Blake just got back from checking the mail. Did one of you get me a gift subscription for BUST magazine? For reals? I FUCKING LOVE YOU, WHOEVER YOU ARE! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! <3 <3 <3

Hullo internets. I am typing this post instead of having a nap (I tried) or working on my painting (I tried that too) because really, I don’t have a whole lot else to do at the moment and the things I do have to do, I don’t wanna do, so here I am.

I don’t know what it is about this painting that makes me not want to work on it. It’s been sitting on my coffee table since the end of September half-finished and I sit here and I stare at it and as I’m trying to fall asleep, I think about it, but there doesn’t seem to be any goddamn resolution to the sucker that it just sits there some more. I’ve shown pictures, it’s the one I’ve dubbed “The Two Sunnies”. The background is done, the two girls are done, now I need to add the elements to tie the whole thing together, sign it, slap a couple of coats of varnish on it and it’d be done, but I still can’t seem to find those slippery elements to tie the whole thing together. I keep thinking about doing hearts hanging from strings like I’ve done in older paintings, with the happy site being bright magenta hearts and the sad side being black hearts with skulls but for some reason I keep rejecting that idea. In the beginning I wanted to add the sentences “Je suis heureuse”/”Je suis triste” above their heads but that wouldn’t leave very much room for embellishment of any kind and I think that would make the painting too plain. Just now I was thinking that it’d be cool to glue a bunch of pills, like stars, to the left (happy) side and have them taper off on the right (sad) side but my pills aren’t the right colours, Blake would probably kill me for using my pills to do that since he pays for them and I don’t even have enough to do that anyway. Yeah, I could do paper pills but there’s no fun in that so the pill idea is officially dead.

I’m giving this painting one more week to come together and if it doesn’t, then it’s going in the closet to be forgotten about while I work on something else. What is that something else? Why Hester Prynne and Pearl, of course, from The Scarlet Letter, but I have to read the book first, which I’m currently working on. I guess the book no longer holds a copyright so it’s available online for free HERE if anyone, like me, has never read it but wants to. What I’m about to say will no doubt make some of you cringe, but I really really don’t like old books and what I mean by that is that I find books that are written with “older language” really hard to follow. I even tried to read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf which isn’t even that old, but the language bored me so I never did finish it (sorry Raya!). The Scarlet Letter hasn’t been too bad so far, it’s really only when the characters are speaking that the language gets “old”, but it’s still probably the oldest book I’ve tried to read, not counting Shakespeare (*snore*) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It was written in 1850.

Anyway, the book’s been interesting so far. I only started Friday night though and didn’t have time to read any of it last night, so I’m only on chapter 6.

Last night Blake and I went to see 2012 which was…well, disaster-porn at its finest. The plot was totally cheesy and you had to leave reality and science at the door, but I’m glad we saw it on a big screen rather than renting it and watching it on my 13″ TV. The kids stayed with Wayne & Judy while we went and they also had a good time, especially because Courtney had a friend sleeping over so there were the 4 of them.

Today I went over to spend some time with Judy and get her set up with Gmail and Facebook and she told me that it was verified, that both of their dogs have fleas…which is something I told them 2 months ago when Lily, the golden retriever, started scratching herself bald at the base of her tail. So, since I have two bottles of flea shampoo, I brought one over for Judy and somehow she sweet-talked me into helping her bathe the dogs. She was soaked, I was soaked, the dogs were soaked, the bathroom was soaked, the hallway was soaked, the kitchen was soaked, but at least the dogs don’t have fleas anymore. I also brought over my trimmers and clipped their nails, which were really bad. Both of their dogs have white nails, so I was fine with doing them and I got them really nice and short, but I won’t do our own dogs’ nails because Hoover’s are black and I’m too freaked out about cutting the quick and I figure if Blake’s doing 1, he might as well do the other.

Anyway, after the dogs were groomed, so to speak, I helped Judy vacuum the carpet, wash all of their bedding and then put the beds back together once everything was dry. AND I didn’t have my eggs this morning so I did all of this running on empty. In fact yesterday I had my eggs for breakfast but then all I had for the rest of the day was popcorn at the movies and I keep wondering how this is going to affect my weight loss progress this week. Oh well, I’ll do better the rest of the week and as long as I don’t gain, I’m golden.

Tomorrow night is the Leonid Meteor Shower and NASA has this neat little thing that shows you when the height of it is for your viewing area. Unfortunately the peak time for us is at like, 6am Tuesday morning and while it’s supposedly going to be the best showing of the Leonids in our lifetime, I’m not sure about waking up at 5am and getting the kids up to go outside in the cold to watch. I’m seriously considering it though! I’m gonna take it up with them tomorrow after school and see if they want to. I figure I can make everyone travel mugs of hot chocolate and we can dress warmly and watch from the swings at the park across the street where there are no streetlights. We should get a pretty decent show from there, if the calculator is to be believed and the kids are up for it. Madison will probably be up for it, I’m not so sure about Wes and I’m really doubting Blake’ll be into it at all. I’ve been wrong before though.

I think I’m finally getting the plague that Blake & the kids had last week. My throat is sore, my glands are swollen and I’m pretty sure I had a fever earlier. :o/

Alright, it’s time for me to stop typing now and find something relatively productive to do. Maybe I’ll just sketch out Hester Prynne and continue ignoring this painting. Maybe I’ll just go to fucking bed.

Ooooooh my god I’m all over the place right now. See, Blake and I have these marathon conversations about life and creativity and expression that are both brain numbing and inspiring at the same time. I love when we talk like this, but unfortunately it’s almost always late at night and by the time we’re done, we’re both exhausted. He’s gone to bed but my brain’s going a mile a minute.

Here’s the thing: I feel like I’ve kind of been in a rut for maybe the past year. Being on proper meds and getting my bipolar disorder under control (more or less) has caused me to change some of my habits. For example, I’m not longer hypergraphic. Prior to getting my meds in order, I would go through a paper notebook usually once a month and I would literally spend like, 4 hours a day just writing writing writing. But now I don’t do that anymore. I still keep a paper journal but I only write in it maybe twice a month and each entry only ends up being a 2 page, bare bones account of what’s happening in my life at the moment rather than a sweeping saga like they were before. Likewise, my blog entries have become a lot more sanitized than they’ve ever been before and Blake & I agreed tonight that that’s somewhat of a problem because I write to process things and if I’m not writing, I’m not processing things, I’m keeping it all inside and that’s A) Not good for me, and B) Not me. At all.

The problem is that for some reason I began self-censoring myself, and rather harshly, and I don’t really know why I started doing that and now it’s gotten to the point where I’m completely frustrated by it. Blogging is like, the fucking wild wild West and there aren’t really any established rules on what you can and cannot write about or more importantly WHO you can and cannot write about. All of that is really left up to the writer and over the past year or so I’ve had trouble reconciling what’s right and what’s wrong as far as what I can write about that’s happening in my life.

