Year: 2013

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in the forever now

Dear Internet,
This morning, in between telling TheHusband to continue smacking the snooze button so I didn’t have to quite get up, I watched the sun rise from our bed. Half propped up on pillows, for about 45 minutes I just watched the sky change from brilliant red to a deep orange to a medium pink and finally fading into lemonade yellow. I thought of nothing as I watched but I was also struggling between being fully awake and the call of dreamland and our fantastically cozy bed. When I was close to being 100% lucid, I enjoyed the spectacular sight that was ever changing in my window until I had to absolutely, positively had to get out of bed.
Ages ago when I was hopping on and off Weight Watchers, I remember in the beginning one of the section leaders giving a lecture about personal love. Not just sexually, but remembering as we struggle with our challenges, regardless of what they are, to always do something for ourselves which can be as tiny as reading in a hot bath with favorite scent in the water to buying a new THING or could be on a much grander scale, like a trip or a large purchase.
The point being is to always remember to love you.
A few years later when I started dialectical behavioral therapy, much of the same concept applied — you need to create a room, a space, a THING to soothe you to bring you back from the edge of whatever it was you were feeling frantic about. This is kind of the underlying architecture of DBT, with the idea of changing one little thing and creating a safe haven for yourself can create a whole new world.
This is something I think everyone struggles with regardless of the state of their mental health; the ability to actually say to themselves in the mirror, “I love you.” And mean it.

——————–

The weekend had a potential, much potential, which at least gave me some breath of hope. I’m now on day 4 of no Lithium and so far, I feel okay. The worst of the side effects, with the Lithium and the tapering off, have passed. I don’t feel like I’m floating, face up, under water as much as I have been. Even if the days are not extraordinary, the more the drugs are emptied from me, the more hope for them to become extraordinary increases.
I’ve started collecting moments of the day to create touchstones to reach back to when things start getting rough. Watching the sun rise in bed, smiling randomly at a stranger, a particular outfit that works well, or writing a random note to someone just because. If I create a fortress  of these touchstones, then nothing can stop me as I battle this disease, this taker of life.
And I will win.
x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2010, 2008

we were all waving flags

Street words on the side of a church delivery door.
Street words on the side of a church delivery door.

Dear Internet,
This morning I cried because I couldn’t put on a pair of shoes.
The inability to put shoes on is not an uncommon thing, but it is a frustrating one. Over a year since my first surgery and six months after the second, I still unable to fit anything beyond flip-flops or Chucks on my feet, with the occasional foray into a ballet flat. This is made even more difficult as my right foot post-surgery is now an 11.5W while my left is a 10.5B.
I’ve been piecing out my shoe wardrobe to keeping only what fits or I absolutely positively love rather than keep everything. While I was never really a heel girl, even the ones I own and loved are almost useless to me at this point and into the pile they go. A recently purchased and rather expensive pair of flats I got at 75% off, talked into buying them via a beloved shoe courtier who silkily promised they most assuredly would fit, turned out to be a “thank fuck I did not buy these at full price” mistake. Several wearings indoors per their instruction and then the eventual public airing of the shoe found they were, after an hour or two, almost unbearable. How a pair of flats could cause so much issue with my feet is beyond me. I do not blame the shoe courtier for the pressure because they do fit at slip-on and comfortably so at that; I blame my feet for their rebeling at being fashionable.
My current obsession is finding a pair of dress boots that are flat heeled (more due to height than comfort) and can accommodate my tennis calves and odd feet. Boxes have been arriving from various vendors for me to try on — funny how I never thought of the shipping of shoes from Zappos and the like to Throbbing Manor to be similar to the receiving of gifts from my subjects but there you are — and again, the frustration at mismarking and advertising of wrong sizes and widths is causing more stress. Last winter, after the first surgery, TheHusband counted I had purchased and returned a dozen pairs of everyday boots before finally finding a pair by happenstance at the mall.
The crying this morning was not simply over the fact my shoes don’t fit, but more about this bottom of this often never ending and seemingly black oil pit I find myself in. Yes, it sucks I couldn’t wear my walking shoes to go on a walk and had to opt for flip-flops, but it’s not the end of the world. Yet to me, it was and also rather symbolic of everything going on in my life.
As I continue the tapering down of Lithium, in fact today is the first day I’ve been Lithium free, my moods have started shifting like a radiograph, even more rapidly in the last week. I started bawling yesterday reading Facebook and then proceeded to go into a several hour depression that quickly, and shockingly, emptied me of life. The black clouds descend so quickly and with such force, I felt powerless. TheHusband spent a couple of hours walking me through my feelings, which continue to be a catalog of everything I feel are to be truths:

