It feels like Thanksgiving was a month ago. For the past few years, my alcohol consumption has been limited to whatever is handed to me at a celebration, but my stress levels were so high on Thanksgiving that no less than six drinks were put in my hand and I did not feel a single one of them. It did short out the constantly scrolling to-do list in my brain for a few hours, though. I will jot this down as another bio-hack nobody should follow, right under using acetaminophen as a mood stabilizer.
I did not take any pictures or try a fun new recipe, but I did scrub the bathroom floor and cook a perfect turkey, so I am counting it as a hosting triumph.
On Sunday I went to pick up my painting from the gallery and inexplicably burst into tears while sitting in traffic on the way home, so I drove to my mom's house and sat crying through her box of tissues while she put a tray of tea and cookies down in front of me. I am not a person who cries much, generally speaking, so the past 6 months have been very confusing for my eyeballs. The other day I watched a tiktok of a mom picking up her teenage son for the last time, and when he wrapped his legs around her waist like a toddler it destroyed me, I was sobbing for an hour. I teared up just now, just writing about it. This is mutiny of the parasympathetic system.
Things downshifted when December arrived, eyeballs notwithstanding. My worry hardened into determination. The advent calendar became a countdown to departure. It feels like when you've waited all day for your event to be called, and now it's time to step up to the block and wait for the signal to take your mark.
Oh no, it is the day of the annual birthday portrait pictures, and I haven't slept in a week. My eyeballs feel like they're made of fire and sandpaper.
I will update with decent photos later. Today we get work toilet selfies.
bad outtake for authenticity
45 was a transition year. I started prying open the escape hatch, spending all my money and PTO on travel, tasting the air in different places, looking for home. I focused on getting better at painting, trying to level up with classes and workshops and research, making lists, forming plans. Now I am closing the book on the first 45 years, and opening up the next.
There are a lot of balls in the air, and I feel very close to ducking and letting them all fall on my head, but I will NOT. I can make this happen. Tickets are bought. Airbnb is booked for a few nights in St. John's while we buy a truck. Rental cottage is being secured for 2 months while we close on a house. Realtor is in a flurry of communication with the broker, the broker is in a flurry of communication with the lenders, the lenders are acting like it's soooo hard to do international sales even though it's totally normal. A lawyer still has to get involved in all this. I can't get my brain to stop lighting up and scrolling like an arrival/departure sign at the airport as it adjusts to all the moving pieces of information. Once I finalize the contract for the rental, I'll have an address, and once I have an address I can get insurance set up for the hypothetical truck, and register for MCP numbers, and get Zenny into school. I keep remembering things to do and panicking, then talking myself back through it all step by step. I feel like the rug is going to get pulled out from under me at any moment, that my dreams will be dashed, or that I'll get there and my piece of shit truck will break down and we'll freeze to death on the side of the road, or that the caretaker at the cottage will be an ax murderer (he's not, he's the cousin of my friend's boss, but YOU NEVER KNOW).
I need sleep.
First, though: dinner at my favorite restaurant, and a cake made by my mother. Am I ready for Thanksgiving? No, I am not. But there is a bird in the fridge and potatoes in the cupboard, so we'll figure it out.
While my boss went on a tangent during our staff meeting last week, I checked my phone for upcoming appointments and saw that I had new email. I hesitated, because I was expecting to hear back about the job in Newfoundland, but I wasn’t sure I wanted bad news at that exact moment. I put my phone away.
…Maybe those emails were just delivery notices and gallery stuff, though. I opened my phone back up. There it was: an unread message from my interviewer in Newfoundland. I scrutinized the partial sentence visible under her name. It said ‘Hi Holly, hope all is well in Hawaii! I…’ Hmm. That could go either way. If it was a gentle rejection, I would be back at square one and feeling depressed. If it was an offer, I would be at the start of something huge and feeling big feelings. I put my phone down again.
Picked it up a moment later. Nobody starts a rejection letter with a first name and an exclamation mark, I decided, and tapped on the message. Tim must have seen my face do something, because he suddenly changed the subject, jumped ahead to Round Robin, and asked if I had anything to announce. He was smiling, but it felt like being pounced on by your mother-in-law at a family dinner after turning down a glass of wine. Announce? To the entire staff? With a face like a boiled ham? Definitely not. I turned my phone face-down and talked about the young homeless guy who had been masturbating through his pocket while asking me to explain WWII fascism a few days earlier (“So, what is fascism? Is that, like… Italy? Hey, can I ask, how old are you?”).
It was considerate of my contact to send me the offer at the end of a Friday, to give me the weekend to panic and discuss with family before formulating a reply. I sent my acceptance the same day anyway.
