Huh?

What’s wrong with me? Don’t I have anything better to do than to sit here and write silly little posts for this silly little blog? I don’t know, you sit at the dining table, just minding your own business, watching the traffic go by and suddenly the urge strikes you to go post a little something. You don’t have any earth shattering news to announce, but it just is that compulsion again to write down your thoughts, insignificant as they are.

This morning I bought a booklet of stamps out of a machine, because the little post office in the supermarket was still closed. It didn’t make any difference, because in the Netherlands you can’t buy single stamps anymore, you always have to buy them in a booklet. It’s called economics. There is too much labor involved in selling a single stamp. Actually, it is kind of handy to have the extra stamps in the house, because I subsequently wrote two more necessary letters. The queen’s picture is on them and I don’t have to lick the back of her, because they are self sticking. If only all of life were that easy.

Actualy, I was sitting at the dining table thinking that life is pretty good and that for the first time in a long time I feel safe. Imagine that. All by myself in my own company, I feel safe. I have a genuine deep down secure feeling and I am not afraid of the world and all the people in it and I am not afraid of what will happen to me in that world, because I am taking care of that. I never did feel that safe with all of my partners, I always felt a tremendous amount of insecurity that manifested itself as stress that would slowly build up and up until it hit the boiling point.

I sure don’t have that now. I feel pretty safe with this person named Irene. Yes, I am coming out of the closet people. I don’t have to be Nora anymore. I have come to trust this person named Irene S**ders very much and I am mighty proud of her, so i am going to let her stand in the limelight and send Nora back to the dressing room to work as an understudy for the odd day when I have the measles or some other childhood disease that I am not likely to catch. From this point on the charade is over and I give Nora the boot, while thanking her very kindly for having helped me pull out of the dull drums I was in and the terrible crisis of love and identity. She can now go back to Ibsen and tell him a tale about the 21st century and tell him we are all still silly people and that we never learn the lessons about love and relationships.

So, from this point forward, if it is not to confusing to you, and I thank you for your patience ahead of time, please call me by my true name, which is Irene, and not Sweet Irene, because i was never that, that was just made up, so don’t call me that, although I was Irene Sweet once, but that was in a totally different life that I have almost forgotten about and it seems like a dream to me now. The only true evidence of it being my very real daughter.

Irene S**ders has some living to do, boy. She hasn’t been out much. We saw her last when she was 17 and very naive and gullible and here she is now all grown up and old enough to know about all sorts of things and thank goodness for that. What timing. She easily has another 30 years left in her to be this person, so make room for her. There is another Power Ranger heading into the world. Quiet but deadly. That’s my style.

Well, I’m just kidding and a little full of myself, but it does feel good to set myself free. I can’t wait to have my nameplate on my mailbox. My father didn’t have any sons, so I am adding the name back into use also. I don’t know what my sister is going to do. She isn’t too fond of her maiden name, but she is also not fond of her husband, so it’s a toss up.

Well, that’s enough news for one night, don’t you think? I am hungry, so I am going to eat something. Something small and easily chewable.

Have a good evening or day, if you are still having one of those. Gosh, it’s still only Thursday.

Ciao…

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Just about!

I think I’ve got just about every document I need for my meeting with the man from social services tomorrow after noon, If i don’t have it, it is not for lack of trying. I have been running ragged collecting them all and making copies of them and just as I was doing that at my sister’s house yesterday, the ink ran out, so I had to abort that mission and go to the grocery store this morning to continue that. I had 11 pages left to copy and dreaded having to do it there, because I visioned badly run machines that would eat all my nickels and dimes, but nothing could have been further form the truth and all went smoothly.

I returned the items that I did not want for the dog and that was no problem and got him some new snacks instead that he likes very much. I even bought tobacco and have 11, 20 Euros left until Friday, which I think is pretty good, considering I don’t need anything else before that time.

I have decided to cut down on the coffee, I will no longer drink those huge two pad mugs of coffee anymore now, but I will drink the more demure one pad smaller mugs of coffee. I realized I was going through the pads at an alarming rate and I thought that was totally unnecessary, so I cut that down right away. Having never done any serious grocery shopping, I am finding out about al these things now and I can be a real cheapskate. It’s a challenge to spend the least amount of money and make the food last.

Out of the blue, I took a nap on the sofa this afternoon and was only awakened because the dog was barking very loudly. It turned out the girl next door was at the front door and had rung the doorbell but I had slept through that. I’m getting old, people. I woke up from the alarm clock this morning and had my leisurely hour drinking my coffee and petting the Uberhund. He is such a darling early in the morning and literally needs the sleep rubbed out of his eyes. Why have a grumpy man when you can have a sleepy huggable dog?

I hope I am never silly enough again to have the great misfortune to fall in love. I hope I am spared such a disaster. It would be such a worse state of affairs than the one I am finding myself in now. I suppose you have to be in the “falling in love sort of mood” and as long as I am not maybe it will never happen to me. I hope to God that I have learned enough from my “love” predicaments not to start down that road ever again. What I called love anyway, it may not have been the real thing at all, of course, but I am not going to bother to find out and put my feelings at risk and do any kind of experimenting. I thought I came pretty close with the Exfactor and if that is as close as I can get, I don’t want to find out how much closer I can get. Strike that one up for a pretty good experiment.

It turns out that the Paramount has more than one good male friend that she spends quality time with and the Exfactor claims that he is not jealous. He is all for given each other the space and freedom they deserve. He has a bigger heart than I have and doesn’t mind going where other men have also recently been. It is really an amazing thing, because the Paramount is not what we call mother’s prettiest. I wonder what the appeal is?

