My nephew (or alternately, my children's cousin), Bill Zeller, killed himself a few days ago. I didn't even realize it was all over the news: huffington post article

He left a detailed and lengthy suicide note, and because I believe that what he wrote needs to be heard, really heard I am posting it here. Folks, this is why people who have been raped and molested cannot, and should not "simply keep quiet about it". When we do, it kills us....slowly.
================================================================

I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I
assume I'll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right
decision. Maybe it's true that anyone who does this is insane by
definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning. I considered not
writing any of this because of how personal it is, but I like tying up
loose ends and don't want people to wonder why I did this. Since I've
never spoken to anyone about what happened to me, people would likely
draw the wrong conclusions.

My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has
affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I
can describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified
and overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. In
kindergarten I couldn't use the bathroom and would stand petrified
whenever I needed to, which started a trend of awkward and unexplained
social behavior. The damage that was done to my body still prevents me
from using the bathroom normally, but now it's less of a physical
impediment than a daily reminder of what was done to me.

This darkness followed me as I grew up. I remember spending hours
playing with legos, having my world consist of me and a box of cold,
plastic blocks. Just waiting for everything to end. It's the same thing
I do now, but instead of legos it's surfing the web or reading or
listening to a baseball game. Most of my life has been spent feeling
dead inside, waiting for my body to catch up.

At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never
connected this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the
darkness at bay for a few hours at a time by doing things that required
intense concentration, but it would always come back. Programming
appealed to me for this reason. I was never particularly fond of
computers or mathematically inclined, but the temporary peace it would
provide was like a drug. But the darkness always returned and built up
something like a tolerance, because programming has become less and less
of a refuge.

The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime
is covering me. I feel like I'm trapped in a contimated body that no
amount of washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I
feel manic and itchy and can't concentrate on anything else. It
manifests itself in hours of eating or staying up for days at a time or
sleeping for sixteen hours straight or week long programming binges or
constantly going to the gym. I'm exhausted from feeling like this every
hour of every day.

Three to four nights a week I have nightmares about what happened. It
makes me avoid sleep and constantly tired, because sleeping with what
feels like hours of nightmares is not restful. I wake up sweaty and
furious. I'm reminded every morning of what was done to me and the
control it has over my life.

I've never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this
hampered my social interactions. I would be angry and lost in thought
and then be interrupted by someone saying "Hi" or making small talk,
unable to understand why I seemed cold and distant. I walked around,
viewing the outside world from a distant portal behind my eyes, unable
to perform normal human niceties. I wondered what it would be like to
take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I
wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better
able to mask.

Alcohol was also something that let me escape the darkness. It would
always find me later, though, and it was always angry that I managed to
escape and it made me pay. Many of the irresponsible things I did were
the result of the darkness. Obviously I'm responsible for every decision
and action, including this one, but there are reasons why things happen
the way they do.

Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my
situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had
no future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but
it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven't touched
alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol
will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my
life in an honest and clear way. There's no future here. The darkness
will always be with me.

I used to think if I solved some problem or achieved some goal, maybe he
would leave. It was comforting to identify tangible issues as the source
of my problems instead of something that I'll never be able to change. I
thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or
lost weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created
programs that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California
or New York or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would
feel some peace and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I
did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was
in any way fulfilling. I'm not sure why I ever thought that would change
anything.

I didn't realize how deep a hold he had on me and my life until my
first relationship. I stupidly assumed that no matter how the darkness
affected me personally, my romantic relationships would somehow be
separated and protected. Growing up I viewed my future relationships as
a possible escape from this thing that haunts me every day, but I began
to realize how entangled it was with every aspect of my life and how it
is never going to release me. Instead of being an escape, relationships
and romantic contact with other people only intensified everything about
him that I couldn't stand. I will never be able to have a relationship
in which he is not the focus, affecting every aspect of my romantic
interactions.

Relationships always started out fine and I'd be able to ignore him for
a few weeks. But as we got closer emotionally the darkness would return
and every night it'd be me, her and the darkness in a black and gruesome
threesome. He would surround me and penetrate me and the more we did the
more intense it became. It made me hate being touched, because as long
as we were separated I could view her like an outsider viewing something
good and kind and untainted. Once we touched, the darkness would
envelope her too and take her over and the evil inside me would surround
her. I always felt like I was infecting anyone I was with.

Relationships didn't work. No one I dated was the right match, and I
thought that maybe if I found the right person it would overwhelm him.
Part of me knew that finding the right person wouldn't help, so I became
interested in girls who obviously had no interest in me. For a while I
thought I was gay. I convinced myself that it wasn't the darkness at
all, but rather my orientation, because this would give me control over
why things didn't feel "right". The fact that the darkness affected
sexual matters most intensely made this idea make some sense and I
convinced myself of this for a number of years, starting in college
after my first relationship ended. I told people I was gay (at Trinity,
not at Princeton), even though I wasn't attracted to men and kept
finding myself interested in girls. Because if being gay wasn't the
answer, then what was? People thought I was avoiding my orientation, but
I was actually avoiding the truth, which is that while I'm straight, I
will never be content with anyone. I know now that the darkness will
never leave.

Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I'd ever met.
Someone who showed me just how well two people could get along and how
much I could care about another human being. Someone I know I could be
with and love for the rest of my life, if I weren't so fucked up.
Amazingly, she liked me. She liked the shell of the man the darkness had
left behind. But it didn't matter because I couldn't be alone with her.
It was never just the two of us, it was always the three of us: her, me
and the darkness. The closer we got, the more intensely I'd feel the
darkness, like some evil mirror of my emotions. All the closeness we had
and I loved was complemented by agony that I couldn't stand, from him. I
realized that I would never be able to give her, or anyone, all of me or
only me. She could never have me without the darkness and evil inside
me. I could never have just her, without the darkness being a part of
all of our interactions. I will never be able to be at peace or content
or in a healthy relationship. I realized the futility of the romantic
part of my life. If I had never met her, I would have realized this as
soon as I met someone else who I meshed similarly well with. It's likely
that things wouldn't have worked out with her and we would have broken
up (with our relationship ending, like the majority of relationships do)
even if I didn't have this problem, since we only dated for a short
time. But I will face exactly the same problems with the darkness with
anyone else. Despite my hopes, love and compatability is not enough.
Nothing is enough. There's no way I can fix this or even push the
darkness down far enough to make a relationship or any type of intimacy
feasible.

So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time
limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn't last because of the
darkness and didn't want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of
problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should
have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing
what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I've ever
been able to talk about with anyone. Losing her was very hard for me as
well. Not because of her (I got over our relationship relatively
quickly), but because of the realization that I would never have another
relationship and because it signified the last true, exclusive personal
connection I could ever have. This wasn't apparent to other people,
because I could never talk about the real reasons for my sadness. I was
very sad in the summer and fall, but it was not because of her, it was
because I will never escape the darkness with anyone. She was so loving
and kind to me and gave me everything I could have asked for under the
circumstances. I'll never forget how much happiness she brought me in
those briefs moments when I could ignore the darkness. I had originally
planned to kill myself last winter but never got around to it. (Parts of
this letter were written over a year ago, other parts days before doing
this.) It was wrong of me to involve myself in her life if this were a
possibility and I should have just left her alone, even though we only
dated for a few months and things ended a long time ago. She's just one
more person in a long list of people I've hurt.

I could spend pages talking about the other relationships I've had that
were ruined because of my problems and my confusion related to the
darkness. I've hurt so many great people because of who I am and my
inability to experience what needs to be experienced. All I can say is
that I tried to be honest with people about what I thought was true.

I've spent my life hurting people. Today will be the last time.

I've told different people a lot of things, but I've never told anyone
about what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while
to realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they
claim to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a
few years ago when I thought I was gay and told people. The more harmful
the secret, the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be
betrayed. People don't care about their word or what they've promised,
they just do whatever the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels
incredibly lonely to realize you can never share something with someone
and have it be between just the two of you. I don't blame anyone in
particular, I guess it's just how people are. Even if I felt like this
is something I could have shared, I have no interest in being part of a
friendship or relationship where the other person views me as the
damaged and contaminated person that I am. So even if I were able to
trust someone, I probably would not have told them about what happened
to me. At this point I simply don't care who knows.

I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need
to stop this. I need to make sure I don't kill someone, which is not
something that can be easily undone. I don't know if this is related to
what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of
killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this
decision should indicate what I'm capable of.

So I've realized I will never escape the darkness or misery associated
with it and I have a responsibility to stop myself from physically
harming others.

I'm just a broken, miserable shell of a human being. Being molested has
defined me as a person and shaped me as a human being and it has made me
the monster I am and there's nothing I can do to escape it. I don't know
any other existence. I don't know what life feels like where I'm apart
from any of this. I actively despise the person I am. I just feel
fundamentally broken, almost non-human. I feel like an animal that woke
up one day in a human body, trying to make sense of a foreign world,
living among creatures it doesn't understand and can't connect with.

I have accepted that the darkness will never allow me to be in a
relationship. I will never go to sleep with someone in my arms, feeling
the comfort of their hands around me. I will never know what
uncontimated intimacy is like. I will never have an exclusive bond with
someone, someone who can be the recipient of all the love I have to
give. I will never have children, and I wanted to be a father so badly.
I think I would have made a good dad. And even if I had fought through
the darkness and married and had children all while being unable to feel
intimacy, I could have never done that if suicide were a possibility. I
did try to minimize pain, although I know that this decision will hurt
many of you. If this hurts you, I hope that you can at least forget
about me quickly.

There's no point in identifying who molested me, so I'm just going to
leave it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about
something that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway.