Certain people – well, really only one – have asked me specifically not to write about them, not to even mention them, and I’ve honoured that…but there’s a “but” coming. The person who specifically asked me not to write about them no longer deserves that kind of respect and as it turns out, never really did in the first place. With the exception of that one person, my policy has always been that if you are a part of my life, I’m going to write about you at some point, plain & simple, because to do otherwise is self-censorship and that makes me a sad panda, it really does. The other policy I’ve always had with this whole blogging thing is that if you don’t want to be portrayed as a douche, don’t do douchey things. I mean, I think that too is also a pretty simple concept, don’t you agree?

So self-censorship…obviously there has to be some but I think I drew my line in such a way that it left me very little wiggle room and I just don’t write the way I used to and I hate that. I like being an open book, I like being a ridiculously honest person, I like that part of me and this week I realized that I’ve lost a lot of that and dammit, I want it back. My moods are stable, my meds are working, my light therapy is working, I’m making progress in so many areas as far as immersion therapy, it’s time to reclaim certain aspects of myself I put on hold for so long.

For example, a large part of the reason I left Camwhores 2 years ago was because I wasn’t stable and I didn’t really trust myself to have an outlet to instantly broadcast anything I wanted to. Near the end there, I was sad one day and I posted a picture of myself crying – for the first time in my (at the time) 7 year camming history. That was when I realized that I needed to reign myself in and get better before I could go on. I hope that makes sense.

During that time, as most of you know if you’ve been reading along, I stopped writing about certain things. For a few months there my entire Live Journal was just Loud Twitter updates because that’s all I could handle at the time. I stopped seeing the world in the unique way I normally would.

But I’m okay now, or close to it. I’m stronger. I trust myself and my own judgment and it’s time to jump on the floor and bang on the ceiling  with a broom (as my shrink puts it) and maybe shake some things up. Wake up my little readership and get them writing again themselves as so many seem to have abandoned their blogs and Live Journal for Facebook and Twitter. Have opinions. Talk to me.

I want to write about the things that are actually happening in my life again. Y’know the expression “dance like no one’s watching”? Well I’m going to write like no one’s reading. Until tonight I had so much fear and I don’t even know where it came from. I had fear about writing about Wayne & Judy in case Judy’s daughter Ashley was reading and her interpretation in telling them about it would be negative. I had fear about writing about my mother for fear of her getting pissed off at me. I had fear about writing about Blake’s mother because I know she reads and she’s the one who asked me (through Blake) specifically never to even mention her online. But in talking to Blake tonight, we sort of found the problem. When I first started writing publicly about my life, the internet was still relatively small and no one I really knew, except for Blake and some of the Scratching Post kids, was reading the things I wrote. And then my mom got online. And then Blake’s mom started reading. And now Blake’s co-workers are reading. And with all of these people reading, I kind of froze, almost like stage fright, and now I’m in this stupid rut of mine.

But Blake and I talked about it and he said to me that who is he to tell me what I can and can’t write about? And who is anyone else to tell me the same? People have to trust my judgment and if they don’t like what’s being written about them they either have to, as I said, stop doing douchey things, or start doing things to portray themselves in a better light. All I do is write what I see and feel, I simply write the truth. If I want to tell you that last night Wayne & Judy drank 28 beer and Wayne was so drunk he pissed all over the floor and toilet seat, well dammit, I’m going to because that’s what happened. If Wayne doesn’t want me writing about something like that, then don’t fucking do it. (Although honestly, I doubt Wayne would care and the incident was actually really funny. Plus they don’t even have internet and wouldn’t read a post even this long so I don’t think they’d see it or care if they did.)

So, starting today, right now, I’m going to once again be more open and honest about the happenings of my life and that includes everyone in it. People who are truly my friends and really know me will totally understand and be totally on board with this, others…well they may not be but that’s just too damn bad. I’m done censoring myself out of respect for people who don’t deserve that respect. What am I talking about? Well, keep reading, here’s where things start getting  juicy.

But where to even start? I guess the biggest thing happening in our lives right now, or at least the biggest conflict is Blake’s mother, Brooke. Right now Blake and Brooke are battling via e-mail over comments she made about me when Blake was in Michigan last month. See, when I first met Brooke – 8 years ago now – I thought she was pretty cool but that facade quickly dissipated and I found myself in a monster-in-law type of situation. I don’t even know where it all began, really, this has been an issue that long, but maybe I should start with after Blake & I got married because I don’t feel like telling the tale of our actual wedding which neither of our mothers were invited to.

After Blake and I got married and I was pregnant with Wes, Brooke would call the house constantly and if I picked up the phone it would either be something inane like what size of clothes Madison wore because she was out shopping at the time and saw something Madison might look cute in – despite the fact that we’d told her Madison’s size at least 5 times prior to that and strangely these cute things for Madison never seemed to appear. In other words, these calls were just calls to call. To this day I don’t even know what their purpose was. Other times when I’d pick up the phone, she’d give me all kinds of bad and unwanted advice and would basically tell me that I wasn’t doing enough as a wife and mother, so I stopped answering the phone.

But here’s the thing: I’ve never really been a phone person, that’s just not how I communicate, so it was a special effort to answer the phone for her in the first place so to be put down just about every time I did, didn’t really encourage me to keep taking the calls. See what I’m saying?

So once I stopped taking the calls – and again, keep in mind that I don’t take calls from pretty much anyone – that’s when she’d start calling Blake on his cell and complain that I never answered the phone. Well gee lady, I wonder why. Blake explained to her that I’m not just a phone person – for YEARS – but the complaints didn’t stop until about two years ago. Without going into huge detail (maybe I will one day, just not tonight), about two years ago Blake and Brooke had basically an e-mail war that lasted almost a year. I can’t even remember how it got resolved off the top of my head, but it did and ever since, I’ve done my best to continue being nothing but nice to this woman. I answer her e-mails, we send each other Growing Gifts and things like that on Facebook with little notes attached and while it all seems like minor communication on the surface, it’s actually huge for me and here I thought after 6 years of her flat out disliking me and flat out saying that I wasn’t good enough for her son and that Blake wasn’t living up to his full potential because of me etc. that she was finally starting to get to know me and maybe even liking me. In fact, I think it was her last visit last fall where she gave me a gift of these neat tin ladies with great quotes on them that I have hanging in my office. I thought that after all these years, we were finally starting to make progress and maybe even bond a little bit.

But then Blake’s cousin’s wife died and he had to go to Michigan for the funeral last month and on one of the nights he was there, his mom got two drinks into her and just let loose saying all kinds of negative things about me. Want a list? Here it is:

• *Everyone* has mental illness, the people she knows who are mentally ill are worse off than me and they can do things I can’t, like work. (“my whole family was mentally ill and half were institutionalized and we could all work. . .”)

• She’s scared I’m taking advantage of Blake. That I “make” him do everything. (When in reality I don’t “make” him do anything and while he does do more than I do, I don’t exactly sit at home and eat bon bons either. I mean, who did she think was looking after the kids, the house and the dogs while Blake was in Michigan?)

