With Live Journal being down due to a server move and Twitter being testy, I thought I’d write here instead.

A few moments ago, I put up a new page called “Art For Sale” (original, I know), where I’ll be listing pieces that are available for purchase. Currently there are three pieces up on there: “Untitled Fuck Up“, “Emo” and “<3“, the latter two being commissions gone very very wrong.

See, my Live Journal “friend”, Stephanie, commissioned me to do both “Emo” and “<3″ and then gave me excuses regularly for 5 weeks after I completed them, ranging from computer problems (yet she was able to make long posts and manage 50+ comments on those posts from her SideKick…hmmm…), to work problems, to PayPal problems, and then, after saying she was going to Western Union me the funds from Wal*Mart “in about an hour”, (twice!) she disappeared off the face of the earth and I haven’t heard from her in a week. We’ve tried e-mailing her, calling her and sending text messages but they’ve all gone unanswered and I’m sick and tired of chasing down a “friend” for payment, so fuck her, they’re now available for anyone who wants them.

The big rub of this situation and why I keep putting “friend” in quotes, is that she knew I was counting on this sale to outfit myself for Touched By Fire and for Steph the Geek’s wedding, two very important, stressful events, yet she dicked me around left, right and center anyway. Then disappeared without a word.

I’m sure I’ll get some “understandable” excuse when she eventually resurfaces, but for right now, I’m pretty pissed off. We went into debt, which we simply couldn’t afford to do, especially so close to Christmas, because she never paid me and I’m sorry, but that pisses me off. That’s not the actions of a “friend”, you don’t pull this shit for almost 6 weeks.

The second she commissioned the paintings, I started working on them and didn’t stop until they were finished. I held up my end of the deal and she just…didn’t. She worse than didn’t, she made me stress and fret and freak out and that’s just not cool.

So, if you would like to purchase what she didn’t, feel free to check out the “Art For Sale” page and let me know! I could definitely use the cash!

These days I’m not doing a whole lot. Gail Cutler, who I met at Touched By Fire and wrote about a few days ago, did end up e-mailing me and commissioning me to recreated “Dream” in honour of her daughter Rebecca, so I’ve been working on that during the last few days.

(”Rebecca’s Dream” in progress. 12 x 12 mixed media on canvas)

Speaking of Touched By Fire, I don’t think I sold “Mania in the Key of Psychosis“, or at least when friends went to see it in person on Saturday, they told me it didn’t have a red “sold” sticker, so I’m assuming I didn’t, so expect that to show up on the “Art For Sale” page eventually as well.

And with that, I think I’m off too find food before I get back to working on “Rebecca’s Dream”. Hope you’re all having a wonderful day!

This week I finished a new piece, trying to use art as therapy for quitting smoking (again).

This one’s called “Death to Smoking” and is going to hang on my studio wall to remind me of how idiotic and dangerous smoking really is so hopefully I’ll think twice about doing it again.

As far as actually quitting smoking (again)…it’s been up and down. I can seem to go 3 days without smoking and be mostly okay, but it’s that third day that kills me. I think if I can get over that hump, I’ll be fine, but so far I haven’t been able to. :o/ I read Allen Carr’s book again and I know how stupid I’m being and yesterday when we were at Wal*Mart I saw two women smoking and realized just how trashy people look when they’re doing it, so I’m aware of all this, it’s just beating the nicotine-craving monster inside me I’m having a hard time dealing with.

I know I’ll get there, I did it before, things just kinda suck right now. I know I just have to keep at it and keep BUSY, and hopefully the next few days will be distracting enough to help me get through 3 days without breaking down.

Thursday is the Touched By Fire art show and Saturday is Steph the Geek’s wedding, so hopefully those will be good distractions rather than stressful events that’ll have me wanting to smoke more. *fingers crossed*

And with that, I’m off to bed so I can start tomorrow nicotne-free.

*sigh* There is so much to say and I don’t even know where to start. So let’s start by jumping on the Obama bandwagon…

Is anyone else completely glued to CNN? (Or your 24 hour news channel of choice.) The US election has me totally captivated and not that it matters because I’m Canadian and don’t get a vote, I will say that I’m an Obama supporter and I it kills me some of the stuff people are choosing to believe about the man. He’s a socialist? No. Canada’s a fairly socialist country and I don’t see anything in his plans that are even close to what we have here. A Muslim? Well, he’s not, but so what if he was? The last I checked, you folks down south had that whole “freedom of religion” thing going for you, so why should that even matter? There’s nothing that says the President of the United States has to be a Christian. I wonder what people would say if he were Jewish? He’s a Marxist? Honestly, I’m not even really sure what that is and I’m betting the majority of Americans don’t know either. Regardless, from what I’ve been told by people smarter than me, he’s not.

