If I was a Jedi, I might just turn Sith for one person.

Remember how I said I didn't think I had it in me to hate someone? Today, I am not so sure that is true. I would like to think that I am a better human being than that. I would like to think that I didn't care enough anymore to feel anything about my Aunt Laura. I've completely cut her off. I refuse to speak to her. When I went to help and visit my parents, I hid from her because I did not want to deal with let alone see her. And yet, she's managed to seriously hurt me from afar once again, and this time I'm taking it so badly, I've been asking the Gods and universe why the hell it can't do us all a karmic solid and end her. She's screaming that she's dying, well, she's been saying so off and on for years, so why isn't she dead yet?! 

This morning I called my Mom to talk and was mildly fussing about nothing too important and she suddenly interrupted. She told me she couldn't handle any drama anymore. She didn't want to hear about anything going on with my friends anymore and only about stuff going on with me and Amanda because we are what is important. She told me that she's basically so emotionally spent that every time my Aunt's number pops up on caller id, she goes into a full panic attack. If my aunt tries to come over now, my Mom hides in the bathroom. My Dad is apparently starting to have nightmares because of my Aunt. My Aunt will not stop hounding and badgering and bitching and screaming and running people into the ground if she doesn't get what she wants, when she wants. On top of all of that she's seems to think my Mom is a fucking parts and organ dispensary and back on the "I need new kidneys" crap. 

I could go on and on about my aunt, certainly all of my friends have heard me bitch about her at least three times, but I can't even put into words how truly abusive, awful, spiteful, and vicious my Aunt is.  I have watched and listened to her scream all day at someone and you can't just run away, because she follows. You can't put her in her place because she will take it out on everyone you care about. 

So what does this mean for me? This means that my parents can no longer be a sounding board, a safety zone, or even a comfort zone where I can vent my frustrations and talk trough or about anything with them and get it out and get my head wrapped around it. I can't ask for their advice anymore. I'm actually afraid to call my parents now because I am worried that anything I say will make things worse or stress them out and they already have so much on their plates and both suffer from severe depression. So, in a way, if feels like I am being shut out of my own home and that's not something I ever thought I would feel. Perhaps that's a bit too dramatic, but its what it feels like right now. 

I wish my parents would just leave everything behind and move up here. My Dad would have a wider job market to search and apply. They could have health insurance. They could live with me until they are back on their feet, Amanda doesn't even mind, she wants them to come up so badly too. But my Dad doesn't want to leave Grandma and Grandpa. I get it. He wants to be there for them. They are 88 years old and won't be in the world forever and he wants to spend as much time as he can with them. I can't and really won't argue with that. Except to say, the offer is always on the table and when Grandma and Grandpa are gone, I will drag them up here kicking and screaming if I have too.     

Tea cups, flowers, wreathes, and Legolas

As promised I am doing a happier blog featuring some family heirlooms from my Mom's side of the family, some crafts I did, and Legolas. First up is a tiny set of tiny tea cups that my Great Grandpa Early had collected. I didn't even know he had collected them until I opened the box not too long ago. I thought I had just inherited some antique tea cups and saucers. 

There was something painting on this little pitcher at one time, I don't know what though.

There were a couple of little dishes like these that Amanda and I kept for altar offering plates. I decided to only keep a few things, things that weren't broken. After all this box of goodies made a trip from Oregon to Kansas, to Idaho and then Washington. 

This is the first cup and saucer. You can't really tell, but it's a pupleish-blue color.

Number two, it has a nice mint color.

And three. Which is obviously pink.

So, yeah, these were some of the lovely treasures from my Great Grandparents on my Mom's side. And while I had tea cups on my mind, when I was at an IEPG council meeting and the project came up for an Ostara raffle basket, I remembered that I had pinned a DIY flower and tea cup art piece to my craft board. So I put in that I would make it for the raffle basket. It only seemed logical since I wanted to make one for myself anyway. 

Well, I did it and it turned out pretty darn well.

Here is the pin from pinterest.

  And since I had my new glue gun out, I decided to make this...

Not sure now I feel about the ribbon, but I can always go back in and fix it later.

Last but not least, my Legolas figurine newly acquired from the Jedi Alliance in Spokane. It's a kick ass church- if you can believe it- filled with figures and memorabilia for fantasy, Scifi, and gaming culture! There are even old arcade machines to play on. I played a couple of pin ball machines and Star Wars. It was fun. They church aspect is more of a community one where people can come to hang out and also talk about what they can do to better the community. 

And there he is. Legolas in all his elven glory. 

