Category: diary

One is silver, the other gold

Dear Internet,
Here is how it begins:
I was working on updating the Caravaggio Project and I was having difficulty remembering if I had been to a particular museum when I was in Rome in ’05. Since I, thankfully, have been cross-posting content over to Livejournal since 2001, I no longer have to depend on my often wrong memory.
As I read through the archives, what piqued my interest in this research was not necessarily finding a definitive answer to my question1, but that many of the people who were commenting on my posts at the time. I either lost contact with them over the years or the relationships had shifted in focus; where we may have once been super close and were now mere Facebook friends who wished each other “Happy Birthday!,” every year not because we genuinely remembered but because Facebook told us.
Continue reading “One is silver, the other gold”

It was a dark and stormy comic

Dear Internet,
TheHusband recently said to me:

Not only are you one of the most ambitious people I know, but you’re also one of the laziest.

 
Here’s an example of that statement:
Within the last year or so, I’ve suddenly got a huge lady boner for comics. Having dipped in and out of the various comics (web and print) & graphic novels on and off for years in a variety of formats, as well as knowing a few comic books artists, this is not really that surprising I should have such a huge interest in them. What’s surprising is that the re-sparking of this passion came fairly heavy in my late ’30s and with a fervor of lust usually reserved for my love of chocolate and writing instruments.
Continue reading “It was a dark and stormy comic”

I may or may not quit you

Dear Internet,
All we’ve talked about is me, me, me. I think it’s time that we talked about you.
I think we need a break from each other. Or at the very least, we may need to start seeing other people.
You see Internet, I love you, I do. You’ve given me my husband, job & life skills, friends, and adventures galore. You are beyond delightful. But our current arrangement is not working out for me at the moment and that saddens me. Truth be told Internet, it hasn’t been working out for quite some time but I was always desperate to hold on to you and be deliriously desperately in denial of the hold you have on me. When we first met Interent, everyday was a fresh day of learning. I was always digging into your nooks and crannies, scratching you under your chin. Now, it seems, nothing is really fresh anymore. Everything is a retweet, a digg, a stumbleupon, a like, or a tweet.
I’m just not that into you anymore.
Continue reading “I may or may not quit you”

Tragedy in the style of the Greeks

Dear Internet,
I’m deeply sorry for the last month of silence. It was not fair to you, to me, or to the dozens of wonderful people who have reached out to me. I have a fairly good reason for at least half of that time:

If you’ve been following me around the social spheres, I talked about this surgery quit a bit in which I opted to have the arthritis and bone chips literally chipped away from my right ankle and the tendon in my right calf cut and lengthened. The original injury occurred in December of 1994, when in the throes of exam week, I slipped and fell on the ice glossed driveway at my parent’s house. This ice aerobics gave me a double fracture and a dislocation in my right ankle, later binded by 12 pins and a plate. When the pins and plate came out, the doctors told me at 22 that I would have fairly severe arthritis. I laughed. By the time I turned 30, the arthritis started making its introductions to my body and by the time I was 35, was becoming a roommate in the vein of single white female.
Continue reading “Tragedy in the style of the Greeks”

Spider-Fly

Dear Internet,
I’m terribly afraid that some days I’m going to completely bore you with my tales. I hope you will forgive me as those days appear for life is not always going to be sunshine and gumdrops. Or grey days and thunder clouds, though as the summer progresses, the latter will be nice.
I woke up with a fright this morning as I dreamt a giant spider with wings was flying around in a room that TheHusband and I were sitting in, and I smashed it with a newspaper, drawing blood down the wall. The body landed in bowl of chips and TheHusband turned his nose up to me when I offered him the bowl of chips with the dead spider-fly body laying on the plates, as if it were purposefully dressing the plate for this occasion. I shot straight up in bed and saw the alarm clock read 6:22 AM.
I have no idea what it means.
Renew is perhaps a good word for today. I’m renewing myself on some projects, renewing my interest in music by listening to Spotify, and renewing my connection with people in general. When I woke this morning, I decided to give a shit today, and just by giving myself permission to give a shit, suddenly I can see a bit clearly.
The blog is not meant to be a quick fix, this I know. But the purpose of this is to chronicle my feelings and thoughts on a more consistent basis. Some days there may be a flurry of long winded posts and others, there may be a dearth where I post nothing but pictures of kittens. I’m just sayin’.
x0x0,
Lisa

And it slows, but for a dream

Dear Internet,
It is nearly midnight.
After my confession, and the cascade of tears that followed, I feel more at ease in my skin. Plans were made for a birthday dinner with my brother and husband, apparently a new family tradition, at The Chop House. Retail therapy cures everything, so before dinner I headed to the mall where I bought myself a new dress and shoes for the evening. The shoes, which while Instagram’d to death, are nude cork wedges. Totally un-Lisa like. But I’m tired of being Lisa-like, so the shoes were bought. While perusing the racks at Macy’s, I considered shoplifting as something also un Lisa-like, but decided that buying shoes that were not my style was more in speed with change. I didn’t fancy spending my 40th birthday night in jail.
Continue reading “And it slows, but for a dream”

