Glee

It's the first tv show in.....oh, ten years? That I've hungrily grabbed the remote control for. It's awkward. It's emotional. It's romantic. It's dramatic. It's hilarious. It's musical. It's "Glee", and I'm in love.

The first season finale just ended like 10 minutes ago, and I swear I'm floating on a hit show success cloud. I'm so excited that Will and Emily kissed. My God. I feel like a need a cigarette or something. Like I just had really good sex. Is that inappropriate? Yeah, I thought so too. Ahh, well. It's my blog. I can cry about not getting to bone Mr. Shuester if I want to. And cry, I will. He is dreamy.

And Finn is all flushed and adorable and tall and sexy, and Puck is beautiful too. I just.....man. That's why I had to showcase the picture above. I mean, seriously? If we even HAD a glee club back when I was in highschool.....and if my teacher/classmates looked ANYTHING like these fucking sexy ass men, well.......I would have been the first to sign up. The music in the show is actually really good, too. I mean, they choose alot of really "popular" songs.....ya know, the Rhianna crap and so on.....but they always put their own spin on it and kind of Broadway it up. I really like what they do with the songs they tweak.

I don't even know what to type about. I'm probably just typing continually because I'm avoiding studying. it's amazing how, every time I've ever posted a new piece of my blog, I've been avoiding work. It's pretty much the only time I ever come on here. That's kinda bad.

And the worst part is that the classes I'm avoiding right now are the ones I was vowing my undying loyalty to just inches down this very page. Blugh. I hate school. I'm ready to graduate.

Anyways, YES! GLEE WAS AMAZING!

Finals

They're a-comin'. And this is the last time I'll ever take Fall semester finals!!! Holy crap. This is the last time I'll ever take Fall semester finals....... whoa. This is the last time I'll ever take Fall semester finals? It sounds different and scarier every time I say it. Ahh, well. Bring it on. I just need to pass. I don't have the most wonderful track record with GPAs. I mean, mine has always been well above average, but Lynne told us that if we're not riding on a 3.8 or higher, we might as well not bother mentioning it to any potential bosses. Ha. And I thought my 3.6 was good.

Hm, what to blog about. I mean, I COULD be doing insurmountable amounts of research for that RNR extra credit essay (that I desperately need to take advantage of), or making one of those three websites that's due.......OR finishing my children's book.....OR developing my pictures.....OR printing my magazine. Or, well, you get the picture. I just have SO man projects. SO MANY. I can't even see straight. And I'm even struggling to try and do some Freelance work on top of work and school. I just don't think I"m necessarily capable of all of this. Well, I guess I could do it if I had more time.

I need to lose weight. All day, I'm either eating or I'm thinking about eating. Or wanting to eat. Or regretting eating, because I can never do it in moderation. Shit. I should go to Barnes and Noble and work on some stuff. I'd probably be a lot more productive if I didn't have the option of sprawling out all over the bed in my bra and half watching tv.

ALSO, can I just SAY that this stupid rebel flag thing is driving me CRAZY? I CANNOT stop fighting about this crap.

My Roommates

Are bitches.

Where do you go when you....have nowhere to go?

Literally, my jaw is hanging to the floor. I'm simply struck stupid by my current state of mind. I am doing HORRIBLY in school. AWFUL. I'm getting grades I've never even come close to getting in my ENTIRE LIFE. Grades so awful I can't even bring myself to write them here on my blog. I haven't eaten in 24 hours. An entire 24 hours, and I'm not even hungry. My stomach is so in knots about my school situation that I don't think I'll ever desire to eat again. It's like I've gone into some sort of paralysis. I'm even wondering why I'm allowing myself time to blog instead of hitting the books again.

it's just that.......I CANNOT, and I need to stress that I am INCAPABLE of trying any harder this semester with school and work. I have nothing left of my physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological being to give. To anything. I am stretching myself so thin that I've become invisible to passers by and even people close to me. So what am I supposed to do? HOW am I supposed to make these grades better when I CANNOT try any harder than I am right now!? Where do I turn!?

I've never experienced this before, maybe because everything I've ever tried remotely hard at, I've succeeded at. This is the first time in my life that I can honestly say that my very absolute best........just isn't good enough.

I never thought I'd run into any situation that I couldn't pull myself through. I might have found it this semester.

It's just frightening, when you realize you've hit the proverbial wall. Because that's when your true character shows, and I guess I'm just scared shitless that my true character won't quite be everything I'd imagined. What if I'm not as brave as I'd always assumed I was? What if I'm not as smart? What if I pour my soul into this schooling.....and fail?

