I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I can’t art journal to save my life. “But anyone can art journal!” I’ve been told when I’ve said this out loud, but that’s not true. I mean, unless you don’t have hands or you’re blind or something, yes, you can physically art journal (and I’m sure some people could even overcome those obstacles and make beautiful journals!) but I don’t think everyone is particularly suited to it and I think I am definitely one of those people.

So first of all, for those wondering “what is an art journal?”, allow me to explain: an art journal is simply a book full of art, kind of like a scrapbook and sometimes using scrapbooking elements, but usually an art journal has more homemade elements in it than prefab ones. Sometimes art journals have themes, sometimes not. Most of the time it’s in a diary format in that each page is expressing something emotional or personal, but there usually isn’t a whole ton of text like you would have in a written journal.

I have many friends who art journal such as Eveline Timeless, Sirens Idyll, Nolwenn and Poetic Dreams and if you follow the links on their blogs, you’ll find both instructional videos on how to do art journaling, but also the blogs of other art journalers all across the internet. Suzi Blu, Julie Pritchard and Willowing have taught classes on how to art journal (and I’m sure there are more people out there teaching classes on it) and there is even a magazine dedicated to it. In the online mixed media world, or at least the corner of it I seem to frequent, art journaling is all the rage.

And I totally cannot do it.

I tried though! You can use any old notebook or sketchbook to use as an art journal but the standard is the good ol’ Moleskine, which I used it my latest attempt at making an art journal. Behold:

Introducing myself on the first page to any potential readers should I accidentally leave the book somewhere. I thought I was off to a pretty good start.

Page 2 was done shortly after laparoscopy #4 when the doctor wanted to put me on Lupron.
If you read my page on endometriosis, you’ll see how I feel about Lupron.

And then…

….

…yeah. :o/

The thing is, by the time I basecoat a page with whatever colour I want to use and wait for it to dry I’ve either forgotten what I wanted to express OR I’ve already written it all out and gotten it out of my system in my written journal, of which I have many many many many. Basically, art journaling for me, is way too slow of a process. I would LOVE to leave behind beautifully illustrated, mixed media books when I die for future generations to marvel over but I think they’re going to have to settle for just text because it seems as though that’s what I’m best at and writing is just how I express myself. (Although since becoming medicated, I no longer write hypergraphically so I’m not going through a notebook every month. This is both good and bad. Good because notebooks are expensive. Bad because I miss spending whole days just writing writing writing and documenting every little thing.)

In my written journals, I don’t even doodle. Sometimes I decorate the covers, like this one for example, but most of the time I leave the covers as they come and I almost always write in them using my beloved Pilot V5 extra fine pens in BLACK, although sometimes I’ll use Uniball Fusion pens because they come in colours, but that’s still pretty rare because I don’t like their tips. (Like, in a few weeks my current journal will be full and the next ones up to bat are a pink journal and a blue journal that are both sparkly and identical except in colour and I have Uniball Fusion pens in the corresponding colours – although Uniball Fusion pens are expensive and don’t go far so the ends of the books will probably be in my regular black ink.)

Anyway, the whole point of this post is that I’m envious of people who can actually express themselves through art journaling and I’m hoping that after participating in The Sketchbook Project, I’ll maybe dust off my Moleskine and give it another try. I think another part of it is that I’m actually pretty utilitarian and so my lizard brain is all “why make it pretty when you don’t have to? Writing’s faster!” and then there’s also my inner critic, who has the voice of my evil grandmother, saying, “you could be spending that time on art that pays your bills blah blah blah” and I really need to learn how to beat that voice back. Perhaps this will be my new year’s resolution for 2011.

In other news, my pink & green girls are coming along fabulously and if I didn’t need the money, they wouldn’t be for sale once they were finished because I am absolutely in love with them. Each girl is going to be on her own canvas, which is what I’ll be working on today, and be her own piece, but really, I envision selling them as a set. I doubt that’ll happen because when I make paintings intended to be sold together, it never happens, but hey, I still try. Here’s a sneak peak at my pink & green girls that are going to simply be titled “Pink & Green I” and “Pink & Green II” because I’m original like that:

And with that, I’m off to find breakfast and get back to work on these canvases. I hope you all have a wonderful day!

This is my sign. Blake screwed it to the outer wall of our house, right beside the “front” door, so that everyone who enters will know the deal.

Before it was put in place, I asked Blake, “do you agree with it?” and he said “absolutely”.