  • Nobody loves me
  • Everybody hates me
  • I will never be happy
  • Everyone leaves me
  • I will not amount to anything
  • I will have never accomplished X,Y,Z
  • I will never have the kind of life as seen by X,Y,Z
  • I am too old
  • I am too young

This has been the same laundry list since I could remember keeping track of all of my demons.
TheHusband got me calmed and by bedtime I felt relatively able to sleep with peace. This morning however, when I woke, the black cloud was back and circling with a vengeance. Since we woke at mid-morning, the sun had been up for several hours and our bedroom was bathed in light which was even more depressing.  This blinding happiness depressed me more as the idea of staying shut in all day while the day glowed like the summer. Toss up: Stay indoors and become more depressed because everyone is seemingly having some kind of life, the world looks shiny and new OR go outside, even against your will, to at least experience what it feels like. Which will hurt more?
TheHusband made the executive decision we were going to walk Wednesday and then talk a walk ourselves. Chop-chop, wash your face, put on a sports bra and let’s go. He tempted me with treats from a local bakery conveniently located around the corner from our house if we did at least a quick jaunt around the neighborhood. Instead, we found ourselves roaming farther and longer, and the quick jaunt turned into a four mile walk in flip-flops, which ended with breakfast at a local place and some Gerbera daisies for the dining room.
We made half-heartedly plans for the afternoon, but found ourselves hiding in our offices while I read and wrote and TheHusband played video games. I was also opposed to the idea of having to put on pants for some reason, but that is not a black cloud thing, that is more of a sensibilities thing. Because, well, pants.
On occasion there will be days where I’ll get a glimpse of happiness, where I know that even at the darkest hour there will be a snap and things will become stable again. That as is before, as in the future, and as is the now, I will climb out of this slick pit of despair and change something. It’s hard to remember the positive in your life, when you’ve gotten so used to the idea that happiness is fleeting. HOW DARE YOU NORMAL PEOPLE HAVE HAPPY LIVES? Which is why I cry at Facebook. And stalk some people’s lives online because I find it so fucking hard to believe someone could legitimately be happy. SURELY, they must be faking it. Or projecting it. Or something. The world is unreal, ergo, what I am seeing is also unreal.
It’s hard to remember not everyone is like me, that feelings are felt and gone so fast, their tail is often the only reminder they are there. It’s hard to remember often what I’m seeing in other people is really a projection or a sum of their life, I don’t know everything going on in their world. All I do know, their happiness reinforces my lack of having any. It’s hard to remember a trigger by something sending me into a spiral, should not be reinforced by swimming in that sea.
And even harder to remember, no matter how prickly I may be, I am not unloved.

x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2003

Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: October 12, 2013

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
Dear Internet,

Writing

Cunning Tales from a Systems Librarian

Reading

silverpigs The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis
(Amazon | WorldCat | GoodReads | LibraryThing)
Status: Finished
Widely recommended by historians and booksellers for its authenticity to the period, incredibly detailed research, and snappy pacing, in the end I found that while I enjoyed the book, ultimately I wasn’t in love with it. There were some inauthenticities that drove me slightly mad (like the use of the word “fuck” which while rare in the story, is not true to period. That word doesn’t show up in English until the high middle ages. I’m also fairly certain there was not a Latin equivalent of the word, which makes it a bit more annoying). I try to keep my prejudices in check knowing that if this was written true to language of the period, modern eyes would be bored so the work had to be given some leeway to make it more palatable. I couldn’t relate to or connect with any of the characters, which while not a terribly huge problem, is not exactly easy finish the work.
But I do like the concept of the series! And I did feel like not only was my brain getting entertainment, but I was also getting a bit of an education too. I’ll give this a few more books before I either fully commit or ditch them. Davis also has a new series with a female lead in the same period, which I also want to check out.

