…and in a sense it will be…it just won’t stay that way because I have issues. Major fucking issues.
For all intents and purposes, yesterday was a good day. A very good day. I woke up at 6am, did internetting until the rest of the family woke up so I could use the blender to make a protein “shake” which isn’t so much a shake or even a smoothie because it’s just protein powder, milk and ice. I hate bananas and yogurt with a fiery passion, so the odds of me ever making a proper smoothie are probably slim to none and I think adding ice cream to make a shake is probably defeating the purpose.
I did get Blake to buy me some Nestle Quick chocolate squirty stuff though, because the supposedly chocolate flavour protein powder we bought doesn’t actually taste like chocolate. It SMELLS like chocolate, oddly enough, but really, it doesn’t taste like anything (and I don’t like plain milk). There is only 15 calories in 1 tablespoon of Nestle Quick. I figure I’ll probably use 2. Anyway, none of this is neither here nor there.
As I consumed my protein beverage, the family got ready to go to work and school and the sun was shining and I just felt warm inside my heart. It was going to be a good day, I could tell. And while I don’t really participate in the family getting ready for work or school, sometimes I like being awake for it because it really is the time in which all 3 of them are the most themselves, together. That’s probably hard to explain, but it’s like concentrated Madison, concentrated Wes, concentrated Blake all within this frantic chaos of getting out the door on time. It’s one of those things that occur in family like that I just sometimes like to sit back and watch, or more to the point, listen to.
So for about an hour it’s all loud and everyone’s rushing around (except Wes, who leisurely eats his cereal and talks to his favourite imaginary friend of the week, for the most part) and they’re all being extremely unintentionally funny, but the second the car leaves the driveway, bound for school and work, the house becomes absolutely silent in this perfect way that, to me, is absolutely calming. The dogs have each claimed a still-warm bed, the cat is sprawled out on the couch sleeping, and I haven’t turned on TweetDeck yet or iTunes. The only sound is the gentle hum of my computer and the lamp on my desk whose spiral lightbulb is due to blow any day now, if the buzzing coming out of it is any indication.
So after they leave, I just kinda sit here and absorb. I look out the window, I say “hi” to the sun, I check on my plants, I drink my protein beverage and then I just sit in my chair and kind of clear my mind and do a mini-meditation. I never know what I’m going to do on any given day. I never really attack a day with a plan of any sort. I wake up when I wake up. I eat when I eat. I make art when I feel like it. I watch movies while I make art (it’s very difficult for me to just watch a movie). I take pictures of things when something catches my eye. I have dance parties with the dogs. I sing. I make strange noises because no one’s home and I can. I read a lot. Every day is different, unstructured and unplanned. Most days are neutral, some days are good and a few days are very very bad.
Yesterday was good, as I said.
After Blake and the kids left, I did some more internetting, this time with more of a purpose. There are many places I visit online that I’ve been visiting for so long that posting to them daily is almost like a requirement and in some cases, kind of like a job. It’s the beginning of the month, that means all votes on Camwhores have been set to zero, as everyone knows, but it also means that our points have been set to zero as well. “What are points?” you might be asking yourself. Well, they’re participation points where, for participating in the community, you are given points, which translate to money at the end of the month. I’d like to think I’m very very good at working this system, so that’s what I mean about some places I go to on my internet travels are kind of like work. Yesterday I had a personal quota of making X amount of threads and posts in the Camwhores forum and a blog post, but it was loose in that my threads and posts would be things I was genuine about posting. I don’t post for the sake of points, I post because I’m interested in having a conversation with whoever else is responding to threads, either their or mine. The quota isn’t so much a quota for points necessarily, but something that I use to make sure I don’t spend more time on the forums than I should because I have other things to do and get sucked into the forums I go to daily very easily.
I had actually come up with some forum topic ideas over the weekend that I didn’t have time to post, so I posted them, wrote my blog post and then I actually went outside and sat in the chair under my carport that was formerly used for sitting in while smoking. It was still early enough in the morning that the sun was streaming in, under the carport, and hitting my face, so I just sat there for about 10 minutes soaking it in. While I was out there, I saw 2 robins, a bunch of red-winged blackbirds and the teeniest glimpse of a cardinal that’s been hanging around in the pine tree beside our driveway some days.