After it was put in place, Madison read it and said she liked it. I said to her, “but do you agree with it?” and she said, “yes, even though I probably do a lot of shitty things that you write about”, to which I replied, “not really” because there was only one shitty thing she’s done so far that I found was worth writing about and I made it a friends only post on LJ. (She stole a necklace of mine that my grama gave to me which my grampa, now dead, gave to her, that had a HUGE crystal pendant and then some kid stole it out of her desk so now it’s lost forever.) Anyway, she & I agreed that that was probably the shittiest thing she’s ever done.

Anyway, if you’ve been reading my site for any length of time, you’ve probably seen me say what’s on this sign multiple times because it’s true. I write about pretty much everything that happens in my life, or at least the important stuff and often times, “the important stuff” is the shitty things people do. I can’t say that I write about all of these things publicly all the time, but they are usually written about either on my site, my LJ (publicly or friends only) or my paper journal, but usually online in some way, shape or form. That’s just what I do. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years of my life and if you have a problem with it, don’t be in my life. It’s really that simple. And really, is it so hard to be a decent person who doesn’t do shitty things? Because if that’s difficult for you, we probably don’t want you in our lives anyway. And that is a sentiment shared by everyone in the Sunny, Blake, Madison & Wes Crittenden family. I know this because I ASKED.

So that’s my sign. Probably the first of many. As I pointed out to Blake, I am now the crazy neighbour who makes signs. :oD So be it.

March & April have not been happy months for me, vaginally speaking. I have stage IV endometriosis which I’ve had 5 surgeries for and after my last surgery, the specialist wanted me to take a monophasic birth control pill for 3 months straight, then take a 7 day break to have a period and begin another round of 3 months of pills. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This would be fine if my body acted accordingly, but it doesn’t. As soon as I start the 3rd pack, I begin spotting. By the 2nd week of the 3rd pack, I’m full on bleeding like a normal period except this bleeding persists for 2 weeks and then on the 4th week of the 3rd pack I go back to spotting, so by the time I’m supposed to take this 7 day “break” from the birth control pills, my body’s done bleeding. I take the break anyway, because I’m supposed to, but I don’t really see the point since I just had an entire month of hellacious bleeding and cramping.

So for the last week of March until roughly now-ish, I’ve been bleeding and at the beginning of April, bleeding and in pain, I got fed up because adding to my misery is the fact that because of my disease, I can’t use tampons, so I’m stuck with crappy plastic pads that quite often give me yeast infections and this month was no different.

Once I realized that I had another yeast infection that’s $20 a pop to cure and that I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it until I stopped bleeding and I was looking at another 2 or 3 weeks of doing so, I lost it. The idea of my already irritated vagina being stuck in a plastic diaper non-stop for another 2 or 3 weeks put me into tears and I sat down with my husband, Blake, and begged him to shell out the $145.99 it cost for Lunapads‘ Deluxe Heavy Flow Kit.

We really didn’t have the money to do this, but I argued that we spend more than that on disposable pads and Monistat per year and we both decided that for my own comfort and our wallets that reusable pads were the way to go and while Lunapads are a little more expensive than the reusable pads you’ll find on say, Etsy, after receiving them in the mail a few days ago, I believe the cost is most definitely worth it because Lunapads‘ construction and material is unlike anything I’ve found anywhere else and they say the average Lunapad has a 3-5 year lifetime, officially, but some of their staff have had them last up to 10 years and by looking at the quality of the ones I received, I’d believe it. This is a well-built product.

When you order, you can choose between regular cotton and organic cotton. The organic cotton costs more and is less absorbent, but is better for the Earth, so it’s your call, but I went with the regular cotton because we already couldn’t afford the kit I was buying.

A Lunapad is composed of two parts, basically. There is the maxipad, which has wings and secures to the underside of the gusset in your underwear with a plastic snap and it’s not just a piece of cotton that’s maxipad-shaped that you secure in your underwear, the part with the wings is two layers of cotton sewn together and then in the crotch of the pad, there’s a liner sewn in that’s composed of (I think) two layers of thick flannel cotton with a nylon layer in between and sewn onto each end of the “pad” portion are two bands of ric-rac which are used to hold a liner. A liner is crotch-shaped and is basically identical to the “pad” portion of the maxipad. This is a basic Lunapad and a liner. There are also liners with wings but the wings don’t wrap around the gusset of your underwear like the pad does, the wings just tuck against your crotch/thighs.

A few of the wings liners came with my kit but I haven’t tried them yet. Personally I kinda wish they would wrap around the gusset and fasten with a snap like the pads do, but that’s a really minor thing and it probably really isn’t even necessary.

