Welcome to all the new people coming from the various Steak & Blowjob Day sites that are now out there!
Enjoy the holiday! ;o)

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>

————————————————————————–

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

This is what I was going to show you all (well, those who are “new”) in linking my old site, the main page of which should have still been up and which Blake is rectifying as we speak but since it’s just a place holder, I figured I’d post the images here anyway.

This was the site’s splash page.
I made that whole thing by myself, including the “parchment”.
The fonts were from misprinted type.

This was the main page.
(Click to enlarge.)
All of those menu items and most of the words were links to other pages within the site or to other sites.
I was really proud of this layout because I thought it was my best and I made the entire thing myself.
Unfortunately I don’t seem to possess those skill anymore.

Anyway, that’s what I was talking about.
I want to have a pretty site like that again.

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 see my shrink on Friday and the weather’s supposed to get sunnier as the week goes by, so I’ll come out of it (and I’ll probably have my meds adjusted) but right now I’m living in a world of suck and self-loathing. I’ve never really kept a calendar of these things ( I  probably should) but I think the end of summer does this to me every year. The first day of school comes and I start to feel like I’m dying. And this weekend has been extra brutal because it’s like, as soon as Friday at 5pm hit, everything got cold and rainy and windy and miserable and it was like *bam*, here we are in fall. (I realize fall doesn’t officially start until Sept. 22nd, but it is very much fall up here already. The leaves are starting to change colour and it’s only about 12 degrees during the day.)

I mean, here’s how the year goes for me:

Spring: I start to thaw and come alive and suddenly the world is wonderful. I get excited looking for the first robin of spring, the first crocuses, the first ladybugs. In March I start plants inside and get excited watching them grow. My sleep schedule goes straight to shit though, as it does in fall because these transitional months wreak havoc with like, my biological clock or something, but it’s okay, it corrects itself by about June-ish.

Summer: I’m in loooooove. The hotter, the more humid, the better. Yeah, I bitch about the heat like everyone else, but the heat just means that the kids and I have all day to scrounge up change to go to the beach when Blake gets home. I nap a lot more in the summer because when we have a heat wave, it gets so hot you can’t move and you just get sleepy (especially because of the meds I’m on that make me sleepy to begin with) and so, I do a lot of my painting at night when it’s cooler, but also at night is when I go to the park across the road and swing on the swings and watch the stars and dig my toes in the cold sand. We eat fresh food, whether it’s from our own garden or stuff grown locally at the grocery store and my whole body just feels better, it feels more alive.  Admittedly, by the end of August the kids and I are all getting on each other’s nerves and they’re ready to go back to school and I’m ready for them to go back to school too, but Labour Day weekend, I think, is usually still hot and this year it’s fall weather and that has me bummin’ hardcore.

Fall: I hate fall. I hate that everything is dying. (Well I guess everything’s not dying, some things are just going dormant and if the trees didn’t go dormant we wouldn’t have maple syrup in the spring…) I hate the Fall Fair. I’m really starting to hate Halloween because I have GREAT anxiety about people potentially coming to my door wanting candy when I have none and I don’t want to buy any because no one ever comes to the door, I just think they might, and the kids bring home almost a garbage bag of the stuff so we don’t need an extra bag of it when I’m throwing out half of their haul behind their backs anyway because it’s junk and none of us needs it…yes, I’m a horrible mother.  I hate the wind and the rain and the leaves blowing all over the place. I hate the grass turning yellow and dying. I begin to worry about Xmas. I used to love the first day of school but now I hate it. The kids are going to come home that day with a million problems that I’m expected to solve by the next day and they’re going to lay 30 trees worth of paper on my desk that I don’t know what to do with for field trips and things we can’t afford but must shell out money for anyway.