The Summer Tale

Dear Internet,
Yesterday as I was leaving work, someone started calling after me I was walking away from the entrance of the library. As I walking and digging in my bag for my phone, it took me a few seconds to realize that someone was yelling my name. When I looked behind me, I saw a woman limping towards me and who, after my confirmation that I was who she was looking for, she began telling me she had lived at Throbbing Manor for nearly 25 years and is currently battling the bank to get repossession of the house. Taken slightly back (How do you talk to a crazy person?), we had a stilted conversation about the gardens, then she had this off-centered laugh about our battle with the ivy, and that she had also met my mother-in-law last year when TheHusband and mother-in-law were working in the gardens during the MIL’s visit. When I could think no more to say, I walked away from her with a twitchy smile on my lips and a what the fuck just happened in my heart.
Today is my 40th birthday.
I’m in my home office, still in my PJs at 1:30 3 in the afternoon. Wednesday is snoring on her pillow under the window fan. I have both windows open, the blinds are pulled down as far as they will go before they go over the lip of the opened window frame, shrouding the room in semi-darkness.
I am severely depressed.
This isn’t “JESUS FUCK, I’M 40!” depressed or even, “Christ. I’m fat” depressed or even a million things that would make us sad and blue on a daily basis. This is different. Far different. This is enveloping not only my heart, but my entire being, it’s physical as well as mental. When I walk, I feel like I’m moving in half-solidified Jello. When I am still, my skin feels like it’s being pushed on at all of its pores. I feel like I am of single mind and two bodies at once: one physical and one epheremal. I watch myself during the motions, a panel of Lisa judges on how well we passed (8.5! Work on your backflip, girl.) through the motion.
Even at my worst stages of BPD, even at the stages of when things were so bad that I felt like there was no way out, there was almost always some small thread of hope that would keep me from being incredibly stupid.
I don’t have that now. At least, not in the same form as before. I don’t have a desire to kill myself but I don’t feel like there is any hope. It seems that I’ve presented myself with a conundrum. Perhaps I am my own unreliable narrative for the second I had written the above, I knew it to be a lie: I want this to go away and I want to be happy.
On paper, everything looks great: I have a great husband, a lovely house, an awesome job. I have old and new friends who are incredible and supportive. I have a brother whose relationship I’m beginning to depend on and materialistically, I want for nothing. For the first time in over a decade, I do not need to calculate the price of an item down to a per hour working cost. But something is not right in Denmark, as all I want to do is do nothing and feel nothing. I just ate a bar of my favorite chocolate. It tasted good, because something tells me this is what I knew to be my favorite bar of chocolate, but it does not make me happy to have eaten it or treat it with joy or even acknowledge that it is good chocolate. It was a bar a chocolate, so I ate it. It’s boiled down to being that simple.
Food is not consumed because it tastes good but consumed because I know it is there for me to eat it. I drink to hydrate, not to enjoy. I watch television to block out hours, not to enrich. (Except for True Blood, because well, that’s True Blood.) I used to read 10-15 books a month, I have finished two books in the last six. When I read the news, of any kind, I have the same emotion for war pieces as I do for saving kittens from a tree. I can’t tell you the last time I felt sexy. Or when the last time I laughed because I was overjoyed. While I never particularly thought of myself as being vain, I did take care of my appearance and even that is slipping. When I do something that should fall into being beautiful, I find that I’ve placed a mask on my body instead. I’m miming what you think I should be doing because that is socially what people know Lisa to do so that is what I’ll do.
So far, over 50 people have wished me a happy birthday on my Facebook wall but I’m crying because no one has sent me a physical card, because I feel that if they really did care, they would spend the few bucks for the card and the stamp. Then I beat myself up over that bit of hypocritical wants since when is the last time I randomly bought someone a card and sent it (i.e. never). Again, a lie: Today’s post revealed a quick written post from my mother who jotted that she was far too young to have a 40 year old daughter.
I am told by people they care about me (see earlier remark about new and old friends being supportive), but I feel like they are just telling me this to soothe their own souls, even when they are being sincere and true. I have stopped engaging with most people locally because I do not know how to be a friend to them anymore as I don’t know how to react anymore to someone loving me, even platonically. When my husband says he loves me, my first reaction is that I feel like he loves me because it’s habit not because he genuinely does. Then I start to cry because I know that bit about my husband is a lie and I feel like an awful human being for even thinking this to be true. And if there is anyone in this world who loves me pure and true, it’s TheHusband.
I am an emotional mess of contradictions and fallacies, and I’m barely keeping my head above water. You were good to me years ago Internet for working things out (and cheaper then therapy). I hope you don’t mind me coming to you again.
x0x0,
Lisa