Adding to this, two days earlier, Zenny was discovered to be hiding three failing classes and a long list of unfinished assignments. She has only had a phone - with parental controls - since she started middle school a few months ago, and it immediately became a huge problem. She began hiding it, pretending to do homework with it in her lap, and shutting herself into her room to FaceTime with her friends all evening. She stopped reading books and drawing, too distracted. We talked about it, timed the apps to shut off at bedtime, and tried to interest her in books she'd enjoy, but it wasn't going well. With this new crash in her grades, I took the device away, checked her messages, and found a group chat with her friends that was filled with swearing, racism, anti-school/parents rants, and borderline-too-sexual anime images. The worst texts were coming from one girl in particular, while the rest of the group tried to ignore her comments and continue conversations about Halloween costumes and k-pop around her thread spamming. I care a lot about children, but this girl needs help I am not able to give, and I can't have my own kid hanging around with someone who calls Black Santa the ‘N’ word (a lot of local kids think they get a pass on using the word because they’re not white, while still using it with the hard-R to insult Black people). I was really angry to see zero pushback from her or her other friends. I have hammered this into my kids for years: when someone says something gross in front of you, you need to say something. Anything. ‘That’s not okay”, “that’s messed up”, or just "NO", at MINIMUM. If edgelord teens don’t get called out by their peers, they become asshole adults.
We locked the phone down until it was basically just a brick that nags her with texts from immediate family, and we’re sitting with her to make sure she gets caught up on all her work. She's already doing better, reading books and making crafts again, but the friend group at school is still a problem, and in the course of helping her catch up I was alarmed by how stupid her homework is. They are giving her lower-elementary work, with coloring sheets and things like "Join these two sentences with the word 'and' or 'but'." In Honors English. No wonder she thinks homework is a waste of time.
So I'm taking her with me. Initially, I was going to let her finish the school year while I got everything set up, but I decided that she can sleep on an air mattress and eat ramen as well as I can. Once decided, it was a big relief - I didn't want to leave her in the first place. I imagined spending the winter alone, cold and scared at night in an empty house, questioning all my life choices and dreaming about not being able to find my babies. She's excited to go, and I have just a slight pang of guilt about dropping a kid from Hawaii into freezing slush and darkness. It'll build character.
Leif is staying; he's graduating and going to university in a few months anyway, and he has a great girlfriend with a great mom who likes to feed him. He hugged me when I got sad about the thought of leaving him, and said he was glad I was going for it and taking a big chance. Also, he looks forward to getting my car. Gavin is just happy to have another place to visit - he's busy with university and not worried at all.
This is going to be a build-your-plane-on-the-way-down kind of situation. I am preparing to hit the ground like a guillemot.
Don't worry, they're supposed to do that
Meanwhile, the man and I are still approaching this as a 'healing separation', because I'm giving him time to accept that I'm gone and get right with himself. Now that everything is in motion, he's starting to see this as an opportunity, and getting excited. Yesterday he said, "This can be good! We'll use the time apart to work on ourselves and focus on our own goals. I'll finish my tattoo coursework, do the blood-born pathogen training, and get certified. And then when you're all financially stable over there - like in the next 6 or 18 months or whatever - I can just quit my job and move out there with you!"
orly?
I put a few paintings up for sale on my website (hollybraffet.com). We are going to arrive with nothing but two suitcases, so it's time to try to scrape up whatever money we can. We are going to be really broke for a long time, but I will apply for grants and write books and sell art! It’s better to risk it all and fail than not try at all.
I was not feeling it this Halloween. We didn't have time to carve the pumpkin. Leif went to a sleepover. Gavin and cousin Chris took Zenny trick-or-treating. Mom and aunt handed out candy. I sat on the couch drinking a Guinness and trying not to be a grumpy asshole. The neighborhood was struggling this year; more porch lights off, fewer inflatable decorations, hardly any chocolate in the buckets. My mother handed out cold sodas, and the kids (and parents) were screaming with excitement because they were dying of thirst after walking so much longer in hot costumes to get treats.
So I kind of dropped the ball on this holiday, but the kids didn't really notice. Now there is a giant pumpkin sitting on my dining room table that I have to break down into pies. I wish I had a cute talking porcupine to feed it to. Or a trebuchet.
Other things are happening.
The art show opened (another honorable mention for me - “your art is so old-fashioned!”), and I took my turn sitting at the gallery for a couple afternoons while tourists and influencers hustled through without really looking at any of the paintings. Most of them just visit Ho'omaluhia to pose on top of rented Jeeps or jump up and down in fancy outfits. We are weird little animals.
This is the painting that won Best in Show, by the way:
On Saturday I presented my Scotland grant project to the Caledonia Society for their annual banquet. It went really well, except that Mike told me it was informal and then everyone showed up in dresses and kilts while I was standing there in jeans and gold sneakers. Most of the audience was not interested in art history and how pigments are made, but they laughed when I showed them Pug Dogs Through History as an example of how art is documentation; we would never know pugs had faces up until the 1900s without paintings to prove it.