• She claims she doesn’t read my site or anything but she’s pissed because I apparently made a blog post where I said that because I stay home and I’m an artist I’m better than people who work. (“she said that you were basically saying how much better you are than people who get up with their kids every day and how much better you are than people who have jobs. She basically said you were saying you’re an artist and anyone who works or takes care of kids all day is a sell out and not as good as you”. This one baffles me BECAUSE THAT SOUNDS SOOOO MUCH LIKE SOMETHING I’D SAY, so I asked Blake to get more info but there was none to be had.)

• Blake said she said, “I may have neglected to tell Joyce the part about you not wanting the present because you wanted the kids treated as equals” or something like that. This is a long dead issue but Joyce is Blake’s mom’s best friend and she wanted to buy a savings bond for Blake’s “first born child” and we freaked because we want our kids treated as equals and Wes was NOT Blake’s first child. Blake’s mom hounded us forEVER about getting Wes an American SSN so they could buy bonds for him, but Joyce supposedly had no intentions of getting any for Madison, so we cut her out of our lives and said thanks but no thanks. According to Blake: “Joyce never knew we had an issue with anything, so we were just ungrateful fucks.”

• She wants to get our kids AMERICAN FUCKING PASSPORTS for Xmas. When I asked why, Blake said “she thinks that being Canadian will hold them back in life, but if they have official US docs they will magically be better off”.

For the last two years I have been nothing but nice to this woman. I’ve met her half way as much as I’m capable of. I reply to every non-fwd e-mail she sends me. I write on her Facebook wall. I send her Growing Gifts. I used to play Scrabble with her on Facebook until Blake told me she uses a program to cheat. I do way more for her than she does for me as far as meeting someone halfway and this is the shit we get? It’s obvious that she still has a deep dislike for me, the same dislike she’s had since day one, meaning that all of the stuff we’ve been doing together that I thought was progress was all meaningless and phony on her end. Here I was being genuine and trying my best to be what I thought she wanted me to be but the whole time she was reading my site and feeling negative about all the things I do. She was a troll, by my definition, she just doesn’t leave comments (to my knowledge).

Worse, she seems to think she has to “enlighten” Blake on what a horrible person I am because he’s apparently too stupid or naive to see it and that’s completely insulting to him.

Again – and I cannot stress this enough – until this very moment I have been nothing but kind and humble towards Blake’s mother. When she cornered me in her kitchen a few years ago (the last time we went to Michigan) to literally tell me that Blake is such & such a way and that I’m holding him back from his true potential, I took it in stride and never fought back or stood up for myself or anything. I just took it. (I’m not good with confrontation.) She pulled a similar move in my own kitchen a few years ago as well and it was the same thing, I just said something neutral and walked out of the room. I have never been hostile or negative or anything like that towards this woman EVER and as I said, within the past two years here I was being honest and thoughtful and trying to build a relationship and the second she gets Blake alone, she tears me down.

I think Blake was more upset about the things she said than I was. I was hurt by them, yes, because I honestly thought we were building a relationship here and her actions were genuine and when I found out they were just an act, it stung because I was making an honest effort…and it apparently got me nowhere. When Blake got home, he said that he’d let the dust settle from the funeral and when things had calmed down, he’d e-mail his mom and settle this shit once and for all. I don’t know how many e-mails have flown back and forth at this point, but the first e-mail went out last weekend and they’re still battling it out so who knows when this is going to be over or if it’s ever going to be over. I mean godammit, Blake and I have been together for 8 fucking years, we have a solid relationship and a happy marriage that works, I’m here to stay. At some point she’s going to have to accept that and accept me or we’re going to have no choice but to live our life without her – and that’s pretty much what Blake’s been saying in the e-mails from what I understand.

What he’s leaving out though, is that she also needs to accept Blake for who he is. Blake has a job he loves in a field he loves and he even acknowledges the fact that he wouldn’t be where he is right now – and be happy – without me. Blake’s mom, according to Blake, expects him to have made his first million by now and have a trophy wife who will host Superbowl parties, attend dinner meetings and have a power career of her own. While we’re happy and accept each other for who we are, we have Blake’s mom who sees both of us as nothing but a disappointment.

And did you know that when I was in the hospital in 2006 because I was having a psychotic episode Brooke’s advice to Blake was to pack up the kids, drive down to her house in Michigan and fucking LEAVE ME? I mean what reality does this woman even live in?

She says she doesn’t even know me because she’s only met me about a dozen times, but at the same time, she’s been reading my site since Blake and I got together and I’ve most definitely met her more than a dozen times and while she claims she hasn’t gotten to know me well enough to love me, she’s certainly displayed that she’s gotten to know me well enough to dislike me and feel negatively towards me.

Blake’s been saying this the whole time we’ve been married: that there is nothing I can do to please his mother because I’m simply not the woman he was supposed to marry. Right now he’s told me to stop even trying to make an effort with her because the two years I  did try obviously got me nowhere so what’s the point? He says his mother needs to examine her feelings toward me and resolve them on her own before we can move forward and until she does that, I’ll never get anywhere with her.

I don’t know how long this is going to take. I don’t know how long this e-mail war is going to last. All I know is that I’m staying the fuck out of it and leaving it between them because there’s no place for me in this discussion even though it’s pretty much about me. I don’t know what the right thing to do is anymore – I thought I was doing it! I’d rather do nothing than misstep and at this point in time I simply give up.

The other aspect of this is that Brooke and her husband Charlie want to come up and visit but until this situation is resolved somehow that simply can’t happen. How can I have someone in my home who feels so hostile toward me? Why should I have to put up with being put down in my own comfort zone? The fact is, I don’t have to and I’m not going to and Blake completely agrees.

To expand upon that topic, according to Blake, Brooke and Charlie don’t like coming up here because they get bored. Well if you’re so bored and your grandchildren aren’t entertaining enough, then don’t fucking come up! In a recent phone conversation with his mom, which sort of turned into a fight – while he was at WORK – she said that Charlie would like to do home improvement projects with us and got all offended when Blake said that if we needed to work on the house at all, we’d probably enlist the help of Phil (my dad) because he’s only an hour & a half away and he does this shit for a living, every single day and has a truck if we need lumber or drywall and a million other reasons. Well Brooke took great offense to this for some reason and started a fight about it, saying how Charlie (her husband, if that wasn’t clear) put in someone’s window in something like, an hour or whatever and Blake was just like “where the fuck is this even coming from?” I mean the fact of the matter is, we don’t really DO home improvement projects and we’re certainly not going to call on Charlie to drive 5 hours up here to like, paint our living room ceiling or tile our shower. We’re not going to start a home improvement project when we have company coming (them) and we don’t have the money to just start a home improvement project when they want to come up just so Charlie will be entertained. It just doesn’t make any sense.

