I don’t really know what to write except I feel like writing about agoraphobia because right now I’m doing anything to avoid completing my “agoraphobia sticks“. I have my Post-Its with my “”missions” on my desk, ready to go. Blake found me a jar and washed it out. On Sunday we walked to Charlie’s Bargains and bought more tongue depressors because I had more missions than sticks. I have everything I need. That is except for…courage.

I keep putting off doing the sticks because once I do the sticks, I’ll have to do them. And now that I’ve involved all of you (thanks for the addresses, keep ‘em coming!), if I don’t do them, there will be disappointment. If I don’t get better there will be disappointment. I always get the sense that people think I should get over it already. “Why isn’t Sunny better? Why can’t she just go for a walk?” I wish I had an answer to those questions but all I really have is a long list of excuses.

Like today, I can’t go out today (despite having nothing better to do) because I already left the house today and I can’t do too many things in one day or I get really tired and unhappy. Plus it’s cold outside. I can’t go outside when it’s cold.

When we first moved here, on the first day of school, I took Wes and Hoover, who we’d just gotten the day before, and we met Madison after school because there was no bus that went past our house. And I had the worst panic attack I’ve ever had in my life. It was so bad that I called my mom because I thought I was having a stroke. Half my body went numb, including my tongue, I went blind in one eye and my chest was pounding out of my heart. I called Blake to come home and when he did, we went top the hospital where they ran all kinds of tests on me and deduced that I wasn’t having a stroke but that I’d had a really sever panic attack. That was the last time I tried picking Madison up from school and as a result, we had to find an alternative way for Madison to get to and from school because again, there was no bus.

Down the street lived (she may still live there, I have no idea) this woman named Lisa who had 2 kids who went to the same school, Justin and Alicia, and she was going to have Justin walk Madison home from school while Blake would drive her to school in the morning. This arrangement was fine, except that Lisa, more often than not, would pick the kids up from school and just drive them home. That was okay, but it was hard to explain to this extroverted woman why I didn’t leave the house. She didn’t understand but was nice enough to work with me anyway and in explaining to other people why I never left the house, she said to me that she told them that I “get cold” and changed the topic. I thought that was very interesting and very nice of her. She only lived about 6 houses up from us but she offered many times to drive me to and from my house to have coffee or for her to do my hair (she was a hair dresser and had a salon in her basement). I declined because we had nothing in common but I’ve found that her attitude toward me is the same as just about everyone I’ve met in this town. They don’t understand why I don’t leave the house, they just know that I don’t and they’ll work with me.

Another example is when Blake and the kids went to Militiagan for Uncle John’s funeral. The grocery store knows I don’t leave the house by myself and they said that if I needed anything to call them up and they would deliver it. They don’t deliver. This is not a service they offer. But Blake is so friendly to everyone and talks to everyone and we’re very good customers so they offered.

Another example is that the one time when I did leave the house, I decided the pharmacy would be my goal because if I freaked out, they would understand because they obviously fill my prescriptions so they probably have a really good idea as to what my deal is.

When I got there, the old many behind the counter made such a huge deal that I had come there and that I’d done it by myself that I’ve only been back a few times since, with Blake. He just freaked me out, like he told everyone in the store I was there and they all practically cheered. I know they were just being nice but that’s not what I need. That’s detrimental to the process.

I think I’m in a better place right now to deal with something like that and I don’t think it’ll happen again, but those are just examples of how supportive the community I live in is. These are just the kinds of people you encounter here, so what am I so afraid of?

I don’t know. My shrink asked me to try and put it into words a couple of years ago and I just couldn’t. I made a list of the things I was afraid of but she didn’t seem very impressed by it.

When I’m out in the world by myself, my mind races. It’s like it goes into overdrive and everything gets hyper-analyzed. When I’m out in the world with Blake, I kind of trust him to do that for me. Something I noticed on Sunday when we walked to Charlie’s Bargains is that when we crossed the street, I just walked right through the street without stopping because Blake didn’t stop. I didn’t even look to see if any cars were coming because I trusted Blake to check and stop if there were any cars coming but because he didn’t stop, I automatically assumed there were no cars and I just walked across the intersection without even thinking until after the fact. When we’re in public together, I’m barely even cognizant of the things around us, I have tunnel vision on Blake and I trust him to keep me out of danger and as long as I focus on him, I don’t hyper-analyze the things around me. This also means I miss a lot though, I think.

About a month ago we were in Michael’s and they have an aisle there that’s all cake baking and decorating stuff that I’d never been down. Since it was an artist date and the whole point was to expose myself to new parts of the store, I went down this aisle and I marveled at all the crazy things there are now to decorate cakes. Mid-aisle, I saw something very interesting and shouted loud enough for other people in the store to hear me, “HOLY FUCK, EDIBLE GLITTER!” Blake thought this was really funny buy I was actually kind of mortified and wanted to cry. When I’m out in public with him, I’m just absolutely oblivious to just about everything around me so without him, it’s like I’m a walking raw nerve. I have to be hyper aware in order to protect myself.

But protect myself from what? I live in the friendliest town in the world, what is there to be afraid of? What danger is there, really?

Well, the fact that I have virtually no social skills could be a bit of a problem. Like, I just don’t know how to interact with people. If someone was rude to me, I’d probably cry because I wouldn’t know what else to do. There’s a lady at the post office who’s really bitchy and unfriendly and I’m scared I’m going to run into her if I go there. She works there, it’s not like she’s just some lady. What if my stick says to buy stamps? The post office is hard because it’s a layered experience. First I have to walk there and that’s hard because A) I don’t walk anywhere and I’m pretty out of shape. The post office is about 1.5km from our house. B) I might encounter people on the way there. C) The mean mail lady might be working. D) I may encounter people at the post office. (Plus there’s the prepwork beforehand, such as getting dressed, washing my hair and generally looking presentable.) The way BACK from the post office isn’t so scary because A) I already achieved the goal of getting TO the post office so I won. B) If I can get TO the post office, I can get back. C) Pending nothing bad happened, I’ll be in a good mood and I’ll feel confident that I’d be able to deal with anyone I might encounter on the way home.

Actually, now that I think about it, all of the things on my “medium” list and above are layered that way.

So that’s the biggest thing I think: dealing with people or potentially dealing with people. I’m not afraid of places, I’m afraid of people. I don’t know why I’m afraid of people or what started it, but I am. I don’t know how to make things any easier. I firmly believe that the world would rather hug you than hurt you and I live in the kind of place I do so what is my problem? My do I let this irrational fear of people basically ruin my life?

I used to be so confident. I used to be so unafraid of anything, fierce even, a lioness. Now I’m a house mouse.

I don’t know how to fix this.

So I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this or not, but a while ago, like maybe 2 months ago, Blake was looking for an activity he could do with Wes so they could spend some time together without Madison (Madison is a resource hog and thinks she’s an only child, so Wes doesn’t get as much attention as she demands), just the two of them, and they started going on “adventures”. These “adventures” were just walking along trails near our house or in Barrie but something was missing from them, Blake said, so I suggested that they start geocaching.

So that’s what they’ve been doing on Saturdays while I work. So far they’ve been bringing Madison with them, but when they venture outside of our town to find caches in other areas, they’ll be leaving her at home.

This morning they went to a breakfast with all the other geocachers in the area and met a lot of new people, learned a lot of new terms and found a whole whack of new caches that were all linked together specifically for the event. Apparently in June, in Midland which is about 20 minutes North of us, the whole geocachers of Ontario or something like that are having some sort of festival type thing with games and stuff like that and I guess there will be about 700 people there. Obviously Blake and the kids plan to attend.

At the meet this morning, they met a couple who had a “travel bug” on their car, so Blake came home and logged that he saw it, which I thought was pretty cool. Apparently the whole idea of travel bugs is that they, well, travel! So you would get one of these and put it in a cache and when the person finds it, they will see a note or something that says “I want to get this travel bug to Italy” and that person might think “hey I have a cousin in Italy” and send it to them and then you can track your travel bug’s progress on the Geocaching.com website.  I thought they were pretty neat.

Since they do it while I’m working, I haven’t seen any caches yet myself, except the ones that they’ve taken pics of to show me, but when they start creating caches, I plan to be fully involved. But I think that’s a ways off. :o/ At the meet today, the people who were really really REALLY involved in geocaching said that to place caches, it’s preferred that you have an actual GPS unit or whatever instead of using GPS on your phone because I guess the GPS on a GPS thing is more accurate than a phone. We can’t afford a GPS unit though but Blake’s thinking maybe for Xmas next year or something. It sucks to have to wait that long to place caches though because I think that’s the fun part. I’d rather make things for people to find than find things. Oh well, I guess we’ll have to wait. I have a million ideas for caches though, I just don’t know where to place them yet. Anyone else out there geocachers?

There are a LOT of caches in our town and a ton of them in Barrie too, mostly placed by the same few people. I think Blake and the kids have found around 20 of them so far.

So y’know how Blake and I had a talk about my agoraphobia the other night? I got thinking about it and I’ve decided to make something similar to the “date night jar” that I posted about a while back, but for agoraphobia. I would paint tongue depressors different colours by level of difficulty and write “missions” on them and then when I was feeling brave, I would pick one based on my level of bravery and do what the stick says.

I figure there will be 4 levels of difficulty: easy, medium, hard and black.

I started making lists today of things I could do and tomorrow I’ll start making the sticks. I also have to find a jar. Here is some of what I have so far:

There are very few places to go in this town because it’s so small. There are 3 parks in town, one across the street from us that I’m not including in my lists because our neighbours would wonder what I’m doing over there by myself and that would drive me bonkers so that’s not an option, one down the street about 2 or 3 blocks away with a pavilion and picnic tables and a concert stage called Heritage park and another one that’s connected to the one down the street by the Trans-Canada Trail called Bishop park. These parks are going to feature prominently in my “easy” and “medium” columns because they’re not too far away and during the day, during the week, there wouldn’t be too many people around.

Then in town there is a dollar store that I’ve never been to and a coffee shop called Coffee Time (it’s a chain) that I’ve only ever been in once.  Those will be in the “hard” to “black” categories with the grocery store and the post office in the “medium” to “hard” side of things.  I also have the flower shop on the list, which is almost outside of town, and that’s on the “black” list and the challenge is just to get flowers. I have another challenge to get flowers from the grocery store but that’s on the “medium” list.

Actually, here’s what I have so far…

Easy:
- Put some tea in a travel mug and journal at Heritage Park.
- Write a letter at Heritage Park.
- Mail a letter to yourself or someone else. (Send me your address to Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com and maybe I’ll mail a letter to YOU!)
- Photograph 3 different animals.
- Photograph 5 different flowers.
- Pack a lunch and eat it at Heritage Park.
- Get the mail.
- Mail something. (And get the mail.)
- Put some tea in a travel mug and draw pictures at Heritage Park.

 Medium:
- Mail a package to someone.
- Go to the grocery store and buy a croissant.
- Go to the grocery store to buy an apple.
- Go to the grocery store to buy a bag of rice cakes.
- Go to the grocery store to buy a box of Thinsations.
- Go to the grocery store to buy a magazine.
- Go to Mac’s to buy a magazine. (This one is slightly different than getting one from the grocery store because I know everyone at the grocery store and Mac’s is full of strangers and is more fast paced. It’s a convenience store.)
- Walk Lucky down to heritage Park.
- Buy grocery store flowers.
- Pack a lunch and eat it at Bishop Park.
- Buy stamps.
- Go to the pharmacy and buy a card.
- Put some tea in a travel mug and bring a book to Bishop Park.

