Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Philippians 4:8

It’s good I didn’t write anything last night, or it would have been an endless rant. Today I’m able to see things more clearly and from a greater distance. I’ve also learned that I can choose what I want to spend my time dwelling on. Suffice it to say that my brother has a mental disorder–the one that starts with “S”–and I’m the only member of my family who is not in denial. Advocating for his care can take a lot out of me. There are other annoying things happening, but honestly, compared to this, they pale in significance.

I’m writing down my goals for September as part of a challenge for the Sparkpeople group Lose Eight Pounds in September. Doing so will put me back to where I was before I fell off the exercise wagon this summer. One thing about Ativan withdrawal is that it’s taught me that I do have the self-discipline to do anything that I set my mind to.

First of all, the motivation to finally get back on track:

I have Wende to thank for introducing me to the fabulous Shabby Apple. I love their dresses, and I felt annoyed that I couldn’t simply order one and begin looking fabulous immediately. I have a mental image of the orange dress stuck permanently in my head, I think.

So for September, I have some modest goals:

1. Lose eight pounds by eating 1200-1500 calories a day, walking every day, drinking plenty of water and avoiding bad carbs.

2. Put my scarves up on Etsy.

3. Cut another quarter milligram of Ativan.

4. Finish organizing my craft room.

5. Eliminate the last vestiges of trashy living from my life.

As far as the trashy thing goes, I’m referring to things like the vacuum cleaner that has been setting on my front porch for two entire months. On my FRONT porch!!! It’s too dirty to bring in and it may work, so I haven’t gotten rid of it. I need to clean it out and test it and DO something with it. I think things like the vacuum cleaner are a testimony to my state of mind last month. Or perhaps I should chalk it up to the hot, hot weather. Or…laziness.

Fun poser pic. Now onto the real meat of this post.

Some people get spring fever, but I’m betting that many people who live where I do get it in the fall instead. We’ve had a couple of cool mornings this past week that have me out taking the dogs for long walks again. As a result, I feel good in a way that I can never replicate at the gym.

Yesterday, I ate some ice cream and afterwards, looked and felt as if I’d swallowed a balloon. I decided that it is time to cut the junk out of my diet again, as it crept back in this summer, causing me to put on an alarming 15 pounds!!! A sedentary life as a writer and binging on carbs definitely don’t go together.

The juicer that Greg got me came a couple of days ago, so I went to the store and bought a refrigerator full of veggies. It is so easy to use. I’m not going to claim that I like vegetable juice, because I don’t. In fact, the reason I like the juicer is because I am not much of a fan of raw veggies without tons of fattening dressing on them. This way, I can just drink them and be done with it. It’s not like I’m going to add a quarter of cup of ranch to a glass of juice, you know? I’m going to replace a couple of meals with it. I’m not fooling around with the weight anymore. I rationalized eating like crap because Ativan withdrawal is so hard. The thing is, it only felt good eating all those carbs for a little while. Then I felt worse. So back on track it is.

Dinner.

I talked to Sky yesterday, and he is doing great. He sent me an email with a link to the PDF version of his book, which he also has available on Lulu at cost. It amazes me that my formerly unfocused kiddo wrote 192 pages. He says some good things, too. I particularly like this:

Some people are expecting an apocalypse; I propose that the apocalypse is occurring right in front of us. We are witnessing the death and destruction of our plants, our animals, our forests and oceans.

Here is the link to Sky’s book if you’re interested.

Sky writes a lot about our destructive consumer culture–”Babylon.” I struggle with it. I agree, but I enjoyed buying a bunch of lip gloss and reading a trashy magazine today. Sometimes I feel like I have a split personality.

I’ve been drawing and painting again, after stopping for a couple of months. What happened is that I looked at what I had done and thought it was complete crap, so I quit. I started up again because there is no other way to improve other than to keep trying, and the process itself is very helpful to me in that I quit jonesing for Ativan while I’m doing it. I would love to do a workshop in a drug rehab facility that encourages people to just have fun with art, because it really does help. Of course, I need to practice what I preach, because although I had a blast with the butterfly, I now look at it and it looks incredibly childish and not in that good kind of way. What’s worse is that I have a tendency to compare anything artistic that I do to the work of others–in many cases, others who have been doing art for far longer than I.

Varmint has been very relaxed lately. She’s mellowing out in her old age. Yes, she has three legs.