You may wonder why I didn't just talk to a professional about this. I've
seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other
issues and I'm positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was
never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent
a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was.
And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both
because I know it wouldn't help and because I have no confidence it
would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of
doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we'd hear
stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories
that were passed down through generations. All it takes is one doctor
who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who
thinks it's her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and
have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling
herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single
doctor who violates my trust, just like the "friends" who I told I was
gay did, and everything would be made public and I'd be forced to live
in a world where people would know how fucked up I am. And yes, I
realize this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they're
based on a large number of experiences with people who have shown a
profound disrepect for their word and the privacy of others.

People say suicide is selfish. I think it's selfish to ask people to
continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won't
feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a
temporary problem, but it's also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old
problem that grows more intense and overwhelming every day.

Some people are just dealt bad hands in this life. I know many people
have it worse than I do, and maybe I'm just not a strong person, but I
really did try to deal with this. I've tried to deal with this every day
for the last 23 years and I just can't fucking take it anymore.

I often wonder what life must be like for other people. People who
can feel the love from others and give it back unadulterated, people who
can experience sex as an intimate and joyous experience, people who can
experience the colors and happenings of this world without constant
misery. I wonder who I'd be if things had been different or if I were a
stronger person. It sounds pretty great.

I'm prepared for death. I'm prepared for the pain and I am ready to no
longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will
probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do.
My only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.

---

I'd also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise
everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional,
dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a
better place when they're dead--one with less hatred and intolerance.

If you're unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist
Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially
when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.

They live in a black and white reality they've constructed for
themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive
by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love.
They don't understand that good and decent people exist all around us,
"saved" or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage
of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by
teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.

A random example:

"I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the
Koran, he will be a terrorist." - George Zeller, August 24, 2010.

If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics
who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child
molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were "saved" at some point),
that's your choice, but it's fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by
those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him.

Their church was always more important than the members of their family
and they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy
their contrived beliefs about who they should be.

I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never
believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was
literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run
by two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others
were around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is
going to Hell because she's Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist
but then talk about the horrors of miscegenation. I could list hundreds
of other examples, but it's tiring.

Since being kicked out, I've interacted with them in relatively normal
ways. I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I'm not sure
why. Maybe because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like
having people I can talk to about what's been going on in my life.
Whatever the reason, it's not real and it feels like a sham. I should
have never allowed this reconnection to happen.

I wrote the above a while ago, and I do feel like that much of the time.
At other times, though, I feel less hateful. I know my parents honestly
believe the crap they believe in. I know that my mom, at least, loved me
very much and tried her best. One reason I put this off for so long is
because I know how much pain it will cause her. She has been sad since
she found out I wasn't "saved", since she believes I'm going to Hell,
which is not a sadness for which I am responsible. That was never going
to change, and presumably she believes the state of my physical body is
much less important than the state of my soul. Still, I cannot
intellectually justify this decision, knowing how much it will hurt her.
Maybe my ability to take my own life, knowing how much pain it will
cause, shows that I am a monster who doesn't deserve to live. All I know
is that I can't deal with this pain any longer and I'm am truly sorry I
couldn't wait until my family and everyone I knew died so this could be
done without hurting anyone. For years I've wished that I'd be hit by a
bus or die while saving a baby from drowning so my death might be more
acceptable, but I was never so lucky.

---

To those of you who have shown me love, thank you for putting up with
all my shittiness and moodiness and arbitrariness. I was never the
person I wanted to be. Maybe without the darkness I would have been a
better person, maybe not. I did try to be a good person, but I realize I
never got very far.

I'm sorry for the pain this causes. I really do wish I had another
option. I hope this letter explains why I needed to do this. If you
can't understand this decision, I hope you can at least forgive me.

Bill Zeller

---

Please save this letter and repost it if gets deleted. I don't want
people to wonder why I did this. I disseminated it more widely than I
might have otherwise because I'm worried that my family might try to
restrict access to it. I don't mind if this letter is made public. In
fact, I'd prefer it be made public to people being unable to read it and
drawing their own conclusions.

Feel free to republish this letter, but only if it is reproduced in its
entirety.

People smell. Not necessarily bad smells, but everyone has a scent, and some days, like today, I can smell them more clearly than others. Could be because I'm at the library, a relatively neutral-scented area, which is to say, there are a lot of perfumes and scented products in the building itself, other than those carried in by the patrons themselves.

The lobby/entryway smelled like teen sweat and testosterone like it usually does, because so many teen boys hang out there after school, flirting with girls.

The first computer I sat at STANK like serious dirty house. I did not look to see if there was a smelly, unkempt looking person nearby from whom the odor was emanating. I just moved, quickly.

The person I am sitting next to now has a woodstove, smokes pot, and has a definite scent, although not offensive yet, just strong. If I had to guess I would say that water availability might be limited. I can understand that. I never noticed woodsmoke on other people when I was in a wood burning household. Now that I'm not, the scent carries a lot of nostalgia for me, and I notice certain woods more than others.

OK, so glasses aren't ugly, but I've decided that this particular pair makes my nose look big. I have a good sized nose anyway, but I've never really minded it before. It is straight, looks more or less like my Dad's. In fact...thinking....I sort of like distinctive noses in other people too. I think a strong nose can lend dignity to its wearer. LMAO..... seriously.

It's just that these glasses aren't doing anything positive for mine, lol.

Found out that I can order textbooks online and still use financial aid to do so. This is good.

Random observations from the day:

Glasses make men look sexier (my opinion only). Which isn't to say that a guy can't look hot to me without them, just that the hotness factor goes UP once he has glasses on.

This is interesting to me because when I have glasses on, I feel less attractive. Yet, I suppose that there men who don't think that glasses = ugly. Somehow this has never before occurred to me. Which is strange, since the above preference has been pretty constant for years.

My dog has been on a killing frenzy!! She killed two mice in the house, nailing one so hard that there were squirt marks (yech!) and has been consistently getting them when she's outside, too. Yay, Bebe!

Now that I have committed to taking the Abnormal psych class, I'm wondering if I should have taken Art History instead, because I am still not sure psych is the direction I want to go in. However, in either case, I want to understand the DSM better than I do; how these classifications are made, what they entail, etc. Besides, art history is boring. Well, not as boring as say, the history of mechanized vehicles, but I guess that since art is abotu process and creativity to me, the history part is just terribly dry and static.

Things will be OK. :-)

I finally managed to get into the math class I need. Final schedule:

Math 143 (college algebra)
Abnormal Psychology
Advanced Ceramics

The psych is because I still have not decided whether to major in psych and go for some kind of art therpay emphasis, or major in art and take the huge risk involved there.

The deal is this: I cannot make "pretty" art or work that is designed solely to please the customers. I make what I make, and if people like it, great. If they don't like it, well, it means something to me, and it's perfectly ok if they don't get it, because it was probably deeply personal anyway. I also am not good at replicating one thing over and over again. Every single thing I make is apt to be different, even if only slightly different. I am not the sort who can happily churn out 20 identical coffee cups.

On the other hand, I am also perfectly happy to allow other people to make what they want to make and to express themselves freely. In fact, I encourage it, because in my mind, mimicry is akin to heresy when it comes to creative expression. I am not terribly concerned with the product or outcome. The creative process itself is what matters, and if the outcome is pleasing, great. So, (shrug) maybe art therapy is soemthing I have potential to do....as long as I can work with people more or less one on one. I do not want to work with, say, a whole class of children. Would be ok, though, with a very lively, active young child, as long as that kid was the only one I had to chase.

Yeah, I don't know. Thinking about this sort of stuff makes me feel better though..... And now I have to find a way to get to school, because the bus service closed down, I am out of money (unless some pottery sold!) and I just do not want to hitchhike (because how on earth would I get back????). I emailed someone about the ride share, but they haven't replied. Sigh....Dammit, and I have to get my books, too. Only the Ceramics class is on campus (the others are internet), but if I cannot at least go and get my books, I am *screwed*!

Planted today: honey tangerine, Moro blood orange, and kumquat seeds. One of the Phaleonopsis orchids has two flower scapes developing. Once I eat the papaya and limes, I'll plant those seeds, too.

And then there's the house to clean.

Am having one of those days when I really need a hug and to be told that honestly, things are going to be OK.

Sigh. I made a wonderful beef and vegetable stew and neither of my kids ever ate it...and there's a lot of it, too. I took a beef bone and some vegetable broth and mushrooms, leeks, celery, and simmered all that together...and then roasted parsnips, onions, rutabagas and turnips with a thin coating of olive oil, rosemary, thyme, and a bay leaf....and after they were roasted, I cut them smaller and threw them into the stock (took the bone out) and added salt. The root veggies were so good roasted that I might make some more and eat them like that without making them into a stew. If I'd had a little wine, I would have thrown that in, too. It was pretty good.

When I'm happy and upbeat I go and do all this cooking, and then the kids won't eat it half the time.

After this stew is gone, I want to make a winter squash curry soup...unless I make dahl first. The winter squash soup will have a winter squash, roasted first, then partly cubed and the rest mashed. In the meantime, sauteed onions and garlic with curry, possibly a pepper...and add cocnut milk and then the mashed squash and some chicken or vegetable broth is necessary, and when that is hot, the cubed squash. Maybe, maybe a very small amount of chickpeas.

And then I wonder, why on earth am I doing this? Why am I cooking all this food when nobody else eats it? I mean, I like my food better than most of the stuff I could get in a restaurant...but geez, I cook so much of it. :-/

They did not even try it. Not even a bite.

Skinny leg, saggy ass pants make butts look big and unattractive.

Feeling better now...a lot better. :-)

My son is moving to his dad's house in Kauai. I will miss him a lot, even though we fight often. Thinking about it makes me feel guilty, but I would rather have him go now while we are still on speaking terms than to be permanently estranged from one another. And he is almost 18 anyway....so he would have been out within a few months.

I really and truly hope that he gets a positive new start there.

What can I say? Only that the broken-hearted cynic and the hopeful dreamer within me are waging war in a serious way.

Had a crappy weekend and today is not much different. Don't much expect anyone to care, but it is what it is.