 Hard:
- Go to the grocery store to buy potato or macaroni salad and eat it at Bishop Park while reading a book.
- Go to the grocery store to buy a sandwich and eat it at Bishop Park with a book.
- Walk to Coffee Time to buy tea.
- Use the ATM @ the bank before going to Coffee Time or the grocery store.
- Walk Lucky down the path to Bishop Park.
- Go to the dollar store and buy $5 worth of stuff to use to make a gift for someone else.
- Get a book from the library.
- Get a movie from the library.
- Go to Clover (convenience store that’s far from my house) and buy a movie. (They have used movies for about $2.99-$4.99)
- Go to the pharmacy and buy a gift for someone.

Black:
- Write a letter at Coffee Time and mail it on the way home.
- Go out for breakfast or lunch.
- Walk to Coffee Time for tea and read a book while you drink it.
- Walk to Coffee Time for tea and journal while you drink it.
- Deposit a cheque.
- Buy flower store flowers.
- Go to 3 Foursquare mayorships.
- Go to the new convenience store (that’s far from my house) and buy a movie.
- Buy a card at the pharmacy, take it to Coffee Time to fill out and mail it on the way home.
- Pick up prescriptions. (I’m not sure if I’m going to put this one on a stick because obviously if I don’t need any rx’s I can’t do this one.)

And that’s all I have so far. I’m welcome to suggestions if anyone has any, although I know it’s hard when you don’t know the layout of the town or what we have here. We are on Google streetview though if you really think you might have some creative ideas! Blake won’t let me post our address though so you’d have to look at the middle of town (Elmvale) and see what we have to get ideas. It’s also hard to really gauge what would be hard or easy for me because it’s hard for me to really describe criteria but if you guys had any ideas, I could list them under whatever category they are. I’m looking for as many ideas and variations as possible, but mostly I’m looking for easy ones to start out with.

I’m also thinking that since the post office plays such a big part in all of this, that maybe you guys could send me mail too? It can’t be all at once though, it would have to be every now and then. Blake said that he’d bring home big packages and Camwhores cheques for me but that he’d leave little packages and letters in the box so that when I pull the stick that says to check the mail, that it’ll be worth my time. That is, assuming someone would actually send me mail. As it is, all I get is coupons and those are NO FUN AT ALL. If you would like to send me mail that I would be able to carry home on foot (so no big packages, but packages that would fit in a laptop bag would be okay) that would be awesome, just e-mail me (Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com) and I’ll send you our address. If anyone wants to start any like, land mail art object exchanges or knows of any, please let me know because I would probably be into that.

I figure once I’m better at leaving the house I can find the local geocaches that are around our house that I can get to on foot using my phone, then if we get a GSP unit thing, I could place them and that would be extra fun because then my kids could find them. Honestly, I’m pretty geeked on the idea of making and placing caches. I would gladly spend an entire paycheque making elaborate caches with neat stuff in them. Like ATCs would be cool to put in them.

Oh another thing is that in the beginning I’m only going to be pulling sticks on days Blake is working from home because that way if I freak out and can’t move (it happens), he can come get me. Or if something bad happens, he can come fix it or whatnot. Or if Lucky takes off on me because he’s the worst mental health support animal in the world, Blake can help me find him.

I’ve tried to end this post about 100 times today – I wrote it while I was working and started it at like, 2pm – and can’t think of anything else to say so I think I’m just goin gto end it here and see if anyone has any ideas for things I could do outside, on foot, with varying degrees of difficulty. I definitely think I’m going to include geocaching in the mix once I know how to do it and figure out how to download the files onto my phone.

Oh, that’s another thing, I have to figure out how to use my phone as an MP3 player. Blake’s going to have to show me how to do that because earphones are people-repellent and that’s a very good thing.

And that’s all I can think of at the moment, so to recap:

- Outing suggestions welcome
- Send me your mailing address! (And if it’s not apparent how I know you, please introduce yourself!)
- E-mail me for our address so you can send ME stuff, which I can then go to the post office and get MYSELF! (And keep in mind that I won’t be checking the mail daily, just when I pull the stick that says to do it, so don’t get mad at me for not acknowledging your letter or whatever right away!)

And I think that’s it. Have a great weekend. I’ll probably update tomorrow when we’re making the sticks.

I couldn’t go to the gallery opening last night. Just could not bring myself to do it. It was downtown Toronto, I had to shave my legs and armpits and wash my hair and put on clothes that weren’t trackpants and a Pixies t-shirt. Just couldn’t do it.

Instead, we went on a little adventure to Stouffville to get pizza. The best pizza in Canada. (I like NYC pizza best, but Stouffville Pizza is definitely 2nd.) Stouffville is about an hour and a half away and it’s where we used to live. It’s also where I grew up and where my grama still lives.

I was absolutely STARVING by the time we got there so we went to Stouffville Pizza first to  order, then Blake went to the convenience store beside Stouffville Pizza where he found Black Cherry and Pomegranate Jones Soda Zilch, which you would never find up here, and also 4 bags of Fizzy Skittles which we’ve been looking for EVERYWHERE but I’m scared they’re not making them anymore, then we went to the bank to get some money to pay for the pizza.

This is Stouffville Pizza, my idea of heaven:

It’s just a guy, in a room, making pizzas for the past 35 years. I forget his name but it’s the same guy, as always, just standing back there making his amazing pizzas. Here’s a crappy cell phone pic of mine, which was ham and mushroom:

That is a serious fucking pizza.

Once we got our pizza, we went to the park to eat it but it was too cold outside so we ended up eating it while parked at the park and talking about how much the town had changed. But it was weird because it was an organic change that I didn’t find strange at all, unlike the first time we went back about 4 years ago for pizza on Mothers’ Day.

We talked about how we wished we could live there again but how it’s way too expensive so we can’t. Then we talked about maybe moving to Aurora but then we went to Starbucks in Aurora afterward and it’s just a bunch of crazy strip malls now so that was out. Plus it’s expensive there too.

We talked about maybe moving to Uxbridge but then we run the risk of running into my ex’s family which would be a very bad thing for all of us.

So we don’t know where to go, not that we have the money to go anywhere but here. I only want to move once more in our lives so it’s got to be the right house in the right town or it’s not happening.

So I didn’t go to the opening and I don’t know how it went or anything like that. The gallery is called #Hashtag Gallery and it’s at 801 Dundas, Toronto. I didn’t know anyone in the show but I shared 5 mutual friends with the co-owner, which is part of why I was going to go. Their site’s not up. I think it’s a bunch of kids doing this and I didn’t feel like I had a place there. I didn’t want to be the old person at the young person event, especially when I wasn’t showing my work there and I didn’t really know anyone. My friends Mike and Lou were going but I don’t really talk to them all that often so it’s not like I would have hung out with them comfortably. I didn’t want to cling to them either and make them uncomfortable. I dunno, I just didn’t feel very welcome so I didn’t go. I’m not sure how I feel about that.  I’m not sure if I regret it or not.

We had a good time on our date in Stouffville, so I dunno. I dunno if we made the right decision. I kinda think we did. It would have been “cooler” to say “oh I went to an opening last night” but I’m just not that cool I guess.

Blake and I had a  talk in bed when we got home about two things: Phil & Lisa and my agoraphobia.

He thinks I went about the whole Phil & Lisa thing wrongly and that I shouldn’t have lashed out at Lisa when I was really mad at Phil. He’s probably right but they are two sides of the same coin and what’s done is done. I don’t feel like I should apologize to Lisa because I never lied, I just told the truth in a public forum. I will never apologize for telling the truth and I will never apologize for talking to my audience and friends about what’s going on in my life and my head, however small that audience may be.

Blake thinks I should defriend all of the people connected to Phil and Lisa on my Facebook so I don’t see any family pictures and stuff like that because it just hurts my feelings to know that even if none of this ever went down, I still wouldn’t be a part of their family. He’s probably right about that too but at the same time, I don’t want to be the one who defriends people like that, it’s just not what I do, but…I think it’s the only way to go. I don’t have a father anymore. I never really did. He certainly didn’t give a shit about me when I was born and he definitely didn’t give a shit about me when I was dying either, so what’s the point in having this person in my life if all he does is hurt and disappoint me? Out of sight, out of mind, right?

When we moved to Elmvale, I stopped having anything to do with my step-dad for a bunch of reasons I won’t get into again unless I’m asked to, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. He was a way bigger part of my life than Phil has ever been and it was easy to break ties with him. Why do I get the sense that it’s going to really hurt to break ties with Phil completely? I think it needs to be done though. I’m not sure how I’m going to do it, if I’m just going to quietly defriend him on Facebook (and the rest of his friends/family members that I have on there) and pretend they don’t exist or if I should e-mail him and just say “this is it, buddy”. But if I do that, then that leaves room for a response, which I don’t think I’ll ever get and I think it would bother me not to get one.

So I think I should just defriend him and the family and quietly detach myself from them all. Like castrating a bull in the olden days, they would tie an elastic band around the bull’s nutsack and wait until they fell off due to lack of blood supply.

A while ago, this was posted on Facebook, I think by my mother and I guess it’s going to be my new philosophy for Phil:

I don’t think he’s ever going to get his mind “right” when it comes to me but it would be a nice surprise if he did. And I guess I’ll just leave it at that.

Our talk about agoraphobia was really frustrating. He just doesn’t understand how hard it is for me to do certain things, he has no empathy or sympathy or whatever (I don’t really know the difference). He thinks I should just be able to go out and do stuff. He thinks I should just go take a walk to two houses down like it’s nothing but I CAN’T ASSHOLE. It’s not NOTHING it’s a very big SOMETHING. And he thinks that I should just be able to jump in the car and go to the grocery store. But I CAN’T DO THAT. I don’t WANT to do that.

It’s just so frustrating because on one hand I wish I could just jump in the car and have adventures but on the other hand, I’m convinced there’s nothing in this world left for me to see, nothing local anyway, so what’s the point? Where am I going to go? Nowhere, that’s where. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to see. The only thing I can do is go to the grocery store to buy food I don’t even need because I’m getting too fat or the post office to get bills. YAY. Big fucking YAY. What is the point of that?

There’s not a chance in hell I can back out of our driveway during the day with all the cars going too fast on our road and the post office isn’t open at night for me to get packages (which I really hate – when I lived in Uxbridge I got my mail in “super boxes” where if you had a package, they would leave you a key for the big box at the bottom of the free-standing PO box tower and that was GREAT. Dealing with the post office people is bullshit.) which is the only thing I would care about getting anyway. And I can’t get a lot of packages on foot, plus the post office is too far away for walking.

I dunno, I just can’t do it. Sometimes I think I can and then reality sets in and I just can’t do it and no one understands. NO ONE. Blake pretends to understand, but he doesn’t, really, or he’d have a different approach than making fun of me and trying to bully me into leaving the house.

Maybe Squam will change things. Squam is a very very scary prospect for me. I’m going to have to put on my big girl panties for Squam. Not only am I terrified of the actually getting there part (what if the car breaks down 10 hours from home? what if the GPS is wrong and we get lost?), I’m terrified of what’s going to happen once we get there. It helps that Belinda’s going to be there because at least we’ll know someone (well, my mom won’t but I think she’ll like Belinda, it’s hard not to like Belinda) but we’re staying in a HUGE cabin with like, 30 different people or something like that, practically the whole retreat happens in our cabin.

What if we don’t get there in time to get a good room near a bathroom or with its own bathroom? I’m really scared that we’re going to get there last. None of us (me, my mom, Belinda) are taking the same classes, so I’m going to be all alone in the classes I’m in and I’m going to feel like a total outsider because I’ve been reading this book called Creative Pilgrimage by Jenny Doh of Somerset Studio fame, and it’s this book my friend Alan got me where she writes about Squam and all the major US art retreats and the teachers who teach at them. A lot of the women in the book (they’re all women) are Squam teachers so I’m learning a lot about the camp while reading this book. And it’s making me absolutely terrified of going.

