It’s so funny to think about how little has really changed for me. Out of all 80 of us, or at least the ones who have been participating, I’m the only one who’s really still blogging the same way I did back in 2000. Every single day. I’m still on Camwhores (formerly portal 9), where I’ve been since mid-2001. I still post in the E/N style, I think. On both sites.

I dunno, I just never really thought about it before today, that things never really changed for me. Everyone else is off doing grown up things and talking about “the good ol’ days” and I feel like I’m still pretty much living them. It’s never really occurred to me until today that most of the people reading this post have no idea what the E/N scene was, let alone were they a part of it. People rarely believe me when I tell that that I started blogging, like for real, before the word “blog” even existed.

Back then, camgirls were smart as well as beautiful (not saying they aren’t now, necessarily, some are, but in a totally different way) and most of them were super geeks who coded their own websites by hand. I didn’t though, I used Dreamweaver which was notorious for writing sloppy code so even though I used it, I would have to often go into html mode and fix the code by hand, so I consider it a half & half thing for me.  This is an image of the main page of the last layout (I think) I coded and created by hand. I was so damn proud of it:

If you’ve never read my “About the Site” page and are curious about my site’s history, you should check it out. There’s a link in there to my first Angelfire site even. Remember kids, everything you do on the internet is PERMANENT! What’s so funny to me about my Angelfire site is that my version of a blog sometimes back then was to write on paper, then scan it in and post that. I should do that more often NOW haha We have a new scanner but I don’t know how to use it or I would totally do that. Also I was talking to Blake about this design just last week:

When I lived in Rob’s basement when I was in high school, on one wall I made this design, except in a circle, as a huge mural. I don’t think there are any pics of it but it was pretty cool and I was pretty proud of it. I was telling Blake about it last week but I can’t remember why, except I did say that I should draw it again in my sketchbook so it wouldn’t be lost forever and lo & behold, here it is!

I don’t like poetry. I don’t like reading it and I don’t like writing it, but after Rob and I broke up, I went through a brief poetry phase. Here’s one of them:

Piss Off

Go back to where you were.

Go back into her arms.

No one needs you here,

all you do is harm.

I hoped you were in a ditch somewhere.

I hoped for blood and gore.

I hoped that you had killed yourself and

your little whore.

I wished that you were starving,

And didn’t have a home.

I wanted you to know great pain,

I wanted you to roam.

I prayed that you had been beaten,

I prayed that you were dead.

I thought that you were staying there,

and you’d stop messing with my head.

But now you’re here and I hate you more,

Than I ever thought I would.

I thought that you had finally left,

finally gone for good.

I wished that you would disapear,

Or shrivel up and die.

But you’re still here living happily,

and I still wonder why.

Why couldn’t you have been a good boy,

And slit your fucking throat?

Nothing I would love better than to

watch your dead body bloat.

Can’t win them all I guess,

But I can always hope.

If you ever want to kill yourself,

I have lots of rope.

Hahahahaha!!! Isn’t that hilarious? I also think it’s funny that on my Angelfire site, I had a “PMS page“, which was basically the original version of my “Shit I Hate” page. I’m also still really proud of this troll story I wrote. If you knew the guy it was based on, you would find it hysterically funny too! :oD

More poetry; I wrote this one for Madison when she was first born:

Too funny!

But yeah, it amazes me how much and how little has really changed since then. Especially the latter for me since I feel like I’m still in the same place, doing the same thing as I was 11 or 12 years ago or however long it’s been (I started my first site in 1997, so how long ago was that?).  On the FB group, we were talking about “what if…” and wondering why none of us ever really made it “big” in the blog world and I still don’t have an answer. It kills me that people like Dooce get all this recognition for the same thing myself and several others have been doing better and longer. What makes her so special? What makes her more marketable than us? Why did she get a book deal? I don’t get it. She’s not the only one, I’ve written about the Mormon mommy bloggers before and that whole thing STILL baffles me.

Anyway, the trip down memory lane was a welcome change from the usual. Do you remember the E/N scene? What/who do you miss the most? Spill! I miss being pretty and having nice hair. Oh yeah, I still maintain a small webcam archive, which can be found here.

~*PLEASE DONATE SO I CAN GO TO ART CAMP!*~

PS. Another thing I just remembered is that a few years ago on Facebook, someone referred to me as an “internet celebrity*” and Madison saw it and was like “wtf does that mean?” so I had to show her my site and some of my Camwhores archive and explain the whole shebang to her. She actually thought it was really cool but now that she’s aware of the fact that there’s a relatively big audience, she won’t let me post everything about her anymore, which sucks, but I respect that. Wes knows about everything but my activity on Camwhores and he thinks it’s the coolest thing ever and constantly tell me what I should tell you guys about. “Tell them I did this!” he says all the time, like when I’m filing him or taking his picture. A total ham.

Okay, nurse Cheryl (ugh) is going to be here in 2 hours. I’d better get a bit more sleep.

(* It’s easy to be an “internet celebrity” when there are only 50 people on the whole entire internet haha)

Edit: Apparently Steph formerly of Delightz.net made the FB group, not Artfag and Steph wrote a really nice post about it which you can find here.

Edit #2: Here’s Artfag’s post about the whole thing.

A day or so after these pictures, which I hadn’t seen until now, my systems would begin failing and I would come closer to death than most people my age ever get.

“I’ve spent the day at the hospital. Waiting for test results.”

“The big one is “fluids”, the small one is morphine.”

“I have to keep a record of my pee…”

“Breakfast, lunch & dinner.”

“FUCK I hate IVs.”

“FUCK I love my shoes!”

(That’s morphine for ya haha!)

THE END.

Around 9am, Cheryl, one of my nurses, was scheduled to come do my dressing, which the night before I was really pissy about because I didn’t want to get up early but I was glad for it when I saw the sunrise. God I love sunrise.

As I was looking out the window at bliss, the phone rang and it was my mom. She said that I should check my e-mail very carefully because she got her Squam registration e-mail. I checked and checked and checked but I didn’t get one yet. My mom said hers said that I was her roommate and that we were staying in the Longhouse, which I know is a 13+ person cabin. Let the games begin! I cannot even imagine the fights to use the bathrooms haha I will most definitely be bringing my Lush “No Drought” dry shampoo! Since my mom’s e-mail said I was her roommate, I’m assuming my e-mail will be coming shortly. So excited!

After I got off the phone with my mom, Cheryl came and that was pretty uneventful. Cheryl is a smoker and she tries to cover up the smell of the cigarettes with perfume, which just makes it worse. When she leans over me to change my dressing, it smells and I can’t stand it. Also, she comes early and I hate that, whereas Janice and Siske come in the afternoon (and they don’t smoke). BUT since I had such a great day yesterday, I’m thinking getting up early isn’t a totally horrible thing to do on “office days” (days where I stay in my office the whole day making art, as opposed to the living room/computer).

After Cheryl left, I made waffles with the REAL maple syrup my mom got me for Christmas, which is one of my favourite things in the world (if you’ve never had real maple syrup, I truly feel sorry for you because it is one of the Earth’s most wonderful treasures) and I brought them into my office and started flipping around to see what was on TV. I watched Wife Swap, the UK version, which was nice and trashy but as always, one of the moms had a revelation that her life sucked and they all became friends and it was heartwarming.

