Sunday, June 28, 2009

Too tired for words

It's been a long (Satur)day, and I'm not sure I'm going to sleep yet.

For not being home, I did a surprising amount of drawing on Friday. Besides (unscanned) zoodles (zoo doodles), four pages of my big sketchbook were filled. Here's one of them:



Most of the page is "inside" jokes (inside my head)... if you don't know the context for Yote and Jackal, Mbear and Fox... it's all nonsense. Except for the hair I colored. I think that's univeresally awesome. And the self-doodle in the lower right. That one is accessible.

This page doesn't really indicate why, but for the first time in a long time I'm excited about scanning and posting my art again. Yaay.

Friday, June 26, 2009

That last post was boring...



...so here's an image quilt made hastily from the first 20 photos I scanned. All of these are from my recent road trip with Mom.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Living in the future.

I realize that, in one way or another, the recent posts I've made can be boiled down to whining about my situation. I'm also afraid that today is par for that course.

Nearly all of today has been spent looking at and thinking about furniture.

It started as a lark while I was vacuuming the house. I decide to give myself a six thousand dollar budget and make a summer hobby out of finding ways to "spend" that money. From there I tumbled down to dozens of google searches, dozens of tabs, and dozens of pages of apartment therapy. Thankfully not for a dozen hours.

In the end today's brilliant idea is to get a one bedroom apartment instead of two (less money for rent, less money for furnishings) and learn how to build a bunch of modular tables/desks so that our living room can also be our studio. Besides an extravagant kitchen with a gas stove, ample storage space, and a KitchenAid mixer, the home-feature I dream of most is a large workspace for crafting. "Heartbroken" is a strong word (and better applied to things that aren't furniture, but I do remember the giant desk I had in Savannah with fondness.

How much trouble, I wonder, to construct a quartet of 30x30 tables? That put together and come apart without hardware? It seems especially silly to go forth and build furniture, especially knowing nothing about where I'll be living. The next week will be critical for finding out if I'm dreaming hard enough to dream these tables into reality.

The Lamp Eternal



When I was a kid I read every volume of Garfield comic strips I could get my hands on. One strip in particular that sticks in my mind had a sequence of Garfield standing by a light switch, flipping it off, zooming into his cat bed while the room was still lit, and in the final panel (a dark one) thinking to the audience, "Faster than the speed of dark."

It's a silly thing to remember, especially because I can't relate to the experience. In this phase of life my room (while I am present to experience it) is rarely a dark place. Even if only my body is present, the light is still on. On many occasions my mom has said to me, "And you were still up when I got up around seven" and I reply, "No, I fell asleep with the light on."

Comfort is why the light is on. Or maybe fear. At the surface, I can point to practicality: I fall asleep with my lamp still burning because I read myself to sleep and don't wake up until morning.

Bedtime reading is another thing that has stuck around since childhood. First the years of being read to by my mom, then the years when we would read a book together before I went to sleep, then the years when I would sneak my book into the bathroom and devour chapter after chapter despite the discomfort of sitting on the edge of the bathtub.

But now as I think about it, I don't remember this sort of nocturnal reading taking place very much in the last three years. I have a book light, sure, for nights of insomnia or an especially exciting story. Those times are the exception. Normally bed time means snuggles, curling up with my arms around my husband, or pressing my back against his and enjoying the slow rhythm of his breathing until I drift to sleep.

Leaving the light these days lets me stay with the comfort of an author until my brain can't string words together anymore. Books keep me engaged with thoughts outside my own head, escaping my vast, underoccupied bed to courtrooms and communes, restaurants and raceways, manor homes and motorhomes. It doesn't matter where I go or what I'm reading; "not present" is all I care about.

Leaving the light on helps me escape my own introspection. Alone in the dark, I often have to spend several minutes aware of thoughts that race or lurk around my mind. When I loosen the tethers of planning this and puzzling that, my consciousness wanders and often falls into the abyss, the unavoidable chasm. Even though I've been staying on its precipice for about 150 days, I'm still vulnerable to its gravity. I'm afraid of that abyss and the raw hurt that never really goes away when my thoughts linger on what's missing from my life, my bed. I prefer to move straight from fiction to dream.

And so the bulb burns.

Occasionally, like tonight, I'm too exhausted to find any of my books suitably numbing. Sometimes I tell myself I'm not only too tired to read, not only too tired to move across the room to flip the switch by the door, but also too tired to stretch the two feet to snap my lamp off at the neck.

But tonight, while fussing around, arranging blankets and pillows and limbs into a comfortable sleeping position, I'll find myself close enough to the light. Despite my headache, I'll look up under the shade at the naked bulb as my fingers find the knob to cut the stream of electricity. It will take two clicks, then I will be treated to my own miniature, captive sunset. The filament will glow for an extra moment, reminding me that lightbulbs are a source of heat as well as light.