But where did this all come from? Well I talked to Blake shortly after his mom had called and he told me about it and I told him exactly where it was coming from: that day or the day before I’d made a post about us moving on Live Journal and how we’d need to fix up our house a bit to sell it and that Wayne had offered to help. THAT is where it all came from, I’m fairly certain. But the thing Blake and I both wonder is: does Charlie even know she’s saying all of this stuff on his behalf? We kind of doubt it. Charlie, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell and Blake agrees, is a pretty laid back, go with the flow, sit & chat kinda guy. It was certainly news to both of us that he suddenly wanted to help us drywall our bathroom because he’s bored out of his skull when he comes up otherwise.

The other issue with them coming up, according to these phone calls Blake gets from his mother while he’s at work, is that it’s too expensive. See, they can’t stay at our house because 1) Our house is very small and our futon isn’t very comfortable, 2) Charlie’s apparently allergic to our dogs and 3) I don’t really want to be alone in the house with them when Blake & the kids go to school and work because his mom corners me, talks down to me and puts me down, so that means they have to stay at a hotel or do what they did last time they came up (for a week) and get a time share somewhere. And this is apparently where the boredom sets in. While the kids are at school and Blake’s at work, they’re left to their own devices and they get bored. I don’t really know what I can do about that. If it were me, I’d do some Googling to see what was around and find something to do, but by the sounds of it, that thought’s never crossed Brooke’s mind. She’d rather complain that they’re bored.

So if it’s boring and too expensive, then I say don’t fucking come up! Plain & simple. If it’s such a chore, such a bother for you to come up to spend money only to not have a good time, then why bother? I mean I don’t have a solution to either problem and neither does Blake. I’m sorry my house isn’t bigger? I’m sorry Charlie’s allergic to my dogs? I’m sorry our kids aren’t entertaining enough for you? I mean what are we supposed to say to that?

What comes to mind is what my mother used to say to me when I was a kid and complained of boredom. She said, rather nastily I might add, “I’m not your entertainer!” and dammit I’m not. If you can’t keep yourself occupied, that isn’t my problem. Complaining about it to us isn’t going to solve your issue, you have to be proactive and go see what’s out there or I dunno, stay home!

I don’t know how to move forward from here. Everything is so convoluted at this point that I worry there’s no turning back. The harder Blake pushes the subject, I think the more his mother is going to resent me, but at the same time, I think he has no other choice than to bring this all up to the surface and address it rather than smile while staring daggers, know what I mean?

And of course Brooke is going to read this post and probably flip out but at this point I don’t even care. Blake doesn’t either. He told me tonight to write whatever I felt I needed to write and I think that’s what I’ve done here, as far as his mother is concerned. Until this whole thing blows over or runs its course or does whatever it’s going to do, I’m just gonna lay low, observe and, for the most part, keep my damn mouth shut on the subject. I wish I had a crystal ball so I knew how this was going to play out, but I don’t and I hate not knowing what to expect, I hate not knowing what to do. Is this post going to make anything better? Definitely not, but I’m sick and tired of pretending this aspect of my life doesn’t exist when it’s been a problem for the entire 8 years Blake and I have been together. It’s a constant drain on both of us and a huge source of anxiety for me. Every time I even think of Blake getting another e-mail from his mom, I have to pop an Ativan because my stomach knots up.

But enough about THAT drama I’ve said what I need to say right now and that’s just what is going on and yeah, Brooke will be making an appearance in my writings again at some point, but that’s enough for now. In the meantime, wanna know what else is going on in my life? Well my friend Jesse has pretty much abandoned me. I’ve sent him e-mails, I’ve written on his Facebook wall several times, I’ve sent him messages on Yahoo, I’ve tried to add him to Last.fm but he won’t add me back….I haven’t seen him since like, the winter and I don’t even know why this is happening. Blake’s talked to him and Jesse claims he’s not mad at Blake or myself, he’s just been “busy” and “doesn’t get online very often anymore”.

Blake went over to Jesse’s house on Saturday to retrieve the CDs he’d borrowed from us because I’m so convinced he’s distancing himself from us on purpose I wanted to get them back before he moved or something and he was apparently all sunshine and lollipops. He said he’d get online and e-mail me, but so far that hasn’t happened and I don’t expect it will.

I don’t like thinking bad things about my friends, but the only reason I can think of for Jesse blowing us off like this is the fact that I don’t smoke pot anymore, so I can’t be his stoner buddy and there’s no smoking in our house anymore so we can’t sit around smoking and talking like we used to. He used to come over at least twice a week, I’d talk to him usually every day on Yahoo, what happened?

The last time I talked to him was on Yahoo at the end of June because I asked him to come to the Hypercube event with us and he said he’d ask for that day off and we haven’t spoken since despite my attempts. Something’s going on there and I don’t know what and while it used to bother me, I’m at the point where I guess Jesse’s been moved into the “acquaintance” category and out of the “friend” category for the time being and that’s why I wanted all my CDs back. It was a “closure” kinda deal for me. Now Jesse can fuck off and do his own thing and I’m not even going to worry about it anymore. If I see him in the grocery store, I’ll talk to him, but I’m not gonna chase him down anymore or make myself crazy wondering what I did wrong. I’m just going to take him at his word that I didn’t do anything wrong and leave it at that.

In other news, Alex and I had our first fight last week. Here’s what happened: Blip.fm posted on Twitter excessively drives me nuts and Ronny is the worst offender on my list. But I love him so I just put up with it and grumble to myself when he’s on a Blip marathon and scroll past them or ignore Twitter until he’s gone to bed. But one day last week, I checked my Facebook live feed and there, from Ronny were a bunch of Blips. Now here’s the other thing about Ronny and I, for some reason Ronny tends to bring out the snark in me, so I commented on one of the Blips on Facebook and said something like “Are you seriously going to make me put up with these here too?” thinking he was posting tweets to Facebook and not realizing it was a Blip application that I could block. I thought in order to not see them, I would have to block Ronny altogether and I didn’t want to have to do that.

So anyway, I got busy talking to Blake or doing something, I can’t remember, and when I opened up TweetDeck, here were these bitchy, passive-aggressive Blips from Alex that were most definitely directed at me. So me, always one to make matters better because I’m talented like that, I posted a Blip of my own…of the Bloodhound Gang’s “I Hope You Die” and mimicked one of Alex’s passive-aggressive Blips in my message to which Alex replied “……..” and then “You’re a real bitch sometimes,” or something to that effect. I replied with “At least I’m honest,” and then a few second later I said something about how I’d rather be a bitch upfront than a passive-aggressive one and that’s when Alex announced that she was too “tired and cranky for this bull” and that was the last I heard from her on Twitter.