Hope? Let's be honest. There's not any. But doggoneit, you rub my nose in that unpleasant little fact, and I will definitely make you pay. It is just not nice to antagonize people that way.

I don't know. I just hurt inside. I hurt a lot.

Bleah. I should eat, but am just not hungry. Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.

You know what, I feel really irrational. I think I am just sleep deprived, having gotten only 4 hours of sleep and not very sound sleep at that. Going to bed. Tomorrow will be better.

I hurt. That is all.

Finally got more minutes for phone, the one where people can't hear me even though they are crystal clear to me. And I have a new phone which is exactly like the old one except that I can't register it, and this one should allow two way conversation, a phenomenon which has begun to assume luxury status in my mind. I actually wouldn't mind just calling people and having them talk to me and I could just listen, but apparently I am not friends with people who want to yak and yak without receiving input. For that I should be thankful, lol!So theoretically, I should be able to transfer my old phone number, account, minutes, and contacts from the old phone to the new one, and I tried to do so for at least one very aggravating hour yesterday. The website said I need a new SIM card which they are sending to me. I don't know what the heck that means. I just want my phone to work. So I called the toll free #, and I got some snippy woman who said that she couldn't hear me, and for me to try callin gher back, and I was like "NO! YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND, MY PHONE DOESN'T WORK, THAT IS WHY I NEED TO TRANSFER THIS ONE TO THE OTHER ONE, BECAUSE PEOPLE CAN HARDLY HEAR ME ON THIS ONE. DO NOT HANG UP!" I had to say it loudly because even when I talk loudly, people say I sound like a mouse. It is sooooo frustrating. And of course, she hung up on me. Finally I got through again on the neighbor's phone, only to be told that they will mail me a new SIM card. :irk:. I am kind of peeved. Will have to wait until Wednesday at least, and possibly 7 business days, before I get it.

In the meantime, I am deluged with my wondeful, very loved children. They are (well usually) great kids, but I had to escape, so am here in the laundry room away from my house...accessing internet....because it isn't working at home right now. Woke up at 4 AM and got a good head start on the day before them....so maybe will get a chance to work with the clay today.

Huh. That all sounds so ho hum. There is a lot more going on inside me, but I just do not want to talk about it here. Will put it into the clay instead. Need to keep working on the other blog and drag myself through 1990 so I can get that part out of my head. Later on, will try to come up with some kind of New Year's Resolution.

Hope Lutheran Christmas Concert 2010 Part One

My Dad is the music director at this church. He is the thin man in black who is conducting.

Ugh. I am working through a sweet, happy time in the storyline of the other blog, and it sucks, because I just don't have the heart for it right now. I know what's going to happen to that innocent seventeen year old girl and all her silly dreams. She's going to hit the pavement hard like roadkill, like Humpty Dumpty, and isn't ever going to be the same again. Those few happy weeks will haunt her for years like a mirage, driving her almost out of her mind, taunting her, making her cynical, except for those rare times...She will pay for that in spades, even though she did nothing at all wrong.

And yet, I can't say that I'd go back and skip out on those weeks to avoid the two decades of subsequent pain. What spot of sunshine would have kept me alive through the darkness otherwise, until I came to a brighter place?

But still, it sucks. It hurts. And it's a little too close to home for comfort.

Things are better now. Well, at least I hope so.

My friend (I guess she is my friend??) tells me that I need to get over my thing of thinking that feelings are icky and embarrassing. Suppose they seem that way to me because they aren't entirely rational, predictable, and often scare the hell out of me. Also, I don't like to be or feel weak, and nothing makes me feel weaker than (ugh, I can hardly stand to write it!) stuff like crying.

I've always felt that crying is for girls, and everyone knows that girls are weak, frail things who wear impractical shoes and clothes you can't climb trees in and who can turn on the tears like a faucet. Girls are prey. Girls can be hurt. They can be hit...and intimidated...and forced to do things they don't want to do...and raped...and treated like property. So naturally, I've spent most of my life trying not to be a girl, not in the sense of wanting a sex change, but more along the lines of being in denial.

It hasn't worked so well. Because I'm naturally sort of obsessive and anxious, things bother me a lot more than they should. If I were the faucet type, I'd be crying a lot. I'm like this machine where you put just one small input into it, and it generates a whole lot of output, except most of that output just stays in the machine churning around until a gear of something breaks. When other women talk about "having a good cry", I don't know what the fuck they're talking about. As far as I'm concerned, crying is a truly gut wrenching experience, occasionally accompanied by lovely stuff like migraines, chest pain, stomach cramps, and vomiting. Oh, and it's, like, the most embarrassing thing on earth short of being publicly incontinent.

So (trying really hard to make this coherent) naturally anything that has the potential to lead to that kind of pain becomes sort of frightening. You know what, I totally lost where I was trying to go with this. I am so sorry. I guess that to resolve this kind of stuff better, I am going to have to keep writing on the other blog, because what happens before too long there is the shittiest thing that ever happened to me, and honestly, it still reverberates through my life today.

Jen's X-rated thought of the day...

Just so you all know, this blog is not child safe.



Now having said that, I want to know: Whose brilliant fucking idea was it to decide that having buzzing, vibrating things anywhere near one's delicate genitals was a good idea?

Let's see here, things that buzz and vibrate in nature:

• Bumblebees
  
• Rattlesnakes
  
• Wasps and hornets
  
• Horseflies
  
• Mosquitoes
  
• Various other insects

Now maybe it's just me, but if I'm out walking around and feel something buzzing and vibrating in my pants, those pants are coming off in a hurry, and not because I want to ease right into that bee, wasp, whatever! Or, I'll find that area of clothing and carefully pinch the hell out of it before it gets me first. It most definitely is not a turn on. And to be honest, if I ever found myself with a man who possessed a buzzing, vibrating penis, I think I'd have to love him a lot to uh...well, you know. So I'm not really getting why adult stores are making so much money off this type of product. I don't even like for my cell phone to vibrate, because my very first thought is, what the hell is crawling around in my pocket?!

So back to my original question, what weirdo looked at a bumblebee and thought, "Hey, that makes me feel horny, I think I'll go replicate that concept for my bedroom"?

I have officially been corrupted: am not only eating meat now, but looking forward to steak eagerly....and gravitate towards the petite sirloin every time I pass the meat section. Of course my kids are happy about this.

If we ever live in the country again and have animals, I want to have a beef calf, raise it on goat's milk. Or hey, we could just buy a side of beef from a friend who has those Scottish Highlander cattle. Or talk to Fish and Game about snagging the next moose that has (fatefully) charged a train. I need to get a crew together for that last thing though, and frankly, a fourth of a moose is enough to last a very long time. Moooose...MMMMMMmmmmmm....

See what I mean? lol.....

As long as I don't start drooling over the fresh cuts of pork.....

I made the coolest sea bass last night! In clay of course....and a little tiny minnow type fish with a rather dismayed expression on its face...it is so cute!

Twas a good day. I am eating too much though, don't want to gain weight back right after I fit into my favorite (size 3!) jeans. Anyway, on to other topics:

I get a lot of guff from people who want me to shut up. I used to be really good at shutting up and keeping secrets. Over time, I have come to realize that as a general rule, when people want you to shut up, it is often for their own benefit and to your own detriment to do so. Which is why they threaten. People threaten when they're afraid. So here's my take on what people take me to task for, namely, talking openly about abuse and general bad treatment. And just so we're clear here, I blab just as openly if I see other people being hurt.

Surviving abuse doesn't make you a victim. Having PTSD, anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, etc as a result of abuse doesn't make you a victim. What makes a person a victim is continuing to cover for the abuser. Keeping quiet about things a person has done to hurt you is cooperating with their abuse and playing into their little game, and dammit, I won't do it anymore. When people who have been abused don't talk about it, it disenfranchises others who are in the same boat. A person who is being maltreated might think that they're all alone, because they have never heard of anyone else going through this sort of stuff, and that's a very lonely feeling, and so, so untrue. Also, wounds that aren't dressed fester and hurt, sometimes to a disproportionate degree. I refuse to continue to experience any kind of pain simply because someone else will feel "uncomfortable" if I acknowledge that yes, shitty things have in fact been done to me. Their discomfort is their problem, not mine. Any shame associated with such events belong entirely to the perpetrator, not the subject of the abuse. It is not weak to admit that bad things have happened, it is strong, because inherent in this admission is the knowledge that this turn of events was unacceptable and has to change. It is the first step to growing out of a toxic, self destructive position into one that is empowered.

Whenever I hear people say that they don't want to hear about (insert child abuse, rape, sexual harassment on the job, discrimination, whatever), my first instinct is to suspect that the person condones that act and has quite possibly perpetrated it themselves. They are too gutless to say that they approve of, say, burning disobedient kids with cigarette butts, so they just target whoever wants to talk about it and say crap like, "Well, I think that's really the parent's business and should be handled in the home, don't you? Before government got involved in the family life nobody thought anything about parents spanking (severe beatings actually) their kids". Which is to say, they beat their own kids and resent that anyone has the balls to criticize that.

I'm not saying that people who are private and have gone through this stuff can't be healthy....but I do question in some cases, whether they have internalized the stuff that happened to them. What I can say is that this is what works for me, and why.

These little animals are really underappreciated. I have never seen anything that kills mice as effectively as a good weasel. We were once lucky enough to have one that moved into the house for a while, wiped out the rodent infestation, and promptly left once the problem was handled. It was so alert and intelligent!

I'm looking out the window; the snow covered mountain behind us is ringed with fog/cloud and the sunlight is hitting the mist. And the sky is blue behind it. So beautiful. It's a good day.

And I sitting here wondering what I'll do for the winter holiday when my kids are all grown. Suppose that at some point I'll have grandchildren (that seems like a long way away...I hope). My youngest is 5, so by the time he's grown in 13 years...yeah, I should have grandchildren by then. Sometimes I think about the possibility of adopting once Charlie's older....especially if the child in question was not an infant. People always look at me like I'm crazy when I say that, and I suppose that they have a point....