On Tuesday there will probably be a fight on the way home from school, which I’m worried about. This 9 year old little shit up the street is jealous of Madison having a friend her own age and jealous of her boobs and just jealous of Madison growing up in general, as evidenced by the fact that this 9 year old tries to dress grown up in boob shirts (where there are no boobs) and high heels and wobbles down the street in front of our house, swinging non-existent hips with her nose stuck up in the air, lipstick on her teeth and a purse around her arm. When Madison uploaded pics to her Facebook last week (two of which I posted here on my site), this 9 year old’s jealousy really bubbled over and she told Madison she was “ugly and horrable”. Then when Madison blocked her on Facebook and MSN, the girl started telling all the neighbourhood kids that Madison was a lesbian because I guess when you’re 9 and live in a very small town, that’s the worst insult you can come up with. Madison laughed it off and set the record straight with the few girls who messaged her to find out if it was true or not, but the 9 year old’s been talking trash about her ever since. Because they walk home the same route, I know there are going to be problems on the first day of school possibly even violence because this 9 year old acts pretty big for her breeches.  But the thing is, this 9 year old, in the past, has known that she can’t do anything to Madison, verbally OR physically because Madison would just ignore her. Madison towers over her and could push her over with one finger, but she’s wise enough just to not engage. So instead, the 9 year old goes after Wes to antagonize Madison into a fight. Blake said he has no problem, if this all plays out the way I’m afraid it might, going  to the kid’s grandparents (who look after her and her sister) and putting an end to all of this shit but I’m the one who has to deal with it “on the front lines” so to speak and the whole situation gives me anxiety like nothing else has in quite some time because I’m afraid of Wes getting his nose punched in as a casualty of war.

Plus there’s also the fact that fall is another transitional season and my sleep schedule gets completely fucked up. Like, here I am at 5 in the morning on a holiday writing a fucking blog post when I should be sleeping.

So that’s fall, or at least this one.

Winter: Well if you’ve been reading this blog for over a year, you know how I get in the winter. I’m better now that we’ve identified that I have S.A.D. and I do my light therapy, but for the most part, all winter I just do my best to cope. It’s fucked up though, as much as winter destroys me, I wouldn’t live anywhere, I don’t think, that doesn’t have it. I think snow is beautiful and many times I’ve tried (and failed) to record what snow looks like through my eyes. I think that without the cold and snow, I wouldn’t have the appreciation for spring and summer that I do. I think my body is so attuned to the 4 seasons that missing one would be worse than enduring it. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t pass up a vacation to somewhere warm in February, but I couldn’t live there. And of course winter means dealing with Xmas, which, as I pointed out, I start worrying about in the fall.

Admittedly though, last winter, with the lightbox wasn’t as bad as previous ones, but I’m still definitely not at my best in any way, shape or form (although I do feel I do my best creative work in the winter because I’m inside all the time and have to use my imagination to entertain myself).

Life is so grey area, y’know? Nothing’s every black & white, as much as I want it to be.

Lately part of my depression has involved privilege, self-esteem and awareness of the issues around me that I never saw before.

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So add to the list that I’m feeling entirely inferior as a blogger, despite the fact that Blake pointed out that I get e-mails from people who say that I’ve helped them in some way by writing about my life and saying some of the thing I do “out loud”. I guess that’s something…not something I’ve ever striven for or done on purpose, but I guess it’s a positive side effect of being so self absorbed….

