Is it weird?

Hello Phuktophiles! I am writing to you today from my basement art studio, which is a bad thing because I recently found that I am allergic to something down here. Yeah. This is the universe trying to keep me away from creating.

Anyway, I was thinking about something rather odd the other day while I was running a shitty customer’s copy order (while she stared at me, perhaps thinking her stinkeye would cause the Xerox to run faster … I’m not sure what the logic was). I have always had this weird fascination with things that had run their course and are no longer in use. I think I may need to provide an example here.

Okay, so here we have a picnic table that is no longer in use, probably no longer safe to use for that matter. Now, most people would chop it up and use it for firewood, personally, I like to ponder these things instead.

The mighty picnic table. Once upon a time it gave families a place to meet and eat, laugh, and have fun. Now, it sits desolate and discarded in a field next to what I can only assume is a sasquatch hiding place. What is a picnic table to do when it no longer provides a place to picnic? It has lost its way, its PURPOSE in this world. How must it feel as it is being dragged aside by a human, a human tired of looking at its flaking paint, a human tired of getting splinters on their arse every time they sit. Perhaps the picnic table was discarded because it was getting ready to fall apart! Perhaps aunt Matilda tried to sit on the picnic table and it collapsed under her … ahem … weight. Oh, mighty picnic table. How the mighty have fallen.

See, I like to give things a back story. I think this might be why people think I’m bat shit insane.

In all seriousness, though, I am one of those weirdos who feel bad for things when they are no longer serving their purpose on this planet. I cry when it is time to get rid of my cars. Oh, don’t even get me started on that.

What is a basketball hoop to do when no one is throwing basketballs in to it?

Where have all the people gone?

Hell, even the random voodoo doll found in the rumored-to-be-haunted decrepit old cemetery needs someone to love it, right?

So, if you haven’t guessed, I am also a pack rat. I may not have a use for this thing today, but by golly, I will have one by tomorrow. So, the question is, does anyone else feel bad for the items left behind, or is it just me?

Please do feel free to tell me how insane I am in the comments section. I welcome your comments, good or bad. However, if you say I am crazy, I am only going to spin it to make it appear that I just have a reaaaaaaaallllllly good imagination, so … yeah. Go ahead.

Peace out, Sauerkraut.

My cousin, and the beauty of 17.

First, let me start by saying that I hope this photo displays well. I can never tell when I write these posts on my phone if my photos are displaying properly or if I’ve been victim of a nasty image resize  🙂

Anyway, that being said, this is my cousin. I took her senior photos for her over the weekend, which I was (as usual) very nervous to do. No, I haven’t yet broken the trend of trying to talk myself out of doing photo shoots. It is an annoying side effect of panic. But let me try to stay on topic here.

I took over 100 images, two shots at a time to ensure open eyes, etc. so 50 shots to go through and this one ends up being everyone’s favorite. Why do I find that to be SO AWESOME? Because I have 49 photos of big, gorgeous smiles, beautiful blue eyes, perfectly styled hair, and planned poses. This shot was a test shot. I took it to test the lighting as it was settling in on early evening and my sunlight was slanting in and becoming very golden-amber. She isn’t looking, she isn’t smiling, she is lost in her thoughts, she is completely natural. I thought while I was editing that perhaps I liked this one so much because I rarely find myself so at peace with my existence that I can’t imagine or remember a moment that felt as peaceful as she looks here. I will never know if she was nervous, sad, or angry, and I don’t want to. In this photo, I see peace.

I’m not gonna get all psycho-babble philosophical on you here, but sometimes I see a photo like this, or a color, or a smile on someone’s face, or a tree branch swaying in a breeze, or even a bird pecking at his dinner and I get lost in a sea of thoughts, swirling and flapping around in my brain. I think of peace, I think of love, I think of things that make me happy and sad, I think of life and of death, I think of how the lives of those around me continue to play out with or without me around and sometimes I am happy, sometimes I just must draw or paint or photograph something because I am so inspired, and sometimes I just cry.

Hers is a life just beginning, and how short a time ago it was when I was just like her, smiling and happy, beginning my last year of high school, excited and terrified of what that meant for me. There is beauty in this world beyond just what we see on the surface. There is beauty in what she might someday become! There is beauty in the things she still has to learn!

But let’s face facts here, Phuktophiles, you don’t come here to hear about my senior photo sessions, do you? You come here to see what my panicky brain has to say about all this.