I mean, let’s face it, we all knew this was going to happen. That I would sign up for this thing and then freak out completely. Last week I paid the last of my balance so I’m now paid in full and there’s no turning back. In the Creative Pilgrimage book, I was reading about a Squam teacher (forgetting the name now, it’s in the bedroom) who makes her students do like, breathing exercises and physical shaking out of bad juju and shit like that and I’m just laying there in bed thinking “thank god that’s not my teacher” because I’m not really a joiner or a participator and that’s part of what makes Squam so scary to me because you really do have to be a joiner or a participator for this and that’s not me at ALL. I’m the jerk who makes fun of the joiners and participators!

I’m worried about lugging all of my mixed media crap through the woods for my 2nd day class. I’m not very strong and I’m supposed to bring a lot of stuff. I’m worried about my 1st day’s class because that’s the photography one and I really don’t understand photography AT ALL. So many people, like Blake and Katie (who wrote me this super long detailed e-mail about it), have tried to explain f.stop and aperture and shutter speed and all this DSLR shit and I just cannot remember any of it or apply any of it. I’m also worried that my camera isn’t good enough for the class because it’s too old. If I can’t make studpily large prints out of the pictures then I don’t see the point in taking them. I need to have that option whether I’m going to actually do it or not. My point-and-shoot camera has more megapixels than the Rebel. By like, a lot. I don’t have a big enough memory card.

And also, this teacher that I’m having for the photography class does “spirit sessions” (that’s what the class is called) and part of the class is that she’s going to do “spirit portraits” of us. I *hate* having my picture taken. I am SO uncomfortable in front of the camera and it shows in the pictures (unless I’m taking the picture, but even then, in recent years, I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with it). I *hate* my smile. I *hate* my teeth. I *hate* my face and the stupid expressions I make. Yet when a camera’s in front of me, I can’t help but grin like a retarded moron from the middle ages and the pictures are never pretty. Also the class starts at something like 7am so I’m going to have to wake up at 6am to do my makeup and stuff IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WOODS at an event I was kind of looking forward to not having  to impress anyone with my looks but at the SAME TIME I really do want my portrait taken to commemorate my putting on my big girl panties and having this experience so I’m totally fucked!

And then my concern with my 2nd day class, which is a mixed media painting class, is that I won’t create anything I like and that I’ll waste my time. My friend Alan also sent me that teacher’s book, called Painted Pages, which I’ve been slowly reading and luckily, I think I like her, but I don’t want to create artwork like she does and looking at the materials list for her class, it appears as though we’re going to be learning techniques to learn how to make paintings like hers. I don’t know how to put those techniques together to make something that’s mine. I guess that’s the entire point of taking the class though, right? So I’m going to have to get over that. I’ve just been reading her book and thinking that none of what she says applies to anything I would do in my own painting. I realize, however, that I’m supposed to be there to learn new things and that I need to be open to those things, but that is extremely hard for me. I’m not traditionally a person who is easy to teach anything. I’m a self-taught person. I learn my own way.

All of this, I know, is just negative self-talk and that everything’s going to be fine and that I’m going to have a great time. I’m just worried as all fuck that it’s going to be negative and being so far away from home, I’m not going to be able to escape if I need to. Especially not in a cabin with 30 other people. I don’t know how I’m going to get any alone time.

Oh and another thing, I’m going to have to get my passport and I don’t even know where to start with that. Like where do I get one and what do I have to do? I think it’s $80 to get one and I never factored that into my expenses, so I don’t even know where I’m going to get the money to pay for that.

I just feel lost in my life right now. I had this big scary thing happen to me this summer and I don’t think I’ve dealt with it AT ALL. I’ve convinced myself that there’s nothing to deal with. It happened. I’m okay now. Life is short so live it. The end. Is it okay that that’s all there really is to it for me? I feel like I didn’t really even go through anything because I don’t remember so much of it. My mom and Blake and my kids, THEY went through something, I just slept. Then I had to relearn how to walk. Then I had to deal with this wound on my stomach for months and months and months and nurses coming to the house every other day. That sucks, but at least I’m not dead, right?

On one hand, I feel like I have to be missing something, something essential that I have to work through. On the other hand, I really feel like there’s nothing TO work through because what happened didn’t really happen to ME, it happened to the people around me. It’s hard to explain.

All I know is that I’ve come to understand how many years I have left in this world and that I need to pack as much into one day as I can. It’s not okay to “waste” days. I’ve felt that way all my life, but I feel it especially strongly now that I almost died. Today I’ve done nothing except sleep, eat Fizzy Skittles and leftover pizza and write this post and I think that’s completely unacceptable because it’s a waste of a day. I don’t know what else I can do to make this day “count” but I’ll figure something out. I’ll probably paint forget-me-nots which are STILL not done. (I’m about 3/4 of the way finished but I’m using discontinued paint so I have to be really conservative with it and that’s very difficult when doing dot flowers.) I’ll probably watch a movie. Those things are not wastes of days. Those are downloading very important pieces of information that I’ll then translate into artwork. Or a post. Or whatever. As long as I’m downloading and learning and absorbing new things every day, they are not wasteful days. As long as I do something productive every day, I can justify living.

I was going to say that maybe after Blake gets home from work, we’ll go for a walk along the trail to the park down the street but if I start doing dot flowers, which I plan to start when I’m finished this post, I can’t stop because I can’t waste paint by letting it dry on my palette while I go somewhere. Blake would say that’s an excuse, but it’s not. Like I said, the paint I’m using is discontinued and I can’t get any more of it so what I have is what I have and I’m going to need every drop to finish these flowers.

And now I’m just babbling so I’m going to stop writing now. I hope I didn’t sound too whiny today, I just have a lot on my mind and I’m worried about like, EVERYTHING right now. Squam is 5 months away so I shouldn’t be worrying this early but I can’t help it. Oh and another thing about Squam is that I don’t really have roaming on my phone plan (and can’t get it without getting a ridiculously expensive plan) so I can’t really use Twitter the whole time I’m there and that’s going to practically kill me because Twitter’s like, my agoraphobia helpline. :o(

Anyway, as per usual, if you’d like to help me out financially with my great Squam adventure, that would be greatly appreciated. I still need money for gas for my mom and my passport and art supplies and food etc. The whole list is on that page, minus the passport because like I said, I forgot to factor that in when I was making the list of expenses. Oops. Despite my being extremely worried about going and what that entails, I’m also really really excited about all the new things I’m going to experience while I’m there and maybe the new friends I might make and also spending time with my mom and of course, finally meeting Belinda.

Okay I’m going now, but I’ll leave you with these two awesome things.

1. Christians “Protest” Gay Pride With Apologetic Signs

2. A Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Square

That’s it. Peace oot.

So guess what? As it turns out, I’ve actually been painting embryos this whole time and not fetuses. Well, sort of. I looked it up this morning and what I paint are humans that are about 10-12 weeks old from the date of the mother’s last menstrual period, so 8-10 weeks gestation. Technically this places them between the embryonic and fetal stages.

I thought this pic was pretty neat, it’s an 8 week old embryo taken from an ectopic pregnancy. I found it on Wikipedia:

I thought that was pretty cool. I’ve been collecting pictures of embryos for years and pasting them in my sketchbooks (thinking they were fetuses, d’oh) but I think the one above is my favourite. I wish my printer was better so it would have printed clearly but I gots what I gots. I don’t know why I like embryos so much, I just do. I think they’re super cute with their giant foreheads and big bellies. I also like how they symbolize different things – vastly different things – for different people.

Last night I finished reading How To Get Ideas by Jack Foster and I wanted to share two parts with you because I thought they were pretty good.

“George Ade was a prolific writer in the early part of this century. I once read an interview of his mother by a man who was not an admirer of her son’s work, and he was indelicate enough to ask her about George’s alleged capricious style and wobbly structure and shallow characterizations.

Finally Mrs/ Ade had enough/ “Oh I know that many people can write better than George does,” she said. “But George does.”

“George does.”

It’s one of the finest things anybody’s ever said.

In two words it crystallizes what happens with so many people (me included), namely: They get an idea, they tell some people about it, the people all say, “Wow, that’s great!” and then they go on to something else and never do anything about the idea they told people about.

I think the reason is: “Wow, that’s great!” is reward enough. It gives you that nice warm glow that comes from knowing you got a really good idea, that everybody thinks you’re a whiz.

But if nothing else happens with your idea, if it doesn’t help someone, if it doesn’t save or fix or create something, if it doesn’t make something better or solve some problem, what good is it really?“

And then he goes on to say that you shouldn’t tell people your ideas or you shouldn’t let “Wow, that’s great!” be enough, which I think is really fucking smart. I am absolutely horrible for this. I blog about my ideas all the time and then it’s like once I talk about them, the magic is gone and then all I’m left with is *work*. I hate work! Everyone hates work! (If you believe that “work” is anything that isn’t fun.) If I don’t tell you guys my idea and I just do it, the whole time I’m making something, I think “wait till they see this! They’re going to love it!” and that fuels my creation of the whatever it is. (And then when no one comments, I feel like shit, but that’s a whole other thing.) The key though, is not to tell and I am a terrible secret keeper if it’s my own secret. I want to tell everyone everything and I’m pretty sure, as Jack Foster believes, that hurts me in the long run.

So I’m not going to blog about my ideas anymore (in full) or my paintings until they’re finished as much as that’s going to pain me.

Here’s another thing in the book:

“More often than not,” Bud said, “people don’t fail; they stop trying.“

That’s me too. Lately I’ve been kinda bitching and moaning in real life about how “everything’s been done” but then at the same time saying “everything hasn’t been done, everyone says that and then someone does something new so why can’t that be me?” but then I don’t do the legwork. I don’t actively sit there and try to think up ideas. Then again, I never have. The book says you should do that but that’s just not my process. I’m getting off track though; the book says that people stop trying and this week I’ve stopped trying on so many counts it’s ridiculous.

First, until today, I didn’t do anything actively to throw myself into being an idea factory. The book says, and I agree because I’ve been doing it my whole life, that in order to get ideas you should pick a subject and immerse yourself in it, become an expert at it and then forget about it and do something else. The key though, is to DO SOMETHING ELSE. Don’t just sit there and do nothing. DO SOMETHING. And then the idea will just come to you while you’re doing something else. That’s how I get 99% of my ideas and it’s also a scientifically proven method, according to the book.

Second, on Monday I started painting the forget-me-nots on “Menopause” and then Blake wanted to go to Wal*Mart so  I had to stop and that broke my flow and I never got back to it. Then, to make matters worse, I blogged about “Menopause” prematurely (look, I’m doing it again!) and now I feel like all the magic is gone out of it and all I’m left with is the tedious task of all these goddamn forget-me-nots. I also posted pics of it on Camwhores on Tuesday or yesterday (I forget), so now that community’s already seen it and it won’t be a surprise when I post it.

I started making a process video of the making of “Menopause” but due to the feedback I got on my self portrait one, I’m worried that since “Menopause” is such a huge piece that’s taken weeks to create that the video will be too long and people will find most of its making too tedious. I think I should make it anyway and if people don’t want to watch it theyh have that option, but it’s not really a huge motivator to continue.

Then today…ugh, today…we’re supposed to go to a gallery opening tonight and I really don’t want to go. I would rather stay home and paint. But, this specific gallery, which I’ll get into in more detail after the opening I’m sure, could be a place for me to show my work in the future so I kinda feel like if I want to go that route with my work, this is my only chance to get my foot in the door somewhere. Also, if the curators are sincere in their naming of the gallery and what the gallery’s supposedly all about, then it IS the right place for my work, if they want it. I have to see what they’re hanging tonight to know for sure, so that means washing my face and hair and putting on actual clothes that don’t have elastic waistbands and leaving the house which I am absolutely loathe to do. It helps that I’m going to know 2 or 3 other people who are going, but not a whole lot. I’m also worried about drinking because they seem really unorganized and they said there will be beer and wine for sale but I don’t drink either and would really like a bottle of water or a diet Coke. I don’t know if that’ll be an option (it should be, but like I said, they seem really disorganized). I also don’t know if there’s going to be food there so should we eat beforehand? I’m also afraid of looking like shit. And what to wear. And what bag to bring. And all that shit that goes along with being me and being agoraphobic etc etc etc. I don’t want to go, but I have to go.