They liked my finished paintings, and I blew the opportunity to scoop up commissions because I forgot to bring my new business cards. I need a manager.
Burying the lede - one of the jobs I interviewed for has advanced me to reference checks/criminal history clearance, and I finally had to tell my boss what I'm up to. They haven’t made an offer yet, but it is feeling very real now. This might actually happen.
First thoughts: SCARY
Second thoughts: lots of things are scary: being accepted into university is scary; moving is scary; getting a new job is scary; having babies is scary. You did all those things before you had a fully cooked prefrontal cortex; you can do this now.
Third thoughts: you needed an undeveloped brain to do those things. NOW when you end up frozen and destitute it’ll just be because you’re dumb.
Third thoughts, as I have mentioned, are assholes.
Anyway, I have a realtor scheduled to do video walkthroughs for potential houses in case they actually offer me the job. “It’s really rural,” the realtor warned. I laughed in Trailer Trash. My dude, they have a Walmart.
My mother is supportive, but in a pragmatically negative kind of way. “Oh, yuck, cold. They get polar bears, you know.” WHAT. I did not see any polar bears growing up in St John’s. I checked, and yes, Newfoundland does get polar bears. But they don’t live there. They ride down on icebergs, hop off, eat a bunch of puffins, and then go home. How? Nobody knows. They just “migrate”. Unless they’re chasing people around or getting into trash - then they get tranquilized and relocated to Labrador. There are fewer than 100 that are too lazy to leave, so the odds of getting mauled by a polar bear are way less than getting trampled by a moose. No problem.
I’m getting complacent, though. It’s hard to maintain anger for years, and you’re not as desperate to escape when the door finally cracks opens. Stay angry, Braffet.
The Algorithm started laying offerings of perimenopausal content all over my feed, and it made me wonder if the emotional upheaval of the past year might actually be due in part to hormonal changes, so my doctor ran a full blood panel to check my levels. Results: NOPE. I am still in full blossom of childbearing-aged womanhood, and none of this is to blame on the development of crone superpowers. I am still the basic model of human having basic reactions to basic problems.
Interviews are all done. Trying not to think too much about whatever word salad came out of me. It's over, it's out of my hands, I can relax and just see what happens. It is scary to think of leaving really soon. It is scary to think of not being able to leave until next summer. It is scary to think about nothing happening at all. It is ALL SCARY, so I am just going to keep working on my atelier homework and focus on the upcoming gallery show.
For class this week, I scrambled to finish my value and color studies for the new set-up, expecting my sloppy mitten studies to get torn apart. SURPRISE, he likes both compositions, didn't want me to quit the mittens, and also is interested to see the gun finished, so now I am working on two paintings concurrently. Good job simplifying things, self.
A nod to the Dark Tower series
How do you simplify a tiny checkerboard pattern?
Answer: you make a mess and get mad and paint a gun instead.
I have ordered business cards and updated my website, so if I don't have anything else to do in the next few months I can try to scoop up some commissions at the gallery show and grant presentation. Now watch me bag a 10k commission and then have to move suddenly.
You know what takes your mind off all the stupid things you said/should have said in a job interview? Getting a call that your husband was hit by a car on his motorcycle. The person behind him failed to brake when traffic backed up on the off-ramp, rear-ended him, and smashed him into the car ahead of him. A chunk of his bike flew under the car and popped their tire, but at least it wasn’t his head. He’s okay, except for a sprained wrist, a burn on his leg from his muffler, and some minor whiplash that gave him a headache (helmets are heavy). Luckily, he wasn’t pitched into oncoming traffic; he was wearing full safety gear; and he got it all on the bike's cameras.
Three other bikers came into the ER while we were there (it was raining lightly, everyone forgets how to drive), and the ones without leather and helmets were in rough shape. Wear your gear, folks.
In other news:
* 2 out of 3 interviews done. #2 seemed pretty good. Fingers crossed.
* Emailed my painting instructor my value studies, but couldn't make it to class (due to Mike trying to get pancaked between two sedans) to explain why it was such a disaster, and that lead to an embarrassing video critique in my absence where the poor guy couldn't understand where I went so wrong and had to scrutinize the pictures for clues like a detective. (He figured it out correctly, btw, which was almost worse to listen to on the recording. I wanted to crawl inside my own shirt to hide.) Decided to scrap the fair-isle mittens and go with something simpler. Now I just have to set up a new still life, start over from the beginning, and catch up with my value studies before next class.
* My therapy homework was to do pro & con lists for moving/staying/changing careers, etc. Every single list I made had more cons than pros.
I might as well just call a psychic hotline or get a tarot reading at this point. One of my professors once said, "You are going to make errors, so err on the side of the dynamic." He was talking about drawing naked people, but it works as a general guideline, too, I think.
