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.

Comments on this site are now manually moderated so don’t freak out if yours doesn’t show up right away. Also I now have it set so that comments automagically close on posts older than 14 days. That is all.

Oh man has it ever been a long day. Hell it’s been a long week so far and I have so much to share!

First things first though: I found out yesterday that I did not get into Touched By Fire, the remedial art show and even though I RSVP’d, since I’m not in the show and don’t know anyone in the show, I’m not gonna bother going. Am I disappointed that I didn’t get in? Well I was for a second, but honestly, I had a feeling I wouldn’t get in this year because with how the show was last year, with a huge emphasis on the ups and downs of mood disorders, I kinda knew that the paintings I submitted wouldn’t be accepted. I submitted “Sparkle“, “Shimmer“, “Shine“, “Binary Ballerina“, “Flower Girl “and “Five O’Clock Abortion“. With “Five O’Clock Abortion” being the exception, almost all of my paintings were shiny and happy and they don’t really fit in with the vibe of Touched By Fire. Part of me is like, “pardon me for getting BETTER, I mean isn’t that the whole point of the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario?” but mostly I’m just “meh”. To be perfectly honest, the deadline for submissions caught me off guard and if I’d given it half a thought maybe a few weeks or months prior to the call to entries I would have finished the painting I’m working on now, which is about being bipolar, or come up with something more fitting of the show.

Also, while I had a great experience last year, I didn’t sell any of my pieces. (I had 3 in the show.) I did get a $100 cash bonus from a guy named Bob who wanted to encourage me to keep creating, which was cool, and the food was good and there was a free bar (I don’t drink though, especially in social settings). This year’s show seems to be very different from last year and the more I found out about it, the more I really wasn’t into it. The show is being held at The Royal Ontario Museum, which is VERY VERY cool and it would have been nice to be able to say that my work has hung there, but the event is only one night and it appears to be open to anyone, unlike last year where they had the gala event for artists and special guests and then the show was open for an entire weekend. That probably means there will be minimal catering and probably not a free bar and I probably wouldn’t have sold anything again. Plus, getting my work down there last year was a huge pain in the ass (Blake had to take a day off work and drive them down because postage was unthinkable) and when they returned my paintings, one was badly in need of repair because all they did was wrap it in brown paper and they didn’t even write “this end up” on it, so it was delivered upside down. Not good for an assemblage piece and it really pissed me off.

Anyway, I’m okay with not being in the show. I’m actually kind of relieved because we won’t have to deal with everything that comes with it and not being in the show means I can sell my pieces on my terms on my own site and actually maybe sell them rather than take a loss like last year.

So, that brings me to the one major change I made to my site today: I redid The Shop. Now small items like my “Bitch Barometers” will be in The Shop and paintings will get their own pages beneath it. That way I don’t have to fight with PayPal code every time I have to add or delete another painting. (For some reason every time I added a new painting and PayPal button, all of my formatting would screw up and the pre-existing PayPal buttons would stop working. I’d end up having to make all new PayPal buttons for each painting every time I added something new and it was a total pain in the ass.)

Since I didn’t get into Touched By Fire, all of the paintings I’d submitted to the show are now for sale on this site if anyone’s interested.

Another addition to the site, that Blake so patiently coded, is that I now have threaded comments. They’re kind of in beta though, because we don’t know how they’ll behave if there are a lot of comments (not that I get a lot of comments).

Along with fixing up The Shop and threaded comments, I added a new page to the site, Beliefs & Philosophies, as well as updating my Webcam page with current camming info and my About Me page. Over the next little while there are going to be more changes to the site as far as design and I’ve registered the domain SunnylandStudio.com, which is going to be the new name of the site. (Although SunnyCrittenden.com will still point here as well.)

So many new things! Check ‘em out!

Other than all that, as per usual I’ve been very busy with Camwhores and Buttercup and various domestic duties that are boring and ordinary.

And with that, I think I’m gonna go find some food and get some sleep because I’ve got another busy day tomorrow. Peace out, homies.

So for some ungodly reason I’m up at the crack of dawn and really wishing I could get back to sleep. It all started with having to pee, then Lucky whining to go out, then Lucky whining some more after he came in, then the children being awake…so I guess now I’m just UP.

According to The Weather Network, we’re supposed to get our first taste of snow on Thursday and I cannot even begin to express how thrilled I am about this. [/sarcasm] All week, with the exception of Thursday, it’s been nothing but cold drizzle and grey skies and while I’m doing light therapy with my super fancy light box, it’s hard for this weather not to affect your mood. (Although I’ve been oddly upbeat in general, which is strange for me for this time of year.) Anyway, last year we didn’t get our first snow until mid-to-late November and I know this because it was Steph the Geek’s wedding and we had a hell of a time driving back home.

On Thursday, in a fluke of nature, the sun actually shone and it went up to a whopping 17 degrees C and I decided that it might be one of the last nice days of the year so Wayne & I should get out and do something. What I really wanted to do was going on the trails by my house and take pictures of the leaves and stuff, but Wayne’s not much of a nature guy so I opted for going to the pharmacy to refill my prescriptions instead, which is something I’ve only done once since living here and I thought it would be something good because that would mean Blake wouldn’t have to do it on the weekend.

So that’s what we did. Really, the trip was uneventful. I got my prescriptions, my Tylenol 1, my mega-ibuprofen, lotion, eyeliner and some Chapstick. Exciting, I know, but the point is, I did it all pretty much by myself. Wayne stood in front of the magazine rack reading a National Enquirer about Patrick Swayze’s last days the whole time.