I may have already mentioned this, but I’ve recently started watching quite a bit of television due to research that shows that watching television slows your brain activity down to the point where you might as well be asleep. I figure this is exactly what my healing brain needs more of, so I’ve been watching multiple episodes of My Name Is Earl while I crochet at night. We watched all of the Breaking Bad episodes available on Netflix, as well as every episode of The Shield. Great writing on all of these shows.

So anyway, I created a couple of patterns that differ from what I normally crochet. I didn’t style the pics or make much of an effort, so it’s difficult to see them to their best advantage. I’ll have to remedy that, of course, if I intend to put them on Etsy.

Sage made me promise to edit out his face on the frilly scarf pic.

I found a website some time ago that I loved, and then forgot to bookmark it. It’s a drawing/recipe site. One thing I miss about Austin is soba noodles, so I plan to make this recipe. Check it out–They Draw & They Cook.

Sage starts school again on Monday. I am planning to go to the coffee shop and write in the mornings so that I can break the habit of not concentrating, if that makes sense. It’s been so difficult to write with Sage playing with friends, etc. around me all day, and I need a change of scenery. Hopefully, that’ll snap me back into some modicum of productivity.

I’ve woken up several times in the past few days with my teeth chattering. It’s not that the bedroom is cold–I wish!–but that I shake so hard that eventually my teeth start acting like I’m in a blizzard. My ears are ringing and I have digestive issues you don’t want me to expound upon. My vision is so blurry that I bought a pair of reading glasses, only to discover that the real problem is that…my vision is blurry regardless of of how big the text I’m working on is.

There are other things too, and after several months of withdrawal from Ativan, it’s getting old. Like gaining ten pounds because I was binging on carbs as a way to calm my body down. The good news is that I have went from 4mg to 1.5mg. I’m going to make it. I could make a career out of warning people to stay away from this stuff.

I have other good news as well. I’ve been wanting to work on a fictional book for quite some time, but I never had an idea that I thought was very good or that I’d even care to put effort into. That all changed the other day. A plot dropped down out of the sky and hit me like a ton of bricks. I spent a good portion of my sleepless night last night mapping out the characters. I think this will be fun to write–even more fun because a good friend of mine and I will be working on our respective novels at the same time and holding one another accountable.

I can’t wait for cool weather to get here. I think the withdrawal stuff is worse because I’m hardly exercising at all. I have a stress fracture that I’ve been nursing and it’s too hot to do those two mile walks with the dogs, who get about 15 minutes walking around the park in the evening and that’s it. It’s been so hot that I don’t even feel like riding my bike–it has been as hot as 95 degrees at eight o’clock in the evening! Ridiculous! /weather rant

Okay. I think I’ve gotten everything off my chest so that I can begin the day’s task of writing articles about bridal shower gifts and editing titles until holes are burned in my retina. (I did 1500 of them yesterday!)

I finally replaced my old reliable brick with an iPhone. I like it even more than I thought I would, and have become a sucker for downloading apps. I love the “Hipstamatic,” which I took these photos with.

I’ve been enjoying hanging out at the pool at the health club with Sage, although lately it’s so hot I don’t even want to go there.

I took some pictures of the cats, and of my feet as well. This is Varmint. The gray kitty is Gordon, who turned out to be a girl.

Sage is totally growing up.

He wants to go back to school for the social aspect. I can’t blame him, because there is just no way we fit in with the people who homeschool for religious reasons. I’m happy I got to spend this time with Sage, though, and he should have better skills than he would have if he hadn’t received the one-on-one instruction that homeschool provided.

I’m busy coming to terms with the fact that we will likely live here for the rest of Greg’s career, if not our lives. His family’s manufacturing shop is here, and he really enjoys the work. We talked about it the other night, and he told me that he has no plans to leave. Meanwhile, I’ve been dealing with the reality of being at home way too much. While I have proven to myself that I can make enough money from home, I’ve been getting pretty lonely lately. So I’ve been looking at career options besides teaching. I just can’t see spending the next 20 years sitting at home and writing, you know? When Greg told me that he saw us staying here for a long time, I realized that changing careers means changing to something that is available here in this small town. Any continuing education–additional degrees, whatever–also needs to be available here. That is very limiting, but perhaps that’s a good thing. I can be very scattered, and this will help me focus. I’m considering nursing, but I need to research it a lot more before making any sort of decision.

Meanwhile, though, I’ve gotten an additional writing gig that pays more, and I’m making some things to sell here locally and put on Etsy. Pics of that later.