So after that I checked my e-mail and there were Facebook notifications where Ronny and Alex had commented on my original Facebook Blip comment saying that it was an app and I could block it and that no one was “forcing” me to do anything. I commented back, even though both of them had gone to bed, that I hadn’t realized it was an app, that I thought I’d have to block Ronny altogether and I apologized for the misunderstanding. Then, later that night I got thinking about it and while yes, Alex was a bitch too, I started it, so I decided to be the first to apologize so we could forget this ever happened. So, I texted Alex with “I’m sorry. I love you.” at like, 1am so she’d get it in the morning and when I woke up the next day, there was a text on my phone from Alex saying the same thing. Everything’s cool now and I think we just caught each other on bad days, but it was just a weird situation because Alex and I had never fought before and I’m glad we have the kind of relationship where we can just apologize to each other and let bygones be bygones. I was proud of us that day. So many women love to let drama like that play out for as long as possible and make it snowball and I really dig that neither she nor I are that type of woman. Or maybe we are a little bit, but at least we both value our friendship enough to just step back and be cool about things. I love Alex.

Saturday night, which those who follow me on Twitter already know, Blake & I went over to Wayne & Judy’s to play euchre and drink a little bit…or in their case, drink a lot. Apparently they started drinking at around 6pm, we showed up at 9pm. Blake & I don’t really drink that much or that often, so he had a 6-pack of beer and I had two 4-packs of Mike’s Hard lemonade. Wayne’s one of these guys who thinks men are superior to women so he always wants it to be men against women and…Judy & I beat them 5 games-0. Wayne knows the game now and at least 3 times renegged and once he decided to go alone on a hand that had NO trump whatsoever. He said “Blake, ya gotta trust me, this hand is ours,” and Blake was like “Wayne, if you don’t have the best hand ever and win this, I’m gonna punch you,”…and then it turned out he had NO trump while Blake had a hand that was almost entirely trump. Since Blake couldn’t really punch Wayne, I did. Later that night, as Wayne got more and more drunk, he wobbled upstairs and when he came down he started bitching at Judy that they need to change the plate cover on the light switch in the bathroom because when he’s drunk he can never find the switch to turn it on. (Their light switch cover is bumpy and has frogs on it and it makes the switch a bit recessed.) And then he tells us that as he was peeing in the dark, all of a sudden he started peeing on the seat. So we were all like, “why didn’t you have the seat up?” and he slurred “oh I never do that, I don’t have to” and I was like, “well if you’re pissing on the seat then apparently you do!” None of us were sure if he was serious or not about peeing on the seat, so all 4 of us went up there to investigate and lo & behold there was piss all over the seat and a huge puddle all over the floor. I don’t think he actually got ANY in the bowl. From that point on, especially because they have a cracked, squishy toilet seat, I went over to my house to pee. But it didn’t really matter because by that point Wayne was so drunk he was practically passing out at the kitchen table, so shortly after the bathroom incident, Blake and I left to go back to our house and while I tried to drink the rest of my Mike’s Hard and actually get drunk like everyone else, I just wasn’t into it so I dumped mine. We tried to play a game of Monopoly but I was just too tired and not really feeling well so we packed it up and I went to bed instead.

Sunday I was hung over which I think is totally unfair since I didn’t even get drunk the night before. Because I felt like crap, I basically just slept most of the day and rested up for the Mad Men finale (which was excellent).

And then of course, after Mad Men was over, Blake and I started our marathon conversation on blogging, creativity and life in general which brings us back full circle. The fact of the matter is, I’m not painting right now because I’m discouraged but that doesn’t mean I can’t be creative in other ways. I’ve got a short story bordering on a novella sitting here that I could be working on. I don’t know if anything will ever come of it, but it’s here waiting for me to write it. I have a million stories from my past left to tell and a new audience to tell some of the ones I’ve told before to. There’s no reason for me to remain in this rut and to become stagnant, waiting around for something to happen.

Another thing my mom used to say about boredom was that only boring people get bored, and the thing is, I’m not boring, I have this wicked imagination to keep me entertained so I might as well use it.

And I think that’s all I have to say.

PS. This entry is 6300 words long.

PPS. This entry was supposed to be posted at about 3:30am but our ISP had an internet outage so that’s why it’s being posted this morning.

A new month of Buttercup begins today! Check it out! (Especially our hot ass cover. ;o))

Buttercup is an independent e-zine for persons seeking a female-focused atmosphere that celebrates diversity, individuality and creativity.
We launched September 1st!
Come join the party!

Lori-AnneCrittenden.com
A Simpler Time Facebook group
(updated more often than her site)

I always get really giddy after finishing a painting. Last night I finished the two I’ve been working on over the last several weeks and it was killing me waiting for the sun to come up so I could take them outside and take pictures of them to post for you all to see. Because I was so hasty in my picture taking and because, as we all know, I’m no art photographer, the colours are a little off and what’s actually pink may show up as more of a red on some people’s screens. This always happens when I use the metallic pink paint I use all the time (that I only have ONE bottle left of and they’re not making it anymore! DAMN YOU, AMERICANA!), usually it shows up as more of a red or magenta, especially on Mac screens (even my own), but I figure it’ll be especially reddish on some people’s screens today because I took these pictures at dawn when the sun’s a little bit red-toned to begin with.

Also, I re-sized the pictures a little bigger than I usually do so the detail shows up better, so click on any of the images to embiggen. (Both paintings are 12 x 16 inches, mixed media on gallery stretched canvas.)

The first painting I call “Binary Ballerina” and this is the one that may appear more red than pink, but I assure you, it’s very very pink and very very sparkly.

“Binary Ballerina”’s background is white, metallic pink, metallic silver and washed over with a LOT of silver sparkles that shimmer and shine like jewels beneath the triple thick gloss varnish. Her hair is a shiny metallic brown and the bodice of her dress is made from light metallic pink cardstock. The bottom of her dress is made of course tulle, like a true tutu and is finished at the waist with matching pink ribbon. Around her neck is a pearl necklace.

As for what she’s thinking…well, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who can read binary and those who can’t. Obviously this ballerina fits into the former category making her something of a…oh, what’s the word I’m thinking of? ;o)

The next painting is simply titled “Flower Girl” and obviously I painted her in the same vein as “Binary Ballerina” (with two more similar executions to come!).

“Flower Girl”’s background is crackled white, metallic (pearlized) white and metallic silver with a healthy wash of irridescent sparkles, which again, shine like diamonds beneath the triple thick gloss varnish. Her hair is painted with metallic “champagne gold” and her makeup is a custom mixed light pink metallic to compliment her metallic blue eyes. The bodice of her dress is made of white, finely glittered cardstock and the bottom is made of layers of fine white and silver tulle with silver ribbon at her waist. In her right hand she holds a basket of pink rose petals, which she scatters before the unseen bride. At her neck is a pink jeweled necklace.

As the unseen bride marries her prince charming, our young flower girl has other things on her mind. In my imagination she’s not Canadian, but American and it is my hope that when she becomes an adult, her world will be a more equal place. The triangle is again, not as red as it appears, it’s actually made of metallic magenta cardstock.

And finally, because I was paranoid that the sparkles wouldn’t show up in still images (as they tend not to, traditionally), I made a little video illustrating that detail. Please ignore my HORRIBLE voice and heavy breathing, I’d just literally run across the road and across a field to the park to utilize the bench and I was a little out of breath.

