—————————- Original Message —————————-

Subject: Another notorious lurker.

From: “Karen” <karenisawesome@whatever.org>

Date: Wed, February 2, 2011 6:21 pm

To: Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com

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Linda Lurker’s email served its purpose and encouraged me to speak up. I don’t know how long I’ve been lurking and I was thinking of a way to explain why, but then I realized that you probably understand what it’s like to be hesitant to interact with people, even though you’re a lot better at the whole talking-to-people-on-the-Internet thing. I’ve always had a problem talking to people on their websites and blogs; I just feel like it’s not my territory so I shouldn’t say anything. Enough about that though. My name is Karen and I’m almost 20 which is really strange to me. I found your blog by searching for something on Google, I can’t remember exactly what but I know it involved The Sims. Then I saw that you had pink hair, and I had pink hair at the time too, so I bookmarked you. Other commonalities (totally didn’t know that was a word but according to spell check it is) include a love of Coke and flowers. Your lawn garden was awesome. Another reason I stuck around was because I’m really interested in psychology and hearing about agoraphobia from someone who’s experiencing it, not just stories and facts in a textbook, is way more fascinating and informative. I’ve had some really bad panic attacks but nothing close to what you’ve gone through.

Finally, almost all of the blogs I follow are “strong woman” blogs, as cliche as that may sound, and you definitely fit into that category. About six months ago my grandfather died and my parents had to move out to take care of my grandma. I live in the house I grew up in, just without them now. It was completely unexpected and I suddenly had to take care of myself. Granted I’m a legal adult now but that didn’t make the suddenness any easier. There’s a LOT more that goes into keeping a decent household than I expected. Several of my friends have moved in since then. Most had stressful home lives for whatever reason and this was just a better environment. It’s basically a house of misfits and even though we have some financial support from my parents, it’s tough getting used to this new situation. Other than maintaining the house, I also go to community college, work online doing freelance writing, and keep my boyfriend’s house in order. The point I’m trying to get to is that I follow the “strong woman” blogs because they make me feel like I’m more in control and capable. Seeing other girls and women come through tough times gives me the motivation to keep going even when I feel too old for myself. Being able to follow other people’s lives also reminds me that things will inevitably change no matter how stuck I feel.

I have a badass cat, too. Now that you kinda know who I am, I think I’ll feel more comfortable commenting so expect to hear from me in the future. :)

Karen

Remember when I asked people to e-mail me just so I know that they’re actually out there?

Well, some folks did.

And I asked if I could share their words, in the spirit of maybe encouraging myself, as well as others.

I dunno, to talk, to speak up, to post, to comment.

To know it’s okay.

So here’s the first one, from “Lurker Linda”.

————————— Original Message —————————-

Subject: The lurker Linda

From: nunya@goddamnbusiness.com

Date: Mon, January 17, 2011 12:59 pm

To: “Sunny Crittenden” <Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com>

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Ever feel like it’s too late to speak up? Kind of like you should have known someones name, but you are too embarrassed to ask it after the 5th meeting? That’s how I feel about your site. I have only made about 3 or 4 minor peeps in the decade I have been reading. I don’t have a livejournal account, and I think I may comment once in a while now, but in the past I was very guarded about what I put on the web. About anything. I had an early site experience where in the first three months of my blog (before the word existed) I had a stalker of sorts. It freaked me the fuck out and I shut it down and did not return to having an online presence until facebook in 2004. And I still share very little.

But all that aside- this is what kept me coming back over the years.

I adore Courtny Love and Hole.

I had a fucked up childhood glossed over by appearances.

I have had panic and anxiety attacks

I have had a vacation to the psych ward once or twice.

I spent years leaving my house as seldom as I could.

I have a husband and children.

A cat and a dog.

I like flowers and growing things.

