happy new year sweetheart

i love you very much indeed

Well I slept in

I guess you got up and did things

I had some strange dreams

But I don't remember most of it I remember

I was in the house on sunburst Street

And I had a roommate

So I knew in the dream

And we had ordered pizza and the delivery guy came but then he called back later and said he had figured our order wrong or something and we owed him more money and so he came back

And I hadn't dealt with him when he came the first time my roommate had dealt with him

So when I open the door I didn't do it really quickly because I think I was having a conversation or something I'm not sure but when I opened it completely and looked out he had his leg in a cast it was surprised

And so I was like oh I remember what the conversation was about I was all kind of turned around and I was asking my roommate where the money was cuz there was some money that Left on that cabinet next to the door and I couldn't find it that's why I didn't open the door right away

So I asked him how much do we owe you and he said $30 but $30 was what we had paid when he delivered the pizza to start with and I'm like you can't be another $30 and then he was like just joking but I didn't think he had been joking

But while I was looking out the door I realized that there were boxes and boxes piled up outside because I had gone through something and I had stuff that belonged to I'm not clear exactly who it belonged to I think it was a niece or something and we were going to take it to her but then we hadn't and we hadn't been back outside because of the quarantine and I had forgotten all about it and it was just boxes of stuff sitting outside that had been rained on and I was like wow I probably ruined all her stuff

and then I looked in the mailbox because that house had a mailbox that was right on the house wall next to the door which is really cool not having to walk through the complex to get to the mail

Anyway there was some mail in there for me and I opened it up and it was a card deck like just playing cards from

An organization that was called something like krah lev

but they were really strange cards they had the backs were not all the same some of them were just solid gold that look like gold leaf I mean it was solid but it was that kind of gold shiny but slightly brushed maybe not gold leaf it all reminded me of Japanese art some of them were just gold and some of them had pictures on them and some of them seemed like they were supposed to be steps between you know like not solid just plain gold and not a picture but like bits and pieces of the picture half a gold diagonally slice down the card I mean it was it was odd because usually one of the things about cards is that they have a uniform backing

And I was saying something about this organization but I don't remember what it was

Okay I'm about to go to bed

And I'm taking you with me

I feel

Close

Not far

So maybe

You'll feel me closer too

I love you very much sweetheart

Well of course it occurred to me today

That it has to be a festival

Whatever the festival is that's like Mardi gras and Holi and whatever else all rolled into one

If there's land and a place

Like it's a community or whatever

then it has to be enough land that there can be a festival there or somewhere it has to be a festival

I don't know what time of year it is sometime that's a good time to be outside I guess

But that's just so obvious somehow

Also I need another word for religion

I mean don't get me wrong I want to religious status so there's no taxes and whatnot but I don't really want to call it

I mean I don't want to call it a lifestyle either I need something better than that

I got two emergency alerts on my phone today

One said the cove had virus was surging and not to go out or have a party to just stay at home

Which I was planning to do anyway

And the other one said it was flash flood warnings

they're supposed to be a cold front coming through and sometime between midnight and noon there are conditions that could lead to flooding in I mean it was like 15 or 20 counties it's like you know a big area

4 to 6 in of rain with more than 6 in occurring in isolated places that they aren't sure where oh wait no it wasn't between midnight and noon it was between 6:00 p.m. and noon but so far there's only been like a couple of little 5-minute periods when it rained so I don't know if it's really going to happen or if it's going to happen outside the window of what they're saying I mean it's certainly has been known to flood here I've just been extremely grateful that there hasn't been a lot of flooding You know during the quarantine

All those hurricanes and everything

Poor Louisiana I think they all hit Louisiana

Anyway so I don't know things might get weird here

Or it might all be fine

The fact that it's really not raining now nor has it really been raining all day makes me wonder if maybe they've got the timing a little bit off I also don't think it's gotten cold I certainly doesn't feel cold

although once this place warms up it's tends to stay warm for a while and once it gets cold tends to be hard to get it warm The insulation is not really very good so I don't really understand what that's all about I mean I guess it's good on the walls but it's bad at the doors and windows but there aren't a lot of windows I think that's the key it's really kind of like a cave

Which wouldn't be my first choice but it helps with the electricity bills quite a bit

I've got just the chorus running through my head over and over and over

But instead of old mother nature

It's dialing for dollars

What are you supposed that means

Okay so I'm about to go to bed

I can kind of almost see the tiny house I'm not sure what you would call it and I'll really a compound not really a city 

village

I think maybe village works

But I'm not seeing it like I'm in it I'm seeing it arially is that weird

and they're not laid out in any kind of grid it doesn't seem like at all

Just as kind of random scattering of tiny houses

One thing that I think is really beneficial and some sort of consciousness around eating but I don't think it matters exactly the details you know I would not want to tell people they need to be vegan or they need to keep kosher or they need to do any specific set of things because it isn't the specifics that are important it's the consciousness around it

However I will say that the more specific the consciousness is around it and the more restrictive in a way the more beneficial it is

Like if you're just saying oh I'm vegan

Well if you're really and truly vegan

That is a lot of consciousness around something

Because you have to know for every single thing that you eat exactly what's in it but

I feel like a lot of people who are vegan aren't really that conscious about it like I've known a lot of people who said they were vegan who seem to eat bread that they bought at the grocery store but I guarantee you that the bread they buy at the grocery store is not vegan

And a lot of people who are vegan and I'm just using vegans as an example I'm not trying to hate on vegans

A lot of them they have an initial impetus of consciousness around their eating they say I'm not going to kill animals I'm not going to eat anything with animal products and really it should also include clothes that they wear and all of that stuff and for some people it really does but when you combine that with the fact that a lot of people don't really cook and so what they do is they say you know I'm going to be vegan and then they buy you know the frozen vegan food at the grocery store and etc

And so it has a consciousness around it for sure but not the kind of consciousness necessarily that I'm talking about

Calorie counting is another example but if you really literally count the calories and write down the number and keep track of it and you actually do that it's very very conscious because you're paying attention to everything that you eat

Which of course not everybody who calorie counts really does either

So I think

It's problematical

And although obviously you're not going to get everybody to do everything You know it's good to set things up for success

So if we're not trying to set down a specific set of rules we're just trying to instill the act of being conscious of what you're eating because food is so much more powerful when you have a conscious awareness of it

But only if you want to you know

And I'm tempted to say well it should be kind of a choose your own adventure type thing

And I'm tempted to make everything I choose your own adventure type thing because what's important is the process

But I don't think it's good to say you have to do something but I'm not going to tell you what to do

So I have to give that some thought

But I definitely think conscious awareness around food is an important aspect that I would want to include

I think although I've never really I guess I've known people who did lent but it was never clear to me that they really got that much out of it

but I think the idea of making choices about things that you're going to refrain from doing because that's what you want to do

I think that's important

and I think having concomitantly things that you take on for a period of time because you want to do them so that not all practices continually the same

I think that making choices about something that you want to focus on either positively or negatively as in either doing it or not doing it for the sake of your development but also from the standpoint of non addiction

I like the idea of my kind of modified in my mind version of Passover which as less to do with the actual events that it's celebrating or remembering or commemorating or however you want to phrase it

My kind of altered conception of it is more about kind of a personal liberation from a form of narrowness so in some way that you were enslaved by something in a very metaphorical way you're throwing that off and focusing on it as a thing that you're going to commit to no longer being enslaved to

And then I really like the counting

I really think some form of counting keeping track of the days like counting the omer but I don't really like the Kabbalah stuff I mean I have a problem with the Kabbalah I like the Kabbalah in the abstract and when I read about it I think oh yeah I understand this completely but then as soon as I finish reading it I can't explain it to you you know it it's just kind of a it makes perfect sense when I'm reading it and then it just goes and focusing on really abstract traits you know where you spend a week focusing on one thing and then the different elements in that to be honest with you I can't really say that I've ever gotten anything out of that and I would not want something like that but I do like the counting

So I think

Two holidays that had a period of counting between them and maybe the holidays would be related somehow

And maybe

So maybe there's one holiday that's about celebrating the removal of an obstacle somehow and then accounting period between where there are a variety of things happening like maybe you kind of get the lint vibe and the Ramadan vibe if you have this period where you were altering your diet for just this period of time to something very specific I don't know because with Ramadan the idea is you're not at least as I understand it is that you're not eating from kind of sun up to sundown as a way to feel the suffering of people who don't have enough to eat as a way to empathize with that and you have these kind of special meals before sunrise and after sunset that are you know fairly large and as I would understand it celebratory so I mean during this whole time you're having a constant awareness of kind of what you're able to have compared with people who are less fortunate than you and I think that's awesome and I think that the the control and the willpower of the not eating during from sunrise to sunset is great but I don't want to do that