Here’s a video of one of the company’s founders showing how Lunapads work. I would tell you more about the founding of the company, but with their new site redesign that information seems to have been left off. Which sucks because the company was founded by two entrepreneurial Canadian women and it is based out of Vancouver, BC. Anyway, onto the video:

See? Easy to use. Great quality. Ingenious design.

What was also shown in the video, that you have to purchase separately and I didn’t, is The Moon Pad Bag, which is a pouch that has two sides, one for your extra clean pads and one for your used ones. Since I’ve been raving about Lunapads all month on forums, my site and Twitter, a few friends have asked me how they would use them at work and that’s how. Another option is that because of Lunapads‘ design, you can put in as many liners as you want, so in the morning before work, you could use a pad for heavy flow, stack it with 2 or 3 or even 4 liners and depending on your flow, you probably wouldn’t have to change your liners until you got home.

Since I work from home and the washing machine is on my way from the bathroom to my office, using Lunapads is pretty easy for me. Our family produces enough laundry that doing small loads every day is no problem, which would keep me in fresh pads throughout my “moon time” without an issue, especially since the kit I bought contained plenty of pads and liners to get me through.

I’ve only been wearing my Lunapads for about 3 days now and I’m only spotting so I can’t attest to how well they perform during heavy flow days, but with how they’re handling moderate spotting I have no doubt that they’ll be fine for my heavier days, especially if I double up the liners, but what I can definitely attest to is how comfortable they are. Honestly, I can barely tell that I’m wearing one and when I do shift in my chair or whatever and feel the pad against my skin, it’s very soft and 10,000 times better than sticky plastic. Since Lunapads are not holding moisture against my skin and their material allows my vag to breathe, they won’t cause the chronic yeast infections I would normally get with using disposables.

So how do you take care of your Lunapads? Well, the recommended method is to keep a container of water with a little bit of soap in it and soak your pads when you change them and then wash them, but I have no intentions of doing that, having a small bathroom and a daughter who hasn’t started menstruating yet and is easily freaked out by the concept. I just plan on dropping them in the washing machine as I use them and doing a load of laundry whenever I need to. This will probably result in staining of my Lunapads, but I mean come on, they’re pads for soaking up vag blood here, I don’t expect them to stay pristine and stains won’t affect their effectiveness. But if that’s an issue for you, then just rinse them out when you change them or when you get home and put them in the mesh bag that comes with them and put them in the washing machine when you’re able to, no biggie.

Yes, the cost upfront for Lunapads IS a bitch, but in my opinion totally worth it for the comfort factor and like I said in the beginning, even the bigger kits like the one I got costs less than I would be spending on disposable pads per year, especially when you factor in the yeast infection treatments that go along with them at $20 a pop. And of course there’s the added bonus that you won’t be contributing to landfills anymore, which is a huge factor in buying reusable menstrual products for a lot of people so I thought I’d mention it. Did you realize that pads are just like diapers in a landfill and take a really really long fucking time to break down? Did you realize that flushing tampons (which you actually shouldn’t do despite the encouragement on the instruction sheet that comes with them) and their applicators, especially plastic ones that take forever to break down, causes problems at your municipality’s water treatment plant? They have to scoop all of that debris out of a big tank with a thing that looks like a big pool skimmer and it all gets hauled off to the landfills anyway.

Another product that you can buy on the Lunapads website is The Diva Cup, which is like a reusable tampon except instead of absorbing the blood, it collects it and you empty it into the toilet once or twice a day, depending on your flow, then you wash it out and reinsert it. I know many people who use reusable internal menstrual products like The Diva Cup and they all swear by it, so if you’re a tampon girl and squicked by the idea of pads but would still like to have eco-friendly periods, The Diva Cup may be the way to go.

In closing, I’m extremely happy with my purchase and I find myself actually looking forward to my next period so I can use all of the neato pads that came with my kit. I’ve also talked it over with Blake and within the next 6 months, we’re going to be buying our daughter Madison, who will be 12 next month, the Deluxe Teen Kit because her menarche is right around the corner and we want to start her off on the right foot, especially since endometriosis is hereditary and I want her to be as comfortable as possible.

And before I go, I should probably mention that in celebration of the Lunapads site redesign, they’re giving 20% off on all orders made before Friday, April 16th, so if you’re thinking of making the switch, today or tomorrow might be the time to do it!

So that’s Lunapads. If you switch, I hope they make your vagina as happy as they’ve made mine.