The Uberhund has found the one sunny spot in the living room and is curled up there now. It must feel good to him, to bathe in the sunlight like that. There is no sign of the cats. They have been hanging out outside a lot lately, no doubt because the weather has been so good. All is well, as long as they don’t make pests of themselves with the neighbors. Sometimes, one of them will take his life into his own paws and sleep on the new chair during the night, but as soon as I show up in the morning, they don’t know how fast to get out of it and make a beeline for the back door lest they get sprayed with the water bottle. I am mean like that.

Well, that’s all I ‘ve got. Tomorrow morning I’m seeing my SPN and in the afternoon I am seeing the man from Social Services who is going to make a determination about my benefits. So, you all keep your fingers crossed and hope for a good ending. I am a bit nervous, although i should not be, as I am an honest citizen.

Ciao…

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Bless me!

Well, bless my little heart! I have been sitting here all afternoon trying to figure out a problem I had with my Dutch blog which did not recognize me as its administrator and so refused to perform all sorts of functions I asked it to. It basically just ignored me and even with the help of the support desk, I couldn’t get the problem fixed, so I finally said, the hell with it and set up a completely new blog in the same style as this one, but with a slighlty different header, though in the same theme. The other blog had two posts on it and it was no great loss and I did not copy them for the newer blog, but just started over again. Maggie May would like it and I will include the link to it here: http://noortje2at.wordpress.com/

I am sitting here yawning something awful, but that is because I have not had a nap at all today and I think I may go to bed on time. I don’t know why I have to do this battle with sleep each night, about when I go to sleep and when I wake up and if I am indeed done sleeping then. I would very much like to sleep just like a regular person from 10 to 7 or something like that. I am sure it would be good for my mental health.

My husband is working late again tonight and won’t be home until after midnight. The problem is that he comes in through the back door and it is in the bedroom,and it sometimes wakes me up, because the door jams.

It is raining and thundering and lightening outside and every time time it thunders, Jesker barks purely out of reflex. The poor dog doesn’t know what is happening except that it sounds very close by, just about on top of us.

Well, I am just about done with my last cigarette, so I must go and make more. I will add to this post in the morning, in the wee hours no doubt. See you then.

Tuesday in the wee hours. I woke up because somebody was very foolishly removing my reading glasses from my hand, when he should have just left them there, because everything wakes me up and it p*sses me off. Why not just let me be and let me sleep in whatever fashion I am sleeping, at least I am sleeping? Even if it means I have my reading glasses clenched in my hand and my book laying on my chest. I hate this nurturing bit that is totally unnecessary and only wakes me up and makes me stay up. Aaarrrggghhh! That was a primal scream in case you were wondering. I am sure I have many more of those in me.

Okay, deep breath and another one.

I just had some nonfat strawberry yogurt and I feel a lot better now. It’s given me energy and food for the brain and now I will have a nice mug of mocha coffee and a cigarette. You see, I know how to treat myself well and I know what I need in the middle of the night. I need to nurture myself through the small hours of it and not be miserly with what I need. So, a tall glass of yogurt and a big mug of coffee. Big, I like everything big. That’s why I like cappuccinos so much. They come in big cups.

Jeez, I can’t seem to find my sense of humor anywhere. I seem to have misplaced it. It’s not anywhere close by where I can see it. I don’t see its laughter jumping up and down the desk. I don’t feel it tickling my bare knees. I think I’ll go lie down for a bit. maybe it will come back to me then…

…of course I didn’t go lie down on the sofa. I went looking for a deleted post of the Dutch blog instead, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. It is well and truly gone and I don’t remember the title of it. I deleted it and then realized that it was a good bit of writing and that I should not have deleted it. Stupid move! Because I didn’t have the authority to publish it, I did send it in for approval, so maybe they will send it back to me. Keep your fingers crossed.

Oh goodness, I completely forgot to stick my headphones in my ears. I could have been listening to music all this time. Where am I with my mind? Life is so much kinder with a soundtrack in your head. I know why I forgot about it. My MP3 player needed a new battery in it, but that was easily remedied. When I live here by myself, i don’t have to worry about that, if I were to run out of batteries, I could just listen to the Real Player or to Deezer. I lived without any music for such a long time and now I can’t imagine doing without, because it makes such a difference in my mood. It cheers me up terrifically.

“There are nine million bicycles in Bejing.” Katie Melua. You can listen to the text, but you mustn’t believe in the romance of it, that would be a fatal move. Luckily, when you are 53 years old, you don’t have to take any of it personally and can just listen to it with detachment and a certain amount of bemusement. When I was younger, I was such a believer in the texts and the romance of it. I thought it was all true. I was the permanently broken heart kid. I walked around with a big ache that could only be filled with the romance that the song texts promised and sometime I thought I had found it. The big dramatic loves of my life, which in the end turned out to be relationships filled with hazardous no go areas.

All my love has been based purely on dependency. In how many ways can you rescue me? Can you take care of me? Can you keep me safe from the big bad world? Well, guess what, nobody could in the end. Least of all Eduard, although he tried the hardest, he also made me the most dependent and the least prepared. I reverted back to a sort of infantine state and became helpless and childlike. I had already become some of that in a relationship previous to that and let myself be treated like a Duchess, which was also my nickname. It was also a very dependent relationship in which I needed to be reassured constantly of the man’s fidelity and love for me and tried to earn it in all possible ways by being a very good girl. I was a ballerina with very sore toes, making pirouettes all day long.

My biggest fear was always to be abandoned by the people who I believed to be in love with, but which were really dependency issues. That’s because I never had clearly defined boundaries and I didn’t know who I was without the other person to give me a definition, dysfunctional as it was. I existed because of who I was with. Now I know that this is not true and I know that I am very well defined in sharp clear lines with a hefty substance and a clear content. I know who I am and what is bullshit and what is not. I am not afraid that I am going to be lost or scared or make some huge mistake in judgment. I will be fine, because I am a grown up now.