I think it's too extreme I think it's you know directly copying

And I don't think that it's really the point that I want to be making

I also think you need something that's like a spring festival kind of thing I think I need that there a variety of spring I think Holi might be the coolest of them but I haven't been able to find out very much about holiday celebrations cross culturally for spring I mean you've got Holi Passover is technically kind of a spring holiday with all the lamb stuff but I think Purim is the the one where you get all the kind of laughing and irreverence and that's the kind of thing I'm talking about I guess you've also got Easter although the resurrection part is n't very irreverent the bunny is in the eggs and stuff is more about fertility so I mean there's a lot of action going on and I'm not necessarily wanting to tie anything to specifically pagan earth cycles or anything because I feel like we're all pretty out of touch with that generally

And then I guess Halloween is when we do our costumes

but I really like Halloween more as Day of the Dead than I do as whatever it is we're supposed to be doing

So you need a joyful irreverent holiday where people dress up as something other than what they are and kind of celebrate joy and mystery and whatever where they get drunk and act crazy let off steam and Mardi gras although that's tied in with Lent but you know what I'm saying

And I like the idea of the Day of the Dead but I think rather than having it be something where you're remembering your specific family dead I think it would be a lot more beneficial to pick an ancestor not somebody that you're related to that's in your family but someone who you feel a strong personal connection to who is not currently alive right

And rather than one day I think it should be longer period of time where you're interacting with that person in some way You know you're learning about them and building some kind of a altar or writing a journal where you're interacting with them like having a conversation or some form of integration with that person that brings them to life for you

and I got to say although I do not have an altar currently I really kind of like the altar building process although I don't know how that really fits in with tiny homes

So I mean I guess that I'm favoring these longer type things

and I guess you could say well okay so what you do is you have your self-liberation holiday and then you pick your person for your personal ancestor and you do that for the however many days that you're counting You could do that but I don't know that I really want to combine those I really don't think that that's the same thing at all and then what is your second connected holiday

And then you have to have a new year festival

I just I feel like there's some importance to trying to determine what are the The common things between religions because if they're common between all religions there's probably some reason why it feels emotionally necessary

But then I want to find ways

To work kind of personal growth

as a thing that's built into the holiday not a thing you have to you know kind of look for or figure out how to do on your own

And I don't necessarily want things where you think about sad things or how you've done people wrong or whatever I know that that's probably appropriate but I would rather that not be a big festival I would rather that just be you know an ongoing thing so that if at any point you decide you've wronged someone you would just go and deal with it then like you know the idea that you're going to have interactions with other people that go badly in one way or another that's not something to make a big holiday about where you have to go oh you know I've done bad I'm so sorry you know that's not what I want to focus on

It's just a regular kind of part of life and I don't know that it needs to be you know all glorified I'm not really looking to focus on you know sin or whatever

Is this just crazy

I'm almost out of battery again and I really need to go to bed

I love you very much sweetheart

💋

So mostly I'm getting four or five hours of sleep sleeping from like three or four in the morning until 8:00 in the morning

And that's mostly fine and then I'll maybe have one day or two days a week that I sleep a longer. If time to kind of catch up and that's just I guess the way it's going to be because I can't seem to make myself go to sleep early and I would sleep late but I am now doing things so I can't

But last night I had nightmares

That kept waking me up about my father and Jason

So I did not get much sleep and sleep I got was not good sleep and as a consequence I've been a little out of it all day

My mother has a web page which I blocked out because the last time I looked at it which was years ago I was like oh this is terrible You need to redo this because it's from like you know 98 or something it's front page it's terrible it's just not something that a professional person would have

And it was terrible whenever I saw it The first time you know and it it hasn't well I guess it has improved some because I guess some of it is gone now it's simpler but she was wanting to try to figure out how to put a link to the Etsy shop because she gets so much traffic on her web page and so I went to try to look at it and I had forgotten how bad it was in fact I can't even bring it up on my phone for some reason Even if I type in the web address it just won't come up

and she's not been very receptive to any of the things that I've brought up so I don't know how she's going to feel about this new web page

and of course I'm not a computer programmer I can't like build it from scratch but you know I can go to squarespace or something

And I guess the way to go with that would be to develop it and then show it to her because you don't have to pay for it until you launch it

But I'm not sure how that's going to interface with her email because I don't think squarespace has email I'm sure it can be directed at her web address I don't know how to do that but I'm sure it can be done

And she was asking me I'm not sure which day she was asking me maybe it was Friday or maybe it was sometime over the weekend she was asking me if I understood hashtags and I'm like yeah I think I understand hashtags what do you mean

cuz I'm not really sure how you understand hashtags you know # is just #

and she's like well I think we should start using hashtags on the Etsy shop

And I'm like I don't think you can use hashtags on the Etsy shop how would you use hashtags on the Etsy shop and she gives me this kind of angry look and I'm like okay well I'll find out so I'm researching it and no in fact you don't seem to be any hashtags on the Etsy shop

And she kind of pre-framed herself as being you know knowledgeable about the wide variety of things but every time I ask her about anything she basically explains to me how to Google

Like I might not know how to do that

I think she's explained to me how to Google like I don't know 15 or 20 times

And now she's asking me about the hashtags

now I had been trying to explain to her about hashtags before in relation to Instagram because she's already apparently got an Instagram and I was like you know if you post something be sure you post hashtag artists of Instagram or and hashtag watercolors or hashtag mixed media or you know whatever but be sure you get hashtag artist of Instagram on there

and she didn't at that point indicate that she didn't know what I was talking about so I thought she understood but apparently not

So you don't use hashtags on Etsy which I didn't think you did You do use them on Instagram which I knew and I had told her about and I didn't think you used them on Pinterest but apparently they have started using them on Pinterest for the last couple of years people who have branding will do like hashtag their brand for everything that they post on there and then also you know hashtag and you know something people would be looking up like vegan baking #vegan baking hashtag I don't know whatever but you know like you would use a hashtag and then apparently that's great and they've all been doing it but they're like but you know only do between two and five hashtags because if you do more than that it looks really spammy so I'm not a hundred percent sure whether hashtags are really a thing on Pinterest or whether these people who are trying to use Pinterest to boost their shops and things which is not as far as I'm concerned the point of Pinterest but some of the videos that I've watched have indicated to me that some people at least are getting business that way and she seems to think that that's the way to go although I'm not sure I believe her

But if she wants me to be trying to broker her art which you know maybe that'll work great and maybe it'll be really really difficult I'm not sure I don't really think this is the climate for it right this minute but whatever I guess we can work towards it but I'm not going to be trying to sell her stuff and sending people to that website I mean I wouldn't buy anything from somebody who had that website I wouldn't consider them to be a professional person I would be like oh your granddaughter built this website for you 20 years ago huh now I'm pointing factor granddaughter didn't build it she built it but I mean that's how it looks this is an old person who doesn't have any idea what's going on in the world now

I'm not being mean it's really really horrible

Also she has art on there that says it's new mixed-media pieces that's like 18 years old at least although I guess it may as well be new cuz some of it is stuff we got hanging up but I'm pretty sure everything is dated so I mean it's not going to fool anybody who's looking

Also she seems to think I'm a PR person so I'm going to have to learn how to do that too because she's like we've got to find a reason why people want to interview me so I can get written up in the local papers

but I haven't really thought of an angle why anyone would want to write her up and I don't really think that that's the way it happens anyway I think it's got to be some sort of you know event or viral video or something I don't know but I don't think people are just going to want to write her up because I call them and say she's super cool

Now I'm not saying there isn't an angle

I'm just saying you know I'm not Alexis

Also I kind of assume

You might think badly of me

For my estranged family situation with my brother

I really just do not know how to respond to him

He wanted me to come visit for Thanksgiving we talked about it a while ago and I told him I'm like you know I'm just not really in a position to do that now I'm not in a position to make any sort of commitments to that effect we'll just have to see how things shake out for me

and he didn't ask me any questions about what my situation was or what he could do to facilitate my coming to visit or anything like that he was kind of just like on me I was supposed to do it

And now

I mean maybe the kid legitimately wants to see me wants to meet me or maybe you know he's pushing him I really don't know

It's not that I don't want to meet the kid

but you know I'm not at a position to travel right now even if it were safe to travel I don't have money for that

And I have every expectation that they would be unpleasantness regarding the estrangement which seems to somehow be my fault

