably ones of me, Lisa and Sandi, and if I don’t look like shit in them, I’ll edit this post and post one [here].

This is what I wore Xmas Eve.
It’s a sheer black, meshy dress/tank top trimmed with dark blue, worn over jeans.
It’s not a very good picture of it, but I tried.

Paul and Sandi got me a fluffy housecoat and got Madison a jewelry box full of jewelry, which she’s obsessed with so way to go Paul & Sandi! I forget what they got Blake. I think they got Wes a remote control car. We got them each a pair of wool socks, which probably sounds lame, but they’re really outdoorsy people (all of my Muskoka family is) and wool socks are a coveted item. We also got them a bottle of Bailey’s.

Before dinner, Lisa gave each of us one present and she got me this really badass notebook/journal that was handmade in India. It’s leather with a design and a tiger’s eye on the front of it and then hand-pressed cotton paper on the inside (and LOTS of it) and then the whole thing closes up with a leather tie. I should take pictures of it, but I’m half writing this post and half working so I can’t. It’s really fucking cool though.

Phil (my father who’s just “Phil”, even my kids just call him “Phil”) got The Beverly Hillbillies on DVD so after the guests left and it was just us, we sat and watched that and then the kids sprinkled “reindeer food” outside on the snow and went to bed. Once that was accomplished, Blake, Lisa and I went to work filling the stockings and setting out Santa presents for my sisters and Wes who all still believe.

At about 2am, we all finally went to bed and the second Raili saw my eyes crack open Xmas morning, this is what I woke up to:

Lisa made some weird egg thing for breakfast that had broccoli in it so I didn’t have any. It’s not like I dislike broccoli or anything, I just don’t think it should be anywhere near eggs. And it should also always have cheese sauce on it. I mean really, all broccoli is to me, is a vehicle for cheese sauce. Having said that, I had toast instead.

After breakfast and me opening my stocking, which everyone else had already done while I was sleeping, it was time to open presents and really, there’s no details to be had there other than the fact that it was complete and total mayhem. And Wes screamed like a crazy person with every Zhu Zhu item he opened, which ended up being MANY MANY Zhu Zhus and accessories.

In the end, Wes scored 9 Zhu Zhus total and about 9 feet of Zhu Zhu playsets which are hamster tubes that all connect and that now my living room is overrun with. We also got Raili and Rachael pink and purple PRINCESS Zhu Zhus so there were 11 of the things going all over the place Xmas morning.

After the little kids went mental over presents, we just all kinda hung out while Phil & Lisa started making Xmas dinner. As I do every year, I went down to the basement and had a nap because I simply cannot function on only a few hours of sleep, especially when that sleep was full of nightmares. While I did that, Phil watched a bunch of videos on YouTube about the conspiracies surrounding 9/11 because he’s paranoid like that (we recommended he watch Zeitgeist, which he did later that evening but I don’t know what he thought of it).

So then it was just random socializing until Phil and Blake took the kids and the dogs outside to go toboganning with the new snow things the kids all got from Santa. I stayed inside, big surprise, but we could see them from the kitchen window and a good time was had by all, especially the dogs, until their snow things broke and everyone had to come in. They were outside for a good hour though and Phil would pull them back up the hill with the snowmobile. Shoulda taken pictures, didn’t. Oh well.

Xmas dinner was just Phil, Lisa, my sisters and us (which is a good thing) and it was a fantastic meal. Phil definitely knows how to prepare turkey and this year LISA made the stuffing at my request so there was no oysters or fucking PINE NUTS in it like there has been other years when Phil was responsible for it. To me stuffing is the best part of Xmas dinner and when Phil was doing it (and making it gross and inedible), it actually upset me that I couldn’t have any so this year I asked Lisa if she would make me just a box of Stovetop Stuffing or let ME make it and explained that Phil’s idea of stuffing was way too gross to all of us so she said she would but ended up making stuffing from scratch, in the bird, in the end, so I was very very happy about that. She also makes these killer whipped mashed potatoes that I love and there was broccoli WITH CHEESE SAUCE, so I was very happy with dinner indeed.

After dinner, Blake and Lisa cleaned up and once that was done, Phil, Blake, Madison and I pulled out my new, pink Bicycle playing cards and we had 2 games of Euchre. There was a bit of drama surrounding that because Madison’s emotions were running high and the fact that she’s still a beginner but Phil won both times, once with Madison as his partner and once with me as his partner. That means Blake lost two times. :oD

Then there was more Beverly Hillbillies and bed. But before I end Xmas Day, I have a sort of announcement to make that no one but me probably cares about.

You know my friend Jesse? I’ve written about him before and the last you probably heard of him was that he thought he was transgendered and into men. Well, he’s been seeing this girl, Patricia, for something like a little less than a year and on Xmas Day, he changed his relationship status from “in a relationship” to “engaged to Patricia [last name]“. I’m not *totally* sure if it’s legit or if they’re fucking with people, but if it is legit then all I have to say to them is “congrats!” and that I hope I’m invited to the wedding.

Jesse and Patricia

Truthfully, I haven’t spoken to Jesse in about a year. He won’t return my calls, won’t reply to e-mails or Facebook communications. He has sworn up and down to Raymond and Blake that he’s not mad at us and we haven’t done anything but still, I wonder constantly about the reason. Blake ran into him a few months ago with his mom and she told Blake that Jesse was in college (I forget what for) and Blake said Jesse, our fairy princess friend Jesse, had grown a manly beard and I got a little worried, but when Patricia posted the above picture on Facebook yesterday or the day before, I saw that Jesse was wearing eyeliner and felt immensely better because that means the Jesse I know is still in there and he already knows how much I miss him so all I can do is still be here when he comes around, whenever that may be. He’s obviously going through some major changes and maybe he felt he had to do that alone or maybe he was afraid of what we’d say or something. Who knows? And I know it’s not just us, he’s been ignoring Raymond too. But whatever, I’m happy if he’s happy and that’s all that matters.