And speaking of household responsibilities, I am never having another indoor cat after Uno dies (this is the ancient, blind, corona virus infected cat we adopted). I love her and everything, but cat box in the house.....blech! I don't really care to have an outdoor cat either, because they kill weasels and birds and I love weasels. Oh, and bats! Bats are cool, too. Besides, with a Rat Terrier around, I don't need a cat. And cats have a nasty way of leaving disgusting surprises in the garden. It isn't that I don't like cats- I do- but I can love them just as well when they belong to someone else!

The kids are having a great X-mas and I am happy. :-)

Have to get myself through the next part on my other blog. I've never been able to write that part down before; I always get right to the point where I am now and then stop. I guess sometimes you have to break a bone in order to set it correctly though.

:sigh:

I am not a big fan of holidays. This year is turning out better than most, but still....I always feel terribly alone during these things, and I hate having to pretend to be in some kind of festive mood (grump grump). Alright alright....I'll try......

I need to get out of the house though. Thinking.....Hike? (where, in this weather????) Ski? (no more skis).....Drive? (Where?)....Finch Arboretum? Hmmmmm........have never seen it in the winter. Meh. Maybe after the first of the year. Then I can hit the Oriental food stores and buy weird produce and other stuff. Maybe get some summer roll wrappers that are reliable. What else could I do......Firewood? (Yes!!! Feeling suddenly cheerful at the thought! Yeah, I know, I am so weird, lol). Help fix goat fence? Yeah, I could go for that too. Haul a truckload of manure? (Ya know, I am not *that* bored....splitting and stacking, OK....shoveling shit, not quite desperate enough yet....). Hmmmm. I need to find some places where I can walk around here in the winter....yeah. In the meantime, I can clean the house again....lol.

Thinking about pottery again, although I haven't made any new stuff since the fall semester ended. I did drop off everything I'm going to sell at Monarch Mountain. None of it is as good as it could be if I were more experienced, so I tried to price it accordingly. Anyway, now that the old stuff is out of my hair and sight, I can start thinking about making more.
Ideas:

• Making a school of little fish. These could be small enough that they wouldn't have to be hollow, and they could even be bisque fired individually or in smaller groups. When I glaze them, I can lay them adjacent to one another or overlapping. When the glazed piece gets fired, the clay and glaze vitrify, and so they will wind up joined by the glaze. Loading such a piece in the kiln would be a pain. I would have to do it myself probably. The beauty of this is that the entire piece would not be at risk during the greenware or bisqueware stages. I've had several pieces broken already, and it pisses me off. With smaller groups of fish or individual fish that are assembled at the last possible minute, if one fish or one small group gets broken, it isn't such a devastating loss, and I can still readjust pretty easily to compensate, or make extras with the expectation that not all of them will come out intact.
  
  
• I also want to make fish that can be positioned away from a wall, swimming in midair above a base. (No, not mobiles, although that would be interesting too). I could make stones by throwing bowls, deforming them into stone-like shapes, texturing them to obliterate the throwing lines, and notching them to accept the fish.
  
  
• Also, I want to start making small groups of fish , like 2-4 small trout sized fish.
  

And I had other ideas, but now my older kids are being a pain, so I have to go and bring the household into order.....

By the way, the tapioca stll hasn't turned out right. The scones, however, are unerringly good.

Gluten- Free scones
------------------------------
2 cups of gluten free flour (I use half cocnut and half quinoa or teff with some tapioca starch)
1/3 cup sucanat or dark brown sugar or whatever
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon xanthan gum (this is *not* optional)

stir all that together in a mixing bowl.

Then--> use a cheese grater to grate 6 Tablespoons of butter (most of a stick) into the flour mixture, and stir that up and try to break the butter up more if you can. The butter needs to be cold in order to grate well.

Stir in 1/2 cup chocolate chips or currants or nuts or berries or whatever if you feel like it.

Whisk together in another bowl:

3/4 cup unsweetened coconut cream/coconut milk
1 egg

and add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir them until it clumps together. Then make a cohesive mass of it using your hands, sort of like kneading. If you need to, add more coconut milk to get it to stick together. It's okay if the dough is kind of sticky.

The oven should be preheated to 425 degrees F

Now pat the dough out on a clean surface, into a disk about an inch high and cut it into pie shaped wedges. Arrange these on a cookie sheet or baking sheet (doesn't need to be greased) with an inch of space between them, more space if you like them crunchier. Bake them for 10-12 minutes.
----------------------------------------------------

I like to use the coconut flour, chocolate chips, and the coconut cream (you can use dairy cream if you want to, but I always have coconut milk and never have cream, sooo). I keep meaning to try the almond flour but the coconut flour tastes so right that I just haven't tried any other yet!

Replay of yesterday, except that I spent more time cleaning and the hosue isn't totally trashed (yet). The kitchen area actually looks OK.

And....how to say it......sometimes I feel like such a fool. I hate being vulnerable, but am realizing that you can't open yourself up to happiness if you aren't willing to take the risk of the pain. And do I want to feel numb and cold and robotic again? No, I do not. Instead I feel as tender as a newly opened blossom in the face of an impending hail storm, hoping to goodness that that hail is going to fall somewhere else. And I've got this bitchy little know it all weatherman who keeps blathering on about the fucking hailstorm headed my way, and I just want him to shut UP already!!!

Spent half the day cleaning, the house looked nice for an hour or two, and now the kids have messed it up again. I suppose that is it hadn't been cleaned this morning, it'd be an absolute pit by now. Besides, the tree is up and decorated, and we made a bucnh of refrigerator magnets. I need to find a good source of bottlecaps to make more magnets with. Usually this would be a good excuse to go and buy some nice hard cider or oatmeal stout....but cannot in the here and now, alas.

Thinking: is it possible that a person could be so messed up and overcome with guilt over an event that their subconscious would cause anything else to get messed up and sabotaged? I am thinking it is possible.

I don't know, I just read back through the part in my other blog where my stepdad killed our cat and how guilty I felt over it, even though there was nothing I did to cause its death and virtually nothing I could have done to avert it.....and realized that it has been pretty much the same thing with Daniel Haugen's death. I didn't make him die, and doctors who know about melanoma have already told me he was probably past saving when I met him, so there wasn't anything I could have done to keep it from happening, either.

Now, aside from the fact that he was a 35 year old man and I was a horrifically innocent 17 year old girl that he more or less jilted without even giving a good reason, and aside from the fact that he'd gone to jail for beating his first wife, let's say that it would have been ideal anyway, if things had been different. Still, it isn't my fault he died, and punishing myself for that for the rest of my life is plain silliness.

I think this is the most beautiful song in the world. My dad plays it too, but of the versions online, this is the best in my opinion. If I were forced to narrow my music down to only one song, it would be this.

Been writing a lot on my other blog. It is my way of working through my past and resolving the issues which stem from all that crap. Since....let's see, when was it...I suppose when I switched counselors...I realized that counselors are only there to *help*. They cannot do the actual work of therapy for me. Unfortunately, that is for me to do. They're there for moral support, perspective, and to help keep me from losing my mind. And then, in the past several months, I realized that unless I work on the issues that haunt me, not only am I going to eventually lose it altogether, nothing nice is going to happen, because I'll be so afraid and paranoid and whatnot that even if it did, I would somehow manage to lose it.

Which doesn't make it any easier....but there it is. So with that in mind, I've been devoting a lot more time to the other blog (and in between posts, here, to take a break now and then). And while there is still a lot of work yet to do, I can honestly say that the nightmares have stopped.

And---(related somehow, don't ask me how, but it is), this verse from a Melissa Etheridge song, the full lyrics of which can be found here:
"And when you make the choice to believe in your existence"...

And see, that has been my biggest issue. I don't know how many times I've wanted to kill myself, thinking that because I was an accidental pregnancy, an almost abortion, that I was less of a person, had less of a place in this world, was an imposition upon it. And the awful thing of it is that when you act that way, people begin to treat you that way, too, which reinforces that belief. But now, I am thinking that a: I don't believe in predestination any more and haven't for a very long time and b: Even when a child is planned, nobody knows exactlt which sperm is going to get which egg, so in a sense, it's always sort of haphazard and accidental anyway and c: This is shit! People are people, and I'm not any less of a person and besides which, d: This is a ploy by certain parent/authority figures to transfer the consequences of their mistakes on to me. Do I treat any of my kids that way? No! Therefore, they should not do so either. Good parents don't make kids feel guilty for being born, for crying out loud.....

Anyway, back to the other blog....trying out the tapioca experiment again, by the way....hoping not to get glue this time.

Actually, forget it. I am going to bed. I just logged my 100th post there and I need a little time to think (sleep) before I write more, because things are about to get interesting and messy in that tale.

Ha!!!!! My oldest son decided to sample my prized tin of King Oscar's kippered herring and ate the whole thing! Seems he hadn't tried it before....

Just like I haven't tried seafood or several other things on my dislike list.....hmmm. But, sorry, no way, no how am I going to try the goat testicles!

Strangeness: I am absolutely phobic of snakes. Spiders, bugs, anything else...blood, etc, is fine, but no snakes. I have been known to jump and scream over garden hoses and sticks, to have a panic attack from inadvertently seeing a picture of a snake in a book, and to be rendered absolutely non-functional over seeing a snake, especially if it was unexpected.

And Charlie just brought a book to me, open to a page with about ten pictures and photographs of snakes, and it didn't scare me at all! I found the shapes slightly interesting, but I was not afraid. Not even a little bit. I haven't done any 'work' on this issue lately at all, had given up trying to change it. I am really hoping that this is going to be a permanent thing. I have honestly never seen a picture of a snake without freaking out before.

