Twitter.

On a whim I’ve signed up with Twitter, because I read about someone else doing it. The problem is that I don’t personally know of anyone else who is signed up also, so it is kind of lonely out there. If you want to sign up and you are looking for me, my user name is ‘brightandsunny’. You know how impulsive I get and how I always want to try something new and hope that I will get some sort of thrill out of it. You didn’t know that about me maybe? That I am secretly a thrill seeker? In the very small sense of the word, of course. i only do it if the outcome is safe. That’s something I have learned as i’ve gotten older, to not take the really big risks.

Something is going on with my mood and it has been happening since Wednesday morning. I feel a decided slant of disagreeability sneaking in. I feel like arguing and there is an amount of negativity in there also. I am not so thrilled anymore with things and maybe that is why I joined Twitter, but who knows? I am negative about things that I was positive about before and doubtful about things I was sure of before and the thing is, that I know that I am not having a change of mind, but a change of mood and I have to be careful not to confuse the two and I have to not make any important decisions when my mood is negative like this, that’s the main thing to remember.

I think I am getting a bit dysphoric, meaning: a state of dissatisfaction, anxiety, restlessness, or fidgeting.

You will remember that I have had these sort of moods in the past, though I must emphasize that the restlessnes and fidgeting play no role here at all and the anxiety is at a minimum. I am just disagreeable to the point of being rude. I feel like being rude and disagreeable and not giving a damn.  Like that is perfectly okay. Can you think of a better place to exhibit such behavior than on the Internet? Instantaneous gratification.

I have not heard anything from my daughetr yet, but assume that all is well. She had told me that if possible, she would get hold of her father, who lives in Oregon, but it turns out that I don’t have the correct phone numbers for him. So I am going to call her again later today, although I have not much hope of getting hold of her. I wil watch the live broadcast again later this afternoon, even though it is pretty meaningless and doesn’t help me a lot personally. It does give me a general idea of how things are there.

The sun is shining today, but it is very deceptive, because it is cold outside and fall has really begun now. I were a sweater under my jeans jacket and I am postponing wearing my wintercoat, which is not much thicker. I may have to invest in a warmer winter coat with good pockets for all the stuff I always carry with me. House and bike keys, kleenexes, poop baggies, odd change, mobile phone, my wallet if it will fit. I’d like to go through life without a purse, if at all possible, but sometimes I don’t manage that. My purse always slides off my shoulder and I feel like such an old lady clutching it in my hands.

There must have been some mix up somewhere and I got an invitation from the center for work and income to apply for a job as hostess at a healthclub answering phones, receiving customers, serving drinks, and answering questions about memberships. I am sure they were thinking of the wrong person and, besides, I am not to apply for any kind of job until January, when I enter into some sort of program to get back into the labor force after having been out of it for a very long time and also with special aid as a psychiatric patient entering the labor force again. I emailed back stating as much and have not heard anything since then.

When In Babylon, do not act like the Babylonians and do confusing and irrational things.

My dear and most true Überhund is bored and he translates this into meaning that he must want to go out, although it is not time to, but to make his life bearable, I will now take him for a short spin around the block, so I will see you in a while.

Well, it turned into a long spin around the blog and I am always secretly proud that the Überhund stays on the narrow sidewalk by the busy street and never wanders into the traffic, even though I don’t shorten his leash. He does know where the sidewalk ends. Also, some gentle tugs and one command from me get him going in the right direction, so he is full of goodwill. I think that tug of war that we had at the beginning, when the Exfactor had just moved out, was won by me.

I am now using the Google reader again to stay updated on the latest blogs, after I had developed a problem with it, which is now solved. It does save you a lot of senseless clicking around. I am going to add some new blogs to my blogroll, I will try and remember to do that after I have finished this. I find blogs of note does not always give you such very good blogs, but sometimes there is something there that is interesting.  I am still waiting to show up there myself one of these days. I am not humble, am I?

I have put a bandage around my arm where I had those two scabs that I kept bothering and even now it’s hard not to mess with them. I want to scratch them when I exchange the bandage, but the little wounds are healing. The Exfactor had an enormous scab on his knee that had to be dissolved with some special plaster, because there was an infection underneath it. I would have had a field day with that one. I don’t know how he could stand not picking it off.

Well, now I am going to try once again to figure out that famous widget of the Black Box that everyone is so lyrical about. I could not get it to work on  WordPress, but maybe there is a way I can do it after all. I am nothing else if not stubborn. WordPress does have it’s limitations, which makes me sometimes long for blogger and I have to give it a long hard think about what I want to do, maybe switch back again?  We”ll see.

Have yourself a good Sunday.

Ciao…

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Precious Sleep!