When I came home from the workshop last month it felt like I had pulled apart a steel trap just enough to get some relief and then let it snap back in place. This time it felt like the trap broke, and I came home feeling pretty good. The man is making half-hearted efforts toward separation to show that he's listening, but he hasn't actually gone anywhere. I don't care anymore. (I will NEVER tell you what I do.) The only person you can control is yourself, and I have things to get done:
* Atelier class every Monday until Christmas
* two THREE job interviews in the next two weeks (!!)
* Quiet internal freak-out about the possibility of actually getting a job offer and having to move out
* Dropping off a painting for a juried gallery show
* Downsizing my stuff
* Presenting my Scotland art project to the grant committee - and about a hundred spectators at a formal banquet, yikes
It's enough to keep me busy for a while.
For my atelier class, we are working on tromp l'oeil (a painting that gives the illusion of a real object popping off your wall). I went with a Newfoundland trigger mitten, some dried leaves from Bowring Park, and a playing card of maritime folklore figures. I nailed some boards together to look like the siding of the brightly painted jellybean houses for the background.
This week's homework was to do a value study. I know how to do value studies, but maybe not with something that has a pattern made up of a MILLION TINY KNITTED STITCHES. It's supposed to be loosely blocked in with broad blotches of value - how do you even do that with a knitted pattern?! I tried it in brown, got mad, painted over it it in grey, got mad again, and started over today. I have 3 days to get this thing done correctly.
NOPE
made two in case I mess one up again
It's going great so far.
I'll keep at it. And level up my skills. And take notes on how to conduct a class. And then break into the Canadian art scene and build an ART EMPIRE.
Our last day was simple and nice. We walked the downtown, browsed shops, chatted with the woman running the art galley, ate fish and chips, saw a hundred high school students bunching into the grocery store for lunch break (Zenny eyeballed the teen cliques and wondered which one was hers, finally deciding that she wouldn’t want to wait in line for her whole lunch break, so her group was probably laying around on the grass somewhere on campus), and we hunted out a lobster. The couple at the table next to us were teachers/kayak-rental owners from Ontario. They said they were relocating, but maybe not to St John’s, because it was too busy, like a small Toronto. That was amazing to us; our one small island has twice as many people crammed onto it as the entire province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Yikes. The couple gave Zenny a fresh oyster, and the table on the other side stopped to watch her try it for the first time, cheering when she liked it.
This has been a really good trip, and we’re so sad it’s over already.
Heading to the airport. Back into the pressure cooker.
Gen Alpha goblin face
Styrofoam under sprayed concrete! Architecture of lies! This is why you don’t hire the lowest bidder.
It was warm and sunny, so I let the girl sleep in while I walked up to the store for breakfast stuff and took a detour around the neighborhood to look at some houses for sale. A couple of them looked pretty good.
Midmorning we rode out to Cape Spear, the farthest Eastern point of North America, with a lighthouse, walking trails, and WWII bunker. Zenny hated it. She didn’t complain, but trudged like a prisoner up the endless stairs, stopping to sit and refusing to budge every time I paused to look at the view. That’s okay; the entire reason I even wanted to go to Cape Spear is because I remember hating the stairs so much as a kid. I took her to the mall afterwards, where she perked up over a bowl of poutine and we bought some fancy chocolates to bring home.
The girl needed some down time, so we stayed in and ordered noodle delivery while watching our K-drama. The power went out for an hour and plunged her into darkness while she was in the shower, which she thought was a great adventure.
With one day left, the stress is creeping back in. Zenny is behind on a fall break assignment that could only be completed at home, and I have storytime in a few days. This morning I woke myself up crying from a nightmare about being back. In my dream I begged the man to tell me what he’d done, and he said, I will NEVER tell you what I do. And I realized that’s all the truth I actually need.
We are going to try to enjoy this last day, taking our time to browse the shops downtown. We are on the hunt for a whole lobster.
In the spirit of “revisit childhood” and also “pretend we live here”, I took the girl to the park today. That’s it. It’s a big park, though.
It was cool and sunny, and she played like a little kid for hours, stuffing my purse with pretty autumn leaves and climbing all the playground equipment that has been banned in the US, making friends with a little girl from Scotland. There are still a million ducks in the ponds, and they swarmed anyone who stood too close to the water, hoping for treats. We walked through the woods along the river, and Zenny found a circle of fairy houses hidden in a grotto.
It was pretty perfect.
Duck yoga
When the shadows started getting long, we went home and had tea to warm up. The characters on our Korean rom-com finally kissed, and Zenny was skipping and happy when we went down to the as-seen-on-food-network Italian restaurant for (really nice and affordable) homemade pasta.
The best kind of easy, simple day. I had a moment of delight when we saw a squirrel, and a moment of joy when a thousand pigeons flew in a huge circle overhead and then dove down to fly past so close that their wings blew my hair. I feel really happy.