Back to Xmas…

Boxing Day morning we woke up and Lisa made us eggs and sausage (I freaking love breakfast sausage but it’s SO bad for you I never have them, except times like that) and we just kinda hung out while Blake and I casually started rounding up all the kids’ stuff and got ready to start the leaving process. I went to the garage to give the dogs their Gravol so they wouldn’t puke in the car (Lucky puked on the way up, despite giving him the Gravol then too) and Blake took them outside for a final tromp around the snow and to pee.

During all this, Phil was getting ready to “go to work”, which in the end meant that he was going to the hunting camp with Paul and some buddies, I think. We packed up, said our goodbyes and off we headed to home.

Getting home was such a huge relief. I don’t hate going up North as much as I used to but being away from home for 2 days really really stresses me out. When we got home and settled, I did some internetting and watched the Leafs game while working on my “Snow Princess“.  Then Blake and I watched some Buffy and went to bed because we were absolutely exhausted from all these KIDS making us insane.

Yesterday was Xmas with my mom, her boyfriend John and his son Chris. This is what I wore (PS. I suck at taking mirror pics…):

The sweater is the $80 cotton sweater I was talking about months ago.
The gauzy thing is from Free People, which is my favourite.

We were actually going to John’s cottage to have Xmas with my mom and it’s right on the lake. John and Chris built a rink on the lake so there was skating to be had by my mom, John, Blake, Madison and Wes just slid around in his boots because his skates don’t fit anymore. I stood there and filmed them while freezing my fucking ass off. So video does exist of everyone skating but I haven’t uploaded it yet and truthfully, it’s not all that exciting so I’m probably just going to upload it to Facebook where I can tag everyone so their “people” can see it.

After skating, the kids played Wii with Chris and the “adults” (term used loosely) just sat around and shot the shit until dinner was ready. Dinner was pork tenderloin, which I don’t eat but everyone else liked it, carrots, broccoli (without cheese sauce), Stovetop Stuffinf (yay!) and roasted potatoes.  It was a fine meal and everyone enjoyed it, in fact I don’t even think there were any leftovers.

When dinner was finished, my mom asked the kids if they’d rather have dessert first and presents after or presents first and dessert after and they chose the latter, so presents it was. I got my mom peridot earrings to match the necklace I got her for Mother’s Day, I got John 2 boxes of Lady Fingers and Chris a black & silver Zhu Zhu pet because damnit, all the kids in my life were getting Zhu Zhus this year. I mean, he’s 15 (or 16?) and probably has no need of one, but he got one anyway.

I didn’t really see what the kids or Blake got, to be honest. I got a big bottle of REAL maple syrup, some weird rubber flower things you put on your wall, pajama pants, a Hello Kitty Beanie Baby, Skittles (w00t!) AND MOTHERFUCKING LEAFS TICKETS!

The tix are obviously for me AND Blake and it’s for the game on Saturday, January 22nd against Washington! So if things go as planned, it should actually be a WINNING game! (They lost the only time I saw them play.) This also means that I have to buy Blake a Leafs jersey for his birthday (the 11th) because I refuse to be seen with him if he’s wearing the knock off I got him from Wal*Mart (we got each other knock offs last year for Xmas, mine’s pink). But whatever, he’s Canadian now, sort of, so he needs his own Leafs jersey anyway.

So not only are we going to the game, but my mom & John have agreed to babysit so I’m thinking MAYBE, just MAYBE, we might get a hotel room in the city to do a bit of partying after the game. But we’ll see how things go. I am SO ABSOLUTELY FUCKING STOKED though. And I almost died of shock because my mother would never get us that in a hundred million years, so THANKS JOHN! :oD He is definitely a good influence on her…

After presents we shot the shit some more, then it was time to go home, we got home and pretty much just went to bed. And that was my Xmas.

How was yours?

Oh and since there’s not video of Madison, here’s a bonus one where she talks about peeing her pants on the way home from school. This was taken the week before Xmas, I think:

Here’s the thing: I feel like I’ve kind of been in a rut for maybe the past year. Being on proper meds and getting my bipolar disorder under control (more or less) has caused me to change some of my habits. For example, I’m not longer hypergraphic. Prior to getting my meds in order, I would go through a paper notebook usually once a month and I would literally spend like, 4 hours a day just writing writing writing. But now I don’t do that anymore. I still keep a paper journal but I only write in it maybe twice a month and each entry only ends up being a 2 page, bare bones account of what’s happening in my life at the moment rather than a sweeping saga like they were before. Likewise, my blog entries have become a lot more sanitized than they’ve ever been before and Blake & I agreed tonight that that’s somewhat of a problem because I write to process things and if I’m not writing, I’m not processing things, I’m keeping it all inside and that’s A) Not good for me, and B) Not me. At all.

The problem is that for some reason I began self-censoring myself, and rather harshly, and I don’t really know why I started doing that and now it’s gotten to the point where I’m completely frustrated by it. Blogging is like, the fucking wild wild West and there aren’t really any established rules on what you can and cannot write about or more importantly WHO you can and cannot write about. All of that is really left up to the writer and over the past year or so I’ve had trouble reconciling what’s right and what’s wrong as far as what I can write about that’s happening in my life.