So one of the big things in the online mixed media world is art journaling and what art journaling is, is sort of like scrapbooking, minus all the premade elements. You make your backgrounds from scratch, you make your embellishments from scratch, you write something on the page, like a feeling or sentiment and build the page around that. It can be one word or it can be whole paragraphs, but it has to be presented artfully and with purpose.

And I can’t do it. Believe me, I’ve tried.

There are probably half a billion tutorials on how to make an art journal on YouTube by various people within the online mixed media community and I’ve watched a great deal of them. But that still doesn’t help me. I simply cannot art journal.

You see, what happens is that I come up with my sentiment and I started making my background on the page and blah blah blah and once I get the page looking all spiffy, I don’t feel the same as I did when I began. For example, the last art journal page I tried to do was based on “I feel successful” because that day I’d sold 2 paintings, but it took me 3 days to get the page ready for words and by then, I wasn’t feeling successful anymore so I closed my moleskine and haven’t picked it up since.

But I journal. Boy, I’m a journaling champ. I write in my journal every single day, usually for an hour, sometimes longer and I’ve been known to go through a journal per month. They just aren’t painted on and pretty, they’re simply words on a page. And I like them that way. I like getting my thoughts out and on paper as soon as those thoughts hit me and I like the feeling of a pen in my hand. Making backgrounds and embellishments and everything else that goes along with art journaling just doesn’t work with my process and thus, I have about 50 different filled journals that are all just text, sitting in a locked cedar box.

Most of the time I don’t care that I can’t art journal, but then someone will link a tutorial video on Twitter and I’ll watch it and I’ll think “I wish I could do that” because what I’m leaving behind for people to read after I’m dead is pretty boring stuff. Well, the content isn’t boring, for the most part, but the presentation is. I would love to leave behind beautiful books full of my visual thoughts and feelings but it just never works out when I try. I mean, I can write 10 pages in one sitting easily, if I had to make backgrounds for those 10 pages and wait for them to dry and then embellish them, I’d never get the words out because I’d forget what I wanted to write about and the words, to me, are the most important part.

So I don’t art journal. I write hypergraphically instead. And that’s a-okay.

Some people have noticed that both my site and my Live Journal are not their usual, colourful selves and these people are wondering why. I hadn’t intended to make this post today, but enough people have asked that I figured it should go up as soon as possible.

Let me start out by reassuring anyone thinking it: this has nothing to do with depression. I am not depressed. (Today, anyway.)

When I was diagnosed with bipolar I, the only two people who were surprised by it was me and my step-mother who doesn’t know me very well and who still doesn’t think I’m bipolar. The truth of the matter is, I am probably one of the most bipolar people ever to be born on this Earth and looking back, it’s very obvious that I’ve been bipolar my whole life, not just in mood, but in mannerism.

My ex, Chris, used to say that the thing he loved the most about me was my passion and the thing he hated the most about me…was my passion. About a year ago on Facebook, I did some quiz meme and the last question said something like, “Say something random about yourself” and I wrote, “When I love something, I really really love it. When I hate something, I really really hate it”. Chris replied to that saying it was probably the most true statement he’s ever read on a quiz.

And that’s the thing. There is very little grey area to my life. Things are either black or white, negative or positive. I either love something or I hate something, there is no “like”. A day is either good or bad, there is no in-between. A place is either awesome or awful. Ideas are either genius or stupid. And sometimes, people are too.

When I find a food I like, I eat that food every day until I never want to see that food again and chances are, I’ll never eat it again. When I find a new band, they’re the greatest thing I’ve ever heard and I have to find/buy everything they’ve ever put out. If I hear a song I like, it’s the greatest song I’ve ever heard. (And if I hear one that I don’t like, it’s the worst piece of crap I’ve ever heard.) When I get interested in a subject, I have to learn everything I can about it. I become both obsessed and dismissive easily. I’m afraid of both success and failure because I can’t see that there’s anything in between. Prior to medication, I was either happy or sad, there was no middle ground.

While I actually like some of these traits, I’m not sure it’s healthy to be as polarized as I am on pretty much everything. Blake and I got talking about things the other night and we decided that I need to start letting in a little more grey. Even he & I aren’t totally sure what that means (especially me), except that it’s time to change my way of thinking and being, because how I operate now isn’t serving me as well as it once did.

What Blake and I were talking about specifically is how I never finish anything and why. I finish paintings, so I consider myself more successful as an artist than I do a writer because even though I write every day, nothing of substance has ever been published (I don’t count the Marketing Magazine articles as real publishing even though others might). And the reason nothing of substance has ever been published is because I never finish those projects and I never finish those projects because I fear both success and failure.