Well, after that long confession, I am going to end this now. In another half an hour, the dog and I are going to take out medicines an go for a walk, a nice and slow walk. I am off to see my SPN this morning to tell her the good news.

Have a thrilling Tuesday. Do you think days like that exist? Tuesdays seem like such ordinary days, except for some rainy day ones.

Ciao…

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Funky Unfrazzled Friday.

Graffiti number 2

Thursday, 6 PM. When I went back to bed early this morning I had a special, but disturbing dream. I dreamed that an enormous nuclear bomb came down to the earth and hit a spot in the United States right where my son was standing looking up in the sky with his mouth open in awe. The bomb fell into his opened mouth and exploded and it was the end of almost all life on earth.

I and some other people survived and we made our way to where the bomb had come down to kill my son. Someone asked me, “It must be very unpleasant for you to know how he has died,” but how did I know that? I looked around me and everywhere there were fires burning, but the most important thing to me was that my son had died in such a horrible way. Then my daughter came to me by airplane from a far away place and brought me beautiful clothes with diamond jewelry and said for me to get dressed for a special ceremony and she smiled at me and said everything was going to be okay.

That’s it, that’s the end of the dream. For those of you who don’t know, my son died 3 1/2 years ago from cancer. He was 29 years old and we knew he wasn’t going to make it, because he had a kind of cancer that nobody has survived yet. It is very possible, that in a way the world as I knew it, ended for me on the day my son died. That symbolically life ended with his death. I think he is the equivalent of an angel now. His spirit, or his energy, is alive somewhere in the universe. Maybe he is watching out for me. I always feel I have to do a better job than I am for his sake. I don’t always succeed.

There has to be some significance to the dream that is escaping me. I am looking at it right side up and upside down, but I can’t get to the center of it. When your child dies before you, it is always a tragedy, it would be for anybody, so there is nothing out of the ordinary there. I felt what any mother would have felt, with the relief that he had not died some horrible way in a horrible war far away from home. He died a kind death. He went to sleep and didn’t wake up anymore. If you can call that kind, which I do when I think of all the ways that young men can die.

There is some symbolism in the dream that I am not interpreting right. The role of my daughter is clear to me, but I don’t understand the nuclear bomb in my son’s opened mouth and the almost total annihilation of the world. It is as if his voice had to be silenced, while he was such a silent, stubborn young man with his definite opinions, living in Alaska because he wanted to be free. I was always so happy that there was no war that he was forced to be participate in, because I would have told him to immigrate to Canada. He would have made a very bad soldier, not because he would not have been loyal, but because any form of violence would have haunted him for the rest of his life, which turned out to be so short anyway.

I think it was determined by fate that my son did not have a long life. Some part of me could not see him grow old and have babies and a wife and an eight hour job and a mortgage to pay off. He was a new age child of undetermined potential. He said himself many times that he felt different from the rest of mankind, but it didn’t seem to hurt him, he had made his peace with that and he had good friends. He was a very sensitive old soul and not made to carve out a huge place for himself in this world. He liked Monty Python movies and Pink Floyd music and he smoked grass and caught salmon on the rivers and lakes of the Kenai Peninsula. He said, “When I die, just plant my body under a big old tree somewhere in the wild.”

Such a gentle soul, he was very much like me in character and that was good, but also scary, because I knew how tough life could be. I knew he wasn’t quite equipped to handle all the roughness of it. Alaska was the safest place to be.

Well, I am reminiscant, aren’t I? It is good to talk about my son like this, He was a good kid. It isn’t a bad sadness that I feel when I recall him. More like a sweet aching heart that misses him a lot, but that knows the time is over for now. We’ll meet up again later, I am sure of that.

Plant leaf number 2

Eduard has gone to work and I have not gone with him. I decided I needed to stay home tonight and not be there to hold up the bar. I don’t need to drink all those lovely cappuccinos tonight and eat all those delicious cookies with them. I am going to make myself an omelet in a while and I know how to make them real fluffy, just like Jesker and I like them.

I have added more music to Deezer. I am trying to add equal amounts of each artist, so it all evens out when it gets played back randomly and everybody gets a chance. It bothers me that it always starts with that song from Amy Winehouse, “Rehab.” I’ve heard it enough already now and I immediately skip to the next song. Eduard says that listening to music this way is expensive, because the computer uses a lot of energy, so I try to save energy in other ways, by not turning on lights. He wants to get me an MP3 player and hook it up to a speaker, which is fine with me too. Most of the music I add to the Deezer list, I have not heard yet, so it is all a big surprise to me too. You do hear very clearly why some people become stars and why others don’t. There is a subtle difference. There are less bright stars on the horizon that are just going to fade out.

I am so excited to get to know all these new performers. I love the way some of them experiment with the music and the words. I’d love to stand in front of a microphone and sing about “Shit” really hard. How wonderful to be so uninhibited. And then sing “Fuck you too.” Just great! I am not normally a user of foul language, but I can imagine how liberating it must feel to use it in public like that. What power! “Merde alors.”

I said to Eduard that I wouldn’t mind being 20 years old now, but he wasn’t too sure about it. I think once you get that awful puberty thing behind you, this could be a very exciting time to be young now in Europe. I don’t know how it would be in the States, I’ve been gone too long. The music is great and so are the clothes and you could kick some ass politically and socially. You just need to organize yourself properly and get affiliated with the right group of people and you don’t have to do drugs, that’s the best part. Maybe I am wearing rose colored glasses.

Right then, I suppose I will save some of this post to be written for tomorrow morning or the wee hours of the night. See you then.

