Asking For Help: A Retrospective Ramble

[Started February 3, 2012]

Last week I was still dealing with crazy head.  Don’t get excited, nothing has changed, but I have a plan of action now at the very least.  I’ve said I want a Renaissance.  I’ve been saying it and feeling it.  But it’s hard to work on my Self and be a semi-single SAH mother and a wife and a writer and an artist and a musician and a business owner.  For some reason I guess I always felt like I should be able to do it all.  Not 100%, but at least do it all myself.  My husband is always away, so I take on the role I have to in order to exist here.  But I want my other roles; I have many.  It’s hard to keep things going and still manage to do everything.  Motherhood trumps everything else, including my sanity.

Drifting Sun has been back burnered for quite awhile now.  My shed was inundated with all of the stuff that was in my office prior to us needing a room for the baby.  I only printed one or two jobs the entire time I was pregnant.  I actually had my sister and husband do the physical printing, and I just did the screening, prepping and registration.  It can get a little smoky while printing, and in July while being 8 months pregnant the last thing I wanted to do was be standing and printing in my tiny hot box of a shop.  So they printed for me as I oversaw the process while sitting outside in a chair, and it worked out nicely.  I did print a couple pieces when they ran into problems, though, and helped them get straightened out.  And I printed a jacket job I had, because it was one jacket (ONE CHANCE SWIPE!) and my husband felt a little too intimidated to do it himself, which is understandable. 

I just printed a job for my cousin (December 2011), a memorial shirt for my Aunt Leslie who died of cancer in 2008.  It was an honor to print these shirts and it got me back into the swing of things with printing after the pregnancy hiatus.  This still doesn’t change the fact that my printing and chemicals and dark(bath)room stuff doesn’t exactly mix with watching a toddler.  And even when I am working on graphics or other things, it takes a great deal of my attention.  I’m always split.  I’m not a working mother and I’m not a stay at home mother...I’m something else.  I’ve tried to work out a situation where I could have her consistently watched once a week but haven’t been able to make it work yet.  At a loss, I’ve taken a friend on as my “assistant” instead.  I need help.  I think it’s obvious, and if I am pleading “please, I’m dying here!” and am not answered with a helpful hand, then by the fuck I’ll MAKE a helping hand.  Leslie is my friend and it seems appropriate she shares my aunt’s name.  Truthfully, other than my aunt, she is the only Leslie I have ever known.  She will visit me a lot and simply allow me to get simple things done like the dishes or getting a shower, just by being another individual that is around.  Leslie has agreed to help me out with my business also.  It seems appropriate that the first time I met her I was in the shed printing a job.  She actually helped me out watching my kid AND printing the first day I met her.  Maybe it was her eagerness, or something inside of her I recognized that seemed familiar, but this girl is a lifesaver.  Sometimes you just recognize people on a soul level and the connection is immediate and effortless.

 

Sometimes asking for help can be difficult.  I have grown to have a problem with this because the response was usually unsatisfying.  I shirked from asking for help...but in truth, I need help.  Isn’t it obvious?  It can be hard to submit to the fact that you are lost, look at the male stereotype of how hard it is to ask for directions.  Last year I struggled with this dilemma when deciding whether to take antidepressants or not and whether to begin to see a therapist or not.  Decisions decisions.  Life decisions.  This year has been chock full of the help I received because of that decision, the decision to heal.  The decision to leave the victim mentality behind.  It’s mostly a battle with EGO.  Ego doesn’t need help...so it thinks.  Truth is...EGO needs help more than anyone or anything.  EGO is the prime reason for all suffering and most of the communication problems among us.  It’s quite the bitch. 

So last year was fucking nuts but it was a first step into what really feels like a whole new life, it seems fitting that December 2012 was the end of the Mayan calendar and the supposed end of the world as we know it.  Nothing seemed to happen, aside from symbolically.  Was that really such a bad thing?  I needed the change.  I needed my world to end so that my new life could begin.  It was a matter of SURRENDER.  I simply had to surrender to the help that I have always desperately needed...physically, emotionally, mentally...and spiritually. 