I spent a large part of the morning sleeping on the sofa with my clothes on, because I had every intention to be fully functional, but after every little job I did I was overcome by tiredness and I just had to go lie down and the minute I did, I was sound asleep and didn’t wake up until an hour later when I would do another little job and repeat the performance. Just now I was sitting behind the computer doing a repetitive job and I was nodding off again, until the Überhund came to warn me that it was time to go for a walk and that cleared the cob webs out of my head, leaving me dying for a cup of coffee and a cigarette and that’s what I am having now.

I wonder how much your desire to sleep, and not being abe to fullfill that desire, influences your mood? I bet it does a lot. I feel chemically imbalanced when I have a shortage of sleep, I literally feel that I am not functioning properly, as if i am a technical appliance that has lose wiring. That is even when I think I have slept enough, but for some reason my body wants more sleep than I am supplying it with.

I think it is the time of year. The changing of the weather and the light and the fluctuation of the season. The leaves are starting to change colors on some of the trees. It is a season of hesitation.

I had to interrupt this briefly, because the Überhund let me know he had to go out again and he was right, he did have to go out again, he had a big message to do, as we say here. Clever dog. I take him out whenever he becomes very insistent, because I know he means serious business then and the patio won’t do. I don’t mind, it is a nice little extra walk around the block for me and the Überhund knows he can rely on me to listen to him.

Oh lord, I am yawning something awful and I do have to last the rest of the evening. It’s not supposed to be bedtime yet. I am going to make it a point to stay up for the 8 o’clock news at least, I should be able to last that long. Maybe some food will wake me up. I try to think of very exciting things to eat, but at this stage of the ballgame there is not much exciting left. I did buy two cartons of very good juice and I have been enjoying drinking that cold from the refrigerator and it is ever so thirst quenching.

I try to make my eating life as interesting as I can, but sometimes it’s a puzzlement. I’m not supposed to eat foods high in calories, so i really shouldn’t eat those puddings I like so much and that go down so easy. Yogurt and curd are good, but I try not to buy them too often, because of the temptation factor of eating too much of them. Ice cold milk from the fridge is very good. I love to drink that. I haven’t had a piece of cheese in ages. I hardly know what an apple tastes like or a pear.

I just gave the Überhund his second bowl of food for the day and he ate it all. This is unheard of. He used to barely finish what I gave him before and only very reluctantly. Just now he barked for a while to make sure some cats showed up that would show some interest in his food. Then he chased them away by growling very hard at them and then he ate his food. He is nothing if not a clever dog.

I am wearing my size 44 tunic. This is the first sized 44 top that I have bought, I have bought sized 44 jeans, but this is the first top in this size that i have bought. This makes me very hopeful. Size 46 is now just a bit to big on me. The black cardigan came today and it is a size 46 and it is a little big, but that will be good for this winter when I will be layering it. I have to get used to seeing my contours and realize that’s not a bad thing. I see women that are really fat wearing tight fitting clothes that are very unflattering and I don’t want to look like that. I think you should always wear the clothes that most flatter your figure. And decorate, I’m a great believer in decorating.

Tomorrow I am getting my hair cut a little bit, nothing drastic, just to get it back in it’s most flattering shape again. It’s been 6 weeks since I last had it cut, so it is time. I have been wearing it wild and unruly, as if I have been in a bit of a storm and everybody likes it. Of course, it is carefully styled that way with the help of a good hairspray. I suppose it looks like bedroom hair, but you would not want to run your fingers through it, but then nobody is allowed to. I could poke somebody’s eye out.

The vet is either always flabbergasted or he is flabbergasted by me. He falls al over his own words when he speaks to me, but I have been unable to observe him with other people. We are theeing and thouing eachother, we are not on familiar terms. He doesn’t know my name, as the Überhund is signed up under the Exfactor’s name, who pays for the bills. An intriguing bit of pandemonium. He is not even very handsome, but I enjoy the game.

Okay, that’s the end of this ramble. I am going to make myself something to eat and get ready to watch the news.

Ciao…

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Night session.

It’s in the middle of the night and I shouldn’t be up yet, but I am, and I have to try and wile away the hours until it is morning or until I have reason to go to sleep again. So far, I find myself wide awake and counting the minutes and the clock ticks very slowly when you do.

It used to be, that I was always in a good mood when I woke up in the middle of the night, but this past week, I have been negative and insecure and I am trying to not let that get to me and put some bravuras on anyway and stay optimistic and write a positively tinted post. If I can’t be positive and secure, I can at least act like I am.

I have decided not to have any music on the blog at all. I think it will make for a more tranquil experience and I think most of you don’t need to hear a lot of loud rock while you read these attempts on my part at writing something coherent. It would be difficult to do both, get irritated at the music and read the post at the same time and believe me, what I had picked out is not peaceful music to read a post by. So, out the window with that brilliant idea.