This is me not trying. This is me giving up. And I need to snap the fuck out of it before I make myself insane. I need to stop writing this post, absorb everything I learned about embryos today and paint some goddamn forget-me-nots until it’s time to get ready.

So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll probably be on Twitter for most of the day if anyone cares and also I’ve been using my Facebook page a lot more lately so hit me up there too, if you want!

Hi.

I’m posting THIS so I don’t lose the link. It’s a short story called The Yellow Wallpaper by a writer named Charlotte Perkins Gilman and it was written in 1892. It’s considered an important piece of feminist literature but never having read any feminist literature, I’ve never read it. Blake’s told me the concept of it a million times though and I plan on referencing it in an upcoming painting, so I suppose it’s about time I read it.

Speaking of reading, this article on the Goatse phenomenon is fantastic and I must thank Joey for posting it on Facebook because I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a long read but, I think, definitely worth the effort. I will not never in my life forget the name “Kirk Johnson” and I’m glad to know that he is not, in fact, deceased. (Stile is quoted a lot in the article and they talk about E/N a tiny bit too, if those are selling points for you.)

I’m listening to Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers right now and it’s very distracting because I keep singing instead of typing. “Swing the Mood” is probably in my top 5 favourite albums of all time. I just went on Amazon to see if they had any other albums and they really didn’t do anything beyond this album it seems, probably because they couldn’t get the commercial rights to all of the songs they mixed. Even on this album, all of the Elvis parts are sung by an impersonator for that reason. Actually a lot of the stuff is redone for that reason it seems. Interesting.

Anyway, there were/are great and I love this album like no other. I know the entire thing by heart. A little known fact about me is that I know the words to an impressive (for my age) amount of music from the 50s and 60s because growing up all my mom listened to in her store was an oldies station (1050 CHUM AM I’ll have you know) and then when I lived with my ex’s family as a teenager, there was a radio station that did Saturday night oldies (in fact, they still might – I should look into that because that was great) and all summer we’d sit on the back deck and drink until the oldies were over at about 3am. I would actually much rather listen to music of that era than anything created in present day because with an oldies station, I’ll probably like 90% of what they play but with anything modern, I’ll probably only like 20%.

When the Jive Bunny album came out, our library had the album so I took it out for a week and took it over to my grama’s house because she had a tapedeck with two decks so you could record one tape onto another and she was the only person I knew who had a stereo that could do that. Well, she loved the album too because this was all the music of her youth of course and I remember her trying to teach me how to swing dance in her kitchen. I think I would have been about 11. (She wasn’t always evil.)

I think it might have been Chalibear who sent me this album on CD a long long time ago from my wishlist but it’s been so long now that I forget. Either way, it’s one that sits on a shelf on my desk as opposed to being buried in my bedroom closet.

Here’s the video for “Swing the Mood”. I just rewatched it and the album version is a LOT different, using the actual vocals for most of the songs and just better mixed in general:

Another facet of my early exposure to early top 40 was that my step-dad was obsessed with The Everly Brothers. I probably know every word to every song they ever did as a result and I actually think that he liked them so much, now that I’ve kinda peeked through what they were really about and watched some videos, because it was probably one of the only kinds of SUPER HARDCORE ROCK ‘N’ ROLL he was allowed to listen to as a kid because his parents were super strict and super assholes who ruled all 6 kids with an iron fist.

I’m getting way off topic though…not that I actually had a topic.

So Blake and I stayed up late last night in bed talking about art well past our bedtimes. I can sleep during the day after my shift so I was okay but he was up late the night before with little sleep because he was on call and his work had “the biggest release of the year” over the long weekend and of course things broke, so he was exhausted but I’ve come to learn that it’s best to get him when he’s exhausted because that’s when he has the best ideas. (He’s going to murder me for saying that but to be fair, it’s not like I do it on purpose, it just ends up that way.)

We hammered out a lot of ideas and I think I have found my direction for the next painting. I can’t see beyond that one and I still have my last one to finish (and one I’m making for myself) but we basically decided that I don’t add enough detail. The metaphor (?) he gave me was the cow jumping over the moon. If you just draw a picture of a cow, there’s no story, there’s nowhere for the viewer to go, but if you draw the picture of the cow over the moon, even if you only change that one little detail, the scene and therefore the story, changes.

With “Me, two.“, there’s a story but I didn’t put in enough detail for the average viewer to really understand everything I meant. When I posted it my friend Jeck said that there was too much negative space and my response to that at the time was that was what was intended and that’s true, but the viewer is left to their own devices as far as understanding why I did that and they’re probably not going to come to the correct conclusion. (That painting is supposed to be a natural miscarriage and something that “just happens”, hence the plain blue sky background.)

Even with “Menarche“, my background is less than apparent. A little more is going on but still not a story, not a communication. I don’t think that needs to have a story or anything like that but I think maybe I leave too much to interpretation when I’m perfectly capable of doing so much more and there’s really no excuse not to except that I get excited and want to share before the idea is fully finished.

I’ll let the cat out of the bag (not that it was some kind of big surprise or anything) that the painting I’m working on that goes along with “Menarche” is “Menopause” and while “Menarche”‘s background is pure, white daisies, “Menopause”‘s (how the hell do I make that punctuation work, technically?) is forget-me-nots, using the exact same method, just changing the colours. That’s what I like best about them, I think.

I’m not really happy with “Menopause” and I can’t figure out how to fix it. I used the crackle paste for the myometrium and it’s white, so when I did a wash of “Terra Cotta Coral”, which is my default myometrium colour, it looks really coral or salmon instead of pink and if I paint it with straight paint, I’ll lose the crackle effect. I did a wash of “brown iron oxide” over top of it to tone down the orange tones but it didn’t do much to help. I may do another wash of that before I call it finished just to see what happens. I think I can only get away with one more before I’ll lose the crackle effect. Honestly, I just can’t wait for that painting to be done already. I had the idea to do it before “Menarche” so I feel like I’ve been working on it for months when it’s really only been about a week and a half. Really all I have to do is finish the forget-me-nots, which I’ll probably do today, do the final wash, varnish it and call it a day.

Doing about a million tiny dot flowers on a 30 x 30 inch piece of work is not my idea of fun anymore. My arms are killing me because you have to hover right above the panel to do them while holding your palette in your other hand and it takes every single muscle you have to do it properly, there’s nothing to lean on or you’ll fuck up your flowers because they’re fresh blobs of paint and you have to go at it with military precision or you’ll paint yourself into a very uncomfortable corner.

The painting I’m going to be doing after “Menopause” is also going to have dot flowers, but not as many of them.

Onto other things…

So what the fuck is going on in Wisconsin, eh? Ain’t that some sexist bullshit? Here are some quotes that SHOULD  piss you right off and turn you into an insta-feminist if you don’t already identify as one:

“Whatever gaps exist, he insists, stem from women’s decision to prioritize childrearing over their careers. “Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.””

“Nor, he argued, does its conclusion take into account other factors, like “goals in life. You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious. To attribute everything to a so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.””

I want to light this fucking asshole on fire. This is another thing Blake and I talked about in depth last night because I never really understood wage discrimination or wage parity or whatever it’s actually called. He said that it’s fucked up because (well, partly because) say a man and a woman start at the same job at the same place making the same amount of money. The woman after a year, goes on maternity leave. In Canada, that’s for a whole year (or you can split it up between husband and wife 6 months/6 months because we’re awesome like that). So in that year, say the dude gets a $5,000 raise. The woman doesn’t get the same raise because she’s not there and when she starts back after maternity leave, it’s kinda like she’s starting back at square one. Say she goes on maternity leave again, that’s two setbacks while her male counterpart is still in the field getting promotions and raises. Another thing is that cpmpanies may not want to hire women of childbearing age *because* it’s assumed they’re going to go on mat leave which costs the company money. I don’t know what the solution to that is. I don’t think women deserve raises and promotions when they’re not there, but there shouldn’t be this crazy wage gap either.

Another thing Blake said was that when women go in for a job interview, they often lowball themselves because they have low self-worth whereas men are often full of themselves so they highball. A company is probably going to hire the woman who will work just as hard and do the same job for $10k less than the man. That causes wage disparity.

That one we can fix. We can raise girls to have high self-esteem and self-worth and hopefully close that part of the gap within the next generation or two, but we can’t work on closing that aspect while creating fucking LAWS that widen the gap in other areas like we see happening in the US right now.

There’s this author that I like named Cathrynne M. Valente who wrote these two books called The Orphan’s Tales Volume I and Volume II. They’re these award-winning fairy tales that all flow into one another and they are fucking fantastic. I loved them. In fact, that reminds me, Madison would probably like them. I highly recommend them.

Anyway, she also wrote this post on Live Journal yesterday about the War on Women happening in the US (THAT IS ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HAPPENING DON’T EVEN DENY IT) that’s also well worth reading. If I could make that link flash and blink and appear 10 feet tall, I would, because you have to read it. I cannot stand it when I hear women say things like “I’m not a feminist, but…” or “I don’t call myself a feminist because it’s such a dirty word”. It drives me up the fucking wall. (Hey I wonder if that phrase comes from The Yellow Wallpaper…) The word “feminist” is something that you, as a person, define in your day to day life. It is the RADICAL NOTION that women are people too. I argue this constantly. It’s nothing more, nothing less. Yes, it encompasses other issues, like gender issues or race issues, a lot of the time, but that’s as it should be. Women, gay people, people of colour, people with mental illness, people with physical handicaps etc etc etc, we are all minorities and if we don’t stand up for each other and become a vocal MAJORITY nothing would ever get done and we’d still be stuck in the fucking dark ages.

Blake told me last night that something truly disturbing came out of Madison’s mouth a little while back that is really getting under my skin today as a result of Cathrynne’s post and the fact that, AS A FEMINIST USHERING IN ANOTHER GENERATION OF WOMAN I should be vigilant about things like this, but I guess Blake and Madison were talking about politics or something and Blake asked her what she would do if she were called to vote on a law that was good for the majority of people, but bad or discriminatory for a small amount of people, like gay people. Wanna know her answer? “Well I just wouldn’t vote.” OMG HOLY SHIT WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS CHILD AND HOW DO I CHANGE IT BEFORE SHE IS OF VOTING AGE? YES I AM YELLING I AM ANGRY. I feel like we’re parenting failures because she said this vile thing. Blake has been talking to her about women’s issues and gender issues and gay rights since she was 4 years old, why is she so…I dunno what the word is, wishy washy maybe? She has opinions but she’s too afraid to voice them. She has strong feelings about right and wrong but she doesn’t assert herself. She has low self-worth. She’s a people-pleaser. I don’t get it. Where have we gone wrong and like I said, how do we fix it?

Don’t get me wrong, I love my daughter and for the most part I love who she is becoming but I wish she was more like me and my mother and even my grandmother who were/are all feminists just by being. It’s like, we have all these strong, mostly independent women generation after generation and then there’s Madison who’s like, the weakest link in this respect. We went backwards. Why? Is it because sexism in her life is not overt? Hell, it’s not even really overt in MY life so it’s not like she sees me having any great feminist battles like my mom and grama had.

For those new to the group, my grandmother (my mother’s mother) has owned a furniture store for most of her life. Not even most of her adult life, she started working in her father’s furniture store when she was a kid and then opened her own when she got married. Back then, women didn’t do this. But you don’t tell a Crittenden woman that she can’t do something (unless she’s Madison).

My mother had me when she was 15 years old. She had to fight to get her high school diploma because in 1979 the school wouldn’t allow her to be pregnant and attend. She had to write her exams in a janitor’s closet. But she still graduated, with the help of a tutor she’s still friends with to this day, and teachers who worked with her, despite the school’s rules and she’s been an independent business-owner since day 1, first with her wallpaper store and now with her art business. She is the most goddamn stubborn, opinionated woman I have ever met and I’m glad I grew up with that.