Anyway, minor milestone for me, I suppose. I wish the pharmacy here was bigger. I actually really like pharmacies, always have. I like looking at the makeup and the hair products and the greeting cards, but our pharmacy is microscopic so while they have all of the above, it’s only in very tiny sections with very little selection and it never changes. The only greeting cards they have are birthdays, anniversaries, get well soon and sympathies, along with a small section of Marjolein Bastin cards, which happen to be mine and my mother’s favourites, but even there the selection is fairly thin. (I did get one for my mom though, which I will mail by myself…eventually.)

Other than that, my weeks have been consumed by Buttercup, my return to Camwhores and this wretched painting that refuses to complete itself.

So first, at Buttercup the conversations are happening so fast and we have so many people posting now that even I’m having a hard time following sometimes! This thing is really starting to take off, which is something we didn’t really anticipate happening until the new year. Perhaps this month’s cover has something to do with it:

Recognize those boobs? Well you might! They belong to the one and only Sybil Hawthorne, who was gracious enough to take a crapload of pictures for us to choose from for issue #2. We thought this one embodied what we think Buttercup stands for and also gives a nod to breast cancer awareness month and thus, that’s why we chose it. I was a bit iffy about sticking boobs on our cover because we have such a wide variety of women reading the zine, but so far the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

Speaking of boobs, here are mine:

Same old bra (I’ve had that thing for 7 years! it’s the miraculous “click bra” that Victoria’s Secret no longer makes!), much bigger boobs.

As I was explaining to some folks on Camwhores‘ tagboard this week, my return to the site, while nostalgic, isn’t going to be the same as when I was on the site before, getting naked all the time and being free with my body. The reason for that is simply because A) I’m kinda fat these days and B) I’m 30 years old now. My boobs aren’t going to get any nicer. I mean let’s face facts here, it really is only downhill from here in the boob department and I don’t especially want an archive of my girls’ decline. I reserve the right to absolutely change my mind, but that’s my thoughts on it as of now. For now, these guns are gonna remain holstered. Now, hopefully I make a few tips or something from the site so I can afford some new holsters (bras) because it occurred to me the other night that in the two years I’ve been gone from Camwhores, I’ve only acquired two new bras, one of which is actually a pretty hideous shade of army green and if I’m going to be showing off my boobs in a bra, it might be a good excuse to invest in some more. For example, I don’t even own a white bra, meaning I can’t wear anything white, which is especially unfortunate since I bought some white shirts this summer without remembering that little fact. Oops. :o/

Also with my return to Camwhores, I guess it’s now time to update the Webcam page on this site.

Someone asked me recently if my return to camming meant that I’d be adding a cam feed to my site and the answer is no. For one, I use WordPress and I wouldn’t even begin to know how to make a WordPress page refresh every 30 seconds, two, I always hated updating two feeds – one for Camwhores and one for my site – and three, only like, 10 people even looked at the cam feed on my site over the years because most of my audience were Camwhores members so it just doesn’t make any sense to add a cam feed to my site. Not to mention the fact that I’m not a members-only cam on Camwhores, so when I’m updating there, the whole world can see me whether they’re a paying customer or not, so there would be no point in having a separate feed for my site.

Over the last little while a lot of former Camwhores members have asked me what it’s like over there now and all I really have to say about that is to watch the tagboard for a few minutes during peak times (9pm is a good time, so are the afternoons) and see for yourself. People are chatting up a storm, the community vibe IS back, the forum has been improved (it now has an arcade!) and people are coming out of the woodwork left, right and center! Last night I actually talked to SINISTER HER on tag for crying out loud! Yeah, that bitch is still around! :oD

While it’s true that the scenery has changed quite a bit in the last few years and there are a LOT of girls I don’t know as well as the old school ones I do, we’re all pretty much the same animal and as per usual on the site, everyone’s really nice and out to have a good time. When I first started camming, part of the drive for me was the party atmosphere of it, putting on some good, loud music and hanging out with 50 of my closest friends and I’m finding that that vibe is absolutely, 100% still there and I’ve been having a lot of fun.

Is it worth the $30/month subscription fee? Hey, I dunno, I’m not your accountant and I’ve never had to pay for it myself, I’m just telling you what it’s like in the deep end and I guess all I really have left to say on the matter is, the water’s fine.

Now…this damn painting. It has been sitting on my coffee table for about 2 weeks now about half finished:

It is (thus far) called “The Two Sunnies” and yes, they are currently armless (doing arms is the absolute worst part of any of these paintings) and all I know is that on the left it’ll say “Je suis heureuse” and on the right it’ll say “Je suis triste”, but other than that, I simply don’t know what the hell to do with it. The girls are going to be holding hands, that’s another element, but in person the painting seems so “blah” to me, even when I envision the words on it and I’m not sure how to take it further. I hate having unfinished pieces sitting around for so long because the longer they sit around, the more likely they are to get spilled on, or have the cat sit on them or the dogs knock them over, so I really want to get this one done, but I lack the vision and the motivation to do so. Everything in my life right now (besides not having any money, which is almost always the case) is going pretty good except this one little thing… Plus! I’ve got nothing else coming down the pipe, my mind is completely blank when it comes to creative endeavors. Because of Touched By Fire, I actually have this backlog of paintings that I’d like to get sold, but I can’t put them up until I know what, if anything, has been accepted for the show. I should find out soon, though.

This weekend is Canadian Thanksgiving and I’m going to be cooking a turkey on Monday. I forget how to cook a turkey though, so I’ll have to Google that, but it’s in my fridge right now thawing and I’m sure it’ll turn out fine. With it we’ll probably have mashed potatoes and a vegetable of some sort, corn probably, and I’m going to attempt to make gravy from scratch, which I’ve never done before and have no idea how to do. (So if anyone would like to tell me, that’d be good. I know I need cornstarch, which I have, I’m just not really sure what I’m supposed to do with it.)