[Finished September 10, 2013]

(Facebook Meme Graphic/artist unknown)

Writer's Block and Compelling Tells

I have been meaning to finish up so many writing 'projects' for the longest time but I just haven't been feeling it.  Scrawled words emerge from time to time on random substrates, but I have been distanced from my writer's mind for some time.  Well, not the mind, just the motion.  Lines pop into my head as usual, but I don't grab a pen.  I let them fall to the bottom of my mind, and figure if the words were that good...they would come back to me.  Some do, some don't. That's the funny thing about words.

I like to have my trusty Moleskine with me, and it is usually in my purse, but I've been using it only for concert noting on the go, as of late.  I've been lost in thought instead of words.  The truth is I have dozens of journals and notebooks...aching for words.  Blank pages scream at me from every corner of my space, but I have not felt compelled to touch them.  I've been lost in instruments more so, but have been lax with that as well, until last week when I was compelled to pick up my Alvarez for three days straight.  Being compelled is another funny thing.  It's almost like a program in your brain you have to follow; you are driven to carry out the mission.  I just didn't seem to want to do anything else, so I just went with it...and let the housework back up.  My bathroom paid, but I was rewarded.  It lasted three straight days and then waned.  It felt good.  Sometimes, I am just compelled to do things and it feels best to just go with it.

So, today while I was in the store for a few things, I was compelled to buy a notebook and pens.  Stationery.  It should be known that I have a thing for stationery; I'm drawn to it like a moth to a flame.  I wander away from my husband at the site of the paper aisle in a store.  I am ridiculous in Staples.  It's borderline fetish.  Okay, I don't feverishly rub composition books on my genitals, or anything, (although if it was a leather bound journal, now...) there is just nothing like a fresh tablet and brand new pens! So, even though I know I have plenty of notebooks of every size and color, I for some reason felt I needed to purchase a small 3 subject Mead notebook and a pack of pens that claimed they were 'The smoothest in the world!'  The Bic Velocity. Good pen.  Smooth.

I felt compelled and went with it and got the tablet and pens.  If my Self says she wants a tablet on a whim, then what does that say?  What deeper tells does my spirit show?  Perhaps that she is ready to write again.  Perhaps that she wants new paper...for her new words.  Or...perhaps she is just a fetishist after all.  Let's see what she is compelled to do with it.

The Apprenticeship: A Hole History

Call me crazy… (crazy)…Hey!  Well, like I was saying, call me crazy, but I am starting a self-apprenticeship.  This term doesn’t really make sense, I don’t think.  I’m not even sure it is proper, and I’m only talking about semantics.  I’m also not sure my apprenticeship itself is proper, because it isn’t a proper apprenticeship.  I remain, however, a self taught woman.  I am schooled, yes, but most of the things I deal with in my business and most of my skills or talents have been self taught.  I seem to work better that way.  The hermit learns better alone, go figure! 

What are you TALKING about, you say?  Lend me your ears, friends, or perhaps, just your lobes, for I am embarking on a journey.  I debated chronicling it, but then decided, eh, what the hell.  My blog is I, I am my blog.  I like to document my progress with everything.  I like to see progress.  I like to see where I need to improve or note things of importance.  Perhaps it is my fear of my encroaching senility?  GET TO THE POINT!  Alright!  I am taking up body piercing.  There, I said it.  Crazy, right?  Here’s the back history.

When I was a teenager, at the tender age of 14, or 15, I can’t quite remember, I was VERY into Green Day.  This has a point, trust me.  Billie Joe Armstrong had a nostril piercing.  Teen girls obsess with boys, well, I wanted to BE them.  I wanted to be pseudo neo punk with colored hair and quirkiness---AND A NOSE RING! 

I remember watching Green Day’s performance at the 94 Woodstock (aahh, we have a year…14) and basically rocking out in my room, which consisted of loud music and hyped up feelings of excitement and euphoria…which begot the idea “I’m going to pierce my nose.”  I don’t know if I used ice or anything the first time I did it??  I may have.  I just remember going to my mother’s dresser and getting into her jewelry box and choosing a red rose lapel pin.  It was a decent gauge, in retrospect.  Figured it would work for a piercing!