Still sick, Sofia the 1st, some things I need to vent about.

Fun stuff first. I saw Sofia the First at my friend's house while baby sitting her son. That was awhile ago, but I recently found it on Netflix and decided that Amanda and I needed to watch it while we wait for the next season of My Little Pony. LOL, Amanda and I really love it and tonight we watched the wassiling episode- or rather their equivalent of Christmas. By the end, and it was a really good ending, we were both doing that ugly cry thing. It was great. But also while watching this show, I've been thinking about some things, things which I will get it in a few moments. 

Okay, more serious stuff. I'm still sick. We're going on about 2 and half weeks now. I started to feel better but for some reason couldn't quite shake it and it came back in full force. So I've been pretty miserable. Miserable in the sense that sometimes I don't realize that I have a fever and take some medicine fall asleep, and wake up drenched in sweat kind of miserable. But I have some antibiotics, am still drinking tea, and have some cough medicine to help. 

Being sick has made trying to do homework problematic. I am for the most part caught up (except for the last papers I need to write for this term) but I gave up on having A's in the classes. Fuck it. I just want to pass the classes and get on to the next term. I am so close to graduating and with everything that has happened over the last several months, I'm just burnt out and tired. Amanda is right, I do need to take time off instead of trying to go right into grad school. I need a break. But I don't want to be doing IEPG stuff, trying to plan a wedding (oh yeah, Amanda and I finally set a date), and doing grad school all at the same time. I'm sure I can do it. Or at least I think I can do it all, but while my brain says "Of course you can" my body and energy level says "Now just a moment sugar, you're gettin ahead of yourself here." Because I imagine all my inner voices to have some form of attitude and possible accents. 

One of my blogger friends was talking about fear and being too afraid to do things. She also talked about anxiety and worrying about everything. I get that. I lived in a sort of paranoid, completely pointless fear for over a year. I was scared to leave my house, scared to be seen enjoying my life even the least little bit. Shit I was scared to be seen walking and carrying in a sack of groceries, all because I had applied for disability and my stupid crazy aunt told me the gov. watches people who apply. I was scared that they would see me on a good day and I would get denied for have a few good days. Thankfully, I decided I didn't want to live like that anymore. 

But while, I got passed those fears, I am scared for all new reasons. Some of them are family related and completely normal, like a kid worrying for their parents. Some things I am scared of are completely irrational, like calling people I don't know. Granted that is left over from call center work and some hiring manager at Borders ripping me a new one right before I had a nervous breakdown. to this day, I don't like talking on the phone unless it is with someone I know and even then I tend to keep it short. Most of the time phone conversations with my Mom are about 20 minutes. The only people I talk to longer than that with are my Grandparents. 

Bringing back the things that I have been thinking about because of Sofia the First, I've been thinking about my current friendships. Most people who know me pretty well have either figured out or have been told that I am very much an introvert. I need time to recoup and recharge after a lot of things. No, it didn't used to be this bad but some health issues, soon to be dealt with, don't make it easy. I'm not expecting that to be a cure all either. But since getting involved with the IEPG a couple of years ago, I've come out of my shell little by little and made some friends on my own. I actually have more friends now than I ever did while in school. That brings forth a whole new slew of problems and social complexities that I don't think I was entirely prepared for.

My parents are pretty much hermits and in a lot of ways I am like them, especially when I get totally engrossed in writing- another scare factor I will get into in a bit. So when I call up my Mom and fuss about this situation or that situation or how I can't seem to understand why there is a seemingly unintentional lack of respect in some areas of friendship, my Mom says that I need to get a new set of friends, I kind of stop an wonder what for. Then I watch things like My little Pony and Sofia the First and realize that either I've got some really selfish and fragile friends or I just need to stop trying to stand up for myself and quit trying to put up boundaries. 

I understand that everyone has had trouble and trails in their lives and that people have had truly horrible things happen to them. I understand that some people will never get over these things and I would never expect or ask them to. It;s not right and its not fair. However, is it really fair to freak out on someone for trying to address something that upset them and they set up a boundary? I'm not even talking big issues, just something small? I've had a couple of friends do that to me and not just once but time and time again. It;s to the point that anytime I have an issue, I am afraid to address with them because I am worried they are going to freak out on me and either make me feel like shit for having an issue or feel like shit that they got so upset. So, instead, I've said nothing and things keep cycling over and over in my head and one of these days I will explode and it won't be pretty. And in the meantime I just get more and more bitter as time goes by. its not really in me to hate anyone, but it is in me to be furious that I can't even talk to someone about something small, talk to them like an adult, resolve it and move on. 

