Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga’s Soul
This is very interesting.

Our yoga class mentions nothing about Hinduism, unless you count the “Namaste” at the end, which I don’t say. I don’t know why I don’t say it, I just don’t.  I guess I kinda think it’s cheesy. On one of the walls, our teacher put up a giant poster of all the various asanas and it has a faint, giant “om” symbol in the background but that’s really the extent of Hinduism in our class so I guess we’re totally appropriating.

HOWEVER, when you sign up for the class she makes you fill out a sheet with your info and sign a thing that says she’s not liable etc. but on it she asks why you want to learn yoga or why you want to take this class. On mine I put “to maintain weight” (which is so not working because we’re doing Hatha now instead of Vinyasa haha, but whatever, we’ll be doing both in the new year hopefully). But I think if enough people put on that sheet that they wanted to pursue yoga  for religious reasons or even just spiritual reasons or whatnot, she would alter the class. She actually went to college to learn how to be a yoga teacher and she’s been doing yoga herself since she was a teenager so I know she knows all about it. But I think everyone says they want to do it for exercise purposes so that’s why the class is the way it is.

Sometimes she interjects during poses that “this one’s good for digestions” or “this one’s good for headaches” etc so she tries to make it more than athletics but not by much. I think I’m going to e-mail her that article and see what she thinks of it. She’s probably already seen it.

This week I got a new shirt. Let me show you it:

I like it a whole lot. In fact part of the reason I like it is because I can do yoga in it. All of my yoga-appropriate shirts are short sleeved and I wear a hoodie over them TO class, but I can’t do yoga with my hoodie on because the hood gets in the way and it’s too baggy etc., so this shirt is perfect for that. I mean, I like it and can wear it other places, but specifically I like it because I can do yoga in it, be warm and not look like a total schlep. The ooooonly problem with it is that it’s a thermal, so it’s that waffle material and holy hell does it ever pick up every fluff, fuzz, dog hair, MY hair and the like. But that’s okay, I’m a compulsive lint brush user so it’s all good.

So I’m sorta…avoiding and rambling because I couldn’t decide whether or not I should write about this because it’s not really supposed to be about me and I feel kind of selfish making it about me but it did and does affect me and I think for my own sanity I should write about it so here goes:

I’ve met Alex’s brother twice. Well, three times now, but prior to Thursday night, I’d only met him twice and had only spoken one sentence to him ever. But I’d heard stories about him through Alex & Ronny many many times and a lot of those stories had to do with the fact that he’s extremely paranoid and once was so violent to Alex as a result of his paranoia, she had to call the cops and ended up moving out more or less because of his behaviour. That was a couple of years ago now, but he’s still extremely paranoid. For example, he used to think that Alex was putting “stuff” in his shampoo to make his acne worse. (This is why he reacted violent toward her.) Hearing the stories, I have always suspected that he was probably mentally ill and I realize I’m not a shrink but from what I’ve read, I’d peg him as bipolar II or maybe even schizo-affective.

It should also be noted that he smokes a lot of pot, just as I used to prior to my stint in the psych ward in 2006. Marijuana doesn’t cause psychosis, but it has been written and I believe that it definitely exacerbates the problem and shouldn’t be used, or at least used with extreme moderation, if mental illness is in the picture at all.

Everything that has happened over the past week or so is a blur and most of it I only heard second-hand so apologies to Alex if I get the sequence of events mixed up.

At some point last week, Alex’s brother (I don’t want to use his name) told Alex that he’d had a dream and as a result of this dream he knew that he was a shaman and that she was too and along with saying this and trying to convince her it was true, he displayed other strange behaviours, although I’m not clear on what those behaviours were. I do know he wasn’t sleeping though and he had mostly stopped smoking pot all of a sudden.

Throughout the week, his strangeness and paranoia increased and after being told about it, Blake & I agreed that he was likely psychotic. Grandiose ideas, paranoia, hallucinations, etc. It all sounded very very familiar. We told Ronny & Alex to keep a close eye on him and at the first sign of total loss of reality to get him to the ER.

So they watched him for a few days. They watched him not sleep and become increasingly, well, nuts.

On Wednesday night, around midnight, something happened or he said something that alarmed them enough to take him to the hospital in Barrie which is called RVH and which is the same hospital where I was taken when I was psychotic. They were there until 4am because while Canadian hospitals, especially ERs, are great, it’s been my experience and now theirs, that they just don’t know how to deal with mental illness. They told Ronny & Alex to take her brother home and to bring him back Thursday when a shrink would be around to take a look at him.

So stuff happened. I don’t know what. But on Thursday he was acting so mental that Ronny & Alex called 911 twice and the mental health crisis line twice. The second 911 call resulted in Alex & her brother being taken back to the ER in an ambulance while Ronny followed behind in his car.

At the ER, a shrink, a young one, saw Alex’s brother for about 10 minutes, gave him a prescription of 200mg of Seroquel (which is like, NOTHING for a guy who’s 3 times my size and I think I was on 600mg daily) and Welbutrin (you do not rx an anti-depressant in a suspected bipolar patient until their mood is stable with something else because it can make them WORSE) said he was “likely bipolar” but that there were no beds in the psych ward and that he was going on vacation and wouldn’t be back until February so he wouldn’t be able to see him again until then. And then they were sent home.

So Alex & Ronny go to Shopper’s Drug Mart to fill the prescriptions and I guess Alex’s brother flipped out completely and was like, yelling that people should stay away from the vitamins because they were poison or something. They got the pills and took him home but not before he told them that he was the second coming of Christ, that the world’s problems were on his shoulders and that they had to kill him so he could die for everyone’s sins. He said that they had to do it because he couldn’t kill himself. Then he tried to throw up on a tree because he said that he had to expel all of the negative energy into another living thing and he was afraid that if he didn’t throw it all up on this tree, that it would infect Ronny & Alex.

After that I’m not quite sure what happened but they ended up back in the ER because it was pretty clear that Alex’s brother was getting worse instead of better and they didn’t know what else to do.

I was working when all of this was happening and so was Blake, but the second he got home, I told him we were going to the ER to wait with Ronny & Alex and to just lend support. Also, Alex’s brother, as I said, is a pretty big guy and if he decided to be violent or flip out, Ronny wouldn’t be able to contain him but Ronny AND Blake probably could. I also thought we should go because we’ve been through this before, at the very same hospital, so we would know better what to say to make sure they were finally going to be taken seriously and to have Alex’s brother admitted to the ward on a 3-day form.

It should also be noted that as of Thursday night, Alex & Ronny had only had about 2 hours of sleep in 2 days as a result of all this. Also, Alex’s dad was on a business trip in Ottawa so Ronny & Alex were dealing with this all alone.

We got there and were just as supportive as possible. I joked around with Alex’s brother, like when he said that everyone was looking at them (they weren’t), I told him that they were actually looking at me and then he called me an albino haha I screwed around with my phone a lot & showed everyone how I could watch porn on it, I used an app I’d never used before that scans the barcode of any food item and gives you its nutrition info, I tweeted, I e-mailed blah blah blah. I joked around with Alex and engaged her in a fart war while Ronny & Blake sat behind us and just talked about stuff I guess. After I think 7 hours in the ER this time and after the nurse gave Alex’s brother another dose of Seroquel, a doctor was finally ready to see him so Alex & Ronny took him into that area and told us that they could handle it from there.

The nurse, after talking to Ronny & Blake and observing Alex’s brother for herself, told them that she was going to recommend to the doctor that he go to the ward on a 3-day form, which is what happened and we all went home.

To “end” the story…Alex’s brother escaped from the hospital on Friday morning and the cops were out looking for him., He walked all the way from the hospital to their house because he wanted to have a shower. The cops waited for him to have his shower and then drove him back to the hospital. The hospital then decided that he was more than they could handle, so they transferred him to an actual psych hospital about an hour away which happens to be a VERY VERY good thing because I use this hospital’s outpatient services and they are excellent. Also, my own shrink either does work there or used to work there and she’s pretty decent so I know they’ll bring him out of psychosis properly, that he’ll come out of there with an actual diagnosis (whereas I did not when I was in RVH) and that his aftercare will be excellent.

He’s got a really really long road ahead of him but I think he’s in the best place possible right now so hopefully he’ll have an easier time than I did with the whole thing.

So having said all of that, after Blake & I got home from the hospital, I was tired and hungry and so on edge that I completely lost it and started sobbing uncontrollably because it was the same hospital, the same situation and I knew exactly what he was going through. I was so scared for him and so pissed off at the hospital for putting Ronny and Alex through all that bullshit. Then when I found out they were moving him to the actual psych hospital North of us, I was so relieved for him that I just bawled.

And I did a lot of crying over the last couple of days because this whole thing has brought up a lot of stuff that I’d thought I’d dealt with but apparently not. My shrink has even said that part of my problems now is that I never really dealt with what happened to me in 2006 so it’s no wonder I’m completely traumatized by this whole thing now. Supporting Ronny & Alex in this was a no-brainer and I’d gladly do it again and will keep doing it, but I’ve very glad that I’ll be seeing my shrink on Monday to discuss all of this.

It’s hard for me to even put into words all of the things that have surfaced as a result of this but I’m better today than I was yesterday and I suspect I’ll be fine in a few days. When we got home from the hospital I told Blake that there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d be able to visit Alex’s brother with them while he was in the psych ward of RVH but now that he’s been moved to the better hospital, I actually want to go up there with them at some point just to see what the facility is like because I’ve heard so much about it.