Varmint does this all the time. Wile E. will simply wait until she’s gone before attempting to take back the bone.

Trying to capture a shot of Sage before he goes to Boy Scout camp. He and Wile E. couldn’t stop playing.

I don’t know what I’m doing with the art. I looked at it last week and thought, “This stuff looks like shit.” There is one drawing I’ve done that I like and that’s it. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Maybe it does.

I’m annoyed with exercise. I found out long ago that exercise and sunshine make me feel sane. I dislike not being able to push myself. Doing so results in a daylong adrenalin rush that gives me palpitations. I attribute this to the Ativan taper. I’d like to get in better shape than I am.

Speaking of the Ativan taper, while it is not always easy, I can feel myself getting smarter. We went to Galveston last week, and I took what used to be my old dose because I was getting sick with anxiety in the car (thank you agor). I was relaxed and out of it the rest of the trip and hung over the next day. I think this is a good thing, because that is the amount I was taking every morning. If it makes me feel that out of it now, that means my brain has healed and eliminated some of those drug receptors or whatever it does.

I want to be independently wealthy. I am sick of writing articles every day. I want to write other things on spec, but it won’t pay fast enough and of course, isn’t guaranteed money. I could write it anyway, but I am so burnt on writing at the end of the day after writing those articles. It sounds like an excuse, which it is, but seriously. Anytime I need to get it in perspective though, I think about being trapped in a classroom all day. Although, I think my attitude is a little stinky this summer because after all, it is nice kicking back and still getting paid by a school district. Some of my web content earns passive income to the tune of $200 a month. I need to kick that up a notch.

We did have a good time in Galveston. We found some awesome restaurants–a Pho place, the best barbecue I’ve ever had and a Central American restaurant that had stupendous catfish. All of these places were very inexpensive compared to what is available on in the tourist areas. The Central American restaurant was one of those ones that was either going to be really good or memorably bad. It had a colorful display of Santa Claus and all of his reindeer on one side of the building and an eight-foot-tall Easter bunny holding a burrito on the other. Greg tried to talk me out of it, but I won, and we were both glad. Even with the cheap eats, we spent way too much money. I am broke, broke, broke, which is why I am stressing more about the writing than usual.

We spent hours and hours by the water. There was an unusual amount of sea life in the Gulf–you could pick up a piece of seaweed, shake it and watch the crabs and shrimp fall out. There were also many, many schools of fish visible and I saw a school of dolphins one morning. I suspect that there may be so much sea life there because it has migrated away from the oil spill. Who knows.

Here are the pics. I’ve never seen so many seagulls in my life, by the way. They were going to town eating the creatures embedded in the seaweed.

I’m struggling with something related to this though. Watching my brain chemistry change after years of being tranquilized is an interesting process. On the bright side, good things are happening. As in, I’ve been afraid of storms for years, but not anymore. I sit on the porch now and enjoy the show. Apparently, Ativan has caused many of the symptoms it was supposed to be preventing. I’ve been on either that or Xanax since Sage was born, and a good amount of it too. I literally no longer know who I am. Here’s why.

When my serotonin levels are up and I’m all happy smiley oh look at that gorgeous tree over there, I really could not give a shit about what is going on in the world. Well, theoretically, I care, but not enough for things to really move me. Right now, they’re not, and I’m simply enraged. I do a lot of research for my writing job, and lately I’ve been accepting assignments that expose where big companies produce their goods. I love writing those articles! Anyway, I was doing research and came across this article about how our f*cking corporations think it’s just dandy to pay Bangledeshi workers 14 cents an hour. I mean, I want our jobs back in the United States! And if they’re not, they could at least be benefiting someone. There is not much to distinguish this from slavery. We think it’s so awful how children had to work long horrible hours in stinking unsafe factories during the Industrial Revolution, but buy our clothes from Kohls and Wal-Mart, our shoes from Adidas and Nike and our gadgets from Microsoft, all of whom are serious baddies in the global marketplace.

Aughhhh! I mean, what should we do, buy all of our clothes from Etsy? Perhaps it’s a possibility, you know?

I’ve known about this stuff. Do people who actually act on their knowledge have less happy go-lucky serotonin? Are we such a apathetic, sociopathic society because we’re all drugged up? What do you do with your knowledge?

On another note, I’m reading Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded–and What We Need to Do to Remake Them

That’s right Michelle, feed the beast.