Now I will say that I didn't

Say Happy Thanksgiving or Merry Christmas over Facebook to him and it didn't even occur to me

now I didn't say happy Thanksgiving or Merry Christmas to anybody else over Facebook either I don't think I didn't post anything that I can think of

I texted my mom

I've had communications with you

But I just feel very strange about all this

I mean maybe I should feel bad that I didn't say happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas

That's a small thing and I could absolutely have done it and it just didn't occur to me

Now it's also true that he could have done that for me as well and didn't and I didn't take any offense at it because it again didn't occur to me

But I just feel really really uncomfortable and like somehow I'm supposed to have been keeping this going all along and I'm supposed to have you know I'm supposed to make it all happen now and I I don't understand I don't understand the kids' situation

I mean do you really think that it was his idea

and that he really wants to meet me and that he loves me when he's never met me and doesn't know anything about me except whatever Jason might have told him which is probably not even right you know I just feel

I feel like I feel every time that I have any contact with my family like bad stuff's about to happen to me and I just don't want to participate in it

I mean like when he contacted me way back whenever that was and was like you know you still have family I didn't even know how to take that like was I supposed to take that like he was opening up to me and saying we love you and we want you to be part of our family and we you know or was he saying you still have family you have obligations to us I just couldn't I couldn't tell you

And I feel as though you don't have any family situation that would make that make any sense to you

And that therefore you would judge me for that

And not wanting to be judged and not wanting to be taking advantage of and not wanting to be saddled with responsibilities that I have not accepted and that are not reciprocated is the main reason why I don't want to have anything to do with my family

And you know maybe that's unfair

Maybe that's not what he means at all

I just know that when I went there before in like December of 2007 January of 2008

I did not feel safe

I did not feel safe with them I did not feel safe in New York City I did not feel safe in my own skin

There were some things that were said that made me feel judged and looked down upon

and I'm just generally not interested in that

but I'm perfectly willing to accept that that might be my crazy and that that might not be in fact what's going on

But even if it's not

I don't understand this idea that because you are genetically related to someone you have some magic bond that even if there has been no attempt made to maintain any kind of a relationship

I've had the same phone number since 1996

And I think I got one phone call in 96 and one phone call and 97 and then subsequently there have been no phone calls

I mean like for example if the kid wanted to talk to me if Jason was really interested in us all having some sort of a relationship you know he could give me his phone number and I could call and talk to the kid or I could give him my phone number again and we could call and talk to each other but instead I don't know his phone number it certainly hasn't been offered to me

Instead there's been this weird series of Facebook interactions that don't make any sense to me

Promises have been made to the kid apparently that you know haven't been signed off on by me I don't have anything against the kid but I don't like feeling like I am letting him down and upsetting him when you know I didn't have anything to do with any of this

I just I don't like it it doesn't sit right with me it doesn't sit right with me and I wanted to send him a you know private message and say something but I really don't want to have to explain my situation when I mean he hasn't asked at all I really I really don't sort of appreciate the you know I don't really know you and I don't really understand your situation but I just want things from you whether you are in a position to give them to me or not I'm not even going to ask you is that something you can do is that something you want to do I'm not going to try to bridge the situation in any way I'm just going to have weird interactions with you and then want things from you

I mean that's not normal right

Am I the a******

And then I had those nightmares about my father and you know I don't know I don't know

I don't know how much of my situation is just my being overly dramatic I don't really think of myself anymore as being overly dramatic I mean I think I was when I was kid but I feel like I'm kind of low-key now

And maybe this is really really selfish I'm prepared to accept that I might be a really really selfish person in this but you know I'm trying to work through this stuff with my mom and I feel like I'm making real strides but I it's not easy you know every time she says something mildly amusing and I kind of laugh she's like are you laughing at me in this like really angry voice and I'm you know having to redirect everything and be like no I just thought you were amusing are you going to yell at me every time I think you're amusing and think that I'm mocking you

And you know I have to reassess myself in light of her and any way that I might be vaguely like her I have to accept that and work out strategies and you know I mean it's it's not all skipping through the park it's it's kind of like therapy but I have to be my own therapist and I'm not complaining I signed up for this but I really don't feel like I can do the whole family of origin at once you know

And I realized that Jason is not my entire family of origin but I just I can't I can't do that too I just I do not feel emotionally capable of spending a lot of time trying to figure out what his motivations for things are I mean I I did that before spend a lot of time getting all embroiled in what the f*** he was trying to say with these weird cryptic things you know but I can't do that now I just can't

So you know maybe I'm ruining the kids' life and again it's not even that I don't want to get to know the kid I wouldn't mind to get to know the kid it's the other stuff

But I mean whatever you know

I had been having some thoughts

Long time ago I had the impression that the thing that talks to me whether it's God or a spirit guide or another part of my brain I don't know whatever I don't want to be locked up I'm not going to make a statement about what it is but

There was a point in the past a long time ago when I felt like

I wanted to go on or rather I felt like I had a calling to be some sort of a religious thing a nun or a minister or something

And we did not go to any sort of religious services so I started going to church with just random friends trying to find out about churches and kind of what they were all about and this is like I don't know like second grade third grade something like that and I would go and I didn't feel God there and I really didn't like it

And then there was some point and I don't remember when it was it wasn't quite that young but it was like way before high school that whatever this thing was that I was talking to said kind of casually well you know you should just start your own religion because I was complaining you know that none of the religions seemed to fit my already kind of developed sense of my relationship with God

and I don't think I ever really took it all that seriously that seemed like you know kind of weird I guess and of course that was a time when there were a lot of cults and stuff so I think it just did not seem like the right thing to do to me

But then I've been thinking about it

And I'm not saying I'm going to do it

Button I've been thinking about it

And kind of

You know what that would look like

What would a new religion need to be

To be positive and self-actualizing and the thing that struck me as being really important

Was there's a quality to what's largely women but it's not entirely women would there's this like apologizing for everything and feeling or presenting very low self-esteem and then there's all this kind of gender trauma

And I don't know it just seems to me

There's some there's a real niche there of some kind of you know empowerment that I don't feel like is being completely addressed and standard religion doesn't seem to me to address it at all and there's a you know pretty good swath of people that have issues with their family of origin and I feel like there are a lot of people who need to find themselves you know in a centering spiritual way right

I mean the younger people they don't have problems largely with the social justice and the helping others part at least philosophically

But there's something that they need that they're not getting

And so I've been thinking about that pondering that and I mean I'm not saying I got real far with it but you know I was trying to think what are some of the core things that you could build into holidays and that you could build into you know cycles of the year that could help people with that sort of stuff and I have some very real doubts about my ability to interact with that many people on YouTube I think eventually it would have to be its own platform somehow and that just all seemed a little bit much but I was thinking about it and I was like well maybe it's a you know maybe it's a book you going to need a book maybe you don't need a book I don't know

And I'm almost out of batteries

So anyway I've been thinking about all that stuff and then this came up this whole thing with Jason

And I'm like so is that supposed to show me that I'm right and it's a needed thing or is that supposed to show me that I'm not capable of dealing with it or is that supposed to show me that before I could do this I've got a whole lot more work to do on myself or just what exactly is the universe trying to tell me cuz I'm getting mixed signals

So anyway that's some of the stuff that's been going through my head

And I really just do not feel like the same person at all

I really kind of feel like I want a new name but I don't really know what it should be

And then I think well you know maybe I'm crazy

but I don't feel like I'm thinking about it in a crazy way I mean I'm not like thinking oh I want to be a cult leader and I specifically don't want to be a cult leader that doesn't even sound vaguely appealing to me

I would not mind having a compound in the desert but I feel like the compound would be kind of like more of an ashram than a compound and it would be a lot more introverted so really it would just be like you know a big property with a bunch of people in tiny houses that had some shared common area and that seems like kind of a cool thing that there might be actually some interest in although I guess you'd need money

So anyway

That's what's up with me

I love you very much sweetheart

Goodnight 💋

I love you very much

I'm going to bed

I'm sorry I haven't had much to say today

I've been in kind of a weird mood

I hope you're doing okay

Goodnight sweetheart I love you very much 💋

 i have gotten very mixed signals from the universe today

i feel kinda disoriented

and

i was thinking last night

i want to change my name

no one had called me by my name

in longer than i can remember

and

it sounds foreign to me

not my name anymore

then

the kid calls me that

and it sounds even more foreign

my head hurts so bad

i almost can't stand it

i think i'm gonna sleep for a while

i love you very much

you feel farther away than i like

and i feel

well, i did feel moody

but

less so now than earlier

but, still

somewhat alienated from myself

goodnight sweetheart

i love you very much

This is kind of a rough time of year for me

I found today that just about everything

I've been kind of contrary

Like if you were with me today I feel like I would have picked a fight with you

Not because it's you

Because that's just kind of the mood I'm in

I'm not generally a fight picker

Then again maybe not

Maybe you would have hugged me and loved me and made it all better

Anyway

I'm going to sleep now

I love you very much

goodnight sweetheart I love you very much 💋

goodnight sweetheart I love you very much 💋

I've been having the strangest thing the last couple of days

today and yesterday anyway I'm not sure if it was going on before that or not

but I have all these little snippets of songs that as far as I could tell don't have any relation to one another at all or any relation to anything that's going on really I mean some of them maybe do but