I am also not going to do a slide show of my art work and I will not be posting all the awards I got on my old blog in the side bar. I am going to try and keep the site as uncluttered as possible and not put anything in that is not necessary or especially useful. It was very nice getting all those awards, but I have them stored in a folder in my images file and I can always get to them if for some reason I need to. Vanity, all is vanity.

I think that maybe I felt more secure with all that clutter around me on my old blog. At least it kept everybody occupied and it distracted from the writing itself some. With all those awards around, the proof was in the pudding, wasn’t it? There was the music to keep your mind busy and the slide show to side track you and all the good causes and the adds. Now I am out there quite naked all by myself, with the wish to cover up a bit, but the sense not to.

Let me tell you something. it is difficult to write down your thoughts as they occur to you. You have to censor yourself as you remember what is okay to discuss publicly and what isn’t. Blogging is a very intimate act and you forget all those thousands of people who also come by and have a look. It helps if you aren’t easily embarrassed and if you feel at ease contemplating many subjects, but there are times when I have to hit the brakes and stop myself from writing things down here that just are not discussable on an open platform. You thought my life was an open book, didn’t you? Well, not quite. There are things I don’t disclose.

I have just had a tall glass of nonfat strawberry yogurt and it has quite perked me up. Now what I need is a nice mug of coffee. No, I never drink tea, I like it, but I always dislike the way it is too hot to drink and having to wait for it to cool down. That’s because I don’t take any milk in it and I do in my coffee. Low fat milk, no sugar.

I had to start wearing my eye glasses again. I noticed that, in spite of my reading glasses, I was having a hard time distinguishing a bunch of letters from each other when I sat behind the computer. They all started to look alike. Yesterday I noticed that my far away sight was worse when I walked Jesker. When I got home, I found my glasses and put them on and right away things were better and they are better behind the computer too.

I hadn’t consciously noticed that my eyes had gotten worse, but now I remember them being this way for a while already. Luckily, the glasses correct the problem exactly, only Eduard isn’t sure if he likes me as much with them on. I had to comb my hair a bit differently in order for him to be happy with them. Men! Wouldn’t you just love and adore this face with or without glasses? Ahum…

Bev was worried about me deleting my old blog, because all that writing would be lost, but it isn’t going to be lost at all. I forgot that I took it all with me over here, so I can just delete that old blog when I am ready for it. I just want to make sure that everybody who wants to, has made the move with me and I am hoping to drop some unwanted baggage along the way. That’s why I don’t want to wait too long with deleting my old blog. I check on things every day.

Okay, the image above was made from a digital collage made by John Mora. Here is the original:

That about does it for me for now. I have somehow managed to get through a large portion of the night. I dawdled a bit and drowsed a bit, but now it is almost 4 AM, so that’s not bad. Why, it’s been a genuine pleasure sittin’ here typin’ these here words.

Have a good Sunday, everyone. Aren’t you glad that today is a day of rest? I am, less can go wrong.

Ciao…

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Music.

Well, on this wonderful rainy Saturday afternoon, I think you have all been spared something. To pass away the hours, I have made a new play list over at Deezer’s and this time I have picked out all rock groups. I thought I would do things a bit different this time and show a completely different side of me. It was my intention to destroy the tranquility of my new blog with some of this music, to the great disappointment of some of you, I am sure, but what is a girl to do when she is home all by herself to pass the time of day? Right!

The only problem is, that I lack the capacity to install music on my blog the way it is now without buying more space and in order to buy more space, I need a credit card, which I don’t have. Ah, I hear you all breath a sigh of relief. I could borrow my sister’s credit card, but she is not home and that may give me just enough time to change my mind, because I do want to think about you who have your speakers turned on all the time and who are suddenly going to hear loud rock when you get to my blog.

Anyway, I did have fun looking for and discovering bands that I liked well enough. That was a bit of a journey. One band leads to 4 others and hopefully one or two of those are good and they lead to other bands. Sometimes you end up nowhere and you have to start the process all over again.

Another fun thing I did this afternoon was upload 6 CD’s to the Real Player and download those to a new MP3 player. It has Feist and Björk and Massive Attack etc. Pretty good music for a fun afternoon. Rocking and rolling all by myself, not really wishing for too much rain, really. I’d rather have Eduard in the great outdoors than indoors, if you get my drift. I want him to take me in his arms and kiss me square on the mouth when he gets home. No funny business.

Boy, I was in bad shape during the wee hours of the morning. I was so far gone from the straight and narrow, it wasn’t even a dash on the horizon anymore. I wonder how I get that way, what process takes place to get me there? It’s a mystery to me. I can only imagine some sort of an electrical storm happening in my brain that addles my thinking process and mixes up the proportions of things. The negatives and the positives. I am alright again now, but it took me all morning to get there and two walks with Jesker.