Something interesting happened when I went to vote in Canada’s big election last month and I was kind of shocked by it. When Blake and I were standing in line for me to take my turn at the “voting cardboard” (voting machines? pffffft. We vote with a pencil and a paper ballot behind a piece of cardboard akin to what one would use for a science fair project!) there was this guy in front of us who was probably voting for the first time. I’d peg him at between 18 and 20. He overheard Blake tell one of the ladies at the polling station that he was American and thus, not voting and then he overheard me pointing out another lady who was counting a pad of unmarked ballots, showing him how ours are really simple (make “X” here, with 3 or 4 choices), compared to Blake’s crazy-assed absentee ballot for the American general election.

The kid in front of us thought this was funny and he said something like, “For you Americans it should be easier, all you have to choose from is an old guy and a black guy,” but the way he said “old” and “black”, it was like both of those things were negatives.

Now this was a month ago and it’s still stuck in my mind. I was floored by the fact that someone so young would have that kind of attitude, but then again, I probably shouldn’t be surprised living in a Conservative riding, in a town of farmers with a population of 1700. Still, it kinda broke my heart a little to hear this Canadian kid spew such an “ist” view. Until that moment, I just kind of assumed that Canadians, being as liberal as we generally are, were all, well, more open-minded and good natured than that.

Seeing that, or rather hearing it, made me imagine just how bad the attitudes must be in certain places in the US right now.

People may disagree with me on my choice of candidate - or rather Blake’s, since he’s the one who voted for him- and that’s fine, but I truly wish good things for the American people, I love them, and I really believe that Barack Obama is going to provide the US with all the good things they deserve. I’m actually a little bit jealous that we don’t have such charismatic, progressive politicians with good ideas for real change in my own country. I believe that Obama’s going to do good by my friends to the south and I’m going to be genuinely happy for our neighours should he win the presidency.

Y’all have had a really rough 8 years under President Bush and I have hope that Barack Obama will be able to relieve some of the stresses that’s put upon your country. More than that, I think he’s going to progress the US in a good direction, an innovative direction, that will repair the country’s reputation globally and make the US a country to emulate.

Like I said, I’m jealous. I wish our leaders in Ottawa would drink Obama’s Kool-Aid.

I’m probably not the only one, but I keep having nightmares about Barack Obama being assassinated at one of his outdoor rallies or during his presidential acceptable speech. Every time I see him on TV, especially when he’s outside, I’m always looking behind him for the guy who’s got the gun or I’m expecting “pink mist” at any moment. Morbid, I know, but you have to admit that it’s a possibility.

Aaaaaaaaaaand that’s enough about politics that don’t even really affect me.

This afternoon I got my acceptance package from Touched By Fire and I had a slight freak out because “Mania in the Key of Psychosis” (pictured left) needs to be made hangable and with it being so big and heavy, I wasn’t sure that was possible. Blake assured me that it was, however, and brought home a hanging kit made specifically for large, heavy pieces.

The other thing making me freak out is that they want me to mail my art to them, at my expense, and I have NO fucking money whatsoever. I have $200 coming in from a commission, but I need that to buy something to WEAR to the event, which is going to end up doing double-duty by being my outfit for Steph the Geek’s wedding a couple of days later. My lowest estimate to ship “Mania in the Key of Psychosis” is at least $70, plus the cost to ship “Hope” and “Dream” as well would be another $20 - and those two are sold, so I wouldn’t even recoup my shipping costs by selling them. Luckily Blake has offered to drive them down to the office of The Mood Disorders Association in Toronto for me next week, because we figure a tank of gas and half a day’s driving will cost less than shipping everything.

In my Touched By Fire acceptance package, there was an invitation to a pre-event gathering the night of the gala event, that starts at 6:30pm and then the show opens (by invitation only) at 7:30pm-11pm. When I read the invitations to these two things, I immediately had to take an Ativan. I am terrified of this thing. I looked at the slide show from last year’s event and there were all of these strange people there, most were middle-aged (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and they were all eating hors d’oeuvres and sipping win or champaigne and the whole thing just didn’t look like my scene AT ALL. Not that I really HAVE a scene, but if I did, it wouldn’t be that.