Also this weekend, hopefully today, will be the yearly destruction of my garden. All of the flowers are officially dead and that means it’s time for Blake to get out the weed whacker and cut them all down to help spread their seeds for next year. I hope it’s not too wet though.

Anyway, now I’m pretty much just rambling so I think I’m going to go make some eggs and actually start my day. Before I go though, because eggs reminded me, Blake and my shrink both swear to me that if I start eating protein for breakfast, that I’ll start to lose weight because that’ll kickstart my metabolism. I’m not totally convinced that eating MORE is going to make me lose weight and if I gain so much as a lb I’m kicking some asses, but I figure there’s no harm in trying it, I’m already fat, so every day this week I’ve been having eggs about 2 hours after I wake up, then dinner and t hen usually a snack after dinner while we’re watching TV. I haven’t weighed myself or anything but I feel better, so I must be doing something right. Or at least I guess it isn’t bad for me, exactly.

Okay, now I’m gone. *poof*

Wow, the current version of WordPress is sooooo different than what I’d been using. Slicker.

Last night two of my favourite people, Blake and my friend Kevin, moved my site onto a new server, fixing my FTP and making it possible for Blake to upgrade my WordPress install. From now on, I should be able to update it myself from within WordPress, so that’s a bonus.

While they did all that, I dyed my hairs.

Sexy, huh? Friday night, no makeup, yeah I’m awesome. Really though, I just wanted to play with my new cam a bit. I have obtained a Logitech 9000 for my re-entry into camming and my god is it ever a nice camera compared to old webcams. It’s almost too good. Part of the beauty of webcams, back in the day (I hate that term, I dunno why I just used it) was that webcams were just crappy enough that they didn’t show zits, moles, stretchmarks, cellulite or light freckles and I, as well as others, were more than fine with that. I haven’t played around with this cam a whole ton, but it’s a lot clearer in low light than older cams, meaning it’s going to show flaws better. I’m cool with showing my flaws, I don’t care, and I can hide my occasional zits with makeup, so I don’t care about that either, I’m just noticing this huge difference and find it very interesting.

I was hoping to get my cam up and running by the end of the weekend, but that’s seeming more and more unlikely as I mentally tick down the things I have to get done in the next two days. For one, I have a Buttercup article due tonight that I haven’t even started (although I’ve done all the research already) and all day today, my neighbour Judy is helping me with my FOOD article for Buttercup because here’s a secret: I don’t really cook or bake and when I do, it’s usually from a box. The only thing I make from scratch are roasts and whole chickens and the subsequent stews and soups from the leftovers. I make muffins a lot for the kids’ lunches, but those come in a back and all I have to do is add water. Earlier this week I was going to do my FOOD item all by myself, but I chickened out and asked Judy to help me because she actually has cookie sheets (okay okay, they’re cookies) that aren’t rusting out. (I use my cookie sheets for like, putting TV dinners and frozen pizzas on and they were hand-me-downs 12 years ago. Mine are probably older than I am and they really are black from stuff boiling over onto them and they really are rusting out.)

I decided I’d take the FOOD column for October because my neigbour’s daughter had this really amazingly easy recipe for something very appropriate for Thanksgiving (Canadian Thanksgiving is on October 12th) and also, I kinda wanted to get my turn over with. I’ll have to do it again in like, 6 months, but whatever, at least after I have 6 months to find another recipe.

So speaking of October, have you seen Buttercup‘s cover yet this month? Because it’s extra awesome thanks to my friend Sybil Hawthorne and we’re all really really proud of both the cover and what we have planned for this month. Last month we weren’t sure if this whole Buttercup thing was going to fly, but this month, after gaining 110 members in September with activity in 40 different groups, we decided to go all out and have more fun with this month. Sooooo check it out!

As far as camming…I’m not sure when I’m going to re-add myself to Camwhores. I have to find, download and crack cam software, for one. I’m told ChillCam is still around, but now you have to pay for it and some girls use Webcam32, which I also think you have to pay for. There’s a free one called Fwink (I think?), but I looked at it last night and it left much to be desired so I don’t think I’m going to be going with that. I have EvoCam for my Mac, thanks to zwilliams, but 95% of my camming will be done with my PC because my MacBook’s built-in iSight is garbage so I need something for that too. Half of my 7 years of camming was done on a PC using ChillCam and the other half was on my iBook using EvoCam, so I’ll probably go with ChillCam if I can find a crack for it or a keygen or something. Any help with that would be greatly appreciated.

Yesterday I sold a painting, although I won’t actually be getting the money for it until Sunday. My neighbour’s daughter and her friend were scouring my Facebook a few weeks ago, looking at my paintings and asking for prices on all of them so I redirected them to my site. Ashley’s (that’s the daughter) friend really liked my “Emo” painting, which has been rotting on my site for almost a year now, but neither of them were about to pay $90 US for it because they’re just not the art buying type, so yesterday I offered it to Ashley for her friend for her birthday at a very discounted price because hey, we’re friends and I’m really really really need money right now. In fact, if anyone wanted to buy a painting or donate money to my site, now would definitely be the time to do it because I’m running dangerously low on art supplies and I literally have about $1.50 to my name right now.

Anyway, this was the painting Ashley’s friend liked so much, which she will now be getting for her birthday, along with a Bitch Barometer, of which I only have 3 left of.

So graduating! On Thursday morning I went to see my shrink and because I’m progressing with my immersion therapy, I’m doing my lightbox therapy, my meds are stable and have been in a good place the last 3 visits, she’s bumped me up from seeing her once a month to seeing her once every 3 months. I can still phone her if anything goes wrong or I need more meds between now and my next appointment, but I’m okay enough now that I don’t need to see her as often.