I am wearing my cute lavender dress and I feel extremely feminine in it, in spite of my cute short haircut. I’ve got my make up on and my perfume and a necklace. I think I could be ravished any moment now, although I don’t think it is going to happen while I sit here behind this computer. Well, never mind, god only knows who’d come to ravish me. It’s not going to be some 23 year old with a bare chest and biceps, lovely as that sounds.

Frances is right, whenever I start to talk about God or about the Queen you all need to get suspicious of my words and my mind. It probably means I am on a walkabout in my mind. I am out in the hot desert of my fantasy, out in the bush where I am overcome by what I think I see and not necessarily by what is there. It’s a strange place to be and it takes a while to get back from there.

I am now listening to Limp Bizkit, another group I had heard of before but never really listened to. Very interesting to sit and listen to a whole album courtesy of Deezer. I imagine that this is the kind of music my son would have listened to. I notice that listening to music brings about a change in my mind. In my case it really does seem to soothe me and it doesn’t have to be soothing music. It is all about the steady beat that counts. The rhythm of it that settles me down. It keeps me focused and occupied.

All the cats are inside on the dining table having a good look outside and being generally lazy. It must be easy being a cat and having hardly any responsibilities. You’ve just got to keep yourself clean and stay out of the way of stray cats and stay friends with the cats you live with. I don’t actually know how hard that is. Maybe it is more work than it looks and there are rituals involved that I am unaware of.

I try to make my life as easy as that of a cat’s. I try to be almost as uninvolved as that, but it doesn’t quite work that way. I do try to be almost that independent, but it doesn’t work that well for human beings. Besides, cats are very dependent on us when it comes down to it, but they have an independent attitude and I do like that. They have that aloofness and that remoteness that I like, as if they don’t really need you. In my case looks would deceive. Wouldn’t you like to walk through the world as if you were an untouchable queen? Oh no, there is that word again. Quick, change the subject.

I still have to listen to my new MP3 player and I will do that as soon as I shut off the computer. I like to have the best of both worlds, so when I have the computer on, I listen to my Deezer play list. The only shame is, that you can’t play the list itself randomly, you can only do that when you download the player. You can, however, switch to the next band.

In the meantime, I am drinking decaf Senseo, while I am really longing for a glass of white wine, but I suppose i wont tempt fate and go down that path and upset my delicate constitution, because one glass is okay, but I’ll want more than one glass and be happy to have three of four. Darn! Wish I could drink and get away with it. I have to face up to the fact that with all this medication I am on, it is probably not such a good idea. There must be a reason for the warning on the pamphlet that comes with it.

Well, I think I’ve told you enough things now. I could go on and on talking about insignificant things all afternoon until it is 6 o’clock, but you’d get bored after a while and forget to peel the potatoes for dinner. Right, I suppose i will shut everything down and hook that MP3 player up and listen to those new CD’s.

Have a good rest of the Saturday. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Oh well, is that good advice?

Ciao…

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Early Saturday morning.

Yesterday evening Eduard noticed that I was acting dysphoric and that I had been since the afternoon. I could only think that this was very perceptive of him and do something about my medication.

Actually, there was more that I could think about doing, being dysphoric and all, but that would have been counterproductive. I am still feeling quite contrary, so I am not out of that mood yet, and I see imaginary danger in shadows all around me. I am doubtful and weary and leery. I am suspicious, but I know it is my imagination and not to put too much value on it. A little bit of paranoia goes a long, long way.

Now I am sitting here having odd thoughts through which I swim towards reality. I must ignore the unreasonable and the illogical and come to some sort of rational thought. I think I still know the difference. I may have to take an extra pill.

I must document this process of me trying to emerge from my own irrational thoughts. Swimming in a jar of amoebas, trying to get to the surface and get out of it. It is thick and sludgy and tough going. Emerge I will. Victory will be mine. No, I am not like Nero watching Rome burn down or like Caesar conquering the barbarians.

I have just taken another pill (the kind that melts on your tongue and works quickly) and I have busied myself making cigarettes. I have turned on the kitchen faucet for the cats, but now they are only sitting there staring at it as if it is a great landscape feature like a waterfall. Maybe it works soothing for them, like a babbling brook does for us. They are absolutely hypnotized by it.

It is the coffee and the cigarettes that are giving me some semblance of normalcy. They are pulling me through this, but I think that pill is starting to work, because I am clambering out of that jar of amoebas now. I must get into a most normal as possible state by this afternoon. I can’t be all fragile and unbalanced. It will be unseemly and awkward if I am. Always go for the gold.

Life is a question of priorities, but as your mood changes, so your priorities change. When you are feeling dysphoric, all you want to do is feel as normal as quickly as possible and that means feeling not irritated and not suspicious and not impatient. Those are your only priorities then and you have no other goals or interests but those, unless you are so caught up in the feelings that you are not aware of them, because no one has pointed them out to you, and you are just speeding along in them being a danger to yourself and innocent bystanders.