After that, I took my plate into the kitchen, filled up my drink and came back to my office to make some ~*SERIOUS ART*~ (not really) while I watched…something. I honestly don’t remember what. Something that was an hour long and was probably a talk show. Whatever it was, I worked on Argent’s painting as I watched (or more to the point, listened). Argent’s painting is turning out to be a royal pain in my ass and I can’t wait until it’s finished and out of my house! EVERYTHING I’ve tried to do with it has failed miserably and I’ve had to make corrections like crazy. It’s making me mental! But it’s almost finished and I think he’ll be happy with it and that’s all that matters.

Once Argent’s painting was in a state of “no touchies”, I started working on my girl who will be on my last page of the Sketchbook Project sketchbook.

I think I watched Ellen while I was doing this and Colin Firth and the little dog from the movie The Artist were on it. Colin was very animated and talking about Gary Oldman being “hung like a water buffalo” and the little dog was very charming. Truthfully though, I can’t see myself seeing either of their movies. Just not interested.

After that, was The View. I like this show a lot, I’ve always been a Whoopi fan, but I don’t normally watch it because when I was working, I didn’t watch TV at the same time, and after I got sick and now that I’m home all day with my thumb up my ass, I spend most of my time in front of the computer which is something I’m hoping to change and yesterday was the first step.

(Paper peony)

On The View, the women did their hot topics but they weren’t all that interesting or I’d be able to tell you what they talked about. I know there was a story where Sheri was on a plane and Courtney Love was there with a short skirt and no underbums and she caused quite a ruckus. Their guest was an old guy from that Tom Hanks/911 movie I have no interest in. I just listened and worked on my girl.

Then it was Dr. Phil and boy, what a show. o_O They had on there a guy who was into infantilism. He liked to act like an 18 month old, sleep in a crib, play with baby toys, act like a baby, eat in a high chair and wear diapers. He had a regular job at a “big box store” working nights, but when he got home in the morning, he’d put on his onesie, hop in the high chair and his poor girlfriend would feed him and change his shitty diaper. I felt so bad for her. She was doing everything for him and he never did anything for her, like nothing, and Dr. Phil was like, “are you having a relationship with an 18 month old or a 24 year old?” and the answer was an 18 month old. And she said she wanted to marry this guy and have kids with him one day, but only if he could “tone things down”, which Dr. Phil said would not happen no matter what the guy said. And it wasn’t even a sexual thing, the guy didn’t get OFF on being a baby, that’s just how he felt naturally. Which I think is weird, but fine, it’s not hurting anyone EXCEPT your significant other who you’re lying to about it and basically using. He needs to find someone whose thing in life is wanting to take care of an adult baby and that girl needs to run away as fast as she can in the opposite direction because he will never change and things will only get worse as he takes it farther and farther.

Normally I don’t watch Dr. Phil because I think it’s pretty trashy and only a few degrees away from being Jerry Springer, but if there’s nothing else on or if the topic is interesting, I’ll watch. Yesterday’s was interesting.

By then it was 4pm and the kids came burting through the door just as a Roseanne rerun came on. They asked me what the show was about and I said it was about a family a lot like ours. They decided to watch it with me and they wanted to know who in the show was like who of us in real life. I said that I was Roseanne, Blake was Dan (obviously), Becky was Madison and Wes was DJ. I also told them that it was probably the best sitcom to ever grace the airwaves. Wes was really into it (it was the episode where it was Dan and Roseanne’s 20th wedding anniversary and he took a part-time job to pay for her present) and Madison not so much. Right after the first episode there was another episode so we watched that one too and in that one, Darlene and David break up because Molly kissed David and Madison got more into it because David is on Big Bang Theory and apparently so is Darlene. This, along with Mayim Bialik, makes me think I should give that show a second chance because when I first watched it, I just wasn’t into it but everyone I know loves it and the various clips I’ve seen online of it, I really liked.

Anyway…after Roseanne, it was Golden Girls, which I knew the kids wouldn’t be so much into (although I was into Golden Girls when I was their age) but they watched it with me anyway. The two episodes we watched weren’t very good ones (one where they were remodeling the garage and Rose is dating Mr. Terrific and the other was where Rose’s boyfriend retires and wants to sail around the world) but I explained to Madison, who’s very interested in gay issues and equality, that the Golden Girls was an extremely progressive show for its time because Blanche’s son was gay and they had some episodes dealing with that, but also the show itself was about women at a time in their lives that you just didn’t – and still don’t, really – see on TV. This made her more interested in the show, but only snippets found on YouTube, not the actual episodes. I’d still really like to get the whole series on DVD or Blu-Ray. It was probably my 2nd favourite sitcom of all time.

By the time the Golden Girls was over, I’d finished my girl and stuck her in the sketchbook and today I’ll give her arms, sew the trim on her dress and give her a quote. Then all I have to do on the sketchbook is a girl for the cover and then I’m finished! YAY!

The only difference between this pic and the one above is that I inked her hair and legs/feet.
She’s just so damn pretty, I wanted to post her twice!

After Golden Girls, Wes went into the living room to watch Pokemon, which he’s obsessed with (by the way, his birthday is in 3 weeks if anyone was planning on getting him anything – e-mail me if you need our address), and I flipped around channels to see what I could find. Blake and Madison were going to the high school for like, a parent/teacher transition night type of thing  so I took that opportunity to watch something Blake would never in a million years watch with me: Toddlers & Tiaras.

I can’t help it. I love this show. I never know when it’s on, so I don’t watch it all the time or anything but every episode I’ve seen I’ve really liked. I think that show falls into 3 categories: ones where the kids are total brats to their parents on camera and therefore the episode is funny because it makes their parents look like losers, ones where the kids are really into the whole pageant and they’re just cute as hell and ones where their parents look like monsters and you feel sorry for the kids. Yesterday I saw 2 of the above.

The first one I watched was where the theme for the pageant was Groovy Girls. Or maybe that was the pageant’s name, I’m not sure. Either way, there were 3 categories in the pageant: beauty, costume of choice and one other one I forget the name of and the pageant was “full glitz”, which means that the girls had acrylic nails, spray tans and “flippers” which are like fake teeth. In this episode, all of the girls were actually really into the pageants and they were old enough to choose that this is what they wanted to do. The mothers weren’t overbearing at all, they were just supportive and this was just what they chose to do with their daughter, like any other family would do hockey or soccer. I *DO NOT* like the spray tanning and acrylic nails and fake teeth, I think that’s dumb, but it’s part of the competition, just like shin guards and helmets and sticks and shoes, so as long as the kid’s okay with it, and all these ones were, I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t have a problem with the makeup either, a lot of little girls like to play with and wear makeup. And as long as the kids are GOOD winners and losers, I don’t have a problem with it. In this show, two of the girls who apparently compete a lot and win and lose to each other all the time, are actually friends. I liked that.

Anyway, seeing the girls in their little bell bottoms and vests and sunglasses and go go boots and stuff like that was sooooooo cute. I especially liked seeing like, the 18 month – 2 year olds all dressed up in their little costumes, they were just adorable. And really,  thinking these kids were cute in their costumes is no different than Halloween. The whole show was just cute little girls being cute little girls and I enjoyed the show immensely, enough to watch a new episode that aired at 10pm.