Certain people – well, really only one – have asked me specifically not to write about them, not to even mention them, and I’ve honoured that…but there’s a “but” coming. The person who specifically asked me not to write about them no longer deserves that kind of respect and as it turns out, never really did in the first place. With the exception of that one person, my policy has always been that if you are a part of my life, I’m going to write about you at some point, plain & simple, because to do otherwise is self-censorship and that makes me a sad panda, it really does. The other policy I’ve always had with this whole blogging thing is that if you don’t want to be portrayed as a douche, don’t do douchey things. I mean, I think that too is also a pretty simple concept, don’t you agree?

So self-censorship…obviously there has to be some but I think I drew my line in such a way that it left me very little wiggle room and I just don’t write the way I used to and I hate that. I like being an open book, I like being a ridiculously honest person, I like that part of me and this week I realized that I’ve lost a lot of that and dammit, I want it back. My moods are stable, my meds are working, my light therapy is working, I’m making progress in so many areas as far as immersion therapy, it’s time to reclaim certain aspects of myself I put on hold for so long.

For example, a large part of the reason I left Camwhores 2 years ago was because I wasn’t stable and I didn’t really trust myself to have an outlet to instantly broadcast anything I wanted to. Near the end there, I was sad one day and I posted a picture of myself crying – for the first time in my (at the time) 7 year camming history. That was when I realized that I needed to reign myself in and get better before I could go on. I hope that makes sense.

During that time, as most of you know if you’ve been reading along, I stopped writing about certain things. For a few months there my entire Live Journal was just Loud Twitter updates because that’s all I could handle at the time. I stopped seeing the world in the unique way I normally would.

But I’m okay now, or close to it. I’m stronger. I trust myself and my own judgment and it’s time to jump on the floor and bang on the ceiling  with a broom (as my shrink puts it) and maybe shake some things up. Wake up my little readership and get them writing again themselves as so many seem to have abandoned their blogs and Live Journal for Facebook and Twitter. Have opinions. Talk to me.

I want to write about the things that are actually happening in my life again. Y’know the expression “dance like no one’s watching”? Well I’m going to write like no one’s reading. Until tonight I had so much fear and I don’t even know where it came from. I had fear about writing about Wayne & Judy in case Judy’s daughter Ashley was reading and her interpretation in telling them about it would be negative. I had fear about writing about my mother for fear of her getting pissed off at me. I had fear about writing about Blake’s mother because I know she reads and she’s the one who asked me (through Blake) specifically never to even mention her online. But in talking to Blake tonight, we sort of found the problem. When I first started writing publicly about my life, the internet was still relatively small and no one I really knew, except for Blake and some of the Scratching Post kids, was reading the things I wrote. And then my mom got online. And then Blake’s mom started reading. And now Blake’s co-workers are reading. And with all of these people reading, I kind of froze, almost like stage fright, and now I’m in this stupid rut of mine.

But Blake and I talked about it and he said to me that who is he to tell me what I can and can’t write about? And who is anyone else to tell me the same? People have to trust my judgment and if they don’t like what’s being written about them they either have to, as I said, stop doing douchey things, or start doing things to portray themselves in a better light. All I do is write what I see and feel, I simply write the truth. If I want to tell you that last night Wayne & Judy drank 28 beer and Wayne was so drunk he pissed all over the floor and toilet seat, well dammit, I’m going to because that’s what happened. If Wayne doesn’t want me writing about something like that, then don’t fucking do it. (Although honestly, I doubt Wayne would care and the incident was actually really funny. Plus they don’t even have internet and wouldn’t read a post even this long so I don’t think they’d see it or care if they did.)

So, starting today, right now, I’m going to once again be more open and honest about the happenings of my life and that includes everyone in it. People who are truly my friends and really know me will totally understand and be totally on board with this, others…well they may not be but that’s just too damn bad. I’m done censoring myself out of respect for people who don’t deserve that respect. What am I talking about? Well, keep reading, here’s where things start getting  juicy.

But where to even start? I guess the biggest thing happening in our lives right now, or at least the biggest conflict is Blake’s mother, Brooke. Right now Blake and Brooke are battling via e-mail over comments she made about me when Blake was in Michigan last month. See, when I first met Brooke – 8 years ago now – I thought she was pretty cool but that facade quickly dissipated and I found myself in a monster-in-law type of situation. I don’t even know where it all began, really, this has been an issue that long, but maybe I should start with after Blake & I got married because I don’t feel like telling the tale of our actual wedding which neither of our mothers were invited to.

After Blake and I got married and I was pregnant with Wes, Brooke would call the house constantly and if I picked up the phone it would either be something inane like what size of clothes Madison wore because she was out shopping at the time and saw something Madison might look cute in – despite the fact that we’d told her Madison’s size at least 5 times prior to that and strangely these cute things for Madison never seemed to appear. In other words, these calls were just calls to call. To this day I don’t even know what their purpose was. Other times when I’d pick up the phone, she’d give me all kinds of bad and unwanted advice and would basically tell me that I wasn’t doing enough as a wife and mother, so I stopped answering the phone.

But here’s the thing: I’ve never really been a phone person, that’s just not how I communicate, so it was a special effort to answer the phone for her in the first place so to be put down just about every time I did, didn’t really encourage me to keep taking the calls. See what I’m saying?