And well, those topics have been many topics of your site. I relate to a lot of what you talk about. I was also fascinated by your cam way back when cams were portals linked on peoples sites. Probably pre-camgirls portals. My friend had a portal and your cam was there. What made me click on yours was you held up a sign that said “sunny” and you were smiling. Every other cam that day was a boring shot of someone staring at their computer. I was also very fascinated by your confidence with the photos you took of yourself. A confidence I did not have. You were the fist person I read who shared the difficult. And it was nice to be able to read what you have been through and relate. I was so not one for group therapy and shit. Therapy off and on…but you were a lot of that for me. My therapy. Reading your struggles…relating. I didn’t know anyone IRL or online who spoke as frankly as you did. Trying to purge my past from me and grow the best I could….you were doing the same thing. I have often said to my husband that I feel extremely weird knowing so much about you, and you not knowing me. Completely my fault.

But anyway. I think you are awesome. I’m happy for your little victories; I have concern when you are down. But I never felt qualified to say anything. I agree, it isn’t right after all this time to not say anything. So, I hope this brings you an understanding of the kind of lurker I accidentally became. .=)

Linda

I told Blake an hour ago that I was coming to bed but I got engrossed by this Salon article about “Mormon mommy bloggers” and now it’s 12:30am.

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

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

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

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

Moving right along…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOWEVER.

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

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

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

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

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

~*Goodnight internets.*~

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.

So busy. So crazy. My world is upside down.

I am kicking all kinds of ass at my new job and I’m pretty sure my bosses are really happy with me so far. Technically I’m still training and probably will be for another week & a half or so (or maybe longer) but I’m learning fast and the more I do it, the easier it is and the faster I can get things finished. I definitely don’t have the whole thing mastered yet but I’m definitely on my way.

My first paycheque made it to the bank today and for the first time in months and months and months we don’t have an overdraft. This is only temporary as I’m buying myself a Motorola Milestone as my first paycheque expenditure because it’ll help me do my job when we go places, like up north to my dad’s for a day and things like that, so I don’t have to lug my laptop around for just a day trip or to go to Starbuck’s or something. Or at least that’s my theory, I’m not really sure how smartphones work and how they’ll work with the stuff I have to use for my job. At the very least, I’m long overdue for a new phone and this one should do me for quite a long time.

Blake had his surgery on Monday. I’m not sure if I really posted about it but they straighted out his septum by breaking his nose and then they like, drilled out his nose holes near the sinuses so he can breathe better because he’s never really been able to breathe through his nose, possibly due to his sister breaking it by whacking his face with her arm, which happened to be in a cast, when they were kids. I guess they were in Germany at the time and for whatever reason they didn’t go to the hospital to have it set properly, his parents just gave him some Tylenol and carried on with their vacation.

But it’s fixed now and this morning we got up early to go to the hospital to have the packing taken out, which we were told was a totally gross process where an enormous amount of stuffing is pulled out if the sinuses and we went in there, Flip camera in hand, ready to film the whole thing and when it happened it was actually kinda disappointing because we had gotten our info on this procedure from people who had had the surgery a while ago. Now they fill the sinuses with self-dissolving, edible gel and they stuff the nasal passages with these long sponges that are very fine, like makeup sponges and that’s what they pulled out of him this morning. I did tape it, I have it on film, but since it wasn’t all that impressive, I’ve decided to let Blake upload it or do whatever he wants with it which will probably end up being nothing.

Anyway, his nose is all swollen and he’s on Tylenol 3′s but overall he’s in pretty good shape and tonight, for the first time since Sunday night, he’s sleeping with me in the bed again. He won’t be able to use his CPAP for a while, until that sinus gel dissolves, and right now beside the swelling, he just sounds like he has a sinus cold. He has until next Tuesday off, which is awesome, but because I’ve been working so much, I haven’t really been able to spend much time with him. I tweeted this yesterday, but that’s the thing that kinda sucks about working from home: you never really know when it’s quitting time. Like right now I’m writing this entry but I’m also monitoring and answering e-mail for my job even though I should have clocked out a couple of hours ago. Oh well.