Teabags number 2

The middle of the night. You people who have sent me a silly poem through the comments box, and you know who you are, please pick up the You Make Me Smile Award. Here it is for your
convenience, Maggie May and Frances:

Nothing spectacular happened yesterday, even though it was Ascension Day and we might have expected something supreme of nature. As a matter of fact, I am kind of disappointed that nothing did, although I am sure that somewhere in the world something significant happened. I don’t know, because I didn’t watch the news or read the paper at all. Let me check the BBC News.

“At least 35 people are killed in a double suicide bomb attack on a town in the northern Iraqi province of Diyala.”

“George W Bush offers $770m (£390m) in new international food aid to help ease the effects of surging food prices.”

“The US military confirms it carried out a pre-dawn missile strike in Somalia which killed a senior Islamist militant.”

Well, those are far from my bed stories, aren’t they? I am certainly not going to lie awake worrying about those things, am I? Those are just the ordinary every day things we always hear about in the news, very abstract words about almost unreal events. What do they mean? What does it have to do with me? Well, I may care about the surging food prices, but my government subsidizes all the farmers in my country, so I guess it won’t be all that bad, will it?

Just some thoughts to wrap your mind around and a reminder to me that I need to read the BBC news more often. I used to read them every day before I started blogging so extensively and I was a well informed citizen of this world, but I guess you can’t be all things to all people, mostly not to yourself, so you do make your choices. It’s easier and more pleasant to be wrapped up in your own little world and all the things that exist in it, and to save your world awareness for that half an hour of news at night on the TV, which is really not sufficient, because it should be at least one hour to cover the news of the world properly, and you live in such a little country as it is, and how much significant news can it produce?

Motorcycle Helmet

Today I am seeing the physiotherapist for the first time and I am very curious. I hope I don’t have to take of too many of my clothes, because I don’t like my body too naked. I like the disguise of clothes.

We have to take Jesker to the vet to see if his knees have improved much, which we think they have, because he hops and jumps around, and to have a sore looked at on his paw. We will get more medication for his osteoarthritis, because it is benefiting him so much and I would like to keep him on the low dose of pain medication, because he is getting around so well.

The other day when we were in town, we met a gentleman with an American cocker spaniel that was a year old and a real enthusiastic dog. She was smaller than Jesker who is an English one, but we liked this one too. The man said that his other cocker spaniel had died when he was 12 years old and that made us kind of sad, because Jesker is going to be 11 years old this month. Knock on wood, so far so good. I can’t imagine life without Jesker in it, but we would go to the humane society and look for another dog right away.

No, you can’t go out and get a new son. You cherish the other child that you also have.

Do you also find it hardest to show how much you love the people you do? As if there is a barrier that prevents you from throwing all caution to the wind and that doesn’t allow you to freely show them that you are crazy about them and would give your life for them? That you absolutely adore them with all your heart and being? Since the start of my illnesses I find that the hardest thing to do and I count the start back to the day my mother died, because that is when I really became full out sick and the absolute day was when I left my ex husband and my kids and set off on my own with my own deeply muddled mind.

Anyway, it is as if you cross a barrier and someone has told you that from this boundary on, you are not allowed to show the people you love most, how much you love them with all the abundance that you feel in your heart. You have given up that right and handed over your papers giving you the privilege. God’s wrath will be your punishment.

I love silently and do not give many outward signs of it, which makes me look aloof and cold, when in truth I care very much. I am so self contained and withdrawn that other people have to come to me and shake the love free from me. If they don’t, it won’t come out. I am almost autistic in this. I would have made a great protestant Calvinist. All of my words of love to God and none of affection to my fellow man.

There is something I wish for and that is the freedom to show my love freely and with abundance. To not be so captured and chained in these emotional confines. I suppose I need a falling star or something to wish on real soon. Can someone arrange that for me?

Well, this is turning into a long post so I guess I will knit an end to it now, as we say here. It certainly has been most contemplative. Sometimes you travel deep into your mind like that.

Have a funky, unfrazzled Friday. It’s almost weekend, which is a mixed blessing, if you know what I mean.

Signed,

Irene the Brave.

Ciao…

Market Stall Hair Sprays.

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Terrifically Tumultuous Tuesday.

Monday afternoon 4:15 PM. Eduard and I were brainstorming this afternoon about how to prevent another ultradian rapid cycle and of course our minds quickly turned to the sign that Eduard had made for me last year. The one that said, “Take a pill and go to sleep!” It was not just for fun that he had made that sign, as I was having troubles similar to the ones I was having now. I said, “But Eduard, If I go to sleep, that will mean that I get to spend so little time with you, because you have to work tonight!” Well, his solution was to go to sleep along side me and then we would still be together.

So at 2 PM, I took an extra pill and a glass of hot milk and in the shortest amount of time I was asleep and I slept for two hours, very deeply, and I feel amazingly refreshed now and well rested and not all that stressed. So you see, there was a good reason for that sign still laying on its place on the coffee table, even though I was ignoring it most of the time and just dusted around it or gave it a good wipe every now and then. It had become so much part of the things that decorated the coffee table that I had stopped paying attention to it.

I will now take a nap every afternoon, come rain or shine, come hell or high water, even if I have to turn off the phone, especially then. Anything is better than going through the ultradian rapid cycling and I must break the pattern of it. I don’t get enough sleep as it is, so this is a perfect solution.

Time for some art in celebration of that:

I hope that this is the solution, but with my feeble minded memory, I seem to remember that last year it was, so it is worth every effort. I must give it a go, because tomorrow morning I am seeing my SPN and I want to tell her I booked a little success at least. As it is, I have enough negative things to tell her and where to start?