So once I stopped taking the calls – and again, keep in mind that I don’t take calls from pretty much anyone – that’s when she’d start calling Blake on his cell and complain that I never answered the phone. Well gee lady, I wonder why. Blake explained to her that I’m not just a phone person – for YEARS – but the complaints didn’t stop until about two years ago. Without going into huge detail (maybe I will one day, just not tonight), about two years ago Blake and Brooke had basically an e-mail war that lasted almost a year. I can’t even remember how it got resolved off the top of my head, but it did and ever since, I’ve done my best to continue being nothing but nice to this woman. I answer her e-mails, we send each other Growing Gifts and things like that on Facebook with little notes attached and while it all seems like minor communication on the surface, it’s actually huge for me and here I thought after 6 years of her flat out disliking me and flat out saying that I wasn’t good enough for her son and that Blake wasn’t living up to his full potential because of me etc. that she was finally starting to get to know me and maybe even liking me. In fact, I think it was her last visit last fall where she gave me a gift of these neat tin ladies with great quotes on them that I have hanging in my office. I thought that after all these years, we were finally starting to make progress and maybe even bond a little bit.

But then Blake’s cousin’s wife died and he had to go to Michigan for the funeral last month and on one of the nights he was there, his mom got two drinks into her and just let loose saying all kinds of negative things about me. Want a list? Here it is:

• *Everyone* has mental illness, the people she knows who are mentally ill are worse off than me and they can do things I can’t, like work. (“my whole family was mentally ill and half were institutionalized and we could all work. . .”)

• She’s scared I’m taking advantage of Blake. That I “make” him do everything. (When in reality I don’t “make” him do anything and while he does do more than I do, I don’t exactly sit at home and eat bon bons either. I mean, who did she think was looking after the kids, the house and the dogs while Blake was in Michigan?)

• She claims she doesn’t read my site or anything but she’s pissed because I apparently made a blog post where I said that because I stay home and I’m an artist I’m better than people who work. (“she said that you were basically saying how much better you are than people who get up with their kids every day and how much better you are than people who have jobs. She basically said you were saying you’re an artist and anyone who works or takes care of kids all day is a sell out and not as good as you”. This one baffles me BECAUSE THAT SOUNDS SOOOO MUCH LIKE SOMETHING I’D SAY, so I asked Blake to get more info but there was none to be had.)

• Blake said she said, “I may have neglected to tell Joyce the part about you not wanting the present because you wanted the kids treated as equals” or something like that. This is a long dead issue but Joyce is Blake’s mom’s best friend and she wanted to buy a savings bond for Blake’s “first born child” and we freaked because we want our kids treated as equals and Wes was NOT Blake’s first child. Blake’s mom hounded us forEVER about getting Wes an American SSN so they could buy bonds for him, but Joyce supposedly had no intentions of getting any for Madison, so we cut her out of our lives and said thanks but no thanks. According to Blake: “Joyce never knew we had an issue with anything, so we were just ungrateful fucks.”

• She wants to get our kids AMERICAN FUCKING PASSPORTS for Xmas. When I asked why, Blake said “she thinks that being Canadian will hold them back in life, but if they have official US docs they will magically be better off”.

For the last two years I have been nothing but nice to this woman. I’ve met her half way as much as I’m capable of. I reply to every non-fwd e-mail she sends me. I write on her Facebook wall. I send her Growing Gifts. I used to play Scrabble with her on Facebook until Blake told me she uses a program to cheat. I do way more for her than she does for me as far as meeting someone halfway and this is the shit we get? It’s obvious that she still has a deep dislike for me, the same dislike she’s had since day one, meaning that all of the stuff we’ve been doing together that I thought was progress was all meaningless and phony on her end. Here I was being genuine and trying my best to be what I thought she wanted me to be but the whole time she was reading my site and feeling negative about all the things I do. She was a troll, by my definition, she just doesn’t leave comments (to my knowledge).

Worse, she seems to think she has to “enlighten” Blake on what a horrible person I am because he’s apparently too stupid or naive to see it and that’s completely insulting to him.

Again – and I cannot stress this enough – until this very moment I have been nothing but kind and humble towards Blake’s mother. When she cornered me in her kitchen a few years ago (the last time we went to Michigan) to literally tell me that Blake is such & such a way and that I’m holding him back from his true potential, I took it in stride and never fought back or stood up for myself or anything. I just took it. (I’m not good with confrontation.) She pulled a similar move in my own kitchen a few years ago as well and it was the same thing, I just said something neutral and walked out of the room. I have never been hostile or negative or anything like that towards this woman EVER and as I said, within the past two years here I was being honest and thoughtful and trying to build a relationship and the second she gets Blake alone, she tears me down.

I think Blake was more upset about the things she said than I was. I was hurt by them, yes, because I honestly thought we were building a relationship here and her actions were genuine and when I found out they were just an act, it stung because I was making an honest effort…and it apparently got me nowhere. When Blake got home, he said that he’d let the dust settle from the funeral and when things had calmed down, he’d e-mail his mom and settle this shit once and for all. I don’t know how many e-mails have flown back and forth at this point, but the first e-mail went out last weekend and they’re still battling it out so who knows when this is going to be over or if it’s ever going to be over. I mean godammit, Blake and I have been together for 8 fucking years, we have a solid relationship and a happy marriage that works, I’m here to stay. At some point she’s going to have to accept that and accept me or we’re going to have no choice but to live our life without her – and that’s pretty much what Blake’s been saying in the e-mails from what I understand.

What he’s leaving out though, is that she also needs to accept Blake for who he is. Blake has a job he loves in a field he loves and he even acknowledges the fact that he wouldn’t be where he is right now – and be happy – without me. Blake’s mom, according to Blake, expects him to have made his first million by now and have a trophy wife who will host Superbowl parties, attend dinner meetings and have a power career of her own. While we’re happy and accept each other for who we are, we have Blake’s mom who sees both of us as nothing but a disappointment.

And did you know that when I was in the hospital in 2006 because I was having a psychotic episode Brooke’s advice to Blake was to pack up the kids, drive down to her house in Michigan and fucking LEAVE ME? I mean what reality does this woman even live in?