I didn’t expect to learn anything from her. Going in to this photo shoot, I didn’t expect that she would teach me something, especially something that she didn’t have to verbalize for me to understand.

Where is my 17? When did I lose my 17? Physically, or rather, chronologically, I lost my 17 in December of 1997, but when did I lose my 17 figuratively? I have been a scared 17 year old, excited and terrified of what the world would give me for the first 28 years of my existence. The past 4 years, I lost my 17. I lost my wonder, my hope, my faith. I lost my light. My cousin, her light burns white hot. Her 17 is still fresh and new. If there is one thing that I can teach her, it would be to never lose her 17. I also want her to know that she helped me find a little bit of mine.

Things just had to change.

Hello Phuktophiles!

Well, I made a decision to stop abusing myself and to stop allowing people to abuse me. I feel good about that.

I have neglected you all so … My lovely readers … I did miss you, though. Once I have a little more control over my brain, I will most definitely write more, but I don’t want this blog to be all about the stupid stuff that happens to me, I really want to start getting the focus back to living with / managing / beating panic disorders and depression, and of course, doing so while still creating art. Once I get it out of my head that I deserve all the bad shit that happens to me and start understanding that I deserve better, I will be able to write with some level of confidence. Until then, I start posts and delete them because I sound whiney and boring.

So, I got new ink. That isn’t me in the shot, that is the Snotface Pupster. But I did manage to shoot some great shots of us getting our ink done. Let’s face it, any reason to take photos at this point is a welcome reason.

I got this on my bicep. Seems fitting for the print nerd to have a registration bullseye…

And being a Lucero nerd prompted this one on my shoulder. Now the 6,000,000 dollar question: why does this not throw me in to a panic, but just about everything else does?

That’s a thinker.

I spent Friday afternoon in Marymount Hospital getting looked at by a new doctor. My beloved Dr Thomas is retired, which threw me in to a panic tailspin, but the new doctor seems okay. See, I am allergic to something and it has been making me completely miserable for months. I have hayfever type respiratory allergies that literally halt everyday functioning, headaches like I have never experienced before, and a lovely new rash on my arms and trunk. Because I needed another reason to hate my body, yeah? Anyway, I thought for certain that I was dying of some flesh eating disease, but no, just allergies, thankfully. Guess what we suspect I am allergic to… Mold. Guess where I am getting this mold… My art space. Le sigh. Yet another obstacle the universe is placing inconveniently in my way? Seems likely. Anyway, my panicked brain was convinced that I have melanoma because why? Because I decided to grow out my hair long enough to donate to Locks of Love. See, Karma hates when I do good deeds. When I do good, bad shit comes back. Karma got my shit ass backward.  Anyway, for the hair reason and also because I had a big, purple rash everywhere, I thought I had some kind of cancer. Thankfully, I was wrong. As usual.

Anyway… That is what is new so far. So… Yeah. Not much. But it is after midnight now and I have to work tomorrow, so when I sit down and write my next post I will post photos from the Medieval Faire that Snotface Pup and I went to last weekend, and photos from the senior portraits I shot today of my little cousin (who isn’t so little anymore). For now, I leave you with this:

Which is a screen capture proving that my idol, Derek Hess, not only follows me on instagram, but he liked one of my sketches. I won’t say that I peed my pants, but I won’t say that I didn’t, either.

Good night, Phuktophiles! Sweet, sweet dreams until we meet again!

Coming soon.

Hey everyone.

So, I have decided, after much thought and panic over the situation, that I am going to start taking this blog in a new direction. Details will be forthcoming, and I hope that the change in scenery will help gain some readers, perhaps get the word out that panic disorders don’t have to own you. We’ll see. Like I said, details to come. In the meantime, I hope my North American readers had a safe and happy thanksgiving, and everyone else … A happy Thursday. Black Friday … Up at 2 am … Worked all morning … Need sleep now …

Have a great night, everyone!

Days like this.

I hate/love days like this.

If you read yesterday’s blog entry, then you know of the guy I am talking about here. After I posted the blog entry yesterday, he apparently went on and read it and commented on my Facebook page that he believes that people who have panic attacks are like “children having a temper tantrum”, people who have these attacks “lack self control”, and to call it a disorder is “pushing it”.