My neck is a delicate thing, and it's sitting out there for the entire world to see. And I feel naked and ashamed.

And I feel tired.

And I feel sore.

And I feel nervous.

And I feel hopeless.

But.....I feel.....hopeful?

I feel excited to prove myself.

I feel determined.

I feel my teeth gnashing together.

This will be a true test. A TRUE challenge. My first of many, I'm sure.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

I can do this.

Interviewing

I'm about to go to some interview/testing/ops thing the Reveille, which is LSU's Daily Newspaper. They've been flooding me with emails, telling me that they haven't had a good cartoonist in years and that they're beyond stoked to see some of my work.

Hm. Cartoonist. Cartoonist for the newspaper? Why, that equates to political cartoonage. Something I'm not sure I feel comfortable with. I just feel like it'll be so easy to offend someone if I decide to do the political cartooning.

But, hey, it's a job. And I need money. And Walt Disney began his life as an artist being a political cartoonist for his local newspaper. So I keep telling myself that every time I feel like I'm not quite equipped for the job. I mean, I can draw. I know I can do a black and white pencil and ink sketch and have it ready to print quickly.....I'm just lacking in the ideas department.

Or wait, maybe it's not even that. I'm sure I'd have ideas, I'm just petrified of pissing someone off.

I really need to get over this "I can't have one person anywhere on the planet dislike me" thing. It's impossible to please everyone, and the sooner I actually learn that and apply it to my life, well, that's when you'll start seeing my political cartoons in the newspaper.

Rejection

I can feel my eyes tingling. My heart is beating kind of fast, and my palms are sticky and gross with sweat.

I just submitted a design on shirtfight.com that I've been working on for, oh.....12 hours? I think that's how much time I spent on it, give or take 2 hours.

I was (sort of) proud of it when I submitted it 20 minutes ago, and now, five minutes after my first comment, I feel like I could cry.

This guy told me it was hard to tell what was going on and that it looked rushed.... :(

....How am I ever going to admit that I actually spent aLOT of time on that freaking design? I don't think I can. I'm so embarassed. I don't even feel like an artist anymore. In my classroom at LSU, we tweak things and play with things and go back and forth and tinker with shit for WEEKS before we have to turn in a final project. And THEN, when the only approval we need is that of our classmates (friends) and teachers (overly nice).....well, I feel like a designer in the classrooms at LSU.

I feel like an artist. Like I have some sort of talent. And I think it's because I get encouragement.

There is none of that on the internet. Everything is so scrutinized and dispensable that hardly anyone gets the recognition they deserve.

Not that I'm saying I think I deserve more praise than I already don't get, because I don't think I've even come close to deserving or earning it.

But I just......feel so stupid for ever bothering with these contests. And I know these are my slightly hurt feelings talking. Sigh.....I should stop wasting time on them. I wasted all of today making that design, and within five minutes, it's over.

The guy who commented on my design is like a big wig on that site. People will agree with him just because of who he is, and therefore my design is damned to the lonely pits of mediocre art hell.

I feel sick. Like I might vomit.

The Artdella blog

So I think I'm going to start another blog called "Artdella." I need to have some sort of almost portfolio of my work up on the internet, because, well, everyone else seems to have at least one. If I actually (miraculously) ever win one of these tshirt contests, I mean......someone (or everyone) is going to be like "wtf who is this girl we need to see a portfolio NOW NOW SNAP SNAP."

Because that's how it is on the internet. Everyone needs proof that you're who you say you are, and they need it quick.

There's this website called teefury that I've been wanting to sell a shirt on, but it's not like a vote thing....you have to send an email with a file of your design to this intimidatingly great designer named Jimiyo, and they decide the fate of your shirt. They look through your blog and your designs and they decide if your shirt is appropriate for their site or not. And once you have a shirt up on there......phew. That's major kudos. More people will be visiting your page than you thought possible.

I feel like I'm learning alot through this tshirt thing I'm trying. I mean, I'm learning how to handle rejection......I've been rejected, what, 20+ times already? Mostly I just wanna give up, but owell. There is something bad that I do, though. I'll design something, and in my head I'm like "Oh, this is good. This just might get me somewhere." And then I get like no votes and not even any comments...... THAT has happened like 5 times thus far.

I'm getting a tougher skin, though. Thank goodness. It's actually helping me cope with my color photography class's horrendously brutal crits. I swear, those fuckers are out for blood.

Ahh well, I'm gonna go back home to Chalmette and.....keep designing. Later. :)

T-shirts. Uggh.