And then there’s the fact that it’s a juried show and I’m terrified of winning. Well, that’s not completely true, I think it would be cool to win, but the idea of all these people looking at me and like, maybe having my picture taken for the newspaper, that shit’s totally scary to me and if anything makes me not go, that’ll be it.

Oddly enough, I did my tarot tonight and for “Hopes and Fears” I got the Six of Wands, which says: “The Six of Wands augurs public acclaim or acknowledgment of some kind. This might take the form of a promotion, a qualification, or the recognition of some piece of creative work.

How fucking fitting, huh?

The other thing in the package that made me sweat a little bit is that they want you to write a blurb on each piece. The instructions say: “Touched By Fire is a testament to the creativity, passion and resilience of artists with mood disorders. What can you tell us about this art and hot it was influenced or impacted by your experience with a mood disorder? This statement will accompany your work on display.” EEEEEEEK! I am the WORDIEST motherfucker in the whole entire world, I don’t know if I can write a simple blurb on any of them, let alone “Mania in the Key of Psychosis”. This is my project for the weekend though, I have to get it done before Blake drops the pieces off at their offices.

For anyone in the Toronto area wondering if they can go to the show and see my paintings in person, it’s open to the public Friday, November 14th and Saturday, November 15th, I’m assuming all day. It’s at The Gladstone Hotel in Toronto at 1214 Queen Street West.

As for an outfit to go to the event (and also Steph’s wedding), Blake and I are going to hit the Goodwill and Salvation Army to see if we can’t find some discarded babydoll dresses from the 90’s, to create something like they have on the Free People website, an amazing online shop full of ridiculously expensive clothes that I’d kill to actually own. Hopefully we can find something that’ll work.

In other news…on Saturday we welcomed a new pet to our family! His name is Lucky, he’s a 2-year-old husky/golden retriever mix and I already love him so very much.

After some initial uncontrollable humping due to the hormones from his neutering, he and Hoover Dog are getting along great. Unfortunately this is not the case with Pixel Cat who has been missing for the past 48 hours. :o( Blake took her to the vet on Wednesday for her yearly vaccinations and when he tried to get her out of the car when they got home, she bolted and we’ve seen very little of her ever since. Once last night, at around 11pm, we saw her under the carport and then tonight around the same time, we heard her scamper across the roof, so we know she’s a live and well, she’s just boycotting our house likely because we had the audacity to bring another dog into the family and took her to the vet for needles all in the same week. She’s very unhappy with us. We figure she’ll have to come in eventually. It’s getting very cold outside and she’s gotta eat sometime.

Lucky is going to be my “emotional support animal” as I undergo immersion therapy for my agoraphobia. he’s going to need a little bit of training before I can go out with him, but we’ll get there. He walks well on a leash, likes to stick close to you and is good in the car, which were the qualities we were looking for. He’s happy, he’s healthy, he’s a total sweetheart and I can’t even imagine what kind of idiots would just give him away. His surrender papers were a fucking joke, he was surrendered due to “destructive behaviour” from separation anxiety, but we can’t even get him to play with a chew toy or eat a dog biscuit and the most he’s done is barked when left alone, so I think they just didn’t want to look after him anymore. They also claimed he was a rescue, which is bullshit. No rescue in the world would adopt out a 2-year-old INTACT dog.

Well, it’s getting late and I have to get to bed soon. I’m going to go outside and call the cat for a bit, maybe she’ll come inside for the night, and then I’m going to bed. I had so much more to say but I’m exhausted and on a ridiculous amount of drugs (due to endometriosis) at the moment and I’m afraid that if I kept writing, I would stop making sense.

Something I *did* want to mention however, is that a friend of mine has set up an RSS feed for this site on Live Journal, so that every time I write a blog post here, it automatically shows up on your friends list over there. If interested, here’s the link. I do ask, however, that if you’re going to comment on anything I’ve written, you do so here and not on the syndication feed, because I’m not reading comments on that and won’t see them!

Also, if you’d like to follow me on regular old Live Journal, which gets updated much more often than this site, you can do so here.

And finally, all day I’m a Twittering fool, so if you’re interested in the minutiae of my day, you can follow me there too! I’m everywhere, baby!

And with that, I’m going to bed.

