Small win

Fitness cult milestone: a shadow of a muscle! From just the one angle, but it STILL COUNTS. 

Only took 2 years.

On Tuesday I find out if any of my paintings got into the juried show. They sent out a mass email yesterday saying they’re narrowing it down from 577 artists and 2,000 entries, so if I just get a spot on the wall that’ll make me happy.

ungovernable

It was nice while it lasted. Then I sat down to fill out my therapy intake questionnaire and had to detail every bad thing that's happened in my entire life, and by the time I got up to the present I was NOT OKAY. 

The last item on the questionnaire was something like, “What strengths do you bring to the table?” and I wrote about how I’m good at having difficult discussions without losing my temper, saying mean things, or storming out.

Except I did not take into account my decision to stop listening to my brain and my heart, and to just go with my gut this time around. 

The brain:

superego

The heart:

ego

The gut:

id

So instead of having a quiet conversation with “I” statements and reflective listening when he wanted to go to a brewery to talk things through, I yelled at him over a plate of honey bacon Brussels sprouts and told him to go fuck himself.

The diners behind us

After that we had a productive talk. He finally asked some questions he's been wanting to ask for years but knew he wouldn't like the answers to, about my life after we broke up. (And he didn't like the answers. Good.) What I find funny are the questions he has very carefully not been asking since then, via sly text messages. He is definitely not asking if I still have feelings for one specific person who wasn’t even part of the conversation. 

Haha, nice try. Who on earth are you hinting about? I have no idea. 

Ask a direct question and get a direct answer, I’m not picking up bait. What I know is that I have no interest in ever dating again or getting to know some new person who might wreck my life, and the next foot that gets wedged into my door to stop me from closing it is getting smashed into a foot quesadilla. An occasional visit from an old friend who would leave me alone for months in between would be fine, but the bucket of single friends is empty. It’s fine, I can paint and raise the hypothetical grandchildren.

Had some caffeine. Ditched my protein shake and bought a steak. Updated my resume. Found a job I might apply to. Got info on insurance so I can switch plans. Submitted my paintings to the statewide juried art show while still kind of angry and named one of them “fuck around and find out”. Oh no.

I hope I can switch this gut thing off before I steal a boat or something, but it's working for me right now. 

Art drop

This is the last week to submit pieces to the Artists of Hawaii show, and I am in full scramble mode. My sketchbook project is almost done, and the last painting will be dry enough to oil in and photograph in 2 days. DRY FASTER.

Latest sketchbook entries (part of piece #1):

Piece #2:

Piece #3: 

Our first meeting with the therapist is the second week of October, so maybe I've got at least that long before reality kicks me in the face.

Edit: NOPE. Didn’t even get that long. 

Wtfbbq

I don’t even know what’s happening. We are really bad at fighting. 

We made a plan to fix things, and a plan to break up, and agreed to work on both of them and see where things fall. Then we split a pizza and raided the "under $5" cheese bin at Whole Foods.

A weird thing happened when we got home. Without realizing it, he told me something that I actually really needed to know, and I believed him, and my guard suddenly dropped. I've had that thing up since about 2002, I did not expect it to just go all at once. 

Nature took the shot and hit the emergency “DUMP ALL BRAIN CHEMICALS” button. It was  lot of chemicals.

Well, damn.

We’re still taking this relationship into the shop for maintenance, though. And I’m keeping the house.

Side note: a few days before all that, I showed up to work with eyes like raw meatballs and did a slightly unhinged storytime, and one of my best library hobos took a kitten out of his backpack and handed it to me. 

My young coworker recently lost her sick cat, so this baby was sent by the Kitten Distribution System for her, but it was exactly what I needed at that moment.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

I got to the bottom of things, even if I did it more like Nancy Drew than Sherlock Holmes.

Hark! A Vagrant

What happened is this: I tried catching the stray cat going in and out of the basement, and only managed to find one of my chickens laying piles of eggs in my painting stuff. While Mike was in New York with Gavin, I bought a mini surveillance camera with motion activation to catch the cat. After a week of not recording anything but mysterious glimpses of a tail bobbing out of view, I brought the camera upstairs to charge and left it in the living room without telling the man, and he didn't notice it sitting out in the open while he was home alone.

So anyway, now we're in counseling.