And my plan is to go to the studio by myself tomorrow she doesn't go on Tuesdays and Thursdays but I really want to paint I don't want to wait until Friday
And you know it's funny because I was painting that painting as like a backdrop for my collage thing
But I didn't want to put it on there you know I mean I liked how the painting had come out I wasn't really sure if it was a finished painting without the collage on it and I had intended it to be like an undersea scene but then when I put the undersea stuff on it I was like I don't like this as well and when I was looking at it by itself I don't know you know when you look at it what you see but for me I could see it as an under c scene but it what it looked like more to me was like like the scene as though you're standing on the bank and there's this body of water stretched out in front of you and there's like all the stuff kind of under the water and the little sparkles of light on the water and it just seemed very like meditative while being very active at the same time I really liked it and I was like I don't want to mess this up by putting a bunch of stuff on top of it
I don't think my mother looked at it
I showed somebody else a picture in my phone and they said that to them it looked like a waterfall in the jungle so I kind of like that the idea that it can look like one thing to one person and another thing to another person I I like that
So I hope you like it
I mean I don't care if my mother likes it
But I would like it if you liked it
Although I wouldn't like it if you just said you liked it when you didn't if that makes sense
So I think I'm done with that one I don't think I want to do anything else to it
And I'm not really sure what I'm doing for the next one so I'm not really sure why I'm so anxious to run to the studio but I am
I posted that picture I wanted you to see
Do you get while I like it so much or does it just kind of look like generic abstract
My neighbor got her first shot today she got it at the HEB which when you look it up is saying that they're not that they don't have any
But her son who is I don't know in his early twenties I guess he works at the coffee shop there and so he had an in with the doctor cuz he gives him extra coffee or something I don't know so he hooked her up
She said she was really scared so maybe he kind of pushed her into it I don't know
She was saying you know but it's good to do because I'm 57 and I'm like yeah I'm 54 and she's like no you're much younger than me and I'm like well I might be 53 hang on just a second let me do math and then I'm like nope I'm 54
I don't really present like 54
I don't think it's got anything to do with how young or old I look I think it's just got to do with you know I don't have any kids and I'm well sometimes I'm hobbling around and I seem pretty old but then sometimes I'm acting more like myself and I just I don't know if you would say it's immature or childlike enthusiasm or what exactly you'd say but I just don't seem like an old woman
Even though I have that crease under my eye which I don't really get because I've been sleeping on my back pretty religiously for quite some time now and using eye cream and it's not so much that my under eyes are wrinkly it said I have that one crease
I mean I'm not saying I'm not wrinkly I've got wrinkles
And slight creepiness
But it's not so bad that it's super overrides
The expression of my personality
But yeah I don't know
I think it's mostly that I don't have kids
Although I find that if I'm talking to people my age they often assume that I do have kids although they're not exactly sure how old they think those kids are
And that's a good bet of course because I'm of the generation that put it off or not maybe that was the generation before me maybe my generation didn't put it off or maybe half of us did and half of us didn't I don't know That's why there's so many young people the whole two generations of women having babies at the same time whatever
But people will say to me things like well you know when they're at that phase like blah blah and I'm like nope
Even though I mean sometimes I do actually know but not from the experience of having children
There was this experience I had and I'm not sure why I've been thinking about it so much lately but it was when I was working at that place not the coffee shop the more recent place and there was this lady and she was shopping there and she was telling me this story about how she'd had breast cancer and she didn't have enough skin when they did her mastectomy for them to do reconstruction and she had to wear this spacer thing in her back to stretch out her skin so they could pull it around so they could reconstruct her breasts
And she was telling me and I know that I was supposed to have some particular response to it I guess I was supposed to empathize and I was supposed to you know give her props for being a cancer survivor and I was supposed to commiserate with the misery of having to wear a spacer in her back so they could stretch her skin and it was I don't know exactly what I was supposed to feel and how I was supposed to behave
But my first overwhelming response was I mean I didn't say this but my first in my mind overwhelming response was you know you got to get rid of your breasts why would you go to a bunch of trouble to make them again
And then also it just seemed like very personal information that she was kind of forcing on me against my will I mean if she wanted me to know she was a cancer survivor she could have just told me she was a cancer survivor and then I could have said something you know I don't know exactly what you're supposed to say there either but something about being you know brave and strong and whatnot I don't know
It's not that I'm unsympathetic to cancer cancer is bad and I certainly wouldn't want it and you know but then she was going into all her breast stuff and it was just kind of grossing me out and making me feel like she was forcing something personal and intimate on me
And I also kind of felt as though she was telling me all this stuff that I had no way of knowing or guessing because she wanted some sort of big display of like she was fishing for compliments and praise and maybe that's not right maybe that wasn't what she was doing maybe she just wanted to commiserate and she thought I would commiserate but I just didn't get it
And that was multiple years ago and I don't know why I'm thinking about it but I thought about it a bunch
And maybe I'm just trying to decide if I'm an a****** I don't know
But I did read some non-binary stuff and that's probably why I'm thinking about it because I read some non-binary stuff where
I'm not 100% sure what the right way to say this is I would say female bodied but probably it's more correct to say gendered at birth as female
But since we're specifically talking about bodies I'll say female bodied
So several of the female bodied ones were saying that they had said to I think other girls at some point something about you know will hasn't everyone secretly fantasized about getting breast cancer so they can have their breasts removed
And being kind of shocked to get a shocked and negative response
And I guess when I read that it made me think about that incident