And finally, remembering the time Reagan and I burned a hole in a fabric napkin by draping it over my desk lamp in order to cast the room in San Marcos in a moody, reddish glow... I'll brave the darkness.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Two Note Day Two

The majority of Tuesday


Today was limited in scope and depth so I vow to keep my comments on the day limited in length. My troubles were as few as my movements, though the correlation means little. I spent the majority of my day reading in bed. What can I say? My brother recommends a good page-turner. Tuesday might have ended there, with a small shift in pitch as the day's note faded out; when my book was over with (it seemed way shorter than 454 pages) I moved from a fictional court case in a novel to a fictional court case in a video game.

(Un)fortunately for my wish to sleep early, checking a walkthrough on my computer got me in contact with my best friend extrordinaire and I was inspired to put down my game and pick up my pen. And not just my pen, but my paints, too. I forgot how awful they can smell. Nothing beautiful came of the artsing session (and I can't get my scanner working), so no art to post just yet, but I'm glad that I pushed myself to be productive at the end of the day. Posting is cool, too. Now that I'm here I want to say more that these quick jots, but the hour is later than I thought.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Heartbroken: A typical tirade

I swear I'm going gray


Writing is not among today's victories.

Drawing is not among today's victories.

Getting my oil changed is not among today's victories.

Resisting running away is not among today's victories.

Receiving a free mug of tea at the bookstore is not among today's victories. It happened, and it was good, but I don't think I can claim credit for it. Even if the free tea (well, hot water; I brought my own tea bag*) was precipitated by me looking awful from a bout of crying, I can't say the freebie was intentional.

(* I did try to pay for the hot water so I wouldn't be that jerk who tried to scam free food, but the barista asked if I was going to be hanging around, and when I said yes, gave me hot water in a mug instead of a cup and refused my money.)

I'm counting the small things that went right today because it was a day of such intense heartbreak that I did wonder how I might be able to run away from home, or run to my husband without looking ridiculously irresponsible.

Heartbreak is supposed to be over when you find your soul mate, fall in love, tie the knot, and live happily ever after. But then why, oh why, despite all the love, devotion, and affection I have for my husband, does my heart ache so badly these days? Absence, instead of making the heart grow fonder, makes the heart a harbor for irrational resentment, accusations, and feelings of neglect and abandonment. All of those are irrational. (See above: love, devotion, affection.)

And all of those good things are returned to me. I hear from him at least once a day, pushing himself to be more verbose in his notes, and putting into paper (or at least email) the things I usually see in his eyes. But woman can not live on bread alone. I'm pacing at the end of my rope, unsatisfied with how little we share.

I've become so out of touch with my husband that I bristle at almost any mention of him. When people ask about him, friends and family alike, I can only stand to answer one or two questions, sometimes less, before shutting down and saying, "I don't want to talk about it." These brusque dismissals are often followed by me going somewhere to privately fight off tears. It's humiliating, but the breadth and depth of my situation are difficult to convey in the casual settings the topic comes up in.

The victories, you see, are in the times I act normal.

The times when I cook and clean.
The times when I create.
The times when I exercise.
The times when I leave the house.
The times when I socialize.

Even when those actions are facets of escapism... three days in the high desert, two days by the beach, five days driving around the state... they're still victories.

Writing is not among today's victories.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Six days on the road with Mom

Six days
Five nights
Four tires
Three cameras
Two women
One trip.

(Six cameras if you count our cell phones and my mom's, but I'm just speaking of what I shot with)

It was a pretty intense trip.

Day one was driving up to Mill Valley, just past San Francisco on the 101. Instead of jetting up the 5, we took the scenic route.

Sweet clouds on the 101 (by annie-duh)

Had a fanTASTIC dinner at a neighborhood place in SF. I had duck, perhaps for the first time, and the peach slices in the salad just melted in my mouth.

We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge before sunset...
Golden Gate Bridge (by annie-duh)

And spent the next two nights with her friends Erin and Joel. They are amazingly sweet people... who I have no pictures of. They did, however, encourage me to procure a head of garlic, take it with me everywhere, and snap pictures of it.

I called the project "Finding Something to Savor Everywhere I Go". About forty photos of my bulb of garlic made it into the flickr set:

Savory Outlook (by annie-duh)

It solved my problem of lacking a subject in some situations, and I challenged myself to work it into as many shots as possible. Most failings happened when the bulb was left in the car or at our motel. It's a concept I'll definitely play with again, though.

Rest of the photos here.

I've been on the road for many days and can't keep my brain sharp as late at night as I'm accustomed to. D: Stupid waking up before noon all week...