Sometimes even I think that my internal monologue sounds insane.

Last night I was working on a sewing project around 3am, and not thinking about anything in particular, when I realized that what kept repeating in my head seemed to be a narration of a gang murder on Sesame Street (Snuffalupagus was mentioned repeatedly) as told in the voice of the aging, drunk, rock star from Love Actually.

Is this unhealthy?

Finally got around to uploading some stuff onto ArtSpots. I think with everything that's been going on lately I frankly forgot all about getting accepted and everything. :) I'm sure it's stuff you've all seen before, but you can go check it out anyway here:

Damalia's ArtSpots Gallery

From now on I'll probably put most of my anthro commission type stuff on there, unless I think it's good in a generic kind of way, like the werewolf commission I did recently. I'd like to reserve my DeviantArt Gallery to be a more general illustration kind of gallery, so for the time being I can refer real life clients there. I really enjoy doing the anthro stuff that I do, but it's not necessarily the image I want to project as a professional illustrator. I'm sure some of you can understand. :\ It's sad, but a reality these days.

In other news, we got another 11 inches of snow on top of the 18 last weekend. There's two feet on snow on the ground right now, which I think is more than we've had at once for quite a few years now. It's nice, but sort of messy. Dad is still doing okay, but he's on all these drugs that are making him kind of weird. He's tired and pretty out-of-it, and he can't eat much, but his blood counts seem to be going up again, which is a good sign. We've been hanging out at home all weekend watching movies. Of course, we've been snowed in since Wednesday. The Prestige, by the way, is really good. I recommend you go rent it.

Oh, and I'd like to sell this piece that I entered in Society of Illustrators, 3x3, and Spectrum--does anyone know if any of them will require me to produce the original if I win?

I think my laptop is trying to slowly commit suicide. Every once in a while it crashes rather spectacularly in a sad cry-for-help kind of way. I continue to ignore the fact that my hard drive is slowly melting into a pile of non-functional self hatred.

Does that make me guilty of hardwareslaughter by negligence? Probably.

We are at the beginning of yet another blizzard. We got 18 inches of snowfall just last weekend, and now we're under another winter storm warning until Friday, with a lot more ice and heavy snow tomorrow night. I think I need to go out and take a picture of the 17 foot snow bank the plow dumped in the front yard just to prove I am not, in fact, shitting you. I only just finished pulling the drifts off the roof. The whole town is practically shutting down. Well, Mike's school is canceled at least. Not that it takes much to shut down a town that practically dies at 8:00pm every day of the week.

But......I like the snow anyway. :)

In spite of my oppressive boredom and occasional loneliness, in a way I think maybe this forced break is probably a good thing for me. It only works because I'm the kind of person who can spend hours on end in total silence and not feel the need to talk or be near another person. I spend my days sleeping in quite late, I do some art (sort of) and take care of the chills and Mike and my family until they go to bed. Then I fart around online for a while, read for a couple hours, and go back to bed. It's basically everything I want to do when I can't actually be doing it. Somehow, though, at the end of this I think I will finally be ready to leave. Always before I've been torn apart at the end of the way-too-short summer and I can never quite look forward to or be excited about going back to school (though there are parts of it that I miss).

I might be wrong, though. I've never exactly been in touch with the whole emotional-side-thing. Strong emotions tend to creep up and surprise me, and I never seem to know how much things matter until something changes. In short, I do an awfully good job of not thinking about the traumatic stuff until I have to. So I guess I should refrain from making assumptions about my feelings, seeing as I'm hardly a qualified expert on the subject.

WOOOOOO BLIZZARD WARNING!!!

There's a half inch of glaze ice covering everything outside. I saw a squirrel slide all the way down our driveway (it's on a steep incline); funny stuff.

And we're supposed to get 14-20" of snow by Monday! I probably shouldn't be so excited about it.

And I got a Daily Deviation! Although it's not on one that I would have ever expected it for. I'm always thrown for a loop on those.

Well Matchy's surgery went well as far as I can tell. He was pretty weak and miserable for a few days, but is acting much more normal now, and I think the incision site looks clean and uninfected. He's lost some weight though. (tentative sigh of relief) I could not handle another one going down right now. If nothing else, the last two months have prooven that family comes first, and as far as I'm concerned, the chills count as family.

Dad came home from the hospital this afternoon. His transplant yesterday went pretty well, and now he's on outpatient until they pronounce him cured....in another 3 or 4 months we'll know for sure. We've been lucky as hell so far. At least he gets to be at home now, unless he gets real sick from the immunosuppression and has to go back in, which they say is a likelyhood, if not an eventuality. I've been on full-time little brother duty so Mom could stay with Dad in the hospital, so I really have nothing new to report, other than I've been busy doing....stuff. When you're in the RISD bubble, I think you forget that real life is such a hassle.