I have deleted my psychiatrists home phone number and mobile phone number from my phone’s memory, so I will never be tempted to call him after hours and have him get exasperated and impatient with me like he did the other day. It’s better just to go the regular route like all mental patients do and call the 24 hour hot line and have me deal with the professionals there. They are knowledgeable and as well informed as my psychiatrist is and not short of patience because I am calling at an inconvenient time. The last time I talked to him, I hung up on him, so you can imagine what our relationship is like now. It was either that, or start calling him terrible names while I was in the middle of an ultradian rapid cycle.

Time for some more art:

I find that adding the art takes care of whatever stress I am feeling at the moment. They are just little points of stress, but bothersome anyway. Like flies buzzing around your head that you have to keep swatting at.

I am staying home tonight and will probably go to bed early. I am not going to the filmhouse and be a fixture on the barstool at the end of the bar in the café. I figure someone else can do that for me tonight and maybe some other nights as well. It’s time to let go of things and people and not hold on so tight. I have to learn to relax. I have to sleep more. I have to close my eyes and just go to sleep more…

Monday evening 7 PM. Eduard has gone to work and I am trying not to be sad about that. Of course, if it was op to me, he would not go to work at all, but spend all his time with me, just talking to me and holding me and cuddling with me. I suppose you could say that I need a large amount of attention and love. I am like an insatiable man in the desert, who has not had anything to drink for days. I know it is not quite healthy to feel this amount of longing for love, but it is sort of like pining away for your loved one when you are first in love. You remember that feeling.

There is an incredibly stupid program on TV called Lingo and only rather stupid people are allowed to be on it as contestants. I am using it as background noise. The public hollers and screams every time a word has been guessed or the right ball has been fished out of the container. A descendant of Freud, a psychiatrist herself, said that there was a vulgarization of society taking place. I very strongly suspect she is right. Everything is reduced down to the lowest common denominator.

Toby just came walking in with a dead bird. Its body was still limp and one of its feet was missing. It was a sparrow. Poor thing, I didn’t know Toby was such a good hunter. I took it away from him. No need to have a torn up bird all over the livingroom. I am not squeamish but practical.

I like making these incomplete images, so I am going to make another one.

I am going to make myself a mug of decaf Senseo and watch a boring medical program on bloody injuries at the first aid clinic. Yippee! My thrilling life by Bitter sweet chocolate Irene, I must come up with a better name like that!

Tuesday morning 4 AM. I had a wonderful night’s sleep, although I did get up at 11 PM thinking I should work on this blog, because that is when Eduard came home and he woke me up inadvertently. I can be so stubborn then and think I ought to be up and about, when it is so obvious that I belong in bed sleeping, but there is one of us born every minute and the world is filled w
ith people like me who are stubborn and fool hearty.

Well, I am truly done sleeping now, I am sure of it and I can sit here with my Senseo and not have the mug slip from my fumbling feeble fingers. Try to say that ten times really fast! And my cigarettes! Oh, my God! They taste so divine! Sincerely sensuous soothingly smelling cigarettes. All of you ex-smokers are shaking your head now and thinking, “Who are you kidding girl? Those are cancer sticks you are smoking!” and I look at all of you meat eating omnivores and shake my head also, so we are even. I specifically didn’t say carnivores!

This morning at 9:30 I have my appointment with my SPN and I can’t wait to see her and inform her about the sleep therapy. It worked again yesterday evening when I was sitting here by myself feeling my mood shift and off to bed I went, after I had taken all of my medications. It was only 8:30 and I was sound asleep in no time, trying to read a book about a new sort of psychology, but getting nowhere fast, because I am not absorbing what I am reading. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t! When you do, it is hard to concentrate on what you read.

Don’t you just love how I drop everything and go to Paintshop Pro and make a new image to post here? It breaks my train of thought and I don’t know what my limit is on how many images I can place in one post. I suppose it depends on the size of them and I always make the original image the smallest size they can be. The lighting and the colors are still a bit tricky, but I am getting the hang of it a little bit. There is also the angle of the light to consider and the intensity of the light. Sometimes it is just the way I want it and sometimes it comes close. I must experiment more with the mirroring effect. Oh, so much to do and so little time!

Anyway, as I was saying, in the morning my mood is always excellent. I am always feeling that life is still full of promise and that all is safe and well. The big bad world is still outside the dark windows. Birds sing their early morning song, little aware that they are prey for our cats, who need collars with bells on them, even though Eduard doesn’t like them for some reason. Nouri will go crazy if you try to put a collar on her, but the other two tolerate them fine. So, coming up , 2 collars with bells on them.

Well, I suppose I’ll go read some blogs now that I still have the time and the energy, and take my pills, for goodness sake.

Have a terrifically tumultuous Tuesday without any tedious tasks in them. Tedious tasks such as fighting dragons and rescuing damsels. We did that last week. Time for new challenges.

Ciao…

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Unfinished Hofleverancier.

It is so gosh darn early in the night that I can’t for the life of me call it the wee hours of the morning yet, try as I may, it’s just not going to work. Over in the Sates, people are still living up a storm and aren’t anywhere near going to bed and are probably full of life doing a hundred myriad things, such as fixing dinner or looking at the clock to see if it is time to go home yet. Over there, it is still yesterday, because it is hardly today here.

I will start by giving you the photograph of the poster that Eduard framed for me yesterday. It is 60 x 90 cm and it hangs in a frame without a frame around it, if you know what I mean. He had to cut it down to size just a wee bit, but you can hardly tell and I am quite pleased with the outcome. I hangs on the wall opposite the bed, so we can look at it all the time.

It is now my purpose to start collecting movie posters that have romantic titles like this in French or Italian or German, any language but English, that would make it too easy. It really has to hit my guts when I see it. Really speak to me, sort to say. They have to be about love, because love is the main ingredient of my life, it is what I live on. I would starve without it or become an alcoholic and look for love in all the wrong places. Yes, again a title of a song.

