Recovering

MAY 12, 2013 :: 8:09 AM

My ability to communicate is slowly coming back, but the delusions and fears are still there. I still wake up afraid that the dog and the man -- but especially the dog -- are not the ones I know; I am afraid that I have been transformed into someone who is not the real woman, but a figment. The house also is a figment; the streets are filled with figments. I wake up at five, go on walks with my camera. To anchor myself in even the slightest bit I take pictures. I use Polaroids because the images come straightaway in my hands, and I can hold them. I see colorful colanders. I ask the man who owns the restaurant if I can photograph them. He says yes. I snap the photograph and minutes later, the colanders appear. They are evidence. I go home and show the photograph, yes, what a nice shot. I order more film because even though I am over budget for film this month I need to ground myself to keep the fear at bay.

One part of my brain knows how to do things. The lizard brain knows how to make coffee and get dressed. The other brain is smothering the lizard brain, tries to confuse it, says, "What is this room? What are clothes?" It looks at images and cannot make sense of them. Yes, this mishmash of things -- the lizard brain responds. I went to the optometrist yesterday. They asked for my phone number and the lizard brain said the number, but I did not know what a phone number was or what the numbers meant.

I chronicle this so that I will remember later.

A baseball stuck in a fence. A beautiful thing. Today is Mother's Day, but I gave my mother her present yesterday, because in Taiwan everything is a day earlier. I made her cry, but in a good way. A beautiful thing. A beautiful thing.

Unwell

MAY 10 2013 :: 9:41 AM

I am unwell again. Symptoms slowly tricklerd in asy yesterday omrning, and then got orse as noon came. A t noon it hit like w a a wave. Frusrating, to say the least, and tiring. I am vey tired.  

Trouble

MAY 7, 2013 :: 11:27 AM

TROUBLE

by Matthew Dickman

Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills
to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter
hung in the Tahitian bedroom
of her mother’s house,
while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes
you can look at the clouds or the trees
and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground.
The performance artist Kathy Change
set herself on fire while Bing Crosby’s sons shot themselves
out of the music industry forever.
I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears. The French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze jumped
from an apartment window into the world
and then out of it. Peg Entwistle, an actress with no lead
roles, leaped off the “H” in the hollywood sign
when everything looked black and white
and David O. Selznick was king, circa 1932. Ernest Hemingway
put a shotgun to his head in Ketchum, Idaho
while his granddaughter, a model and actress, climbed the family tree
and overdosed on phenobarbital. My brother opened
thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body
until it wasn’t his body anymore. I like
the way geese sound above the river. I like
the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.
Sarah Kane hanged herself, Harold Pinter
brought her roses when she was still alive,
and Louis Lingg, the German anarchist, lit a cap of dynamite
in his own mouth
though it took six hours for him
to die, 1887. Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned
and so did Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Virginia Woolf. If you are
travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially
on a train. Andrew Martinez, the nude activist, died
in prison, naked, a bag
around his head, while in 1815 the Polish aristocrat and writer
Jan Potocki shot himself with a silver bullet.
Sara Teasdale swallowed a bottle of blues
after drawing a hot bath,
in which dozens of Roman senators opened their veins beneath the water.
Larry Walters became famous
for flying in a Sears patio chair and forty-five helium-filled
weather balloons. He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet
and then he landed. He was a man who flew.
He shot himself in the heart. In the morning I get out of bed, I brush
my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.
I want to be good to myself.

Mum

MAY 6, 2013 :: 8:48 AM

March 2013.

My mother likes to draw things while she's chatting on the phone or on Skype. She sent me this through email; I asked her if I could share it on the blog.

My mother is an artist, a warrior, a highly sensitive person, and the reason I am alive -- in more ways than the most basic.

I've been working on a project for her Mother's Day present for the last couple of weeks, and doing so has brought me to tears on some occasions. Always, a sense of deep gratitude. Always, a sense of wonderment that this human being helped to produce me and is yet separate from me, has so many stories locked away, keeps sadnesses that I will probably never know. A sense of the ticking clock that tells me to value every moment, even if she is on the other side of the world, to Skype with her often, to take photographs of her, to tell her that she is beautiful, to share with her more of myself, now that I am grown.

Places to Go, People to See (a new feature)

MAY 4, 2013 :: 9:43 AM

Many other bloggers have a feature like this, in which they share links to specific posts that they've enjoyed; I tend to be lazy about culling such things, and so I haven't done the same. However, certain features in my new reader apps (Reeder on my laptop and Feedly on my iPad/Phone, if you're curious) have helped me to keep track of, well, Places to Go, People to See. And so I will try to be consistent about this feature, which will post on Saturdays. An experiment of sorts.

• JSA wrote a very brave post about the decision to go on lithium.
• A picture-heavy post about wearing silk scarves on sfgirlbybay, which has been tickling at me ever since -- I've got to try some of these looks out.
• Emmadine's post about Lynn & Lawrence makes me crave knit hats, even though it was 80 degrees yesterday (in San Francisco, this is like seeing a unicorn drive a MUNI bus). 
• I so desperately need a meal planning/recipe collection system, and Kyla Roma's seems like a good jumping-off point.
• If you haven't seen my guest post on Paper Lovestory about my planning/organization system, you might want to take a look -- especially if you, too, tend to geek out over stationery and planners.

Thanks for reading, as always, you lovelies -- have a splendiferous weekend!