She says she doesn’t even know me because she’s only met me about a dozen times, but at the same time, she’s been reading my site since Blake and I got together and I’ve most definitely met her more than a dozen times and while she claims she hasn’t gotten to know me well enough to love me, she’s certainly displayed that she’s gotten to know me well enough to dislike me and feel negatively towards me.

Blake’s been saying this the whole time we’ve been married: that there is nothing I can do to please his mother because I’m simply not the woman he was supposed to marry. Right now he’s told me to stop even trying to make an effort with her because the two years I  did try obviously got me nowhere so what’s the point? He says his mother needs to examine her feelings toward me and resolve them on her own before we can move forward and until she does that, I’ll never get anywhere with her.

I don’t know how long this is going to take. I don’t know how long this e-mail war is going to last. All I know is that I’m staying the fuck out of it and leaving it between them because there’s no place for me in this discussion even though it’s pretty much about me. I don’t know what the right thing to do is anymore – I thought I was doing it! I’d rather do nothing than misstep and at this point in time I simply give up.

The other aspect of this is that Brooke and her husband Charlie want to come up and visit but until this situation is resolved somehow that simply can’t happen. How can I have someone in my home who feels so hostile toward me? Why should I have to put up with being put down in my own comfort zone? The fact is, I don’t have to and I’m not going to and Blake completely agrees.

To expand upon that topic, according to Blake, Brooke and Charlie don’t like coming up here because they get bored. Well if you’re so bored and your grandchildren aren’t entertaining enough, then don’t fucking come up! In a recent phone conversation with his mom, which sort of turned into a fight – while he was at WORK – she said that Charlie would like to do home improvement projects with us and got all offended when Blake said that if we needed to work on the house at all, we’d probably enlist the help of Phil (my dad) because he’s only an hour & a half away and he does this shit for a living, every single day and has a truck if we need lumber or drywall and a million other reasons. Well Brooke took great offense to this for some reason and started a fight about it, saying how Charlie (her husband, if that wasn’t clear) put in someone’s window in something like, an hour or whatever and Blake was just like “where the fuck is this even coming from?” I mean the fact of the matter is, we don’t really DO home improvement projects and we’re certainly not going to call on Charlie to drive 5 hours up here to like, paint our living room ceiling or tile our shower. We’re not going to start a home improvement project when we have company coming (them) and we don’t have the money to just start a home improvement project when they want to come up just so Charlie will be entertained. It just doesn’t make any sense.

But where did this all come from? Well I talked to Blake shortly after his mom had called and he told me about it and I told him exactly where it was coming from: that day or the day before I’d made a post about us moving on Live Journal and how we’d need to fix up our house a bit to sell it and that Wayne had offered to help. THAT is where it all came from, I’m fairly certain. But the thing Blake and I both wonder is: does Charlie even know she’s saying all of this stuff on his behalf? We kind of doubt it. Charlie, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell and Blake agrees, is a pretty laid back, go with the flow, sit & chat kinda guy. It was certainly news to both of us that he suddenly wanted to help us drywall our bathroom because he’s bored out of his skull when he comes up otherwise.

The other issue with them coming up, according to these phone calls Blake gets from his mother while he’s at work, is that it’s too expensive. See, they can’t stay at our house because 1) Our house is very small and our futon isn’t very comfortable, 2) Charlie’s apparently allergic to our dogs and 3) I don’t really want to be alone in the house with them when Blake & the kids go to school and work because his mom corners me, talks down to me and puts me down, so that means they have to stay at a hotel or do what they did last time they came up (for a week) and get a time share somewhere. And this is apparently where the boredom sets in. While the kids are at school and Blake’s at work, they’re left to their own devices and they get bored. I don’t really know what I can do about that. If it were me, I’d do some Googling to see what was around and find something to do, but by the sounds of it, that thought’s never crossed Brooke’s mind. She’d rather complain that they’re bored.

So if it’s boring and too expensive, then I say don’t fucking come up! Plain & simple. If it’s such a chore, such a bother for you to come up to spend money only to not have a good time, then why bother? I mean I don’t have a solution to either problem and neither does Blake. I’m sorry my house isn’t bigger? I’m sorry Charlie’s allergic to my dogs? I’m sorry our kids aren’t entertaining enough for you? I mean what are we supposed to say to that?

What comes to mind is what my mother used to say to me when I was a kid and complained of boredom. She said, rather nastily I might add, “I’m not your entertainer!” and dammit I’m not. If you can’t keep yourself occupied, that isn’t my problem. Complaining about it to us isn’t going to solve your issue, you have to be proactive and go see what’s out there or I dunno, stay home!

I don’t know how to move forward from here. Everything is so convoluted at this point that I worry there’s no turning back. The harder Blake pushes the subject, I think the more his mother is going to resent me, but at the same time, I think he has no other choice than to bring this all up to the surface and address it rather than smile while staring daggers, know what I mean?

And of course Brooke is going to read this post and probably flip out but at this point I don’t even care. Blake doesn’t either. He told me tonight to write whatever I felt I needed to write and I think that’s what I’ve done here, as far as his mother is concerned. Until this whole thing blows over or runs its course or does whatever it’s going to do, I’m just gonna lay low, observe and, for the most part, keep my damn mouth shut on the subject. I wish I had a crystal ball so I knew how this was going to play out, but I don’t and I hate not knowing what to expect, I hate not knowing what to do. Is this post going to make anything better? Definitely not, but I’m sick and tired of pretending this aspect of my life doesn’t exist when it’s been a problem for the entire 8 years Blake and I have been together. It’s a constant drain on both of us and a huge source of anxiety for me. Every time I even think of Blake getting another e-mail from his mom, I have to pop an Ativan because my stomach knots up.