I did mention that I was a cynic once didn’t I? I suppose I am not yet a cynic about love, although I can be about other people’s love and romance. I can see the silliness of it then, but not when it concerns me. I am dead serious about my own love and my own feelings of romance. I have very deep feelings of love and lust for my husband and romance about him to. I can get turned on by him at the most inopportune moments. Like in a café full of people who are all drinking and talking at the top of their voices and I see him there mingling amongst the people.

I suppose that’s a pretty healthy attitude to have after you’ve been married nearly fifteen years.

Here is another photograph I want to share with you. I was recently discovered as smiling as mysteriously as the Mona Lisa and I was hung up at a museum. It seems I am quite an attraction there.

This is at the MOMA, so you’ll have to travel there to see me, although you can also come to my house and see me, whichever is the cheaper trip for you, but we don’t have a spare bedroom, so you’ll have to stay at the Crown Plaza downtown. Besides, we smoke and you don’t want to inhale our tobacco fumes, do you? Especially not if you are one of those clean living Americans who are so conscious about air pollution.

Actually, you can do all these fun things here at Dumpr.net

I fooled around with a photograph of some graffiti and came up with these things:

You see what happens when you let a woman loose with a computer in the middle of the night! Give her some interesting websites to visit and she’ll bombard you with stuff you’ve always wanted to see, but didn’t know where to look for.

Here is an image that is halfway through the process of becoming a kaleidoscope, I thought it was so pretty the way it was and as a kaleidoscope, it didn’t look like anything at all; I was very unhappy with it, so I give you this instead. I don’t know what to call it, except unfinished.

Okay, okay, I am giving you a lot of images and not enough text, I hear you.

Mean Moody Middle Aged Mom has given me two Awards and invited me to a cappuccino and a biscuit. The awards are the I’ve Got a Friend in You Award and the You Cheer me Up Award. Unfortunately, or not, it depends on how you look at it, I already have these, but now I can hand these out to some other people. And by the way, the cappuccinos and biscuits were delicious, so thanks Mean Mom. She sure is a nice woman for being such a mean mom. Reputations these days are worth nothing!

I give both the awards to the following people:

1. Andrea
2. Crystal Jigsaw
3. Aims (in spite of her subject matter right now)
4. Frances
5. John Mora
6. Connie Rose
7. Mya
8. Omega Mum
9. Maureen
10. Juliana

Oh yes, I suppose you want to see what the awards look like so you can pick them up. Ha, ha, silly me, I nearly forgot. These two are for all of you:

Yesterday afternoon, Eduard and I put clean sheets on the bed and then proceeded to put them to good use right away by climbing into the bed. The dog has gotten so used to this, that he just sighs very deeply and goes to sleep on his pillow beside the bed and completely gives up on us. You could say that he has a good bedside manner. The cats get slightly disturbed, because they like to lie on the bed and we thrash about too much to all
ow it. Oh well, you are only young and crazy once, before you know it we will be needing walking aids and support hose.

I don’t know if I am actually hypo manic, because the medications I am taking are working so well that it is hard to tell. I am much more interested in doing things and I am very interested in clothes and make up right now. I would like to go into town every day and spend money, which we don’t have, but I would gladly shoplift if I knew I could get away with it, that is how greedy I feel. Everywhere I go, I see things I want to have, I need to have, I must have. I would have no guilty conscious right now and I think that says a lot about my state of mind.

I am hoping to find a bundle of drug money and I would not take it to the police, but spend it all on myself. Eduard is more honest and is waiting to win the lottery. I am thinking more of robbing banks. Very compassionless. I’d take the loot and make a clean run for it, without killing anyone, of course. I think I have no scruples when it comes to money when I am hypo manic.

Maybe I can sell some books and get a little bit of money that way. It’s been a source of income in the past and I’ve used it when I needed a bit of money to go buy something on sale. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Well, I think I’ve given you enough text to go with all of the images now. It is actually in the wee hours of the morning and I will get dressed and made up and pretend I have some place I absolutely have to go. Maybe something very exciting will happen today! I must be prepared for anything at all and be ready to do battle with windmills like Don Quichot. Eduard can be my Sancho Panza. My bike will be my trusty Rocinante and off to battle we go.

Yes, dream on, Irene, foolish women like you make the world an interesting place to hang out in. Maybe some day someone will write a novel about you, a fictionalized biography called “Chasing after Pipe Dreams.”

You all have a Sensational Saturday with lots of sensible and sensual activities, you must mix one with the other to stay a healthy person. I for one, am off to take my medicines and see if I will become more “normal.”

Ciao…

P.S. If you are the least bit nostalgic and you want to hear a nice bit of music, turn off the Sonific Songspot and go here.

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On love.

There comes a time, when I have been up for a while in the wee hours of the morning, that I start to feel that it is time to take my medication. I start to feel weary and sad and a fist starts to squeeze around my heart and takes my breath away. I know that if I pay attention to what is going on with me then, because it sneaks up on me slowly, and I take my medicines, I will start feeling better after about half an hour and suddenly I feel the weight drop off my shoulders and I can think straight again without the feeling of doom hovering over me.

You would think it is a simple thing to remember that it may be time to take your medication, but because it is such a subconscious feeling when it starts, you almost are not aware of it right away and it is just a nagging unpleasantness that creeps up on you like a slowly moving high tide. Suddenly you are almost under water and drowning and then you better move fast before it is too late. The two medications that work quickly are the oxazepam and the risperdal. Very soon after I take them I feel a great deal of relief and I feel the tension dropping off me.

I wonder if that is why I so often dream that I am smoking dope and feel very good when I do. A feeling of total bliss comes over me when I dream like that. It must be all those little chemicals moving around in my brain while I sleep.