For my entire life, I have thought of myself as weird. I was different. No one else that I knew had these night terrors, no one else spent whole nights in the emergency room, no one else was tortured. People like this guy remind me that I am different. 18 million others are “different” like me, but all you “normals” make it seem like I am the only one who has this, and it is because you have never experienced it. You normals place a stigma on it and make us non-normals feel shitty just for having (yes, it is) a disorder.

Well, to that I say… Go live your cookie cutter life. I mean, I have thought the most profound thoughts, gained the most wisdom and intelligence, I have learned the most about my body and my mind BECAUSE of this disorder. This disorder makes me strive for understanding, it gives me compassion for other’s sufferings. I could go home from work and crack open a beer and stare at a television, but I don’t. I explore the mind. I explore art. I explore communication and expression and emotions. If that makes me a “weirdo”, as this guy called me, then, BRING ON THE WEIRD!! Evolution may not have cured the amygdala of not having an off switch in my brain, but having no off switch is making me evolve in ways that I hope others get a chance to experience. It has it’s side effects, I’m not denying that, but having this panic disorder makes me the person I am. If you are only interested in some cute girly girl to giggle mindlessly at your jokes, then don’t look here. I WILL challenge your intelligence. I WILL expect adult conversation. I WILL be constantly trying new things and evolving. That is what being a human is all about. Do you think we were built with this profound ability for cognitive thinking, for critical analysis, to waste it?

I will return to concentrating on my art. I will take on new challenges, start new trends, and make myself a better person. For anyone who can’t keep up with that, we can be friends, but you had better be willing to try to keep up. Some people don’t want the challenge. So, yeah, I might be weird, but if you are willing to try to dig beneath the weird to get to my next layer, you will find a pretty intelligent girl who can be a nerd AND have a good time. You will find a girl who loves to explore art so much that every day when she puts on her makeup it is a tutorial in color harmonies, not just putting on a pretty face. If you dig a little deeper, you will find the most loyal, compassionate, and caring soul. You will find forgiveness, you will find suffering, love, empathy. You will find a vulnerable little girl who still doesn’t like to be called weird, but respects your opinion enough to let you call her that. A little deeper and you will find a little girl who wants to be accepted, she wants people to love her for who she is and not this goofy mask society asks her to wear. I am finding that all too often, men are asking me to just wear the skin layer, the cute girl who doesn’t have emotions or feelings, who shouldn’t try to be so smart because it cuts in to “fun time”. Well, hey, being smart IS fun. It is to me, anyway.

I get it. The skin layer IS fun! You see exactly what you get when you look at the skin layer. I understand that. I know people don’t like surprises, I know that people just want to have fun and emotions are baggage. I get it. Boy, do I ever get it. You are talking to a girl who has fallen for the “hey, let’s get together!” … “Don’t worry, I like nerdy girls” … “Well, that was a great fuck, let’s do it again” … “Oh, wait, you have emotions? Yeah … I’m not looking for a relationship or anything, but we can continue to fuck” bullshit guy scam too many times for me to count. I am ashamed of it, actually. I am ashamed of how many times I have fallen for it, but I am more ashamed at how many guys try to pull it.

A new prerequisite for being my boyfriend… You must read and understand my blog and be willing and able to discuss. LOL

Anyway, so that is my rant for the day. I really started this thing feeling like shit because I hate it when people call me weird because of a medical/psychological condition I didn’t ask for. However, fuck it all if I don’t feel 100% better. Seriously. I love my little bloggity blog community. You guys make me look at myself from a different angle. You let me say what I want and not what I think people want to hear. Fuck people. They will take advantage and turn on you the first chance they get! Ah, alas, I am still fascinated by them. 🙂

On another topic altogether, we are back to the former best friend again (sorry). I’ve said some shitty things to him. I said them mostly because he infuriates me with his constant passive silence. The problem is that when I get angry at his passive silence, he gets more passively silent.

Well, it has been 6 days and he is ignoring my existence. I told him that I was done fighting, and I hope that he has a good life. He didn’t say anything.

Now, a part of me is hoping that he is so hurt by my cutting the cord that he can’t answer me, but I know that probably isn’t the case.

I have decided to pretend he never existed.

It is difficult, pretending someone whom you loved dearly for 11+ years never existed. Whenever I think his name I say “who??” as though I have no idea what my brain is talking about. As you can tell, I am failing.

I am someone who believes that love never really dies. I mean, it hides, it gets sick and ALMOST dies, but it never really goes away.