Feminism was never a topic of discussion in my life growing up, it was just a fact of life. Crittenden men don’t last long. They die, they get divorced, Blake was brave in taking my last name, let me tell ya. It’s the women who are the trunk of our family tree.

So with Madison is her lack of WHATEVER just because she’s been talked at instead of shown by example? Like, for example, the books she reads, we deconstruct those in this house like crazy and point out how the main characters are or aren’t good role models or good feminists. Most of the time they are though so I’m thinking that maybe there’s less sexism in her life so it just doesn’t register with her? And I think that’s a problem. That makes people lazy. That’s how bullshit like what’s happening in Wisconsin happens! How do I convince my daughter that her voice matters and is important?

I am going to be on her after school like a fly on shit now that I know she said what she said because to me that is absolutely unacceptable. I don’t know what I’m going to say but I’m going to be showing her Cathrynne’s post and going from there.

It kinda bugs me that Oprah has never really used her voice and influence to come out and say that, “yes, I am a feminist” and put a newer face on it. And if she did, I must have missed that episode.

Speaking of Oprah, my mom and I go to see her next Monday. My mom posted on Facebook on Sunday (I think) that she watched the Oprah’s Lifeclass Tour that morning when they were doing it from Radio City Music Hall and that by the end of it she was bawling. To be honest, I don’t really like Oprah’s Lifeclass because I find all that so-called inspirational stuff to be really boring and after watching a bit of the St. Louis Lifeclass Tour last night I’m wondering what the hell I signed on for. I like Oprah, I may even love Oprah (how can you not love Oprah? the woman’s a saint), but the rest of them like that Bishop guy and Deepak Chopra (especially Deepak Chopra) are just going to drive me nuts, I’m pretty sure. I am no longer a spiritual person. There is nothing guiding my life except me. I don’t care to hear otherwise. Science saved my life, not prayers (but thanks for them all the same, I mean, while I don’t believe in that stuff I don’t think it can hurt).

The other thing I’m worried about is that it’s going to be a lot like going to the Leafs game and I’m really worried that I won’t be able to do it and I know my mom won’t want to go alone. Plus, it’s not like I’m going to know beforehand if I can handle the crowd or not, I won’t know until we’re there. And my mom’s hardly sympathetic to my situation either, she’s of the “ull yourself up by the bootstraps” kind of person so if I’m having trouble being there, she’s probably not going to be of much help. I really should have gotten 3 tickets so Blake could have come and I’m wondering if maybe there are scalpers there we could pick up a third ticket so he could come. I know he doesn’t want to come with us, he doesn’t want to touch this thing with a 10 foot pole, but I really want to be there and I’m scared I won’t be able to do it without him.

Some feminist role model I am. I can’t even leave my fucking house.

Anyway, so my mom said on Sunday that the Lifeclass Tour, which is what we’re going to, had her in tears so last night we went to Wal*Mart so I could buy waterproof eyeliner and a smaller purse because they aren’t allowing big bags into the event and I currently use a laptop bag to haul my crap around. The purse I got is okay, I guess. It’s pretty…old person bag…but I didn’t really have a whole lot to choose from. It’s plain black faux leather with two pockets at the front that do up with silver buckles and then on the inside there’s a main part and a little zip up pocket for tampons and lipstick. It has visible white stitching. It’s the pursiest purse I’ve ever owned, I think and it’s definitely NOT me at all AND it cost me thirty goddamn dollars. At Wal*Mart! I wanted to get a new wallet too because mine sucks but that’ll have to wait for another paycheque because those were like, $30 too. Highway robbery.

The waterproof eyeliner I got is by Hard Candy, which is a brand I’m not familiar with but they had some pretty neat stuff. Like glitter pencil eyeliner in a million different colours (I got pinky purple, turquoise and silver, mostly for Madison to use next year when she’s in high school) and this neat face illuminator stuff that I didn’t get because I was on a pretty tight budget. I did get a new thing of mascara because I haven’t had a new one in a year and I think you’re supposed to replace that stuff every 6 months or something. HOWEVER, when I got home and opened the package, I realized that I got non-waterproof stuff so I’m going to save the one I had before for Oprah-like ocassions and use the non-waterproof one for every day use. I got Maybelline’s The Falsies mascara in case anyone cares because I really like it and it’s only like, $6 at Wal*Mart. I also got a tube of Maybelline’s new 10 Hour Super Stay Stain Gloss because it looked pretty cool and it really is. The stuff is totally a gloss but it does not budge. I put some on last night when I got home and slept with it on and here it is the next day and it still looks more or less the way it did when I put it on, just faded. Highly recommended if you like a gloss look with the staying power of a lipstick. I think next paycheque I’m going to try their new 24 Hour Lipstick since the gloss stuff is so good.

Hard Candy doesn’t test on animals according to their packaging but I don’t know about Maybelline. I know for a fact that L’Oreal tests on animals and while I really like their products, I’m trying to find alternatives for that reason.

I also got ponytail holders because mine all get lost. I usually use itty bitty ones because my hair’s so thin, like ones that slip on my fingers, but they didn’t have those so I had to get bigger ones. Oddly, Wal*Mart had a really small selection of hairbands which is another thing I went in for because I only own one of those and it’s leopard print and it looks pretty stupid.

In other news, I gained 3 lbs according to Wii Fat last night and I’m not buying that crap about body fluctuations because  I have a stomach flu (again) and I just took the mother of all shits right before I weighed myself so if anything i should have been DOWN some weight, but no, I gained  lbs.  This really sucks because as a family we’ve been tracking calories with MyFitnessPal and it says I’m only supposed to be eating about 1200 calories a day. Then at the end of the day when you’re finished logging, it says “if every day were like today, you’d weigh blah blah blah in 5 weeks” and the majority of the time I’m right at or just a little above the 1200 calorie mark so it’s been saying that I should be 128 lbs or so instead of the 135 I am. I’m supposed to be losing weight with this thing, not gaining. BUT as Blake pointed out, counting calories has slowed my weight gain considerably so that’s a good thing. I’m okay with being 135 lbs, I don’t mind being a healthy weight or even a little bit overweight but I can’t go over that without having a serious hit to my self-esteem and my surgeon really doesn’t want me to gain any more. I guess we’ll see how things go. I’m going to give it another month of calorie counting alone and trying to do better with coming under my 1200 (or at least not going over) and if I gain any more weight aft6er that then I guess I’ll be forced to use the dreadmill. It’s just such a goddamn waste of time, I can’t even stand it. I do not, in the slightest, take even an ounce of pleasure from physical activity. I was probably a sloth in my past life. I liked yoga though, but that’s not really an option for me right now and I never lost any weight doing it.

Okay I think that’s all I’ve got for today (as if that’s not enough) and I think I need to go have breakfast because I’m sick and haven’t eaten yet today and then finish this goddamn painting.

THE END.

I’m listening to Adele’s album 21 which I’ve had for a long time but never really listened to in its entirety until today. I’ve gotta say, it’s leaving me less than inspired. This is old fogey music. American Idol crap. I like “Rolling in the Deep” of course and I like whatever the second song on the album is, but the rest is like…Whitney Houston-esque garbage. This is adult contemporary, middle age “safe” music, the likes of which you find on easy listening stations and is TOTALLY ABSOLUTELY 100% NOT MY THING AT ALL. I love her voice and I really really wanted to like her but this is just…blah. Rainy day wallpaper. Blah.

So anyway yesterday I finished another self-portrait:

Self Portrait #2
12 x 16 inch mixed media on watercolour paper

The jewel-as-trache-scar was Charlie’s idea. It was a good idea so I used it.

Right now I’m working on my second 30 x 30 inch panel and a 12 x 12 inch wood panel. The 30 x 30 is the one with crackle paste on it and if I’d have known via Golden’s site how crackle paste really worked instead of relying on the instructions on the jar, I would have done a much thicker layer so I would have achieved bigger cracks. As it is, I can’t really afford any more crackle paste and the cracks are very small. I guess I’m going to try working with the cracks that I have now by applying a wash of colour with the idea of the watery colour gathering in the cracks but if that doesn’t look right I guess I have no other choice but to buy more crackle paste because it’s really important for the piece to be super duper cracky. Deep, fissure-like cracks is what I need, like a dry desert floor. I’m going to need to get one of those things that I don’t know the name of…one of those things that artists use that looks like a little flat trowel. Maybe it is called a trowel, I don’t know, but I need one whatever they’re called, if I’m to apply a second, thicker coat of crackle paste.

The really shitty part of this situation is that I’m probably going to have to either sand or scrape off the layer of crackle paste that’s there already, which also means that I can kiss my flawless basecoat goodbye. Not good when I’m using a discontinued colour and I only have one bottle left. WOE IS ME. #firstworldartistproblems

The 12 x 12 inch wood panel I’m working on is actually something called “gessoboard” which is *like* a wood panel but it uses that compressed, cardboardy fake wood that they make office furniture and cheap shelves out of and it’s primed professionally with gesso for a super smooth surface. Paint just glides on these fuckers. This is my first time using one and I’ve gotta say I’m a fan. The problem is that they’re pretty pricey, $18 + tax for a 12 x 12 when I can get 3 canvases of the same size for about the same price. But they are soooo nice and I can use my triple thick gloss glaze varnish on them without the fear of it cracking if mishandled. It probably wouldn’t work as well to glue heavy stuff on like the watercolour paper I use for my girls, but it’s PERFECT for flaming, glittering uteri. ;o)

So the absolute worst thing for me is a lack of ideas. It is not my natural state AT ALL and these days, while productive, I feel like I’m in a big of a creative rut. I realize that probably doesn’t make any sense since I’ve been posting lots of artwork but for the most part, these are all old ideas that I’m pulling out of my sketchbook and making real, I’m not really coming up with anything new.

So, I’ve been reading this book that I’ve actually had for years, since I was in college, called “How To Get Ideas” by Jack Foster and it’s a really simple book with a lot of good ideas like, how to look at things and really see them, doing morning pages (essentially), giving yourself deadlines and the space to come up with terrible ideas because sometimes terrible ideas are actually really good ones and this part really struck me:

“”And idea is delicate,” said Charles Brower, the head of an advertising agency. “It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.” 

I think this is why many people seem bereft of ideas. 

They’ve run into too many sneers and yawns, they’re heard to many quips. And so they’ve said the heck with it and don’t even try to come up with ideas any more.

The fear of rejection shuts down their idea factories.”

When I was in night school for copywriting, my first copywriting class, my teacher said the same thing, that you can’t be negative in any way during a brainstorming session because if you are, people will clam up and not want to stick their necks out with terrible yet potentially genius ideas.

I can’t really say that this has ever been my experience though. This part of the book is 100% me:

“I used to teach a three-day seminar on advertising in Chicago. One of the assignments I gave each student was to create, overnight, an outdoor board for a Swiss Army knife. Most of the students would come in the next morning with the required billboard, but several of them would say that they worked for hours and couldn’t come up with anything. This happened three years in a row. 

The fourth year I tried something different. Instead of asking for just one billboard, I asked each student to create at least ten billboards for a Swiss Army knife. And instead of giving them all night, I told them they had to do it during their lunch hour. 

After lunch everybody had at least ten ideas. Many had more. One student had 25. 

I came to realize that when faced with a problem most people look for the one right solution because that’s the way they were brought up. All through school they had to answer multiple-choice and true-or-false questions, questions that only had one right answer. And so they assume that all questions and problems are like that. And when they can’t find a solution that looks perfect they give up. 

But most problems aren’t like exam questions in school. Most problems have many solutions. And as soon as I forced my students to realize that, they found those solutions.”