Every change in mood brings the responsibility of its own set of priorities to straighten out situations as quickly as possible. So, in a way, you are constantly doing damage control and setting new priorities, unless you are between moods and are in a neutral space and have neutral feelings, when priorities seem to present themselves in their own good time at their own slow pace. I know very few people who live in spaces like these, but they do exist and I can hardly take them very seriously, because they have not done battle, but I do envy them their lives.

Of course, nobody is safe from external factors, such as war and natural catastrophes and death. We all have to deal with those things and receive the blows of them. These things don’t discriminate between those of us of complicated minds and those of us of easy minds. Imagine how difficult it must be to receive these blows when you are, for instance, already clinically depressed or hypo manic or dysphoric or psychotic. It is my experience that during such an episode, I can deal with the catastrophe, only to go tumbling down twice as hard afterwards and fall very deeply and stay down very deeply at an almost unreachable place. The catastrophe gets internalized and becomes part of the psyche of the person who was struck and is woven into the fabric of her mind.

The image above is made from a collage by Lisa Sarsfield. Here is the original:

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time sleeping. Every time in the morning I thought I was done, I went to sleep some more on the sofa, until I was well and truly done at noontime and I walked Jesker, but then Eduard came home early in the afternoon and we took another nap together until 4 PM, which was lovely also. I don’t know where all this need for sleep is coming from, but it is most welcome. I get so very grumpy when I need to sleep and ignore it and it feels like my world is falling apart when all I need is sleep. I also feel a great desire to eat when I am tired, so that’s a real big signal. It’s hard to ignore that one.

Our Queen was on a state visit to Estonia. She was traveling by herself, except for all the usual attendants and security people, of course. She is 70 years old and her husband, whom she loved very much, died some years ago. Sometimes the crown prince and his wife accompany her on visits, but often she goes alone and I feel so sorry for her. She always has a cheerful, smiling face and always looks attentive and interested and never seems to tire. She always has to look as if she is in the best of moods and as if she is knowledgeable about every subject, which she probably is, knowing our Queen. She is the best ambassador to our country that we have, but the the cameras show her sitting by herself at the dining table at some state diner and she is all alone and I do feel for her. We think she is going to abdicate in two years time, at least, that is a slip of the tongue she made to the many journalists that follow her.

There, that was just some information about the Queen I threw in. A bit of culture about the Netherlands. Oh, and her name is Beatrix of Orange-Nassau and the crown prince is Willem-Alexander of Orange-Nassau. I think he will be King Willem the IV.

I bet in England, Charles is never going to be made king and William will be crowned king after his grandmother, so you will have a King William there as well.

It has just started to rain like crazy and it is thundering also, so our spell of heat is over. It was fun while it lasted, but I didn’t get out in the sun much. There will be no tanning for me ever again. No extra wrinkles in this delicate skin which is still peachy smooth. Hey, I can’t help it, great skin runs in the family.

Okay, I think I am off to bed again. have a great day.

Ciao…

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Running ahead of myself.

4:00 PM. On the day after the day you say you feel depressed, you will feel better. That’s some sort of a rule that has been confirmed by my SPN this morning. It is the very act of owning up to the mood and allowing yourself to have it and not fight it anymore, that makes you feel better and more able to bear it.

As a result, I have had a very decent day, that I can’t complain about at all, and that I can even look back upon with a certain amount of satisfaction. After I saw my SPN, I went to have cappuccinos with Eduard at his work and from there I went to M&S Fashion, where I bought Capri pants and two tank tops and a necklace. This was after I found a cute little lavender colored dress in my closet this morning that I don’t remember buying, after I also found two other little dresses there last week that I also don’t remember buying.

The theory is that I buy these when I am in a dysphoric mood and very high strung and I don’t consciously store this information in my memory, so it is all a surprise later on. My closet is not very big and the clothes are packed in, so every once in a while I have a good look around and make these discoveries. Now I wonder what else is in there that I don’t know about and I am a little bit afraid to look. I can tell by the labels where it has been bought, but I have no memory of doing so. I wish I would also buy shoes and jewelry this way, because I really need them as well.

So, anyway, I bought a nice pair of Capri pants and I am wearing those now and they are very comfortable. I had forgotten that I have two other pairs, but luckily, these are beige and the others are white and black. The tank tops are green and black. The necklace is adorable and it is a rule that, when I buy several kinds of clothes, I also buy a necklace. I love and adore necklaces. I share this with my younger sister who always wears one too. I feel naked if I don’t wear a necklace and will turn around and go home and put one on if I am going somewhere. Contrary to that, I have been wearing tiny titanium earrings and not those big jangly ones that make my ears irritated and infected, although I like wearing them too. Maybe I will wear those again the next time I get hypo manic, but you can’t plan those things. It has to happen naturally.