Like I can't remember all of them right now but one of them is parts of a chorus line

You know Bob sleds in San Juan and everything is beautiful at the ballet but not like the whole song just little bits and then it's it's really it's like you know how

On Sergeant Pepper's lonely hearts club band there are places like I think for the benefit of Mr kite is one of them George Martin takes a bunch of clips of music and kind of throws them up in the air and then splices them together and makes this like kind of crazy phantasmagorical mix

Well this isn't crazy or fantasmagorical well it's a little crazy

But there's that chorus line

And I should have written it down because now I'm kind of drawing a blank on with the other ones are but normally when I have songs running through my head I feel like there's you know correlation between them and something

So that's kind of weird

And I have this intense desire to go to a restaurant

It's just crazy

Haven't been to a restaurant since March

And I'm not going to

My mother has suggested that we go to Becks several times like maybe three times

And I'm like no it's not safe

And she's like but we could sit outside

I'm like I still don't think that makes it safe

I've pretty much stopped following the news

I try a little bit everyday and I just can't

So I get little snippet snippets

But I wouldn't say I have a really good idea what's going on

Also I kind of am trying to try out Reddit since I'm on there now and what not

And I probably should be trying out news but I wanted to kind of ease into it so I'm trying with a bunch of skin care ones and I am not impressed

I am uncertain that I'm going to become a Reddit person

I think I'm a Twitter person and I'm not sure what that says about me but I think that's who I am

I'm also uncertain why

I follow so many female rabbis

And the percentage of what I read because even though I follow a lot of people when I'm scrolling through you know it doesn't show you anymore just everything that everybody you follow said it's got some kind of algorithm

Which I want to go on record with saying I still don't like

But it seems like the vast majority of what I actually read on my Twitter feed is female rabbis

So now I just think of the other people who I follow regularly

And maybe it's not the majority maybe it's only half but that still seems like a lot

I guess what I'm really telling myself is the people I would like to be friends with are female rabbis

And I wonder if that's really true

I'm going to be at the studio tomorrow because it was already planned

But I am looking forward to that thing

And I'm very disappointed that people just do not seem to be writing a lot of new Christmas songs or even making exciting new recordings of Christmas songs

I had so much fun with the Hanukkah songs and then I'm trying to do Christmas and there's just playlists of you know an hour or two hours or three hours a Christmas music and it's like you know that's not what I'm looking for

And it's just been so nice not to have all the Christmas you know I mean when you're working retail Christmas starts in you know early October

and at least at Starbucks we would get the Hanukkah stuff at the same time that we got the Christmas stuff in early October

but at that last place the Christmas stuff would be up till early October and like you know a week before Hanukkah people would be like where's the Hanukkah stuff it'd be like what hasn't come in yet they're like the Christmas stuff's been up for 2 months it's like well yeah but I don't make these decisions

So you know

I like Christmas music

but you know I'm not torn up about not listening to it and I'm not upset that there are no Christmas decorations anywhere that I can see well I think they're probably some there are definitely Christmas lights on the front of my building but they didn't put the ones by the office this year cuz the office is pretty much closed it's pretty much been closed most of the year You have to make an appointment

All the people who work here have to live on premises because this isn't a corporate apartment it's a individually owned apartment and that's just their rule so it works out pretty well because you know if they need to have a meeting they go and have a socially distance to meeting outside the office or they kind of just stand in a circle six feet apart with masks on and stuff

But no Christmas decorations

And I'm not doing a lot of driving around so I'm not seeing a lot of Christmas decorations

I mean I guess to and from the studio I see a little bit but you know not much and the stuff I'm seeing really isn't on yet you know cuz it's not dark so you know some of them go on a little bit before dark so I guess I've seen a little bit but I mean it's not like

If I was still at that place they would stick me on the register and they would bring cart loads of boxes of ornaments up and they'd be like unwrap all this between customers so you're unwrapping it getting glitter all over yourself and hanging it up on pegs for them to come and get later and it I mean it really sucked I don't miss that at all

And those f****** with their war on Christmas where if you say happy holidays they give you s*** to the point where last year I didn't say happy holidays or Merry Christmas to anybody I would just like have a nice day you know and if they specifically said something to me then I would just repeat back to them whatever they said to me you know and that was lower than the level of festivity that I actually wanted to have but I just wasn't willing to deal with it so it was like the few the very small percentage of people who are war on Christmasers ruined it for everybody

and I don't know how many times I'm going to say that my face is almost healed up

It's like I keep saying that and then as soon as it's almost healed up then more stuff pops up

I feel like I've been telling you my face is almost healed up for like 2 years

So I've stopped saying it

That's probably not true I probably haven't stopped saying it

but I looked in the mirror today and I'm like well you know this is pretty promising it's looking good

and then I realized that I've been saying that it's almost healed up for so long and I'm like you know

Whatever

It's going to be healed up

At some point

Maybe it's like jinxing it to say something

But I just got to say

I really love not having Christmas rubbed in my face I really love it

Oh I'm pretty sure I didn't tell you

That place I worked they're closing down

Not all the stores just that store

Pretty sure it's closing like December 31st or something

It's almost my birthday

I wonder what I'm going to do for my birthday

I mean nothing I'm not going to go anywhere I don't have money to go anywhere and there's no place safe to go

I'm going to be 54 I think

I think I thought I was 54 for about half of this year already but I'm pretty sure that that was wrong I'm pretty sure I'm about to be 54

Yes I just did the math and checked 54

That seems like a very good age

And you know it's really weird

I know I've gained weight

And I'm not wearing makeup well I wear a little bit of covergirl clean fresh skin milk when I go to the studio

But you know I think I like the way I look better now than what I did I don't know a year ago or five years ago

Maybe it's the vitamin c and the retinol

I don't know My face seems different

Seems much less jowly

I have that big line still under my eye that hasn't gone away but they seem a little less crepey to me

The lines in my forehead the horizontal lines seem more noticeable they're not real deep and they're not real noticeable but I didn't really notice having horizontal lines before The 11s there's just one now but it's a lot more deep

I have some legit crow's feet they're not deep their lines not like full on folds or anything unless I smile

And I have noticable nasolabial lines they're not bad but they are there

So all this is to say that I'm not saying I look like I'm 25 or anything

I just kind of like the way it all looks a little better somehow

I'm probably going to need a blepharoplasty though I don't want one I don't think I'm going to have one but I think that my hooded eyelids are going to impair my vision at some point

But maybe I can find some of that face yoga or something because I really don't want to have any kind of surgery on my face

but I'm just looking at those eyelids and going 

man, I forsee issues

I'm not upset with them being hooded

I like my hooded eyes

but if they droop down into my field of vision which I've just recently learned that they can do that's not good

I mean I don't really think I will like what that looks like but I'm more concerned about my vision

But the retinol may help that over time so don't know not going to worry about it yet

Anyway I should probably go to bed

Since I should have gone to bed over an hour ago

Goodnight sweetheart I love you very much 💋

 i need to go to sleep

but

i got to see the planets

usually i can't really see stars and whatnot

but these were quite clear--  looked like a plane

only stationary

i've done more than 100 of those collages

in

right at a month

but

i don't get to spend all my time doing them

there are between 12 and 15 that i'm keeping

haven't figured out what i'm doing with them yet

i find myself wondering

do you like them?

i love you sweetheart

i hope you sleep well

goodnight

I've been falling asleep in the chair

But I have to get up reasonably early so I really should have gone to sleep at least a couple hours ago

So I'm going to go to sleep now

But I want to wish you a happy solstice

And a dawning of the age of Aquarius

And I'm setting my intention

For happy

And allowing the universe to bring me the things that I want and that I need to 

Follow my path

My belief

Is that I'm on my path

And I love you very much

I'm giving you a big hug and a kiss

I'm holding you tight in my heart

You have good things in store

I believe in that reading I gave you

And the country has good things in store

I believe in the reading I gave it

I'm happy and grateful and glad to be alive

And I can't wait

For all the really beautiful and creative

And happy adventuresome things

But the universe has got planned for me next year

And I hope that you're feeling something like that

🧠🫀🫁🧲⚙️🧿🛡️

So this is some exciting stuff that's happening in my life

Other than headaches

About two and a half weeks ago

I ordered a book a blank book from a person that I order blank books from

And the previous one I had ordered before that was from my mother for her birthday

