Thanks to a kind internet friend, I am currently signed up for Suzi Blu’s “Be. Divine.” workshop on Ning in an attempt to keep my creative juices flowing throughout the holidays when I typically get depressed (doesn’t everyone?) and things start to go sour for the winter season.

Truthfully, I don’t think I’m going to be making any of the projects in the class and I’m sort of being a non-participator in the sense that you’re supposed to start the class by being grouped up with a “goddess sister” to help keep you motivated and well…I don’t want one. I’m flaky and unreliable and I don’t want to feel like I’m responsible for someone else’s good time in this class. I just don’t want to feel like I’m letting someone down or that they got screwed in the “goddess sister” department. The other part is that…I don’t feel like I have very much in common with most of these women, which I’ll get to in a minute.

The main reason I won’t be completing any of the projects in the class is simply because I’m fucking POOR y’all, REALLY REALLY poor, and I can’t really afford to buy new stuff for this class or ‘waste’ the supplies I already have on stuff I’m not going to sell. These days I just can’t afford to play, as sad as that sounds.

If you think that’s as sad and pathetic as it is, feel free to hit up that “donate” button on the right-hand side of this site and throw some cash my way, or even better, purchase something from the shop. That’d be rad. OR if you’re feeling REALLY generous, you could always just buy me presents to cheer me up, some of which are art books that would really help me out. And that’s the end of the begging /poor me portion of this post.

So goddesses…my first assignment for class is to make a goddess journal and write down what a goddess is to me. Well, since my goddess journal is currently drying its first cover layer on my desk, I decided to write about it here instead. Maybe I’ll print it out and put it in the journal when it’s done, I dunno. It IS going to have Courtney Love on the cover though!

Anyway, the question was posed in class a few days ago and I’ve had some time to think about it. I’ve also had the opportunity to observe some of the other women in the class and there’s something that’s really bugging the crap out of me and I feel like I need to get it out.

I don’t know what a goddess is to me yet, but I have decided what a goddess ISN’T. A goddess ISN’T someone who can only be pro-woman by being anti-man. The anti-man, “boys are stupid” sentiment being thrown about in this community of women is really starting to grate on my nerves. It’s not just because I love men and have the greatest husband on the planet. It’s not just because I have an amazing son. It’s not even because I know an equal proportion of intelligent men and women and truth be told, I’ve met way WAY more stupid women than stupid men and I’m talking about the ability to make life decisions here, not  the ability to add 2 + 2. But like I said, that’s not even it.

What it is is the inability to say positive things about women without tearing down men at the same time. Really, the two shouldn’t even have anything to do with one another. I mean, what do men really have to do with women to begin with?

What killed me is that I made a blog post on the class page showing off the “Bitch Barometers” I’d found and explaining them, and one of the women said in a comment “I’d change the 2nd barometer to be more luscious, but still designed to keep the men OUT!!” This actually made me make a face at the screen and kind of step back for a moment. In making those, in thinking about my uterus or my period or cramps or any of the above, men never even enter my mind. In fact I’m PMSing like a motherfucker right now and last night when I suddenly decided I wanted an ice cream cone, who went to the store in a snow storm at 11pm to buy me cones and Haagen-Dazs from the convenience store even though it’s $10 a goddamn pint there? That’s right, my husband Blake. The same guy who drew me a bath afterward, with green tea bath salts I might add, and then sat on the toilet and talked to me for 45 minutes about life and the world in general while I soaked my aching girly bits. The same guy who happened to minor in Women’s Studies and is probably a bigger feminist than I’ll ever be.

I take offence to male-bashing, just as much as I take offence to woman-bashing. I mean ladies, before you say something anti-man, say it in your head but in the opposite, against women and see how it sounds. Is it still funny or cute then? Why then, is it acceptable to repeat it against men? Then you’re just as bad, if not worse, than the stereotypical men you believe to be the majority of the penis-having populus. You just propagate the problem. If any woman ever said some of the things I hear out of this class in front of my 5-year-old son, I’d slap them silly. It’s the same thing as saying “Girls are bad at math” in front of a 5-year-old girl. (And if anyone said that kinda shit in front of my daughter, believe me, I’d slap ‘em just as hard.)

Why can’t these women build other women up just on the merits of being a woman? And why does everything have to be a man’s fault? I just don’t get it.

My family is matriarchal. I don’t know where the men go, they just disappear. It started with my great-grandmother, whose husband died young, then her daughter, my grandmother, who took over his furniture store at a time when women didn’t even have jobs, let alone created them. Then came my mother, who had me at 15, but still finished high school, ran her own business for 12 years and is now a successful artist. And then there’s me, and as much as I’m down on myself all the time, when I go down the mental list of the shit I’ve done and the shit I’ve been through, I’m not a goddess, I’m a fucking WARRIOR.

And let me be clear: It’s not ALL of the women in this class who are boy-bashing. It’s just enough of them for me to feel uneasy about the vibe, it’s like cheap perfume stinking up the place when we’re supposed to be acting like goddesses, discussing divine femininity and perspiring rose petals.

So what is a goddess to me? Dudettes, I still don’t know about the modern definition. But I’m pretty sure Aphrodite, Artemis, Hecate, Persephone, Kali or any of the others didn’t waste their time bitching about how stupid boys are. They had better things to do. And so do I.