And more to the point, I can't even talk to these friends about how they have treated Amanda in some situations. Another friend of mine once made mention that I don't have much a back bone. In some cases, yes, that is true, I have a hard time standing up for myself, being assertive, and a lot of people take advantage of that. But when people start talking shit, belittle, and try to police Amanda and in her own home no less, that tiny back bone of mine gets really big and its all I can do to bite my tongue and keep from causing a scene. 

   

I would just treat this all as some learning experience from which I can grow from, and in a lot of ways it is. Except I don't like the person I am when I am constantly angry. I don't like how snappish I get, how down right bitchy, and given more toward gossip and venting to Amanda about it. She's got enough on her plate, she doesn't need to hear all of my issues. She should be focusing on finish her novel because her mentor from Grad school want to send it to her personal editor to try and get it published!!!

Now I will discuss why I am scared to write, or at least why I think I am afraid to. There are a lot of reasons. First it was that I could never get quite. Well, we have our own place and will be setting up the "Bowie room"/ office/ Library in its entirety over the next couple of days. So I will have a quiet space to work and room in which to spread out and set up story boards and whatnot. Sometimes I am scared to write because when I feel the urge, I am frustrated and feel guilty because I should be doing school work. I tried setting up a schedule but Amanda thinks with my health and how tired I am all the time, that I need to remove some of what I want to get done in a day from that and just take it a little bit at a time. Okay. I can do that, so these are things that I can easily work out and have to some degree. But the bulk of it is that I am actually scared to it down and write. I'm worried about my characters and if they are all the same, if I've given them enough flaws and if they can have room for growth. I am scared that I peaked when writing fanfiction. I am scared that I will only be a mediocre writer and that no one will take me seriously. Hell, most of my friends don't and that makes me less and less willing to share anything I've written, especially when some of them hate some of the things I write about. And I am most especially scared of writing because if I can't get my friends and even my own family to read my writing without begging, how the hell am I going to get an editor or an agent to look at it and then  publish it? 

I don't know how many times I have sat and cried over even the last bit of that. I've wondered if I should just give up on school. If I should forget about going to Grad school for writing. If I should just erase all my stories and burn all the printed hard copies, the disks, the flash drives, and wipe and rewrite the hard drives of my laptops where everything is saved. Amanda says no. Amanda and my parents think I have talent. Amanda thinks I hit a big milestone when writing fantiction and that I am going to hit more. That there is room for more development and growth. Do, I want to give up writing? I don't really know who I am without it. But at the same time, being scared to sit down and write, leaves me feeling a bit lost. And while feeling that way, and having all these new challenges with people I want to stay friends with and know I can build stronger relationships with, on top of finishing school, and everything else, is kind of exhausting. I always try too look at things from the perspective of "anything I learn, can be useful for personal growth but also in terms of writing". And also, the get up and keep moving. But sometimes, sometimes, a girl gets tired and needs to sit down, rest, recharge, and regroup. 

On a slightly more upbeat and kind of funny note. I won a cruise today. I have dyslexia and it took me 5-6 times to call my health insurance case manager back today. I called some out of service number that google was still doing quality assurance for and also Royal Caribbean cruise lines and won a cruise for two with nominal fees of course. I finally got the number right and got to talk to the health insurance guy. 

The next post will be happier, I swear, because I said fuck it last Friday and got some crafting done.   

    

Sick, herbals, homework grief, unabashed ugly crying

To start tonight's... ehm... this morning's blog off, I am showing you a picture of tea. Not just any tea, semi-magical tea. When you whine on social media about how sick you are and one of your friends happens to be a licensed herbalist and lives near by, you get a middle of the night house call filled with instructions and stuff. Now, Amanda and I had already gone to the store and gotten this brand of tea's seasonal sampler, which was great because it had Throat Coat in it, but my friend brought this with her because it has yarrow in it. She also brought two things of ginger and an elderberry tincture. What's great about the elderberry tincture is that I had completely forgotten about it. We used to buy the juice when I was in high school and mix it with grape juice to make it more palpable. 