LOL, so I am a dork.... :-P

Today's bright idea: Combining a cemetery and an arboretum as a green alternative to conventional burial grounds and practices.
Supporting reasons:

• Ecologically, conventional cemeteries are a nightmare because they require lawn to be fertilized, trimmed and watered and provide almost no wildlife habitat at all.
  
• Also, they aren't very pleasant places
  
• Conventional caskets are a wasteful and silly expenditure.
  
• Planting a tree over a dead body is greener.
  
• The idea of one's body being converted into a towering, beautiful tree that people will walk under is a lot more appealing than being a rotting corpse encased in metal or concrete under a skin of lawn.
  
• Such a cemetery would give a more positive spin to the life--->death-->life cycle
  
• The trees would provide wildlife habitat and could be longer lived than gravestones.
  
• They're also more interesting than a gravestone.
  
• The cemetery would have more than one function since it would also be a place where people would stroll, kiss, relax, read, meditate, etc.
  
• For couples or families, the idea of having two trees planted nearby, knowing that their roots and branches will intertwine is a lot more romantic and less depressing than having two corpses rotting together side by side.
  
• People could select particular trees (within reason for the climate/region) that would reflect their personality or identity.
  
• There could be memorial plaques on the trees instead of gravestones. Or, there could be very small stones at the base of the tree. The grave markers would therefore never be lost, because it's pretty damned hard to lose a big tree.

I think this is what I want to happen to my shell when I die. Plant an apple tree over me.

Chnaged my mind. I want a Stewartia pseudocamelia instead... or possibly a hazelnut...

Found the phone. Just in time, too....

Great. I left my cellphone somewhere, probably at the library. It wasn't good for much anyway, but I could still text on it....and listen to people, lol......I guess they were usually frustrated people since they couldn't hear me, but still, it was some sort of a phone....sigh...

LMAO......

Kleber: Mom, can I buy this? So and so drinks it and says it is good.

Now, he happens to get away with this shit because he knows I have a high opinion of so and so. I do not, however, have a high opinion of being manipulated and so I call him on it and tell him he is full of shit. He tries, unsuccessfully, to text so and so, and I giggle at his frustration at being unable to attain his hoped-for endorsement of the product. Meanwhile, he has put two different such products into the cart. I mean, I already got duped into buying bacon yesterday. Bacon!!! And today I bought petite sirloin steak (I guess I cannot fairly call myself a vegetarian anymore). So.....

Mom: Look, I'm feeling manipulated here. I bought bacon yesterday and steak today. What is happening to me??? You say that so and so likes everything you want to buy.

Kleber: So and so is an expert on nutrition, Mom. (still checking I pod for a response to his text!)

Mom: (Rolls eyes at this blatant attempt, walks off laughing.)

Long story short, he gets one of the energy drinks. It is supposedly better for being sugarfree, however, I have my doubts about artificial sweeteners. At any rate, making me laugh is definitely a good way to soften me up, and he did that. So, we're in the truck now.

Kleber: Thank you for buying that, Mom

Mom: (rolls eyes and starts truck.)

Kleber: No, so and so really did say that this is the kind they buy, that it's good. (opens can, takes a sip) OH MY GOD!!!! THIS STUFF IS VILE! How can they drink this?!!

Mom: is still giggling........

A Case of You - k.d. lang - Hymms of the 49th Parallel

More about food, inspired by the shocking fact that neither of my sons will eat kippered herring, not even the King Oscar's brand!

Things I won't eat at all, ever:

• Liver
  
• Goat testicles (haven't tried, won't try)
  
• caviar
  
• Intestines
  
• Gjetost cheese
  
• Pork rinds

Things I don't eat, or don't eat much of:

• Milk
  
• Eggs
  
• Pork
  
• Oily, fishy tasting fish
  
• seafood (haven't tried most of it actually)
  
• Cucumbers
  
• White bread
  
• Iceberg lettuce (would rather have spinach or leaf lettuce)
  
• Ice Cream (sorbet instead- no milk)
  
• High fructose Corn Syrup
  
• White sugar
  
• Cake, cookies, things with frosting...
  
• Fried foods...except for fried okra!
  
• Potatoes (occasionally eat new potatoes)

Foods that are (almost!) as good as sex:

• Ciao Bella's Blackberry Cabernet Sorbet
  
• Certain brands of hard cider
  
• a freshly picked, fully ripe peach
  
• My Grandma Amy's sticky rice cake dessert
  
• Certain artisanal cheeses which I cannot find here anymore...
  
• Concord grapes
  
• Prime rib or Scottish Highlander beef....if I am in the right mood for it...or moose meat..(yes, the veggie treehugger really said that!!)

Feeling better....I think I am going to have to continue exorcising the "demons" of my youth though....

And, am listening to a k.d.lang CD I haven't heard before: Live by Request. I love just about anything by her, but my favorite has got to be "Case of You", which, unfortunately, is not on any of the CDs that I own or borrow. "Barefoot" is a close second.

Still trying to replicate the tapioca pudding recipe. Asked the ladies at the health food store if they'd give me a hint on how to make it and they just laughed at me! They did tell me to search online and I found enough to try again. It seems that tapioca has to be soaked overnight, a crucial step that was neglected on my first attempt. That stuff was so disgusting that I threw it away! It was like glue!!

(Food Inventory resumed)

Flours, meals and flour-like substances

• Buckwheat (which is from polygonaceae and is not a grain at all)
  
• Blue cornmeal
  
• Masa Harina
  
• All-purpose white flour
  
• Sorghum flour
  
• Milled flax seed
  
• coconut flour
  
• Teff flour
  
• Xanthan gum (not flour at all but necessary if you use non-wheat flours)
  
• Almond Meal
  
• Amaranth flour
  
• Quinoa flour
  
• Tapioca starch
  
• Hemp seed protein powder
  
• Potato flour
  
• Chickpea flour (somewhere I have a recipe that requires this

Beginning to notice a pattern: I get depressed after being with or near my son. After I have been away from him for a while, I begin to feel better. Not blaming him for my feelings, but I do think he has figured out exactly how to hurt me and is now flipping switches and pushing buttons and enjoying the show. And he's so good at it. I feel like shit, like curling up in a ball and crying all day long. Bleh.

Probably should work with the clay; that always seems to help. And right about then, he'll come home with some new remark to stab me with. I would really rather be slapped around.

Anyway, the pottery is *still* pinging!

Heh. I'm sitting here in the kitchen listening to the sound of my freshly fired pottery pinging on the counter behind me. It's still cooling, even though it came out of the kiln at 8 AM. Overall, I am not as happy with the work as I could be, but it is first semester work, and it's good motivation to keep striving for improvement. Where am I going to put all this stuff???

And, have been blogging on the other blog, and realized, life is really not bad at all compared to what it used to be, lol. Actually, things are pretty darned nice. My orchid just started blooming, some of the pottery is satisfying, I got at least 100 lbs of clay for free, and gas in my gas tank, food in the cupboards, and hot running water. And yeah, just got out of a HOT full, tub of water washing that smelly stuff off (bleah!), as opposed to a sponge bath in a frozen bathtub with a couple of gallons of water in a room with a smelly bucket of sewage. So life is actually good.

It's just that I get scared sometimes.

But I am still sort of depressed in spite of myself. I did make some more things today and brought home a lot more clay that other students were throwing away. One of the things was supposed to be sort of squash-like, but wound up as a head of garlic. I meant for it to be a lid+ body piece but I am not going to be back when it is leather hard in order to cut the top off. Mostly I just got my hands into the clay.

And they were offering free chair massages (which sounds kind of funny now that I am writing it, a chair getting a massage, hahahaha...) and my shoulders, neck, etc have been sort of sore so I thought, what the heck, having never gotten a professional massage before. She did a good job, but she used some kind of oil that reeks like AXE and I hate it! I hate smelling this way! She said it was tea tree oil, but I know tea tree oil when I smell it, and if it's on me, there isn't much of it. Yuck. Will have to take a bath when I get home. I have no idea what I usually smell like, but the idea of running around smelling unlike myself bothers me.

Anyway, now I have several school-free weeks with with to clean house, cook from scratch (which I already did, but not intensively) and make pottery stuff....probably more fish and botanical/sea life inspired forms.

The fish came out really nicely, except for some glaze dripping on the back side of it, which is a fairly minor issue. It is RED!

Bleh. Depressed again. Listening to this.

I know that I am a worthy person with a lot of nice qualities. But damn, sometimes I feel like such a discard when I look back upon the history of life and feel like any more of that sort of thing will be one time too many. Ugh..... :-(

OK, that is a lot more than 50 lbs!! I know because I had to carry it, and I left about half of it at the studio to get next time, too! :smile: It will give me something to keep busy with.

And I didn't make a lot of money at the pottery sale, only $24, but it was enough to help.

Happy and having a good day, despite the curve balls life throws at us. I just finished my final evaluation for the ceramics class, and most of my remaining work will be out of the glaze firing by Wednesday. The teacher asked if I had prior experience with sculpture, based on my work. At first I said not really....then remembered that I've been sewing and working with fabric, including three dimensional fabric forms, for most of my life. So see, all those years of sewing weren't wasted! He said I have a knack for clay and a willingness to allow the clay to express itself. :-)

And, I have about 50-60 lbs of clay to bring home to play with over the winter break. I want to make more fish, like maybe some of the weird ones that live in the deepest parts of the ocean, but am leery of transporting them because of breakage. Hmmmm. If I can drive them in, they'd get here in one piece.

And, I have a lot of pottery that I don't need. I am wondering if I can give it away.....

Sigh..There is a movie where a guy is trying to kill the baby and the baby's crying, except the baby is made of a tree stump. And the woman is trying to defend the baby.

And, believe it or not, I got freaked out over this scene. I mean, first of all, it's a frigging movie. Secondly, it isn't a baby. Who else freaks out over crap like this??!