So I've been doing these contests for a while. These t-shirt contests. I was initially intrigued with this whirlwind of crap when I read that there are actual cash prizes for winning such a contest. I thought to myself "hey, I'm good. I can do this. I'll just whip up a design in an hour and get a thousand bucks. Everyone LOOOVVEESSS me."

Ha. Right.

I've never felt so small and untalented in my life. I push these designs I make for hours and even days. I've literally put at least 10 hours into each design. And I get online to submit my shit, and I see these other blogs full of posts like "oh man, after 4 hours of working on this, I just couldn't justify spending any more time on it."

.....and the work is beautiful.

So I usually either give up and don't submit at all, OR I submit, get embarassed, and then yank it off before anyone noticed it.

Pitiful. And I call myself an artist??

Seeing is Believing

I watched my grandmother die two nights ago. At 3:45 in the morning.

She'd lost conciousness hours before, so all we had to go by to make sure she was alive was to watch that fragile chest rise and fall. Listen for the gurgling as she rattled in another breath. Her lungs began to really fill up with fluid a few days ago, and she'd been sounding terrible. Could hardly speak. Didn't have much of an appetite. She sort of stopped eating altogether. Couldn't swallow water, much less one of the thousands of pills she was supposed to take at whatever time for whatever ailment.

Right after dinner, on the night she died, she started thrashing around alot in her bed. She kept pulling at the peach fuzz on her head that's grown back since they stopped the chemo. She kept nearly crying and saying "I feel like I'm crawling out of my skin." She started talking nonsense, told us to take all those sentimental pictures of her family down off the wall because she "didn't want to look at them anymore." She said she saw Sassy running past her bed over and over. Sassy was at our house, in her kennel, 4 miles away.

When it got closer to the end, as her body relaxed and she started to get comfortable, she started muttering. To whom, I don't really know. I know it wasn't to my Aunt Suzy, who'd been sitting next to Maw Maw for hours, crying, singing to her and telling her she was a good mother. No, Maw Maw wasn't talking to Nanny (I call her Nannu, not Aunt Suzy). In fact, she'd ripped her hand out of Nanny's, rather violently, over and over. I don't think she knew what she was doing. Her eyes kept rolling in the back of her head, she kept swinging her good leg back and forth in the air.

She kept looking at the ceiling, at something we couldn't see, and saying "I see Billy and William. They're not close, but they're coming." William was her husband, who died 8 months ago. Billy was her son, who died 21 years ago. He had only been 23 at the time. She kept saying this, I kept looking on, horrified, my mom and Nanny kept crying.

I was frozen, and reminded so much of the time 8 months ago, when I'd been in that exact room, in that exact spot, witnessing the same exact thing. Except with William, my Paw Paw. It almost felt routine now. How sad, to become accustomed to watching the people you love die. Slowly.

Right before she fell asleep for the last time, the very last thing she said, was "Okay, God."

Now, my mom and nanny and everyone in the room thought not much of it, but me.....no, I remembered when Paw Paw started talking with God like he was there in the room. He started with all that right before he went into a coma, which had shortly preceeded his death. I closed my eyes, felt the moisture pooling in them, held them back for my mother's sake, and said goodbye to Maw Maw. Then I went outside, which is where I always seem to run, to cry. By myself. I sat down on the curb where I'd sat on New Year's Eve. Then, I'd watched the fireworks between bursts of silent sobs. Now, there was nothing to look at. Nothing broke up the complete pitch blackness that pressed down on the bubble of earth that was within my line of vision. It was audibly dark, which sounds like nonsense, but that's the only way I can describe it. The street was even more deserted than it had been when I was out on this curb 8 months ago, crying about Paw Paw. 4 houses had been demolished since then, and the street felt lonlier.

I rocked back and forth, staring at my hands, feeling it, that thing I felt during the ordeal with Paw Paw. I felt "it" pushing on me, pushing on my back, right below my neck. Pushing me into the gravel I was sitting on. I was outside, by myself, and I allowed myself to be weak enough to give way to it. I curled up on the ground, and I cried. I felt pitiful, laying there, my feet freezing, my toes going numb. I'm almost embarassed to type it now, but I have to tell someone. The tears just kept rolling sideways down my face, over the bridge of my nose, dripping into my hair. I kept thinking about everyone I knew in Baton Rouge. All my LSU friends. What they were doing while I was doing this. Johnathon and Geoff, hopefully together somewhere and with Nicole, having fun. Doing something together. Michael, with Melinda most likely, happy to believe he was probably happy too. Chelsie, happy wherever she was with Julian. Sara, with her family. Kelly, doing her nutrisystem somewhere in New Orleans. I stopped crying at some point and just thought about everyone I knew, individually. Hoping everyone was at ease. And then I thought about Chad. And then, I thought about Chad. And I thought about Chad. And Chad. And that made me cry again, for reasons completely unrelated to Maw Maw and the fact that I was curled around myself outside and in the dark, crying.