And so I told this lady who I'm starting to think of as my friend I told her hey this one's for me you don't need to hurry there's no rush

And I guess maybe it's the law of attraction or something that when I throw stuff out there I just get a crazy amount of universal feedback

Because this thing is still not arrived she mailed it and she lives in I think the Northampton area of Massachusetts and it spent a week or almost a week at the Boston mail distribution center

And then it spent another week at the New Jersey distribution center

And now it's made it to Houston not the distribution not the local mail but the area distribution center so it'll probably be delivered on Tuesday but it might be delivered tomorrow but I don't think so

it's just weird because you know pretty much anything I've ordered to the mail has been coming in a timely manner but I said no rush on that one and so it has taken its time

And my phone this is another exciting thing that's happening to me my phone on my background wallpaper whatever you call it I have had a pretty generic geometric shape because when I tried putting in pictures it was too busy with the little icons on it but sometimes I guess yesterday evening it like lost the connection to the picture or whatever so the screen was just kind of glowing red and I didn't really put that together when I went to bed cuz I wasn't too coherent cuz I'd been kind of sleeping off and on in the chair but then I got up this afternoon and I was looking at it and it was just kind of freaking me out a little

So I started looking at the wallpaper pictures and I was like no I want to put one of my pictures and I looked all through and I found that little first collage thing that I did that wasn't even actually taped down to anything it was just sitting on the table and I'm like oh yeah that one I'll do that one

And then I realized that I could actually change the shape of the icons so I changed them to a kind of a amorphous blob shape it's pretty close to a circle but it's just a little bit off

And I'm liking both of those things really really well and then I changed the color of the icons except it didn't change the color of the icons but it did change the color of my keyboard and I like it so much better it's this kind of steel gray color and it's just so much easier on the eyes than the bright blue not that I don't like bright blue but I don't know it's like I got a whole new phone

And it occurred to me that I really should change some of the icons on the front because there are few on there that are things I never use and then things that I do use are like in a different place but I'm used to where they are now so I may not change that

These are not really very exciting things

And I'm sorry I missed that zoom meaning I didn't really snap I don't know whether it was that I didn't see it in time or I just didn't understand what I was looking at I don't know but I didn'treally realize that it was going on until after it was already like an hour in and I didn't know how long it was going on but I just I just didn't didn't check it

I don't know I feel sort of out of sorts

I hope you're doing okay

This is one of only a very few years of my adult life that I have not worked retail and I mean I guess I'm helping my mom with the Etsy shop so I guess there's a way you could say I was working retail but I would not I would not count that because what I mean is workin retail

And every year when it was getting closer and closer to this time of year

I would be like I cannot believe that you were spending another year working retail

And funnily enough before I got let go even though it was early I was already like well you know it's getting pretty close

Even though it wasn't really all that close I had like the specter of working and retail again this Christmas and that turned out not to be true so I'm just kind of grateful

I know there are a lot of ways in which this hasn't been a good year a lot of ways

And all the death and trauma and isolation and fear of tyranny and all of that stuff has just been one giant roller coaster ride

But I would say that this year has been a real psychological growth year for me probably not just me but I can't really speak to you everyone else's experience

But I think we've all had to take stock of a lot of things that we weren't taking stock of and that's different for different people but just the total disruption of everything and the sense of normalcy I feel like has made us have to look at things in a different way

And that's good even if a lot of other stuff isn't

I love you sweetheart

Okay well I'm awake now I woke up at 1:00 initially and I had a super bad headache so I was like in today's the day that I'm sleeping in if I want to so I did but I didn't go to sleep until like almost 7:00 this morning so

I really feel pretty turned around

I did not see that zoom

But I have a ticket for the other one

I love you sweetheart

Hope you're doing okay

Goodnight sweetheart I love you very much 💋

Goodnight sweetheart I love you very much 💋

goodnight sweetheart I love you very much 💋

Goodnight sweetheart I love you very much 💋

I love you very much sweetheart 💋

I'm going to bed now

Working from home tomorrow and Thursday

Studio Friday

Not sure about Saturday yet

I'm falling asleep in the chair

I have to go to sleep

I asked myself before I went to bed last night

To think about

What I want

In the spirit of setting up intentions

For the eclipse new moon today or I guess now yesterday

And I had a lot of dreams that were very involved but when I woke up what I remembered was

I dreamed I had to move to this apartment and I didn't really like it or maybe that's not even true maybe I like to just fine but I didn't want to go there for some reason I thought I was not going to like it

And then after I'd live there for some amount of time not very long

I think the person that made me move there

because I said you know I didn't think that this would be what I would want at all but in fact it's sort of a perfect apartment

Because I can hear the train in the distance

And I can hear the ambient sounds of people playing instruments in various parts of the neighborhood

So there's always

Train whistles and music 🎵

I love you very much sweetheart 💋

goodnight sweetheart

❤️ I love you very much 💋

I gotta go to bed

I love you very much sweetheart 💋

I gotta go to bed

I love you very much sweetheart 💋

I love you sweetheart

I've got to go to bed

I have some things on my list to do's today that I don't really want to do so I'm going to be limiting my social media

So I'm going to be kind of out-of-pocket

so I thought I'd just front-load things by telling you some stuff it's been interesting that's happened to me in the last few days

The other day my mother said to me how can you make such pretty things out of that pile of junk

And I'm like isn't that your collagen supplies

Like isn't that what you use when you make collages

And she's like yes

And I'm like then I don't understand the question

But I kind of do because when she does collages she usually you know takes a couple of squares of stuff put them together and puts a butterfly over the top of them or puts a stamp over the top of them or something like that

She not really trying to create a new picture you know she's just trying to create a little thing that somebody can buy cheaply that doesn't have a lot of work in it and I don't know how much time she puts in them

But the thing is I love collage it is absolutely one of my favorite things to do

I take like one break to eat a bar at around 1:00 and I only take the amount of time it takes to eat the bar which is not very long and I'm not even stopping to drink water very often

no I can't do it the whole time because there's other stuff that needs to get done but I really really love it

But I let myself get away from her model of you know just a few pieces and some stamps or something

And I think there's like fully six pieces from the last session that I'm just not going to be able to let her have

Cuz you know I've been making them for her

But last time I just got all carried away because

You know I had those pieces that I couldn't finish well the reason why I couldn't finish them is they needed something that none of the pieces I had pulled out contained so yesterday I started off by looking through a couple of plastic folders You know the ones that are kind of the shape of an interoffice memo that have the two circles one on the flap and one on the envelope and then they've got a little string that you wrap around them they usually made out of kind of a browner than manila folder kind of action

Well it looked through a couple of those and I ran across something and I was looking at it and I'm like man this is really good what is this because they were just cut into little squares that were like maybe three by four roughly and then I realized that what they are are like those kind of waxy paper palettes

So like you know the stuff that you put your paint out on and then you you know smear it around when you mix colors and stuff and I mean it seems to be acrylic it's not watercolor that's going to wash off or anything

But I'm like this actually is junk that she cut up because most of it is like you know either stuff that she specifically painted to be texture for collagen or paintings that weren't working for one reason or another that she cut up

But here is a whole pile of actual trash that is like surprising and yet it's like the mother load of goodness

So then I was all reinspired and reinvigorated and I did not do the collages the way I should be doing them where I'm just putting a few pieces together I started actually you know doing more my actual collaging right and it was funny because then yesterday she's watching me work and she's like I'm going to have to start charging them by weight

Which I guess I should have taken as a criticism that I was spending too much time on them

which I didn't because I was so enthralled with doing then that I wasn't listening for criticism

And when we had the discussion about it she was like I was I was doing the collages for her and she was like now do you want to sign these do you want us to specify that they're your collages and I was like no that isn't necessary I'm doing them for you and I'm making them out of your old paintings and stuff so I think it becomes problematical if we say they're my collages but they're made with you or paintings so then they're at least partially your collages and you know who needs all that confusing bother so just sign them we'll say they're your collages

So there's like 16 boxes of three that are posted on the Etsy page plus some that I thought were good enough she wanted to frame some just in a cheap frame and sell them so there's some of those

These are only like five of those so far

And she's like okay well we're going to need some for in the studio

And we got enough box card sets so just start making some individual ones to sell to people that come in and I'm like okay so that's what I've been working on the last little bit here