In the midst of writing this post, Ronny called me and told me that they’d visited Alex’s brother at the hospital today with their dad and that her brother’s pretty disoriented, thinking he’s been there for days instead of not even 24 hours. You can kinda tell that the meds are starting to do their job because he’s a little pissed off that Ronny and Alex “put” him there, as any sane person would be if they were in that situation. The nurse that they spoke to while there said that she doubted he would be out sooner than a week, which I explained to Ronny as being very good news. As long as he co-operates and actually speaks his mind, he should be able to get an actual diagnosis and start the long process of trying to find the right meds.

And as I explained to Ronny, their outpatient services are excellent and that since Alex’s brother doesn’t drive and lives an hour away, they’ll actually send a cab to pick him up for appointments and another one to bring him home, all on the government’s dime. He’ll also be able to get his medications through the clinic so he won’t have to pay for them, which is good because he doesn’t work and psych meds are super expensive. In a way, this story has a happy ending.

In other news, my kitchen is finished. Blake and Madison and Madison’s friend are putting the cupboard doors back on and after a bit of touch-ups on them because the paint stuck to the plastic they were laid down on, Blake’s going to paint our shelves green (which are now white). Then at some point my mom’s going to wallpaper the backsplash and line the shelves with the same wallpaper, then we’ll put everything back in the cupboards and it’ll be done! It looks GREAT, the light in there is so much nice now that it’s bouncing off of a greyish blue instead of pineapple yellow.

Tomorrow night is the finale of The Walking Dead, which Ronny & Alex are going to come over for and that should be awesome.

The only thing right now in my life that isn’t so awesome is that I’ve been gaining weight again. This is partially due to the fact that I’m not eating my eggs for breakfast anymore, that I’m not eating dinner with the family anymore, I’m eating too many large assorted subs, I’m doing Hatha yoga now instead of Vinyasa and because now that I have my own money, I can afford more junk food. In other words, I am absolutely doing this to myself and it’s making me very angry.

So starting Monday, I will be eating my eggs for breakfast again and I am going to start eating dinner with the family again, while cutting out most of my junk food consumption.

See the thing is, if I’m eating my eggs and having dinner with the family, I can “afford” to have a bit of “vitamin J” every now & then, but with the combination of things happening diet-wise right now, I can’y and especially not in the quantities I’ve been having.

I know it’s a total cliche to say “the diet starts on Monday”  but it’s easy to eat eggs on the weekend because Blake will make them for me, it’s NOT so easy to eat them during the week because I have to work and don’t have time to make them. (I think microwaving eggs is an absolute SIN).

And I absolutely have to give up my subs, or at the very least, limit it to a small one once a week, as opposed to a large one a few times a week. Truthfully, I’ve been eating them so much because I don’t know what else to eat since I haven’t been eating dinner with the family and since they eat gross things so often it’s just easier to get a sub and be done with it.

But the key is the eggs, so that’s priority one.

Anyway, I’m just babbling at this point, so that’s life right now and I hope you’re having a wonderful weekend! Mine is dedicated to watching really bad movies and painting because it’s been a while and I have a lot to catch up on. THE END.

- Life is pretty good right now.

- Slooooowly but surely I am making progress on a couple of paintings while mentally plotting the 24 x 48 inches of gallery stretched canvas I have sitting in my office.

- I am getting really really good at my job.

- My sleep schedule is getting a bit better yet I’m still sitting here an hour past bedtime waiting for Ativan to dissolve, so there is that.

- Ronny is painting the kitchen, it’s almost done and it looks good.

- Pomegranates.

- I farted during yoga tonight and survived. (No one heard, THANK GOD.)

- I’m reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and can barely put it down. I also loved A Thousand Splendid Suns but I think I like The Kite Runner better. I think they’re making it into a movie.

- Tonight I watched the movie The Virgin Suicides, which I’d seen before and liked and knew it was based on a book, but had no idea until I went to add the movie to my wishlist that the author of the book was Jeffrey Eugenides whose book Middlesex is in my top favourite books of all time. The Virgin Suicides is now a must-read.

- I hold 10 different mayorships on Foursquare. Wut wut.

- Xmas shopping is allllllmost finished. This is helping with my yearly holiday stress induced freak out.

- The Walking Dead is so close to my nightmares that I require my night time dose of anti-anxiety medication an hour early or I can’t watch it. One episode I had to watch during the day because it just wasn’t happening before bed.

- I discovered during yoga tonight that part of my left calf is numb and still is 5 hours after discovery so that has me a little worried about a possible blood clot or some other dire affliction.

- Got paid today, so that’s awesome.

- Madison had to go to the hospital to get her ass x-rayed on Friday because her friend thought it would be HILARIOUS if she pulled Madison’s chair out from under her when she went to sit down. Thank god Ronny happened to be here so he could pick up the kids since Blake’s now 2 hours away.

- A very good friend of mine was just hired by the company I work for and she’ll be working with me. This is super extra awesome for about a million reasons.

- I need to be sleeping in the next 7 minutes or I won’t have a good tomorrow, so that is all.

I just randomly woke up with some of the worst cramps of my life and a huge gush of blood between my legs. Luckily tonight was yoga night (which caused the major cramping to begin with…I thought I shouldn’t go because I was in pain but Blake said I’d regret it if I didn’t go, but now here we are…) so I was wearing the biggest of my Lunapads and I didn’t get blood on the sheets. I’ve been up long enough for the Tylenol 3 & Naproxen to be doing their jobs so along with my Magic Bag (sort of like a heating pad you microwave, I think it’s full of some kind of beans) I’m doing alright.

It’s only Tuesday and my first day without Blake & kids in 10+ days, but already I feel like my days are less pressured now that I’m doing my job full time . I’m still training but I’m still expected to train 8 hours a day and that’s a lot easier without everyone around. Blake checking on me to make sure I didn’t need anything and could work was making me pretty insane. It’s just better if I do my work when the kids are at school and Blake is at work, then I take a break until the kids go to bed and then work until it’s my bedtime. And of course clear up the inbox a bit when I wake up in the middle of the night like tonight or work extra like I did the other night when I couldn’t get to sleep until 4am. There’s no real schedule and as far as I can tell, we’re on the honour system and I think that’s just peachy.

This Friday is payday AGAIN and I think that’s so fucking crazy that I get money AGAIN. The only real jobs I’ve ever had, like where I was paid by a 3rd party (I don’t count my job at the vet office in high school, everyone has a high school job, right? plus I didn’t work there long), were freelance writing jobs or commissioned painting jobs where you just got paid once. Or maybe half up front and half upon completion. This “regular paycheque” thing and how fast the time flies in between them is so completely foreign to me that…I dunno. After this next paycheque we’ll be out of overdraft and then some, I think, which is good good good.

The way we’re going to do it after we’re out of debt is that 1/4 of my paycheque will go in savings, 1/4 will go in a bank account to save for taxes, 1/4 will go to family finances and 1/4 will be to do whatever I want with. As my mother is probably thinking right now after having read that, that plan was Blake’s doing, not mine, as I am the most horrible person on Earth when it comes to money. I don’t understand what to do with it, how to budget, how to prioritize bills, how not to spend it. The concept of saving money is just…I don’t get it, but Blake says it’s a good thing because after a year or so, we’ll have saved enough to buy a cheap car with cash or, if he also gets a raise (he has an interview tomorrow!), put a decent downpayment on a better house. Or, like, we’re going to be old one day and while Canada has an okay pension deal now, I think, you have to supplement that with savings. So whatever, I’m just happy with my own 1/4 and he can do whatever he wants with the other 3/4. I trust his judgement. I mean, he grew up with money and I didn’t, plus whenever money’s been discussed in my lifetime I’ve just kinda tuned it out because I don’t care, so he knows more about it than I do. I have a hard time dealing with the meager money issues surrounding Sunnyland Studio. :o/

And speaking of which, no, I have not been painting. As I’ve said before, once I get a routine down with this job thing, my plan is to be able to do like, half an hour’s work on a painting and while that’s drying, do my job, then when that’s finished and I’m waiting for more e-mails, I’ll go back to painting. I’ve had these 3 girls on the go for like, 5 weeks I think and I’m getting really antsy to do something with them considering they don’t even have backgrounds yet.

I got my new phone on Thursday or Friday, I think, and I’m already in love with it. I downloaded an app that tracks your periods, which is helpful because I’m not on the pill anymore but my beef with it is that it only lets you track the period of one person, whereas it would be helpful if I could also track Madison’s periods, but that’s probably something that wouldn’t occur to a developer. I’m also playing Foursquare as an unofficial form of immersion therapy. As I’ve explained before, I won’t do anything without a reason. I can’t just “go for a walk”, I can only “walk to a place”. The destination is the reason and just walking to a destination for no reason is something I would never do. Like I wouldn’t just walk to the park and back because that would be stupid, but theoretically I would walk to the store to buy a Coke. But there are baby Cokes in my fridge, so why would I even do that? To get points on Foursquare.

For those not in the know, Foursquare is this (stupid) game where you get points for “checking in” to locations using your smartphone just about everywhere and if the location where you are isn’t in the database in your phone, you add it. If you check into a place 4 times (I think), you become the “mayor” of that place, but you can be ousted by another person if they’ve been there more times. Your locations are then broadcast on Twitter or Facebook (I only put mine on Twitter) with a short message, like tonight we went to yoga, so I inputted the studio and when I checked in, my message was “Namaste, bitches!” and that was broadcast to Twitter.

