After more than 10 years on LiveJournal, I'm closing up shop here. The new Russian TOS make me deeply uncomfortable. I hate to leave behind the history, the heart, the community that we had here, but it's time to move on. I'll leave this journal here until my subscription runs out next spring, and then I'll delete this journal for good.

You can find me as scarlettina on Dreamwidth, where I've imported all my entries. See you there, if you care to join me.

Farewell, beloved LiveJournal.

1) I have not seen a movie in far too long, and I'm not sure why, except to say that I haven't been overwhelmed by the choices that theaters are offering me. I've heard really good things about LOGAN which, somehow, surprises me but has made me curious. What would people recommend I see?

2) It's getting toward annual review time at work. I've gotten stuff done this year, but I kind of feel like I've been a pill, too, mainly because I've been frustrated by my lack of movement and the lack of opportunity for same in the organization. I've been sniffing around for making a move of my own, because I don't like getting up in the morning unhappy about my prospects. I don't expect a major raise this year. I'm kind of expecting to get slapped down. Perhaps if I keep my expectations low, I'll be pleasantly surprised. Only time will tell.

3) More than ten years ago, when I left therapy, I promised myself I'd never do it again because I felt like I'd covered the landscape over and over again. Well, I'm back in, and taking a completely different approach. It's been interesting so far, educational. I like the people I'm working with. It's expensive but I'm worth the investment.

4) Creatively, I'm in this weird landscape where I'm in for small projects, not large ones, and even those, I don't feel invested in. I've never been in a headspace like this before, where creativity feels like an essential part of me but doesn't feel accessible right now. Everything feels tentative and effortful. I'm hoping that maybe I can put together some time to do some creative work this weekend.

5) But on the subject of this weekend, this needs to be tax weekend. I want to get it done, and done earlier--much earlier--than I did it last year. Which means creativity may need to take a back seat. :: sigh ::

As you may be aware, in the wake of my illness and another incident, I began to lose my hair at an alarming rate. The second week of January, it looked like the hair loss had stopped. It turns out that I was right. It has stopped. Thank G-d.

So where we're at now is that my hair has started to grow again, and I am seeing, for the first time in years, its actual color. I forget sometimes that my natural hair color is the color of my eyebrows, a glossy black, rather than the rich red-dark brown that I've been coloring it. At this point, that black is highlighted with silver. I'm not completely silver, but rather salt and pepper. And all those silver hairs are shorter than the rest of my hair because, of course, they are new.

Today I had my hair trimmed. The longer hair was looking raggy and thin. The shorter hair was looking just, well, wild. My stylist trimmed the ragginess and shaped the hair a bit so it looks more presentable overall. I didn't color it; I'm concerned about applying chemicals to the newly-active follicles for fear that I'll mess with things. I figure the next time I see her, about six weeks from now, we'll color the hair again, when it's longer and it's been growing for a couple of months. Right now, I just want to rest my hair a bit.

I'm so glad that it looks like this episode is over. I began to cry every time I looked in the mirror. Now I feel so much better.

1) Most of the things I want to write about are probably too private to actually write about here. Which is a problem for me personally because I really want to write about them. This is a display of self-consciousness possibly not previously displayed in this blog. Ever. And that's saying a lot. It's one of the reasons you haven't seen much of me lately. I have entered this weird "I'm not telling you" phase. :: sigh ::

2) I'm deeply unhappy about the new administration in the White House. I suspect this is a surprise to no one. I have been more politically active in the last three weeks than I have been in years. On the one hand, it's been exhilarating. On the other hand, it's been exhausting and disheartening.

3) I have been having such trouble writing the last few months that I'm off of fiction writing for a while. Every time I try to do it, I get about 1,000 words in and stall. It's frustrating, it's painful and I'm woefully self-conscious at the keyboard. There's so much baggage around fiction for me at this point that I feel itchy in my skin trying to write. Poetry is happening a little bit but not enough. So I'm turning my attention to other kinds of creativity for which I have some aptitude: jewelry, coloring (some evidence of which you may have seen here or on Facebook), drawing and painting--things that aren't wrapped up in words. I figure that if one of these takes, maybe the pipes through which fiction flows will loosen up enough for me to try again. Right now, though, not so much.