So I have been doing an inventory of my cupboards to ascertain what I have enough of and what isn't there or is there in insufficient quantities, because I keep finding that I thought I had things, starting a recipe, and then find that some key item is missing. For entertainment's sake, I'll post the lists here. :-P Ummm....keep in mind that I have this fear of running out of food, ok?

Grains and Cereals

• White cornmeal grits
  
• Yellow corn polenta
  
• Red quinoa
  
• White quinoa
  
• Oatmeal, rolled (a lot!)
  
• Oatmeal, scotch steel cut
  
• popcorn, multicolored
  
• Amaranth
  
• Wheat, whole berries
  
• bulgur wheat
  
• Kasha (buckwheat groats)
  
• Rice, jasmine white (a LOT, because this is my favorite!)
  
• Rice, sweet white
  
• Rice, brown basmati
  
• Rice, wild (which is not real rice at all, but whatever...)
  
• Rice, Lundberg's wild blend
  
• Rice, arborio, white
  
• Rice, Calrose brown
  
• Oh! almost forgot the purple barley, but that's for planting

Beans and Legumes

• Lentils, red (a lot)
  
• Lentils, french green
  
• Lentils, plain old brown
  
• Green Split peas
  
• Peanuts, wild jungle
  
• Chickpeas
  
• Beans, aduki
  
• Beans, black turtle
  
• Beans, lima
  
• Dried refried beans
  
• Beans, kidney

And while writing this list, I realized that I have no yellow split peas at all, with which to make dahl. This list is not including the canned beans, by the way, only dried beans. Most of the canned beans are white cannelini. Hey, I don't have any plain barley, either, with which to make mushroom barley soup! I wonder if I can use quinoa instead.....I mean, it isn't like barley has much of a flavor.

At Safeway accessing wifi again, and this time, the eating area is free of racists and bigots. Tell me please: why do so many men walk around looking threatening? I can't imagine that women find that attractive, but on the other hand, my taste usually isn't the same as the average woman, and vice versa. I see these scowling men everywhere, and it just makes me feel nervous. Really overweight men, though, tend not to scowl, but to be friendly. I am shallow enough to find this almost as threatening as the scowly guys, lmao.....

And see, there I am, doing it again, going through life feeling like some kind of a prey animal alert and watchful for predators. I got picked up by one of those the last time I went hitchhiking. Don't ask me how, but I just knew that guy was not quite safe. He was acting weird. So I remembered that a good strategy is to remind such men that you are a fellow human instead of a sex object, and I starting asking him about his family and telling him that I had kids, etc. That seemed to work for the very short distance he drove me. I was really, really glad he didn't take me to Coeur d'Alene. I haven't gone hitchhiking since that day.

And...I'm tired of Safeway, so that's all I have to say for now.

Spazzing out. Not doing very well.

The health food store has some fantastic tapioca pudding that they make there, and it has neither eggs nor milk. I buy way too much of it, but the last few times, they didn't have any. It only has four ingredients, so it can't be too terribly hard to make. I am going to give it a try, and if it turns out well, will post the recipe for my imitation of their product (lol). I love tapioca...especially the large pearl kind that looks like fish eyes....could only find the small pearl at a reasonable price though...

I was looking for a picture of Shahena'ko S Kamikaze, one of the two Alpine does that inspired me to work the Alpine breed of dairy goats, rather than Saanens, which were definitely my first love in goats. I didn't find Kamikaze, but I did find an old, old image of Sodium Oaks Kiwi Mallow, who was the other inspiring doe (edited to add- Mallow was also Kamikaze's grandmother). More than twenty years of breeding and advancements later, Kiwi Mallow is still a striking testament to her breed:



The image is from The Buck Bank semen website, a good place to buy dairy goat semen from. The Sodium Oaks and Shahena'ko lines were the ones I used almost exclsuively in my own herd, because Kiwi Mallow and Kamikaze were what I wanted to see walking aorund in my pasture (and through the show ring)!

Footnote: I forgot how to write html to post images and had to look it up!!!! I feel so stupid! Need to start writing a new website, lol....

Still trying to figure out what to do in terms of a major and long term education plan. Things that interest me enough to consider working in them and associated factors, pros and cons:

• Permaculture, sustainable agriculture: I could farm or develop plant or livestock varieities or strains or progressive agricultural systems or techniques for the rest of my life and feel thoroughly happy and fulfilled. Problems: Chemistry and advanced math required (wtf, I don't want to formulate new pesticides!!!), and my hips don't allow for the heavy manual labor I used to enjoy so well. Could work in the dairy goat industry, but there just is not enough of a demand. If it weren't for the Chem, I would find a way to do this, but having failed the last chem class in spite of extreme effort and memorization.....will have to find something else and possibly raise stuff as a hobby or independently.
• Fine Art: It is definitely within my ability to do this, and I would be happy working in this field. Problems: getting a 4 year degree without abandoning children, and finding a job in this field in our challenging local job market.
• Psych: I've wanted to work this area for years, particularly if it has anything to do with autism or exploring differences in thought, i.e. neurodiversity. Temple Grandin is one of my heroes! Problems: Statistics, worries that they might not want me in the field to begin with because I'm sort of atypical, frustration with what I perceive as subjectivity and biased viewpoint in the field, compared to some of the other sciences. Still, I would totally do this if I could get through the Stats class.
• Somehow combining art and psych: Ah...this seems like a nice combination. Something like art therapy or OT. Having experienced first hand the difference that immersing oneself in oneself in clay can have on my psyche, I know that art is therapeutic and calming and cathartic, just as getting my hands into a garden or spending time with animals is therapeutic. (animal therapy?). Problem: research is needed to determine what kind of a degree I need. Can I actually find work in this field? I know for a fact that there have been times when art has literally saved my life, and it isn't even so much about the results. It's the creative process and the sensory experience of the stuff.
• Physical anthropology: very, very interesting stuff, and forensic anthropology is not too far removed from pathology. Cons: I already tend towards depression. Combing over the bones of dead children or infants might be a bit much for me. Also, having smelled decomp a number of times.....I could do it, but......still, a possibility to keep on the list
• Art education: That isn't the right word for it. Main drawback here is that I really do not like working with large groups of kids. One on one is soooo much better.

Other than being cold (blogging outside, brrrr!) and having issues with my eldest son, life is good. I don't even mind the cold, because (sacrilege!!) I actually prefer winter to the bright sun and smothery heat of summer. Especially when big snowflakes are falling in slo-mo like flower petals, or when it's really cold and you shine a flashlight on the snow and it sparkles like diamonds, and the flakes skitter with a crystalline sound as you walk. It's slushy and drippy right now, but it'll be nice again before long.

I know this is so wrong, but I honestly think I could spend most of the summer in some pleasantly overcast and foggy coastal area and be very happy about that. lmao....

Some horrible woman with small (less than 2 years old) twin boys just walked her kids into the bathroom and started smacking one of them. I could actually hear her hitting him. Of course he was crying and wailing pitifully while she bitched him out. I went and told one of the librarians, but by the time she came out, the woman was leaving. The whole scene just sort of freaked me out. It should not be legal for people to do that to their kids, especially really small ones. And now I feel sort of ashamed because I didn't have the balls to go and confront her about it. Those poor kids. It's been years and years since I was hit like that, and I still feel all unsettled and upset seeing it happen to someone else.

You know what though, I think it is normal to be upset by this sort of thing. It should never, ever be acceptable in any society to treat a child that way. :-(

Got some reference books for doing pottery over the winter break. Well, sort of. They aren't pottery books, they're books about turtles, whales, and coelocanths, all things I wnt to depict in clay.

And for some reason, I've been really food oriented even though I am not really eating any more than usual. Oh! I found teff flour! They don't have whole grain teff (snarl) but I am happy to be able to get this. Also found amaranth flour, another hard to find item. :happy dance:

And I tried to make summer rolls tonight, but the stupid spring roll wrappers aren't working right. Will but a new batch of them tomorrow and use the filling with those. :-)

Three pieces had sold by the time I left. I got one of the raku pieces and brought it home; the other weren't done yet. The raku firing was cool and invigorating, even though there was a lot of smoke. So, here's how the raku process and firing works (I don't know enough yet to be highly technical or accurate but will do my best!):

The raku pieces need be be sturdy, with simple shapes and preferably no projecting parts, because they're going to have to undergo very stressful and sudden temperature changes. So we made plates, tea bowls, vases, tumblers. These were bisqued (think of it as a pre-firing with no glaze), and then we had to use special raku glazes. There's a white, and a copper glaze that turns shiny green and metallic, and others...I didn't know about the others so didn't use those. These were then put back into the electric kiln to force any remaining moisture out of them, because otherwise, they might explode and ruin other pieces when they go through the firing. Meanwhile, our teacher fired up the top hat kiln outside. This is a kiln such that the top lifts off the base via use of counterweights. It is propane fueled. The pre-warmed and dried pieces are then loaded into the top hat kiln, which looks like a flat base with a cup turned upside down over the base. Flames and heat sometimes come out of the top of the kiln. The temperature in this kiln has to go up to 1900 degrees Fahrenheit, after which helpers stand by with gloves and tongs and others (like me) stand next to metal trashcans holding armfuls of straw. The red hot pieces are carefully dropped into the trashcans onto a bed of straw, and then more straw is thrown onto them (which promptly ignites) and the lids are put on quickly. Meanwhile, the top hat kiln is filled again with more pieces. After a while (like 20 minutes) the pots in the trashcans are pulled out and laid onto pieces of kiln shelving. They're all covered in blackened straw, but when you brush the straw off, the colors are intense and stunning, even gaudy if you use only the copper green. As they cool, they make small pinging sounds and the glaze cracks, because the temperature changes have been extreme. So if you use white, which I used a lot of, you get this network of fine cracks, and the smoke and soot from the straw turns the clay body black between the cracks.