These paintings aren’t for sale yet and won’t be, I don’t think, until the other two in the series are finished, but let me warn you all now that I plan on selling these ones for a small fortune – unlike all the others – and I’ll tell you why:

• These paintings took me almost a month to make, not counting procrastination time. (With these kinds of paintings it’s all done in layers and it takes time for those layers to dry, bond, sew, whatever.)
• Certain materials, such as the pink metallic paint, are no longer available, making them somewhat precious.
• These are larger than previous works.
• These are ONE OF A KIND. There will never be prints of these paintings because the materials used make it impossible to get an accurate digital copy and thus, making prints is impossible. I’ve tried two different cameras and a scanner and the glitter and metallics just don’t translate so these ORIGINALS are all there will ever be. I reserve the right to repaint the same picture by hand, but truthfully, I hate repeating myself and even if I did, there would be differences and imperfections making another painting an original too.

I keep going back & forth on pricing so I don’t even want to give a ballpark figure, so I’ll just say that these are going to be more than previous ones.

Anyway, it’s 8:15am and I have other things to do, so I better get to it and I hope you like my paintings!

So apparently when you make a transaction via PayPal, you only have 45 days to dispute it. They only tell you this AFTER you’ve put in a dispute request. So “boooo” to that. Here’s what I sent them, which was denied, but which I’m glad there’s still a record of it at PayPal at the very least, which I’m sure will be taken into consideration should anyone else have the need to ask for a refund:

I signed up for Suzi Blu’s online “Be Divine Goddess Workshop” in Nov. ‘08, which was supposed to run for 10 or 12 weeks. It is now almost June, it has still not concluded and now, according to her new business plan ( http://suziblu.typepad.com/a_lovely_dream/2009/05/suzi-365-day-26.html ), she wants us to pay a $10 yearly membership fee to her NEW site in order to continue taking the class which she has now dubbed as “ongoing” with no end date in sight. I’m sick of waiting for this class to be over, it was not as advertised, it has been neglected and now she wants to charge me more money to keep taking it?

I would like a full refund so I can cut my losses, end my relationship with her site and its shoddy, neglected workshops that promise things she doesn’t deliver but keeps changing to save her own ass anyway and be done with all things Suzi Blu. I feel that I have been strung along by this woman long enough (almost 6 months for a 10 week class!), that the class was not as advertised and I deserve full repayment of my workshop fee ($55 US) as a result.

I didn’t have 6 months to spare, I had 10 or 12 weeks. I don’t think it’s fair that I should have to wait even longer for the videos required for this class to conclude and I certainly don’t feel it’s fair that I should have to pay more money now because she’s decided to change and extend the class on a whim. Even if she were to put up the rest of the class videos within the next 24 hours, it would be too little too late as I’ve wasted enough time. I’ve been a PayPal customer since 2001 and this is the first time and hopefully the last, that I’ll ever have to request a refund from a fraudulent vendor. And I can guarantee it’ll be the last time I request a refund from this one.

Thank you for your continued excellent customer service, it is my hope that you can resolve this matter promptly.

S. Crittenden

While they said it was an indisputable claim due to the 45 day rule, I still e-mailed them and explained that the entire reason for the dispute in the first place was because what was supposed to be a 2 month class stretched into 6…and beyond! 45 days ago she was still giving promises and making excuses which I, and others, were gullible enough to believe and here we are, in May, with the class still not finished, with cheap “guided meditation” videos thrown in (one continuous image with her guiding us through a meditation, a video that would literally take 10 minutes to make) to appease everyone as “extras” that were never supposed to be part of the class and now a whole new policy being thrown up because Suzi’s thrown a tantrum.

And if she bans me for this before the class concludes? I’ll contact PayPal again and have that on record as well. I paid for something, she hasn’t delivered, in fact she’s changed what that “something” is a couple of times and thus, I deserve a full refund. Service was not as advertised. Vendor has not delivered. End of story.

So I guess we’ll see what happens. Honestly, I just want my $55 back (although I highly doubt I’ll get it) so I can delete all of the “Be Divine” class materials I have so far and pretend it never happened, rather than wait around for a class to end that she’s just announced today is never going to end. I mean the entire reason I haven’t left the community yet, even though I’ve wanted to since MARCH, is because I keep waiting for this damn class to end so I have a full set of course materials which I PAID FOR. If I pay for something, even if it’s a crappy something, I want it or I want my money back, plain & simple.

Anyway, that’s enough headache for today. I’ve got shit to do. I’ll edit this post once I hear back from PayPal and not that I expect anyone to go through with it, but if you’re disenchanted with the way Suzi’s goddess class has been handled I suggest you make a transaction dispute with PayPal. You probably won’t get your money back, but it’ll be on her record and taken into consideration if there are any future disputes. And who knows? Maybe if a few of us do it, PayPal will take notice and refund our money anyway. I dunno. At the very least, this post’ll look great in a Google search won’t it?

So yeah, I’m done.

Edit: HAHAHA My bad. It was supposed to be a 5 week course. I just went & checked. What a joke.

Edit #2: “So someone from this class notified paypal and said they are not happy with their product and want a refund. But they never asked me first. What is a girl to do? Its been past 45 days I cant even give a refund.” – Suzi Blu

Whatever. As I said, I never expected a refund, but I did expect Suzi’s snark, which I find laughable. Just how predictable can she be? I just wanted this info out there so it was on record with PayPal and this post would eventually show up in a Google search of her name so people would know what they’re really getting into when they sign up for a Suzi Blu workshop: excuses excuses excuses.

And for added Google goodness: Suzi Blu! Suzi Blu! Suzi Blu! Suzi Blu! Suzi Blu! Suzi Blu! Suzi Blu! :o)

Edit #3: Magically she now says, via a video in the goddess workshop area (posted just after she would have gotten the e-mail from PayPal about this transaction dispute), that the last video will be up tomorrow. That means after I download it I can quit her Ning and I’ll never have to see or hear about Suzi Blu and her constant stream of internet drama ever again. Hooray!

Edit #4! A letter from PayPal:

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

Hello Sarah, I understand what you have gone through and I apologize for
any inconvenience. The issue that you have is something that I have
handled before and I will do my best to provide you possible options
that will help us resolve this issue. If I understand you correctly,
your concern is about case PP-700-261-909.

A deferred complaint is a complaint that is not actively investigated by
PayPal because the user hasn’t followed the guidelines for filing a
dispute.

Disputes are defined as deferred when:

* A Non receipt complaint is filed more than 45 days after the
transaction date.
* A Not-as-described complaint is filed more than 45 days after the
transaction date.
* A Not-as-described complaint is filed within 45 days after the
transaction date but only qualifies for the PayPal Buyer Complaint
Policy.

Note that a deferred complaint will be noted in the seller’s account and
that PayPal may decide to start an investigation into a deferred
complaint at a later stage. [That's what I was goin' for. Consider me satisfied.]

To view the specific terms and conditions, click the “Legal Agreement”
link located at the bottom of any PayPal webpage and click “User
Agreement”.