I have to go in and get a blood test done to check my thyroid, my blood sugar, my salts, my cholesterol and various other things which are all routine when you take the kind of drugs I do. She also put me on the waiting list for their metabolic somethin’ er other clinics which is basically where you talk to a dietitian in a group and s/he tells you how to eat properly in order to lose weight as almost everyone gains weight because of their meds. Now, I’m no longer on the medication that made me gain weight and I stopped drinking Coke and I’ve been more active, theoretically I should have lost at least 10 lbs by now, if not 20, but I haven’t lost a single pound since going off the drug and these blood tests are partially to figure out why. The drug I was on, called Risperidone, can slow down your metabolism, which I’m 99% positive it did with me, and it can take like, 5 years to recover from it. It also probably didn’t help that I was on this drug just as I was turning 30, when your metabolism naturally begins to slow down a bit, so I kinda got the double whammy and I think it is SO damn unfair. Luckily I’m not gaining any more weight, I’m just not losing any which bothers me more than you could even imagine, especially because I’ve taken many many steps with zero reward.

But anyway, I only have to see my shrink now every 3 months and that is a good thing. Also, the light therapy, as much as I’m loathe to admit it, really does seem to be helping, so I’ve been in a good place for a while now.

Alright, I guess that’s all I really had to say, so it’s time to throw on a bra and get over to Judy’s so we can make these damn cookies.

Yesterday I had a Pepsi for the first time in probably 15 years and it immediately made me remember my grampa.

When I was a kid, my mom would let me play hooky from school so I could go up to Alliston with my grampa, which was about an hour and a half away and also happened to be where I was born. This was where his carpet store was and a few times a week he’d drive up there in his big blue van to make sure things were running smoothly and to do “measure ups”, which meant that he was going to someone’s house to measure their rooms for new carpet.

On the way up to Alliston, my grampa would give me a Pepsi from a mini-fridge that plugged into the van’s cigarette lighter and being a Coke fanatic, this was the only time ever that I’d drink Pepsi.

When we got to Alliston, my grampa would leave me with Flo and Bonnie, his two employees, and he’d give me some money to go to the Stedman’s store down the street and buy clothes or toys. I would do that of course, but I’d never spend all of the money. Instead, I would go to the pet store behind my grampa’s store and more often than not I would buy a small animal that my mother would kill me for bringing home. My grampa would always come back from his measure ups and pretend to get mad at me for buying the animal and he’d tell me to take it back and I’d cry and get my own way and then we’d go two stores down to have Chinese food for lunch where I’d get an extra fortune cookie because Bing, the owner, liked my smile.

When we went to Alliston, I’d bring books and toys with me and I’d hide behind the rolls of carpet , which were stacked vertically against wood scaffolding and read or play my Game Boy, drinking my grampa’s Pepsi from a styrofoam cup the whole time.

After work, we’d go to a restaurant, the name of which is completely escaping me but it was the same one every time, with Flo (who was actually my grampa’s girlfriend, although I probably wasn’t supposed to know that considering he was still married to my grama) and I would order LIVER. Yes, a child who likes liver, who grew into an adult who likes liver.

When we were done with dinner, we’d drive Flo home and then head home ourselves, drinking Pepsi along the way. One time my grampa pulled over because one flukey night we could see the Northern Lights just outside of Alliston, something I’d never seen before nor since.

Since the store didn’t close until 9pm and it was an hour and a half home AFTER dinner, I would get home late enough that my mom was too tired to give me or my grampa shit about the new pet I’d acquired so I’d just get my pajamas on and go to bed.

And that’s all I have to say about my adventures in Alliston. For now, anyway. It’s just so weird how a taste or a smell can trigger such strong memories, especially when you haven’t experienced them in a long time.

In other news…on Monday I spent the whole day with my neighbour, Wayne, because it was his day off and he wanted me to rip CDs onto his computer.

A few weeks ago, Wayne was drunk and somehow we got started on the topic of religion, which in my experience is usually a bad idea. Wayne is technically a Catholic, although I guess you’d call him non-practicing as I’ve known the guy for 4 years and I’ve never seen him go to church, he definitely doesn’t eat fish on Fridays and while he believes in God, I seem to know more about Catholicism than he does.

Wayne’s known for quite some time that I don’t believe in God, so that day he asked me what I did believe in, what did I think happened after we died and stuff like that and that’s how we got on the topic of karma, a word he’d heard before but a concept of which he’d never really considered. So I explained to him the various thoughts on karma and my own personal ones and ever since, we’ve both been obsessed with it. Me with getting him to understand the concept and him with saying that I’m “funny” because I now constantly remind him to think about karma.

I lent him season one of My Name Is Earl, which he liked (I would have lent him the rest but I don’t have them) and ever since he’s kinda been turned on to the whole idea of karma, while still not totally grasping it. he says things like “Judy and I sacrifice so much and karma doesn’t reward us,” and I’ll say “but what have you done for someone other than yourselves?” and he’ll say “well we sacrifice so Courtney can have the things she has” (Courtney’s their daughter) and I say something like, “well you don’t get a reward for parenting, for doing something you’re supposed to be doing anyway,” and he’ll sit and think about it for a bit and then change the subject.

Well, the other day I thought of a good way to explain it to him so I think he’d understand. So on Monday I said to him that I was going to explain karma and I asked him what he does when he sees a stray dog in his driveway. He replied with “I try and chase it off,” to which I replied with “and what would Blake or I do? Or even Madison?” and he said, “well, you’d probably try and trap it” and I finished his sentence with “and we’d all go through great lengths to find its owner and, failing that, we’d call animal control, do you see the difference?” And he DID. He explained back to me that doing a good deed would give you good karma and I said yes, that’s exactly it, but remember, it has to be something completely unselfish and outside yourself. And he said to me “but if you call animal control, you’re kind of doing a bad deed because then the owners will have to pay money to get their dog back”, to which I replied, “that’s not my problem, the bottom line is that I saved that dog’s life, it didn’t get hit on the road, it didn’t die of dehydration or starvation and it didn’t get attacked by coyotes. The owners having to pay to get their dog back, that’s their own karma”.