That is me to a tee. (T?) I am afraid of bad ideas. I think that everything that tumbles out of my brain should be genius and I tend to think things are “precious”, even ideas. I’ve written before about how I’ve been trying to overcome my art supplies and projects as being “precious” but I think I need to do the same thing with ideas too or else I’m going to make myself insane. I have to allow myself to come up with 100 terrible ideas because within those 100 terrible ideas, there could be 1 or 2 really good ones.

Or maybe even none.

But I won’t know unless I try and it’s actually a HELL of a lot more difficult for me than I thought it would be. I’m known for being really creative, creativity is what I’ve got, but for someone who supposedly has a creative mind, ideas sure are hard to come by when I get in ruts like this. They’re rare, but they happen.

And the book addresses ruts. The reason they happen is because of repetition and I think that’s definitely true in my case. I don’t leave the house. I watch the same movies over and over again. I listen to the same music over and over again. I go to the same stores over and over again (Michael’s and Curry’s). There is little to no surprises in my life unless you want to count catastrophe and you would think that I’d have some residual “stuff” to work out because of everything that happened this summer but I honestly don’t think I do. Besides, I’m not sure what a pancreas even looks like or necessarily where it’s located. And I’m not good at drawing bodies so my wound is kind of out of the question. Maybe I’ll go there some day but right now, I don’t think, is the time. Plus, since I don’t really remember anything that happened, I don’t have a whole lot to work with.

Anyway, that’s where my head is today. I only have 2 & a half more hours left of work and then I plan on coming up with terrible ideas for the next 2 days that I have off.

Tomorrow I’m going to be making a honey spiral ham with potatoes, corn on the cob and asparagus but it’s just going to be us so there will be lots and lots of leftovers.

OH! GET THIS! So on Facebook I’m friends with one of my father’s sisters and Lisa tagged a picture of her daughter on her photography business’ fan page. So I went to the picture because I didn’t even know this kid existed (I barely know this aunt) and in the album is pics of Phil’s brother’s daughter too. This leads me to believe that there was some sort of family get together recently which is interesting because Phil never gets together with his family because they don’t really talk. But this is the exact type of thing, like my own grandfather’s FUNERAL, that I wouldn’t have been invited to. Lisa’s pissed off that I didn’t want to invite them to our anniversary party, for legitimate reasons, yet it’s PERFECTLY FINE to not include me in my own grandfather’s FUNERAL or ANY family reunions. How the fuck does that work?

Just something that occurred to me yesterday while I was clicking around on Facebook.

Oh and for those who were concerned, Ana Voog is home from the hospital and is okay. She’d been withdrawing from an antidepressant which caused suicidal tendencies and she ground up Xanax in a coffee grinder and tried to OD. Then she ran away from the house at some point and the cops had dogs out looking for her. She also had a gun and she shot a gazebo. That’s all she’s really said about it other than the fact that her shrink was going to be retiring but changed her mind so Ana can still see her and I guess she had to go in front of the courts and prove that she wasn’t a drug addict and didn’t need rehab or something. I dunno, the series of events wasn’t crystal clear. All I know is that I’m extremely happy that she’s okay and that she now has a new lease on life.

Happy Zombie Jesus Celebration!

Last night we went to Staples to buy Madison a 3-fold science project folder thing and Blake thought it would be a good idea to buy me a new chair because I’ve needed one for quite a while. Years.

My old chair, pictured above, was found in the garbage in 1997 and my ex welded the broken parts back together at work. I remember it was 1997 because that’s when I got my first computer and thus, needed a computer chair.

It was worn out when I got it of course, but I loved it and over the course of a decade and a half it got pretty…gross. Stains everywhere – to match the ones it came with – a hole in the seat, the arms covered in so much paint that they became hard and cracked. Obviously it was time to retire the old thing.

I like my new chair, though. It allows me to sit cross-legged, which I couldn’t do in my old chair, but I feel like I have to be careful with this one. Not get paint on it. I’m not sure that’s even possible, to be perfectly honest, but I guess I’ll try.

Right now Blake and Wes are out at Curry’s spending the rest of my paycheque. Nice, hardcover sketchbooks are on sale, 2/$10 so Blake’s getting a pair for me and Madison’s getting a pair too, for Easter. Then I’m getting another 30 x 30 inch wood panel for another uterus and then some paint for it from Michael’s and then my paycheque is GONE. I can maybe afford a pack of Fizzy Skittles and that’s like, IT. :o(

I was about to write “sucks to be me” at the end of that paragraph, but it doesn’t suck to be me. more than 3/4 of the world would be over the moon to be me. I have shelter, food, a bathroom, clean water etc. I’m extremely fortunate to live where and how I do and I need to remember that more often.  We all probably do.

Last night I was blog-hopping and I started at the Squam blog and kinda went from there and I thought it was kind of funny how most of the blogs I visited were all trying to figure themselves out. I can’t even think of an example off the top of my head and I can’t go back to their blogs because I didn’t bookmark any of them, plus I don’t want to call anyone out specifically, but they were all trying to be deep and like, I dunno, just deep I guess. And here I am, blogging about paint. Or a chair. Or glitter paper. Or any number of absolutely trivial things.

But the thing is, I think I’ve got myself pretty figured out for the most part. I did all that soul searching and trying to figure out why I do the things I do and all that crap YEARS ago and I heard someone once one call that “mental masturbation” which I kind of agree with, but reading these blogs made me wonder if that’s what people want to read in blogs these days. I know they did back when I was doing it a long frickin’ time ago and maybe that’s why so few people read this anymore, because I don’t spill my guts out the way I used to. Honestly though? I just got bored of that. I mean, I still do it to some degree but nowhere near the way I used to.

Not that I care if people read this, not like I ever did, I just find it curious how my readership has changed over the years and how it continues to change. And how it’s changing again, right now. For a while there, I had the Suzi Blu/art journalers reading along but I think I scared them away when I got sick and now I know they’re not coming back when I’m painting miscarriages on canvas. I don’t see myself being in the pages of Somerset Studio any time soon, thank GOD. Not that I expect to be on the cover of Juxtapoz any time soon either…

I’m babbling. That’s okay.

As I said, right now Blake’s out getting me art supplies and I’m a little worried that I keep spending ALL my money on art supplies for art that I know will never end up anywhere but on my own living room walls. The utilitarian side of me is really concerned about this. I’m also worried that the art I’m doing now, not being as safe and as buyer friendly as my girls, is….I’m afraid that my mom won’t approve. I normally don’t give a flying fuck what people think of me, for the most part, but it felt good when I was doing my girls, doing art that my mom approved of and that her friends could appreciate. I think that’s a large part of why I did them for so long, that and mental safety.

I cannot tell you how fulfilling it feels to have gotten “Me, too.” out of my head and into reality. Finally! And to have it look almost exactly as I saw it in my head. It’s like having a toothache and the relief of finally having it pulled. Now, I can’t say I’m completely happy with “Me, too.” and I can’t exactly call it my greatest masterpiece, but I do feel a great deal of relief that I don’t have this pressure anymore, pressure that I put on myself, to get it done and out of my brain. Ideas plague me. They keep me awake at night, laying in bed working out the technical logistics of how to make an image work. Like how to use crackle paste to convey the idea of barrenness, which I’m doing in the painting I’m working on now. I don’t want to tell you the ideas for the two wood panels (not that any of you care anyway)  but I think that they are going to be amazing.

My big worry with them though is that they’re both pretty big, 30 x 30 inches and they’re meant to be a set. Not a diptych but definitely a pair, but the amount I want for each of them, when put as a set, make them pretty goddamn expensive. A little unobtainable. But I think they’re worth that and I wouldn’t sell them for anything less (as long as they come out as well as they look in my head).

Blake says I shouldn’t worry about stuff like that and I should just paint, but I’m spending my entire paycheque on this stuff, I have zero money left over after supplies, I have to worry about this stuff. But then Blake says, “so say you’re not going to sell any of these, don’t you have to get it out anyway?” and I guess the answer to that is a definite “yes”. I hate sounding cliche or like an “artiste” but I really don;t have much of a choice in the matter with these. With my girls, I would sit down and think “what can I create today?” and start pulling out materials and then I’d get inspired by the materials and that’s how I’d create them. With this series of paintings, which really needs a name now that I think about it, I wake up with the ideas or they just pop into my head when I’m trying to fall asleep. Then as I think about them some more and work them out in my head, they grow larger and clearer and then suddenly, like today, they’re totally in focus and it’s like I have to look around them to see anything else.

I would kill to not have to be working right now and painting instead. There is so much work to do on these wood panels and I feel a little overwhelmed. I know I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew, I know I’m capable of doing this, it’s just daunting. I wish I had a bigger studio space (although I’m grateful for the space I have now) and I wish I had assistants like Damien Hirst, who could do my basecoating for me while I work. Maybe I can convince Blake to help me with that when he gets back. Wes could help too and they could bond or something (which is what they’re doing now).

I’ve gotta say, now that I’ve worked out the details of these next two paintings, I’m more excited about them than I was for “Me, too.“. I think these ones are going to be better realized, a more concrete idea and even though I have no idea what to do with them once I’m finished, at least they’re on wood panels so there’s not a lot of damage that can be done to them in this house. The worst thing that could happen to them is they get covered in dog hair.

Anyway, I think I’m going to go sketch for a while in between e-mails. Sorry for babbling your ear off. Have a great weekend. :o)

I woke up to a very sad scene. :o( My dogs had killed a bunny in the backyard. I cried a little bit and then I went outside to take care of it. And of course take pictures. Here it is:

Poor thing. :o(

I’m told by the neighbours that it didn’t suffer but still, my dogs are dickheads. I can’t believe they even caught it though, my dogs are fat, lazy bastards and bunnies are pretty speedy little things. Maybe it was sick. (They say a cat can’t catch a healthy bird, so maybe the same goes for dogs and bunnies?) Oh well. Nothing can be done about it now. I grossed Madison out by picking it up with my bare hands and putting it in the garbage bag. I don’t see the difference between picking up a fresh carcass and picking up a live bunny, personally.

This morning Blake made me “the tomato thing” that I love so much because I’m trying to eat big breakfasts/lunches and have my meals and snacks get smaller as the day goes on because that’s what my doctor recommended. One of my Twitter friends asked about “the tomato thing” so here’s the recipe (it’s a Jamie Oliver recipe from “Jamie’s Food Revolution“, which I highly recommend because it’s awesome & we use it a lot):

Cherry Tomato Sauce With Fresh Pasta

1.5 pints of grape or cherry tomatoes
4 cloves of garlic
a small bunch of fresh basil (we buy the frozen cubes and use 2 of them)
1 lb of fresh lasagne
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
olive oil
2 pats of butter
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
4 ounces of Parmesan cheese

Cut the tomatoes into halves or quarters. Peel and slice the garlic. Pick the basil leaves off the stalks and put them to the side. Finely chop the stalks. Cut the lasagne sheets into 3 or 4 long strips and put to one side. Grate the Parmesan.

 Bring a large pan of salted water to a boil. Put a large frying pan over medium heat and add a couple of lugs of olive oil and the garlic. Add the butter and let it melt. When the garlic starts to brown, add the tomatoes. Give everything a good stir, then add the basil stalks and half the leaves. Add the vinegar and season with salt and pepper. Drop your fresh pasta strips into the pan of boiling water and cook for 3 minutes. Drain in a colander over a large bowl, reserving some of the cooking water. Add the pasta to the frying pan with a splash of the cooking water and half the Parmesan. Give it a good stir. Taste and add a little more salt and pepper if you think it needs it.

Sprinkle the rest of the Parmesan and the basil leaves, tearing any large ones up.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

This stuff is sex on a plate, I could – and have – eat it every day if it wasn’t so carb-o-licious. Definitely one of my favourite  meals.

All I’ve been doing this week is working on my 30 x 36 inch painting. I don’t really want to talk about it though. Weird right? Normally I can’t keep a secret to save my life and this isn’t really a secret exactly, it’s just that I don’t want to talk about it quite yet. It’s really no big deal, honestly, it’s just jumping back into where I was in 2006 with both feet.