I have to tell you something that came to me when I sat in my hospital room and stopped crying and a complete sense of calm came over me, and that was this thought: I can not divorce my husband. It would be like having one half of my body torn off without anesthetics by two powerful Clydesdale horses and not dying because of it, but forever writhing in the pain of it.

I have to find another solution to the problem that is my marriage, but I do not want to give up the life that I have with my husband, who is also my best partner and my best friend and my best confidant. He is my soul mate and the other half of me and I can’t live without him any more than I can live without air to breathe and water to drink and bread to eat. He is me in the male definition and I don’t hate him and I don’t dislike him, although I hate his actions and I dislike his deeds. But I love him dearly and I want to grow old with him and I have no other picture in my head but that one.

I think we need a lot of counseling and possibly there are not going to be any easy answers and there may not be any perfect solutions. I don’t have any right now. I can only state some facts and desires and a total and absolute declaration of love. That is in my heart and it can’t be cut out with a scalpel, because the patient will die. Eduard was my first love and I want him to be my last love. And my everlasting love.

And I will take a licking and keep on ticking. Isn’t that how the commercial goes?

Lest we all forget, he is not the most beautiful man in the world, but he does have the most kind eyes and that is why I am posting his picture, so you will see this man that my heart wants to belong to. It is he who used to be my knight in shining armor come to rescue me, but I am no longer a damsel in distress. I am the lady of the castle who wishes the lord of the manor by her side as an equal partner.

We are the odd couple together. The two people who make a parody of life and who laugh and are silly about the same things. Who are cynical about politicians and who scorn articles in the newspaper. We are bread and butter and Mutt and Jeff. We are the Best Couple in Maastricht, give or take one or two. We can finish each other’s sentences and thoughts and are compatible in all things. We belong!

Okay, I am a sentimental fool. Shoot me for that. At least I am not quoting Pablo Neruda’s poetry here.

Have yourself a Sensational Saturday, a Singing Songs Saturday, a Sensible Saturday if you must. Don’t forget to tell the person you love how much you do!

Ciao…

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Wonderful Wednesday?

The possibility exists that in the foreseeable future I will be a divorced woman. When I first realized this, I was very devastated and I thought it was the absolute worst thing that had ever happened to me. Worse than the murder of my mother and worse than the death of my son, but now that I’ve grown somewhat used to the idea, I realize that I will be okay, although it is not the outcome that I want and not the outcome that I would have wished for.

You see, I love my husband very much and I thought I would be spending my dying days with him, but now it is possible that I may not and the thought needs to grow on me and I need to get used to the idea. The wine is again giving me Dutch courage, but I am waiting for a prescription from my psychiatrist for a stronger tranquilizer that will prevent me from falling apart and going to pieces completely. Don’t tell me there is no courage to be found in wine! If I drink it at a steady rate, I find just enough courage for me to be able to say that I am doing just fine, thank you.

We saw my SPN this morning and she encouraged Eduard to be completely honest and say the things that needed to be said and not the things that he thought I wanted to hear. Well, he certainly took her up on that. And you know what I did? I physically attacked him! I beat him with my fists and called him names and the SPN had to interfere and call me to order. The side of my hand and my pinkie still hurt. All my anger came out in a huge rage. Well, really! Such anger and hurt came out and why oh why do you think it did?

Well, it is Tuesday afternoon 12:45 pm now and I am completely calmed down. I talked to both my sisters and it is actually my older sister who gave me the best advice. She of the calm and sensible attitude, who doesn’t let herself be swept away by emotions. I told her every time I am, I will call her and if that was okay with her and she said, of course! It is good to have sisters to talk to, especially the kind that keep their heads on straight when drama is happening.

Eduard is at work now, but will be home at 3 pm. He wants to talk and I am ready. I am as cool as a cucumber. I cried all the way home from the therapist’s office. I didn’t care who saw me, I had a pocket full of tissues and bawled my eyes out. Tears ran down my face and dropped on the asphalt. I nearly got run down by traffic, because I was senseless off. I didn’t care.

Jesker was very upset when I came home crying. He didn’t know what to make of it and I gave him a treat and he very quietly went off to eat it, but then he kept looking at me as though he knew something was wrong. I said, “It’s you and me and the cats, kid.”

Well, that’s all I’ve got to say for now. This will be a running commentary. I will add more to this later. When I have hopefully had my tranquilizers. A little ciao for now…

It is now Wednesday morning and I have just gotten up. I am stone sober and have not had a drink since 1:30 pm yesterday afternoon. Instead of giving me a new tranquilizer, my psychiatrist has tripled the amount I was already taken and I can quadruple the dose if I want to and feel the need to. So far, it is helping me a lot and I feel a lot calmer. It is also helping me sleep a lot better, which I am always very grateful for. I fell asleep very early yesterday evening and was out like a light in no time at all without me remembering reading my book even.

Eduard has one of his first appointments with my psychiatrist for his own benefit this afternoon. Hopefully, a lot of good will come out of these talks and Eduard will be able to get everything straightened out in his head that he is now concerned about. I can’t discuss what is happening with Eduard and his feelings too much here as this is my blog about my feelings and I don’t want to expose him and his feelings and thoughts, unless he specifically tells me I can.

We did spent some real quality time together yesterday, so it is not as if we are only spending time in strive with each other. I, for one, have a great need to feel his nearness and hear his words and be hugged and comforted by him. You must remember, that in spite of everything, he is my best friend and my lover. At times I feel great anger, but I also feel great love. Eduard is the love of my life, in spite of the fact that I have been badly hurt by him.

We will see what I normally call wonderful Wednesday will bring us. I am hoping for peace and serenity and lots of positive things, but you never know. Life is fickle and continues to throw you curve balls. I need to get good at catching those, let alone hitting them out of the ballpark. I suppose I will equate life to a baseball game and I am at bat and I need not to be struck out and try and make it to first base. That will be where my sanity lies then. And that is how I will go around the bases until I get to home base. It may be a long game, or it may be over quickly, we will see. I am all of my runners and all of the people at bat and Eduard is throwing me the curve balls.