After that Wayne was quiet for a little while, which is weird for Wayne, and I could tell that he was finally starting to “get it”.

And it’s not like I’m trying to preach or convert anyone or anything, he brought the whole thing up weeks ago, it’s just that Wayne & Judy, as much as I love them, they don’t do a whole lot for other people and they don’t really think outside of themselves or their own family (we’re included in that), but now I’ve got them, or at least Wayne, beyond their normal limits and honestly, I’m kind of proud of the fact that I did that.

With my belief system, which is karma-based, all of the bad things that are constantly happening to them – which I won’t go into because it’s not my place but let’s just say some REALLY bad shit – is a result of living a selfish existence. And maybe “selfish” isn’t even the right word, I don’t know what to call it. But like, they’ll utilize the food bank, but they’ve never contributed to it. A woman at Wayne’s work raised funds so Wayne could adopt a dog for Courtney for her birthday and we’re talking $300 here, and they took that, but they’d never in a million years do the same kind of thing for anyone else. I’m not saying they’re bad people at all, quite the opposite actually, they’re nothing but good to us, me in particular, and I really do love them dearly, it’s just that they don’t seem to see beyond the borders of their own existence and I truly believe that if they did, their luck would change and their lives would be better.

God, do I sound like an Evangelical or what? Please let me stress again that Wayne’s constantly been asking me about karma since it came up a few weeks ago, I’m seriously not pushing an agenda here, it’s just that he’s interested and I think opening him up to it would be of great benefit, so I patiently answer all of his questions and explain things the best I can.

Anyway, as time goes by and as I think of more examples, he seems to be getting it and I think that’s a good thing. I even told him, you can believe in God and karma at the same time, just think of it as God giving out karma, think of it as living by the Golden Rule.

So that’s Mondays with Wayne, constant talk of karma while I’m over there doing nice things for him.

Tomorrow night Blake’s going to be updating my badly outdated WordPress install, which I’m very excited about. It’s possible that when he does that, it might fix some of the annoying things I hate about WordPress, like the fact that I can’t wrap text around images. (It works when I’m typing the entry but when I publish it the formatting goes to shit.)

This update has made me think about my site a little more, specifically about its layout and some of the things that bug me. For example, I belong to a number of Ning groups and I’d like to place their badges either in the sidebars or even on my Exits page, but for some reason when I paste in the code, they don’t show up properly and I’m not sure if that’s a WordPress issue or if it’s the theme I’m using. When I designed this site originally, I wanted a fairly bare-bones layout because most of what I do is text anyway, but as I post more and more pictures and do more and more art, I want it to be more reflective of what the site’s all about and who I am. I don’t know if I have the graphics skills required for the kind of site I have in my head, but I think Blake and I should sit down and try to work something new out in the very near future.

And thinking about layout has led me to thinking about the site itself. The thing is, most blog sites, which really I guess mine is, have titles. Yes, people use their names as their site’s title and domain, but most arty blog sites have titles, for example, The Hermitage or Ruling At Life or Broken Toyland. I’ve been SunnyCrittenden.com for a very long time now and suddenly I’m thinking that it’s time for a title. SunnyCrittenden.com will still point to this site, but I’m thinking it’s time for my name to take a backseat to something bigger – I just don’t know what that is yet.

A long time ago I wanted my site to be called “A Pocket Full of Posies”, but the domain was taken. :o/

I dunno, it’s just something I’ve been thinking about tonight.

Okay I think it’s time to retire to my Sims Bunker while I still can. I’ve got a couple of days off from Buttercup, so to speak, before we all head into the craziness of October, so I’d better take advantage of it.

Goodnight!

Ugh. For some reason, right now when you go to my site a “Twitter API” keeps asking me for a username and a password. If this is happening to you too (and I’m assuming it is) just hit “cancel” and it’ll go away. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the Twitter plugin I have so tweets will show up under “Peep Show” to the right. I’ll have Blake take a look at it when he gets home from work.

Anyway, I’ve been a busy little bee today and I’ve added two new pages to my site, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Last winter I shut down my webcam after 7 fun-filled years of camming and I sort of did it on the sly, as quietly as possible, which left some folks confused and apparently a little hurt because they claim there was no warning. I think the fact that I shut down my site’s cam feed a year prior and the fact that I was only updating my Camwhores cam feed once every 30 days for about a year near the end was plenty of warning that shutting it down altogether was inevitable, but I can still understand where they were coming from.

Because I keep getting questioned about why I left Camwhores [NSFW] and stopped camming, I decided to put up a page explaining why, but also explaining a little bit about camming for the newer people that are coming to my site and have no idea of my “sordid” past.

As I was writing the page, I realized that an article on camming is nothing without pictures, so I asked my friend Kevin, who owns and runs Camwhores (the site where I did most of my camming) if I could have a copy of my cam archives, which was apparently impossible as the file format the cams are archived as is only readable by the server. After giving it about 2 minutes worth of though, I asked him to put my archive back up on Camwhores, both so I could rip pics from the site for my webcam page, but also because I’m actually pretty proud of my cam’s archives, there are a lot of good memories there, from doing Scratching Post shows in my underwear, to meeting Blake, to finding out I was pregnant with Wes and watching my belly grow. Not to mention the friends I made along the way, a lot of whose names appear on my naked body in Sharpie or in my cam’s caption in many of the archived images.

I’m not going back to camming, I think I should be clear about that – I think that ship has sailed – but I do plan on using my Camwhores account to chat on tag and post in the forums from time to time, so I’m sort of “back” in that capacity, but that’s about the extent of it.