The piece of writing I’m working on now – or at least what I was working on – is a really solid idea and could very easily (we think) be published in any number of ways. Where the grey comes in is that I need to stop worrying about what comes after I finish. I need to learn how to worry about that later and just finish. And I realize I’m going completely against my own new philosophy by writing this next part, but after it’s finished, I need to not worry about success or failure because my ideas of both are actually kind of warped. I worry about success because of expectation. If I finish this and it gets published and people like it (and I consider publishing it at all successful)  and talk about it, then people will expect me to write and publish something else and I don’t want that pressure. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s failure. Failure is that it gets published (or it doesn’t and I’m rejected repeatedly), people don’t like it, people criticize it and I want to crawl under a rock. Where’s the grey area there? Because I totally don’t see it. I see the grey area prior to finishing, that I shouldn’t worry about everything I just wrote and should just finish it, but I don’t see the grey in what comes next. Do you?

Plus there’s the fact that I don’t see the point in finishing a piece of writing if no one’s ever going to see it.

Another example of me not seeing the grey is yesterday. Yesterday I did a bunch of things that were positive and I was having a great day and then the dogs got loose and I had to chase them all the way to hell and back. In case you’ve forgotten, I don’t leave my house very often and in telling Blake about the dog incident, I said, “I’m so scarred I may not leave the house for like, two months,” and that’s where he pointed out that I wasn’t seeing the grey. I left the house because  a shitty incident happened, the shitty incident didn’t happen because I left the house.

Now I’m not promising overnight changes here or anything. Like I said, I’m not even totally sure what “seeing the grey” even means because as it stands now, I don’t really see it, so it’s going to take me a while to adopt this new life philosophy but I plan on working on it just to see what happens. No doubt there will be remnants of my bipolar-ness that I won’t want to remove because I like those aspects of myself and hey, a leopard can’t change its spots, but I’m going to try, with Blake’s help and maybe yours too, to figure this shit out and try living a different life to see where that leads me. Who knows? This could be the key to everything or it could be another dead end, but I feel that it’s worth trying.

So that’s what “Shades of Grey” is in reference to. I’m glad you’re all along for the ride.

So Monday was my birthday and in honour of that, we at Buttercup decided that I should do an article about what it was like to be raised by a teen mom. I have mixed feelings on this assignment. One, because I’ve already painted my mother in a negative light on Buttercup (which I think she was very upset about) and two, because my childhood really wasn’t sunshine and roses and it’s going to be difficult to bring many positives to this article.

However, this is my assignment and truth be told, the concept was my idea, so here we go.

I was born March 1st, 1979 to my 15 year old mother and my 17 or 18 year old father. My mother’s birthday is at the end of August, meaning that she was actually 14 when she got pregnant and in 1979 that “simply didn’t happen” and when it did, parents forced their girls to abort or sent them away to have the baby and then give it up for adoption. In 1979 my mother was a pariah, they even made her write her high school exams in another room from everyone else, fearing that her visibly pregnant belly would be a bad influence on other students.

I’ve asked both of my parents numerous times how I came to be and while I’ve gotten mixed answers, what it all really seems to boil down to is the fact that neither one of them were given any kind of sexual education either at school or by their parents. At one point my mother told me not to believe my friends when they said you couldn’t get pregnant your first time, which has lead me to believe that perhaps she DID get pregnant her first time, but really, my conception remains largely a mystery.

What’s not a mystery is the years that followed. After I was born, my parents lived together in an apartment above my grandpa’s carpet store and my dad worked as his apprentice, learning the carpet trade. My mother stayed home with me. Around the time I was a little over 1 year old, my parents split up, my mom claiming that my dad had more interest in growing and selling pot than he ever had in me, which, knowing him now is a believable scenario. That’s when my mom and I moved in with her parents and my great grandma, who lived next door, looked after me when my mom went back to high school. I would see my dad again once when I was 3, but never again until I sought him out when I was 13.

During this time, I’m assuming things were okay or at least no one’s ever told me otherwise. What I do remember though, was when I was 3 years old, I was sitting on the floor in my grandmother’s living room watching TV when my mother called down to me from her bedroom saying that she had a present for me. So I went up to her room where she was doing homework and she said to come closer, which I did, and then she spanked me. This is one of my very first memories of my mother and I’ve asked her since why she did that and she said it was a “preventative measure”. She figured because I was quiet I must have been doing something bad and if I wasn’t I was about to so that’s why she spanked me. Nice parenting there, ma.