But enough about THAT drama I’ve said what I need to say right now and that’s just what is going on and yeah, Brooke will be making an appearance in my writings again at some point, but that’s enough for now. In the meantime, wanna know what else is going on in my life? Well my friend Jesse has pretty much abandoned me. I’ve sent him e-mails, I’ve written on his Facebook wall several times, I’ve sent him messages on Yahoo, I’ve tried to add him to Last.fm but he won’t add me back….I haven’t seen him since like, the winter and I don’t even know why this is happening. Blake’s talked to him and Jesse claims he’s not mad at Blake or myself, he’s just been “busy” and “doesn’t get online very often anymore”.

Blake went over to Jesse’s house on Saturday to retrieve the CDs he’d borrowed from us because I’m so convinced he’s distancing himself from us on purpose I wanted to get them back before he moved or something and he was apparently all sunshine and lollipops. He said he’d get online and e-mail me, but so far that hasn’t happened and I don’t expect it will.

I don’t like thinking bad things about my friends, but the only reason I can think of for Jesse blowing us off like this is the fact that I don’t smoke pot anymore, so I can’t be his stoner buddy and there’s no smoking in our house anymore so we can’t sit around smoking and talking like we used to. He used to come over at least twice a week, I’d talk to him usually every day on Yahoo, what happened?

The last time I talked to him was on Yahoo at the end of June because I asked him to come to the Hypercube event with us and he said he’d ask for that day off and we haven’t spoken since despite my attempts. Something’s going on there and I don’t know what and while it used to bother me, I’m at the point where I guess Jesse’s been moved into the “acquaintance” category and out of the “friend” category for the time being and that’s why I wanted all my CDs back. It was a “closure” kinda deal for me. Now Jesse can fuck off and do his own thing and I’m not even going to worry about it anymore. If I see him in the grocery store, I’ll talk to him, but I’m not gonna chase him down anymore or make myself crazy wondering what I did wrong. I’m just going to take him at his word that I didn’t do anything wrong and leave it at that.

In other news, Alex and I had our first fight last week. Here’s what happened: Blip.fm posted on Twitter excessively drives me nuts and Ronny is the worst offender on my list. But I love him so I just put up with it and grumble to myself when he’s on a Blip marathon and scroll past them or ignore Twitter until he’s gone to bed. But one day last week, I checked my Facebook live feed and there, from Ronny were a bunch of Blips. Now here’s the other thing about Ronny and I, for some reason Ronny tends to bring out the snark in me, so I commented on one of the Blips on Facebook and said something like “Are you seriously going to make me put up with these here too?” thinking he was posting tweets to Facebook and not realizing it was a Blip application that I could block. I thought in order to not see them, I would have to block Ronny altogether and I didn’t want to have to do that.

So anyway, I got busy talking to Blake or doing something, I can’t remember, and when I opened up TweetDeck, here were these bitchy, passive-aggressive Blips from Alex that were most definitely directed at me. So me, always one to make matters better because I’m talented like that, I posted a Blip of my own…of the Bloodhound Gang’s “I Hope You Die” and mimicked one of Alex’s passive-aggressive Blips in my message to which Alex replied “……..” and then “You’re a real bitch sometimes,” or something to that effect. I replied with “At least I’m honest,” and then a few second later I said something about how I’d rather be a bitch upfront than a passive-aggressive one and that’s when Alex announced that she was too “tired and cranky for this bull” and that was the last I heard from her on Twitter.

So after that I checked my e-mail and there were Facebook notifications where Ronny and Alex had commented on my original Facebook Blip comment saying that it was an app and I could block it and that no one was “forcing” me to do anything. I commented back, even though both of them had gone to bed, that I hadn’t realized it was an app, that I thought I’d have to block Ronny altogether and I apologized for the misunderstanding. Then, later that night I got thinking about it and while yes, Alex was a bitch too, I started it, so I decided to be the first to apologize so we could forget this ever happened. So, I texted Alex with “I’m sorry. I love you.” at like, 1am so she’d get it in the morning and when I woke up the next day, there was a text on my phone from Alex saying the same thing. Everything’s cool now and I think we just caught each other on bad days, but it was just a weird situation because Alex and I had never fought before and I’m glad we have the kind of relationship where we can just apologize to each other and let bygones be bygones. I was proud of us that day. So many women love to let drama like that play out for as long as possible and make it snowball and I really dig that neither she nor I are that type of woman. Or maybe we are a little bit, but at least we both value our friendship enough to just step back and be cool about things. I love Alex.