The neat thing about all this is that it's very fast, you're directly involved and you watch all these cool things happen right in front of you, not behind the solid door of a kiln. It's almost magical. Also there's this element of instant gratification; compared to waiting a couple of days for a glaze firing from a regular kiln, the raku glaze firing gives you a finished piece in your hands within an hour. I think it would be too stressful to go through every day, but it is a refreshing change from the routine of the usual way.

At the pottery sale (finally) and none of my stuff has sold yet (uh-oh, gotta buy gas next week...) but who knows, it still might. People keep wanting to buy the stuff I'm keeping!

I got a lot of newly glaze fired stuff:

• the colander's glaze is all washed out and flat; going to try to reglaze and refire it.
• The baking dish is sort of underwhelming. I mean, it's good enough to use, but it isn't special. I might sell it.
• The paddled lidded box was glazed in shino and it looks great! So do several other shino glazed items.
• One of these is a coffee cup which was paddled from a slab cylinder (see note below) and glazed in shino, finger wiped down to the body, and the interior was glazed in iron red, which dribbled in s few streaks on the exterior as well. My mentality is to let accidents happen in pottery, because they're often fortuitous.
• The goat teapot is bisqued, but every time I look at it, I feel sad about the horns it used to have. :-( I need to get over that, lol....
• Made an elephant for Charlie, and it's also bisqued.
• Bisqued and glazed my second fish, a kokanee salmon, with Rose's Red. This is risky because Rose's Red isn't terribly predictable. I asked the lab assistant to do everything possible to put it in a place where it'll get reduced so it'll be red, not off white or gray or light green.
• Also, we are doing the raku firing today! I am so psyched for that!

Note--->

• Paddled- you take a form or a piece of clay and use an object to pat it into shape. Such pieces are stronger because the particles of clay are compressed more tightly, and the piece has a different character than one which has been thrown or handbuilt.
• Slab cylinder (or whatever)- The clay is rolled out into a thin sheet and then shaped. Slab cylinders usually have a seam unless you're good at hiding it. Paddling hides the seam and makes it more personable instead of looking banal...and makes it stronger, too.
• Finger wiping- pretty much what it sounds like. You dip the piece in glaze, and then quickly make marks through the glaze as if you were finger painting. These areas look different. In shino, they're darker, like a dark apricot color, whic contrasts very nicely with the rest of the piece.

OK, I'm gonna run back to the ceramics studio....the raku firing will be beginning soon. :-)

Hmmmm. I am in that "tired but alert" state of mind. I should be in bed so that I can sell my work in at least one day of the pottery sale. But, I'm not tired yet (yawn). And my body is hungry even though the rest of me is not.

Made some gluten free scones today, chocolate chip flavored. This was fun because: it was a challenge. Making stuff with other-than-standard flour is always challenging. Also, I found some of the coolest flours to use: quinoa, coconut (who knew you could buy coconut flour??), almond, tapioca and....hmmm. Seems like there was another. I only used the coconut, quinoa, and tapioca flour for these scones, with the addition of xanthan gum (because non-gluten flours tend to crumble a lot and the xanthan gum helps with that). And, although there was an egg, and butter, I was also able to make it with coconut milk instead of cream, which I never buy, whereas coconut milk is pretty much a staple item in our cupboard (it's good for curries and Filipino desserts). I had to use sugar and didn't want to use honey or agave syrup, etc because they are liquid and I was messing with things enough as it was. So, I settled for dark brown organic sugar. There wasn't a lot of it, only a third of a cup for the entire batch. The verdict? They're pretty good! I can taste the quinoa and a hint of coconut (goes well with the chocolate chips) but these actually make the finished product mroe interesting. The standards are pretty bland and uninspiring by comparison. Next time I want to try it with the almond flour! :-) If you folks want a recipe, I can post it.

Oh! Forgot! Why would I want to make this weird recipe to begin with? Well, because. Quinoa is cool: see? It has a protein level of 12-18% and the protein has all 8 amino acids, which is uncommom in the plant kingdom. Since I don't often eat meat, this is really good to know. Also, I like weird foods and uncommon agricultural crops that we hardly ever hear about. It annoys me that most of our food comes from just 5 or 6 crops. It seems to me that relying very heavily on such a narrow array of food is:

• boring
• not smart from a crop failure scenario viewpoint
• not smart from a biodiversity angle
• predisposes people to allergies and makes them a lot more vulnerable in the event of contamination of the food supply
• Probably doesn't supply a balanced array of nutrient or minerals.
• and besides, why is it that we can make thousands and thousands of dishes from meat, and yet we don't even try to do that with plant foods? With a few exceptions, such as soybeans, corn, potatoes, wheat, rice and peanuts, we eat most of our plant foods in just a few forms, often cooked just as they are. Only freaky people like me carry it to the next level.

What I really want to get my hands on: some teff. This is such a cool crop! You can plant an entire field from a single handful of the stuff! I found teff wraps today, but some seed or flour would be nice. And when spring comes, I would like to grow some quinoa and amaranth.

I feel so fragile sometimes, like my soul is naked and vulnerable to the world around me. People sometimes say stuff like: "You hold your cards very close to your chest", or "I can't tell what you're feeling or thinking" or "You don't have feelings (or empathy)".

This always surprises me, because from my point of view, I am utterly at their mercy.

By the way: for the celebratory goblet assignment, I finally found something worth celebrating- getting into the advanced ceramics class! Yes! I just used a lot of various techniques that we have learned or might learn in class, such as trimming, paddling, modeling, texture, etc. When it comes to the glazes, I will use more techniques there too.

The goat teapot: I started making another horn, and while putting it on, managed to break off the other one. Arrrgh! So instead, whittled the remaining stubs of horns into short spike type horns, which are more typical for a female goat anyway. It looks acceptable now. Not fabulous, like it used to, but still good. The only thing is, it now has no handle, because the long, curling horns were the handle. Grrrr.... I guess I could drill holes into the sides near the central opening and insert a wire bail?

And the sgraffito casserole with a goat handle perched atop the lid is sort of questionable. Specifically, the handle and lid are very nice. They are also very poorly matched to the casserole. They don't fit at all.

From such frustrations come experience.......

My son says that I am a horrible mother. I don't think he has any idea how horrible a parent can be. He says that I'm manipulative; I think I'm not good enough at predicting human reactions to be manipulative. Besides, I tend to just spill whatever's on my mind, whether that's a good idea or not. How can a person with such a loose mouth be sneaky and close lipped enough to be manipulative???

Guess I'm feeling defensive. Or maybe my own childhood was so incredibly messed up that I actually am a bad mom and don't even realize it, because his life seems like utter paradise compared to what my siblings and I went through. If you are curious about that, you can go to my other blog.

You know, I am going to start writing down what he says to me. Things look different on paper than they do floating around in my ears and head...which, by the way, is why I blog so much.... :-P

OK, now I'm just crabby. Every clock in our house, including the one in my truck, has a slightly different time, and I missed the goddamn bus by 30 seconds!!!! It is the day to set up for the pottery sale. I'm pissed!

It's no good. I can't focus. It's cold here and there are so many people and soooo much noise.

So, I am at Safeway taking advantage of the free wireless to work on my math homework. My phone apparently doesn't work well anymore; I can hear people, but they can't hear me. I suppose I should be upset by this, but given that I am hating the thing right now, I don't really care.

Oh. Well, the server for the math website is not working. Oh well. Suppose it can't hurt to sit around and see if it works in an hour or two.

Sigh....what to do about that stupid phone???

OMFG, what a crazy, messed up weekend....

I mean, sometimes you just cannot win no matter what you do. :-(

Please, please tell me that the rest of my kids are not going to be this difficult to get through their teens.

And I am going to leave that stupid phone alone. I hate phones. I hate...how to put it....well, I don't have a good way to put it except that I have a hard time dealing with conflict over the phone. I mean, first of all, if you call someone, you never know if it's a good time to call them or not. They could be in the middle of something and highly upset to be interrupted, and most of them will not say so. Was it a good time to call? You don't know whether they'll be annoyed or not...until you get them on the phone, and probably not even then. Ugh! And then, there's the (wholly verbal) conversation, with no visual cues at all. And the potentialty for a barrage of words faster than I can take them in or sort them out, and the threat of being hung up on, or worse, for the other person politely continuing but wishing I would hang the F up. And then, when you get off the phone, there's the relentless replay of any unpleasant feeling parts of the conversation, over and over and over again. Arghhhh!!!!!!!

LOL...I guess I feel a little better for having vented.........

I don't have any words, only analogies.

My empty womb sliced up in a jar, awaiting further dissection and scrutiny, being searched for signs of cancer......This loss of which organ makes me even less desirable than I had been before, although less mercurial and far safer.

The huge standing, hollow cedar trunks, some of which had a few living, struggling branches, over in Hannah Flats. Their emptiness was big enough for me to stand in, their living flesh stretched to hold the decay and void within.

The blue gleam of a robin's egg shell among the grasses, smeared and fouled on the white side of the shell.

Your eyes, so honest looking, so unreadable, haunting me, haunting me, in my mind. I can't escape and the axe is poised and I am frozen with fear. I would prefer almost any other wound; but he knows my weaknesses too well for that and I am, quite simply, screwed.

What do you do when the horizon is gone and your compass is broken and you're tired of limping along?

Depressed. No good reason, just am. :-(

Ya know, being alone isn't all that bad. It's kind of nice! I can cook or not cook as I like, go to bed late, read at bedtime, make messes and clean them up when I want to, and eat pretty much whatever I want to (like cereal and milk for dinner, or a grapefruit for lunch) and not feel guilty for any of this. Whether or not I should have had to feel guilty for any of those things in the first place is another story for another time. There's a lot of freedom and lack of conflict when you live alone (or in my case, alone with kids).