I started drinking the tea and taking the tincture per her instructions that night. The next morning I did feel better, but not a lot and since my drainage was a darker icky color, I decided to go to urgent care as well. Urgent care was lame. All they said- after asking me how I am sure that I am not pregnant, really?!- was that I have an upper respiratory infection. Well it was either that or a sinus infection. But they basically gave me cough syrup with codeine, sudafed, and a nose spray. I totally get the "some things don't need antibiotics", I really do, but since the only thing to read in the room was a single small poster detailing the how and way of that topic, I really didn't need a lecture about it. I also didn't ask for antibiotics, I asked what I was sick with precisely, mainly because with how utterly terrible I had felt, I was worried it might be trying to turn into the flu. No flu, thankfully. However, the biggest kicker of the whole urgent care issue, was the paperwork they sent me home with detailing if and when I should return. Every single thing that was listed, was why I went in. I was like really? 

Anyway, in conjunction with the nose spray, sudafed, cough syrup, and all the herbal stuff, I am feeling better but the crap is lingering. It also doesn't help that I have managed to give it to Amanda. So I am still coughing a a little bit, my throat is still raw, I am still coughing up stuff, and today I  apparently had a fever I didn't even know I had except for waking up from an unintended nap drenched in sweat, signaling that it broke. Lovely.

Moving on. Before said nap today I had that infamous unabashed ugly cry. Okay, it was more like sobbing and looking around my house asking no one "Whhhhhyyyy?!" in that really pathetic voice. I watched the last two episodes of Merlin today while eating my lunch and waking up. I really love that show and while I think it was a good ending, I was so unsettled by it. I can't discuss why because Amanda hasn't seen it and I want her, no need her to finish the series so I can talk to her about it. 

Lastly, because where would I be without a little venting, homework grief! Because I have been sick and not feeling well, because I have been worn out with all the stuff going on around my birthday, I got a little behind with some homework. Not a lot, but last week, I was really struggling with some of it. Basically, I was having trouble settling down to actually do and then not getting so frustrated that I could finish it. The problem is that I am taking a Literature class. You'd think that it would be easy for me. I love to read, to talk about books, to enjoy them and the experience I have with them, not analyze the ever living fuck out of them until it isn't fun anymore. Ever heard of beating a dead horse, well trust me Beowuf, Othello, and Frankenstein are so dead you couldn't being them back if you wanted to. What is worse, for whatever reason my first instructor couldn't finish out the term and they gave us some new instructor who pardon my french, fucked shit up, in my opinion, at least for me. He didn't like my paper proposal and not only did he not like the paper proposal, he erased the previous feedback from my previous instructor and downgraded me. 

So while I have been unhappily trudging through hoity toity, ego inflated, bullshit (doesn't anyone ever read something to just read it and enjoy things anymore?) about the three pieces of lit, and sick, this new guy has incited panic into my otherwise miserable as of late existence. I have freaked out about it so bad that its like pulling my own teeth to get myself motivated to get it done. I just plain don't want to do it. But I don't want to throw away all the previous work I've already put into the class either. 

Something I have learned about myself, is that sometimes, I need to talk it out verbally to get through some things. Talking it out, albeit after a little break down over it, helped. I got this week's assignment done and out of the way so I can focus on last week's assignments. Actually it wouldn't have been so bad had I not gotten sick the week that whoever wrote this class decided that putting 4 rather large assignments in one week with a shot ton of extra reading, was a great idea. And I simply loathe how they set up their final projects. They want to "scaffold learning" so they split up certain parts of the the final projects into certain weeks. Which in theory should work, unless you are me and used to doing things  certain way. As in giving an annotated bibliography before I've even read the material I'm basing my project on. I'm not kidding. And if I remember correctly, I didn't even have a response on my topic proposal from the first instructor until after the annotated bibliography was due. Further, it is pointless, in my opinion to give an annotated bibliography before you've read the material because you don't know exactly what points you are going to make or really even what to search for in the way of sources. You only have an idea, and shouldn't you get your own opinion in your head first before you start reading and being influenced by other people's opinions? You know think for yourself first, then see what other people have thought. 

Okay, I am finally getting tied, so I am going to finish my tea and go to bed. Tomorrow I get to tackle my other class. Which means reading and watching the Matrix then doing a discussion board post about it and avatar and modern films. Then I get to work on my rough draft for my LOTR paper, at least that make sense and is interesting.       

Just popping in for a moment.

So, I do have some blogs to write and things to catch you all up on but haven't sat down to actually write them yet. So in lieu of that, I am posting a vlog for the YouTube Pagan Challenge that I recorded today. I decided to get into this because I wanted to try vlogging and also because I wanted to get back to working on my pagan blog. Why not do two things at once. 

So yeah... Here it is and there I am. You now get to actually see me and hear me. I disable comments on my video because the world is full of trolls and I don't need the negativity. Anything positive anyone wants to say will be missed too, but I don't mind that. Have fun, I ramble, you have been warned.