Not great

 POV: the flowers in my studio at 3am 

Had individual intake appointment at 5am, couldn’t sleep.

 It was rough. Turns out going through a lot of bad stuff as a kid makes it hard for someone to gauge the severity of a situation; if you're not in imminent danger of being murdered, it’s something that can be worked through. Also, sudden feel-good hormone dumps are a common fight or flight response, and abrupt loss of shyness/self-consciousness is a sign of emotional detachment. 

Seems obvious, but hearing it from a professional helps.

Tried to unwind my brain and paint flowers for the rest of the day, but messed it up and wiped the whole thing out.

Driving the paintings down to the gallery today. I should probably be more proactive in getting to know the other people in the show, build a community. I need more people.

Achievement

Today I paid off my car! Took her for a celebratory wash. 

It’s been a mess over here. We’re good. We’re bad. We’re shopping for a new fridge. I don’t know. Therapy tomorrow. 

My mother and aunt want to go on a trip next month for my milestone birthday. We can’t find an opera to reenact the original San Francisco trip of 1996, so I’ve been looking at art museums in cities on the West coast to see if any have a Bouguereau. Maybe we can do an art quest instead of getting yelled at by Wagner for 3 hours.

I’m in!

Two of my paintings were accepted into the show! One of them was the one I irritably named “fuck around and find out” at the last minute. Whoops. At least if I win anything, we get to hear a respected dignitary announce it over a PA system. And then I will have set the expectation for all my future painting titles. “The fuck is this”, “that goddamn lace collar took 42 hours”, “another fucking landscape”, “tranquility and shit”. Sorry, progeny.

I’m surprised they picked the one I accidentally sent blurry pictures of. Maybe it was because it was blurry and they didn’t know better, but I have a suspicion that they just liked the Native & Naturalized theme because it’s more “Hawaii”. I kind of preferred the invasive species one, with the mongoose skull.

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. 

Like National Treasure, but it’s just me trashing my studio

Vague posting pisses me off, but OH WELL.

I have been trying to catch another glimpse of Basement Cat using old-fashioned flour-on-the-flour kind of detective work, and things have gotten weird. I found more than I was looking for, and I need an explanation. But guess who rots her brain on podcasts and thinks she can solve the case? Fetch my deer stalker cap.

I’ll get into it later. Right now I am racing the clock to paint one last painting before the gallery deadline. Took the day off today to finish all the blank pieces.

It’s coming along in small bites. 

Last photo is today’s progress. Still have time to block in the butterflies before bedtime. Then the whole thing gets a second pass, and I think I might be on track for the show. 

hurricane season

The first hurricanes of the year are heading our way, with a big storm thinking about turning into a hurricane right on top of us, and another hurricane right behind it. Blogger changed its formatting so we can no longer post gifs from the internet, so here is the link to the NOAA satellite view. They should get here by Saturday afternoon.

And of course it's just me and the two younger kids at home this week. Did I remember to get plywood this year? No, I did not. At least the louvres have been repaired, so we can pretend to close the windows by cranking the slats from flat to downward. We have a camp stove and a bucket of apocalypse food from the ballistic missile incident, so I just have to remember to stock up on water and we'll be set. Except for, you know, the windows being as stormproof as a paper bag. The basement is safe if things get bad - so long as the yard doesn't flood and the lychee tree doesn't decide to launch itself onto the house.

Storms hardly ever make landfall on Oahu. Not worried.