Saturday night, which those who follow me on Twitter already know, Blake & I went over to Wayne & Judy’s to play euchre and drink a little bit…or in their case, drink a lot. Apparently they started drinking at around 6pm, we showed up at 9pm. Blake & I don’t really drink that much or that often, so he had a 6-pack of beer and I had two 4-packs of Mike’s Hard lemonade. Wayne’s one of these guys who thinks men are superior to women so he always wants it to be men against women and…Judy & I beat them 5 games-0. Wayne knows the game now and at least 3 times renegged and once he decided to go alone on a hand that had NO trump whatsoever. He said “Blake, ya gotta trust me, this hand is ours,” and Blake was like “Wayne, if you don’t have the best hand ever and win this, I’m gonna punch you,”…and then it turned out he had NO trump while Blake had a hand that was almost entirely trump. Since Blake couldn’t really punch Wayne, I did. Later that night, as Wayne got more and more drunk, he wobbled upstairs and when he came down he started bitching at Judy that they need to change the plate cover on the light switch in the bathroom because when he’s drunk he can never find the switch to turn it on. (Their light switch cover is bumpy and has frogs on it and it makes the switch a bit recessed.) And then he tells us that as he was peeing in the dark, all of a sudden he started peeing on the seat. So we were all like, “why didn’t you have the seat up?” and he slurred “oh I never do that, I don’t have to” and I was like, “well if you’re pissing on the seat then apparently you do!” None of us were sure if he was serious or not about peeing on the seat, so all 4 of us went up there to investigate and lo & behold there was piss all over the seat and a huge puddle all over the floor. I don’t think he actually got ANY in the bowl. From that point on, especially because they have a cracked, squishy toilet seat, I went over to my house to pee. But it didn’t really matter because by that point Wayne was so drunk he was practically passing out at the kitchen table, so shortly after the bathroom incident, Blake and I left to go back to our house and while I tried to drink the rest of my Mike’s Hard and actually get drunk like everyone else, I just wasn’t into it so I dumped mine. We tried to play a game of Monopoly but I was just too tired and not really feeling well so we packed it up and I went to bed instead.

Sunday I was hung over which I think is totally unfair since I didn’t even get drunk the night before. Because I felt like crap, I basically just slept most of the day and rested up for the Mad Men finale (which was excellent).

And then of course, after Mad Men was over, Blake and I started our marathon conversation on blogging, creativity and life in general which brings us back full circle. The fact of the matter is, I’m not painting right now because I’m discouraged but that doesn’t mean I can’t be creative in other ways. I’ve got a short story bordering on a novella sitting here that I could be working on. I don’t know if anything will ever come of it, but it’s here waiting for me to write it. I have a million stories from my past left to tell and a new audience to tell some of the ones I’ve told before to. There’s no reason for me to remain in this rut and to become stagnant, waiting around for something to happen.

Another thing my mom used to say about boredom was that only boring people get bored, and the thing is, I’m not boring, I have this wicked imagination to keep me entertained so I might as well use it.

And I think that’s all I have to say.

PS. This entry is 6300 words long.

PPS. This entry was supposed to be posted at about 3:30am but our ISP had an internet outage so that’s why it’s being posted this morning.

]]> http://www.sunnycrittenden.com/wp/2009/11/09/things-are-gonna-change/feed/ 1 http://www.sunnycrittenden.com/wp/2009/02/22/who-the-fuck-is-sunny-crittenden/ http://www.sunnycrittenden.com/wp/2009/02/22/who-the-fuck-is-sunny-crittenden/#comments Sun, 22 Feb 2009 09:03:26 +0000 Sunny http://www.sunnycrittenden.com/wp/?p=1076 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.

There. I said it.

Truly, I’m going out of my fucking mind this week and it’s only going to get worse for like, the next three weeks to a month or so. I feel completely hopeless and worthless and scared. PMS is not helping the situation, nor is the fact that I’ll be on the rag for my birthday.

I am terrified of my upcoming surgery (March 11th) even though I’ve done it three times before. The times before though, I knew and liked my doctor and it was in a state-of-the-art hospital. This time I’m being butchered by Midland’s biggest douche in a very small hospital. I used to be able to lay on the couch for 3 or 4 days and just watch TV but I can’t do that anymore, which is why there are so many books and movies on my wishlist.

I’m also sort of – just a little bit – excited about the prospect of reading books in this secret park that’s down the street from me this spring, even though the prospect scares the crap out of me as much as it excites.

Last night I woke Blake up at 2am in tears because I couldn’t do the steps involved to have a shower and he had to spend almost an hour talking me through it. That’s a hard thing to admit, but there it is all the same.

Jesse and I are friends again, which is good and I’m happy about that, but he just broke up with his girlfriend of (I think) 3 years and needs me to be a good friend and I feel like in my current state I’m totally failing and that makes me feel like shit. Tomorrow he and my friend Alex are coming over, pretty much because we’re all fucked and need each other, but to be perfectly honest, I’d much rather lay in bed in the dark and not deal with anything. I’m afraid I’m not going to be very good company, but I always think that when I’m like this and between the four of us, I’m betting we’ll all have a good time even if I’m apprehensive about it. (Oh btw, Alex, Blake’s picking you up after work.)

Too much is going on right now. I got involved in a project with some women I met on the internet and there’s a meeting with them on Saturday night that’s probably going to be several hours long. Tomorrow there’s social hour with Jesse and Alex. Tonight there was social hour with just Jesse, although I pretty much ignored him and watched Grey’s Anatomy because I’m a bad friend. (He & Blake played Guitar Hero so it’s probably okay.) Last weekend was pretty much ruined by my dad and my neighbour, which is a really long story and probably none of your business.

I have so much to express that I’m getting headaches that border on migraines, yet no motivation to actually express them. I need money, therefore I need to either sell the paintings I currently have for sale or paint new ones that will actually sell, but I have no ideas for those. I only have ideas for paintings that I don’t want to sell, that I want to make prints of instead, but that doesn’t help me with money now and is all dependent on the arts grant I applied for a few months ago.

I haven’t subscribed to the Toronto Star yet because I kind of think we can’t afford it. When I originally did the math, I read the fine print wrong and it turns out that it was only $4 and change per week for the month of February but after that it was more than $6 per week. I don’t think we can do that and it bums me out. Blake says we can, but I dunno. I already feel like I cost our family too much as it is, that I’m this walking, talking money pit and subscribing to the newspaper will probably just make me feel like a bigger financial burden. I don’t sell enough paintings to pay for the subscription myself.

I was really looking forward to doing the crossword and reading the arts section in the secret park by my house. :o/

I still haven’t varnished Wes’ painting and I have no excuse for that except…I can’t even fucking get myself into the shower and dressed afterwards at the moment, varnish is much more difficult.