Honestly the whole thing’s pretty silly, but since I got the phone and started playing it, I’ve left the house 3 times in 5 days and I’ve gone to 7 different locations. I know this because the game keeps stats. Tonight I actually said to Blake that when he went somewhere (I forget where we were talking about now), that I would come too just so I could check in and get points and that is VERY unlike me. If I can stay home, I do, and I never go out unless I absolutely have to – usually, anyway. But I like games and points and winning and as a friend pointed out the other day, it’s very feasible, since our town is sort of technologically challenged, that Blake & I could become the mayors of just about every location in town. And that would be sorta cool. Personally, I’m looking forward to being the mayor of the mental health clinic I go to because that’s sort of like being the mayor of Crazytown and that’s just FUNNY.

I had a moment on Sunday when we were at the bookstore that was sort of interesting and I’m not really sure what to make of it, except to say that it was interesting.

First of all, I love bookstores. Probably more than art stores. Dunno why, I just love magazines and books and the fact that I have enough money to actually buy magazines now is asjdlwgflyfg. So we went to Chapters on Sunday and I made a beeline for the magazine section where I grabbed bitch and BUST magazines, the former of which I’d never read before but had always heard good things about. (I’m enjoying it, I must say.)

Now Chapters is a super high stress place for me, even though I love it, because it’s one of those places where I feel like A) I don’t belong and B) I feel like people are looking at me like I don’t belong. I took Ativan before we went in but that didn’t stop the mini panic attack I had in the “80% off best-selling fiction” section where I had to crouch down and pretend to look at a book on the bottom row or I was going to pass out. So I took another Ativan and pulled Blake to an obscure part of the store where I crouched down some more (because I thought sitting would have us kicked out) and pretended to look at low books until it passed, then we went back to the “80% off selected best-sellers” section where I had been looking at this book called The Help, which I knew was on my Amazon wishlist. But see here’s the thing, a couple of days prior, my friend Charlie said he’d bought me a few books from my wishlist and I knew what all of them were called but one and I was afraid The Help was one of them so I didn’t want to buy that one but I couldn’t find anything else I was interested in because the store was just way too huge and overwhelming.

But then I was likme, hey I have a phone now where I can get my e-mail! So I pulled it out and pressed the little e-mail button and up came my inbox. But then I realized that I’d filed the e-mail where he’d told me which books he’d bought and so that knocked the wind out of my sails and I told Blake we should probably just get the magazines and leave. Except I decided to double check my e-mail again and when I did, I accidentally hit the “menu” button which gave me the option to look at my e-mail folders, so I found the e-mail with the list of books, found that The Help wasn’t one of them, and so that’s that one I bought.

It was kind of a cool moment though, when I realized for the first time that I literally had the internet in my pocket. Not only could I check my primary e-mail on this phone of mine, but I can check my work e-mail and do my job from it, I can log onto IRC and have instant friends if I’m ever stuck for some reason or just bored, I can update Live Journal or probably my site because I’m sure there’s a WordPress app for it that I just haven’t downloaded yet (mental note). I can hang out on Camwhores on it, play Foursquare, use it as a GPS, use Google maps and a thousand other things that I haven’t even though about. Oh, and I can track not only my periods by LEAFS GAMES, which is very important. (Although I haven’t found a decent app yet for real time scores.) I’ve often wondered if a lot of my agoraphobia was tied to the fact that inside my house, on the computer, I have a life, but once I step outside my front door, for the most part, I don’t. I’ve also known that money’s always been a big part of it too, so now that I have some, maybe things are going to start to change. In fact I see them already changing, but I don’t know how far it’ll go. I don’t see myself driving to Barrie any time soon or going to yoga by myself, although a couple of weeks ago I did drive to the grocery store, at like, 8pm, in the rain, to get chocolate mousse pudding and that right there is a small bit of progress.

When I told my shrink about the new job on Friday, she was happy about it but cautious. While the job is great and I love how it’s changing our lives and that I think I’m pretty good at it so far, it does cause me extra anxiety and thus, my anti-anxiety meds have been bumped up to 3x a day rather than 2 at bedtime.  I think this is only a temporary thing, like while I train and I’m unsure a lot of the time if I’m doing the right thing or I’m unsure if the boss is going to think I’m lazy because I didn’t answer 3 e-mails in a row when *I* know I could, but I thought it best to let them handle them in case I was wrong…that kinda stuff. Once I know the job inside out, which they expect will take several months, I don’t think I’ll need the extra pill, but for right now I do. And like I said, my shrink is happy about the job and agrees that it’s the perfect job for me, but is cautiously optimistic about it rather than just plain ol’ optimistic.

So I guess we’ll see how that goes. I mean, as I’ve said, I think the job is going great and I like my bosses, I just have some adjusting to do and they know this is my first job, too, so I think they’re being extra patient with me.

Anyway, these days I couldn’t be happier. Life is amazing. I fully expect to be hit by a bus any day now.

Blackface is Fashionable Again – I don’t understand this AT ALL.

On the ubiquitous use of “crazy” – Absolutely guilty of this (I also use the word “retard” quite liberally, which is an ableism 101 no no, so I’m trying to use it less, but I have a short story that pertains to this. I was psychotic in March 2006 and in Dec. 2006, for Xmas, my mom got me a t-shirt of that pink bunny I forget the name of (which I hate, for the record), that said “cute but psycho”. And that was the most hurtful gift I have ever received. I probably wouldn’t be as upset about it if it were to happen now and NOW I’d understand the intent a little better, but this was on the heels of her writing about what a “luxury” it was for me to go crazy and it was just too soon. So I freaked. Anyway, I have often thought my own use of “crazy” and “insane” to describe things was pretty hypocritical of me and lazy, so I shall now rethink their use.

Last night I had a 2 hour phone conversation with someone in the middle of the night, which was the first time I’ve spoken to anyone who wasn’t Blake (and maybe one phonecall to Alex) in about 13 months. My options were to either use the phone or do video chat and since I hadn’t washed my hair and since I’d just woken up randomly in the middle of the night and happened to catch this really busy guy online, I went with the phone option. Anyway, it was weird, a little bit awkward and my ear really hurt afterward. Using the phone is just one of those things I’m going to have to relearn how to do I think because of….stuff…..

…okay this is the first and only time I’m going to say this publicly but I have a job now. One with a boss. And it was my boss with whom I was speaking to last night on the phone. And because he’s my boss, I’m probably going to have to do it again. In fact, I think he said, because he was training me, that we were definitely going to do it again. So I have to get used to using the phone – at least for him.

The job…I’m really not allowed to talk about it. Soon I’m going to have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and everything, but I can say that I’m doing customer e-mail support for a large website. I get to set my own hours, which is good because I can sleep when I need to sleep, I can make art when I need to make art and as long as I keep the inbox relatively empty, everyone’s happy. I think I’m going to be extremely good at this job once I learn the ropes and I think the past 9 years of my life makes me uniquely qualified for it. Never having had a paying job before, especially one where my hours are fluid, there have been a lot of adjustments (for example, I’ve done NOTHING but job-related things for the past 2 weeks, with one day for art) but I think I’m getting the hang of things. I like my boss, he’s a straight, to-the-point, no fucking around kinda guy, which is good for keeping me on task, particularly because I’m a textibitionist and can chat a person’s ear off quite easily. Two of my co-worknerds I’ve known for almost a decade and are very good friends and the other three I have yet to meet or talk to, but should soon.

Anyway, the job just sorta fell in my lap and since it’s something I’d probably do for free because I’m a nice person who likes to help out, I jumped at the chance and now here we are: a dual income household.

Next week Blake’s having surgery. Because of his sleep apnea he uses a CPAP machine but it doesn’t work so well because the mask goes over his nose and his nose is really messed up, to the point where he can’t really breathe through his nose or smell things. Sooooo a surgeon is going to basically make his nose canals (totally a term I just made up) bigger by carving them out. Recovery is about 10 days apparently, so he’s taken the week off and I’ve been kind of getting myself prepared for that. Like, he’s going to be on heavy drugs and in pain so I can’t just send him to the store to get milk because we’re out and since he’s not at work, he can’t get it AFTER work, so this week I went to the store by myself in the car and picked up a small lists of things just to make sure that I could do it and that I could stick to the list. The only deviation from the list is that I got Blake peanut butter cookies. The point though, is that even though we’re going to stock up on groceries before the surgery, I’m prepared to go to the store if necessary. (When I went it was about 8pm, so moderate traffic AND it was raining, so if I can do that, I can go pretty much any time if it’s absolutely necessary. At least to the grocery store, I’m not sure about the pharmacy since that would require parallel parking. :o/)

I’m also probably going to have to do most of the cooking while he’s recovering, which sucks because I hate cooking, but I’ll do what I gotta do. Madison can do a lot of the cooking too and she actually likes doing it, so there’s that as well.

Speaking of cooking, yes we make spaghetti sauce out of our tomatoes a few weeks ago. We ended up making enough for one large spaghetti dinner for 4 people with enough sauce left over for another 2 or 3 person meal. I hated the sauce though. Blake liked it, Wes liked it, Madison hates tomatoes so naturally she wasn’t a fan. I think it would be really good in like, lasagna maybe, but for straight up spaghetti it was too….vegetable-y.