You may want to consider trying to recover your funds outside of PayPal
using other methods.

For example, you may want to consider filing a report with your local
police department or filing a complaint with the Internet Crime
Complaint Center (IC3).

IC3 is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau
of Justice Assistance and the National White Collar Crime Center. They
review and evaluate complaints and refer the information to the
appropriate local, state, or federal agency.

To learn about identity theft, fraud prevention and purchase protection,
click the “Security Center” link on any PayPal webpage and go to the
“Buying Safely” column.

We appreciate your patience and understanding regarding this matter, and
wish you continued success on PayPal.

Sincerely,
Alexander
PayPal, an eBay Company

Edit #5! So I guess I won’t be getting that last goddess video as promised even though I PAID FOR IT.Beware kids! This is the kind of unprofessionalism you’re dealing with when it comes to Suzi Blu!

You have been banned from Mixed Media With Suzi Blu

Sorry, Sunny, you can not access Mixed Media With Suzi Blu as you have been banned. If you think you’ve been banned in error, you can contact the administrator.

Edit #6 (05/25/09):

Dear Sarah Crittenden :

This message is in regard to your complaint submitted on 5/7/2009 5:31:40 PM against Suzi Blu. Your complaint was assigned ID 7862040.

The Bureau has decided to close this complaint and consider it unresolved. You have indicated that the company’s response to the complaint does not settle the matter, and the BBB has determined that the company’s response does not adequately address all the issues or make a good faith effort to resolve the dispute.

Please feel free to contact us with any further questions.

Regards,

Michael Sedio
The Better Business Bureau

Do you ever have those days where you just don’t feel like you fit in anywhere? I’m having one of those. You see, I’m an artist, or at least I try to be but a year ago I wasn’t much of one because I was afraid to use my imagination. Literally.

You see (and I’ve told this story a million times before, so those who have heard it bear with me) what lead to my bipolar disorder diagnosis was psychosis where I lost complete touch with reality, had to be hospitalized and given heavy doses of anti-psychotics for 10 days. Even after those 10 days, I just wasn’t “right in the head”, as they say. It took the anti-psychotics about a month to set me right.

It was the scariest fucking thing in the world and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

At the same time, I was hyper-creative during psychosis and super happy, psychosis for me was much like being stuck in my imagination which was fine for the first couple of weeks and then it got scary. Really really fucking scary.

It wouldn’t be until I my shrink and I found the right medications and the right doses where I felt okay to create again and to use my imagination. It was almost 3 years after I was hospitalized.

Where I found my inspiration to create was YouTube. On YouTube there was Suzi Blu and Willowing and the two of them made videos on how to art journal or draw faces and feeling good about yourself in general. So, when Suzi Blu started her Ning.com community and offered a class called “Les Petite Dolls”, I was right there to sign up and that’s when I started creating again. I made friends in this community, including Suzi Blu, and as far as I’ve been able to tell, that’s the whole point of having a Ning community. That’s why you have a friends list kind of like Live Journal.

Through the course though, I discovered other artist communities on Ning, namely Willowing’s, then Milliande’s and finally Gary Reef’s.

Well, I’m not interested in taking any more online art classes right now, namely because I don’t have the time for them, nor can I afford them, but I joined these communities anyway as a lot of my friends from Suzi’s Ning seemed to overlap within these other sites.

But I didn’t last very long in Milliande’s community because…well, I don’t know how to say this in a nice way even though I mean it in a nice way but Milliande’s community was a little too wishy washy for me. I respect what they’re doing over there, but I like a little edge, I’m not always prone to making “safe” art and that community is clearly meant for women who smile and menstruate quietly. Honestly, it reminded me of a nunnery.

And that’s cool. Obviously some people enjoy that and they enjoy their community and like I said, that’s totally cool, but it’s not really my scene. So I left Milliande’s community. I never even got to the point of filling out my profile and uploading a userpic. (Although I do follow Milliande on YouTube, she’s very creative and an incredibly nice person. I just don’t fit in with the community that surrounds her.)

So then I joined Willowing’s community because someone over there had made a post about how to convert files from the classes we were all taking between all of these artists into a format that could be put on your iPod and after that I stuck around and watched people chat and read some of the threads and Willowing’s built a nice little community there. But still…it’s a community that focuses on “whimsical art”, which again, is totally cool and I do whimsical art sometimes too, but I can only take seeing so much of it before I want to rebel and paint a coat hanger abortion.

Also, I was totally on board with Willowing and I watched her videos on YouTube but then recently in one video she did something in a painting that I consider cheap and sinful and it just kind of soured me on learning from her. And again, I’m not trying to bash anyone here, I think Willowing is a lovely woman and I like her a lot – she’s genuine, real and caring and I love that about her – I just didn’t like one thing she did and I’m picky so it bothered me. I don’t even want to say what it was because I don’t want to argue about it with anyone. It was just something I would never do in a million years because I think it’s tacky and more importantly not acid-free, not archival and not fade resistant. And it was something that could have just as easily been done with paint, but she cut corners and I hate that.

With that bit of sourness said, Willowing must be an excellent teacher because I saw the student gallery from her first class and just about everyone created beautiful pieces that they should be proud of. If you’re looking to do art journaling, you should consider signing up for her next class which begins June 8th.

So, it was obvious I didn’t really fit in with Willowing’s crowd either, although I’m still a member there, so off I went to Gary Reef’s Ning community to see what was happening there. Well, a LOT is happening there. His is the smallest of the communities I’ve talked about here, but next to Milliande’s, his is probably the most active. In fact, his is so active, I have a hard time keeping up.

First and foremost, I dig Gary. Certain folks had spoken badly of him lto me before I joined his community and none of the things I’d heard have turned out to be true. He’s a nice guy who genuinely loves art – all kinds of art – and his community is run sort of like what I imagine art school to be like. There are monthly challenges, which is where I can’t keep up, like last month for example, was Georgia O’Keefe month and the challenge was to paint like her. Before that it was…crap, I forget. A dude.  Klimt! That’s it!

This month, as I understand it, the challenge is simply to create art every day for 30 days. It should also be noted that Gary teaches classes too, but unlike Suzi and Willowing, he purposely goes for smaller classes because he wants to give his students more one on one time. This is another reason I dig Gary Reef, he doesn’t appear to really be doing this for the money and as I understand it, he’s already a somewhat  recognized artist in the “art world” so he’s not really doing it for the fame either. He’s just doing it, as far as I can tell, because he loves art and he’s a social guy. And that’s awesome!

However…as I said, I can’t keep up with the challenges. I simply do not have the time. They were all doing an artist trading card exchange that I really wanted to be a part of, but again, I couldn’t find the time because of this Hypercube contest. I tried to keep up with the blogs and make friends but aside from the people I already knew from the other communities, I didn’t really feel welcome. I uploaded one painting, the “5 O’Clock Abortion” one (because I thought they’d dig it with Gary & Suzi being basically mortal enemies and that painting was kind of a rip on what Suzi was doing at the time with her “Rodeo Girl” workshop) and where it got rated 4.5 stars by like, 250 people on Suzi’s Ning, it got voted like a 2.5 on Gary’s. Not that I care about ratings necessarily, but it seemed…snobby. And then I got looking around the forums in the community and some of the conversations that were happening were, well, snobby! Like art snobby. And I’m just not into that. I find those conversations amusing, but I don’t want to be a part of them.