I sterilized it with alcohol and also lit it with a lighter I’m sure and all those crude things that you know about sterilization when you are 14 years old in the 90’s without the internet.  I then, listening to Green Day, popped that lapel pin through my right nostril!  It was ridiculous.  I think the next day to school I wore the only jewelry I had to put in it (I didn’t even have a hoop).  What I had was a simple ball earring with a cross that dangled from it.  Ridiculous.  In a nose?  I was 14, give me a break!  So I wore it.  I think some people thought it odd.  No, I’m sure some people thought it odd, but one thing holds true today that was true when I was 14.  I’m out to find myself, not please you bastards!  ;) 

So I eventually changed the jewelry and yadda yadda.  I really didn’t have a good ability to get any jewelry suitable for a nose, lack of funds and “allowance”.  My mother hated my hair dying and piercing-capades, obviously.  Anywho, that’s the history of my FIRST piercing.  Onto the point.  I ended up doing my own ears a couple of times, even my top cartilage, as well as my own navel.  The navel I did have problems with, but hell, I did it with a large safety pin.  I simply left the safety pin in at one point!  (CRAZY!!)  Hey!! :/

Like I said I pierced myself multiple times and then pierced my best good friend, Hilary!  I pierced Hilary about gazillion times up her ears and such.  So began my piercing history.  And then it laid dormant.  I did get my own tongue pierced when I was 18 and had it in for about 5 years.  I have my nose pierced today, still.  I rarely wear earrings though, but it’s mostly because I am lazy and didn’t like sleeping with them.  But that was before I knew of awesome jewelry, also.

So a couple of months ago I was hanging with my tattoo artist pal and mentioned to her how I used to pierce stuff.  It made total sense at the time, seeing as how we were hanging out post bar time.  I just said it was something I could see me getting into possibly.  Later she had someone that was interested in a piercing.  I wasn’t about to do anything crudely.  I decided to order supplies and everything proper to do piercings the right way.  It would be different then a lapel pin, but it looked slick as hell the way the hollow needles worked!  I watched some YouTube videos.  Found a good kit.  A good book.  A good professional How-To DVD.  I’m doing this!

It seems crazy to delve into something like this out of the blue, but there are roots to this in my early adolescence.  I’m mentally regressing, it makes perfect sense!  I’m exploring who I thought I was or was meant to be back then…and dividing that by who I am now, maybe?  Split the diff=piercings.  (I’ve said before, math is not my forte, if I have one at all!)  14 year old Missie would be proud, but “I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now…” as Mr. Dylan would say.  Let the hole thing begin! 

Me to You,

Missie (Crazy!) Sue

"I'm Taking it Back!" - The Resurrection of ICQ

I just installed ICQ 7.7.  ICQ, if you are not aware, is a nifty little program that I think created the internet back in the 90’s.  Not really, but it was a lovely and simple program that was pretty much the precursor to text messaging if you think about.  It was glorious.  You had a number.  You had a contact list.  You messaged people privately. (Privacy? Remember that?)  Or you could chat with groups of people.  A good time was had by all.  It can really go hand in hand with a young teenager learning their way around the web.  It is also good I kept a good head about me.  I was a young girl with access to many anonymous people from all over the world.  I received at least two phone calls from people I talked to on the net while in high school.  (They were actually people I talked to for a long time on ICQ, I didn’t just let anyone call me!  It’s still scary in retrospect if you think about it, though.  This is one of the many instances that I am immensely proud of my past self because it had that could have gone bad air about it.  But yes – I let guys call me from South Carolina and from Canada before because of ICQ.)

I think that ICQ perhaps got lost in the madness of AOL Instant Messenger.  While this was a neat little proggie as well, I never found it as satisfying or appealing as ICQ.  I always missed ICQ, but after my friends weren’t using it anymore and everyone “moved on” what was the point?