4) I have been spending a lot of time distracting myself with iPad games. Probably not good for me, but it keeps me from doing other things that are probably a lot more self destructive. I have been playing Fishdom, a match-three game with an aquarium theme that I find addictive and just entertaining enough. I've also been playing Plants vs. Zombies 2, which I find challenging and, occasionally, a little more stressful than I want my light entertainment to be. I'm choosing my play times carefully as a result. I've been thinking that I need to add some kind of adventure game to the mix. Must ask the gaming cohort what they'd recommend. (Hey! Gaming cohort! What do you recommend?)

5) I have tasked myself with trying things I haven't done before. This has resulted in my signing up for some Meet-up groups and joining friends to attend events I haven't been to before. I would like to report on them as I do them, though my writing here has been much more unreliable over the last eight months than ever before, so I won't make promises. Still, it's a project. Also, I'm thinking about one thing I have done before: taking another Earthwatch expedition. More on that depending upon whether or not I actually decide to do it.

I got up and recorded the poem I posted here. I went and had a ridiculously delicious and caloric brunch with friends. We went and bought art supplies. I came home and did some painting, and then I spent the rest of the day napping and coloring. This is one of the two pages I colored. It's in a coloring calendar I purchased for 2017. This is June; I also colored February. It's done in color pencil with gold Sharpie marker highlights (that don't translate well in a photograph). I bought the calendar to remind myself as I color each month that only I can make of the year what it becomes.

Kate's second memorial is today. I won't be attending, for a whole variety of reasons. I wrote this instead.


Kate has gone to sleep
The lasting rest, that silence
present even in a ringing crowd—
a place she’d never choose to be—

But for when she’s weaving
yarn or words or steps
in patterns seen and heard and felt
—the rush of air that brushes by
when swinging round a square—
A rush like time and love and friendship
that lasting rush, sweet dance
Years and breaths and patterns long

Kate has gone to sleep
a place she didn’t choose to be
An empty space, a silence
in a dancing square

She’s still there dancing
in time and love and silence
holding hands and laughing
Quiet smile
and rest

In the service of . . . I don't know, some idea that maybe I could do something beautiful with the words of someone gone, I opened her Live Journal to read it. Her voice is so clear that I can hear it like she's just in the next room, like I could just walk in and start having a conversation with her. I miss her. I miss her laugh. She mentions people that it's hard for me to read about. I'm never mentioned. I know I mattered. Well, I believe I did. I have to believe I did. Maybe I was fooling myself all that time.

I can't believe that. That way lies madness. Perhaps in a very real sense.

But I realize that I can't do this art thing I was thinking of doing. It would hurt too much. It would hurt for what I've lost: friendship, love, opportunities to build new things. I'm finally at a place where I'm not longing to go back to bed all day long. I was feeling strong today. Now I'm feeling helpless and pointless and like I was wishing for things I was naive to wish for. Things Providence doesn't seem to think I'm worthy of.

What a bad idea that was. I can't do that again.

I have been a writer my entire life. My first publication came in third grade, when the class published a newsletter. My audience was 30 kids and, possibly, their parents. I don't remember the specifics of the article, but I do remember one moment of editing, when my teacher changed the sentence, "Each student made up Indian names for themselves" to "Each student gave themselves Indian names." Factually speaking, her edit was incorrect, because we were never given guidelines or resources for finding actual native American names. We made them up, based on what we'd read in some book or seen in some movie. I remember it irked me. Yes, in third grade, I was capable of being irked. About being edited. Oh, the irony.