Along with the webcam page explaining my departure from the cam world, I spent last night pulling images from my archives and putting them in an album in my gallery, the link to which is on the webcam page. But here’s an old school pic for the sheer hell of it:

The other page I put up today is simply a favourites page and it can be found by clicking here. It’s nothing special, just a few lists of favourite things from movies, to music, to books, to actors and artists, so people can get a better feel for me, especially if they’re visiting my corner of the internet for the very first time.

So that’s what I did today. I hope you’re entertained by some of it. :o)

Fall is not a good time of year for me and it appears the annual melancholy has begun to set in earlier this time around. My brain doesn’t work, I can’t think properly, I’m frustrated, upset and agitated most of the time, feeling useless and depressed.

It doesn’t help that, yet again, we were turned down for debt reduction from those who hold my student loans, despite the fact that I have a well documented mental illness and on paper, after bills, we are left with around $400 per month to feed 4 people and 2 pets, as well as pay for gas for Blake to get to and from work and that’s with only paying the minimum on our $3000 credit card debt, debt that’s been incurred due to the pressures of these student loans that theoretically, I should be exempt from paying but they have been dicking us around for YEARS instead. (Losing our documents, claiming documents haven’t been received, forgetting to send out forms, claiming certain forms have been lost in the mail, telling us to fax certain things and then saying we weren’t supposed to fax them at all, but mail them, etc etc etc…then turning us down for debt reduction despite numerous letters from my healthcare providers and hard math that says flat out, we cannot afford this on one income.)

Anyway…I’m agitated for a million reasons, and this being my site, I reserve the right to list them here.

Our lawn hasn’t been mown since roughly the end of July because our lawn mower bit the dust. Our 3-year old-lawn mower that would probably still be running just fine if it hadn’t been doing double duty all this time, as our neighbour has borrowed it pretty much every weekend since moving in here 3 years ago. So, it’s a 3-year-old lawn mower with 6 years worth of wear & tear on it and it died. No good deed goes unpunished, right? It’s like that time we gave someone’s car a boost and the wind caught our hood and bent it backwards. We can’t afford to eat, let alone a new one and I worry constantly about how our house looks from the curb with all of these weeds and this overgrown lawn badly in need of a mow and I also worry about getting a citation from the town. Our original plan was to try and find a lawn company to mow it and fix it all up before the end of the month, but that would cost between $60-100 (we’re assuming, no one’s called to get an actual quote that I know of) and we just don’t have it, so I guess my only option is to sit here and fret and make myself sick about it until the snow covers it up and we’ll deal with it in the spring. If someone from the town comes to the door to cite us, I’ll probably snap and lose it on them.

Also, speaking of my neighbours and our house looking like shit…Blake’s mom brought us up Blake’s old futon, which was better than our current couch. The week that happened, we had Blake’s mom’s SUV at our disposal, as well as my mother’s van and could have taken our old couch to the dump, but no, my neighbour’s daughter, who was moving into a new place, wanted our old couch for people to sit on when they were smoking in her garage. I told Blake this was a bad idea, that we should say that she had until the end of the week to pick it up or else we’d be using one of our mothers’ vehicles to take it to the dump, because I had a feeling that this goddamn couch was going to sit under my carport making it look like trash indefinitely. And lo & behold, it’s been like, 3 weeks and it’s still sitting out there looking like shit and making me go out of my fucking mind because between the state of the lawn and this godawful stained, floral abomination sitting amongst the unkempt recycling, fall leaves and garbage cans all at the front of our house, we look like we belong in a run-down trailer park somewhere. It’s probably going to snow before this shit is taken care of and that’s completely unacceptable to me. The goddamn thing is pretty much right in front of our “front door”, you have to squeeze between it and the BBQ to get inside.

It’s easy to say “well go out there and do something about it yourself”, but I can’t even leave my own house to tend to my own garden because I’m afraid of people looking at and/or talking to me. I do not want the whole world watching me attempt to rearrange furniture under my carport and quite fucking frankly, I shouldn’t have to because this situation shouldn’t have fucking happened to begin with.

…

The brakes on the car went 2 weeks ago. That took $320 out of October’s $400 food, gas & Halloween costume budget. School trip permission slips came home for both kids, which totaled around $45 and it wasn’t easy to say “no” when our town’s annual Fall Fair happened.  We couldn’t afford Thanksgiving dinner, so we didn’t have one. Our friend Alex brought us some of her family’s leftovers though, so at least I did get a little taste of turkey but I still felt like shit that I couldn’t cook a turkey of our own and share it with them, which was the original plan.

Our house has been filled with visitors during the past several weeks and this has not been a good thing. My step-mom is already asking Blake & I what we’re doing for Xmas and Xmas is the last thing I even want to even think about right now because if I let my mind go there, I’ll probably end up in the hospital for a suicide attempt. I fucking hate Xmas on a good year and this has not been a good year and I’ve been at the end of my rope for quite some time. (For those who are inevitably going to ask, my wishlist is here, the kids’ incomplete wishlist is here.)

In November my friend Steph is having a wedding. I say she’s “having a wedding” as opposed to “getting married” because she’s already married, but they never had a wedding. Long story short, he’s from the US and she’s from Canada, so this is the “official” wedding in Canada for her family and friends. This shouldn’t be a big deal but it is.

First of all, I’m agoraphobic and have social anxiety. A wedding is really not my thing. However, I love Steph and I want to be at her wedding, so I’m doing everything in my power to go – although admittedly, there’s a very good chance that as the last minute I won’t be able to. That’s neither here nor there, though.