I am becoming continually more frustrated with Facebook.  I started a Twitter account to follow Johnette Napolitano from Concrete Blonde, among other things, but that was a main one, and I am intrigued by its possibilities and I love love love how ICQ now hooks up to Twitter.  It is supposedly able to hook up to your Facebook also but it is having a problem with that currently.  Hm. Isn’t that interesting?  Screw Facebook.  It’s a love hate relationship anymore.  It’s like Walmart.  Nothing can be good forever.  It’s like a band once they make it; you almost have to remember them for what they were before they sold out and changed in order to fit in with the money.  Bah.

So I’m picking and choosing what I want from the mainstream media machine that is ‘creating’ us.  I’m choosing to blog.  I’m choosing to Twitter.  Yes, I’ll still Facebook reluctantly, but I’m taking ICQ back!  I want to explore it in its updated form and see what it has to offer the web user today.  This should be interesting.  So there you have it.  I’m taking it back!  Join me if you want.  The echo is pretty damn loud in here.  So far only one guy from Spain that follows me on Twitter has found me.  It’s just me and Javier for now, but let’s wait and see who’s coming with me!  I feel like it is the apocalypse and you have to travel around seeking survivors. ICQ-Q-Q-Q-Q???!!  

[My name is Missie Sue.  My number is 635303735.  I am predominantly right brain bored.  Idiosyncrasies keep me going.  ICQ for conversation. My left brain will give my right brain the message.  ;P]

The Medieval Drifts Into the Renaissance

I don’t know if this makes sense or not, but I want a renaissance.  So many of my energies now are just reverberating ripples of shit that I experienced in childhood, adolescence and high school even.  The worse times and hardships are obviously focused on.  I need to burn the sage through the house of my mind.  I want to inspire myself again.  I want to be muse-ical.  I seemed so young and naïve and troubled as a teen but I also seemed so full of passion and energy and spirit, so fresh and alive, so many hopes and dreams.  What ever happened to that girl?

I have a theory that if I surround myself with the positive things of that era it will tap into that feeling from the past.  It’s just a theory, most of my theories are ludicrous, I understand, but I was thinking about how powerful music is and how it psychologically triggers emotions from the time that we remember it from.  Memory is amazing; we can remember the lyrics to a song we haven’t heard in YEARS and we can forget simple things from our daily life.  It’s really quite baffling to me.  BUT my theory – if I could just tap into the Missie Sue that wasn’t scared of failure, that knew there was something special going on and believed in the magical world and other ridiculous concepts before reality shat on her soul. 

Renaissance, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:  “…2. …a movement or period of vigorous artistic and intellectual activity.”  That sounds like just what I need.  If I could just tap into that energy from my past, maybe I can pick up where I left off?  Maybe I can get that girl back?  Maybe I can see what she wanted to say?  I understand I am so much wiser than she ever was, but I also think I have lost touch with something she tapped into far more easily than I.  I’m delving into the subconscious this year.  I’ve been swimming in there for years, but I mostly stay to the shallow end.  I need to give ‘er a good leap off of the old diving board, hands clasped together, head tucked.  I need to see what’s down there.  I’ve been stirring up the waters, but I need to shine some light on the proverbial watering hole, down to the pith.  

Step one is surrounding myself in nostalgia I suppose.  Symbolism is important to the mind, especially to mine I reckon.  I’ve been trying to tap into the music that sustained me at the time, but that’s going to be difficult while still clinging to the music that is sustaining me now.  Baby steps.  I also installed ICQ.  I’m taking it back.  It was one of the coolest things about my youth – exploring communication.  I don’t know if this makes sense.  I don’t know anything anymore, honestly, if I get down to MY pith.  My pith is deep and a little dark but in the spirit of adventure and reclamation I set out on one of the most critical years of my journey.  I’ve tended to this wound enough, let’s see if she can stand - and dare I say, walk again.  

I’m continuing on the Vision Quest(ion) that is my life this year.  I’m trudging on ahead, musing along the way, stepping back – stepping forward.  Stepping sideways I hope all the while just to keep that perspective open.  “For good and for real…for good and for real.”