But when I found those pallet things just kind of freed me

Until then a lot of the things I was doing they looked more like my work

I don't really contain any of her paintings

So I think what I'm going to have to do is make some kind of formula

so I spend it certain amount of time making simpler cards that are more like what she actually wants or else I'm going to end up just making art and it's all going to be my art and I'm not going to want to let her sell it with her name

Also she's decided that she does not want a brand she just wants it to be her name so I guess I can stop spending time working on that and trying to bounce it off for and find something that she likes and she thinks this her

Which I get and I understand and I respect

But it's going to make any kind of cross-pollinization with like YouTube and stuff it's going to make it a little more difficult because her name is so common and I have this same issue thatit's really hard to find her with searches and stuff

In fact when I try to look up just her name her shop which has her name doesn't come up at all I mean that may change as we have more page views and whatever but that doesn't come up at all what I get is a painting of hers well not really a painting a little calligraphy thing from back in the '90s that some guy is selling like a vintage home decor shop or something on Etsy

And I think it's pretty funny because she's pretty much uniformly said no to all the things that I was trying to do to change in ways that might I thought help

So we'll see

She seems pretty happy with the arrangement though and I am having so much fun

See if you can guess which six pieces if you want

Anyway I'm going to get back to actually I was about to take my shower and I'm taken wow a long time to write this okay

I love you

Have a really good day I'll talk to you later

I gotta go to bed

I love you very much sweetheart 💋

Good Morning

I feel pretty good

The weather is beautiful

I love you very much 💋

Well this is not as early as I was going to go to bed it's like at least an hour and a half later and I was going to go to bed but I don't really know where the time went

I love you very much sweetheart 💋

Okay I had dinner and I completely recreated that avatar now I'm sure it isn't going to look the same to other people color-wise because there's a difference between the monitor of my computer and the screen of my phone so I made the match completely but the tones are going to be off because the monitors off

Between my laptop and my phone

So like on the computer the color of her lips and the color of her shirt and pants is the same color and that's a really pretty pumpkiny orange

But when I did it on my phone it's a much redder orange brighter harsher so I could change the clothes but I couldn't change the lipstick color so they don't match now

When you're picking colors on those wheels where you've got the white and the gray and the color I find that a very unsatisfactory way to pick colors

and I really thought there would be no way I could match him but of course I can match him cuz I can see but they don't match because I I don't know exactly what the difference in my monitor is and I don't have any way to adjust for that really

Anyway probably isn't really that important if the colors are exactly the same and then it seems as though there's no way to look at my avatar on the phone which makes me sad because I always like to look at my little avatars

I also had to do some computer work for the Etsy store

And what is fascinating to me is

I mean it's not like I haven't read stuff on Reddit

I research things all the time and sometimes there are feeds on Reddit that have pertinent information for things I'm looking up but I've never found it so super helpful that I said oh yeah I want to invest a lot of time in this thing

Kind of reminds me of what was that thing called back in like 2005 tribe something

Although not exactly

It also reminds me a lot of message boards from back before the world wide Web

Anyway I don't really know how to maximize it

I pretty much never read my Facebook feed

And I kind of come and go with the Twitter feed

Although I feel like Twitter is the one well no I like Instagram I like Instagram a lot I'd like it better if it weren't owned by Facebook but

Facebook live is great so they clearly have the ability to make good products

whatever anyway I'm not going to stay up late tonight I say that now but I'm hoping it's true because I'm going to try to get more sleep and get up earlier tomorrow

Anyway not going to bed quite yet

But hopefully in a couple hours

I love you 

Well you would think by this point that I would be competent to sign up for social media

But somehow I'm not sure how I got the password wrong

So then when it asked me to verify my email I clicked that and then it said sign in

And I typed it in and it said that's not right

But I was doing it on my phone and it gave me an option to sign in with Google so I said sure sign in with Google and then I entered the password but it was supposed to be the Google password and I put the Reddit password

So then I had to do a verification on my Google account and I changed the password on my Google account which then I've subsequently changed again because I didn't want it to be that

So I can't change the email on the account or the password on the account without the password on the account I thought maybe I could change the email and then I could send a different verification because now there's another account that signed up with that email so it's all very complicated and I'm not sure what I'm going to end up with I mean this one will stick around for some amount of time but at some point they will probably say well that's not email verified and then I have this other account

And it doesn't seem to want to give me the option to make the avatar look like I wanted to look and I was really happy with that avatar so I'm not really certain what I'm going to end up with but I feel confident I'll end up with something

This new Avatar

 if I can't change it 

is at least 

bright green

How are you doing this morning

I'm moving really really slow but I feel pretty good I feel like I got some kind of download in the night and that everything is good somehow

I almost wrote you another thing after I went to bed but I'm like if you start writing things in the bed you're never going to go to sleep so I didn't but I was having all kind of songs running through my head which I mean isn't super unusual but in addition to songs I've heard recently I had Roger Clements for some reason that I haven't quite pieced together yet

And I just wanted to tell you

In case you didn't know

I think about you all the time

Even if I'm not writing you anything

Even if I'm not saying anything at all

And I've been thinking about it a lot but I haven't quite known how to say this and it's probably not really important that I say it

But

When I said that thing about weighing your thighs it wasn't about the weight of your thighs it wasn't like oh his thighs need to be thin it was about your thighs

But not from the standpoint of is he too heavy or too light from the standpoint of

Like you might look at a girl's breast s and you would be maybe thinking about what they'd feel like to touch or you know doing that thing that guys sometimes do where they're like taking their hands and cupping them and trying to kind of feel the heft of them or whatever like that that's not about oh your breasts are fat they should be thinner it's like acknowledgment of the fleshiness of something and acknowledgment of kind of a wanting to feel it but you can't feel it with your hands so you're feeling it with your eyes

Does that make sense I was not in any way meaning that you know if you gained a certain amount of weight you were going to be unattractive

Although since my experience of you is thin and thinner I do take notice of kind of where you are falling on your personal spectrum

And my historic enjoyment of you is within a range of thin to my mind

So that's what's attractive you know

If you had started off chunky then maybe I would be fetishizing your chunky you know what I'm saying

I'm probably going to need to say any of that but it's been really bothering me that you might think that I'm wondering how thin you are or how fat you are or worrying that you've you know gotten heavier during the pandemic or something that's not going on

Now concomitantly I know I've gained weight or something I've changed shape I'm different somehow

And I'm not real happy about that

Sitting on my ass seems to have made it a little smaller and a little softer so in general I think I'm happy with my ass although I haven't exammed it in any close proximity to the mirror so I don't know about cellulite and stuff like that

I know that none of my pants fit me tighter in fact they seem like they might fit me looser

But I'm quite certain that I have not lost weight

So I can only suspect that I have lost some muscle which makes sense cuz I was doing a lot of walking and I have not been doing any walking so generally speaking I don't think losing muscle is a good idea

And I feel certain that my stomach is a little bigger than it was

Also my face looks a little bigger to me

And from those markers I would say I've gained weight

But none of my clothes feel significantly different

Everything still fits

But I don't wear my clothes tight I wear them loose and everything was super loose before the pandemic because I had lost weight I have certainly gained back that weight

but on Friday my mother very kindly said that if I didn't have a scale she would be happy to buy me one so I feel confident that she thinks I've gained weight

Anyway those are just morning thoughts it's all running super late today I would normally be there but I overslept and I think she's running late too

But I'm not too upset about it cuz I did some work yesterday and I feel like we're really close to pit in the brand thing down

Oh and that poster or image with the dumpster fire is amazing I love it so much

Did MK do that for you

I mean I'm not saying you couldn't have done it but it looks more like his style

Anyway I hope you have a good day sweetheart

I love you very much sweetheart 💋

I gotta go to bed

Ok

Not really sure what I did

got up about 3

had some bills to pay

and

computer stuff

shepherd's pie

with peas

I'm watching schitts creek

I wasn't into it at the beginning of the pandemic

the narcissistic thing was quite off-putting for me

but

I decided to try again

I like david

I don't think his character is very different

from his personality irl

and 

I really liked his wine/sexuality analogy

and his not so much

playing one on television

as just being on television

pansexual

and

I really like

that it isn't a big trauma

it's just something everyone accepts

and it can be funny

without

like

a laughing at moment

it's funny

and eugene levy and catherine o'hara

are part of my pop cultural history

but

whatever, there's a lot more to watch

I gotta go to bed

I love you very much sweetheart 💋

I fell asleep in the chair

But I have to sleep for a while

So I'm going to bed

I love you very much sweetheart

Okay well interesting day today

She loves the coffee mug idea

But when I started talking about Zazzle she started talking about

Gear bubble

Which I have not heard of

When I tried to look it up on Google the first thing that came up was is it a legit business