When I came inside I realized that I was actually still really tired considering I’d gone to bed around 1am the night before and then got up at 6, so I decided to take a nap. I woke up at 1:48pm, let the dogs out, then went around the house opening windows because it had to be about 25 degrees outside. When I went to open the living room windows, I saw that my bleeding hearts were in full bloom, so I went into my office, grabbed my camera and opened the door to go take pictures of them when I noticed that on the doorknob was a delivery notice from Canada Post saying that they were there at 1pm. I believe that they were there, but I sincerely doubt that they actually knocked on the door because when someone knocks on our door, no matter how faint, Hoover and Lucky go mental and will not stop barking until the door’s opened and they see the person’s okay. If Hoover and Lucky go mental because someone knocks on the door, traditionally I wake up. I don’t actually answer the door because 9 times out of 10 it’s either a delivery (they’ll come back) or a Jehova’s Witness (don’t care if they come back) and I don’t like strangers seeing me moments after waking up from a small coma.
The delivery notice said that we could pick up the package at the post office after 2pm, so I called Blake and asked if he was planning on leaving work early because it was Monday and generally on Monday’s he has Judo and therefore comes home early. He said he wasn’t going to Judo but that he could come home early to get this package. The odd thing about this package was that it was addressed to me and required a signature and the only thing I was expecting was the new Gogol Bordello CD from Amazing, which would not require a signature. Whatever this package was, was a mystery. Blake reminded me that I’d signed a form at the post office saying that he can sign for my packages, so he said he’d pick this one up on his way home from work, pending the thing I signed hadn’t expired.
After I got off the phone with him, I picked my camera back up and went outside to take pictures of my bleeding hearts and the lone baby tulip I have that just began to bloom over the weekend. (I think I’ve now photographed everything in my garden that’s going to bloom before July, so the first official “Keep Off the Lawn” post should be coming soon, for those who are into those.) While I was out there, I noticed a LOT of growth happening from plants that had seeded themselves in the fall and thought about what a shame it’ll be when we decimate them this weekend with the sod cutter because that sneaky sneaky grass, I swear, grew over the winter somehow and is now taking about about 1/3 of the bottom of my garden. No matter though, the sod cutter makes easy work of removing it and we can move this grass to the backyard where there is no grass, just weeds, and my friend Ruggedo send me PLEEEEEEEEEENTY of seeds this year to make the front look amazing. On my list of things to do is to buy a canvas the same size as my current “Grow Dammit!” sign and paint a new one using the colours of the garden, but financially, doing so hasn’t been high on my priority list, which is why I haven’t done it yet. I also meant to do it last year as well, but again, the same thing.
When I came inside, I put my camera away and did a little more internetting for a few minutes and then I decided that it was time to work on the two canvases I began prepping over the weekend and who were waiting for the splatter stage in my process. These ones were actually going to be a bit of a challenge because one of them is going to be a repainted version of “Shimmer“, which is the one Madison accidentally destroyed by letting it bounce off the corner of the shelf it was sitting on, causing the canvas to rip and the varnish to basically shatter. If you’ll recall, “Shimmer” is actually 1 in a series of 3 and my intention for all 3 was to put them in The Square Foot Show in July. That’s still my intent, so “Shimmer” needs to be reproduced. The challenge with these canvases is that the splatter technique I used for all 3 of those paintings is different than the technique I’ve been using for the past year and I wasn’t sure I remembered how to achieve the same effect so all 3 would continue to match and look like a set.
Over the weekend I went through journals from last year (I write down pretty much everything) and found where my former technique – which in retrospect is actually the superior technique – differed from my current technique and I was fairly confident I could repeat the background accurately for the new “Shimmer”. The second canvas I was prepping is for a turquoise version of “Love Fairy”, the painting I just sold so since the only difference between that one’s background and “Shimmer”‘s background is different types of glitter, it made sense to work on both of them at the same time.