While I like Gary and I kinda like his community, I just find it way too intense for me. I want to participate, but I feel like I have to have a PhD in art history to participate in the conversations…and I consider myself very much an outsider artist in that, I know fuckall about art history, I know fuckall about “the masters”, I’ve never been to a museum in my life, I only know like, 5 famous paintings and maybe the same amount of famous painters and to be honest, I kinda want to stay ignorant because I don’t want all of these things that have already been done to influence what I’m doing. (Not that what I do is all that original.) Maybe that’s a bad attitude, I don’t know, but I didn’t go to art school for a reason and Gary’s community feels like art school and I don’t fit in.

So where does that leave me? Well, there’s still Suzi Blu’s Ning right? Well…not so fast. This afternoon my friend Marylin and I sent out a mass e-mail to all of the friends we’d made on Suzi’s Ning over the past (almost) year (50+ for Marylin, 70+ for me) – using Ning’s feature to do so – trying to get support for me with this Hypercube contest, particularly because the contest is about being creative and in my case, that means ART but also because the friends I’ve made there know all about my agoraphobia and my plans to start immersion therapy in the spring and I thought they’d appreciate the update. Also, other women on the site send out mass e-mails to people constantly pimping out their blogs, Etsy shops, giveaways on their websites and hell, in March, my friend KY Kelly sent out a mass e-mail asking her friends to vote for “Shutter Sisters” in a contest where they could win $50,000 for a dream project – and these “Shutter Sisters” weren’t even a part of our community! And no one said ONE WORD about that. I even voted for them and know others did too!

But, several hours after Marylin and I sent out our messages, to OUR FRIENDS about something important that would change my life and the life of my family for the better, Suzi sent out an e-mail to all members of the community saying that we were only allowed to send messages to our friends if it was about one of her classes or about art.

Well, for me that was the last draw. In the winter Suzi dismantled all of the groups people were participating in, essentially destroying the community that was forming on her Ning (honestly, I forget why now) so now there’s not much of a community there anymore aside from the blogs and in the mass e-mail she sent today, which was definitely slanted towards me, she said “I invite u to start your own ning and make videos of yourselves and share your life everyday. Then u can tell your people whatever you want!” The “share your life everyday [sic]” bit, I’m pretty sure, was referring to the blog post I made in the community about how my immersion therapy was going, which Marylin and I linked to in our mass e-mails. So I guess I would interpret that as we’re not supposed to be sharing our lives in our blogs on her site either, only class or art related things.

Suzi’s Ning has been going downhill since early winter and personally, I’ve only been sticking around to get to the end of the “Be Divine” class which seems to be taking forever to conclude. (It started in November and was only supposed to be like a 10 or 12 week course!) I paid good money for that class, I am a student of that class and I’m going to download all of the videos and course materials that I paid for or I’m going to e-mail PayPal for a refund. I have no intentions of taking any more classes from her because I just don’t agree with some of the things she does,  I don’t feel I have anything else to learn from her and there’s little to no community left, so I guess there’s no reason for me to stick around there either. And now I’m not even allowed to send a message to all of my friends there – using Ning’s “send a message to all friends” function to do so – to say goodbye when the “Be Divine” class is over and I leave.

So where does that leave me? Well that leaves me without a Ning community to be a part of. As I said above, I like Gary Reef’s and Willowing’s communities, but at the same time, I feel so burned by my experience with Suzi Blu’s community that I’m reluctant to go in there and make friends and really try to be a part of things. My preference would be to hang with Gary’s crowd, but I just don’t feel like Gary’s crowd wants anything to do with me. Some people were welcoming, but I got the chills from others.

So I guess I’ll just be a lone wolf from now on. I did just fine before without all of these Ning people, I’ll be just fine afterward, I guess. (Although taking a class from Willowing, should she do another that focuses on faces and bodies and animals, isn’t out of the question. I just have no interest in art journaling.)

Some people during the course of this past year have asked me if *I* was planning on starting a Ning community – because quietly, beside Twitter, Ning has become an in thing – and some have even suggested that doing so would be a good idea…but I don’t want to. I don’t have the time to maintain one, for starters, and also, I have nothing to really offer. I’m not qualified to teach a class in anything, I don’t know art history or anything like that. And when people suggested it, they meant a community built around me, like the community of folks I have on Live Journal, but if I already have a community based around my Live Journal and Twitter and Facebook and this site (although the comments don’t really reflect that, bastards!) then what the hell do I need a Ning for?

I dunno. I’m just a little bit sad tonight. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong in Suzi’s community, I just thought I was sending a message to the people who have requested my friendship and with whom I’ve made  connections with. Rather than message them all one at a time, I messaged them all at the same time…which Ning has a function for. I used it as it’s intended and as far as I knew about Suzi’s community guidelines, I wasn’t doing anything wrong because I wasn’t promoting anything that competed with what Suzi does.

But then again, she’s known for changing the rules without warning, so who even knows what’s right or wrong in that community anymore.

Again, I dunno. As I said, I’m fine with being the lone wolf, but I’ve been the lone wolf for most of my life and I really wanted to find a place where creative people would accept me for me and bring me into the fold. But I don’t think I’m going to find that on Ning. I put my toes in the water of several communities, as I said, and it didn’t work out so I guess there’s nothing left for me to do but paint my heart out and keep to myself over here. And who knows? Maybe I’m the asshole here. Maybe I’m the problem and these communities are just fine & dandy. It’s hard to say.

Anyway, sorry for the bummer post. I’ll leave you with pictures of Princess Pixel sneaking a drink from my brush basin last night. (The side she’s drinking from is clean water, the other side is painty water.)

PS. When I make posts on my site, most of the time, unless the post is really picture intensive, I cross-post it to Live Journal and that’s generally where the comments are posted and the conversations take place. I really only post things to my site to either save my Live Journal friends from having 20 million pictures on their friends page and so people who don’t have Live Journals have a place to post comments as well. (My Live Journal is set so that anonymous folks can’t post comments and people who do have Live Journals but who aren’t on my friends list, their comments are screened and I post them manually. This is due to past trolling behaviour.)

A warning: you may be a little shocked at some of the language in this book, and that’s another weaknes of mine. I tell people who come to my cooking class that sometimes I can be a little bawdy and I sure hope that don’t upset them. But I’m my father’s daughter, and I’m banking on one things, and I’m not budging on this: my God has a sense of humor even if what I say has a four-letter word in it. I think He’d want me to laugh. What’s in my heart is not irreverence but a full knowledge that God’s laughing too.

- Paula Deen, It Ain’t All About the Cookin’