( Beneath the cut: some historyCollapse )

The last couple of years, there's been almost no writing at all. What little I've tried has been almost painful. Rejection, somehow, has gotten harder to take rather than easier. And I just . . . just stopped. Except for occasional forays on Live Journal, there's been nothing. A lot of the lack of creativity has had to do with depression. As I’ve written about here before, for a while I was surrounded by people with cancer, which took me back to my core trauma (my mother’s death) and pretty much paralyzed all of my art—whether it was writing or making jewelry or photography or singing.

I began thinking recently that I really need to write again. Fiction feels hard right now; it feels sensitive and sore, too hot and painful to touch, like it’s a big part of the wounds of the summer and fall. So, I’m taking a page from Inigo Montoya (who took a page from Vizzini): When the job goes wrong, you go back to the beginning. I’ve pulled out my copy of A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver and started to read and take notes. I’ve also started to write each morning, a couple of pages of whatever comes. I’ve had a couple of ideas for poems. I’ve been looking over older work, wondering why I didn’t submit some of the pieces I’m seeing now with fresher eyes. I guess we’ll see what happens from here.

Previously on "My Hair": I've been diagnosed with telogen effluvium, apparently the result of my illness last August and, possibly, a separate emotional shock. For those who don't wish to read the article, the money shot is: "[telogen effluvium is the result of] an environmental insult that 'shocks' the growing hair follicles so much that they decide to go into a resting state for a while....This form of TE usually lasts less than six months and the affected individual has a normal scalp hair density again within a year." Basically, I've been losing my hair at an alarming, upsetting rate. Morning showers are usually followed by bouts of crying as I remove thick, alarming nests of hair from the shower drain and pull handfuls of it out of my hair brush. It's been awful.

Update: This morning, I washed my hair and discovered that there was no hair in the shower drain. None. After months of cleaning drifts from the floor and nests from the drain, there was none in the shower this morning, and nearly a normal amount in my brush. The last two showers, the hair loss evidenced in the shower has been lessening. If this persists, the condition may finally be reversing itself. I don't want to count my chickens here, but I may finally be seeing the end of the tunnel. My hair is still ridiculously diffuse and thin for me, and the texture is unfamiliar. I still hate how it looks. We'll see how things go. Fingers crossed.

I have made it a habit, on December 31, to make a year in review post. Today, the thought of reviewing the year is challenging, to say the least. 2016 was perhaps one of the worst years I've ever lived and reviewing it to the depth that my usual questionnaire format would require is exhausting just in the consideration of doing it.

But it was an awful year: devastating illness, the after-effects of which I'm still dealing with, the deaths of friends, the loss of a love that I still can't believe or . . . I just can't. We lost a number of influential artists this year (Bowie, Prince, Carrie Fisher, Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, and so many others) and while I'm sad they're gone, their loss is a remote thing to me emotionally. Our incoming president elect is grossly and manifestly unsuited and unfit for the job he is about to undertake and that fact--along with the reality that so many of my fellow Americans voted for him--is, to me, horrifying. I published nothing this year, nothing, mainly because I was so depressed and bottled up that I produced nothing--unprecedented for me.

This year did produce good things: my newly renovated bathroom, my trip to Ireland with E, my visit with the family over Christmas, and the love and support with which I am surrounded daily. Sophie (who lounges in my lap purring even as I type this) and Ezekiel. Good books, good theater, good movies. The craft fair experiment. I do have a great deal to be thankful for. I know it. This year, it's been hard to remember it, but I must do so, for it's these things which make life worth its day-to-day challenges.

In 2017, I must pay more attention to my own self care. I must focus on my own art and writing. I must get my home in the kind of order that will allow me to find some peace and comfort--divest myself of more stuff, find some visual order instead of the visual chaos with which I live every day. I need to foster my own financial recovery; there were things I had planned to spend money on in 2016, but there were other financial hits I totally didn't expect.

In short, I must make myself my own first priority. I have spent far too long taking care of other people, other people's dreams. This has got to be the Year of Me. That's a terrifying prospect. But I suspect it will be a good one, in the end.