PS. I dyed my hair tonight and it turned out brassy. :o(

PPS. I’ve been playing a lot of Spore lately. If you want to add me to your buddy list, you can do so by searching for “Sunnybananas”!

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

Sooooooo a couple of days ago, my friend Heather told me of this art show thing called “Touched By Fire“, which is an online art gallery specifically for people with mood disorders, sponsored by like, the Mood Disorder Association of Ontario or something like that. Along with the online gallery, they have an actual art show in November and she figured I’d be interested.

So I went to the site and looked at everything and saw that they’d actually EXTENDED the call for entries for the show to THIS COMING FRIDAY. Well, that was too soon for me to paint anything new, so I asked the buyer of “Hope” and “Dream” if she’d mind if I submitted those two for showing and she said that was cool, so figuring this whole thing was too karmic to pass up, yesterday morning I did.

Then I got thinking about the theme of the show and decided I should submit the painting I made when I was psychotic, which I’ve been calling “Camp Tampon” all these years that most of you have seen before. I mean, I figured if there was ever a time and place to show it and maybe even sell it, Touched By Fire was probably it.

So yesterday I dragged it out of the bedroom - the thing’s 30 x 36 and weighs a ton (truthfully, I’m not even sure how to hang it so I never have) - and set it up on my easel to dust it and fix some things that had come loose in the last couple of years, as it was moved around a lot during its lifetime. Then I sprayed it with a final coat of Krylon in a few places and then Madison helped me drag it out onto the driveway so I could take better pictures of it for submission.

What sucks is that they only allow you to submit one picture per piece, so this is the one I submitted, which kind of sucks because it doesn’t really do the complexity of the piece justice. I mean, this sucker is manic chaos on canvas:

The contrast between that piece and everything else I’ve ever painted, I think, perfectly illustrates how my thought process was so fucked when I was manic, which I was when I started the painting and by the time I was finished, I was in the throes of psychosis. In fact, I deemed in “done” approximately 4 hours before the ambulance came to take me away. This painting started it all.

For the sake of the show and to better illustrate what the painting is about (since they don’t give you a place to explain), I renamed it “Mania in the Key of Psychosis” when I submitted it and I put a price tag of $500 on it because….why the hell not? It’s been sitting in my house for almost 3 years collecting dust and truthfully, I don’t even want to part with it and while I doubt anyone would buy it anyway, that’s how much it’ll cost for me to part with it. Also, there’s like, easily $200 worth of materials in there, if only in the gems alone. (Yes, you heard me, GEMS.)

This is a Herkimer diamond, bottom middle of the painting:

Beside the Herkimer diamond is Hello Kitty and *real* aquamarine growing on another piece of rock:

Why I put these in the painting, I have no idea. I was out of my head. I suspect it was because they were gifts and the thing that made me finally snap and go over the edge was my birthday. That’s why the painting is full of wax and sparkly star confetti and birthday candles.

This is a….well, it’s a very very racist “Black Americana” salt shaker, holding a key. If I hadn’t done that to him, I could have sold him on eBay for about $150, they’re super collectible. This one was my great grandma’s:

Here’s the pepper shaker he’s supposed to be holding (bottom right of the painting):

I cut up my driver’s licence and threw that in too, probably due to frustration at being suddenly afraid to drive and isolated as a result:

Something about the tampons…I wasn’t scheduled for my period when this was all happening. There is no doubt that my mania/psychosis was partly fueled by PMS because for the first 3 days I was in the hospital (that I barely remember) I literally laid in bed, in kind of a yoga pose and bled all over their sheets, kind of out of defiance, like “fine, I’m just gonna sit here and bleed then”. My shrink has since told me that there’s a link between mania, psychosis and estrogen and it’s probably not a coincidence that this all culminated the way it did. And by tampons in the painting, my brain somehow knew that this was part of it, but I didn’t.

Another piece of my licence, with my signature:

A button, which some of you have probably seen before. It says, “Well Aren’t We Just a Ray of Fucking Sunshine?” I think Ditsy gave this to me:

A cigarette butt and pills I painted pink, but which exploded with the moisture. There are also moonflower seeds in there (bottom left of the painting):

Tampon, baby Jesus, sunglasses:

Unhappy face. My psyche knew something was wrong, but the rest of me didn’t. In fact it was like there were two of me and one was trapped inside:

A box with paint, an eyedropper, more tampons, string and barrettes:

A box lid full of painted nails, cigarette butt upper left corner:

Same thing, different angle:

Other materials used: acrylic paint/paint bottles, burnt match sticks, A Million Little Pieces by James Frey (top left), bubble wrap (bottom), string/thread/various fibres, a jar full of scented candle wax, a compact, a Coke can, dried baby’s breath, a toothbrush, o.b. tampon wrappers…and so much more.