The one I watched at 10pm was vastly different than the one I watched earlier. The one at 10 had horrible parents pushong their kids to do this when they really didn’t want to do it. The one little girl was SICK and feeling like crap but her mom made her compete anyway because the grand prize was $10,000. This mom made the poor little girl not wear her glasses when she was on stage and then belittled her when the little girl didn’t do her routine – which she’d only learned 2 DAYS prior – because the girl couldn’t see the judges or her mother in the audience telling her what to do. Then another mother, who was a hardcore Russian immigrant, was just a monster. He would withhold her daughter’s favourite stuffed bear, “Micha”, and only give it to her when she had to do pageants because apparently when the little girl held and played with Micha, her thumb would go in her mouth and this is how they stopped it. The little girl, Mia, would only get to play with Micha at pageants and seeing the reaction of the girl, who was only 4, when she got to see Micha, it was just heartbreaking. I almost cried. She was just so happy to see her friend again. Then in one of the cutaways, Mia said to the camera, “I want to do good at the pageant because that’s how I know my mommy loves me” or something like that and I *DID* cry, it was just so horrible. And worse? When Mia was on stage doing her beauty routine, she wasn’t listening to the emcee who was kinda like telling her to get off the stage but nicely and Mia’s mom flipped out and started screaming in their hotel room that the emcee hated Mia and that they had to “forget about it” (winning) and that they should just go home. In the end, Mia won a high title and $500 and the FIRST THING she wanted to do when she won was to show her mother and her mother PUSHED HER AWAY. OMG my poor heart. :o( That woman was just a horrible person and she was so blessed to have such an adorable, loving little girl and she didn’t even appreciate her in the slightest. If I can find a clip, I will show you this awful woman so you can wretch with me.

In between episodes of Toddlers & Tiaras, I actually watched a show called “I Cloned My Pet” which was the most pathetic hour of television I have ever watched in my whole entire life. These people were all fucked in the head. There was literally nothing else on except a rerun of the same Wife Swap I’d watched in the morning and that’s the only reason I watched this extremely stupid show.  EXTREMELY stupid.

After that my choices were a show about hoarding or American Idol and because hoarding shows just piss me off because the world just does not need that much excess, I chose American Idol because as much as that show bugs me, I have to admit, the auditions at the beginning of each season are always entertaining.

As I watched American Idol, I started working on an art journal page that uses vellum as bubbles which is a technique I’ve used before and I’ve always really liked, but the only vellum I had on hand was green, yellow, orange and red so my bubbles actually look a lot more like polkadots (hmmm, polkadots are also apparently two words OR one word and they have their own Wikipedia entry). It’s not finished yet and it was night by the time I started working on it which meant that the light in my office was garbage so I figured I’d work on it again today and take pictures of it tomorrow when it was finished. I have absolutely no idea what to write on the page, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnd that was my (mostly) internet-free day yesterday in support of the SOPA protest! I will say one thing though: I didn’t tweet yesterday because Twitter was supposed to be part of the black out but I had TweetDeck up just out of habit and I was really disappointed by some people who I *know* knew about the blackout and who tweeted inane bullshit anyway. Some people retweeted SOPA-related things instead of posting which was better than what other people were posting, I guess, but posting at all is the opposite of the concept of a “blackout”. I really, truly thought my Twitter feed would have been completely dark yesterday but it wasn’t and it’s making me evaluate who’s on my feed and why. There are some folks I have on there who I’ve kept just to be nice, but they’re not nice to me back or they don’t interact with me so I wonder why I bother. Soooooooo, I think over the next few days, there are definitely going to be some cuts. Hopefully people won’t make a big issue about it.

Okay, going to go to my office now…WAIT, one more thing! Apparently my posts aren’t always showing up on peoples’ LJ friends lists for some reason and I don’t know if it’s my x-poster or if it’s Live Journal but I’ll x-post an entry and it’ll go through fine, but when I go to edit a post via WordPress and click “update” it’ll tell me that my password for LJ is wrong (it’s not!) and it’ll only update the version on my site. So I dunno what’s up with that. Also when I go to a Live Journal entry and manually edit a post’s userpic and mood, which I do with everything I post, I’ll come back a few hours later and the post will be back to my default userpic. The mood will still be set to what I changed it to, but the userpic will be default. So I dunno WHAT the hell is going on but if you guys on LJ don’t hear from me for a few  days, either check my actual LJ or my site. I *think* the error is with LJ because they were having a lot of problems over the weekend so I’m just waiting for them to fix their shit before I investigate further.

NOW I’m going to my office! Happy Thursday!

~*Please donate!*~

Not that it makes a lick of difference, but my site will “go dark” tomorrow in solidarity with the other sites that are protesting this bill. That means I won’t be updating. I also won’t be tweeting or doing anything considered as providing content because that’s exactly what’ll happen if this passes, sites you care about will go dark. The bottom line is that this will affect the internet as we all know it. Like I said, read the above link for a breakdown on it and see for yourself and do me a favour? Really click the link and read it. Because if this breakdown is all true, and I have every reason to believe it is, then we could all be in very deep shit if SOPA passes. I can’t do a damn thing from my little bunker in Canada but you? You reading this? I bet YOU can. So do it.

Last night was pretty miserable. I know I don’t really post about Blake very often, but I’m really worried about him. When I woke up from the nightmare of pancreatitis in Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie, I woke up to the love of my life being a changed man and I don’t like this change. He can’t help it, I know, but he’s not well and I want more than anything for him to be better. He needs to talk to someone about what happened this summer and soon, I think, before this change in him, this sadness, becomes permanent. There’s just no joy in his life anymore, he doesn’t laugh as easily as he used to, he mopes, all he does is work to avoid everything else…he just goes through the motions of living, he doesn’t actually do more than exist. And that worries me a great deal. Last night we just held each other and cried. For hours. Things are not okay. Not everything is getting better.

………….

For the last couple of days I’ve been playing with an idea that I want to run by you guys to see what you think. I think I want to put a 24/7 spycam in my office, overlooking my desk and part of the couch. I say it would be 24/7, but really we would probably turn it off sometimes, just not often. Really, the only time it would go off is if there was any sexy/naked private time going on, which I know ruins half the fun, but I don’t do sex on cam, never have, and there are legalities in place that say a cam like this couldn’t be sexually explicit if children were to also appear on it from time to time.

What you would see, on any given day, would be me sitting at my desk making art and probably watching a movie, possibly with someone (likely Madison or Blake), watching TV with me on the couch. It would not be riveting entertainment and it would not be streaming cam because that would be extremely cost prohibitive. It would be a simple, old school, 30 second refresh cam that would be on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, give or take.  We could possibly chat live on Twitter.

Now, you might be asking yourself why on Earth I would want to do this so here are my reasons:

1. I am creatively blocked in a seriously painful way. I avoid my office like the plague and when I’m in there all I do is watch movies and accomplish nothing. Maybe with an audience, I’d be more productive.

2. Maybe with an audience I’d actually make an effort not to be a scuzzy bitch. Don’t get me wrong, if this happens you will most likely see me in yoga pants and t-shirts 95% of the time, probably with little or no makeup, probably with my hair in a ponytail. I’m not aiming to look beautiful here, I couldn’t care less about that at this point, I mean making an effort to have clean hair. Changing my clothes more than once a week. That kind of stuff.

3. Maybe this will attract more people to my site and more people means more people seeing my art and maybe buying some of it. Also, I think from a marketing perspective that maybe some people might be more likely to buy a piece if they see the process by which it was created. Street artists have been working on this principle for, well, ever.

4. I think it could be fun to chat with people while they were watching me (and whoever else was in the room), live.

Now, do I think anyone will actually watch? I highly doubt it. I think the ship for spycams, unless they’re maybe nature cams, has sailed. However, I know a few friends would watch sometimes and that it would enhance our spontaneous Twitter parties and that could be really really fun. Really, the cam is going to be pretty boring otherwise.

The only drawback I can see is that the whole world will find out my big deep dark secret, the thing only my family and a few really close friends know about, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Really, the secret itself probably isn’t a big deal at all, I doubt people would care that much, but it is sort of strange and it will require an entry on the webcam FAQ I’ll have to write up to nip the whole thing in the bud.