I know, because I’ve seen the pictures, that not every moment was horrible during my early childhood. I know my mother took me with her to the CNE which is a big fair held in Toronto in the summer and I know she took me with her to friends’ cottages and that there were always a lot of other teenagers around me as a child. And in the pictures I seem happy.

But something else I remember is house parties. I remember my mom and I going to Toronto because she was dating a guy named Cooper and I remember being put to bed early in a strange house and listening, in the dark, to the partying happening downstairs. I remember waking up early and the house being so trashed that when I walked down the hallway to the bathroom, ketchup packets from McDonald’s stuck to my feet and beer bottles full of cigarette butts were everywhere. I don’t remember anyone ever checking on me during these parties. Nice parenting again, ma.

Things didn’t really get bad though, until my mom married my step-dad when I was 5. I think she partially married him so I’d have a dad and when things turned sour between him and her, she took it out on me. In short, my mother became abusive and would remain abusive until I was taken away from her by the Children’s Aid in grade 7 and again in grade 9. She denies to this day that she ever abused me, but whether she can admit it or not, she did and I have the scars, both physical and mental, to prove it. Oh and a Children’s Aid file thicker than the Toronto phone book. When I was 15 I was legally emancipated from her so I could be on student welfare and live on my own as an adult while still attending high school.

But I don’t think I really blame her for that. I’m not mad at her for that. I used to be, I spent a lot of my life hating her for not being the mother I felt I deserved, that I felt every child deserves and our relationship since I was about 11 has always been strained and while things are good right now, I still feel like I have to walk on eggshells around her or World War III is going to break out.

It wasn’t until I had my own daughter though, that I understood the gravity of my mother’s situation. My mother hit me because she was a child herself and was never allowed to develop other methods of coping. In 1979 there were next to zero resources for teen mothers, the parenting course at high school that I took before having my daughter didn’t exist when my mom was having me and my mother had to put up with a lot of shit, namely her loss of childhood and a constant barrage of judgment and name-calling that it’s no wonder that she took out her frustrations on me, the reason for all of that.

What I’m saying is that I don’t forgive her for what she did to me and how she raised me and I never will because it fucked me up for life, but I don’t hare her for it because I’ve done my best to put myself in her shoes and I understand.

I was technically a teen mom myself, getting pregnant at 18 and having my daughter at 19, although my pregnancy was not an accident. But in 1997/1998 there were TONS of resources for teen moms. I had a group run out of the region’s health department bringing me healthy foods every week, like fresh produce, whole wheat bread, chocolate milk and cheese. I had a public health nurse come once a month to go over what was happening inside my body with me and tell me how my baby was growing. I had a church group that ran what was called a “community kitchen” for teen moms teaching the other girls and I how to cook healthy meals, which we made in large batches so everyone got to bring home left-overs, both a fresh dish and something to put in the freezer. An extension of this church group made sure I had gifts and a turkey every Xmas and a ham and an Easter basket for my daughter every Easter. When I threw my daughter’s father out of our apartment for good (long story, which will no doubt be another article) and had to go on welfare to support myself because I was only eligible for a minimum wage job that wouldn’t even cover my daycare expenses, they gave me a daycare subsidy that allowed me to go to a local community college (which they also paid for) so I could do upgrading to my education in order to get into college. When I did get into college, my government subsidized 80% of my daycare costs and gave me student loans that covered tuition AND living expenses. When it came time to put my custody and support arrangement in writing with the courts, my government paid for my lawyer to help me get it done.

Support like this didn’t exist for my mother and because of that, it’s no wonder that she and I have had completely different parenting experiences with completely different outcomes. The only support my mother got was outdated advice from her mother and my great grandmother and the “wisdom” of her teenage friends. I know my mother was on welfare when I was very young and she was still in high school (how weird is it that I was AT my mother’s high school graduation?) and I’m sure there was a social worker involved during that time, but because of how my childhood was, I can’t imagine that social worker was very helpful.

Despite at all though, I love my mother and I appreciate the things she had to give up in order to have me. from what I’ve been told, abortion or adoption were never even considerations and I thank my mother on this, my birthday week, for giving me the life I have. It’s been a bumpy ride, no doubt, but I’m grateful nonetheless.

Oooooh what a week it’s been.

First of all, I’m menstruating, which is always fun and because I’m menstruating I’m taking insane amounts of codeine which has made me extremely constipated and I know that’s probably TMI but I don’t fucking care. The stool softeners? They are ineffective and I’m cranky because I literally have something up my ass. Aren’t you glad I shared?