So, I put on the movie It’s Complicated while I splattered the canvases and while they dried on the coffee table I started drawing my girls for both paintings. It’s Complicated was actually an uplifting movie for me, similar to the way Something’s Gotta Give was also uplifting to me. For one, I love Meryl Streep, I mean, how can you not love Meryl? And Alec Baldwin was in it, as well as Steve Martin (who, oddly, was not at all funny). But it was uplifting in that movies like this, where the theme is kind of about aging but still having fun, give me hope that life is just going to keep getting better. I kinda knew that was true, just from watching my mom get older and really come into her own after hitting 40, but it’s nice to see validation of that through movies with actors who are actually playing characters who are around their actual age. So watching that actually put me in a better mood than the good mood I was already in.
When the movie ended, I just kept drawing my girls with the TV off, enjoying the silence that was about to be broken by the fact that the kids would be bursting through the door in about half an hour and right on cue, they did, and Wes was crying because Madison actually elbowed him in the head when she was waving goodbye to one of her friends. Madison also had to report that Wes had taken off on her to go play with another kid and I had to give Wes shit of that because that’s simply not allowed. Madison’s in charge on the way home from school and to be safe, he has to do what she says. So he said okay, apologized to Madison, they both fixed their afternoon snacks and ate them while watching TV, then Madison started her homework while Wes played with toys. During all this, I did – take a wild guess – more internetting. Mostly catching up with everything my friends tweeted about during the day when I had TweetDeck closed and commenting on those things.
I intended to either watch another movie or see if Oprah was going to be of interest while I worked on my girls some more, but by the time I was finished internetting, Blake came through the door with a giant Amazon box. Blake’s mom asked for the kids’ wishlist last week, which I found obnoxious because the url’s been the same for oh, 6 friggin’ years now and you would think that at some point she would have, I dunno, BOOKMARKED IT, or maybe checked the TWO PLACES it’s available online, in plain sight, on my site and Live Journal, which we know she reads. Anyway, when I saw the box, I assumed it would be birthday presents for Madison from her and Charlie because the other Amazon package was clearly my CD and as I said, that was the only thing I was expecting so I shoo’d Madison out of the room and opened the box.
The first thing I see is the Battlestar Galactica boxed set. Um, what? I grabbed the packing slip and closed the box’s lid, telling Blake to hang on, that this was definitely not from his mom and definitely not all for Madison. It was from my friend Charlie who, on the odd occasion, likes to surprise our family with gifts because he’s awesome that way. So I called everyone in and played Santa Claus. I told Madison that her gifts were for her birthday and I told Wes that his gifts were for his birthday too.
After the kids left with their haul and Blake went to put his Battlestar Galactica on the shelf on his desk, I cried. I had just had the best day I’d had in a long time and the gifts from Charlie tipped something in my brain, like overloaded it with positivity that I just bawled. I mean, the things he picked out for me were great things, but what really had me excited was Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution book, which is half cookbook and half cooking lesson about how to feed your family real food as opposed to processed shit. His “revolution” is teaching people how to cook again because so many families don’t anymore and while Blake and I do cook, we really only know how to make about a dozen things between the two of us and our whole family is getting mighty sick of those dozen things. I mean, Charlie didn’t just pick out a gift with this one, he enabled us to nourish our family better and I don’t even think he understands the gravity of that. And maybe I’m being melodramatic, but to me that is a very very big deal and I cried and cried and cried.
As the kids began to watch Avatar (one of Charlie’s gifts) Blake and I went in the kitchen and worked on dinner together, which is something that also rarely happens and it felt good being in the kitchen together. It always feels good when we’re partners in crime. I started cutting up craploads of basil to make this basil/garlic/olive oil pasta that I make (with lots of vegetables) and Blake got out the biiig pot and set it on the stove to boil while he searched the cupboards for the tri-colour pasta I asked him to get during our last big grocery shopping. He couldn’t find it and decided he must not have gotten any, so he turned the stove off and went to the grocery store to get some as I continued chopping basil. For this pasta, 1 package of fresh basil will DO, but really, I think you should use 3, which is how much I was cutting up. Then I put it in a bowl and added about half a bottle of olive oil and about half a jar of minced garlic with maybe two teaspoons of salt, some ground pepper (I hate pre-ground pepper, it’s always too powdery and I just don’t like it) and a bit of parmesan. With those quantities, obviously we make a lot of this when we make it because it’s good for lunches and afterschool snacks the next day. It’s also healthy and CHEAP.