If you recall, it was in 2006 that I had my psychotic break and created “Camp Tampon“. But what I was doing right before that was, I think, a lot more interesting than cute girls on sparkly backgrounds. And I’ve kinda decided not to do cute girls on sparkly backgrounds anymore. I figure if you want those, the ones I did before are available on Etsy and Zazzle and those are good enough. Maybe every now and then I’ll add a new design for Zazzle but I’m not going to do girls exclusively from now on. They just don’t interest me as much as they used to.

I’m still going to do the colouring book, I’m just going to take my sweet ass time with it and just work on it in my spare time rather than making it a full-time job.

My friends The Perlorian Brothers linked an article about Damien Hirst on Twitter last weekend and I started reading about him. I’d heard his name before but didn’t really know who he was and the more I read, the more obsessed I became and the more links I clicked. I just don’t understand why the art world singled him out and said “yes, we are going to make you, Damien, the richest artist in the history of the world” when there are so many more deserving artists out there. (I don’t know of any because I don’t really follow the whole art world but I’m sure there are better out there because Hirst didn’t really impress me all that much.) I guess suspending a shark in a tank of formaldehyde is sort of interesting but wouldn’t it smell? Why would you want that in your house?

I got clicking around on Hirst’s Wiki page and stumbled upon the piece “An Oak Tree“, which Blake thinks is stupid but I think it’s kinda genius.

I just don’t understand how artists can make a living from their art. The concept completely baffles me. Like, how do you make enough money to pay rent and eat and stuff? Let alone make enough to go on holidays or travel or make appearances at plavces and stuff like that. I know how Hirst did it but I mean like, more normal artists. It takes me like, 2 weeks to make one painting! I could never make a living from them!

I have so many paintings planned right now, it’s ridiculous. They’re just popping out of my brain and I can’t even get them on paper fast enough. For the next one I actually need a 24 x 30 inch or maybe a 24 x 36 inch wood panel, which is going to run me about $30 + shipping which I totally don’t even have. I already spent my entire paycheque last week  on the piece I’m working on now. This art shit is expensive! I mean, with my girls it’s easier because I already have a stockpile of stuff for them but these are different because they’re large pieces so I need large substrates and I just don’t have those “in stock” because I’ve never needed them before. Plus, I don’t have anywhere to store them to keep them “in stock” because my house is so friggin’ tiny.

Oh well, as per usual I just have to figure it out.

Right now I’m just focused on the work. Everything else is optional or a bonus or whatever. I just want to plow through all these ideas in my brain and create art that *I* want to see. To hell with everyone else. If you don’t like it, don’t look at it, y’know?

When I went nuts, I was terrified of using my imagination because psychosis was so much like being stuck in my own imagination, which is a scary place to be, believe me. SO that was in 2006 and it wouldn’t be until 2008 when I would use my imagination again and that was when I took Suzi Blu’s class and learned how to make my girls. But my girls were safe and not at all what I would normally do if I weren’t so scared of my own mind.

So when I “went there” last week and started working on this 30 x 36 inch piece, I got really scared that I was manic and about to lose my mind again. I was crying daily, afraid that if I went nuts that I’d lose my job again, but still working on the piece while Blake assured me that I was okay and that I needed to trust the medication.

I think I kissed mania right on the lips though. I’m almost sure of it. I’m okay now and it’s passed, but I wasn’t sleeping, which is a bad sign and I was just having strange thoughts that I can’t really explain. Like, one day I thought it would be a hilarious idea to sit the kids down and tell them we were getting a divorce but then tell them later that I was kidding. I didn’t DO it. I just thought, for a brief minute, that it would be extremely funny to do this. That’s not a good sign.

But like I said, it passed and now I’m 99% sure I’m okay.

Yesterday Blake and I made a decision on the gardens. We’re not going to do the front yard this year (for those new to the fold, my front “lawn” was replaced with a wildflower garden in 2006) and in fact, we’re going to plant grass seed instead. The reason for this is because if I have surgery in the spring, I won’t be able to take care of it and Blake & the kids don’t want to take care of it for me. Plus we don’t plan on living here much longer and the house will be easier to sell with a lawn. BUT we are going to do veggies in the back yard because they’re easier to take care of, they have the added benefit of being food and it’s a much smaller garden.

We don’t have any money right now but I hope to buy seeds sometime very soon so I can start them inside and have healthy plants to plant in the spring.

Last year Ruggedo got me these awesome upside-down hanging things that you plant cucumbers or tomatoes in and they were pretty neat. They didn’t produce very much but we’re going to try them again this year with tomatoes instead of cucumbers to see what happens. I think tomatoes will do better, personally.

And I think that’s all I’ve got in me today. I’m kinda feeling “blah”. I decided not to go to the Game of Thrones exhibition   today in order to stay home and paint on my day off. I just honestly do not even care. I like the show, but I’m not a fanatic and props and stuff don’t really excite me. I know it was my idea to go but really, I was just looking for something cheap/free for Blake and I to do together and he doesn’t care if I go or not so I’m just not going to go.

So that’s that.

Anyway, happy Sunday! I hope you aren’t too hung over this morning! *bashes cymbals together*

PS. Blake and I finalized our guestlist for our anniversary party last night and we’re going to order the invitations soon soon soon. I’m so excited!

PPS. “Indigo Ocean” is now on my site and ready for sale!

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Yesterday was artist date #2 and I had a FABULOUS time only spending $14!

I decided we’d just go back to Michael’s for artist date #2 since artist date #1 was so successful. Michael’s is probably my favourite store on Earth because I get in there and I just feel like I’m home. I look around at all the beautiful things and just kind of enter this trance-like state where I’m in absolute creative bliss where all there is IS imagination. My brain starts firing a mile a minute and I’m bombraded with images of the things I could do with the things all around me. I don’t just see a package of Swarovski crystals, I see the bindi of a mermaid in Fiji. Know what I mean?

The first priority was getting a sheet of foamcore because I need it to make my girls sturdy so I can put them in the shadowbox and have them stand up straight. Jeck is sending me some vintage Valentines and what I have envisioned is two girls giving each other Valentines, but what I’m afraid of with that is that it’s too specific. *I* would have something out like that year round, but would anyone else? I dunno. My other idea, which I kinda like better, is to make a burlesque girl or two and make the background like a stage. Then I’d paint the outside of the shadowbox black with red sparkles and get Blake to drill small holes all around the sides of it so I can wire the inside with Xmas lights just like the bulbs on a burlesque stage. The lights are LED so there’s no heat from them to burn the paper so it could be left on/plugged in indefinitely.

I’ve been looking for a way to make girls with “mink” stoles (made out of marabou) but it was bugging me because you can’t really do that with canvas for fear of the canvas fraying and wood would be difficult because you can’t sew through it and if you drilled through it, it probably wouldn’t look right, but the shadowbox idea would work extremely well for it and I think I’ve just convinced myself that this is precisely what I’m going to do. I think one should be in a long, red “va va va voom” kinda sequined dress with a red stole and one should be in a white flapper type dress with a black or white stole (thoughts?). I’ve got this lovely metallic ruby shade that would be perfect for hair that I’ve been dying to use (which they’ve now discontinued!), so I think I’d put that on the girl with the white dress and I’d probably make the girl with the red dress a blonde.

It’s funny…a couple of weeks ago I was pissing and moaning that I was all out of ideas and now I’m so full of ideas I hardly know what to do with myself. I feel like I have so much work to do between the shadowbox, which is going to be a lot of work, and this “orange girl” I’m doing.

Blake got me that orange Martha Stewart glitter paint last week called “Orange Sorbet” that I’m completely obsessed with so I think I mentioned that I painted two boards with it, one a thin layer for putting under white crackled paint and one a really thick layer to use on its own as a background for an undetermined girl. I’d been staring at the second board all week, not knowing what to do with it, when I turned to Twitter yesterday and asked for ideas. Katie suggested “Creamsicle”, which I liked, but it still didn’t feel right and neither did anything else anyone suggested so I tweeted that I’d put the board away and work on something else rather than force it when my friend TE came up with a genius idea that is so good I can barely stand it. I don’t wanna say what it is though in case I mess it up and get frustrated with it and it never happens, which is a possibility because it’s not the easiest thing I’ve ever attempted. I think it’s going to be pretty easy, to be honest, but it’s something that could frustrate me easily too, so I don’t wanna count my chickens before they hatch. If I can pull this off though, I think it’ll be really cool.

So anyway, foamcore. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s two pieces of Bristol board (er, cardstock weight paper, I guess) with a piece of light foam sandwiched in the middle of them. I don’t know what other people use them for, but we used it a lot in ad school as the background for our print ads when we were doing presentations. Because of that, I thought it would be a good idea to check Staples on our way through Barrie because it was on the way to Michael’s and it was also on the way home, so if it ended up being cheaper at Staples, we could easily go back and get it.

Well, foamcore at Staples was $5.56 a sheet. For the same size sheet at Michael’s, we lucked out because it was 3/$5! I only needed one, so I could pay for it with the change in my wallet and still not put a dent in my $10 artist date budget!

On our way to Michael’s, we were behind this guy:

You can’t really tell because my camera was focusing on our dirty windshield instead of the car but that’s a fucking HUMMER with the license plate “SIZDZMTR”. It was being driven by a guy, so is he admitting that he’s overcompensating for his tiny penis?

Anyway, at Michael’s I got sidetracked by the Martha Stewart paint again because it’s on sale for 40% off, which is an extremely good deal that was very very hard to walk away from. The glitter paint is just so goddamn beautiful. But I can get paint any time and god knows I have enough of it and what I don’t have, I can mix myself anyway, so I figured paint wouldn’t be a wise investment at this juncture.

We kinda wandered aimlessly for a few minutes, just going down aisles and looking at stuff, when we got to the bacck of the store where the yarn is and it sucked me in like a Dirt Devil: GLITTER YARN. MARTHA FUCKING STEWART GLITTER YARN. Check these bad boys out:

I had a REALLY hard time deciding on colours. They had a nice light purple, a nice light turquoise (but I figured I’ve done enough turquoise for the time being), a really interesting bright green, red, a really crazy magenta that I almost bought but Blake said it was too overwhelming and again, I decided that until “Magenta Love Fairy” sells, there’s no point in doing another girl with that colour scheme. They were $5.99 per skein BUT they were also on sale for 40% off so I could afford these TWO plus my foamcore and this:

That journal was $1.50 but I had a 40% off coupon so I saved 60 cents! So not only did I get all that for like, $13 but I had $1 left over to get a ginger molasses cookie from Tim Hortons on the way home. SCORE!

For some reason Madison laughed at me, I think, for taking pictures of my yarn. I set the yarn up on my desk to take the pic and when you turn my camera on it makes a tinkling sound and when Madison heard that she ran into my office and almost wet herself she was laughing so hard. o_O She never did tell me why she was laughing, but I think that was why. I dunno why that’s funny.

Anyway, she is one smart cookie who is definitely on the same wavelength as me because she told me exactly what I intended the yarn to be: the trim on a girl’s dress.

So for those playing the homegame, I’ve got the shadowbox on the go, the orange girl and now a pink girl and a blue girl who are going to have frilly trim on the bottom of their dresses. Busy busy!

Now I think I’m going to go do my morning pages and then when Blake wakes up, I’m going to have eggs and breakfast sausages. I am SO glad he’s home! I am SO glad everyone’s home! The house just wasn’t the same without them.

PS. We ran into Raymond & Lauren in the Michael’s parking lot and it was really good to see them. Sometime soon I think we need to invite them over.

PPS. Argent is so fucking wise and amazing and he said something to me yesterday that he probably wouldn’t want me to share but that I will cherish always. Thank you so much for being my friend. I am not worthy. <3

PPPS.

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I finished Argent’s painting on Saturday afternoon but I’m going to post about it last so it still remains a surprise for him when he gets it in the mail so….