I haven’t really had time to work on any paintings so things are still all over my desk, unfinished. The problem here is a total lack of routine, made especially difficult by Blake being home, but also problematic is my lack of a sleep schedule. For example, this morning I woke up at 7am after going to bed the night before at around 3:30am, then I stayed up and did the hospital thing with Blake and when we came home, I started working and did that until around 1 or 2pm, then I napped until about 4:30pm and worked until 9:30pm-ish and then I was exhausted because I’d taken my dinner time pills, so I went to bed and woke up again at 12:30am and started working again and here I am at 3:30am, still half-working. And the thing is, tomorrow is probably going to be totally different. I’m hoping that my new phone will help me schedule my time better, like maybe I can set meetings or alarms or whatever to be like, “okay you take your morning pills at 12pm” and another one that says “okay you eat your eggs at 1:30pm” and another that says “have a nap at 3pm”, “wake up at 4:30pm” etc etc etc and work during the in-betweens. Blake does similar things with his Blackberry so I think my phone will do this too.

And maybe that system won’t even work at all, but I plan on trying it anyway. I can totally work without a set schedule and get my 8 hours a day in, but I’d like to try a schedule just for a week or two to see how well it would work. I mean, maybe that’s what I need.

I’ve been neglecting Camwhores like crazy and I am SO sorry about that. I’ve tried to come chat on tag when I get a chance but I haven’t really had that many chances. I did cam for a bit today to show off my new ears. I got them for $4 at Shopper’s Drug Mart today. I suppose they’re technically horns, but I think they look more like ears, personally.

So that’s pretty much life right now. My whole world is upside down and honestly, I’m only giving you half the story because I can’t put the rest into words. I’m having a lot (like a LOT) of trouble coming to terms with the fact that I’m no longer “poor” after being poor my whole life. Obviously we’re not rich, but we’re not struggling now or at least we won’t be shortly, and I don’t know how to live without struggle. Disposable income is a completely foreign concept to me.

I realize that’s a totally privileged white girl thing to be stressing about but I am and it warrants a long discussion with my shrink on Friday. I’m not sure how she’s going to react to the whole job thing. On one hand, she doesn’t think I should work because I can’t handle it but on the other hand, she’s asked me before why I don’t work (before she knew about my art and took that seriously), like wanting to know the details about my anxiety about working so I’m not sure what her reaction to this is going to be. If she’s going to see this as a good thing or a bad thing. *I* think it’s a good thing, Blake thinks it’s a good thing, Kevin thinks it’s a good thing and I’m thriving so I hope she sees it as a good thing too. And it’s not just the financial aspect that everyone’s all gung ho about, it’s the mental stimulation and being rewarded for something you’re (I’m) good at. It’s the possibility of building a routine rather than flying by the seat of my pants and doing whatever, whenever.

Anyway, it’s an adjustment. Life right now is in flux and I think I’m doing well under the circumstances.

This sucks. This sucks so hard.

I’m on Blake’s computer right now because mine…is FUBAR. It was/is a MacBook that was about 6 years old, I’d guess, that I was given when it was about 4. At the time, Blake had built me a new computer so he put Windows on it so the kids could play Sims 3 on it and I just used my big box.

Fast forward about 2 years and he says, “y’know…the Mac is actually a little better than your desktop and it’s a laptop so you should use that” and I reluctantly did, giving my desktop to the kids so they could play Spore and Sims 3. (The reason we were running Windows on the Mac was because I couldn’t get Spore or Sims 3 installed on it using Mac OS but both worked fine with Windows, I don’t know why this is.)

So I used the Mac for about 4 or 5 months and had *just* gotten it broken in and all set up the way I wanted it and then last week I woke up and the Mac wouldn’t wake up. I shook the mouse, pressed every key on the keyboard, closed and opened it and finally had to do a hard reset. When it started up again, it was running slow as molasses. iTunes was unusable, FireFox was also unusable yet somehow TweetDeck was working fine. It wouldn’t restart of its own accord to I had to do about 5 hard resets until I called Blake at work in tears not knowing what else to do. He suggested that I use IE to download Chrome, so I did and Chrome seemed to be working okay, so I made that the default browser and imported my FireFox bookmarks. But iTunes still wouldn’t work, it would load up but you couldn’t make it play or press any buttons. Then I tried to open Photoshop, which I use pretty much every day, and it wouldn’t load due to a program error, even though it was working fine the day before.

So I put up with this wonky machine until yesterday when I backed up all my stuff and Blake wiped it, with the intent of putting Windows 7 on it, which he had had on it at one point when the kids were using it but the key expired or whatever because it was only a trial, so he had to put XP on it, which was on it when I began using it. (Yes, using Bootrcamp, which I’m told isn’t the most stable, but what the hell else is there?)