So yeah. That’s what crazy looks like. Every tiny piece of….ephemera….I put in there meant something at the time, but a lot of the meaning is lost now, as I don’t remember everything from that period.

I have a huge bag of pills that I’ve amassed over the last 18 months, leftovers from the stuff my shrink’s made me try and I debated adding all of those to the piece, but in the end I decided not to alter it from its original state except to reattach a few of the paint bottles that had fallen down just because of their own weight and only being originally stuck there by paint and varnish.

Anyway, I’m really curious to see what these Touched By Fire people are going to think of it, especially in contrast with the other two pieces I submitted and in light of the whole theme of the show.

If accepted, I don’t know if I’ll be able to go to the actual show. I mean, it’s in Toronto and yes, we would be physically able to get there and everything but I looked at the pictures from last year’s event and there were like, 300 people all crammed into the space and I dunno if I can deal with that. I don’t think is mandatory to go to the show or anything, but there is a really big part of me hoping my stuff gets rejected so I for sure don’t have to. :o/

I guess we’ll see what happens.

(Originally posted on Live Journal, last week.)

Howdy, circus freaks!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

I re-read the CammityJane entry I posted yesterday and I’m not entirely happy with it, but I’m not going to go editing it until I DO like it because I don’t believe in 2nd drafts. I’ve never gone back and edited anything I’ve ever written in my whole entire life, so I’m not about to do doing that now. SO THERE.

Once it’s finished (if it’s ever finished) and I’m thinking about turning it into a book, THEN I’ll play with stuff. Right now I just need to get the story out of me and slowly but surely, it’s coming.

Fiction’s weird. I’m not sure I’ve really talked much about the CammityJane journal, but last year when I went nuts, I had this huge explosion of concrentrated ideas and it was as if I got stuck in my own imagination and the problem was that A) I didn’t realize I was “off” and B) I couldn’t bring myself out of it.

It was during that period where the story of Jane (or more to the point, the other people she’s going to encounter) came into my mind and I spent most of my time in the hospital sketching scenes in my head with these characters (none of whom have been introduced yet), but not writing down a single word.

When I got out of the hospital, I got out my pencil crayons and drew every location of every scene, maps, character sketches and right now, I guess the name of the game is moving characters from point A to point B, which is actually a lot harder than I originally thought it would be and I find as I obsess with that, my characters lose a little depth.

For example, the “strange man” Jane encounters in the latest post is seriously glossed over from what’s in my head and I know that my descriptions aren’t sufficient if the reader’s going to come away with the mental image of him I have. At the same time, I also know he’s going to show up later so that gives me a second chance and the opportunity to round him out a little more. (How he moves, for example, is important, but in the restaurant setting I had a hard time trying to figure out a way for him to move because everything takes place at one table and it was important to the over all story that Jane come to him and not the other way around.)

Anyway, this isn’t a serious project or anything, just something I work on when the mood strikes or a character walks into my dreams demanding attention, which was the case with Good Eat Part 1 and “the strange man” himself.

In other news, my 10lbs of plain ol’ grey plastiscene arrived on Monday and I’ve spent a good portion of the week screwing around and seeing what I can do with it. So far I’ve only made a really stupid looking girl with a lot of hair…

I realize the face is dumb, that part took maybe 10 mins but each “strand” of hair was hand-rolled by yours truly and took about 30 hours total.

I’ve been on Wikipedia practically all day researching dragons, I think that’s what I’m going to make next and there’s a reason; when I was in grade 5 or 6 (hard to say since I had the same teachers and the same classroom for both grades, it was a split class) an art lady came to our school to teach us about using clay and I made this really awesome Chinese dragon, that’s now long gone, and I wanted to see if I could do it again, but better since I’m no longer a chubby little kid with chubby little fingers doing things the way someone else tells me to.

All week, when I’ve told people that I bought 10 lbs of grey plasticine, they’ve all asked the same question: “Why grey?” Well, it’s all gonna end up grey anyway, isn’t it?

The reason I got it was mostly to help me visualize certain things in 3-D and to better figure out where shadows would be (when painting) and I don’t need colour for that. In fact, for my purposes, I think colour would be distracting.