…ARGENT, DON’T LOOK AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST!

Blake and the kids left for Militiagan on Monday morning and my time alone has been both interesting and bittersweet.

Monday afternoon I started watching that stupid Red Riding Hood movie with Amanda Seyfried BECAUSE Amanda Seyfried is in it and she’s like, the embodiment of one of my girls but I got bored halfway through, turned it off and decided to have a nap. This was at about 4:30pm. Well when I woke up, from a nightmare about being in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter with a serial killer on the loose, the house was pitch black because it was still light out when I went to bed and it didn’t occur to me to turn on any lights before I laid down. So I laid there in bed, in the pitch dark, listening to the wind and the heat register in my room making ticking, knocking sounds as the metal cooled from the furnace being on and I freaked myself right the fuck out because I was convinced there was a serial killer casing the house. Then the goddamn dogs started freaking out and barking in my office, which they do when someone’s at the door. I was practically crying by this point and it took me 20 minutes after the dogs calmed down to convince myself it was okay to leave my bed and go turn on all the lights and close the living room curtains.

I’ve been carrying my pink, aluminum baseball bat around with me in every room I go to ever since and I’ve only been letting the dogs out one at a time because I figure if there IS a serial killer out there, the logical thing for him to do is to poison the dogs so I have less protection right? So if I only let them out one at a time, theoretically he’d only poison or kill one of them so I’d be left with the other for protection. DO NOT FUCK WITH MY LOGIC, PLEASE! IT IS KEEPING ME SANE!

On Tuesday I woke up in a lot of pain in my pancreatic region, the same pain I had when we went to the ER a few weeks ago. I took all my drugs in the morning, including the morphine, plus a handful of Tylenol 1s and that didn’t help. By 1:30pm it was time to take more morphine, so I did and also took more Tylenol 1s plus a mega strength Ibuprofen. That didn’t help. Then I took my last Gravol and that DID help so I got worried about what I would do if the pain came back and I didn’t have any Gravol to take so I messaged Ronny to see if they would come keep me company that night and if they would bring Gravol with them but he wasn’t replying so finally at about 4:30pm, I called Alex and explained what was going on and she said they’d come over around 6:30pm for dinner because I was in the process of making beef stew in the crock pot. She said picking me up Gravol would be no big deal and so they came over at around 6:30pm as promised, I took more of the Gravol they brought me and I felt totally fine.

We ate beef stew and watched Glee, which I’d never seen before and I’ll probably never see again because it was stupidity on a scale I couldn’t even comprehend and I think the stew turned out pretty okay. It wasn’t phenomenal but I liked it enough and was hungry enough to have one & a half bowls of it. Ronny and Alex only had one bowl each so I’m not sure if they were genuinely full or if they didn’t think it was so great and were just being polite haha (It won’t hurt my feelings if they didn’t like it, I used a mix.)

Then it was 9:00pm and time to watch their shows, New Girl and Raising Hope. Now one thing you need to know about me is that I traditionally can’t stand sitcoms. Especially ones from the past 10 years or so. Roseanne? Wicked show. Loved it. The Cosby Show? Television genius. Golden Girls? As Jax said the other day, “Betty White is a flawless human being.” I loved Blossom. My Name is Earl was pretty good. Love The Office. I can’t think of anything else I really watched that was a sitcom growing up. I watched a lot of one hour shows that were more drama or comedy than a sitcom like My So-Called Life and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Six Feet Under and those are the types of shows I prefer to this day.

Anyway, Raising Hope was just “blah” to me but New Girl was FANTASTIC. I love Zooey Deschanel in movies so I kinda figured I would like this show but I never knew when it was on or what channel and I didn’t really care enough to figure it all out. I didn’t realize it only started this fall and we’re only 11 episodes in. I thought it started last year and I didn’t really feel like catching up, y’know? But now that I’ve seen it and I’m in love, Blake will be d/ling all of the episodes that have aired so far and we’ll be keeping up with it because it’s great.

Another show that Kevin actually recommended to me is Up All Night with Christina Applegate. I’ve still only seen one episode of it, but it’s like New Girl in that it’s shot more like a movie than a TV show and what I saw was really really funny. (I forget what I saw now though. My mind is a like a sieve.) I think that one only started this fall too, but I don’t know when it’s on or what channel and it’s not OnDemand like New Girl is. (But they only have the last two episodes of New Girl OnDemand, which sucks, but we have a PVR so I can just record it.) Anyway, I think that’s a show I’m going to get Blake to d/l so we can catch up on it too.

Ronny and Alex left around 11pm I think? And then Blake called and we talked for a while about what he’d been doing in MI and then I stayed up until about 1am working on a painting (more on that later) but had to get up at the asscrack of dawn yesterday morning because stinky Cheryl left a message saying that she was going to be at my house at 8:30 in the goddamn morning. I really dislike Cheryl, she makes me get up early even though we’ve asked her not to (they’re supposed to work around OUR schedule), she never listens to me when I tell her that I need a strip of drape across the top of my dressing or the Hypafix tape they use will pull down because my belly hangs over and is heavy, and come unstuck and the whole dressing will fall off. (She listened to me yesterday morning though because she knew Blake wasn’t around to patch me up. She just likes rushing through my dressing and doing the bare minimum so she can get off of work early and leave Blake to do the drape. That’s my hunch, anyway.) Plus she reeks of cigarette smoke which she tries to cover up with perfume and it’s just friggin’ gross. I mean, she’s nice & all, but out of all the nurses I have, she’s the one I like the least. Siske’s my favourite because she’s just awesome, I can’t even explain how or why, she just is, Janice is next, she’s just so nice and bubbly and she has a great sense of humour, then there’s Blue, who’s brand new and doesn’t know how to do my dressing AT ALL (I really hope I don’t get her on Friday…) but she’s nice and funny and chatty and I just really like her. And then there’s Cheryl.

After Cheryl left yesterday morning, I was exhausted from staying up the night before, so I fell back asleep on the pull-out couch in the living room until about 10:30am, then I made and ate waffles, then I feel asleep again until noon and then I was up for the day. I watched The View and Ellen and Dr. Phil while I worked on this painting I’m doing. The painting is hard to explain, I guess it’s sort of a mandala of the sun, but my intention for it is to either photograph it or scan it and make prints of it to raise money for Squam. My dilemma is that I don’t know how to go about making prints and because I used glitter (of course), I’m not sure how well that’s going to print. I don’t know if I should take orders and then go to an actual printing place and print that many or if I should use a 3rd party service like Zazzle or CafePress. I’m thinking the latter would be a lot easier considering we’d have to *find* a printing place around here that does giclees (because if I’m going to go to an actual printer, that’s what I’d want) and do a test printing, so that’s one trip, then another trip to set up the printing and pay the money up front for them, then another trip to pick them up, then more trips if I sell any more and time is a really precious thing around here because I don’t drive and Blake has so little of it. So I guess I have to decide between Zazzle and CafePress and I’m going to have to order testers from them to see if the quality’s good enough to sell to the public. Do you think I should do products too? Like mugs and t-shirts and stuff? I suppose that question is best answered once you guys see the finished painting. Hrm.

My plan for today is to nap, since I got up at 5am, and then to watch movies while I finish this painting. Blake said I could order a pizza tonight, so I fully intend to do that even though I’ve been living on pizza products all week. Monday night I made a frozen pizza (which was disastrous, my god can I ever not cook), then yesterday I had Bagel Bites for lunch/dinner and I have Pilsbury Pizza Pops for lunch today and tomorrow. Right now, y’know, just to mix things up, I’m eating a chicken teriyaki TV dinner. Blake really needs to come home so I’m not eating absolute crap. I feel like garbage from eating so much processed junk. I mean, I *love* microwaveable junk, but only sometimes, not as my main diet.

So, Argent’s painting…

ARGENT, STOP READING NOW!

Argent’s painting is a disaster. :o( It gave me trouble from day one, right up until the very bitter end. I think I explained the beginning but I’ll go over it again in case I didn’t.

Argent plays the lottery so I intended to make him a lottery fairy and I succeeded at that, but I had him send me old lottery tickets, which happened to be black, white and pink, so the painting’s colour scheme was pink and blue. (I added the blue so it wouldn’t be as girly, but in the end you could barely tell there was any blue in it.) I went through TWO canvases trying to glue the lottery tickets on as a background because my exacto knife went through them when I tried to trim the excess off the edges, so I switched to wood.

When I was done with the background, you couldn’t even tell there were lottery tickets in there but I figured that was okay, I could just use the tickets as the fairy’s skirt. Well, that didn’t quite turn out as intended either. When I used matte gel medium to adhere the sparkly overlay across the skirt, it totally wiped out all the numbers so all that remained was the pink strip across the top. *head desk*

Then I spent a million hours doing the lettering. They were stick-on letters, I didn’t do them by hand, but they didn’t stand out so I had to make a paste of white glitter and acrylic glazing liquid and a bit of water and I had to VERY carefully smoosh it next to and in between the letters, then let it dry over night and then once it was dry, I had to sand it so it looked like an outer glow. I think I was successful at that in the end, but it was a total pain in the ass to do and I was damn lucky that I thought to do that because it wasn’t planned.

But then this bitch of a painting bit my ass pretty hard when it came time to varnish her. I usually use Micron Pigma pens to do my outlining, usually an 02 or an 005. This time I decided to use an 08. The difference between the two is just how big the point is, an 02 is finer than an 08 and a 005 is finer than both of them. I wanted a thicker line, so I used the 08 and I left it for 3 days, doing other things, so it should have been completely dry and “cured” so to speak.

Well, when I went to brush on the varnish, the ink smudged, ruining the entire painting. I can’t sell a painting with a flaw like that, so I sent a letter with it to Argent saying that I couldn’t accept payment for it because of the flaw and that he could just have it.

I was really  upset about this. I worked so damn hard on that painting and it was such a pain in the ass to do and I was really counting on that money to help pay for Squam, but I just couldn’t, in good conscience, sell it like that. Because Argent’s my friend, I was only going to charge him $250 for it which is the same price as almost all of my paintings, even though it was custom and I normally charge a more for that. That would have dented my Squam fund pretty nicely, it would have covered my deposit and then some, but at the same time, it’s not like I’m really out anything but my time and the cost of the letters ($20 because I had to buy two packs to get both colours), everything else was stuff I already had. The stars are pretty expensive because they come in a kit and ONLY in a kit (12 colours I think), so it kinda sucks that I’m now out of white ones but it’s okay because I really do think stars are lucky and that this painting is lucky and that Argent’s going to win the powerball EVENTUALLY because he has this painting. It was such a pain in the ass that I figure it HAS to be lucky! haha

Anyway, I took some pics of it before I sent it off (oh that was another thing; I had it all wrapped up and addressed when I suddenly remembered that not only did I forget to take pics of it beforehand, I also forget to take pics of MYSELF with it, which was my new year’s resolution…so I slapped on some makeup and Blake took some goofy pics of me laughing because he was making fun of the fact that I take pics on burst all the time…you had to be there…):

I’m trying to train myself – and I think I’ve maybe mentioned this, at least I know I have on Twitter – not to let things be “precious”. Meaning that I like to hoard things and I’m afraid of wasting materials or making mistakes. For example, I would normally only use one jewel on a painting because I only have so many in my stash. On Argent’s painting I used five: three stars for her necklace, one for her bindi (that one was a Swarovski crystal, actually) and another for her wand. This painting was definitely an exercise in things not being precious, believe me.

Anyway, here are the goofy pics. I look like shit (keep in mind, I’ve lost a LOT of my hair from being sick), be kind:

THE END.

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PS. Blake and I got our sketchbooks for The Sketchbook Project out in time! He finished every page of his, I didn’t. My mom didn’t finish hers either, I don’t think, but I know John did. My friends Stephy and Alicia also finished theirs, who else participated this year?