So what do you guys think? Would you watch? Would you interact with me live on Twitter? Do you have any interest in this whatsoever? Do you see any drawbacks to this that I may be missing? (All family members have “signed off” on this, Madison even thinks it’s a good idea, Wes doesn’t care, Blake said he’d turn the cam off sometimes.) Oh and there wouldn’t be archives because archives take up server space and I’d really like to save server space for nicer pictures that I take with my camera. I would like to have something below the cam though, that said something like “3 people are viewing this cam right now”, but worded better. I have no idea how you would make it do that. Do you? I know how to make a 30 second refresh page (in Dreamweaver), so I’m good there, but I have no idea how to make a counter like that.

Anyway, just a little idea I’m thinking about. To make it happen, I would need the USB cable on my wishlist and another cam. Ideally I would use the cam I have now for the spycam and use the one on my wishlist for Camwhores, but if anyone has an extra *decent* cam kicking around that they would want to send me for this, I wouldn’t object. Blake says that as long as this thing doesn’t cost him any money, he’s totally fine with it, so this has to happen for free. (We have a little spare computer to use for this – at least temporarily, it’s technically spoken for.)

Oh but another thing about the spycam? If it bothers me, I’m taking it down. If it’s just eating up bandwidth and no one’s watching, I’m taking it down. If a family member objects to it being there, I’m taking it down. This may just be a temporary thing while I’m in this funk, I dunno. But I think it’s okay to try.

Last week Blake and I went on a date. Keith, my mom’s ex-boyfriend, sent us a $50 gift certificate for Swiss Chalet and my mom gave both Blake and I gift certificates for EB Games and at the beach they’re literally right next to each other, so we went and had perogies, cheesy garlic bread, ribs, a chicken type of thing on flatbread, a strawberry sundae and a piece of apple pie – all for 4 bucks and change! Then we went next door and bought Skyrim.

I was so stoked to get Skyrim. I’d built it up in my head as this awesome fantastic thing but the problem was, my computer wasn’t good enough to play it so we had to get it for Playstation. #FirstWorldProblem, I know, but the thing is, I really really hate consoles. I can’t stand those little joystick things you use with your thumb to move, it just seems completely unnatural to me. I tried really hard to play Skyrim on PS3, I really did, but in the end I just got frustrated and gave up. Also the game seems way too big. Like, I played for about 2 hours and barely got past character creation.

The other thing is that these days I’m having a really hard time justifying the playing of games when I should be doing things that’ll make us money instead. Or at least things that are semi-productive. I canceled my WoW subscription because it was just stupid to keep paying for something I only played maybe once every 2 weeks and even then, I was just dicking around, farming for whelps and sprite darters anyway; I wasn’t even leveling. My subscription runs out on February 6th so I only had a month left to play it anyway because I was paying for it with Xmas money, so no big deal. I saved us 15 whole dollars by canceling a month early. *shrug*

I don’t know why I’m so unmotivated. Depression? S.A.D.? Our sketchbooks for The Sketchbook Project have to be in the mail in 16 days, I have one page to finish (I’m not finishing my whole book) and I can’t bring myself to touch it. Dunno why. Argent’s painting has been sitting on my desk, about 65% finished, but I can’t seem to push through and get it done. I have a million ideas for paintings, I’m not at a loss for those, I just have zero desire or motivation to actually make them happen. I have all the materials (although I’m running dangerously low on canvases). I have the pictures in my mind. What the fuck is wrong with me? How can I call myself an artist when I’m not only NOT making art but not selling any either? Like tits on a bull, I tell ya! Squam cannot happen soon enough!

Speaking of Squam, my mom and I damn near had heart failure yesterday when they announced on Facebook and Twitter that the spring session was full/closed already. My mom commented on the post on Facebook and after a few grueling hours, they commented back that there was still plenty of room for the fall, so we could breathe easy. *whew* We don’t think our envelopes have even left the country yet, so hopefully they get there in time!

Okay I can’t think of anything else to write so I think that’s it for now. Blake awake and making coffee so maybe I’ll get him to make me a tea too, which I’ll take into my office where the most productive thing I’ll do is stare a hole into my cutting mat. Oy.

Edit: Blake scanned my colouring contest entry. The scan kinda sucks though. The ornaments on the tree were silver and I guess the scanner’s light really washed out a lot of the colour for some reason. Like, in the original, Santa’s cheeks and nose are rosy and the package at the bottom is actually purple and lavender but it looks white and washed out. Oh well. Here it is.

I’m not really sure how we got on the topic, but sometime around 10pm Blake, Madison and I started throwing names around for a Regretsy-inspired site about the stupid stuff we find on Pinterest and jokingly, I threw out “Chagrinterest”. Blake was like, “that’s actually pretty good” and Madison was like, “I don’t get it”, so I read the definition of the word “chagrin” to her:

cha·grin [shuh-grin] noun, verb

noun
1. a feeling of vexation, marked by disappointment or humiliation.

verb (used with object)

2. to vex by disappointment or humiliation: The rejection of hisproposal chagrined him deeply.

After that she was like, “omg that’s perfect” so after that I went to my domain registrar (NOT GODADDY!) just to see if “Chagrinterest.com” was available, it was, and in less than 48 hours we had a domain, domain e-mail addresses, a website and 16 blog posts. Welcome to…

We don’t plan for it to be a very big site. Not like Regretsy. Just a place to post all of the random, crazy shit we find posted on Pinterest so it doesn’t clog up my site and so others can participate. Blake wants to write posts, as does Jax, so that”s our “staff” at the moment…except we do have someone to introduce. A new partner for this project who hasn’t worked with us previously. Her name is Martha Stupid and she is FABULOUS! Behold!

For more information on the magnanimous Martha Stupid, please see her intro post on Chagrinterest!

So that’s what we did to ring in 2012. We’re having a lot of fun with it and we hope you might too. :o)

This is what she said in her e-mail to him:

Hey E-rock,

So I’m sure as you know christmas is coming up, uhh, tomorrow, so Merry Christmas!

This summer my mother, Sunny Crittenden, has been through a lot. She was in a hospital in toronto from July until very recently, very sick with pancreatitis. She was unconcious for most of it and she was on millions of IVs and on machine support for everything from breathing to even simply pumping her heart. The statistics were that only 1 out of 5 people would survive what she has been through, and now here she is, a miracle coming home for christmas. She is still very sick, and she is hospitalised at home still, but we I am very grateful to have my mother here and alive. And all day, everyday, I get to come home and hear you playing guitar. From 5:00am (when the first nurse comes) to 10:30pm (when the last does). She downloads them off your site and plays the youtube videos on a loop, and that’s all I’ve heard since she came back. She has liked your facebook page, follows you on twitter, knows all your solos, and seen every inch of your site. She LOVES you, and as I couldn’t think of a better christmas present, even though it would be a late, I was wondering if you would pretty pretty please, for a cute 13 year old girl and her sick mom, plz give Sunny Crittenden a shout out on one of your videos, she would flip out if you so much as said her name. I don’t know, but I think that would make her christmas worth living for :)

Thank you so much whether you do it or not, I understand why you might not. Although, even emailing her at: sunny@sunnycrittenden.com and mentioning her daughter emailing you would make her faint :P

-Your biggest fan’s daughter

Is that not the most embarrassing thing ever? It’s REALLY hard to embarrass me, but Madison succeeded admirably, not because of the fan stuff, but because me, being extremely honest, I now had to e-mail him back and tell him that Madison basically lied to get a response from him and that made me feel like shit. Before I get to my response, here’s what he e-mailed me:

Hey there Sunny,

I hope you’re feeling better. Your daughter recently emailed me and filled me in on whats been going on. First of all, I’m really glad that you got to spend Christmas at home with your daughter who (i can tell just by her email) loves you very very much. I also want you to know that she also filled me in on how you’re a HUGE fan of mine. Just for the sidenote, i always feel interesting about calling people or having fans haha I just do what I do because I love it and consider myself a fan. Anyway I’m really glad that you enjoy the tunes and would like to thank you for your support. For me, nothing is ever one sided so if there is anything I can do for you to maybe brighten a day or put a smile on your face, hit me with it, its my turn to return the support. Im going to send over my EP (dont know if you have it or not) and include 2 unreleased youtube tracks (shhhhhh those are top secret :)) They cant fit in the email so im going to send them via YouSendit. If you need anything from me at all, dont be afraid to ask, we’re gonna get you better! :)

Eric

Nice guy, right? And I think he was kind of maybe excited about this whole thing because he also e-mailed Madison just to tell her to tell me to check my e-mail, which put a lump in my stomach  because I didn’t know what to say to him.

So I stewed about it all day. My friend Robert gave me a good foundation to work with so I just spent all day trying to build on that in my head. I also had no idea what to suggest as a possible song for Eric to cover because his e-mail sounded like maybe that might be an option and while I thought of a bunch of stuff over the past few months, my mind was a total blank when basically asked. Blake and I discussed it when he came home from work and I decided that I would e-mail Eric when I woke up this morning. First thing. Here’s what I sent…it’s…long… :o/

Hey there Eric,
I cannot thank you enough for your kind message. My daughter is right that

I love your work (to a ridiculous degree), but I fear she may have

exaggerated our situation to invoke a response from you and I’m a little

embarrassed about it. Madison is 13 and when her dad suggested she “play

up the sickness angle” as a TOTAL JOKE, not knowing she actually would

e-mail you or that you’d even see her e-mail, she took that to mean

“exaggerate greatly”.
But the thing is, I *am* sick, I’ve had a really really hard road, I

really did come close to dying this summer due to pancreatitis and things

aren’t so great these days as a result. This e-mail is probably going to

be pretty long, but I feel like I should tell you the TRUTH behind what

Madison said and you can decide whether or not I’m deserving of your kind

sympathy.
Here goes…:
At the end of June I woke up one day with the worst pain imaginable in my

stomach, to the point where I could barely even breathe. I was supposed to

work that morning but I was in way too much pain so I told my boss

something was wrong and that I couldn’t work right now as I was going to

have to go to the hospital because I knew something wasn’t right. As I was

doing this, Madison took her little brother, Wes (age 8) to school and

then ran back home to help me. By the time she got home, I could barely

talk or breathe or function, my husband was at work in Toronto (which is

about 2 hours away) and he’d CARPOOLED to work, so he couldn’t just come

home and take me to the hospital, so Madison called 911 and then called a

family friend to come meet us at the hospital.
In the ambulance, I threw up and was in immense pain, but they got me to

the hospital in more or less one piece, and when I got to the emergency

room, they immediately hooked me up to an IV and fed me morphine and then

they gave me a CAT scan and an x-ray and they came to the conclusion that

it was pancreatitis. Pancreatitis only occurs for two reasons: alcohol and

gallstones. I don’t drink, so in my case it was a rogue gallstone that had

lodged in my common bile duct (which is shared between the gallbladder and

the pancreas), which made my pancreas inflame. They said that pancreatitis

goes two ways: it either clears up really fast or it goes south really

fast. The treatment for pancreatitis is basically starvation. If you don’t

eat anything, the pancreas doesn’t have to process anything, so by

starving yourself, you give the pancreas a rest and the inflammation goes

down, so that’s what they decided to do.
While all this was going on, my husband, Blake, took a subway, then a bus,

then a cab to where his car was parked and THEN he got to the hospital. It

took him like, 6 hours to get there. Meanwhile, our family friend, Ronny,

had taken Madison back home and they picked Wes up from school on the way

and Ronny just looked after them until Blake got home from the hospital.
At about 10:30pm, Blake got a frantic call from the hospital saying that

he had to come now because they didn’t know if I was going to make it

through the night. Remember when I said that pancreatitis could go south

really fast? Well that’s what happened to me.

 

When Blake got to the hospital, I wasn’t breathing on my own and they were

trying to insert a central line, which is a big IV in the neck. Our little

local hospital basically couldn’t deal with what was going in with me, my

respiratory system was crashing fast, and the bigger hospital closest to

us couldn’t either, so they loaded me up in an ambulance and drove me to a

big, scary hospital in Toronto called St. Mike’s, which is a pretty big

fucking deal. Like, you know if someone is at St. Mike’s, they’re knocking

on death’s door.

 

I don’t remember St. Mike’s though, because I spent from June 25th-July

25th completely unconscious. I was intibated, which means I had a

breathing tube down my throat because I couldn’t breathe on my own, and I

was tied down and sedated because I kept trying to pull the breathing tube

out. This is apparently instinct and everyone does it, except in my case,

I succeeded more often than not. This is me after removing my breathing

tubes. I was proud of myself (I was pretty drugged up) for removing it so

I asked Blake to take a picture: http://www.wildrumpusday.com/Tubeless.jpg

 

This is me in the ICU: http://wildrumpusday.com/icu.jpg

 

When I was in the ICU at St. Mike’s, they wouldn’t let me eat or drink

anything because the pancreas had to rest. Instead, I was fed through a

tube in my nose that bypassed my stomach and went straight to…actually

I’m not even sure, I just know that it bypassed the digestive system to

give the pancreas a rest. I had this feeding tube until mid-August. Also

while I was in the ICU, they said I was probably the sickest person there,

which is pretty scary considering where I was. They said that 70% of

people who were as sick as I was, died, so Madison wasn’t far off when she

said that 1 in 5 died.

 

With pancreatitis, there is often an issue with fluid building up in the

body and this fluid compresses the lungs, making breathing extremely

difficult and in my case, almost impossible and fatal. At the time I got

sick, I weighed probably between 150-160 lbs but with all the fluid that

was collecting in my body, I weighed 220 lbs. On July 5th, they had to do

something drastic to save my life, so what they did was cut me right up

the middle of my belly to extract this fluid. Right off the top, they

extracted 4 litres of fluid, which is TWO big bottles of pop worth! I’m

not sure how they did it, but they continued collecting fluid through this

big wound in my belly until the swelling in my body went down

considerably, then they dressed the wound with something called a “vac”,

which is this foam that is covered by plastic and then a vacuum is

attached to the middle of it and fluid is sucked through the vacuum and

collected in a little canister which they hooked at the end of my bed. I

would have this dressing until the beginning of October, changed every

Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

 

During this time, my kidneys failed so I had to have dialysis. They didn’t

know why they failed, they just did and then 2 weeks later, they just

started working again. The body is weird, man, we know so little about how

it works.

 

At the end of July, on the 25th, I had improved enough that I could be

moved to a hospital closer to home, so I was transferred by ambulance to

Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH) in Barrie, Ontario, which is about 45

minutes from our house. I would be put in the ICU of course, and since I

had no recollection of ANYTHING that happened at St. Mike’s, when I woke

up in RVH and Blake and my mom told me everything that had happened and

that I’d missed an entire month of my life, I just cried. I still cry even

thinking about it because it was just so goddamn scary and my mom and

Blake and my kids went through so much, not knowing if they were going to

get a call one day saying that I’d passed away.