Watching

  • BBC The Fairytale Castles Of King Ludwig II With Dan Cruickshank
  • Atlantis
    A new spin on the mythology of Atlantis coupled with Greek mythology, this new series from the BBC is also produced by the same folks who did Merlin. Expect to see a lot of familiar actors popping in and out, slightly changed storylines, and a same kind of goofy feel. Not a bad show, but not something to absolutely love either. More of background noise than rapt attention, and more a long the lines of binge watching rather than catching it every week.  Atlantis is coming to BBC America in November.
  • Homeland
    Third season has begun and I’m a bit weary after the first few episodes of their portrayal of Carrie’s bipolarism. Not everyone who goes off of lithium, automatically gets tossed into the crazy hospital. Even more importantly, while ECT is commonly still used for treatment, you don’t just “get it” just because you’re having a moment. There are some wretched side effects to ECT that aren’t even addressed in the show. I get the point is to underscore her craziness to mean her unreliability, but it’s beginning to feel slapstick rather than serious.
  • Masters of Sex
    A quasi-historical romp of the late 1950s, following two of the pioneers of the science of sex. Two episodes in and I’m hooked, not on the obvious (it’s sex. For science!) but by the subtle interplay of characterizations and relationships. Sure, there are some stereotypes, like the hooker with the heart of gold, but overall this is great fun to watch even when it’s attempt at being serious.
  • BBC Four – A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home, BBC Four – Tales from the Royal Bedchamber
    I realised recently that if my life was a choose your own adventure, I would have chosen a path similar to Lucy Worsley‘s. By day, a Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces in England and historian/writer at night, Worsley’s interests not only match my own but what I’ve come to adore about her is how she makes history accessible and fun, no matter what the topic. I also love the fact that she’s willing to get into a historical thing to experience it herself, whether it is dressing like a Georgian queen, sleeping in a medieval bed to find the pea, or not bathing for a week to get a sense of how they did it in ye olde tymes. Her interest in a broad range of topics makes her exploration of them fresh and compelling. She also has several books out to support her topics, which I’m hoping to check out in the near future.
  • Da Vinci’s Demons
    I finally got around to see the final two episodes of this season and it was much better than my previous impression. Like Atlantis in that it’s kitchy and background noisy, it’ll stay in the rotation with the hopes it will get stronger in the future.
  • The Bridge (US)
    Slow, slow pacing; the murder solved mid-season, the fact I couldn’t get “it puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again” out of my head whenever Ted Levine walked into the screen, the unbearable hotness of Demian Bichir, and the confusing actions of possibly Autistic Diane Kruger made this show hard to watch at times. It just felt utterly confusing, some main characters dropped for a few episodes with no mention, and then magically reappear, the too many sub-plots floating around, and the strange build of romantic tension (or not) between Bichir and Kruger. TheHusband really liked this show. Not not loved, but liked. This is an American take on the Danish/Swedish version, and soon there is a joint English/French version, The Tunnel, coming in a few weeks. As one critic intoned, this is a format that works. Apparently so.

Weekly watching: Elementary, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Sleepy Hollow, Survivor, Downton Abbey, Boardwalk Empire, Doc Martin, QI, Peaky Blinders, Project Runway, The Newsroom, Sons of Anarchy, The Vampire Diaries