Which made me less happy that she brought it up

So she started telling me about it and apparently it's set up to mass produce things for you on demand and it's integrated supposedly with Amazon and Etsy and eBay

So you just design your item and put it on your gear bubble store and then it's just automatically gets uploaded to your Amazon or Etsy or eBay store and then when people buy it through your other store the gear bubble people ship it out

And I'm like yeah I don't know that doesn't sound like what we want really

and she's like no it's great I've already paid $300 for a seminar on how to do it

And I'm like wait who did you take the seminar from and she's like oh gear bubble and I'm like so you paid them $300 for them to show you how to use their technology that doesn't sound right and she's like and they have a Facebook page you can join and I'm like I don't really want to join a bunch of Facebook pages I mean I'm not saying I won't join any Facebook pages but I don't want to just join a bunch of random 

and she's like well I've already joined so you could just use my passwords and get on there and see everything she's like none of the people who are trying to do it are very happy though they say it's really hard to do and I'm like okay

So they find it hard to use the creation tools to make their products she's like no no no they don't have any problem with that they're having trouble getting the stuff to work while it's integrated with Etsy and eBay and Amazon

So I'm poking around the site on my phone and I click on the link for the you know integrate with those places and it says just $97 a month

and I'm like okay well I don't think we want a store with this place and she's like oh I already have one and I'm like have you used it she's like no

and I'm like once we figured out how to get traffic to the store and we're selling lots of stuff and we are having trouble keeping up then maybe that would be a time to look into something like this but I mean it doesn't make any sense to pay $97 a month to mass produce things to sell online when there aren't people buying them it's just going to cost money it's not going to make money

And we had talked on the phone the other day about the branding which was coming together a little more after I kind of got a feel for what kind of stuff we were doing because before I had seen her paintings but that's not really what we're marketing to sell online right I mean the little ones yes but not like the $1,500 ones although I don't know she made some noises like she was pushing for that and I just I don't know

so we had some discussions about the branding and I think that the the niche the concept the idea is that these are instances of making yourself happy or giving them as gifts to make someone else happy like you know I don't want to say that it's only good during the pandemic but right now everybody's been thinking about how you know trapped they are and how they can't do the things they want to do and they are scared and they need just a little thing that makes them happy

And even though that's a thing for right now I don't think it's just a thing for right now and I don't think that people are going to forget this realization that they've had that they just need a little drop of happiness you know and so I've been trying to come up with something

and a lot of my stuff is not right for her you know it's too ironic or it's too borderline snarky you know it's like the happiness situation or hardcore happy or Happy camp or just happy with an exclamation point after it

but when I say I'm they just don't sound right they don't resonate in fact that drops of happiness is maybe a little closer than a lot of the other stuff but it's not right drops of happiness that's not going to stick

but anyway I had been thinking along those lines and I told her and she's like yes yes yes that's absolutely the right direction to go and she was like she's working with this woman apparently she's been working with her for like three years the one who's sort of an artist and sort of a poet but also sort of like a life coach and sort of like a branding coach and you know I don't know

Apparently my mom has been working with her for 3 years and she is the source of this mythology about my mom being this person who you know did all these practical things and spent her whole life in the service of other people and has just now as a 77-year-old woman discovered that she's still creative and she wants to make her creative mark in the world and so this woman is pushing that as her story right and that might be a compelling story but it isn't my mother's compelling story

And I asked her I'm like how did she get the impression that you were this housewife who had been you know putting everyone else's needs first and has suddenly decided you're creative how did she come to believe that that was accurate and she's like well I've been going to her for several years and I haven't done much well okay so maybe she looked at my mom and said most likely scenario is that she's a woman who put everyone else first because that's what most women do I'm not saying that's accurate necessarily but it is a widely held belief but I mean it isn't at all true about my mother in the first place I can't think of any evidence that my mother put anyone else ahead of her ever I just don't think that's even mildly accurate but even if it was

My mother was supporting herself with her art and her galleries and real estate that she purchased with money that she made when she was working as a computer programmer when that was like a really rare thing so she was doing all of that from the time I was I don't know four

I wasn't living with her yet

She was running around doing whatever she was doing she wasn't married it was just her and she was living off Hershey bars and Coke cans based on what was in her car

by the time I was 11 I was living with her and she had me working assembly line production shrink wrapping 8x10s I mean she had a commercial shrink wrapping machine and she was periodically coming through checking my work and telling me how I was not cleaning it enough and I wasn't keeping the the shrink wrap is on this roll that has like two sheets that are connected so when you're pulling it through it's one sheet on the top and one sheet on the bottom and you put the artwork in that you seal off one end and then you put the artwork in there and then you line it all up and you pull the handle down and that seals it on one side and then you turn it and you seal it again and you seal it again and you have to keep the heating element at the right temperature and cleaned off or else it makes a kind of a messy line when you shrink wrap it and she didn't want to have to do it again or clean it up so she wanted me to do it right the first time so she would come through and yell at me if I wasn't doing it right

And you know I was doing like a couple of hours at a time in the evening it was you know my after-school job

And she was paying me for it like I don't know a buck fifty an hour or something

I think when I got my quality level high enough and my production quantity high enough I went up to like as much as $3 an hour which you know is nothing to sneeze at because minimum wage was probably around that or I don't know how often they changed the minimum wage when I started working minimum wage was $3.35 oh sorry when I started working for other people the minimum wage was $3.35 but that was when I was like 17 18 something like that

She also had me cutting mats

Just the inside cuts she didn't want me using the big mat cutter to cut down the big boards both because she was afraid I would injure myself you know cut my hand off or something and also because she didn't think I would be able to maneuver them well enough to get them perfectly straight but the inside cuts I could do and double mats and then later she got an oval mat cutter and then I was cutting oval mats and had to sharpen the blade with a whetstone

so I wouldn't say it qualified as a DIY project it was like full-on production with hundreds and hundreds of pieces at a time

nor do I think she was checking to make sure that my homework was done before I was doing that

So I really don't understand how

except I think I do I think that what she did was she was complaining about having to take care of her sister and take care of her husband and you know all these things that she had to do that were sucking away her life

And I'm not saying she didn't do any of those things for some period of time and she did spend a lot more time with Shirley so I mean you know I'm not trying to say she didn't do anything I'm just saying the characterization of her entire life being spent in the service of others is offensive to me That's what I'm saying

so when I realized that this is the mythology this woman has been working with her for her brand I really did not think that much of what this woman had to say was going to be useful to me because I'm not going to do that I'm jolly well not

But I understand where it comes from now because that woman probably said something at some point about my mom being you know spending her life in the service others and that fits in very much with how my mother feels like she was she was the best most wonderful you know whatever personal relationship you want to put in there the fact that that has no bearing on reality doesn't matter because she's a narcissist

and I am a little bit angry so if I sound angry I am a little bit angry but I'm not that angry

And I'm certainly not angry that she had me shrink wrap things and cut mats I enjoyed all of that stuff more or less it's hard to enjoy shrink wrapping but

But none of that stuff is useful to me The work she did with this Mary Ann person

And she said she had some verbiage that she'd emailed her about you know exact phraseology or whatever but then she also told me that she'd gotten some of the descriptions for the cards from that woman and I'm like oh well I hope you saved it because I didn't like it and I changed it

I did not know it was the professionals work because it just sounded like my mom's regular disingenuous sounding talk

But you know my mom has spent a lot of time over the last 20 years taking seminars on branding and things like that because she used to I mean branding I guess was still important but it wasn't quite so prevalent in the everyday world you know it was like they were brands for sure but you know she was just her own brand her name or her last name and gallery sorry I don't want to put the names and she worked you know pretty hard and she didn't charge a lot of money she had a very competitive product that was you know semi mass produced well I mean it was mass-produced but it wasn't like made in a factory it was made in a home factory You know and she would do calligraphy things she would write out these little sayings they were I mean they were nice right and things like that are still popular just not in the style she did them and not the kind of thing she did but I mean the idea is Tyler's and is never going to go out of style The idea that you've got some sort of an image that you're going to look at that has you know words of wisdom or a poem or something on That's a good idea right so she would write them out she had a calligraphy pen and ink she would write them out and initially she wrote each one individually but then once she found the things that people like to buy she would write it out and she would get a print made of it and she would do these little watercolors on top of them and they were just like splash splash splash you know three flowers and a butterfly kind of thing but just real loose and she would do she had like three different colors she had the you know the flowers and the stems and the butterfly and she would just paint you know she'd paint the flowers and then she'd paint the stems and then she would paint the butterfly she would just do big batches of them so it was very much a mass-produced commodity