 

So in the ICU at RVH I still had the feeding tube, although this one went

straight into my stomach, and I had the vac dressing on my abdominal wound

and I had a trache, which I’m going to explain in case you don’t know what

it is: A tracheotomy is when they punch a hole through your throat and

hook it up to oxygen because you can’t breathe on your own. The one that I

had initially at RVH didn’t allow me to speak, so I had to mouth my

questions to Blake and my mom, about what had happened at St. Mike’s. I

was so drugged up that I couldn’t write (see an example of an attempt at

writing here: http://www.wildrumpusday.com/SunnyPage.jpg), so that wasn’t

an option either. Eventually they would put in place two other traches,

one that allowed me to speak like an android and then one that allowed me

to speak normally, and then none at all.

 

When I was first at RVH, they wouldn’t let me eat or drink anything, but

after a while they took the feeding tube out of my nose and allowed me to

eat things that were a pudding consistency because since I hadn’t eaten

anything in so long,there was a danger of choking. I couldn’t even have

water because it was too liquid.After a while of that, they did a test to

see if I could swallow solid foods and they found that I could so solid

foods were added to the menu, which I was grateful for. They also gave me

all the water and Coke I could drink.

 

I still had the vac dressing, which got changed every Monday, Wednesday

and Friday and one day I convinced a nurse to take a picture of the wound

with my cell phone. Here it is if you want to see it, but I’m warning you

that it’s pretty gross and graphic:

http://4bit4.livejournal.com/166479.html

 

I was (and still am) on a LOT of drugs, including high dosages of

morphine, so a lot of my hospital time is pretty much a blur, but two

weeks after being transferred to RVH’s ICU, they moved me to a general

surgery floor because I had improved so much. This was a very good, very

surprising thing because at St. Mike’s they said I wouldn’t be out of the

hospital until Christmas, but I sure showed them! The problem though, was

that I couldn’t walk. I hadn’t used my legs in almost 2 months so I had to

re-learn how to walk, which was a long, really frustrating process. I had

to walk with a walker on wheels until mid-October.

 

Finally on August 25th (I don’t know what it is with hospital personnel

and the 25th of the month), they let me go home. It was almost 2 months to

the day of when Madison had called 911 and I was eager to go home. Once

home, a nurse would come to the house every other day to change my vac

dressing and to make sure I was doing okay.

 

The vac dressing came off around the beginning of October (I think), which

was fantastic because it really sucked carrying around a canister of fluid

everywhere you went, especially since I kept dropping the unit and almost

broke it many times.

 

When they cut me open though, they cut through the muscles of my abdomen

so now they’re herniated and my guts are all out of place and swollen. I

get crazy stomach pain because of this, which is why I’m still on the

morphine. These pictures are what my stomach looks like now because of the

surgery, but I’m warning you (again) that these ones are semi-nude and not

safe for work:

http://www.sunnycrittenden.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=7910 I basically

look like I’m 6 months pregnant and I need surgery to fix it but it’s a

waiting game because I also have cysts on my pancreas because of the

pancreatitis and I have to go BACK to St. Mike’s to have a surgeon drain

those cysts before my surgeon up here can fix my stomach. Right now we’re

waiting for a bed at the hospital so they can run some tests on me and

then do the cyst-draining procedure. Very soon after that, I’ll be able to

have my “big surgery” to fix my guts, which I’m really scared about

because I’m going to be in a lot of pain afterward and there’s going to be

a long recovery time when it’s all over. I’m also going to have to stay in

the hospital during most of the recovery and they’re saying that that’ll

be around 2 weeks. :o(

 

During this whole ordeal, I lost my job. I was a customer service

representative for a website, working from home, and it was a pretty

cherry job. Technically I was a sub-contractor (from another country, no

less) so it was perfectly legal for them to replace me and I don’t blame

them, they needed someone to fill in the gaps that were missing because of

my absence, but at the same time, we are now down to only living on

Blake’s income and that’s almost impossible. We’re putting groceries on

credit cards because we truly cannot afford them otherwise. We’re going

into debt pretty fast and it’s really really scary.

 

To make matters worse, due to poor nutrition (because my guts are so

screwed up, until recently I would throw up just about anything I put

down, so essentially I was bulimic), my hair started falling out. A LOT.

Here’s a pic:

http://www.sunnycrittenden.com/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=8099&g2_serialNumber=1

 

The good news though, is that my wound is healing really well. Up until a

couple of weeks ago, a nurse would come every day to clean the wound and

change the dressing, but now Blake does that every other day and a nurse,

named Siske, comes Monday, Wednesday and Friday to also clean the wound

and change the dressing and just to make sure that it’s healing okay. We

had a setback a few weeks ago where the new tissue started breaking down

due to too much moisture, but that seems to have been corrected by using

different material to dress the wound. Here’s a big of what it looks like

now, that weird bit on the right is actually my BELLYBUTTON. They’re going

to build me a new bellybutton when I have my big surgery because my old

one is so messed up:

http://www.sunnycrittenden.com/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=8102&g2_serialNumber=1

 

Believe it or not, this is a REALLY REALLY condensed version of everything

that happened, but I’m trying to keep it as brief as possible so I don’t

waste your time. Sorry this is so long. :o/

 

Here’s me just before Christmas, after putting on about 10 lbs because I

stopped throwing everything up:

http://www.sunnycrittenden.com/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=8268&g2_serialNumber=1

 

SO, things are improving, I’m just really waiting to have these two

surgeries so I can go on with my life. I’ve been extremely depressed and

my psychiatrist thinks I have post traumatic stress disorder because of

everything I went through and I don’t disagree with that.

 

But enough about that, let’s talk about you! YES, I am a huge fan, Madison

didn’t really exaggerate that point (although I don’t listen to your songs

24/7 like she let on, but I do listen to some of them often). My favourite

pieces of your work are Rolling in the Deep and Skyrim, but I also loved

your rendition of My Little Pony. I thought Skyrim was SO well done that

that’s the one everyone in this house now knows by heart because I listen

to it so much.

 

I feel strange about using the word “fan” to describe the people who read

my blog too. I’ve had a website with a blog since 2000 and while it’s

nowhere near as popular as your YouTube channel, I do have a lot of

fan-like people. Instead of “fans” though, I just call most of them

“friends” because it’s easier when talking to other people about them.

Then again, I communicate with my fans probably more than you do because

of the nature of a blog, so it’s different for me than it is for you. You

also probably get bombarded with e-mails, if the comments on your videos

are any indication. :o) I hope you’re enjoying your fame, you deserve it!

 

I’ve been giving a LOT of thought over the past few months as to what I’d

like to see you do next and I think I’ve narrowed it down.

 

First, I think doing the Pixies could be phenomenal if you could pull it

off, but I’m not sure they could really be translated into metal very

well. My next idea (and my favourite band) was Hole, but sadly, I don’t

think your audience would appreciate that very much considering most of

them are boys who probably buy into the whole “Courtney killed Kurt” thing

(don’t even get me started on that) and if you did Hole then your cred

would probably go down. As much as I think Hole would be awesome, I

understand the reasons behind not doing it.

 

So, are you ready? Here are my big ideas as to what you should do next:

 

I have ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS wanted to hear a metal version of Hazy Shade

of Winter by the Bangles. I know it’s a cover (can’t remember who did it

originally at the moment) but their version, in my opinion, is the best

version and I think it could be really well done as metal.

 

My second idea was Atlas by Battles because I think that could be really

interesting as metal too.