Links

x0x0,
lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2003

To collect or not to collect, that is the question: part i

Backstory

First, I must reveal a secret to you: I have had no formal training or have taken classes in collection development.  So my methods of selection and purchasing may be a bit more erratic than others in my position.
Now the next thing I’m going to tell you is that I worked at a book store for five years and one of my primary responsibilities was ordering in new titles, weeding out unpurchased titles, and general section maintenance.  I was in charge of one of the largest sections in the store which comprised of fiction, poetry, SF/F, romance, mythology, manga, graphic novels, and gaming books. This is my education.
The blasphemy: To me, collection development in a library and maintaining a section in a bookstore are strikingly close to being the same process.
Some librarians, when I’ve postulated this hypothesis, have argued with me that there was NOTHING remotely similar between the two functions. I disagree. Are we both collecting for the community? Yes. Are we being mindful of what we’re collecting? Yes. Are we promoting our collections via various means? Yes. Are we purchasing titles on recommendations? Yes. Do we accept donations? Bookstore: To an extent, if they have used book section. Libraries: Typically, yes.
How are these not similar?
When my friend Carolyn started her new gig as an academic librarian recently, she approached myself and a few other  mutual academic librarian friends for advice on collection development in an academic environment.
As I had been thinking about this very topic for some time given my own unorthodox background, I thought this was a perfect time to write something up.

Collection Policy

GRCC Library’s multipage collection policy can be best summed up as thus:

The library collects to support the curriculum in any capacity. We also collect titles by authors that are connected to the city or state in some fashion. In addition, we will collect for professional development if the titles are applicable across a fairly broad spectrum.

I should mention what we purchase, we are mindful we’re purchasing for an area that is incredibly narrow: community college. Not quite high school, not quite four year universities so purchasing items can be a bit tricky.  While we have a fiction collection, we’re less likely to purchase fiction titles since we’re a block from GRPL. The exceptions to this is if the title is by a Michigan author or an instructor is teaching a class with a specific title, in which we’ll then have copies available. We also collect to support events on or connected to campus if the person has a book, journal, or other out in publication.
I sometimes stretch the boundaries a bit and will purchase items that are not only not in our collection but are also not easily available to obtain from the state consortium.  An example of this is Henry Rollins, writer, poet, spoken word and general renaissance man, who tours a lot to support his work. He’s been attached to various larger universities in the state for his performances and yet, the availability of most of his work is incredibly limited to get  from our state consortium.  I took this opportunity to change that by buying all of his available print work for our collection.  In so far as I know, we’re the only library in the state with a large catalog of his available print works.
The library is structured as follows: there are five full time librarians and two adjunct librarians who share liaison duties. Each librarian is a liaison to numerous departments and as liaisons, one of our jobs is to buy materials to support that departments curriculum needs.  My departments are:

Now items that cross departments (a title that could be in either one or the other OR something we’ve seen and think the college should own) or reference based, are purchased via mutual agreement between the fulltime librarians. We have a set budget that is divided across the departments and how much each department gets fluctuates every year. For example, I have one department I cannot spend all their allocated sources no matter how much I try, so this year I’ll put the surplus back in the pool to reallocate to another department for next year.
Our collection development budget is for print, ebooks, video, periodicals. Databases are reoccurring costs are not included in this line item .
We have to spend the cash within our fiscal year (July 1 to June 30).
This is all pretty straight forward and easy to follow.  I have the policy in hand, a list of my departments, and a budget to spend.  So now what?