Some folks have suggested that I do stop-motion videos since I now have all this plastiscene and believe me, I’ve been thinking about it, but if it’s gonna happen, it’ll be a long time from now. I’ve got too much on the go between now and the spring and once the warm weather hits, using plastiscene is going to suck because it’ll be way too melty. So, if I ever do a stop-motion video, it’ll probably be next fall. (And if I did do one, I’d have to buy coloured plastiscene, so I’ll wait until I have a good idea first. :))

And finally, this brings me to YouTube and video blogging in general.

A few people have subscribed to my YouTube channel, which is fine, but don’t bitch about there being no context, because sometimes I’m uploading this stuff to be used for other things. For example, there’s a few videos that friends asked me to put up there, that have absolutely nothing to do with my site or blogging or anything, they just wanted to be able to share them with their own friends or post on their MySpaces. There’s probably gonna be a lot of that, so basically, if I don’t embed the video in a blog post and write about it, I uploaded it for someone or something else.

Another thing that keeps coming up is the lack of Madison (my daughter) in the videos I’ve uploaded thus far. Well, there’s a reason for that, a few of them actually.

The first is that, unlike Wes, she understands what a video camera does and as such, she tends to not “be herself” or becomes a different version of herself when it’s around (which is a nice way of saying that she tends to get obnoxious). She grew up with me following her around with a digital camera, so she doesn’t do this with stills, just with video. Wes is the opposite. If I get out the digital camera, he turns into an obnoxious little brat, but with the video camera, he acts himself because he’s too little to understand that it’s recording. He’s seen the videos of himself, but he just doesn’t understand the concept of video yet and he’s barely even aware of the internet, let alone YouTube.

The other reason is simply that she doesn’t want to be in videos that are of just “real life”.

She wants to put on plays and dress up and do fashion shows and stuff like that, which we do videotape for her, we just don’t put them online because she’s self-conscious and doesn’t want us to. We respect that. :) Basically any footage of Madison that gets put online is with her final approval and this is the kind of stuff she wants out there:

(That was from her school’s Xmas concert.)

Since that’s the case, most “kid videos” are going to be put up by Blake over at the kids’ site, Bunnies & Bees, for their aunts & uncles & grandparents to watch (and whoever else wants to, obviously, but it’s mostly a family thing).

In other news, it’s Wes’ 4th birthday on Tuesday and last week a few people e-mailed me to see if I’d gotten a wishlist set up yet, so this afternoon I cleaned up the kids’ old wishlist (deleting unavailable items/stuff they’ve kinda grown out of wanting etc), which can be found here.

And with that, I’m out.

And that’s all I have to say about that. *cough*

I’m well aware of the fact that this site still doesn’t have a theme despite having the best help imaginable, but I’m busy, lazy, horny & working on some other stuff at the moment. Planning, scheming, scanning, painting, writing, editing…I’ve been a pretty busy girl lately, one who doesn’t get enough sleep. Winter was late but it’s finally here and it’s like a floodgate let loose in my brain. Not in a crazy “uh oh, are you taking your meds?” kinda way, but in a creative way. Looking out the window at everything covered in snow is a great canvas; in my mind it’s so easy to mentally “paint” the landscape when everything’s white and obviously this leads to creative mental “shit” (otherwise known as ideas haha) that I don’t get to tap into in July or October. I’m trying to make the most of it before the sand and salt turns everything brown and screws with my chi.

Anyway, the other day Steph, the sexiest geek girl on the planet installed some WordPress gadgetry of some sort that will, eventually, help me organize things better, but until I decide how I’m even going to organize anything (layout, what content I’m even going to add in the end) I don’t think I’m gonna screw with it yet. Playing with YouTube all weekend and thinking about what’s possible has made me want to rethink how I was originally going to do some things, and has actually made me contemplate a few new ideas. I know I say this a lot, but we’ll see how things go and when I know what the fuck I’m talking about, I’ll let y’all know. :D

In the meantime…here’s a picture of me drawing on Krissy’s ass. :)

If you wanna know what’s going on, watch the video:

I spent most of today reading this woman’s website, which was probably the most interesting reading I’ve done in a really long time, mostly because of the sheer amount of things we had in common and the fact that it left me wondering what else we had in common. Hers is a blog I could probably read for the rest of my life.

Also, while In My Language was brilliant, this video is even better. :D