Having said that, the vegetable garden is officially over. This weekend Blake’s job is to pull up all the tomato cages and put them away in the shed. Now the questions I have is: should we leave the bean, tomato and pepper remnants and let them compost a bit to be removed in the spring or pull them up now?

Los Campesinos are coming to Toronto on October 8th, to a very small bar (I think?) and I really want to go, especially since I have a job now and can actually afford to, but that’s 4 days after Blake’s surgery so he won’t be able to take me. Ronny & Alex don’t like them (well, they don’t dislike them I don’t think, I just think they just don’t like them). I thought about bribing them to take me by paying for both of their admissions and parking and drinks and all expenses incurred but after buying a major purchase with my first paycheque, which should arrive by then (although being a large sum of money “from the internet”, there’s a good chance the bank will put a hold on it), I’m not totally sure I can afford it. If I can though, I’d really like to figure out a way to go. There’s not a chance in hell I could ever drive myself and like, be THAT independent or even take the bus and stay over at someone’s house (I know many someones in Toronto) so I don’t know how I could get there, but again, I really want to because this is one of those situations where I may not get another chance to see this band because they’re from Wales and while they’ve put out 3 albums I get the sense that their remaining a band is sort of shaky. Anyway, I’m trying to work things out so I can go.

Art. I submitted a whole bunch of stuff to Touched By Fire but it’s doubtful that any of it will be accepted for two reasons:

1. None of my stuff is moody enough for that show. My shrink offered to lend me back “The Two Sunnies”, which is about bipolar disorder and that I gave her as a gift, but that show doesn’t really like to take works that aren’t for sale so I declined and just submitted what I had on hand.
2. I submitted probably 8 pieces total, all in the same category, when apparently there was a submission limit of 3 that was on another page and I didn’t see until I’d already finished submitting.

Therefore I doubt I’ll get in and I don’t really care because it’s not exactly on the top of my priority list these days. Going would be fun, since as I’ve mentioned before it’s at the ROM and being able to say that you’ve exhibited at the ROM is kinda cool, but it won’t be the end of the world if they don’t accept me. The Square Foot Show and everything it entailed has kind of soured me on the all bullshit required to do these Toronto shows that I just…meh.

I DO have to set aside some time to get my OAC grant proposal package finished and sent out. I have a printer now, so I can do that and since I don’t really expect to have much in the way of new work that I’d like to submit between now and the deadline (Dec. 1st), I might as well just get it done.

Suddenly with this whole job thing, getting my shop stocked for the Xmas season is less of a priority as well since art is no longer my main form of income. Now I can just create what I want to create when I want to create it, which I think is better for me creatively anyway. The next 2 pieces I’m doing are more to fill up my shop than because I want to do them admittedly (another bee girl, who was supposed to be black but I was tired after not sleeping for 2 days and I accidentally shaded her white, oops and a fairy who’s supposed to be black & sorta goth but I haven’t figured out how I’m going to pull that off yet). The 3rd girl I’m working on right now is a mini girl with a pink dress that’ll be the cover for my The Sketchbook Project Sketchbook, which I’ve decided I’m going to use as an actual sketchbook rather than making it like, an art journal. The cover will be pretty because all of my sketchbook covers are pretty, but the guts are probably just going to be crude sketches and notes because that’s how I use sketchbooks. Why make it more than it is? Or at least this is my plan so I don’t make myself nuts trying to make something fancy before the deadline, which is only 3 & a half months away. I know that seems like a lot of time, but to me it’s not and I traditionally don’t do well with deadlines to begin with sooooo…

We have (or are about to have) two sets of new neighbours, one on either side of us. The people in Wayne & Judy’s house I think I’ve already made a small post about but here’s the gist anyway: dad seems cool, about Blake’s age I think, named Brad, works for Bell Canada, haven’t met the mom yet, this is not their first marriages as there are I *think* kids between them, 2 or 3 from previous marriages/relationships and only one of their kids, the one from THIS marriage, lives with them full-time and that’s 7 yr old Jacob who is Wes’ new best friend. They’ve only been living here a week and already Madison’s walking Jacob to school most days because the parents go to work too early to drive him and our kids are walking anyway. The mom says that in the winter she may be able to drive them to school in the mornings, but this was all arranged between her and Madison so accuracy of statements is in question. Since we don’t know them very well and really just met them a week ago, we’ve told our kids to decline any offers of rides to school. I think they’re fine because I think most people are fine, but we just don’t feel comfortable taking advantage of that when we don’t really know them. Back to the kids, besides Jacob, I know they have another 10-ish yr old boy, possibly a 12 yr old boy and a rumoured teenage daughter. I’ve seen the 10 yr old boy (last weekend) at the park with Jacob and Wes but I haven’t met the other 2 yet and I don’t know whose kids are whose. They have a long-haired wiener dog that Lucky will NOT stop barking at, which got hit by a car in front of their house this weekend because it was following the kids when they went to the park. It’s okay, but it did skid across the pavement so they put up the part of the fence that the owner of the house had taken down so the tractor to cut the lawn could get through while it was for sale. Hmmm, what else? Jacob is not in Wes’ class, which sucks since they became such good buddies 2 seconds upon meeting each other. Jacob’s kind of a shit who swears a lot (ha, look who’s talking) and seems a lot more grown up than Wes is. I guess that’s the difference between growing up in a city and a village.

At some point soon, supposedly, my mom’s giving Wes a set of bunk beds from the cottage where the bottom bunk is a futon/double bed so I foresee many sleep overs with Jacob to come.

On Sunday when Blake & I were pulling out of the driveway to go to Starbuck’s, our other neighbour Francis, who owns the town’s only bar flagged us down and told us that not only did he get married the weekend prior, but she has a house in Barrie and he’s moving there because she has 5 kids and his house isn’t big enough to accommodate them. His house has been for sale all summer and I guess is going to remain for sale, but in the meantime he’s going to be renting it “to a buddy” so I dunno if that means a single guy, a single guy and a wife/girlfriend, a couple with kids or what, and knowing who Francis knows, the age of this person or persons is completely variable so I’m interested to see the outcome of that.

Either way, I have no intentions of being friends with any of these people, on the right or on the left. Especially on the right because I will bet you any money that whoever moves into Francis’ house is going to be a smoker. I don’t think the people in Wayne & Judy’s house smoke, but I’m not sure. And even as I say that, I doubt myself because even though I have extremely antisocial tendencies, I’m kind of a social person. I know that makes no sense whatsoever, but like, Wayne & Judy lived in their house for a year & a half before I said more than “hi isn’t the weather lovely today” to them but then we became really good friends for a while until…well, you know the story. Leeches.

Anyway, I’m good with being antisocial for the time being and so far the W&J neighbours seem good with that too, so bonus. (Although I kiiiiinda get the vibe that Brad & Blake are gonna become friends because I kiiiiinda get the vibe that Brad’s as big a fan of the internet as Blake is, unlike with W&J where we literally had nothing in common with them except smoking occasionally.)

Speaking of smoking, I am 5 months smoke-free.

Yoga. Yoga is yoga. Nothing to really report there except that I really fucking hate plank still and I’m stressed over the fact that she said we’re going to be doing bridge again at some point and I just cannot do that pose if my life depended on it because I’m not strong enough. I can finally do a mean tree pose though. I could always do it at home, I’ve been doing it for years (more or less) without even knowing it was a yoga thing, but I’m too distracted in class to do it normally, but I found that as long as I “set my hips” (which is hard to explain) first and turn to face the wall and away from everyone else, I have do it for the full set of breaths as the teacher can (but I’m relieved when it’s over). There’s another balance pose she makes us do sometimes that uses a block and you stand on one foot, leg bent, and put your other leg straight up in the air and…I forget what you’re even supposed to do with your hands but it sucks and I hate it and I can’t do it both because my balance is shit but also because my legs just aren’t strong enough. I have the muscle-density of a milk-fed pig, I swear to god.

Annnnd that’s all I can think of to write about really. New computer’s awesome (although it has some keys I’m not used to that I just want to rip off because they make me angry), depression has seemed to have lifted, new job is good, money is good, hockey season officially starts next week, everything is just good.

So obviously, “She’s Like A Rainbow” is finished and I’m really really proud of her because in person, she just looks amazing but now I’m thinking about future projects and the things coming up and I’m becoming completely overwhelmed by it all. When I become overwhelmed, I’m unfortunately the kind of person to just sit down wherever I am and cry and I’m trying very very hard not o do that.

I really wish they made a suitable paper planner for me to keep everything straight because right now, my TELUS calendar is just not helping me. I miss my Big Fat 5-Star planner. I don’t know why they stopped making those, they were great.

Anyway…

The drop off date for The Square Foot Show, which Blake says I should submit to just to give me the exposure AND the option of going to the gala if I choose to, is 3 weeks away. If I don’t submit, that’s no longer an option. Also, there are prizes because it’s a juried show and it’s not like I think I would actually win something but it’s like the lottery, you’re not gonna win if you don’t play, so I might as well play. But what I’m stressing over is what to submit. What is representative of my work *and* what don’t I mind giving away for only about $100? (They sell the pieces for $200 & change but keep 50 friggin’ percent.) I’m allowed to submit up to 3 pieces and since I paid $20 to be in this show, I feel I should submit the maximum allowed. Right now I’m thinking “Sparkle“, “Shimmer II” and “Five O’Clock Abortion“. What do you guys think of that selection? I was thinking of maybe putting in “Turquoise Love Fairy” instead of “Sparkle” but I dunno. I just think it has to be one or the other because I don’t want two fairies in the same show. Personally, I like “Sparkle” better, but she’s been in my Etsy shop for the last 7 months & hasn’t moved so maybe I could sell her at Sq. Foot, is what I’m thinking.