Well, he couldn’t get Win7 on it because he was using a key from work and I guess the computer had to be on the network to authenticate or something so that was a bust and that’s when he tried to put XP back on it. It kept freezing during the install and then when it was installed, trying to put other programs on it, like Photoshop, it would freezer and stall out and he’d have to start over and finally he got maybe 4 progs on it, one being iTunes and another being FireFox (which I prefer because of all the extensions) and they were doing the same things they were doing on Thursday so basically my computer is totally fucked, meaning that I basically no longer have one.

What sucks is that I have absolutely zero way to get a new computer so my only temporary solution is to hijack Blake’s for now, but for how long? He needs a computer too and this is the one I won at Camwhores expressly FOR him so I can’t just take it back (and if I did, what the hell is he going to use?)

So I don’t know what to do.

Sometimes, because Camwhores buys so much shit from them, Dell gives Kevin a deal on computers but there aren’t any right now and I wouldn’t have the money for one even if there was one.

Long story short: I’m completely fucked and have no way of updating my cam, doing shows or running my business and I’m at a loss as to what to do and freaking out completely.

So the itty bitty town I live in (population 1700) is in this contest by TSN and Kraft where they could win $25,000 to upgrade our rec centre’s facilities which we are in DESPERATE need of.

How it works is that for the next 24-hours (voting started at noon, my time and ends at noon tomorrow) you can vote for either us (Elmvale) or another town called Brighton (population a lot more than 1700) which I’M TOLD ALREADY HAS A TOWN POOL SO TO HELL WITH THEM and whoever gets the most votes win.

And that’s where you come in. We need your votes! And the beauty of it, my lovely internet-addicted friends? Is that you can vote AS MANY TIMES AS YOU WANT between now and noon tomorrow. As long as you’re not voting by mechanical means (prevented by a captcha), you can vote as many times as you possibly can and WE NEED YOUR VOTES!

So please, vote once, vote twice, vote a million times! Our community deserves it.

Thanks in advance! I’ll update everyone on if we won or not after the contest is over. :o) GO VOTE! VOTE VOTE VOTE!

My friend Jay Holben linked this in Facebook this afternoon and I just got around to watching it now. Pretty interesting stuff. It’s a year old, so you might have seen it and I’m sure the stats have changed, but still interesting I think. Anyway, the text moves faster than I could read, so I suggest pausing when necessary and also possibly viewing the video in a larger size than I’ve embedded here. Here’s the YouTube link to the video.

So, is social media a fad? Even before watching this video I would have said “absolutely not”. The world’s changing and I feel really privileged to be alive at this point in history when the world’s changing changing changing and doing it faster than a lot of people can even keep up. I mean, how many people reading this can even figure out their Facebook’s privacy settings? (Take a look at Time magazine this week, that’s the cover story.)

I dunno, I just like this stuff a lot so I thought I’d share the video. I’m too tired to make a real post about it, so excuse me for not being my normal verbose self tonight…

Edit: Here’s this year’s version of the same video with updated stats, it was released this month.

Hullo internets. I am typing this post instead of having a nap (I tried) or working on my painting (I tried that too) because really, I don’t have a whole lot else to do at the moment and the things I do have to do, I don’t wanna do, so here I am.

I don’t know what it is about this painting that makes me not want to work on it. It’s been sitting on my coffee table since the end of September half-finished and I sit here and I stare at it and as I’m trying to fall asleep, I think about it, but there doesn’t seem to be any goddamn resolution to the sucker that it just sits there some more. I’ve shown pictures, it’s the one I’ve dubbed “The Two Sunnies”. The background is done, the two girls are done, now I need to add the elements to tie the whole thing together, sign it, slap a couple of coats of varnish on it and it’d be done, but I still can’t seem to find those slippery elements to tie the whole thing together. I keep thinking about doing hearts hanging from strings like I’ve done in older paintings, with the happy site being bright magenta hearts and the sad side being black hearts with skulls but for some reason I keep rejecting that idea. In the beginning I wanted to add the sentences “Je suis heureuse”/”Je suis triste” above their heads but that wouldn’t leave very much room for embellishment of any kind and I think that would make the painting too plain. Just now I was thinking that it’d be cool to glue a bunch of pills, like stars, to the left (happy) side and have them taper off on the right (sad) side but my pills aren’t the right colours, Blake would probably kill me for using my pills to do that since he pays for them and I don’t even have enough to do that anyway. Yeah, I could do paper pills but there’s no fun in that so the pill idea is officially dead.