Onto other things…

Yesterday Blake & I went to Toronto to pick up my paintings from The Square Foot Show. The trip was pretty uneventful, we just drove there, went to the gallery, stood in a line and picked up my paintings. Nothing too exciting. When we were walking down the street toward the gallery, there was this guy dressed in shabby, dirty clothes and a shirt that didn’t fit (I don’t think he was homeless but definitely mentally ill) and as we walked by, he said to Blake, “do you have some spare change for a Coke?” We were walking pretty fast and Blake just shook his head “no” and as we were walking, I asked Blake if he really did ask for change for a Coke and Blake said yes, and so I said if the guy was still there on our way back, I’d give him the Coke that just so happened to be in my bag. (I’m on meds that cause dry mouth, I travel with liquids.) So we went to the gallery and got my paintings (I didn’t sell any, which is a good thing*) and on our way back, the guy was still there so I got the Coke out of my bag and said, “Sir? Here you go.” and he said, “I don’t want that.” Confused I said, “Isn’t that what you asked us for when we passed by here earlier?” and he said, kind of belligerently, “NO, I asked for a COFFEE.” So I said “sorry” and we just kept walking to the car. We know for a fact that he said he wanted a Coke when we walked past him the first time, especially since we heard him, as we were approaching him WITH the Coke, ask another person for change for a Coke, so Blake figures he really wanted money for beer or something, which just made me sad.

On the way home, as we were on the outskirts of our town, the clouds were pretty spectacular so Blake pulled over and I ran into a field to take pictures of them. Behold:

My pictures, admittedly, suck, and they looked much cooler in person.

*So like I said, I didn’t sell any of my paintings at The Square Foot Show, which is a good thing and I found it funny that there was a guy in line talking to a VERY outspoken American woman who was happy that he didn’t sell anything either (which surprised her). I’m happy to have not sold anything because AWOL Gallery takes 50 goddamn percent of the $225 they charge for your paintings plus you’re out the $20 it cost to get in the show (plus gas to get the paintings there, then going to the show, then picking them up), so really you don’t make any money at all. The show, for me, as I think I’ve said before, was just to have another show on my resume for when I apply for the Ontario Arts Council emerging artist grant which I’m told by one of the program’s directors isn’t even necessary so next year I doubt I’ll take part in the show.

I would like to somehow find out about other shows that are actually happening in my area but I don’t know how you go about doing that. There IS some sort of arts council in Barrie that I know of but I’ve been on their website and they only seem to advertise events after they’re already happening, so that does me no good. There is also a local like, arts club type of thing but you have to pay quite a bit of money to be part of it, if I recall correctly, and I don’t think I’d benefit from it enough to make the financial investment because I don’t live in Barrie and I don’t think you should have to pay money just to find out about art shows before they happen. There has to be a better way, I just don’t know what it is.

Since I didn’t sell anything at Square Foot, I am going to submit all 3 of those paintings to Touched By Fire. I’m 99.9% sure they’ll be rejected because they aren’t depressing enough, but that’s okay, I’m going to submit them anyway and see what happens. No harm, right? And if I get in, that’s kind of a cool thing because the show’s at the ROM in Toronto and I happen to know the food is excellent and that there’s a free bar. Or at least that was the case when I was in the show before.

Anyway, I’m just rambling now…which I suppose I’ve been doing this entire post. I think I’m going to check e-mail, go back to bed and when I wake up, I’ll post my new paintings to Etsy.

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.

“She’s Like A Rainbow” is finished and for sale in my Etsy shop!
Check her out! (There are more pics of her here!)

Honestly, I think she’s probably my top two favourite paintings that I’ve done.
(My #1 being “Just Like Honey“.)

Also, you may not have noticed, but my site & LJ are pink again.
I just wasn’t feeling the grey anymore.

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.

Some people have noticed that both my site and my Live Journal are not their usual, colourful selves and these people are wondering why. I hadn’t intended to make this post today, but enough people have asked that I figured it should go up as soon as possible.

Let me start out by reassuring anyone thinking it: this has nothing to do with depression. I am not depressed. (Today, anyway.)

When I was diagnosed with bipolar I, the only two people who were surprised by it was me and my step-mother who doesn’t know me very well and who still doesn’t think I’m bipolar. The truth of the matter is, I am probably one of the most bipolar people ever to be born on this Earth and looking back, it’s very obvious that I’ve been bipolar my whole life, not just in mood, but in mannerism.