It seems the winter weather is finally leaving us. A few days ago, it actually snowed just a little bit and it hailed, but all day yesterday the sun was out and it wasn’t very cold out. The weatherman says that the temperatures will be slowly rising and before you know it, we will be able to go out in our summer jackets. That is, if I still have one. I will have to look on the coat rack and see what is still there. I think everything I had was too big and I had gotten rid of it, so I may have to go out and buy something new. Woe is me!

Miss Understood was so kind as to give me the Attitude With A Gratitude Award back yesterday in her comment, so I am adding that to my sidebar today. So thank you, Miss Understood! I appreciate the gesture. It is nice to get back something you have stolen and have been handing out so freely, but Cath from Crazy Cath’s Reflections says it would have come our way anyway, I should have just been patient. So Cath, maybe you can make it official yet.

I think that on Friday, Eduard and I will go downtown and I want to go to the chapel and light a tall candle and have a word with my Higher Being. It has been awhile and I think we must have ourselves a bit of communication to retrieve some of our old feelings that we shared last year. I need to get across that I appreciate the Good and learn my lessons from the Lesser Good, if that is at all the purpose of them, I don’t know, because the ways of the Higher Being are a mystery to me. I don’t believe in Punishment, I do believe in Lessons Learned and not repeating them in the future. If I must go on the road less traveled, I need some guidance along the way and I am hoping to find it in the chapel by the beautiful statue of Maria and the Child, whom I always see as the personification of Mother Earth.

Right, those are my words for today. Courage I must have above all other things, and serenity.

In spite of all things, I wish you a wonderful Wednesday, in which you find many things to be grateful for and which will be a day to remember as being an especially good day.

Ciao…

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Love.

Love means that from this day forward, I don’t cast huge long and dark doubts like sharp shadows on what my husband tells me. I don’t suspect every word and every deed as being something else than what it really is, a perfect reflection of itself and not a some twisted and altered version that is trying to disguise a hidden truth. It means that I see what I see, I hear what I hear and I interpret it in the most positive sense that I can and as it is meant to be perceived.

Love means I have to do that, because anything else will render me immobilized by fear and suspicion and insecurity. This will make me the jailer of my husband and his life and the capturer of his every move and thought and it is a task that is too exacting and exhausting and distrustful for me to want to take on.

Love means I have to trust again and I have to be willing to stick my neck out and be ready for the blade of the guillotine, even if it never comes. I have to be ready for that moment and trust anyway that it will not.

Love means that you assume everything has a quantity of sureness that it doesn’t and a quality of purity that it can’t possess, because we are human and we are prone to failure and repeated mistakes and promises that we make when we feel most sincere, but that we forget when we are most sincere about something else.

I will not forget intense sadness. How can you forget that, when it starts seeping through your veins at a boiling point, to emerge as a large quantity of salty tears and overwrought words? That is pure expressionism, it isn’t pretty. It is pain in mixed primary colors and lots of black.

But there you have it, that awful and unavoidable emotion called love. The one that is colored red for passion. The one emotion that can break your heart and tear your soul to a shredded state. It is a puzzlement, isn’t it? It is life and death together.

There are so many hurts I could tell you about, but I will not. They are not pretty things and show the main characters of the tragedy in a bad daylight. It will expose them as con artists who tried to pull the wool over people’s eyes, but didn’t succeed. Oh, that sounds so harsh and bitter.

So, let me tell you about bitterness. It is full of cynicism and bad taste and fed by jealousy. The green eyed monster that also dwells in me. Yes, everything has a color, besides the blues. The green eyed monster lives beside the color red and is fed by it through a very short lifeline, like an umbilical cord and it, in turn, gives life to bitterness when called upon to react too many times.

Let me be full of wisdom and have this all figured out intellectually and see what I do with this knowledge. Let me be as sage as a philosopher and find my comprehension inside my own head through my own reasoning powers. Maybe there is even a book written about it, a sage book about love and life. I will order it.

Well, love you know, it is a funny thing and I don’t know if we intent to set out and fall into it on purpose. Sometimes I think we do. We just convince ourselves that we must. It is a temporary state of insanity, which can turn into a permanent condition. Save Our Souls, is all I can say.

Ciao…

P.S. On the Sonific Song Spot you can push the button with the double arrow for the next song.

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Grief and more.

Let me add an explanation to this photograph and not have it stand so dramatically by itself.

I have come to find out that my husband’s involvement with the other woman is of a much longer duration and deeper intensity than I originally thought and I am quite devastated by this knowledge.

I am trying to keep my reaction to this knowledge within bounds and not become overly emotional, therefor I feel a lot of pain deep within my heart and therefor the grief that I feel but can’t properly show, except through this photograph and the title of this post.

I don’t want to shed too many bitter tears. I don’t want to utter too many angry words. I feel a great need to reestablish the very strong bond that I have with my husband and that has always been there throughout the years of our marriage. The bond of love and friendship.

Trust has been broken. Naivety is gone. Unreservedness is out the window. It will take a very long time to retrieve all those things, if ever.

If we stay together, I feel that I will love and trust conditionally and I don’t know if I can live with that. It is very difficult to live with insecurity for the rest of your life.

I have declared my love to him, so he need not doubt that. He has declared his love to me and that makes it all so confusing.

We are mere human beings with our limited capacities of doing the right thing. Yet, because we are human beings, we have the capacity to rise above ourselves and do the heroic thing.

I pray to God that we come out of this somehow unscathed and wiser and more whole and complete, but I know only time will tell.

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