Steph invited our entire family to the wedding, which I was excited about because it’s being held at Casa Loma, which is an honest to god castle that I thought the kids would get a huge kick out of. I also know there are going to be other kids there. Well, we can’t afford to clothe our kids for a wedding, so Alex is going to be staying home with them instead. Furthermore, the sad truth is that over the spring & summer, I gained a lot of weight due to the medication I was on, called Risperidone, for biploar disorder and it got to the point where literally the only thing I had to wear was pajamas I’d worn when I was pregnant with Wes. Luckily I have a good, generous online friend who helped me figure out my current sizes and sent me a couple of pairs of jeans and some t-shirts so I could leave the house if I wanted to, so I’d at least have the option and that was great. Unfortunately, I have nothing appropriate for a wedding because all of my “fancy” clothes are a size 0 and I’m….temporarily not a size 0.

In August my shrink put me on a new drug called Ziprasidone (Geodon/Zeldox), which appears to be the “right” drug and as my body’s gotten used to it I’ve just now begun to lose some of the weight I gained on the heinous Risperidone, but there’s no way I’m going to be back to my old self by the middle of November for Steph’s wedding, so buying an outfit is unavoidable if I’m to attend. Not only does this cause financial distress, but also social distress as this now involves going to a mall, probably with kids, probably on a weekend and the reality is that that scenario makes me want to die. Plus there’s the cost of gas to GET to the wedding, which is a small sum, and of course the gift, which I’m embarrassed to be stressing about but I am.

There’s also the matter of my hair, which is also embarrassing to even be writing about but I’m going to anyway. Last year I dyed my hair flaming red as it was growing out from being shaved and that turned out to be a huge mistake because red, as some of you may know, is a total pain in the ass to maintain (especially when you’re blonde) and very hard to strip out (especially when you’re a porous blonde). Long story short, I ended up having to visit a hair salon twice, at $70 a pop, to have my hair turned into a shade found in nature and I vowed (for the millionth time) to never dye my hair by myself again because I screw it up 90% of the time.  Well, getting my hair done professionally before this wedding is a financial impossibility, so a journey to the drug store’s blonde-in-a-bottle aisle is unavoidable and I guess I’ll wear my hair in a ponytail or something because I can’t afford to even get it cut. (As an aside, if anyone can recommend a GOOD brand of drugstore hair dye, particularly in a cool blonde shade, that would be great. I used to use Feria, but it doesn’t seem to matter which brand I use, I end up with yellow hair.)

Blah blah blah. Flat out, we cannot afford to go to this wedding and I hope Steph understands if we can’t. I know Steph would rather have us there than receive a gift, that’s just the kind of person she is, but it’s not looking like I can go and hold my head up high at the same time, so there’s a very good chance we won’t go at all. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t and YES, if we don’t go, I’ll probably regret it for the rest of my life and feel like a total fuckwad. I’m cringing at the thought of Steph even reading this post, so Steph, if you ARE reading, don’t tell me.

I’m so so so frustrated that this site still looks like a piece of shit after deciding to revamp it many many months ago. It’s been “my job” to create a background image and a banner and between my computer dying and losing all my fonts as a result and just a complete lack of inspiration, it hasn’t happened. It drives me insane that this site is like, the first impression all of these new people are getting of me and it is SO not even remotely close to my standards, it’s embarrassing. It distresses me greatly. I wish I knew CSS, I wish I knew how to make WordPress do the things I want it to do, but I don’t and neither does Blake and he doesn’t have a ton of time (or – what’s the word – “motivation”) so progress has been slow and frustrating.

I’m trying so fucking hard to get my shit together and this site, my “web presence”, is a big part of that because it helps me understand who I am (and that’s been pretty “up on the air” for a while now) and it’s killing me for things to be in the state they’re in. Fortunately, a friend of mine just hooked me up with Photoshop for the PC so at least now there’s a point in trying to rebuild my font collection and get graphics for this site completed. He also hooked me up with an older version of Word, so there’s the possibility of new zines in the future too…(except for that pesky printer problem of mine that I can’t afford to deal with right now either).

And finally: art. This is eating me alive from the inside out and at this point, I’m completely paralyzed by fear and uncertainty and I’ve stopped creating altogether due to an utter lack of self-esteem.

I was doing good, I was taking my Suzi Blu art class and had a million ideas and completed some paintings, a few sketches for future paintings and felt, temporarily, like I was “me” again and back on track. But then business and money and justifying my time and all of this stupid shit got in the way and now I’m stuck again.

I’m extremely uncomfortable with selling my art. Don’t get me wrong, I like and need the money, and really, it’s just going to collect dust in this house anyway so it might as well be on other people’s walls, but it makes me feel sick to my stomach trying to attach monetary value to anything I do. The fact of the matter is, I think I’m shit and thus, everything I do is shit and when someone says “no, that’s not shit”, I believe them for a second but then I worry that if I believe them all the way and price accordingly, no one will agree with them and make me feel shittier than I did before.

That said, I’m putting “Ennui” and “Beloved” up for sale:

(More pics.)

(More pics.)

They are 12 x 12 on canvas and $150 US + $10.00 s/h/PayPal fees = $160 US total each. If anyone’s interested, e-mail me at Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com for instructions on how to send payment. First come, first served. If you think I’m crazy for charging that much, well…so be it, but that’s how much “Hope” & “Dream” went for so that’s what I’m going by.

SOLD!! SOLD!! SOLD!! HOORAY!!!

Originally I wanted to wait and sell these two AFTER I’d gotten pics of them that were good enough to make prints out of, but I have no one to help me and I can’t figure out how to do it myself (plus I don’t have the means to front the money for prints anyway) and if I’m going to continue making art and I dunno, exist, the money needs to start coming in now.