Part ii: The Slings and Arrows

two pints of lager and a packet of crisps

Dear Internet,
Randomly discovered today this week is Mental Health Awareness Week. I’m not sure if I had found out sooner if I would have done something to celebrate, you know, other than going off of Lithium. So we’ll just chalk it up to it’s the thought that counts.
Hello there.
I’m coming down from my last dosage of Lithium and the last few weeks have been kind of an emotional nightmare. Keeping it all together has been much more exhausting than I would have figured and I’m attempting to save all of my energy when I head to California at the end of the month for Internet Librarian conference, of which I’m on a panel. Professional development for the fucking win! The cost of the trip is bordering on staggering as flights are more expensive (GRR is a large but not really airport. Monterey is the same.) then if I had flown out of a metro area. The conference and pre-conference times start from the weekend until the middle of the week, which jacks the flight price higher. So then, of course, I have to have more days at the hotel (5 nights, 6 days). Now I’m whinging about money and time, which wasn’t my intent.
I just hope I’m somewhat back to normal by then. By back to normal I mean not what I’m feeling right now.
At first the way I would describe myself is sharp, like a knife. Anything coming close to me will get poked. My physical boundary space is highly protected. I shut down how I feel emotionally, about anything really, unless provoked. Being provoked could range from someone outwardly doing something to me to someone annoying me enough in some capacity I snap and give them a what for. Or, more often then not, I’ll just choose to ignore them. It’s much easier online, and as expected, in person is much more difficult.
As one would expect, it’s quite lonely here.
Some days I grasp at the straws of which I proclaim, silently mostly, I AM Lisa Motherfucking Rabey! I have done great things! Before turning into a sobbing mess a few minutes later. Those brief seconds are the sign I know not is all but over. I’ll keep taking those flashes, no matter how minute.
One of the small steps I did to help with, well, everything was getting rid of using our bedroom (and bed) as my personal office space. The tired laptop hobbling along I’ve been using as my desktop has finally bit the dust and I just decided to dock my Air.  Moving all of my electronics out and also forcing me to sit up and use a desk should start the mental separation of tranquility and solace (bedroom) and pew pew of the digital world (physical office).
I should move my DS3 as well but you never know when you have to check turnip prices in Animal Crossing.
x0x0,
Lisa
 

This day in Lisa-Universe in:

Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: October 5, 2013

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
Dear Internet,

Writing

The Lisa Chronicles

Watching

Weekly watching: Sleepy Hollow, Survivor, Downton Abbey, Boardwalk Empire, Doc Martin, QI, Peaky Blinders, The Bridge (US), Project Runway, The Newsroom, Sons of Anarchy, DaVinci’s Demons,  The Vampire Diaries

Links

x0x0,
lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 1998

Conversations with TheHusband on Writing

Dear Internet,
TheHusband is a snob.
So when he asks me what I’ve written lately, and I give him the word count from EPbaB for the day, he turns his nose up at me. “That’s not real writing,” he says. “That’s just your blog!”
This conversation goes back and forth every couple of months, with me defending and him objecting. Finally, it comes out to him, real writing is fiction. Preferably long fiction, a novella or even a novel. Short bits, flash, and other work such as writing a diary online are not “real writing.” But it would count, he says, if I got paid for what I did. (Which is a whole ‘nother entry.)
Writing fiction is hard work. You have to be an exceptional liar, because something you’re creating is false; a lie upon itself. You also have to have the witheral for isolation, tendency for physical solitude, and the ability to create at the drop of a hat. Doing all of this without going insane.
At least that’s my interpretation of it.
For years, when I come up with a story from my past that I was planning on working into a diary piece, he stops me and says it would make good story period. Why not turn that into something else?, he asks. Use it as a jumping off point for a bigger story concept. In the past, for whatever reason, I’ve chosen to ignore him because where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do with my writing seemed to be so opposite of where he tries to gently push me.
Something today clicked. I was thinking of something, which leads to another, as it often does, when I recalled an event from my childhood that upon my nearly 30 year removal from the incident, seems quite extraordinary. I was indeed going to write about the incident in its natural form for EPbaB, but something stopped me – the idea that this bit from my childhood would indeed make a grand launch pad into a fictional world. Why attempt to explain what happened and why when time has eroded the more fragile of the concepts of the period? Instead I could create another world where I can fill in the details as they were meant to happen or as I wanted them to happen or as I thought I had remembered them.
In short, make shit up.
This dawning of clarity of how this world works came to me at 4:45PM as I was in the bedroom taking my afternoon pills. When the dust cleared from this acceptance of truth, I checked the clock for the time so I could recall it back to TheHusband for I wanted this moment to be ingrained.
And just like that, the beginning of something came and within an hour, I had slightly over 1200 words (or the equivalent of 43 tweets) committed to paper in some kind of coherent series of events. When I told TheHusband I had committed 1200 words on fiction today, I got a “That’s nice, dear. Is that about two pages?” I huffed and corrected him on the page count.
It was the first time since the beginning of the year I have written anything resembling a fictional story.
A couple of years ago, I purchased Scrivener and last year, I started organizing my work. I have roughly over 40 story sparks, ideas or lines that could be the basis of something, which also includes a couple of ideas that are formatted for novel length. In addition, I have five pieces which are in progress and more than a dozen completed. With the exception of the odd submission here or there, none of this has been shopped around anywhere.
It’s always been painful as I could come up with ideas, I could take notes on these ideas, but getting those notes into a fully formed idea has mostly failed. One thing is for certain, I keep collecting ideas and my tenacity to see them through exists regardless of past experiences.
Another truism that has occurred over the last couple of weeks, as my come down from the drugs has taken place, I’ve started to seriously wonder why I haven’t been using writing as a way of my own escapism from this chaos in my head. Isn’t that what I’ve done before? Why is it so different now? And why wasn’t I exploring a fictional world to give some peace to the conflicts that keep occurring?
I have no answers.
If one thing is for certain from going through my archives in the last year, I am my own worst enemy.
x0x0,
Lisa
P.S. The one thing I do know, is when I was able to do what I did today, the first thing I wanted to do after telling my husband was to tell you.