I should end this here, but I just want to be CLEAR CLEAR CLEAR that I’m not dissing Suzi or her class, I’m just fired up by a few stupid comments by some chicks who should be old enough to know better. I get that some women have had bad experiences with men, but I have a problem with anyone who paints any group with the same negative brush, especially in this instance where we’re supposed to be women building up other women so we can all become goddesses in our own right. I don’t think this can be achieved with the way some are carrying on. I mean, you CAN build one group up by tearing another down, but isn’t that the exact thing our feminist mothers and grandmothers fought AGAINST? Think about it.

So I guess I’ll get off my soapbox now. I’m not really looking for a fight or a feminist philosophical debate, I’m just saying that women can stand on their own virtue and tearing down the entire male gender doesn’t make anyone closer to goddess status.

Shutting up now. Going to bed.

Howdy, circus freaks!

Right now I’m doing some stuff online that’s inadvertently bringing people to my site for the very first time and I’m feeling the urge to scramble around cleaning things up because my site is a bloody mess. So, the first thing people should know when coming here is that THIS SITE IS UNDER HEAVY HEAVY CONSTRUCTION AND DOESN’T ALWAYS LOOK THIS BAD. It’s never been the most well-designed site, in its almost 7 years of existence, but it’s always been a HELL of a lot more organized than it is at this very moment.

So hello new people, my name is Sunny and I’m a writer, an artist and a semi-retired muse. I’ve been living my life publicly, online, in front of an audience (so to speak) since 1997 for reasons even I’m not completely sure of. Over the years I’ve had a running webcam (which I’m probably the most “well known” for), an IRC channel, forums, I’ve sold my art and writing and things I’ve made through a website that no longer exists called Merch Bitch (this was in the days pre-Etsy). Half the internet’s seen me naked, knows my kids names and knows where my husband works. I’m an open book, there’s very little I hold back (and when I do, it’s usually as a courtesy for others), and that’s why people read and have followed my crap for so long….I think, anyway. I live an extremely examined life and truly ascribe to the old adage pertaining to such.

In 2006 I had a (very public, as it happened online) psychotic break and I’ve pretty much spent the last two years in a living hell that I never thought would end. Between the unparalleled terror of psychosis and its aftermath, the lack of aftercare I was given upon my release from the hospital and then 18 months of hellacious trial & error with psychiatric drugs, I’ve really been through the ringer. Throughout it all, I was diagnosed with bipolar I disorder and it’s been a slow crawl back to who I was before. Only recently have I become stable-ish and I feel myself becoming a better, if battle scarred, version of who I was before. If there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout this whole ordeal, it’s that life is just a series of processes. I feel like I’m just beginning another, which will eventually end or change and another will begin again.

So that’s me. Oh and I’m 29, married, with two kids, a dog & a cat. This isn’t a current pic, but is, more or less, what I look like (when I’m not sick, anyway):

Part of my “coming back” from mental illness has a lot to do with art and currently I’m enrolled in Suzi Blu’s online workshop “Les Petite Dolls“, which I gushed about here and here and my dear friend Raya paid for me to do because she was glad to see me eeking back towards my old creative self.

When I was starting to “lose it”, just before (and during) my psychotic break, I began working around the clock on a few creative endeavours that I thought were “genius”, including a painting I entitled “Camp Tampon” which to this day I still feel really captures where my mind was at the time. I mean, there’s a definite contrast between that and the way I usually paint.

Because my creative mind was so affected by the mania and because psychosis felt like I was “stuck” in my own imagination and I couldn’t get out, I’ve been afraid to be creative or use my imagination ever since. I’m afraid that if I let my mind “go there”, I’ll get stuck again and that was the single worst experience of my life. I’ve been beaten, I’ve been raped, I’ve been homeless, but psychosis was scarier than all of those things
put together and naturally I want to do everything in my power for it never to happen again. In my mind, that meant stopping all creative activity because to be creative meant I was risking losing it or going over a line that I had no way of seeing. It’s taken my shrink a dozen visits to convince me that as long as I take my medication, it’s okay to be creative and only now that we’ve found what I think is the right medication, have I been able to trust my creative self again.

In the Suzi Blu workshop, you have a profile where she asks specific questions so she can help teach you better and one of them was “What has kept you blocked with art in the past?” to which I answered, “Fear of my own imagination/mental illness. (It’s a long story.)” And this is that long story. You get a blog there too, but I figured if people from “Les Petite Dolls” were clicking the link to my site in my profile anyway, I might as well just write it all out here and be able to post pictures and links to better explain myself.

So there ya have it. Art has always been a huge part of my life (my mom’s an artist, I just grew up with it) and it feels good to have it back.

Also, for those who keep bugging me about it, I posted some pictures of my hair here on Live Journal.

Why? Because I hate MySpace.

A few days ago Ditsy & I were talking about how much we hated MySpace and it got me thinking…why the hell do I even have one when there isn’t a single feature I like, use or pay attention to? Especially when my first thought in even talking to her about it was, “Holy shit, Ditsy’s on my friends list?”

When an honest to god friend gets lost in a sea of…I don’t even know for sure what I’d call most of them, oh that’s right bands…it’s time to simplify, so I just deleted it.

So the next time someone asks “Hey what’s your MySpace?” they can give me the same look I get when people ask for my cell number. (Just wait for Sunny Vs. the iPhone. Oh the hilarity. :oD)

PS. Is it sad that I made the big version of that screencap my desktop background?