 

My third idea is a band you’ve probably never heard of (but should) called

Mother Mother. They’re Canadian. Their song Polynesia could be really well

done as metal as well, I think.

 

Speaking of metal, I used to be basically the mascot for a Canadian indie

metal band, called Scratching Post, when I was in my early 20′s. I would

run around at their shows in a pair of panties with their logo on them,

and big boots and a Scratching Post t-shirt. Pics of that are here:

http://www.sunnycrittenden.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=5084

 

I just thought you’d think that as funny. :o)

 

Anyway, I’ve monopolized enough of your time (again, I am SO sorry this is

so long! future e-mails will not be this long, I promise!) and I thank you

again for your kind e-mail and the EP. That was very very nice of you. I

also apologize on behalf of Madison for exaggerating so much. She’s young.

 

I hope you had a good Christmas (or whatever you celebrate!) and an even

better New Year.

 

Your friend,

Sunny

 

PS. Just in case you wanted to, you can post this e-mail, or parts of it,

wherever you want. :o)

 

Like I said, I tried to keep it as short as possible, but it IS kind of a long story, especially when you have to explain so many things, like a tracheotomy. (Damn, I meant to also include a pic of the trache scar. Oops. Speaking of which, is it normal for a scar to hurt? I’ve never had a scar hurt before and this one really does.)  Also I’m just a really verbose person and this is partly why I don’t like replying to e-mails; every reply takes me like, an hour to type out, even if it’s for something really simple. I think that’s partly why I blog. If I’m going to take an hour to write so much to just ONE person, I might as well post it publicly so everyone can see it and I save time.  I hate it when someone I haven’t heard from in a while asks me what I’ve been up to like they’re so special I’m going to write a response just for them. Read the fucking blog! And if you don’t have the time to follow along or go back and read what you’ve missed then leave me alone and just follow along when you do have the time. My time’s precious too, y’know.

Anyway, I’m getting off topic and eerily enough, Eric’s version of the Skyrim theme just came on iTunes. I swear sometimes iTunes is psychic. Ghost in the machine!

Madison’s been spoken to about lying to get what you want, even if you think it’s for a good cause. I think this was a pretty minor offence because she really just exaggerated things that were true, but there’s still a lesson to be learned here. Do I think Eric will e-mail me back? I dunno. It probably won’t be for a few days if he does, I would guess, because it’ll probably take him that long to read my e-mail haha

So this is what’s been happening in Sunnyland over the past 48 hours. Now you know. And now I’m going to go stuff my face with waffles.

Expect a picture post later because the cat was being weird last night.  Oh also? I slept like, 8 hours last night. In a row. This is pretty much unheard of these days. Okay. Waffles.

Edit: Dammit, the Reddit post is now gone but the comments aren’t. Someone posted this.

Edit #2: PA updated with this.

Edit #3: MOAR.

Edit #4: Oh snap.

Edit #5: Parody video.

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

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

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

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

So that’s what’s happening today.

I also didn’t have dinner last night because I knew if I did, I’d throw up. My “mind over matter” dealie isn’t working so well these days. I *am* almost 6 days barf-free but over the past 2 days I came pretty close and I don’t know if I can keep this up. I guess my mental powers just ain’t what they used to be. Then again, if I don’t believe in those powers, they won’t work, so I should probably be a little more positive about it.

So none of you probably noticed because you all saw the post earlier in the day, but I’ve removed yesterday’s post entitled “Sweet Child o’ Mine” because Madison got mad at me for posting her note. She wasn’t mad that I showed the whole world, she was mad that it was an image that people could save and potentially print out and bring to school to tease her with. Her friends don’t really come here but she was afraid of that scenario. She said that if I could figure out a way to leave the post up but make it so people couldn’t save the pics, I could leave it up, but as you all know, that’s not possible, which is a shame because I think that was a good post. I saved it as a PDF so I could print it out once we have black ink again, though, so it’s not exactly lost forever, it’s just not public anymore.

Anyway, total lapse in parenting judgement. I’ve apologized and promised that I wouldn’t post publicly about her sexuality again, especially in a savable format. We’re good.

I wish I could post publicly about how everything went down with her last night because I think it was very interesting but since I’m banned from speaking of her sexuality I can’t really go into details. I understand her reasons for being upset, and again, it had very little to do with you guys and more to do with people from her school, and I respect them. If she were an adult, I probably wouldn’t because don’t tell me shit if you don’t want it on the internet (unless you specifically say “don’t post this”, which I do respect, or unless it’s really obvious that it shouldn’t be public) but she’s a kid and has the right to grow up with a little privacy. Note that I said “a little”. She is unfortunately my daughter and I put everything on the internet that happens in my life from the mundane to extraordinary and sshe’s a part of my life so there’s going to be some cross-over. I’m not just going to write around her.

I explained this to her and she seemed fine with it. It was mostly the sexuality thing and who she likes (which I know I didn’t mention but I do have a video teasing her about someone we thought she was crushing on last spring that she hated but I didn’t know until last night because she didn’t tell me) because those things can come back to her at school if it falls into the wrong hands. And like I said yesterday, she’s already being teased at school, to a much higher degree than she let on before, and it breaks my heart so I won’t do anything to knowingly contribute to it.

So that’s what happened to the post, more or less.

Before I apologized, she was really mean to me and made me cry, which was a bad move on my part. Now that she knows she has that power, she’s going to use it as she gets deeper into the teen years and the shitty part is, I can’t control myself. I can’t not cry when someone’s being mean to me. I’m an extremely sensitive person and I cry a lot. I cry if the store’s out of ketchup chips. I cry if someone shows me a video on how Chicken McNuggets are made. I cry when celebrities die. I cry when Blake yells. I cry when Wes tells me about when he saw me at St. Mike’s and I was “sleeping”. I cry when “Creep” by Radiohead comes on my iTunes.  I cry for really stupid reasons, especially when I think people are mad at me or they’re being mean to me. Blake’s like, “it’s only going to get worse as she gets older” and I just cried some more because Madison’s never been mean to me before. She’s never gotten mad at me before. She fights with Blake all the time and gets made at him and that’s just their dynamic, they butt heads and scream at each other for a while, then Madison goes to her room and Blake goes to his desk and a couple of hours later Madison comes out and pretty much acts like nothing even happened, which Blake doesn’t let her get away with, they discuss whatever it was calmly at that point, but it always turns out okay.

Yesterday Madison made me cry, twice, and didn’t even apologize for it after everything was fine and we were back to joking around and being normal.  She was indignant, she was like “good” while I was crying, even though she didn’t say that. That really bothers me.

It getting worse will absolutely destroy me and I’ve been crying all morning just thinking about it. :o( Okay I’ve only been up for an hour, but I hit the ground weeping. I don’t know how I’m going to make it through her teens if this is how it’s going to be. She’s just literally, in the 13 years she’s been alive, has never gotten made at me before, she’s never lashed out at me, she’s never said anything mean. That’s not how we are. Or that’s not how we were.

Don’t get me wrong, even after she saw I’d posted the note and before I apologized, she was still telling me all about school and the kids in school and who she liked and was acting totally normal. She took the opportunity to be mad at me and ran with it to see what it tasted like and I think it tasted good. She’s been testing the waters with me a little bit the last few weeks, like saying “no” if I ask her to bring me a bottle of water from the kitchen or to recycle my old ones or to grab me an apple while she’s in there or whatever. She plays it off like she’s joking but she’s kinda started taking it too far and I can’t really explain in text how she’s testing the waters, it just feels like she is. Blake thinks the same thing.