This day in Lisa-Universe in:

la princesa de los Ingenios

Dear Internet,
It’s the 272nd day of the year or the end of September, whichever is easier to remember. As I quipped to TheHusband today, my favorite time of year for it’s one of the few months we’re not running our boiler or the central air, ergo the electric and gas bills are down.
And here I bet you thought I was all seriousness and no fun.
I’ve been purposely withdrawing from a semblance of social life as I meter down on the Lithium. I’m currently taking 900mg a day (I started out at 1500mg), and have found that this particular dose is working well for me. At the advice of Dr. H., who suggested if I found a level that worked for me to stay there so I’m heeding his request.
Most of the problematic side-effects from the higher doses have gone, which has been a tremendous amount of relief. As I don’t know how I am going to respond on the lower doses, I thought it best to curtail anything I don’t need to be actively involved in. This includes but was not limited to withdrawing my volunteer work with a few local comic cons happening this fall, my application for a part-time job at a new local comic book store, a few classes I was going to take, sponsored by Grand Rapids recreational department, and a few more things.
If my absence around town before was due to mobility, before that to some sort of depression, this time for a fairly sensible reason: my mental health. Some of the scariest moments this year was going on a new ADHD drug and having it take over my life. When I sampled Adderall and Focalin, I was living in emotional hell and the strain of being “normal” for everyday things took its toll.
I became a sketch of a person who only seemed to exist in novels or on a television show.
This is always the part that never seems to get discussed: the ramifications of going on/off controlled substances and how if done wrong, can fuck with your life in many serious ways. This is the reason why I write about because I want others to know they are not the only ones going through this particular hell. I also noted to my small support circle of those who also were gifted with being Bipolar my tactics and plan and they also agreed what I was doing was sensible.
This entire year has been exhausting. And I feel incredibly vulnerable, tender, and weary of the world at large.
My session with my talking therapist, Dr. P., have been ramping up pretty well. A year into our therapy and I’m finally revealing more about the inner core of me than before. I’m realising more so than ever talk therapy may be one of the few drugs I have left in my arsenal and I don’t want to waste it on discussing stupid things. I need to get rid of the burned husks and lay it bare.
I’m still solidly working on my archives, bouncing through different back-ups to add back in here at EPbaB. TheHusband often reminds me the back-ups I pulled from former SQL tables, still chock full of injected code, can easily be cleaned up by him. I then explained there is something Zen in the grabbing the data I need and cleaning it up myself. It can be so automatic but at the same time, soothing. There is sense of accomplishment to the act his fancy scripts cannot give me.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in 2003, mainly working through the entries where I found my high school sweetheart when I moved back to GR and what happened after. In 2008, he would track me down to my place of work to try to rekindle something, and follow up with the same move in 2011.
Reliving that extremely short period of 2003 has been much more painful than I would have imagined even a decade removed. I was so absolute and sure about our relationship even though he failed me over and over again. I was smart enough in 2008 and again in 2011 to recognize the bridge he was trying to sell me was never, ever going to materialize. It also didn’t help matters after 2011 connection, I found out he was still living with his girlfriend of many years and has a long rap sheet for various offenses. Politically, we’re so far apart it’s laughable and his various social media streams indicate he’s one step away from writing a manifesto while solitary living on the mountain.
In 1989 we were not an ocean apart. By 2003, no matter how much our hearts begged to be joined, our differences outweighed us. By 2008, I had no idea who this man calling on me was for he was not the man I had fallen in love with 20 years prior. By 2011, I was just tired of the ping ponging and the lies.
It is like a bullet has been dodged multiple times. The 17 year old me weeps for the death of someone she had loved, who had died many, many years ago and instead now sees just the shell of a person she used to know.
But it is finding those lost moments of time, which are ripe in their honesty and candor, so appealing as I go through my archives. They remind me I would not be here today without these events happening, the decisions and sometimes the regrets I have chosen. My personal history may not have world changing moments, but there is a richness to the layers of my struggles, pain, and happiness that helped define me as a person and charted the course of my life.
And it helps to remind me, as I come off the drugs, all of that is inside of me. That life, no matter how monochrome it may feel, can always randomly burst into technicolor.
x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in:

Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: September 28, 2013

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
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Writing

The Lisa Chronicles

Watching

  • Hit & Miss
    Hit & Miss showed up randomly on Netflix and we decided to give it a whirl. Chloë Sevigny plays Mia, a pre-op transsexual contract killer who finds out she has a son when the mother dies from cancer, naming Mia guardian. The setup is that Mia, yearning for a better life than the one she grew up with, decides to take on the role of caring not only for her son, but also the rest of her ex-girlfriends’ kids while juggling her day job and romantic interests, as well as all the complications of being true to herself.While the set-up sounds schlocky and alarm bells in terms of handling should be going off, Sevingy surprisingly pulls this off with grace and dignity. The character development was deft and felt honest, and I felt like I could care about these characters, deeply.The show was shot in/around Manchester, UK and theoretically takes place in Manchester and also possibly Leeds, but it could be anywhere UK. Mia’s accent has been likend to that of someone who comes from Irish traveller background (which she hints at as she grew up on the fairgrounds), but her accent keeps dropping in/out; it’s never consistent.The last episode is left wide open for a second season to begin, but SKY tv, one of Britain’s main networks, have announced there will be no second season of Hit & Miss. This is upsetting because there is no closure from the end of season one, which left the viewers with a Mexican standoff between Mia, her son Ryan, and Mia’s boss Eddie. And what happens to Liam?
  • Downton Abbey
    Fall means the return of pumpkin spiced ALL THE THINGS, changing of leaves, and of course the return of my beloved Downton Abbey.For American viewers, Downton Abbey season starts in January on PBS, but I am me and there are reasons why the Internet was invented. This is one of them. I promised ages ago that I would not reveal spoilers anywhere publicly for those without access until January, but I will say season four is shaping up to be as drama filled and nail biting as the previous three.
  • Survivor
    There are only two reality shows I watch, this one and Project Runway. Survivor is more of the influence by TheHusband who loves the strategy and unexpectedness of the show rather character development, so by osmosis, I watch this show too.
  • Sleepy Hollow
    New offering this fall, based on the idea that Ichabod Crane (played by a dreamy Brit, Tom Mison) is not left alone to sleep under a tree for 250 years, but rather he is called awake to help save the world from evil in 2013. The reason? Horsemen from the apocalypse are back, looking to finalize the beginning of the end, witches are also involved, and lawd knows who else.Two episodes in, while not brilliant material, it’s not bad. It doesn’t cater to the obvious and there is some surprisingly good dialogue written. This is definitely on the rotation for weekly viewing.

Weekly watching: Boardwalk Empire, Doc Martin, QI, Peaky Blinders, The Bridge (US), Project Runway, The Newsroom, Sons of Anarchy, DaVinci’s Demons,  The Vampire Diaries

Links

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This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2010, 2003, 1998