Then there’s also the fact that there are 3 weeks left until the submission date which means I have enough time to do 1 more painting for consideration, 2 if I really haul ass and get productive. I have ideas and I’m going to start 1 tomorrow, but the 2nd idea is going to have to wait until I learn a specific technique in my art class on Monday and really, if that one goes as planned, I’d rather have it in my Etsy shop than Sq. Foot.

This is the shit that keeps me up at night, seriously.

Also keeping me up at night is the fact that Touched By Fire has already sent out their call for entries and I don’t know if I’m going to submit this year or what I’m going to submit this year. I think I have until October or November to decide, which is nice, but that also crosses into my Xmas season issues. I’m told, and I’ve seen this with my own eyes, that in October/November, Etsy kinda goes crazy with Xmas sales, so I want to have my shop as full as possible. That’s only like, 2 months & change away. It takes me about 2 weeks to do a painting and I can do 2 at a time. That means I have a lot of work ahead of me and I’m not sure if I can do Touched By Fire *and* stock my shop for Xmas.

Honestly though, Touched By Fire kinda pisses me off. The show is put on by The Mood Disorders Association of Ontario, which is why I call it “the remedial art show” and the first year they accepted me, my first year submitting, they chose “Mania in the Key of Psychosis“, which is apt, and they juxtaposed that with “Hope” and “Dream“, which also makes sense. But when I submitted last year, I submitted a ton of paintings, including my “The Devil’s in the Details” which I thought was appropriate for a show called “Touched By Fire” and they didn’t accept me. That’s cool, I can handle rejection, but the thing is that almost all of the paintings I submitted were shiny, happy paintings and I almost feel like I wasn’t accepted because I got better. My meds are working (for the most part) so I make shiny, happy paintings now and that’s not what they want. They want tortured, moody depictions of mental illness and to me, that kinda seems like defeating the purpose of the Association, don’t you think? I mean, isn’t the goal here to help people get better? So why isn’t that represented in the show?

So that’s why I might not bother submitting to that show this year. I don’t want to paint something dark and moody specifically for that show because if it’s not accepted and if it IS accepted and doesn’t sell, then what the fuck am I going to do with it? My online audience of customers don’t want that shit and I kinda don’t know if it’s right to paint outside of your own headspace/mood just to get in a show, does that make sense?

“The Two Sunnies” would have been perfect for the show, but I gave that one to my shrink, partially as a “thank you” because she HAS helped me immensely but also to show her “hey, this is actually what I do for a living so quit telling me I don’t have a job” (and she hasn’t done that since, as a point of fact, every session she asks me if I’m painting because if I’m not painting it’s probably time to adjust my meds).

You can submit work to the show that’s not for ale, but I’d kinda feel like a dick asking her for it back, if only for a few weeks. Especially if something happened to it (the Touched By Fire people were NOT gentle with my work when they sent it back to me…).

And then there’s just trying to get my shop as full as possible for the Xmas season. Of COURSE I want to sell things the second I put them up, that would be great! But at the same time, I need to have a full shop by like, mid-October which means that I need to start painting my ass off (which I’ve been doing, I finished 3 paintings this month!). And that’s fine, I can do that, but things like Camwhores and WoW are going to have to get to the back of the line. And YES WoW is totally a recreational thing and I can see how the outside observer might be like “well not playing a video game is pretty easy” but when you’re an officer in a guild, especially, it’s a little more involved than that. People count on you. Camwhores? Well that’s just another can of worms.

For someone who “doesn’t do anything”, I sure seem to have a lot on my plate right now and I don’t really know how to make time for everything. I think painting has to be my #1 priority, WoW on weekends, Camwhores when I can’t sleep.Oh and there’s yoga too, can’t forget that…the art class I’m taking too….

When the kids go back to school, I’ll have more time to get things done, which will help a lot, so I have that to consider as well, especially when it comes to fitting Camwhores into my schedule.

Anyway, as I said, this is the shit that keeps me up at night. Hopefully now that it’s all out of my brain I can finally drag my ass to bed and sleep like a normal human being. Maybe?

It truly is the perfect food. Well, “junk” food. I think I read somewhere that dark chocolate like, boosts your endorphins or dopamine something and that’s a good thing. All I know is that I love it, especially late at night when it’s hot and humid and I don’t want to go to bed yet because tomorrow’s going to be even hotter and more humid, so I need to use the night to get work done.

I’m taking an art class right now that is so fucking awesome that I honestly couldn’t be happier. My brain is exploding with ideas and I’m frustrated that my hands don’t work as fast as I’d like them to and paint doesn’t dry as fast as I’d like it to. I just want all of this creative energy out of me and into the world! I want to paint a million paintings and have them in homes all across the world! I’m close to that, which I should be proud of, my paintings are all over the US, a few in the UK and one – ONE! – in my homeland of Canada! If I could get one to Australia and Japan, I would feel immensely successful.

I’m still undecided about The Square Foot Show. Like, whether or not I’m going to do it. Blake says I should at least submit and be part of the show, but not commit to actually being at the artist’s gala bullshit thing that I totally do not want to do. Like, in the slightest. I barely made it through my friend’s wedding last weekend, I don’t know if I can deal with a bunch of Toronto strangers.

I guess we’ll see how it goes.

Oh one more thing about art before I switch topics: my art teacher? Totally awesome. I e-mailed her, asking if she could teach me how to shade people of colour because I learned how to shade my girls in a very specific, Caucasian way and I don’t know how to adapt that method to work for darker complexions. Shading is just something that doesn’t come naturally to me at ALL. So she e-mailed me back, actually really excited about the idea of darker complexions and said that in week 3 of the course, she’ll put up an extra video (it’s an online art class btw), teaching us exactly what I asked for: how to shade people of colour. I AM SO STOKED. I have had a billion ideas for girls of different ethnicities as it’s one of my goals in my artist’s statement to express Canada’s multiculturalism, but until now I haven’t been able to and it’s been making me CRAZY! Learning how to do this thing may be the difference between me getting a $5000 arts grant in the spring and not getting a $5000 arts grant in the spring. The same goes for The Stupid Square Foot Show.

So that’s art right now.

But let’s talk about yoga. Oh my god people, I LOVE yoga and I am in a continuous state of SHOCK that I love yoga. I literally failed gym class every year of my life. I can scan my report cards and prove it if you don’t believe me, it was pathetic. (How do you fail gym class? By not showing up, my faking injury or illness, by having a doctor who didn’t mind writing notes, getting kicked OUT of gym class for calling your gym teacher things you’re now too ashamed to admit you said…)

Anyway, yoga. It just works with me, it clicks, I can’t explain it. I feel both relaxed AND energized (and SORE!) after every class, it’s like I’m full of this weird energy or something. My teacher knows I’ve never done yoga before so in the beginning she took it easy on me but as we’ve gone along (I’ve only been going for 5 weeks), she’s been going harder on us and I think she’s a little surprised that I’m keeping up and practically begging for more.

I’m not very strong yet, but I am naturally flexible, so I’m better at some things than others. Like today we did pigeon pose and I rocked the shit out of it because my legs are super bendy and I sit like a freak all day in my computer chair anyway, pigeon was a cakewalk. But plank? Oh my holy lord do I fucking hate plank! My arms and upper body just aren’t strong enough to do plank-like things, like these crazy bitch push ups she made us do a few weeks ago? My god I was dripping with sweat and was sore for a full week afterward – BUT IN A TOTALLY GOOD WAY.

Honestly, I wish we could go twice a week, but we don’t have the money to do that and I think her classes are all full because her studio only fits 5 or 6 people right now. She’s planning on expanding, but I don’t know when that’s going to happen.

ANYWAY…*deep breath*, it is 3:34am and I think I have just enough energy left to get the paining I’m working on into the final steps of being finished. So I’m going to go do that and wish you all a happy tomorrow. :o)

Oooooh my god I have so many thoughts swirling around in my head right now that I can’t even begin to process them all unless I start writing shit down, so that’s what I’m going to do. It’s been a busy, happy (mostly) few days so I guess I’ll sort everything by day, starting with Thursday night.

Thursday night I was playing WoW with my friends Stephy & Keenan and eating Crispers when I lost a filling. I have nightmares regularly about this very thing and while I anted to freak out, I stayed mostly calm, especially because our dentist is awesome and I was pretty sure I could get it fixed, if only temporarily, the next day. Plus, it didn’t hurt. Still, when I got into bed I woke Blake up and freaked out a little bit, but not as badly as I would have in the past and then I went to sleep.

Friday morning Blake told me that our dentist could see me in the afternoon, after my shrink appointment, so yay.

My shrink appointment didn’t go as planned. See, the thing is, I only see my shrink once a month or sometimes once every 3 months, so she doesn’t always remember things about me or what we talked about last session. Plus, she’s sometimes quite a bitch, but despite that I mostly like her. It’s not her fault she has like, 500+ patients and at the mental health clinic I go to, where she works 2 days a week, she gets paid peanuts compared to her private practice and probably has more clients, all of whom she usually sees once a month. I’ve been in the waiting room with a lot of her patients and believe me, I’m definitely low priority and to me, that’s a good thing.