And this brings me to Touched By Fire, the art show I submitted to last month. I’m on their online gallery, but I haven’t heard anything from them either way about the actual gala event. Since I’m on their online gallery and I recall reading something about how accepted works wouldn’t appear on their website, I’m assuming I was rejected and part of me is relieved that I won’t have to go (can’t afford the gas to get there anyway! + y’know, social phobia…) and the other part of me feels like shit that I was (probably) rejected for a remedial art show. BUT, I guess it’s only October 16th and the show isn’t for another month so maybe I’m jumping the gun in my assumptions.

Anyway it’s fall, I feel like shit, I hope I die in my sleep so this shit will end and that’s all I’ve got to say.

/wrist

Over the last little while I’ve been contacted by some people who have noticed that I’ve more or less dropped off the face of the Earth during the last year or two and they were wondering why. Questions like these come out of nowhere for me because I don’t know to whom I’m replying, where they know me from, what they know of me and my life etc. so I never know how to answer even the simplest things like “so, what have you been up to?” I simply don’t know where to start. This is very frustrating.

The fact of the matter is, because of growing up and certain life events and the fact that I’ve been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I’m not sure who I am anymore and what I want. I don’t know if I want to have a site anymore and even if I do, I don’t know what to put on it or how much to share.

Furthermore, things have gotten a lot more complicated than they were a few years ago with this WordPress shit vs. making a website in Dreamweaver that was comprised of mostly tables and because of this, maintaining a site – what you’re reading right now – isn’t something I feel I can do myself. Of course I’m capable of it, if I wanted to learn, but I don’t want to and if I’m not doing it myself, then do I really want to do it at all? Currently Blake (my husband) and I are trying to find a happy medium. Really, as far as I can tell, WordPress is just a template system, so all we need to do is come up with a template that I can edit and update myself. We’re working on it. It’s probably going to take a while.

But then the other problem I’m trying to work out in my head, and have been for a while, is which content is for my site and which content is for Live Journal? And really, what IS the point of having both? Do I even really need both? Why not just point my domain to Live Journal? But the thing is, there are some things that don’t feel right in a Live Journal (or a personal blog, I guess), such as articles, product reviews or endorsements, 3rd party content (YouTube videos like the one above etc). Basically I have no idea what to write or where anymore and I’ve completely lost track of why so many people even follow what I write, create and do to begin with, so it’s hard for me to figure out how to keep everyone happy.

And speaking of keeping everyone happy, there’s another problem. Back when I started doing whatever it is I do, the Internet was still sort of an underground thing. Everyone and their mother (certainly not MY mother) wasn’t potentially reading every word I wrote and that allowed me a certain freedom to be as honest and open as I’m known for being and have sort of built a reputation on. Well, some people don’t like truth and honesty. Some people get upset when you write about them, even though it’s all truth and facts and honesty. Some people don’t like the whole world knowing what they did on a Sunday afternoon and some people feel as though I’m trying to hold up a mirror so they can see something they perceive as being there when I’m merely being honest, but with a writer’s eye. This makes it very difficult to write about one’s life and if I can’t do so honestly, then I can’t do it at all.

It just seems like on all levels of life, I’m stuck. I have no refuge. I used to “write it out” when I was feeling badly or trying to process something and that outlet’s mostly been taken away by people who don’t understand me or what I do. I absolutely resent them for it and I’ve racked my brain searching for happy mediums and work-arounds, but I keep coming up short.

Truthfully, though, I’m a little bit sick of writing about my life for an audience anyway. For friends I’ve met through this technological journey who are also writing about their own lives, say, via Live Journal? Sure. But thousands of strangers? I dunno anymore. Especially not when I’ve been increasingly bombarded with anonymous folks over the years who trigger my paranoia and contribute to my shaky mental health and waning self-esteem.

I had to disable anonymous commenting in Live Journal recently due to troll activity and comments have been disabled here (along with “pings”?) for a long time because I don’t know how to control the posting of spam. I don’t know how to make this two-way communication between the many of you and the one and only me work anymore.

While parts of me are still the same, and the core of me is still the same, the last few years have been pretty rough on me and I’ve done a lot of changing and growing as a result. Unfortunately some of you, it seems, wanted me to stay the same, so to those of you who fall into that category: I’m sorry I let you down and I’m sad to see you go. (Except that’s a lie because if you honestly expected me to stay a scantily clad 20-something year old on a webcam forever, you’re probably an asshole and good riddance.) For the rest of you, I hope you’ll stick around long enough for me to figure out whatever the fuck it is I’m doing because I have a feeling that whatever it is and once I get all of this shit figure out, it’s going to be interesting.
Things can only get better.

So while comments are disabled and will remain so for a while, feel free to e-mail me at Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com or snail mail me at the address below. Give me suggestions, tell me how you found me, tell me why you’ve stuck around, tell me what you’d like to see more of (you lose points for saying “tits” *eyerolls*) or what you think I should stay away from. I’d really like to know what all of you strangers are getting out of this whole thing, it’s always been a mystery to me and finally having some perspective from the other side of the screen would probably help immensely in sorting out the mess that is my so-called internet life.

Sunny of the Great White North

PO Box 3042

Elmvale, ON

L0L 1P0

CANADA

Edit (08/12/08): Not to discourage the e-mails (they’ve been great so far!) comments have been re-enabled, so feel free to register and be heard! :o)

It took me so long to figure out this WordPress shit that the stuff I just threw up there is badly out of date. I mean, look at my about me page, Digit is long dead for god’s sake.

I don’t know what 2008 holds for me. I’m hoping to find some direction, whether that’s going back to school (either to finish my advertising program since I’m already $32,000 in debt because of it or for a one year art program), focusing on re-starting my own business or just getting healthier by quitting smoking and vowing to walk the dogs more often.

Either way, I hope everyone out there has a great holiday season and hopefully I’ll make this place a little more awesome in the new year!