Also making me cranky is the fact that my site has been down for a lot of this week and while that’s not really a huge deal since I x-post everything to Live Journal anyway and haven’t had a whole lot to say, it really sucks because my e-mail is on the same server as my site, so when my site’s down, it probably means I have no e-mail either. So my apologies if you’ve left comments on LJ or have sent me e-mail this week and I haven’t replied, I haven’t been getting my LJ notifications (obviously) and while I’ve been trying my best, it’s hard to remember who I’ve replied to and where so again, I’m sorry. Some people have asked about my host as they’ve seen me bitching about this all week on Twitter and I’m hosted by my friend Kevin, who is the co-owner of Camwhores.com, and he hosts me for free so I try not to complain. It’s not his fault the server took a shit this week and I know he’s been working extra hard trying to fix it, so when I complain, I’m not complaining about my hosting provider, Kevin is great and I love him, I’m just bitching because I’m bitching.

And speaking of my site, in the last 30 days I’ve had almost 3,000 unique visitors , which is actually a record since I began keeping stats just over a year ago. So hello new people! My name is Sunny and I’m not nearly as whiny or insane as I probably sound in this post. If you’d like to know more about me, there’s a page for that and while I update my site usually once a week or so, I update my Live Journal just about every day so if you’re bored, you might want to check that out too. Anonymous comments are turned off on my Live Journal because some people are pricks and while comments are moderated on my site, I’ll approve and reply to just about all of them as long as you’re not being an asshole. I’m done with giving assholes a forum, there are an infinite number of sites on the internet to be an asshole on, take The Forum [NSFW] for example, and I just don’t need to put up with them here.

Anyway…

This week Blake and I watched the movie Precious, but Blake reviewed it for Buttercup and his article will be going up tonight at around 1am so I won’t say anything about it other than I liked it and I agree with Blake’s assessment of the film.

Also this week I worked on my ATCs a bit and just about had a coronary because I spent hours and hours and hours meticulously drawing and shading miniature versions of my girls and then I used a Micron Pigma pen (02) to outline their mouths and noses so I’d be able to see them after I painted their faces with a flesh colour. I do this on my regular sized girls every time and didn’t figure it would be a problem. BUT IT WAS. A HUGE problem. I went to paint their faces with the flesh colour and the ink fucking RAN! That has never happened to me before and these pens are supposed to be waterproof and archival so WTF? So I stopped painting faces with the second girl and decided to let the ink “cure” over night and when I tried painting their faces the next day, everything was totally fine. I ruined 2 of 8, which sucks because I worked really hard on them, but at least I didn’t ruin the whole batch. Currently they’re still sitting on my desk with freshly painted eyes and faces awaiting hair colour and dresses. Truthfully, I haven’t kept working on them because I got distracted by another project…

This other project…well, I don’t really want to talk about it too much because I always do that (I suck at keeping things secret) and because I always do that and give too much away, I self-sabotage and never finish anything. Here’s the gist: I had a dream on Monday that was so vivid and so surreal that as soon as my eyes opened I flew out of bed and just began writing down every detail I could remember. Then that afternoon I fleshed it out a bit more and when Blake got home I showed him my scrawls to see what he thought and he thought it was brilliant, which was reassuring because I never know if my ideas are brilliant or stupid.  I thought about the story over the next couple of days, slightly intimidated by it but Blake threatened that if I didn’t write it, he would, and he wouldn’t do as good of a job as I would because I saw it all unfold in front of my eyes in the dream and for some reason, I think this is a story that needs to be told. I think it’s a story that’s never been told before, but then again, I’m not exactly well read so I could be talking out my ass there. Anyway, yesterday I actually started writing the thing and somehow, in the span of a couple of hours, I had 10 pages typed out, today I added 4 more and this story, that was only supposed to be a “short story” is turning into a novella. Honestly, I don’t know where it’s coming from but it’s a refreshing feeling and I’m enjoying the writing process more than I’ve enjoyed writing in a long time. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it when it’s done, but I’m trying not to worry about that and just fucking write the thing.