My SPN said that I gave the appearance of being very together and very calm and relaxed and, funnily enough, I was. That’s exactly how I was feeling this morning. I felt like a cool, calm, collected adult. That doesn’t happen very often, that I just very calmly sit and give off those vibes. At least not in the office of my SPN. Really, it is the perfect place not to be cool, calm and collected. You’re supposed to show your real feelings there, after all. It felt like a great serenity had settled on me and a lot of clarity also. I think it is a result of yesterday’s confession to myself, that I allowed myself to be in a certain mood and didn’t make a big deal out of it. Hopefully it is a sign of maturity, but it can just be a sign of a certain mood.

I took a nap on the sofa when I came home from downtown and then took another nap in bed after Eduard got home. It was lovely. I am sleeping a lot now and I like it very much. It is all healing sleep, but I don’t want to sleep too much during the day, because it will subtract from any sleep I get at night, but I do very spontaneously fall asleep.

The image above is made from a collage made by John Mora tittled “back.soon.” Here is the original:

Yes, you’ve guessed it, I like John’s art very much and he allows me to use it as a basis for my contraptions. I see that right now I keep repeating one shape, so I must break free of that and get into something else. That happens.

I am listening to Dire Straights right now, which is a bit more cheerful than Leonard Cohen, whom I guess I just don’t get, but I’ve got an Amy Winehouse CD lying ready to be played here. It’s from the library and I had to put a reservation on it. I have to upload it to my Real Player. I haven’t read the news about Amy, but I guess it isn’t good. Something about drugs and beating people up. Poor thing. I suppose fame will do that to you. I suppose my moods would take a run with me if I suddenly were to become famous. I would need a full time therapist.

Speaking of therapists, my SPN is going to be talking to the Personality Disorder Team on my behalf and I will hopefully get a psychiatrist and a therapist appointed to me. The psychiatrist will be there for the medical part and the medication and the therapist for the, well, the therapy. I am a bit nervous about leaving my SPN behind me, because she is very good, but I do think I need the specialized help, because I am so fragile and I just can’t afford many more big slides downward. I can’t afford the drama and the tragedy and the tears and the pain and the sadness.

Well, enough said about that, let’s not waste words on that now. Let’s think of something completely different. Like how to end this epistle. It’s all good and well to sit here and type as if there is no tomorrow, but there is and I need to keep some words in storage for that day too.

I hope you all had a really great day and that all the best of your wishes came true. Listen to me! As if I am your fairy godmother.

Have a good evening, I am going to save Amy now, upload her I mean. Ciao…

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Satisfying but Silly Saturday!

Starry Night

Friday afternoon, 5:30 PM. Well, I have managed to piddle away a whole other day doing all sorts of things and nothing important at all really. In the morning at 7 AM, I lost my Internet connection and was like Captain Hook without his hook. The help desk didn’t open until 8 AM, so I actually had to amuse myself for an entire hour. I did this by trying to fix the problem myself by removing and reattaching several wires, but that didn’t help.

At 8 AM, the man at the help desk started telling me a complicated story about which wires to disconnect and I told him to hold on a minute while I gave him my husband to talk to who is much more technically gifted than I am. They had a bit of a conversation and wires were disconnected and reconnected and after a while, I had Internet again and that was the most important thing of all. Thank goodness for technically savvy husbands!

What I did after that is sort of vague to me. I was supposed to have gone back to bed, but I never did make it there. I did all sorts of other things behind the computer, but I don’t rightly know what they all were anymore, so I claim partial amnesia.

I did pick out a new template, which is the stretch denim, it being a wider template than the other, but then I spent a long time trying to get it to look as much as possible like the old one. Only the banner changed, as you can see, as I have misplaced the large size of the tulip photograph, so have added the metamorphic one instead. Blowing my own horn a bit here too, no doubt.

I have changed the images on my slide show and first had them in the middle of the page, but then didn’t like that and moved them back to the sidebar. At first I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the ones in the middle of the page, but it turned out that you just delete them as you would any old post. Now I have to figure out how to add images to the slide show without going through all sorts of hassle.

Charley Toorop

I was busy like this until Eduard came home and he saw the condition I was in and the apartment and he said that maybe I was spending too much time behind the computer, which I weakly protested, since it is only the last few days that I am so preoccupied and obsessed at the cost of everything else. He does have a point though, but I am not ready to change my manners just yet. I need to be a little obsessed a little while longer.

He did have a surprise for me. A new mobile phone, one that closes so you don’t have to deactivate the keyboard every time you stick it in your pocket and it comes with its own built in tunes. I am learning how to use it as the instructions are in German and English, but one of the languages on the phone is Dutch. See how continental we are? Now I want people to call me, so I can hear the tune I picked out. I’ll call myself in a little while.

Finally, after all that excitement, Eduard and I went to bed for our afternoon nap and I slept at least two hours and it was wonderful. I am sure it was very boring for Eduard, but it can’t be helped. It is therapeutic, after all! We did have a huggable time beforehand.

