Resentment, party of one.

I know this blog might lead you to think otherwise, but I'm not the sort of person who spends their whole like complaining about things. I keep the vast majority of the suck in my life bottled away. I mean, I don't want to deal with it so why should anyone else? This personality quirk (flaw?) has the potential to get me into trouble. It did just that earlier this evening.

As I mentioned over the weekend, I deal with SAD. So does, I believe, about 30% of the American population, so I'm in good company. Coupled with that is that I also have remnants of depression. I was diagnosed in middle school, went through medication and counseling, and found a way to keep it under control on my own, sans meds. This worked pretty well for the last bit of high school and the first bit of college. I don't know what it was that started setting me off again (stress, displacement, relationship, diet, whatever), but I began having trouble with it again about halfway through my sophomore year of college.

For those of you who also deal with this problem, you'll understand my dispair at having these troubles again after 3-4 years symptom free. You'll also understand the annoyance of hearing people who've never dealt with depression tell you they know how you feel, most especially when they compare your mental instability to stress of a paper they're working on. It doesn't quite work that way, folks.

When I'm in a depressive episode, I operate under a fog. Emotions feel less, food tastes less, words mean less, you get the idea. I've come to discover, though, that when an episode coincides with SAD, it turns into self-directed rage (at least for me). That's what happened when I made the painting in the most recent post.

There's a method of creating art called "Psychic Automatism," which is pretty much when you tell reason and logic to piss off and you just let your hands and your emotions do their own thing. This method was the groundwork for surrealism, though surrealism did in some cases evolve into a higher exploration of sensory confusion (think Dali). That vicious, nightmaring wolf is what came out of me when I let emotions run. This is something that frightens me and I don't know if I actually feel safe encouraging myself to continue this sort of thing. It's like looking at it proves that my mind is a little more on the dysfunctional side than I'd like.

This is the state I was in earlier today when my boyfriend told me he resents me for having all my friends around at college while he's away living with family he doesn't know terribly well and teaching at a school where he's the youngest in his department by a good 10-15 years.

Yes, I do have my friends around. That's about it. I've lost my passion and been forced into a major I don't really care about, I'm losing my sanity one day at a time, waking up in the morning makes me want to scream some days, I've cried myself to sleep every night for the past week, and I can't trust my own head to not create fantastical and horrifying images to torment me until I literally remove them from sight (and even afterwards to be honest). I'm sorry that you refuse to reach out to the other interns who you know from college for a little support or maybe drinks now and then, and I'm sorry that you feel like you're intruding at your uncle's house, but you have a job you love, and a pet to calm you down, and someone who asks how your day was and makes you dinner, and you never have to feel the kind of crushing loneliness that makes every part of you ache because you always have someone there.

You have no right to resent me for being unhappy 300 miles from you. Yours is not the only sad story.

Seasonal Affective Dilemma

The more is snows up here in the godless north, the more I come to discover that I suffer heavily from Seasonal Affective Disorder. This is not something that should be combined with LDRS syndrome (better known as "Long Distance Relationshipping Sucks" syndrome). It messes me up and I end up painting things like this:

...even though I totally meant to do a cartoon blood-thirsty dog that I would have named "Journalism." Somehow I got that nightmarish behemoth instead. (It's also apparently impossible to get a decent picture of it in my horribly dim house.) It actually makes me really, really uncomfortable to have it in my room, but at the same time I can't bear to paint over it. blarg. Sometimes I think my brain takes a vacation from working and crap just happens.

I need to clean my room.

Also, Trimalchio's Dinner is painful as hell to read through, and it is a serious testament to my good-studentry that I haven't given up entirely on it yet. (The key word there is "yet.")

Senior Year, Semester One

Holy crap, I'm a senior. When did that happen?

It's been weird getting used to school this semester. My house is the same, my roommates are the same, but I'm painting now and boyfriend is living in a different city. The painting is okay, I guess, but the second part is kind of suck. Seeing as this is the worst thing that's ever happened in our relationship though, I should probably count myself lucky and just shut up.

On the painting front, I'm in two painting classes (2&3) simultaneously so that I can still graduate on time, and I'm thinking that for all of my P2 projects, I'll focus on style variation and medium control, and for my P3 assignments, I'll do a series on pigs. It's not exactly going to be all snorts and sunshine, though. I'll probably do three or four adorable paintings and the last one will be either a plate of bacon or a picture of "blooding," which is where a hog is hung upside down and has its throat slit. Yes, it's gruesome, but the American fantasy of a green pasture with happy little pigs rolling in the mud is utter crap and people should be aware.

But for now, here's the first adorable painting.


It still needs some love in some places, but it's generally done.

Moving on, my a cappella group recorded all (most of) our new songs on Saturday and we should have a CD ready to sell by our Spring concert at the end of March. So stoked!! It's going to be awesome, and I can't wait to see how it turns out.

I'll try to actually blog this semester. Jill and I have been experimenting a lot with cooking, so maybe exciting food stuff will appear on here. This will not become a food blog. There are already a ton of those that are much better than this one would be (Vegan Yum Yum, Use Real Butter, etc.).

If anyone still reads this thing, thanks for sticking around! I'll try not to disappoint.