The cat peed in our bedroom but I can’t find where.

There is so much crap on my desk I don’t even know what to do. It’s making me clausterphobic though, but at the same time, there are too many steps to solve the problem so I just take Ativan for the anxiety instead. It’s just easier that way.

So that’s my life right now. I’m sad. I’m really fucking sad. And I’m probably going to be like this for at least another 3 weeks, which just makes me even more sad, so I might as well wallow in it because there’s no getting out.

- Cleaning my kitchen.
- Making meatballs for tomorrow’s dinner.
- Listening to the Beastie Boys (and various other crap I refuse to admit to).
- Making a grocery list.
- Looking at recipes on KraftCanada.com because dudes, I am so not a gourmet.

The cat (Digit) is sitting on the kitchen table and meowing for no apparent reason. Well, I’m sure there’s some reason, but I’m not even sure he’s speaking to me, so I’m basically ignoring him and hoping he’s not brave stupid enough to go for the onions I’ve got on the stove. It’s hard to say, but I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt.

I’d take pics because my kitchen’s actually somewhat clean (haha) but I can’t upload them so what’s the point? >:o( Yep, still grrr there.

I’m so weird when it comes to food and this is what Jesse and I have in common, except he probably has an eating disorder (worrisome) and I don’t (reassuring!), we decided today. We also decided that Jesse is so special, that we should have Jesse Day with a parade and everything. I don’t think I’d be a very good cameraperson for that event, all the footage would be blurry from laughing so fucking hard if it’s half as funny as it is in my head. :D Sumpin to ponder though. *strokes chin*

We like to make up our own holidays around here. :)

Does anyone see why I couldn’t make these in advance and freeze them? And if I did that, how much longer would I have to bake them from frozen? Hrm.

FYI? Meatballs are much more labour intensive than I thought they’d be. (But then again I’m probably making twice as many as we’ll actually eat for dinner.)

Cooking in the middle of the night isn’t a weird thing for me. I don’t do it all the time, but it’s something I’ve always done and when I do cook, my brain seems to think that 10 people live in this house, it’s ridiculous. Sometimes it’s meals in advance or parts of meals, sometimes it’s stuff for lunches, sometimes it’s muffins or brownies. Usually it revolves around whatever happens to be in the house at the time.

When I was little I indisputably had the best great grama in the whole wide world. I mean, she was textbook fairytale old lady, white hair, short, GIGANTIC boobs, wore floral mumus (I shit thee not, but it worked for her with the boobs & all), walked with a cane, was old as the dirt in her garden, she crocheted, she cooked, she was awesome & probably the best friend I’d ever had in my whole entire life until I met Blake.

She’s also probably the reason my sleep schedule is, and has always been, as fucked up as it is because I was with her a lot and we’d cook in the middle of the night or draw pictures or she’d tell me stories or I’d sit in the bath and she’d read me stories. I dunno if she was the nightowl or if I was or we both were, but this is what we did so certain sleep/wake habits make a lotta sense to me.

It’s 4:44am as I type this, my meatballs are finished, they’re with the sauce in the fridge and the rest of the dishes can wait until tomorrow. I should go to bed. My body knows it, my mind knows it – it’s just a fact. I should have been in bed a long time ago…but as I turned out the kitchen lights, I noticed that one of the windows has frosted in a sort-of fleur de lis pattern that may just be worth the wait for this morning’s sunrise because the sun will come directly through that window at one point, I just have to wait for it.

It’s stuff like that that I live for, as lame as it sounds; cool looking shit that nature just gives us, I mean those moments are gifts from the universe as far as I’m concerned. I like to memorize them.

I’ve been thinking about my dad a lot lately. My biological dad, Phil. I really only have one, he’s it, he porked my mom and out came me, it’s crazy but I accept it. He’s a kooky guy and I kinda like him, but I think he’ll just be Phil for the rest of my life because I don’t think he’ll ever really be my dad. He’s just this guy I know that I’m really interested in, probably because it’s ingrained in my DNA to be as such. (I’m a little obsessed with nature vs. nurture.) Phil’s just Phil, Lisa (his wife) is just Lisa and Raili (my almost 2 year old sister) is just Raili. There’s no textbook or Wikipedia entry that can tell me how we’re all supposed to fit together.

Ever since I met Phil & Lisa, when I was 13, I’ve been trying to figure out what Phil and I had in common, because that’s what you do when you meet one of your parents for the first time and it’s taken me years to even make a list of 10 because some of the things he does (and they do) are pretty bizarre. They just live in a whole different world than I do. But now that Raili’s in the picture, it just all kinda makes sense. It’s like, she was the missing piece to put the whole picture into perspective for me (and maybe for him too, although I doubt he’d say so).

I know I’ve posted this picture of her before, but dammit, it’s a good picture. :)

I’m probably thinking about Phil & Raili because Phil’s birthday is Feb. 11th and Raili’s is at the end of Feb. (I suck, I’d have to look it up) and mine’s the 1st of March, so there’s part of me that thinks we should all get together at some point in the next couple of months while our energies are compatible, but I’m not big on birthdays so we need a different reason.

Something I grew up doing was making maple syrup with my Aunt Betty & Uncle Bill, I wonder if they’d be interested in doing that in March? They live in the bush, I’m sure we could find some maple trees and collect enough sap in the span of a few days to have at least one good pancake breakfast/lunch/dinner with enough syrup to maybe even take home. Something else to ponder.

Hmmmm sugar bush dreams sound pretty good, I think I’ll ponder that in my sleep & wait for the next frosty window.