Anyway, I was excited to tell her about doing yoga because yoga is a huge deal for me in terms of social awkwardness and agoraphobia in general. A year ago I couldn’t do this. Two years ago, this would have been an impossibility. I expected my shrink to be like, “yay you!” but when I told her she wasn’t really that enthused about it and that wasn’t the reaction I was going for. She was more amused, I think, that Blake was doing it – omg a MAN doing yoga, imagine! – than me and that kinda bummed me out.

Then I thought she might be happy that I still haven’t smoked since April 23rd, but she didn’t seem to care about that either.

So the next thing I wanted to talk to her about, or at least make her aware of, is that article about picky eating adults I linked in Live Journal the other day and how researchers are thinking it might actually be a disorder and that they were doing a study on it, which I signed up for. So she read the article, which I’d printed out for her, and the whole time she had a kind of smirk on her face like she was trying not to laugh and when she was finished, she said that she didn’t believe it was a disorder. (She spent about a minute 30 seconds skimming the article, I might add.) Then Blake and I started telling her about all of my issues with food, which are actually pretty immense when you lay them all out and I think I’m going to write a page about it on my site sometime soon because maybe it would be interesting to other people, but anyway we told her about ho sometimes it takes literally 2 hours to decide what to have for dinner and then in the end I usually end up eating something separate from the family anyway and after laying it all out on the table, she looks me dead in the eye and says, “is it possible that you’re just a spoiled brat?”

I had no idea how to respond to that. This is my shrink. This is the person who’s supposed to help me with my issues and help me figure out how to live with them or fix them and here she is completely invalidating what Blake and I spent the last 10 minutes trying to explain? I mean basically what we were saying is that we think I have OCD and that it manifests itself with food. Y’know how some people with OCD are germaphobes? Well I’m pretty much a foodaphobe in a very similar way and she asked me that? What kind of bedside manner is that? That’s bullshit. Your shrink isn’t supposed to CALL YOU NAMES.

And what really kills me about this shrink in particular is that when I first started seeing her, almost  years ago now, I told her “hey I sleep ’til 1pm and work at night and smoke and live a really weird life”, she said “that’s okay. It’s your life and you have the right to live it how you want to.” And she stuck with that for like, the first year, but after that she started trying to change me or openly disagreeing with how I live my life. She thinks I should go to bed at 11 or 12 and get up early in the morning all of a sudden. Most of the time I actually DO do that but it’s the principle of it, she told me before that I could sleep however I wanted to as long as I was getting enough of it.

And then there was the one time where I walked into her office and like, almost the first thing she said to me is, “why don’t you get a job?” Like lady, have you not been listening for the past few years? Do you not remember my issues? That was the most asinine suggestion I’ve ever heard in my whole entire life. I’m not offended by people thinking I’m whatever because I don’t have a 9-5, I don’t expect people to understand my life and I don’t care, but SHE SHOULD because I’ve (we’ve) spent hours upon hours explaining to her how we are, how we live, how life is, and she just doesn’t pay attention or listen or write the right things down.

And by the way, I have a job, thank you. I have several. I’m an artist. I’m a camgirl. (A bad one at the moment, but whatever.) Those two things are what I do to bring in money so my kids can have the things they want, which brings me to my other job, being their mom. They LIKE that I’m always home and that I’m always there for them. Our family is extremely close and that’s the way we like it and a lot of that has to do with the fact that 85% of the time, I am completely available for whatever they need. So fuck you and your “get a job” crap. I’m all full up. It pissed me off when people negate being a stay at home mom as a job. That’s fucking bullshit, especially considering the fact that I also work from home at the same time.

Anyway, she pissed me of with the accusation that I as a “spoiled brat” and after she said that, I sort of shut down and stopped participating in the conversation, but I guess Blake explained things to her and she conceded that I probably have OCD tendencies but that I wouldn’t like the main treatment (exposure, which wouldn’t work in this case anyway, if you read the stories on PickyEatingAdults.com) and I couldn’t have the other treatment which is high doses of anti-depressants because they would make me manic. So we all concluded that the best thing to do is to just continue trying to work around it since I’m not exactly starving and Blake can deal with it with me. And really, I’m getting better. Not with food, I’m still a wreck over food, but I’ve been actively trying to make things easier on Blake when it comes to my stupid idiosyncrasies.

So after my shrink appointment we came home for a while and then it was time to go to the dentist where I got a temporary filling and I have to go back this Thursday for the real thing. I hate when the assistant dentist girl tells the secretary that they’ll need 40 minutes for me. :o/

But that’s a milestone in and of itself. I have had a lifelong fear of dentists but I’ve been really lucky to have two really good ones the last several years, especially the one I see now, and now it’s really no big deal because I know after the needle part, I’m good. The dentist I see now is really gentle and understanding and I’m really going to miss him when/if we move or when/if he retires. (He’s kinda old, but I don’t know how old. He’s spoken of retiring while I’ve been in the chair so I know it’s on his mind. Oh yeah, and he’s the only dentist in town.)

After the dentist I had a much needed nap and when I woke up, we went to Wal*Mart to get Madison a new bathing suit and flip-flops because hers were fuX0red and last year’s bathing suit wasn’t fitting so well. So we did that and while we were there, Wes said that he wished he could have a Zhu Zhu pet, which is a mechanical hamster that makes sounds and runs around on the floor and is about $10.

We went to the toy aisle after getting Madison situated and I looked at these mechanical hamsters and when I saw one that was pink, I was sold. I told Wes I would buy him one but that he couldn’t have it until he earned it by doing basic chores around the house. He was good with this, so we put two of them in the cart, one for him and one for me, so we could play with them together just as I played with Tamagotchis with Madison at around the same age.

I also picked up the new “Hole” album, Nobody’s Daughter, which is really a Courtney Love album that she decided to brand as being Hole for reasons I can’t even comprehend. I wasn’t going to buy the album out of principle but then my completest nature too over and suddenly I had to have it. Also I watched Courtney’s “Behind the Music” the night before and that made me want the album. (Have I ever mentioned how goddamn susceptible I am to advertising?)

I also bought two spiral notebooks because my current one is almost full and they were on sale for $3 a piece for the big fat ones, so score! And I also bought new underwear because my bum is no longer a large (it hasn’t been for quite some time, but I haven’t had any money) and is now a medium to small – w00t! I just grabbed a 3-pack of Hanes Her Way bikini underbums because ideally I’m going to be needing to buy smalls eventually.

I know, you totally care. We also bought shampoo, how exciting!

When we got home, I opened my Zhu Zhu pet to see what it did and then I started listening to Nobody’s Daughter, which I expected to hate but I’ve gotta say it’s actually growing on me, or at least some tracks. I think it’s better than the abysmal America’s Sweetheart, but only by a fraction. This may sound kind of weird, but America’ Sweetheart was kinda contrived while Nobody’s Daughter feels more honest. What I mean is that Live Through This was about Courtney’s Life, more or less, as was Celebrity Skin because that’s when she was going through her Hollywood phase. During America’ Sweetheart she was completely fucked up on drugs from crack to coke and getting hauled off to Bellevue because she was out of her mind and hardly any of that is present on America’s Sweetheart. Nobody’s Daughter is very much a comeback album and what she went through to get here, I think, what she learned along the way. (I think certain songs might be about people she met in rehab and some of it is definitely what she discovered about herself through therapy.)

Anyway, I won’t lie, I kinda like it – so shoot me. (But I still refuse to call it a Hole album because it’s not. Certain songs are VERY Hole-esque, but it’s just not Hole.)

So as I’m listening to the album for about the 3rd time, I’m reading my Facebook feed and one of my friends posted that he was going to the Courtney Love show the next day and I was like “WHAT????? HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS????” and immediately I was upset that I couldn’t go because I was sure it was either sold out or we couldn’t afford the INSANE $50 ticket price, which was a shame because on Saturday, the night of the show, we were celebrating our anniversary by going to get ribs and strawberry pie like we do every year and thus, we had a babysitter (two of them in fact!) and could conceivably go.

I sulked hardcore and tweeted about it several times, trying to figure out a way we could go. I have two paycheques coming any day now (well one is) and Blake said he could lend me the money for us to go and I could pay him back with that but the cheque is only for $200 and change and I need that money for the kids for the summer so I didn’t want to blow half of it on this show.

But just as I was considering it, Saturday morning, my friend Heatha messaged me and was like, “hey I can give you a deposit on the painting I want to buy so you can go to the show” and I was like “fuck YES” and that’s what happened. The deposit was exactly enough to pay for the tickets, parking and if we added $10, which I did, get a tour t-shirt.

Before I get into the show though, first and foremost Blake and I were celebrating our 8 year wedding anniversary by going to Haugen’s for the best ribs and fresh strawberry pie in the world, stopping in Greenbank where I grew up, to the bakery there where we bought the best garlic cheese bread in the world, as well as some pretty kickass ginger cookies.

Voila:

Normally we get a whole strawberry pie to bring home with us and share with the kids, but we didn’t this time because we were going to the Courtney Love show afterward and we didn’t think it would keep well in the trunk of the car that long. Plus, we were trying to be as frugal as possible because really, we can’t afford to celebrate our anniversary, but it’s important to us so we do it anyway.