Now Eduard is cooking paella and the whole apartment smells good. He is making it with shrimp and chicken and I am sure that it will be delicious. I won’t be able to eat the chicken, though. I’ll have to eat around it. Jekser is eyeballing the shrimp, because he loves them. He would eat the whole pound of them if we let him, so we gave him some extra kibbles instead, that is much healthier for him.

Monet 1

Oh yes, I have been doing a lot of experimenting with the metamorphics and I am becoming quite contend with them. I am catching on to the possibilities and how to use them. Slowly by slowly, as Irene always goes.

I have to tell you people, there is a lot of difference if I have enough sleep and take my medicines on time. Whenever I become unreasonable and very down, I have done one of these things not right and I quickly need to remedy the situation. The problem is the point to which I am reasonable enough to realize that. Therefor the sign on the coffee table.

Okay, that’s enough for now. I’ll catch up with you guys later in the night or in the early morning. I am still in my bathrobe. Isn’t that scandalous?

Saturday some time in the night, way too early to call it morning.

Peacock

Sometimes you have to break up your own train of thought with an image, but will it work? (This will not make any sense to you, because before this I had a bit of a rant about something and Blogger will not let me put it in no matter what I tried, so we’ll just forget about that and consider it left unthought and unwritten. The god of the Bloggers didn’t want it out there apparently.)

No, it didn’t, so I very leisurely smoked a cigarette and drank my mug of Senseo and that calmed me down a bit. Pretty soon the oxazepam will start to work and I will be doing a lot better. I will no longer rage like a storm in a glass of water. All confined and unable to get out. Now I must eat soemthing. Hhhmmm…yogurt, because there are no cookies.

That tasted good!

Today is Saturday, so Eduard gets to spend the afternoon on his own however he pleases. It’s his time out from all the responsibilities that rest on his shoulders the rest of the week. It’s his mental health afternoon. He doesn’t have to tell me where he is going or where he has been as long as he is home by 6 PM. His psychiatrist thought that this was very important for him, but I had already agreed to such an arrangement and we have the particulars drawn up in a contract that we both agreed on. That way everything is clear to the both of us and there will be no misunderstandings. Eduard needs to feel that he has this small amount of freedom without care for anybody, including me. I need to feel some amount of control by having drawn up the contract.

I can do all of this, as long as I keep on an even keel and my moods don’t start fluctuating wildly, so it is important that I take care of myself well. I m
ust sleep on time and take my medication on time and extra if I need it. I have to be my own best monitor, nobody else will feel as well as I how I am doing, well, with the exception of Frances maybe! She has the uncanny ability to pick up on my moods very quickly.

Here is one last image, a portrait of myself made unrecognizable.

Have yourself a satisfying but silly Saturday with sumptuous weather and now snow flurries!

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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Le Repos, Picasso.

I’ve just woken up from my morning nap and I have to grab the bull by the horns and write while I am still filled with good feelings and tender hope, as I always am when I just wake up. I can’t write this fast enough and also take sips of my huge mug of coffee and drags of my cigarette, but I must not become neurotic and think I am not going to make it at all and go down with the ship.

Early this morning I visited all of those blogs that I do and tried to leave many witty comments until I ran out of steam and had to go back to bed. It was a lot of fun while it lasted. I read so many blogs now that it takes me hours to get through them and leave comments too, so sometimes I have to do it in shifts, as it is becoming a regular part time job. I would like to get paid by the hour or by the blog, but I don’t see anything that fortunate happening in my future, so I just read them for my enjoyment and for the humor and wisdom that I get out of them. Soon I shall share more of these with you that I have found recently, but today I must rush on and not make any long stops.

I have been raiding my sister’s book case and reading thrillers from her large selection thereof. I never realized that she was such a reader of thrillers, but now she has me completely hooked also. Eduard went over there last night to return some books that I had finished and came back with three very hefty ones by a Swedish author, one of which I have started to read last night. I have decided that I like thrillers very much, while it is usually not a genre that I read, but now they really hold my attention and I find myself turning the pages eagerly, anticipating the final ending and the solution of the case. Such entertainment and suspense if it is well written.

Eduard is also going to the library today to pick up some books by Joyce Carol Oates, as they have several of hers and I can only hope that they are as good as the one that I recently read and enjoyed so much. Writers can be funny and fickle and write something completely different than what you had anticipated and not at all what you wanted. So we will see and hope it is all as wonderful and worthy as the one I read. I feel especially hungry for books right now and I am devouring them while I make myself comfortable many times a day in the bedroom with my coffee and my cigarettes, as I have decided that this is the place I like to be best.