My ex, Chris, used to say that the thing he loved the most about me was my passion and the thing he hated the most about me…was my passion. About a year ago on Facebook, I did some quiz meme and the last question said something like, “Say something random about yourself” and I wrote, “When I love something, I really really love it. When I hate something, I really really hate it”. Chris replied to that saying it was probably the most true statement he’s ever read on a quiz.

And that’s the thing. There is very little grey area to my life. Things are either black or white, negative or positive. I either love something or I hate something, there is no “like”. A day is either good or bad, there is no in-between. A place is either awesome or awful. Ideas are either genius or stupid. And sometimes, people are too.

When I find a food I like, I eat that food every day until I never want to see that food again and chances are, I’ll never eat it again. When I find a new band, they’re the greatest thing I’ve ever heard and I have to find/buy everything they’ve ever put out. If I hear a song I like, it’s the greatest song I’ve ever heard. (And if I hear one that I don’t like, it’s the worst piece of crap I’ve ever heard.) When I get interested in a subject, I have to learn everything I can about it. I become both obsessed and dismissive easily. I’m afraid of both success and failure because I can’t see that there’s anything in between. Prior to medication, I was either happy or sad, there was no middle ground.

While I actually like some of these traits, I’m not sure it’s healthy to be as polarized as I am on pretty much everything. Blake and I got talking about things the other night and we decided that I need to start letting in a little more grey. Even he & I aren’t totally sure what that means (especially me), except that it’s time to change my way of thinking and being, because how I operate now isn’t serving me as well as it once did.

What Blake and I were talking about specifically is how I never finish anything and why. I finish paintings, so I consider myself more successful as an artist than I do a writer because even though I write every day, nothing of substance has ever been published (I don’t count the Marketing Magazine articles as real publishing even though others might). And the reason nothing of substance has ever been published is because I never finish those projects and I never finish those projects because I fear both success and failure.

The piece of writing I’m working on now – or at least what I was working on – is a really solid idea and could very easily (we think) be published in any number of ways. Where the grey comes in is that I need to stop worrying about what comes after I finish. I need to learn how to worry about that later and just finish. And I realize I’m going completely against my own new philosophy by writing this next part, but after it’s finished, I need to not worry about success or failure because my ideas of both are actually kind of warped. I worry about success because of expectation. If I finish this and it gets published and people like it (and I consider publishing it at all successful)  and talk about it, then people will expect me to write and publish something else and I don’t want that pressure. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s failure. Failure is that it gets published (or it doesn’t and I’m rejected repeatedly), people don’t like it, people criticize it and I want to crawl under a rock. Where’s the grey area there? Because I totally don’t see it. I see the grey area prior to finishing, that I shouldn’t worry about everything I just wrote and should just finish it, but I don’t see the grey in what comes next. Do you?

Plus there’s the fact that I don’t see the point in finishing a piece of writing if no one’s ever going to see it.

Another example of me not seeing the grey is yesterday. Yesterday I did a bunch of things that were positive and I was having a great day and then the dogs got loose and I had to chase them all the way to hell and back. In case you’ve forgotten, I don’t leave my house very often and in telling Blake about the dog incident, I said, “I’m so scarred I may not leave the house for like, two months,” and that’s where he pointed out that I wasn’t seeing the grey. I left the house because  a shitty incident happened, the shitty incident didn’t happen because I left the house.

Now I’m not promising overnight changes here or anything. Like I said, I’m not even totally sure what “seeing the grey” even means because as it stands now, I don’t really see it, so it’s going to take me a while to adopt this new life philosophy but I plan on working on it just to see what happens. No doubt there will be remnants of my bipolar-ness that I won’t want to remove because I like those aspects of myself and hey, a leopard can’t change its spots, but I’m going to try, with Blake’s help and maybe yours too, to figure this shit out and try living a different life to see where that leads me. Who knows? This could be the key to everything or it could be another dead end, but I feel that it’s worth trying.

So that’s what “Shades of Grey” is in reference to. I’m glad you’re all along for the ride.