My parents divorced when I was 11ish. It was brutal. There was constant fighting, sibling was pitted against sibling, feelings were shredded, and I still hold on to a lot of misgivings about the whole ordeal (it took thousands of dollars of therapy for me to see that).

Anyone who knows me or is a regular reader of my blog knows that both of my parents are very important to me. There was a period of time when one or both was on my shit list, but nowadays I know that my parents are saints.

Bear with me here, this memory is foggy:

One day, a long time ago, after my parents had been divorced for a while, I might have been 15 years old or something, I had a panic attack (as usual). The next day, it took me until evening time to muster the courage to ask my dad a simple question that I (as a child of a wicked divorce) needed answered:

“Daddy, if mom was in our front yard and she was attacked by a dog and she was getting hurt, would you save her?”

My dad took a deep breath and put his hand to his mouth as he always does when he is contemplating. He sat forward in his computer chair and put his elbows on his knees.  What he said won’t be repeated verbatim, but it was something like this:

“Your mom was a very important part of my life for a very long time. We aren’t together now, but I still love her, it is just a different kind of love. If she was getting hurt, yes, I would stop it.”

At that moment, I knew that love didn’t die, it just changed.

I will never feel guilty for loving my former best friend enough to fall apart. I will never regret the things I said to make him understand just how much I was hurting. What I do regret? I showed him all of my art. Every photo shoot, every drawing, every painting, but he never showed me anything he wrote. I regret not pushing harder to read his words. I regret not pushing harder to make him sit down and play guitar. I regret never asking to see his soul … if that makes sense. Would I stop his pain if he were getting hurt? I would still, after all that has happened, take a bullet for him, and I would honestly always believe that the world was better off with him in it and not me. My love for him will change, I’m sure, but it won’t die.

And with that, I hope I can put all this pain to rest.

The awesomeness of healing salted wounds…

Well then.
I saw the Turtle in passing yesterday and I am pleased to say that the salt is gone, the blood, coagulated. The wound is scabbed over. Even picking at the scab yesterday didn’t reopen it.

Anyway, this little metal guy is the reason the Turtle is thusly named.  A little history:

Apparently, the Turtle was camping once upon a time and everywhere he turned, this metal turtle was there, as though it was following him. I’m not sure how I came to possess him, but I think the story is the perfect metaphor for the Turtle. He has been “following” me around in a sense, because I have been trying to hold on to our friendship more than the Turtle was. Well, it has been two weeks since the last time we exchanged words, and I actually don’t care. I’ve evolved. I guess you could say I am the turtle now … I carry my “shelter” on my back, I retreat inside when threatened, and I’m slow. I mean, who else in the world would still be trying to fix a dead friendship for as long as I have been?

So the metal turtle sits on my bookshelf watching over my bedroom. Two weeks ago, I considered throwing the little guy away so I wouldn’t be reminded of the Turtle every morning when I reach for my perfume. Well, look at how cute he is. I can’t throw him away! However, now I can’t throw him away because he’s cute, not because I would be in some way betraying a friendship.

FREEDOM!

***

Well, day 4 of my vacation was uneventful aside from basic socializing and downloading copious amounts of music. Yes. I do absolutely love my music.

This is a shot of the stage at Peabody’s that I shot on Saturday because I really need to stick to this photo-per-day project I start 100 times every year. I have good intentions, I swear. Unfortunately, I missed today! Oh, and yesterday. And I am pretty sure almost all of last week.  🙂  Anyway, the point being, at some point I am going to start this project and actually stick to it, but I got a couple of awesome pics that I wanted to post here.

This is outside Peabody’s while Tony was having a smoke. Yes, I still enjoy sniffing other people’s smoke. As a matter of fact, the best smoke I have sniffed lately (ever) was Ben’s (from Lucero). Yup. I know that sounds incredibly stalkery and creepy, and I have made peace with it. I will be smoke free for a year on July 14th. I have to get my fix somehow …

I absolutely love Ben. He is a genius … and too modest, because he probably wouldn’t call himself a genius.  I am considering making the 2 hour drive to Pennsylvania to see Lucero again. Stalker.

And the two monsters I am sitting.

So, not quite a photo per day, but whatever. I get points for trying, right?

Well, kiddos, that will be all for today. On a sidenote, my phone wanted to autocorrect “kiddos” to “midsized”.

@_@

Yeah. I guess that makes sense on some level.  That’s all I can say about that.

Good night!

Or, rather, good morning, it would appear …