I slept all the way from Haugen’s to the venue and since we were early, I continued to sleep in the car until the lineup to get in was considerably smaller and after fixing my makeup we got in line. Security confiscated my PENS! I had 3 BRAND NEW Pilot Precise V5s in my bag, which are kind of expensive as far as disposable pens go, and they confiscated them because of graffiti. I didn’t protest because I know there’s no point in doing that in situations like this, but man, that sucked. Plus you’d have to have a lot of time and be really dedicated to tag the bathroom with one of those.

The security chick was like, “after the show just come out and I’ll give them back to you” and I thought “yeah right”. And of course after the show, those security guards were nowhere to be found.

Anyway, the show. The show was pretty awesome and I can’t help but love Courtney Love. I’m sorry, I know some of you hate her guts and don’t get why I like her so much, but whatever, she was great. Here’s a review of the show, which I agree with. Her voice was different than usual (I’ve seen her as the REAL Hole twice before), even different than on the album, and I noticed that her annunciation was different too and actually very Jagger-esque. She belted out tunes old and new and the audience sang along to a lot of it and all in all it was just a really great show. (Well, except that she sang Doll Parts, which is the worst Hole song, imo.)

We started off in the “pit”, which was full of little girls like me when we started, and we were about 3 people back from the barriers but when it got closer to Courtney coming on, all these goddamn Amazons pushed and shoved their way in front of all of us and when Courtney came out, the “pit” went fucking mental (as to be expected). We stayed in there for the first 3 songs but when the girl to my left threw her totally full beer into the air all over the crowd and the woman to my right started literally punching people, I decided it was time to get the fuck out, so I grabbed Blake’s hand and we watched the rest of the show from the back where it was cooler and I could actually have a drink.

Luckily, being a primarily female audience and not a very tall one, I could actually see Courtney from the back from the waist up and the sound at the venue is actually really good so I was happy with our position, except when 6 foot tall dickheads decided to stand right in front of me. Repeatedly. I was a 6 foot tall dickhead magnet, I don’t know why. Luckily they never stayed in front of me very long and the back was sparse enough for me to move around so I could see better.

When we first arrived at the show I went to the bathroom and it was totally clean. When Courtney finished her encore I went to the bathroom again and it was absolutely trashed. The men reading this may or may not know this, but in most womens’ public bathrooms, to the right of the toilet, is a receptacle for used menstrual products. When I went to the bathroom at the end of the show I checked every available stall and I swear to god that every girl in the whole venue was on the rag but me. These receptacles were so full that all around them on the floor were used pads and tampons. It was beyond disgusting and made worse by the fact that the floor was all wet for some reason in the whole bathroom, which made the tampons bulk up. SO GROSS.

After the show, we went home and hung out with Ronny & Alex for about half an hour, then they went home and we went to bed and now it’s Sunday afternoon and I’m writing this post.

The only thing I have left to say is that Ronny now lives in Canada (he’s from MI) because he and Alex are getting married on Saturday and he brought me Vanilla Coke Zero, Cherry Coke Zero, Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper and Cherry Dr. Pepper, none of which we have in Canada because….I dunno, we fucking suck. I just had a can of Vanilla Coke Zero and just about had an orgasm on the spot. When they discontinued regular Vanilla Coke up here I was so upset because I LOVED it and when Ronny told me that they had Vanilla Coke Zero in the US I was like “that’s it, we’re moving” so that’s why he brought these all up.

Right now I’m drinking a can of Cherry Coke Zero and I actually think it might be better than the vanilla.

Oh and one more thing: I got the most BEAUTIFUL wedding invitation from our friends Alicia and Tim in Georgia that blew me away on Friday and I wish so badly that we could afford for all of us to go because those two actually kinda met through me and I’d really like to see them become husband and wife. Alas, financially it would be an impossibility, but I hope they know I’m there in spirit. (And I think they should totally webcast it…*cough*)

Anyway, that is all. Have a great week everyone!

I’m hot and pissy. Don’t get me wrong, this is how I like my summers, crazy hot & humid – to me, not much is worse than a cold summer – but that doesn’t mean I don’t also reserve the right to be sleepy, tired and semi-miserable.

We just got back from yoga about a half hour ago and I’m kind of having some thoughts about it. If Blake stops being irritating long enough for me to get those thoughts out, it’ll be a miracle, but I figure I’m going to try anyway.

I am absolutely fascinated by our yoga teacher. I think it’s because I’ve never met a yoga teacher before or really anyone who’s all that athletic in any way. The ease with which she does the poses she teaches us has me in absolute awe and as a person, even though I’ve only met her 3 times now, I can’t seem to peg her down. I only remembered her full name this time. All the other times I forgot it. I bet she doesn’t remember my name either and probably for the same reason I never remembered hers: we don’t use them.

Her studio is in the basement of her home and is only big enough to accommodate 6 people, at the most, and so far we’ve only ever had 5.  I know she’s married, but I don’t know for how long. I know she has a baby who’s just sitting up (because he was present for our first class) but I don’t know if she has any other kids. I know she has a dog, but that’s only because I saw it tied up outside her house today after class.  I have absolutely no idea how old she is. I would guess she’s around Blake’s age, but she could just as easily be older or younger. I have no idea how long she took yoga before becoming a teacher or what kind of yoga (well she said her background is Iyengar) she practiced before becoming a teacher or what kind of a student she was, as in, top or bottom of the class, if ya know what I mean.

I have no idea how long she’s been teaching.

I have no idea if she eats meat or what religion she is or if she’d be upset that I killed a tiny spider crawling on my mat today in class. I think Blake said her day job IS a nutritionist but that doesn’t really tell me anything other than it’s probably a good guess that she’s into healthy, organic eating and that she probably takes a multivitamin and maybe some other supplements too.

I have no idea if she grew up around here or if she moved here (why? especially since the town she lives in only has like, a church and a convenience store and is even further into the middle of nowhere than us) or how long she’s lived here. Her house is in a new subdivision, but I can’t tell how new. No one in the subdivision has a fenced-in yard though, so I ‘m thinking it’s gotta be pretty new. Is this her first home? Or did she & her husband own a home before this one? Or several?

Almost all of the above is absolutely none of my business but after each class, this is what I find myself thinking about. At this point in the game, I keep also thinking that yoga is probably something I’m going to stick with and I expect that she’s going to be my yoga teacher for a rather long time considering that I’m not very optimistic about us being able to move before Madison starts high school.

So how is yoga working out for me? I know some of you do yoga or have done yoga or whatever and are probably wondering how the most out of shape girl in the world is doing with it. Well I’m here to tell you that despite it not being the easiest thing I’ve ever tried to pick up and I have a lot of gripes about it because I’m so out of shape, I’ve gotta tell ya, I think I like it. Which is totally weird because I never expected to.

First and foremost though, I fucking HATE plank pose. Every time she’s all “and find your plank” I’m thinking “oh dear god, no” because my arms are nothing but little chicken wings that have a hard time supporting any kind of body weight. Now, if you’d have caught me 4 or 5 years ago, I would have done better because my arms and shoulders were actually pretty muscular from carrying Wes around, but that was the last thing I really did with them. Worse is that during last week’s class, maybe because I said before class that I didn’t sweat and wasn’t sore the next day after the first class but Blake was/did both, she made us do a thousand reps of these crazy yoga push ups that were absolutely brutal for someone who has never done a push up in her whole entire life. And that class, I DID sweat and I WAS sore the next day (and the next day and the next day and the next day – pretty much until yesterday). As I said…somewhere on the internet last week: The first week I went to yoga, the second week I survived it.

Today wasn’t so bad though, but I’m finding with each class there’s at least one or two poses or activities that I just don’t like. Today it was…I don’t even know what it’s called but she made us lay on our backs, bring our knees up to our chests, put our hands behind our knees to hold our legs tighter to our chests and then she wanted us to rock frontward and backward and then she wanted us to do the same thing without holding our knees. She was practically standing on her head, she was rocking so violently and fast and while the pose/activity itself was okay and I could do it, I could feel every single one of my vertebrae rocking against the hard floor and it fucking hurt. Want me to do that in a squishy bed for an hour? No problem. But on that floor (and really, what good is a yoga mat anyway, aside from designating your space?) I just found it absolutely painful and couldn’t understand how she could do it so hard and so fast.

And then there’s that goddamn plank pose, but  already mentioned that. I’ll probably mention it again before this post is done.

Last week she had us do bow pose for the first time, which I was absolutely useless at. I can get my hands back there to grab my feet just fine, it’s actually making my legs “bow” that’s the problem. Last week they simply would not budge from the mat. On the weekend Blake and I were laying in bed talking in the dark for lack of anything better to do and I demonstrated for him how my legs just won’t do that. He can do it no problem, the big jerk, but mine absolutely refused. Today though, I was pleasantly surprised to find that holy shit, I was doing it! I don’t know what changed and my feet weren’t exactly touching the back of my head or anything, but somehow, practically over night, my legs decided that they could do this and so they did.

The other thing I can’t do that I hope to be able to eventually do? “Step in and find your stride for warrior”. From downward dog (on tippy toes with your palms flat out in front of you with your bum in the air so your body makes an “A” shape, for those who don’t know), taking my right foot and bringing it beside my right hand in ONE STEP is damn near impossible for me. She can do it perfectly every time. Blake doesn’t seem to have trouble with it and neither do the other girls in the class, but me? I have to take 2 or 3 little steps to get my right foot anywhere near my right hand and this annoys me to no end. I’ve ever tried practicing at home and I just can’t do it. I’m sure I’ll be able to do it one day, just like I was able to do bow pose today, but I am so jealous that everyone else can do this seemingly easy thing while I absolutely cannot.