Other than that, we’re totally fine. Blake tweeted this weekend, “I think that Madison and @SunnyCrittenden sitting around shooting the shit is just about the cutest thing ever.” and he mentioned somewhere else that it was “heartwarming”. I don’t/didn’t really understand what he meant because Madison and I were just being normal, this is how we are after school every single day, but I guess he doesn’t see that because he’s at work. Madison and I have talked after school about everything under the sun since she started school, pretty much, so it’s totally normal for us, but again, he just doesn’t see it. I don’t know what was different this weekend, but something was and he noticed and he mentioned it. He also said that it “warmed his heart” that we went into my office and watched The Muppet Movie together while I made art because, to him, Madison and I don’t do that together. But the thing is, after school we do, we’ve watched many an Oprah episode after school together and now on Thursdays we watch Extreme Couponing together. (That show is AWESOME.) Since I got sick, I don’t go in my office that often so we don’t watch as much TV as we used to, but obviously we still do it because we did it on Sunday and last Thursday with Extreme Couponing. In fact she stayed home from school that day to help me deal with a new nurse because I just couldn’t deal with her by myself (and rightly so, she was pretty gross and I hated her touching me :o(). Today after school, Madison is going to the pharmacy to pick up the drugs for me that Blake forgot to get on Sunday because he worked all weekend. She’s a GOOD KID, she just has this streak of malice now that I don’t know how to deal with.

And it bugs the hell out of me that she doesn’t believe me that she’s a good kid when I tell her she is. Maybe I should write her a note. I mean, she helps out around the house a LOT and for no allowance because we can’t afford allowance anymore, she runs errands, she’s constantly asking me if I need anything and both kids understand that walking is difficult for me, so they both grab me water from the fridge and stuff like that and they seem happy to do it. Sometimes (not often) I say in the living room where everyone is, as a joke, “the next person who gets me an apple gets a kiss!” and all three of them will literally fight over who’s going to do it, like they all run to the kitchen to get the apple. The ONLY thing I know for certain in this life is that my family REALLY loves me. Like, to an abnormal degree I think.

So then how could she be so mean to me? I don’t understand. Blake tried explaining it to me as there being reactions that come from the (logical) brain and reactions that comes from the (illogical) heart but I still don’t get it. I could never be that mean to her. I’m the one always sticking up for her, I’m the one always in her corner.

I guess all there is to do is to try and grow a thicker skin. Blake says I need to try as hard as I can next time not to react when she tries to hurt me and he guarantees that there will be a “next time”. I’m not so sure about that, but he’s probably right about the thicker skin thing, just in case. I just don’t think I’m capable of it.

Enough about that.

Last night I watched a movie called “The Switch”, which starred Jennifer Anniston, who I think is SO pretty and Jason Bateman who I think is a dork. Juliette Lewis and Jeff Goldblum were also in it and Juliette was really great. Jeff, not so much. Anyway, it’s about an artificial insemination gone awry and it’s a romantic comedy, which I’m a sucker for, and I expected it to be really awful as most rom-coms are but it was actually pretty decent and do you wanna know why? It’s because it was based on the short story “Baster” by JEFFREY EUGENIDES (!!!!!!) who is probably my favourite author in the whole wide world. He wrote Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides and a new book that I forget the name of but Blake’s getting it for me for Xmas. Something about a marriage or a divorce or something, I honestly didn’t read the jacket, I just saw the name and basically screamed in the middle of Chapters because I love him so much.

Right now I’m half-assedly reading Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs which is kinda cool because of its gimmick (the story is written around strange photos that were supposedly “found”, but I’m not so sure – the photos are interspersed throughout the book) but the writing is kinda “meh”. The story is kinda “meh” too. And actually now that I think about it, the writing sounds like I’m reading a blog, which I don’t really mind but I read a lot of blogs and I want more from a book. Apparently they’re making this book into a movie and I have no idea how that’s going to work.

Speaking of movies, The Help comes out next week on DVD and I have to have it. If anyone was going to get me anything for Xmas, that’s the thing. It’s on my wishlist. Just sayin’…(I hate that term and I can’t believe I just used it, but it fit…)

Here are scenes from my bed from yesterday:

Wes gave me a bat ring for Halloween. It’s one of my prized possessions. :o)

My empty Tylenol #3 bottle.
I always keep them so I know when I can refill the prescription because I only get 100 pills every 30 days so I don’t become an addict (probably too late).

Wes’ picture from the dentist last year.
His hair IS tinged pink in this pic, it’s not  a trick of the light.
I just realized that it’s weird that its for the DENTIST and he’s not showing his teeth.
They probably wanted him to, but he probably politely declined.
That’s just how he is.

This is my extra special snowflake mug.
Blake got me a set of 4 from Caribou Coffee when he was working there like, 10- years ago.
This is the only survivor. :o/
It’s getting old and I need a new one but I haven’t been able to find a suitable replacement.
It’s stained on the inside and the inside also has a whole bunch of fine cracks.

I’ll be very upset if anyone breaks it.

Yesterday Blake called me from Shopper’s Drug Mart and told me that Isopure Plus (my protein drink that I need so I don’t die of malnutrition) was on sale for $3.50 off, which is a very big deal because the stuff’s $15 + tax for 6 bottles which is very expensive for us and he wanted to know if I thought he should get 2. I said yes. I wish we had more money so we could get more than 2 because that’s a really good deal and we should probably stock up. :o/ It’s NOT a good deal if we have to put it on Visa and pay interest on it, so that’s why we only got 2.

Today is a grey, rainy, depressing day. I really really hate fall, especially right now when we’re in the tail end of it; when the leaves are all off the trees and soggy brown muck on the ground and it’s cold enough to see your breath but there’s no snow. I love rain when everything’s green, but when everything’s brown, it just depresses me. Also, I just don’t get outside enough. I want to be outside, I just don’t know what to do out there.

Did you know that a serving of cashews (1/4 cup, which isn’t a lot) has 9g of protein? Learn something new every day. The chicken bowl steamery microwave thing I’m going to have for lunch is like, 18g of protein. My mom found an online protein calculator and she says I need 44g of protein per day. I’ve been doing some research of my own and I read that if a person is recovering from a surgery or an accident, they should actually DOUBLE their protein intake because their bodies are working extra hard to heal themselves.

My wound is almost healed and while my guts are swollen and unhappy, I can’t exactly heal them, so I say I should split the difference and that I should aim for 66g. There’s no way I can eat that much in a day without gaining a ton of weight and there’s also the puking thing to consider, but I can come close with the Isopure Plus (18g of protein) every day. I got Blake and Madison to try a little bit of the Alpine Punch flavour last week and Madison said it tasted like medicine and Blake just said he thought it was pretty good. I agree. The texture is a little weird and takes some getting used to (it’s more dense than water or juice) but after that it’s actually pretty good. Blake got me grape this time and everything I’ve read says that that one’s the best flavour so I guess I’ll see later tonight.

Even though Isopure Plus is designed to be easy on tummies, I find that if I drink it too quickly, I feel really really sick, so I have to drink it in little sips across a span of an hour or more. If it gets warm, I have to put it in the freezer to cool it back down, because it’s pretty gross when it’s room temperature.

Anyway, I’m very pleased with the stuff.  I just wish it wasn’t so goddamn expensive.

Okay I think it’s time to go into my office where I can’t see the grey day, watch some bad movies OnDemand, eat my chicken bowl steamer thing and then work on this sketchbook. I got the sketchbook for the Limited Edition Sketchbook Project last week so the pressure’s on! My theme is “the last word ever spoken”. Hmmmm.