When I went back inside, she was asleep. With her eyes open. She looked pained. Her lips were pulled down in the corners at angles I previously believed impossible for the human face. It didn't look like a peaceful sleep, and on top of it, she jerked every time she managed to take a pitiful breath. We counted them. 10 breaths a minute. 8 breaths a minute. The average person takes 15 or so breaths a minute.

At 3:30, her breathing started to spike. 15 breaths a minute, 16 breaths a minute. 18 breaths a minute. She was panting. Her eyes started to "bruise," which means that they were pooling with blood. Her irises and pupils were lost in the reddish black that covered everything you could see between her eyelids. It was frightening. I've seen it millions of times in video games and movies, but actually having to watch someone's eyes bleed is..........

13 breaths a minute..........7 breaths a minute.........4....................


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.........................3 breaths................................................


.....waiting for her to breath felt like an eternity. Having to sit there and watch. Stare at her chest unblinkingly. It was traumatizing. I got tunnel vision, I was staring so hard.........................................................................................................I could barely hear the rattling of her lungs over the loud thumping of my own heart. I felt like it was scratching its way out of my chest.

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..........................................................2..........................



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.......................eventually, I stopped staring at her chest.

Her eyes were open still. They were black. Her mouth had sort of relaxed itself, it was just hanging loosely over her dentures.

I kissed her on the forehead. She still felt warm. Still felt alive. I heard my various aunts and uncles and cousins and close friends of the family crying and sobbing around me, the noise just swirling up into the air and evaporating. I didn't really care what they were saying. They reminded me of those noisy churches where the people run on stage and beg to be saved, and everyone's hollering and fanning themselves and screaming up at "the Lawd." It was ridiculous and I chose to ignore it. Ya know, just shut the fuck up and let her go quietly.

I didn't know whose hand was gripping my shoulder while I leaned over her body, and I kind of shook it off. I didn't want anyone to touch me. My entire concentration was trained on the sensation of my fingertips brushing over her skin. I was trying to make a memory of it, trying to do it so softly and deliberately that I'd never forget it. I didn't hear anyone call the police/coroner/ambulance, but someone must've, because at some point they all started to show up, asking us who this is and what type of medicine that was and could you sign here and how are you related.

Fuck 'em, I went and sat on the couch for a while and excercised this talent that I have of making myself completely deaf whensoever I choose. I sat there, deaf, and watched my mother. She was the only person, other than me, who wasn't allowing herself to cry. She bustled in and out of the room, phone on her ear, bag of pills in her hand, give them to the ambulance guy, argue with the ambulance woman about who knows what since I was deaf. Pat Aunt so and so and Uncle who and whatnot on the back, move on. Drop anyone's hand who tried to hold her's for too long. She didn't want to be touched. Just like me. I got up and followed her, suddenly HAVING to be next to her. Crazy how fast emotions change.

I only saw the police man's mouth moving, sort of, while I stood like a loyal Golden Retriver behind/next to my mother. I think he said "sorry about your loss" or something like that. The coroners, coming in with their spiffy business suits and wheeling her out of the house, covered in that white sheet just like I'd nightmared about when I was ten. It was almost exactly as I'd imagined it.

They let us say our last well wishes and what not to her right before they covered her face up, and I swear to you, I SWEAR, she was smiling. Her lips were pressed against each other, and I hadn't seen her face so serene and at ease since before Paw Paw got sick. It made me smile.

Of course I've cried since then, I was good at holding it back while I was there. It just hurt, having to keep swallowing that lump. But I did it, because I think....I think it's more comforting for other people to hug someone who's composed during something like that. I like to believe it's like hugging a rock, or something else as stable. My sisters have always thought of me that way, and it surprised me that I became that for alot of other aunts and uncles who I presumed would be stronger than me when the time came.

I believe in God now. I have to, after seeing that. I'm not going to become some crazy God crusader, and I'm not going to look on atheists with disdain. I just....I'm convinced. After seeing what wasn't there with Paw Paw, and seeing what wasn't there with Maw Maw now, too, I realized it is there. Something is there.

I just think it's one of those things you have to see with your own eyes.