Although I don't think I ever actually went so far as to fantasize about getting cancer that that goes a little far for me
But I got to say I wouldn't want
Well I don't think I would want to have top surgery anyway because it looks really disgusting and it seems like it would hurt a lot and I haven't actually ever had a surgery and I don't really want surgery well I guess I had my tonsils out I guess that technically counts as surgery but they don't cut you open and I had my wisdom teeth removed that was oral surgery and I had four permanent teeth removed before I had my braces on so technically I've had surgery several times but I've never had anything where they cut into my body and I don't really want to have my body cut into
I have a pretty strong aversion to that
And I wouldn't want to have the top surgery where they make you look like a man I don't want to look like a man I know that's counterintuitive since I've said that since I was a kid I've wanted to be a man but I haven't wanted to be a man so I could look like a man
Does that make sense
It's just that breasts are awful
And I guess I could bind them
But that would be really uncomfortable too
And I don't really care that much aesthetically I mean I wish they were smaller and more muscular
But it's not really an aesthetic thing it's more of a they're uncomfortable and they get in the way and they make your back hurt and they're just awful
And if you bound them you'd eliminate some of those problems but then I think your chest would hurt all the time
And I am very anti any kind of shaping clothing no spanx for me I wore a girdle once I got this really beautiful dress and it's not like it was tight fitting or whatever but you know it was a thin fabric and it did not look good if you were like lumpy or whatever so I wore a girdle and I pretty much just never wore the dress again and said oh my god this is horrible
I wore false eyelashes once too
I mean I think it's kind of funny because pretty much as soon as I started having to wear clothes and go to work I said well you know these things need to have elastic waist they need to be stretchy I acknowledge that women's clothes aren't going to have pockets whatever but you know this needs to be 100% as comfortable as it can be made to be and then within those parameters look as good as it can
And that was not the popular view it was very much unacceptable or kind of looked down upon to not have buttons and zippers and you know pleats and shaping garments and heels and all kind of things and I did wear underwire bras for years and years but as soon as I found some supportive bras that weren't underwire I pretty much switched over so I haven't worn a underwire for maybe 15 years I don't know maybe not quite that long I feel like I wore some underwear bras when I came to see you at chose in the early days
This is all pretty random
I ordered a couple of new bras they were on a clearance they were like 750 each which is great cuz you know they're normally like 40 bucks each although we'll see how comfortable they are I should still be able to return them if they don't fit You can't return underwear but you can return bras
I'm in kind of a weird mood I have a little bit of a headache was kind of belligerent today and she got here really late
I could take a CD with me tomorrow there's a CD player at the studio or I could listen to podcast although then I'll be streaming I'll use a lot of data I could listen to an audiobook if I download it that won't use data we've been pretty much listening to the same CD over and over and over again since like October
She brought a bin of CDs well like one of those plastic shoe boxes and I thought oh great there's a bunch of them but every time I see one that I think has promise I put it on and she's like oh I don't like that I'm like but it's from your bin and she said yeah I don't think I've listened to that one before I don't like it
Okay and fairness they've only been a couple of those they were like Spanish guitar or Latin American something but she didn't like those and she's got like I mean you know it's I guess they're not terrible she's got like a yo-yo CD that's got like a little you know he plays pieces and it's fine but they're not pieces that I'm particularly attached to so as a limit to how many times I want to listen to them so we've listened to that and she's got a few other things but just none of it is anything that does much for me smooth jazz and it's all kind of easy listening you know
Some of it is classical and some of it is jazz but it's all basically easy listening
So we've just been listening to cedar Moon over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again
And I do actually like that CD I mean it's not like my favorite but I do like it but I'm getting a little sick of it today we weren't even playing anything
Have to give some thought to what I'm going to paint maybe something related to tarot
For babies some other sort of meditative state painting I really like that one I did
When I was painting my mother said it's like you've been painting your whole life I'm like well I mean I kind of have
And she's like you can ask me anything you want about watercolor I painted with watercolor for years
And it's like well you know I'm like okay
But probably when I'm writing the throws of painting probably isn't what I'm going to like stop and ask questions you know
I was worried I had ruined it several times
She doesn't really seem to like it when I'm working you know like when I was working on collages it seemed like every time I would get like really into something where I was focused she would want me to stop and take video of her or take pictures or whatever and you know that's fine cuz I'm supposed to be doing that stuff but it does kind of seem like it's a bit of a coincidence that every time I'm really into it she needs me to do something for her
But today she didn't stop me and she didn't demand that I do anything for her but she did seem kind of weird about it and she did seem kind of surly when she was asking me for advice with the things she was working on
Might be my imagination
But I was a little surprised that she didn't even come over and look at what I had done I was a little surprised
But I mean maybe I think it's better than it actually is because I'm still pretty close to it sometimes when I first paint something I think it's really good but then after I get a little more detached from it I look at it and realize that it isn't really all that good or at least not as good as I thought it was
And of course one of the cool things about working in acrylic is you know that it dries really fast and so you can take the canvas and food of the wall or lean it up against the wall or set it someplace where you'll see it and you can look at it repeatedly over a long stretch of time and then you can see how it needs this it needs that whatever but with the watercolors it's a little trickier I mean I guess you could thumb tack it to the wall but that's going to mess up your painting so I don't really have a way to bring that home and look at it I just am looking at it on my phone or my computer and those are both good ways to look at things but not quite the same
Anyway I got to go to sleep it's late it's very late
I love you very much sweetheart 💋