Lest you think that that is all I do, you are almost right, but I do do some small household chores, at least the ones that cause me minimal amounts of stress and are pleasant to do and do not make me feel like a little heap of frustrated human being. I like washing the dishes and I like doing the laundry and I also like taking care of the animals and making sure their dishes are clean and filled. Those are the kind of jobs I can handle easily and that do not cause me to have heart palpitations and break out in a cold sweat. I leave the more complicated stuff for Eduard to do, or it doesn’t happen at all for now and I just don’t care, as there is always a tomorrow and an end to the present situation and we will see where this all ends up.

Rushing on from one subject to the next, while not neglecting my coffee and my cigarettes, I can tell you that visiting blogs in the wee hours of the morning is a very nice thing to do. Some people update their blog every day and those are the most interesting, of course, requiring you to leave comments and having a good think about what you are going to comment about. Depending on the blog, you have to be humorous or serious or caring or compassionate. There are so many kinds of feelings out there and so many kinds of stories and I read them all. I find that I can do this in the middle of the night and not become all befuddled and confused, unless it starts to be breakfast time and I get the sense that the real day is starting, bringing its real issues with it and its real essentials.

Sometimes, when I have the courage, I turn the computer on during the day and check the blogs that I had not got around to during the wee hours of the morning. I find that my attitude is a lot different then and I am not as astute and sharp minded as I am during the night. Daytime befuddles me, no doubt, and makes me a different observer and a different commenter. I am much more careful and guarded and I don’t think I am nearly as funny, which is true, because I don’t feel funny at all during the day. It is only during a few hours in the night that I am anxiety free and I feel that there is no big brown bear sitting on my chest causing me to have difficulties breathing freely.

Woe is me, now my coffee has run out and so have my cigarettes and I feel that I am running out of steam also and my hands are starting to move over the keyboard a bit more slowly, so it is time to stop. I wrote and wrote and then I reached my destination which is wishing you all a good day and many pleasant blogging hours and all the good feelings that come with it. So, ciao…

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Trash Images number 1.

I hate rapid cycling! I absolutely and totally hate it! It happened to me again yesterday afternoon and I will never get used to it and I will never accept that this is part of my life, though I know that I must. Out of the blue, I fell into the pit of deep dark despair and all I could do was wait for my medication to start working and for me to climb out of the pit again. There was nothing I could do, nothing to take my mind off of it, nothing to lessen the impact. I just had to go though it and wait for it to be over.

I can imagine that someone who doesn’t know what is happening to him, will think he is going absolutely crazy and be filled with horror at this sudden switch of mood. I know what is happening to me and yet I suffer. It gets so bad that I have visions of myself committing suicide, even though I know I will not do that, because I know that my state of mind is temporary and that I will feel differently after a certain amount of time has passed. Imagine being stuck in that state of mind and not climbing out of it again. And then, suddenly, it is over and I am “normal” again and I can function and not sit curled up on the sofa waiting for the world to collapse around me.

I am sure that the Oxazepam is helping me a lot, because I am taking quite a hefty dose of it. I don’t feel drugged, though, and I function fine on it, where a month ago that same dose had me asleep on the sofa. That shows you the state of my nerves.

Well, I don’t know what went wrong yesterday. I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary and kept myself strictly to my schedule. I didn’t sleep in the afternoon and maybe that is what went wrong, maybe I needed that sleep, but I was reading a very exciting thriller and couldn’t wait to finish it. I was in bed, but sort of half sitting up with a bunch of pillows behind me and my decaf coffee and cigarettes handy. So it wasn’t really down time.

Every day I am reinventing the wheel. Every day I have to have a talk with myself and set myself straight on a couple of things. Every day day I need to make sure that my head is screwed on right. Every day I have to find the same answers to the same questions, only there are tiny variations in them all the time. Every day I learn each lesson anew. Every day I am brave and some days I am sick and tired of it.

If I must live like a hermit, I will live like a hermit. If I must shelter myself, than I will. I will do whatever it takes not to have rapid mood changes. I don’t want to be hypo manic and I don’t want to be depressed. I just want to be. That’s all.

Well, now that I got that off my chest I suppose you all want something light hearted and amusing, but I don’t know if I have it in me.

All the animals have been by to greet me, but Eduard is still sound asleep. Eduard changed the sheets on the bed last night without letting me know that he was doing that. I was watching TV and not paying attention in the least. I realized he was not in the living room, but I didn’t wonder where he was instead. Then he walked in with a big grin on his face and said that he had changed the bed and he knows how much I like to go to sleep in a clean bed. Isn’t he a peach? I will never give him up, of course. Hoards of women may try and abduct him, but I will fight them tooth and nail until my last breath.

Well, I am keeping it kind of short today. I need to take my medicines now and eat breakfast and go back to bed for some more sleep. I was up very early and I don’t want to upset the schedule too much.

Have yourself a lovely Sunday. Be true to yourself in all that you do. Ciao…

P.S. I can’t find the original photograph, but it was one of trash laying about in the street after open air market day.

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