Anyway, while Blake was at the store, I used our biggest Tupperware container (which is also the container we store the finished product in), loaded it with fresh snow peas, a whole bag of frozen broccoli, half a bag of frozen green beans and carrots and a few handfuls of regular frozen peas with a bit of water at the bottom, put the lid on and started the microwave for about 13 minutes. By the time I was done doing that, Blake was home with the pasta, the water was back on to boil and my part in the kitchen was finished. The rest was up to him to drain, assemble and mix, which is just how we roll.
While the pasta was cooking, Wes decided to watch Avatar with Madison (he’d previously deemed it too scary and drew flowers in the kitchen instead) and we said that they could eat in the living room while they watched it. I had already started diving into the Jamie Oliver book and was busy putting Post-Its on the pages with stuff I think I’d eat, or at least try, if Blake made it, with notes on variations I’d use, such as “no goddamn peppers in anything”, when dinner became ready. Blake decided to eat in the living room with the kids and watch Avatar while I ate while I read.
We didn’t realize how long Avatar was and it was fast becoming time for the kids to go to bed, so we told them to remember which part they were on and that they could watch it today after school. So Blake did most of the dishes, with Madison doing the tail end while Wes got ready for bed and then when the dishes were done, Madison got ready for bed and then we were kid-free.
It had started really cooling off outside so I went around the house and started closing windows, then I came back into my office and read some more of the Jamie Oliver book until Blake came in to join me. Even though I had had a nap, I was exhausted from not getting enough sleep, but I wanted to make sure I was for sure going to fall asleep (because sometimes when I’m in a good mood, I can’t sleep, which kinda sucks) so Blake & I decided to watch Gossip Girl, Nurse Jackie and The United States of Tara, which are 3 of my favourite shows, before going to bed.
During Tara, Blake gave me a massage and when it was over, we went to bed. Except we didn’t go to sleep and here’s where things take a downturn. I said, “I think I’m manic,” and he said, “you’re not manic, you just had a good day, you started your day off with protein, which gives you energy and you just had a good day from there” and then I started crying because I was afraid I was going crazy. Here’s the problem with me, which is something I think I’m probably going to have to bring up to my shrink when I see her on Friday: the happiest I have ever been in my whole entire life, I was completely out of my fucking gourd and it ended with psychosis and hospitalization. So, I am very suspicious of “happy”. Too much “happy”, especially if I’m alone when it happens, and I’m convinced I’m manic and I’m going to go crazy and that scares me more than anything. The more I talked to Blake about how scared I was that I was manic, the more panicked I became until I was pretty much inconsolable and snotting all over my sheets. It took Blake until about 2:30am to convince me that everything was fine and that I should just go to sleep.
And today hasn’t been a good day. It should have been, I’ve got new books to read and paintings to paint and movies to watch and the sun’s shining, but when I have exceptionally good days like I did yesterday, they are almost always followed by an exceptionally bad day, which I think is just the nature of my disease. My meds are stable though, as far as I know, but it wouldn’t surprise me if, after telling my shrink all about this, she doesn’t raise my mood stabilizers as I’m only taking 3/4 of the full dose. But if it’s not the drugs, if the drugs are already doing what they’re supposed to be doing and this is more of a psychological thing then I think I fucking need therapy because it happens way too often. I mean, who the fuck is afraid to be happy? Besides me, I mean? That’s not normal. I mean, obviously I have a completely rational explanation for why I distrust happiness NOW, but really, my whole life, I’ve never even really believed in happiness. I always thought people who claimed to be happy were either lying or delusional. And then the time in my life where I was unbelievably happy and in a good mood every day for months, I was nuts.
My shrink’s told me a million times to trust my drugs, but I guess the bottom line is that I don’t. Or I’m afraid to. I don’t know which one it is but I think it has to change.
So that’s my story.