So often I sabotage myself by, like I said, explaining a project so much on here that I feel like I’ve completed the project or that just having the idea “out there” is enough for me. And I often get caught up in my fear of success. As much as people accuse me of being an attention whore, the opposite is actually true. I fear the spotlight like nobody’s business and when it comes to creative work, writing in particular, I fear criticism and thus I don’t often put very much out for critics. Even as I write this story, there’s this little negative voice in the back of my head telling me how much it sucks or how implausible the story is or how flimsy my characters are and all kinds of wonderful things like that. And it’s one thing for my own inner critic to say these things, but it’s a whole other thing for other people to say them. Since I’ve never really put anything out there for that kind of scrutiny (and yes, I realize that I put myself “out there” constantly with my site and my cam and all that, this is different) I don’t know how I’d deal with it and a fear of the unknown suddenly surfaces.

But right now all the story is, is 14 pages on my MacBook that no one’s seen but Blake and until it’s finished, that’s all it will be.

This week I also taught Wayne & Judy how to use Facebook, to the best of my ability. Right now they can’t afford internet but they have a wireless card in their computer so Blake built a booster on our wireless router and set them up with the password for the network so they have internet…some of the time. Most of the time they don’t get a signal, but this week they’ve actually had a strong signal for some reason and thus, they’ve been calling me every day to show them how to do things on the Facebook accounts I set up for them last week. Today Judy was asking me how to play FarmVille because a few of her friends sent her FarmVille gifts and since I have that application blocked on my own Facebook, I didn’t really know what to tell her. She also called me yesterday afternoon to tell me that she figured out how to comment on people’s status messages, which I thought was cute because she was so proud of herself for figuring it out.

This weekend I plan on going over there and if they have a strong enough signal, I’m going to set them up with FireFox, add all of the bookmark tabs that they’ll ever need and delete their shortcuts for Internet Explorer altogether. Yes, I realize Chrome is the new big thing but I haven’t used it myself yet and I want them to quit clicking on stupid pop up ads that tell them they have a virus, causing them to freak out and call me. Oh and I changed all of their homepages (they have 3 profiles on Windows, one for Wayne, one for Judy and one for Courtney) to Google so now how they get to Facebook is by typing “www.Facebook.com” INTO Google and going to the first search result. *headdesk* I don’t really blame them though, their Internet Explorer has/had so many toolbars on it for some reason that it had 3 possible inputs for a url and no doubt they chose the wrong one many many times. I got rid of the Ask Jeeves one, but since I don’t use IE and haven’t in many many years, I wasn’t sure how to get rid of the others and it’s difficult to tweak anything when they’re over your shoulder asking what you’re doing every 30 seconds. So, setting them up with FireFox and breaking their IE habit seems like the best thing to do. I also set them up with Gmail accounts and I’m going to try and get them in the habit of checking their e-mail as often as they check their Facebook so they understand how Facebook’s e-mail notifications work. Instead of Google, I’ll probably make Gmail their homepages for that reason.

I’m not a very patient person and my patience in teaching them how to use the internet is surprising even myself.

This week I got a call from the mental health clinic saying that they wanted to set me up with an appointment for another doctor who I think is a nutritionist or something. Are nutritionists doctors? This woman has “Dr.” in front of her last name and she runs a metabolic sumpin-er-other clinic where I see my shrink and I requested to get in on that when a spot opened up because the meds they had me on has slowed down my metabolism and while I’m still eating my eggs every day to help boost my metabolism, progress has been slow and this clinic is all about how to switch your metabolism around and lose weight. Apparently it’s 6 or 8 weeks and it’s in a group setting (oh yay) once a week in the afternoons. I’m assuming the new group starts in the new year and my appointment with this new doctor is on the 29th.

Before I called them back, I checked with Blake to make sure he was okay with using his days off to take me to this thing and he was, so I called and made the appointment with the new doctor. I guess she’ll like, assess me or something, I have no idea. Maybe there’s even a chance I can’t get into the clinic because I’m not fat enough. I don’t know how these things work.

And speaking of mental health…since some folks have been asking…no I have not been driving anywhere. I have not been doing my immersion therapy. I have not been checking the mail. I have also been neglecting my light therapy and had a really bad day earlier this week, so starting Monday the lightbox is going back on my desk and I’m going to start using it again. As for immersion therapy…I’m just done with it. I don’t even care anymore. I can go places, like with Blake or even with Judy, and be okay. I haven’t had a panic attack in public since the spring and I think I’ve made all the progress I’m going to make right now. I have zero desire to drive the car, in fact I hate the car and the mere thought of driving, so fuck it, I’m done. Maybe I’ll pick it up again in the spring, maybe I won’t. I’ve decided that in the end it simply doesn’t matter and that I’m fine where I am. So that’s that.

Anyway, this is a really long fucking post about basically nothing so I’m going to end it here and get back to work on my story.

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.

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