And we would have to periodically change the map colors or the background colors or you know something so that they maintained their you know freshness but people bought them

And then at some point they kind of stopped buying and she foundered a little

And somewhere in there she married Bob and he I think wanted her to get a job or maybe it was just when the malls and art shows and stuff stopped working out maybe she got a job then and she blamed it on him I don't know she definitely blamed it on him

And then for the last I don't know 20 or 25 years she's taking these branding seminars she took this I mean she was spending thousands and thousands of dollars going to this woman who was an equestrian

She had a horse ranch

And she spent a lot of time talking about archetypes and I don't know if it was her if it was somebody else that was or maybe it was when she was at the watercolor arts society but she got this idea in her head that what she had been doing was beneath her

But she was an artist and she should do big paintings and get you know big bigger price tags now I mean not like world famous artist price tags but you know when you're going to charge like $500 to $1,200 for a painting even if that is a reasonable amount for a painting you have limited who can afford to buy it right

When she was selling things in the mall and we had things that were you know 6:50 and 7:50 and 999 and 16 and you know 25 and 50 and the most expensive thing we had maybe was a large framed print that was maybe I don't know $100 or $125 framed for a you know 24x30 maybe

and this is long enough to go that those prices would have to be adjusted up I mean if you go to frame something that size now it will cost you much more than that for just the frame but she was buying the Nielsen frames which were metal and cut into pieces and you put them together and I was doing that too You know

So I mean the business that she was doing was more based on doing volume sales than the idea of doing large things for large ticket items

That has never really worked and that is what she wants to work she wants to make these big sales of the bigger watercolors that are more prestigious so that she can feel like she's a real artist That's what she wants

But then she wants to have small things that people will actually buy so she can bring in some money

And I keep telling her that there's nothing wrong with that but that I don't think it's one brand I don't think the smaller things are the same brand as the big things and I just think that she thinks that what we're going to do is we're going to sell a bunch of these little things and we're going to get a big market and then we're going to somehow get those people who wanted those things to buy the big things and I'm like prints

Maybe not Prince of all of them but I mean we can integrate some of the things into you know if we go for this happy thing we can integrate some of it it can I mean to my mind it's a little tricky because they really don't feel like the same thing but if she's just bound to determined then okay maybe

I feel as though that isn't the best way to go about it but she's pushing pretty hard that this is what she wants and really only because she's acknowledging that there's a pandemic and she can't have decorators coming through the studio

So I just have to figure out this happy angle and I feel like it's right there somewhere and I'm just not quite seeing it

Anyway I didn't get as many cards done today because I was doing a lot of other stuff but I have two that are almost finished designing and today it was going a little slower with the designing I think initially I pulled out all the things that I just could look out and go Bam but I think I've used a lot of them and so now I'm looking at things plus I was initially just slapping things together with stamps which I thought was a good idea and I feel confident that that's what she would do if she would just stick a couple of like squares together with a stamp cut out butterfly and call it a day although she does have some collages that are really nice looking that basically she does she puts them together and she paints over them with you know some color to kind of tie it together and I wouldn't necessarily call it a collage it doesn't look like a collage it looks like a cohesive piece not that the collages don't look like a cohesive piece but you know what I mean it doesn't when you're looking at it you don't think immediately oh that's things stuck together you just think oh that's a mixed media piece and those look pretty good but they aren't her typical like collage cards they're like she has one framed in a really big mat and it looks really good but it's like I don't know $65 or something

Which I'm not saying it's not worth I'm differentiating it from her collage cards and stuff so I don't know I don't know

I need the version of the happiness situation that goes with her stuff because that doesn't but that's kind of the working title that I have running through my head because that's you know the kind of thing I would say it's

Something is suboptimal

Happiness situation

I have a particular sort of way that I string things together and it's more me than it is her

Oh my God I just thought of something really funny I was asking her how old this Marianne woman is because you know her stuff sounded sounded so much like the kind of thing my mom would say to me and I thought well maybe it's a generational thing so I asked her you know how old is she and she's like oh she's 62

And my immediate thought was oh so she's way older than me but I actually 62 isn't way older than me That's like 9 fixing to be 8 years older than me which is not much older at all

but I don't know if I'm stunted or what but I'm just I don't think I'm much like people my age usually are

When I have occasion to talk to people my age they are really interested in things like their kids being a college and mortgages and vacations and retirement and CSI I don't know they just seem like super boring people super boring now perhaps all of the people are super boring but generally when I meet somebody young they're not boring

They might be stupid and they might not be all that interesting but at the very least they've got s*** going on I don't really understand and that's kind of interesting

Now she's a creative type

In creative types aren't usually like you know their age right I mean mostly they're a little more fringy so they're not like those people who want to talk about their vacation homes and their mortgages in there retirement and their kids in college

And maybe she's really good and she's duplicating the sound of my mom's whatever because that's what she helps people do is turn their ideas into a brand

So maybe my initial assessment is inaccurate

That could well be I don't have any basis

No experience with her personally

But the very idea that my mother

Would be letting somebody work up branding stuff for her based on something that was so completely a lie just she knows that isn't right and that she wouldn't say anything

To disabuse this woman of her completely erroneous beliefs about what my mother spent her life doing you know I mean I'm really proud of her that she supported herself with her own business and you know didn't have jobs and wasn't reliant on men I mean all of that stuff is what I like about my mother you know but she wants to just toss that away so that she can have some feel-good kudos that she did so much for so many other people like that somehow makes her more valid as a woman

I really dislike it

and I have to come up with this branding and I'm just not seeing it I'm just it's just out of reach I can see it over the edge of the hill and it's kind of blurry and I can't read it but it's so close I feel like I'm so close to it

And what I think I've really always believed is that my mother doesn't know what she's doing has an ever known what she was doing she was just winging it and pulling herself along with a kick in the seat of the pants or whatever just stay in one step ahead of it

And so there isn't any reason why I shouldn't be able to do that and I've always sort of believed that but it's just that her life was so chaotic and I guess what I really mean is my life was so chaotic and I just didn't want that you know

I wanted a paycheck coming in that was steady that I could count on I didn't want to have to be running around like a chicken with my head cut off having to hustle I guess

but also like with the coffee shop I had people pretty regularly saying things to me not like customers but like people I knew saying things to me like I should open my own coffee shop since I know how to run a coffee shop and it's like well yeah sure but the thing about Starbucks was that it was a brand

The idea is you have to have the following You can sell them stuff that's great but when you have the following then you can market things to those people and you can make money

But if you're just one little individual thing you don't have that following so you don't have what you need upfront to really be successful now you can absolutely build a business but you know people make the mistake a lot of times of thinking will you know how to do this so just go do your own and it's like yes but you don't understand that I will not have a large chunk of what allows me to be successful at doing this it's not apples to apples you know

And that's part of what makes the internet such a huge deal like the great equalizer or whatever because you have the ability to get followers from all over the world all over the country just by doing like a few things right now what the few things are you have to do That's a little bit less clear and it's very dependent upon chance

Like that German guy you know he started last year in like September or October and he made I don't know three or four videos and he had said you know that he was making the videos but he wasn't really getting any followers and so he pretty much decided that he was going to stop making videos and you know he would just send videos directly to the two or three people he knew that were interested in watching his progress that he had you know initially been putting them on YouTube just so you'd have a convenient place to send them to look at the videos but then when it didn't seem like anybody was really looking at them it just didn't seem like it was worth doing and then the pandemic hit everybody stuck at home and they're looking for content and there's this whole cottage fantasy trend and the tiny house trend and it just you know kind of all came together for him so one day he looked at his YouTube page and he had like you know 10,000 followers or something and he was like oh s*** I'm going to start making videos again

And then he got a patreon and you know he's wanting to get 100,000 subscribers for Christmas

And I'm pretty sure 100,000 is a threshold for something on YouTube I can't remember now it's not the one where you get the plaque that's like a thousand I think or maybe it's 10,000 I don't remember but but my point is that the likelihood that he would have had that kind of exponential growth had there not been the pandemic is not super high so a lot of it is stuff that you can't necessarily control You know you can't catch lightning in a bottle by formula well maybe you can but it's a lot more likely that it's more organic than that things go viral at certain times in certain contexts

It's my belief that in doing a lot of this stuff for my mother it will become clear to me how these things relate more to me as I'm figuring out how they relate to her and having to continually do workarounds of things that I think are interesting for me

I might be wrong about that but I really do believe it

Like by figuring it out for her I'm going to back into or reverse engineer or something The way to figure it out for me