I’m giving this painting one more week to come together and if it doesn’t, then it’s going in the closet to be forgotten about while I work on something else. What is that something else? Why Hester Prynne and Pearl, of course, from The Scarlet Letter, but I have to read the book first, which I’m currently working on. I guess the book no longer holds a copyright so it’s available online for free HERE if anyone, like me, has never read it but wants to. What I’m about to say will no doubt make some of you cringe, but I really really don’t like old books and what I mean by that is that I find books that are written with “older language” really hard to follow. I even tried to read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf which isn’t even that old, but the language bored me so I never did finish it (sorry Raya!). The Scarlet Letter hasn’t been too bad so far, it’s really only when the characters are speaking that the language gets “old”, but it’s still probably the oldest book I’ve tried to read, not counting Shakespeare (*snore*) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It was written in 1850.

Anyway, the book’s been interesting so far. I only started Friday night though and didn’t have time to read any of it last night, so I’m only on chapter 6.

Last night Blake and I went to see 2012 which was…well, disaster-porn at its finest. The plot was totally cheesy and you had to leave reality and science at the door, but I’m glad we saw it on a big screen rather than renting it and watching it on my 13″ TV. The kids stayed with Wayne & Judy while we went and they also had a good time, especially because Courtney had a friend sleeping over so there were the 4 of them.

Today I went over to spend some time with Judy and get her set up with Gmail and Facebook and she told me that it was verified, that both of their dogs have fleas…which is something I told them 2 months ago when Lily, the golden retriever, started scratching herself bald at the base of her tail. So, since I have two bottles of flea shampoo, I brought one over for Judy and somehow she sweet-talked me into helping her bathe the dogs. She was soaked, I was soaked, the dogs were soaked, the bathroom was soaked, the hallway was soaked, the kitchen was soaked, but at least the dogs don’t have fleas anymore. I also brought over my trimmers and clipped their nails, which were really bad. Both of their dogs have white nails, so I was fine with doing them and I got them really nice and short, but I won’t do our own dogs’ nails because Hoover’s are black and I’m too freaked out about cutting the quick and I figure if Blake’s doing 1, he might as well do the other.

Anyway, after the dogs were groomed, so to speak, I helped Judy vacuum the carpet, wash all of their bedding and then put the beds back together once everything was dry. AND I didn’t have my eggs this morning so I did all of this running on empty. In fact yesterday I had my eggs for breakfast but then all I had for the rest of the day was popcorn at the movies and I keep wondering how this is going to affect my weight loss progress this week. Oh well, I’ll do better the rest of the week and as long as I don’t gain, I’m golden.

Tomorrow night is the Leonid Meteor Shower and NASA has this neat little thing that shows you when the height of it is for your viewing area. Unfortunately the peak time for us is at like, 6am Tuesday morning and while it’s supposedly going to be the best showing of the Leonids in our lifetime, I’m not sure about waking up at 5am and getting the kids up to go outside in the cold to watch. I’m seriously considering it though! I’m gonna take it up with them tomorrow after school and see if they want to. I figure I can make everyone travel mugs of hot chocolate and we can dress warmly and watch from the swings at the park across the street where there are no streetlights. We should get a pretty decent show from there, if the calculator is to be believed and the kids are up for it. Madison will probably be up for it, I’m not so sure about Wes and I’m really doubting Blake’ll be into it at all. I’ve been wrong before though.

I think I’m finally getting the plague that Blake & the kids had last week. My throat is sore, my glands are swollen and I’m pretty sure I had a fever earlier. :o/

Alright, it’s time for me to stop typing now and find something relatively productive to do. Maybe I’ll just sketch out Hester Prynne and continue ignoring this painting. Maybe I’ll just go to fucking bed.