And then I balance this against the sheer coziness and warmth of waking up next to someone you want to wake up next to, or coming home and seeing a welcoming face and arms to fall into. To me, that's priceless. The question is, how likely is it that I will get someone that I really and truly want to wake up to or come home to for an extended period of time? Hmmmm. I'm thinking that unless I can hook up with someone that I really adore, it just isn't worth the time and pain.

I finally got in to school and got a good look at my glazed (finished) pieces, the bisqued (half finished) and some of the greenware (not even bisqued yet) pottery. My work sucks. It's not good. I hate most of it.

And the one piece I was excited about, my goat teapot, someone broke one of the horns (which functioned as the handle) off! It is bone dry and I cannot attach a new one. Color me sad. :-(

Can it be? Internet at home? It's the equivalent of a water dropper compared to a garden hose anywhere else, but still, it's internet. Don't count on it lasting or being a reliable thing though.

Snowed in here. Have no idea whether there will be school for any of us on Monday or not. Unfortunately, by the time I can call, the bus will have left already! Can't they give people some kind of an idea regarding school closures the night before school rather than the morning of? How are folks supposed to plan??? Other than school, I have no good reason for wanting to go in to town (it was email but now I have checked that and found the usual array of things not worth having looked forward to).

And, despite the hassles and closures and rescheduling and whatnot, it is *beautiful* outside! The trees are just dripping with snow and everything looks so pristine out there. The nice thing is, it isn't even that cold.

My sister and her family came up for Thanksgiving, which was a nice surprise. At one point, my brother in law asked me why I think about the past so much. I've been thinking about that ever since. The thing is, she was able to leave here and go to college right away and get on with building a new life. I still live here. I still know the same people my parents knew, even if I hardly see them, I do hear about them. The roads I drive are pretty much the same. The businesses we delivered newspapers to are the same ones I drive right by. And the fathers of my children were inextricably tied to my past in various ways, so it's inevitable that looking at them will occasionally lead my mind along a thread to the past.

On the other hand, I work out the problems in today by working through my past. I know that it isn't possible to escape this stuff, however nice that would be. It follows you- in dreams, in flinching when someone moves to quickly, in small ways that scream loudly to your psyche. Some people can get up and walk away from an accident scene and cry a time or two and not think about it again. I'm not like that. Things affect me deeply, and ruminating on them is what I do to try to make sense of it all.

I still don't know how to respond to that comment, but I guess it wasn't really a question. I think it was more of a shut-up-and get-over-it-and-move-on sort of thing. And don't-talk-about-it-anymore-because-we-don't, too. And I will get over it, but I'm also not the sort to walk off from a half wounded monster. If I'm going to kill something (speaking figuratively) it's going to be dead, period, because I don't want to wake up some night and find myself confronted with it right when I thought I was happy.

I think that I have become obsessed with pottery. It's such a good feeling.

Sometimes I feel as though I'll wither up and die if I can't at least get a hug once in a while; but then I think back and reflect on how bad a bad love life can be, how stressful, how degrading it can all get. And then I actually feel relieved, and remind myself that I am never, ever, going through the stress of having a man again unless it's someone who will treat me well, someone I can love from the very marrow of my bones. I am never going to settle for someone that I don't really want again.

Man, I am so tired of trying to survive from one day to the next......

The good news is that I have located a retail outlet for my ceramics. Now I just have to start producing more of them, which frankly is going to be a challenge unless I can get to school reliably.

I am absolutely exhausted. Too tired to go into the details, but let's just say that getting minutes on my cell phone has become a priority.

What would it look like if the wire did melt on the piece? Would the wire melt after or before the clay and glaze set up? (probably depends on what kind of wire). Can I stabilize it with soft clay, or would that adhere to the piece? Maybe if I make fewer sections, it wouldn't be such a pain to deal with. Or --> I can make them interlock and fit together like puzzle pieces.

My truck tires are more bald and unprepared for winter than I ever would have guessed. I thought that the truck was weaving all over the road this morning because of the snow...but no, it appears that the alignment is off and the front tire on my side is so bald that there is a strip where it it down to the metal threads! Eeeek! So I am going to get right down to work on resolving that ASAP. Gosh, if it isn't one thing with that truck, it's another.....

I'm not going to worry anymore about hope and whether it's there for me. Hope isn't something that is elusive and lands on you; it's like everything else, you have to make it or bring it into being through what you do, think, etc. At least, that's what I think today..... Not going to sit around waiting for it, either. I'm just going to go live my life and do the things I need to do, because if I sit around longing for life to work out the way I'd like it to, the only thing that could possibly occur is that I'll sit around waiting and occasionally random lucky things will happen, along with plenty of less random, less happy things.

The Ceramics teacher gave me my last display piece back and took three more for the display case. One of them is kind of crummy in my opinion, but he said it was nice....

Maybe I already mentioned this, but I made a goat shaped teapot last week; she's coming along nicely and is all cleaned up and ready to bisque fire. Made several other pieces today, including another fish (this one is anatomically correct this time) and....hmmm, I don't know what else. I just didn't really have the touch today, felt enthusiastic but not creative enough, and I could hardly throw a good pot to save my life. Oh yeah, I made a small colander, because I don't always need the great big ones.

Our next assignment is to make a sculptural, non-representational piece that incorporates another material after it is fired. I had this idea to make a nice vase type thing and then break it or slice it up while it was in the leather hard stage, and make holes in each piece, and wire it back together, and glaze it, and then......and here is the problem. Then what? Because see, any glaze will make a piece stick to the bottom of the kiln in the glaze touches the kiln floor. Wire will melt, so it would have to be taken apart again before it could be fired, but then the glaze is an issue because of the glaze melting the pieces to one another and to.......oh......wait...... They could melt back together? hmmmm.

I have been working through a lot of the trauma, abuse, etc issues and wanted to make pots that expressed that kind of thing, that's why I was going to break it. If it would melt back together enough to stay in one piece, even barely......oh my, that sounds risky. Thinking......

And I was going to make a lot of small, cute, defenseless looking little round extruded pots and violate and ruin and distort them in various ways, but the extruder and I didn't get along today.

And.....maybe I just wasn't mentally gathered enough to do a good job today. Who knows.

I read Innocence Destroyed a study of childhood sexual abuse, as well as The Unsayable, The Hidden Language of Trauma, which apparently is about Lacanian psychotherapy, and then I looked at The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook and honestly, aside from making me aware of how much worse it could have been, these things didn't help much. The Last book does have an interesting section on nutrition and how the foods we eat can affect anxiety, and that actually was worthwhile. Sigh......I need to give up the coffee..... :-( and eat more B vitamins.

I guess that the reason these books are unsatisfying is that they are not giving me the answers to the questions I have, which is primarily whether or not there is any hope for me.

No phone. No internet at home. And now, because I was able to sell my old snow tires, i am at least able to drive (but limited still). Hmmm. I can't even blog.

But, I can blog on my computer and then publish it when I get home. And I can journal the stuff I really shouldn't publish anyway. And I can clean the house so that at least *something* feels like it is under control.

I still don't know what to do about the stuff I mentioned in the last post though.

An aside: every time I start researching issues like PTSD of anxiety or Asperger's or abuse survivors, I start to feel really....no polite way to put it: all fucked up and beyond fixing. Like damaged goods. And then I feel sad. Like, who would want to deal with all this shit? sigh......

And this is why I push it away and don't deal with it, and then things don't get better. And I have had a lot of counselors and counseling and stuff, but they tend to say crap like:

"Look into the mirror and say 'I'm good enough!' 'I am special and lovable!'"
(well, this just doesn't cut it for me)

"So, what are you going to do with that?"
(WTF???? This does NOT help me! If I knew, why would i have come to you for advice in the first place?)

"Why do you want to feel as if something's wrong with you?"
(Um, because I don't think denial is a good thing?????)

"I'm sorry those things happened to you."
(Well, gee, so am I. We both are. Now what?)

These things aren't helpful. They just leave me feeling like a fool for opening up enough to talk to someone about it, incredibly self concious, like I wish I could just rewind the tape and start over. Oh, and angry...if you couldn't tell that already.

It isn't that I don't want to do the work it takes to heal, it's that A: I have to live and function in the meantime and B: still not sure what that work is and C: people get sick of hearing this shit, especially since others have apparently had it worse and are purportedly healthy and functioning people (????), and D: Geez, where to find the time??

And now I am in the library feeling unproductively shitty and wanting to not cry in public because that is weak and lame and wishing that I could believe that there is hope, that there's a path out and....um....I need to go think of something else now........

Pottery: the Mamo glaze has actually been turning out more oatmealy transparent than opaque with brown spots, so I might try glazing with it for a change, particularly combined with other glazes.

Going to make more fish and animals. Also, slip sgraffito. More ash glazing too, need a good source of ashes. I need to find a way to elevate the fish above the floor of the kiln so as to be able to glaze both sides of them. I have no idea how ashes will interact with the glazes I've used, or with combinations of those glazes, so that will be an entirely new direction I can go with.

More than anything though, I need to work on the *quality* and finish of the pieces: making better feet on thrown pots, a smoother, cleaner junction of base and sides on slab built things, smoother seams, etc. Part of the problem is that the pots dry to leather hard while I am gone over the weekend. For example, I should have gone in today even though I had no class, just to trim and finish my leather hard pots before they cannot be worked on. I have a bad feeling that by Monday they will be too hard to trim well. :-( Mostly though, I just need to throw, throw, throw, until I can reliably get what I want from the wheel. I've been circumventing and avoiding this by focusing on hand-building, and turning out some pretty nice hand built things, too, but...... need to focus on throwing skills, too. Guess that I have such a loathing of failure that I simply don't try as much as I should, not only there but in a lot of areas of life. You can't fail if you don't take the risk to begin with.

Anyway....so I am waiting around for the managers of the coffee shop I frequent to show up so I can ask them about possibly exhibiting some stuff there. It is not up to the standard that I want, but that will be all the more incentive to produce better things.

Feeling terribly creative and upbeat. :-)