I’ll get there though…

Anyway, I’m absolutely exhausted and I’m losing my train of thought pretty fast on this one, so I’ll stop here and write about yoga again next week. (Probably.)

Oh, but one more thing about it: Right now I’m reading Eat, Pray, Love and I’m about half way through the book when she’s in her guru’s Ashram in India and she keeps referring to “this type of yoga” but she never writes about actually doing any yoga – just meditation and chanting -  so for anyone who’s read the book, what the fuck is she talking about?

And that’s all I have to say about that. Now I will leave you with a picture from my day.

Know what I hate? When you’re half asleep, in a great dreamscape, but conscious enough to be rolling around in bed trying to control the flow of blood flowing from your vagina so it stays on the pad, rather than gushing up over it and soaking through your pajamas onto the sheets. I really really fucking hate that. Oh yeah, and cramps too. If it weren’t for the pain I was in while all of this was happening, I probably would have kept sleeping, but no, I got up and by the time I took all my “morning drugs”, including painkillers, I was up and awake and there was not a goddamn thing I could do about it.

So here I am.

As I’ve mentioned a few times already, I’m reading Eat, Pray, Love and right now I’m in the middle of the book where she’s just arrived in India and she’s talking about yoga. Admittedly, I know absolutely nothing about yoga. When I went last week, the teacher wanted us to fill out some paperwork that was half questionnaire and half  “you can’t sue me if you break your neck” stuff, but she asked the question, “why are you taking yoga?” Blake & I were the only ones filling out this information because the other 3 girls in the class are regular students and since Blake always finishes these things first and leaves me feeling awkward while I finish mine, I just wrote “to maintain weight” as my reason, but that’s not totally it and now I feel like she thinks I’m vapid for saying that because according to Eat, Pray, Love, yoga is much more than a body exercise. It’s supposed to be all transcendental & shit. The fact of the matter is, I don’t really know why I’m taking yoga. It seemed like a good idea at the time? It’s a good immersion therapy exercise? To take away some of my menstrual pain eventually? (I hear there are poses for that.) To show off how flexible I am as a party trick one day? All of those reasons? None of those reasons? I don’t know. What’s the right answer to that question? What is it she would have wanted to read under that question? I know “to maintain weight” wasn’t it.

By the way, I’m doing Hatha yoga, which according to Eat, Pray, Love is just your run of the mill yoga, nothing fancy. I think Kelley, our teacher, said in one of the e-mails to Blake that she was mixing it with another kind of yoga, but I forget what she said now. All I know is that last week was a positive experience and I’m actually kind of looking forward to this week’s class.

Last week’s class I found to be very very easy when I expected it to be very very hard. I did all of the poses more or less correctly, according to Blake, but I didn’t get into them the proper way and I didn’t do certain nuances of some poses, like in downward dog your heels are supposed to be flat on the floor but I’m not flexible enough to accomplish that yet because my muscles haven’t stretched enough from repetition of the pose. And I don’t really understand the teacher’s instructions most of the time. Like, she says to flex or release the muscles in your wherever but I have absolutely no fucking clue as to what muscles she’s talking about most of the time because the only muscles of mine I’m ever aware of is the uterine ones. And my thigh ones, but that’s a long story as to why…

So I made it through all the poses and my position in the class is right beside the giant wall clock in the studio and I was amazed at how fast the class went. I was expecting it to be an agonizing hour, like gym class where time just stood still, but it wasn’t like that at all. In fact, I didn’t even think to look at the clock until there were only 10 minutes left.

Since I didn’t know any of the poses to begin with and since she didn’t name all of the poses we were doing, the only two I picked up on was “table pose”, “child pose” and “downward dog” because those seemed to be the transitional poses between other poses.

Blake was apparently sore the next day from doing the class, but I wasn’t and I’ve been wondering why the whole time. Blake says it’s just because he hasn’t used a lot of those muscles in a long time, but I would guess that neither have I, so why wasn’t I sore? I felt barely any strain whatsoever during the class which made me think I was either doing it wrong (likely) or maybe my flexibility is just better than Blake’s (possible).

Right now I am in hell due to menstruation (my 3rd period this month, hooray for me!) and on the questionnaire she asked if we had any health problems that may affect our ability to do yoga and I put down “endometriosis”, SO, on Tuesday I don’t know if I should tell her I’m in hell before the class or if I should just not say anything and do the best I can. “They” say that exercise is good for cramps but that has never been my experience at all. I’ve never tried yoga for it before though, not really. I do a variation of “child pose” all the time for period pain where I sit cross-legged and bend the rest of my body forward the same as “child pose”, but I don’t think that’s an actual yoga pose and we don’t do “child pose” for very long during the class so that one won’t be doing me any favours tomorrow. I’m just hoping that this period hell will be over by then, but I’m not holding my breath.

And the only thing I have left to say about yoga is that Blake & I have brand new, spiffy yoga mats that are apparently in the trunk of the car and will stay in the trunk of the car (so they don’t get dog hair on them) and mine is pink. I don’t know what colour Blake’s is, but I’m guessing blue since that’s the colour of the first one he bought. It was $60 for both of us to rent mats for the class but I didn’t want to do that, especially because I suspect we will be taking yoga from this woman for a really long time because I actually like it but also because I wanted a pink one godammit and the ones for rent are either “gym class” blue or “crusty blood clot” maroon.

So that was yoga. I know I was brief about it last week and you guys wanted to know more than “it was eeeeeeeasy”, so there ya go.

In other news, I haven’t painted a fucking thing in a week because I’m a WoW addict who does little else right now than chew painkillers and pretend I’m a blood elf and that’s mostly what I intend to do until the end of next week, criticism be damned.

The thing with WoW, especially right now in the formation of a brand new guild, is that it’s largely a social game. I spend my days (and nights) killing fictional beings, yes, but I’m also chatting with about 15 other people while I’m doing it. And it’s like…okay say you stay off the internet for a day (the horror!) and you can’t get caught up with your friends list on Live Journal or Facebook the next day. WoW’s similar in that if you don’t log on for a day, you can miss a lot socially but the people who were on, have probably out-leveled you by about 2 levels and right now we’re all trying to stay within the same range of levels to be able to do dungeons and quests together. This guild ‘s entire purpose was to start toons from scratch and level them together. (A concept that’s been lost on some people who have decided to roll death knights who start at level 55, but whatever, good for them. I hope they like playing alone because that’s all they’ll be doing for quite some time.)

Anyway, as an officer of the guild and also the person with the most time on her hands, I kind of act as guild master when our guild master isn’t around, which is often because she apparently actually has a life. She pretty much only logs on to buy us guild bank tabs because she’s the only one who can do it and sometimes she levels her priest for a few hours, but she’s never on for entire days or nights like the rest of us are. (Which is fine, this isn’t a diss on our GM at all, I mean really, the job at this point is to just buy bank tabs and that’s pretty much it since our officers can add people to the guild or promote people.)

Basically the guild is being run by me, our friend from Camwhores, Warcorp and our friend Stephy. And Stephy got a job today so her time in Azeroth is soon to be more limited, I’m assuming. Warcorp’s our money-making machine who has almost single-handedly financed our first 3 guild bank tabs (I helped too, but nowhere near as much as he did) and since we’ve been filling up the tabs pretty quickly, I’ve been telling people what to take, what to sell, what to use and what to disenchant and I’m not even sure I’m doing that correctly because I don’t know for sure what a lot of the stuff we’re banking is for or what it does. I’m a WoW nerd, definitely, but I definitely have to ask the other WoW nerds of our guild for guidance on a lot of things because the game’s changed quite a bit since we stopped playing 2 years ago and the only profession I ever did seriously was alchemy (which I’m doing again) so I only really know what’s useful for that.

I’m hoping that Ditsy can spend some time with us every now & then to organize our guild bank a little better because I’m told she’s an expert WoW organizer.

Last night we did our 2nd guild instance, which was Gnomeregan and it took foreeeeever. Blake didn’t end up in bed until almost 2:30am, so tonight is probably not going to be a WoW night, especially since we still have yesterday’s True Blood to watch – so maybe I’ll get some painting in after all. Really, the two paintings that have been sitting on my coffee table for about a month only need arms, a signature and varnish to be finished, so I could probably get that done in a a couple of nights if I really wanted to. And since I like money, I should really want to.

Anyway, that’s all I really have to report other than the fact that both kids had excellent report cards and once again, both of them got principal achievement awards. The last day of school is on Wednesday and it should be an interesting summer with Alex & Ronny getting married, the kids going up north to Phil’s for a week or 2 giving Blake & I TIME ALONE OMG, my gardens and a few other things we have lined up.

So that’s that. I will now leave you with some lovely WoW screencaps that I’m sure you will all be thrilled by.

This Wailer is no match for Endometria!

My ride.
It sucks that when I get the next level of mount I HAVE to ride a brightly coloured chicken because there are no black high level chickens. I think that’s stupid.
The other day I saw a blood elf riding a zebra and I meant to look up how that was possible.

Blake & I drinking. He’s a troll shaman. And actually that’s a pic from last week, he’s had a change of hairstyle since.

Me riding a wyvern to destinations unknown.
This is how we roll on the Horde side, wyverns, zeppelins and dragonhawks.

And finally, the sun setting in Tirisfal while I wait for a zeppelin to Orgimmar.