I've been trying to work on a couple commissions, so at least I have that going sometimes. I'm doing them digitally now, since it fits my lifestyle these days much better. I simply don't have the uninterrupted time to work acrylic. I'm reading a lot. I'm in the middle of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire epic, and am quite hooked. I've been going through 1200 page books in two weeks.

Right now there isn't a day in the 10-day forecast that doesn't have a snow icon on it. We're sort of in the beginning of one of those fugly midwest blizzards that's supposed to dump a foot and a half+ of snow, plus ice and sleet and hail. Sounds like a good time for all. Lucky we rented a bunch of good movies.....but I'm not looking forward to shoveling. It's not very cold, so it's going to be a wet, heavy snow.

And this is the END OF CHIVALRY (plucked from a friend's link, thought I'd share).

We put Tani to sleep this afternoon. The vet ended up checking her teeth and found that the back teeth were all worn normally, which indicated a more serious problem because she still couldn't swallow. He suspected an esophogial cancer, which we couldn't do anything about anyway. Everyone tells me it was the right thing to do, but I always wonder if we could have saved her. If somehow, I could have worked harder or been more attentive or more devoted and could have saved her, and it just wracks me with guilt.

The worst part isn't so much Tani herself being gone, but rather that the event reopens worse wounds left by my other two girls dying. Chilli and Dea had terrible dental problems that just kept coming back. Malclusions, abcesses, spurs, overgrowth. We tried everything with them. I syringe-fed Dea for 6 months. I loved them both as much as I could ever have loved anything, but they both left--and in terrible ways. Chilli died in my arms of an infected abcess, and Dea we finally had to put down or she would have continued to starve to death. She couldn't eat due to the root spurs and was so thin you could feel her bones, but she still acted so normal and curious right up to the minute we gave her over to the vet. Tani was like that today, and now I find the ghosts of my other two haunting me just as much as hers.

This has been about the worst week I've had in a long time.

At least Dad is doing well. He's got another 8 days of sitting in the hospital getting stuff pumped into him, and hes bored out of his mind, but things are still going well.

Something Dad always tells me (and this is a Woody Allen quote)......There are two kinds of people in the world, the horrible and the miserable. The horrible are people who are born without limbs, or deaf, or blind, or end up with incurable diseases. Everyone else is miserable.

So be thankful you're miserable.

Wow. Today might be my worst day in a very long time. It is certainly the worst Valentine's Day I can remember. I'm not even sure where I should start in on it.

One of my chinchillas, Tani, is having dental problems. I know that she's probably had them for quite a while, but she's always managed to stay perky and energetic in spite of being anorexically thin for the last year. Over the last week, she's had a real downward turn. She's got matted fur around her eyes and is drooling and pawing at her mouth and acting like chewing hurts (which is a really bad sign). She isn't keitoacidotic yet, but she isn't responsive and she just sits in her house and shakes occasionally.  I've taken to syringe feeding her, but that's no way to live. There is a surgery that we could pursue, but it's only a temporary fix, and I think she's too weak to make it through something like that right now. I've had enough experience with these types of hereditary dental maloclusions to know that we have to put her down. I'm totally lost over it, and I've spent a good part of my day crying, but there's just no point in prolonging this for her, as much as I want to, it's just not the humane thing to do. I need to schedule her euthanasia for sometime this weekend.

Pandora, her daughter, has been just freaking out since I moved Tani into the little nursery cage this morning. She can't find her mom and she won't stop barking and calling. Panda has lived with Tani pretty much her whole life and has never been alone. I have to do something with her after Tani goes or she'll go downhill too, like Dea did after Chilli died. So I'm also trying to get an appointment to have Panda's dad, Matchbox, nutered. Right now he's too aggressive to live with the other boys, but he's been chewing his fur because he's anxious and lonely. If I can get him nutered, he can live with Panda and it solves the lonely problem for both of them. It's a sort of rare procedure on a chinchilla, though, and I haven't heard back from our vet about it yet.

I guess that yesterday eveningish Casey got an email from res life that basically said that she was getting a new roommate.....on friday or saturday of this week. This would not have been a problem if I was not effectively still living in that room. Or at least my stuff was still living there. I withdrew for this semester, which means that I technically don't have any rights to the space, but I haven't had any chance to take care of cleaning up my stuff and getting it stored away.....seeing as I'm something like 1400 miles away from it right now. And not exactly by choice. Of course, this is a vacation week and everyone has left for the time being, so Casey got this email just as she got home and was in no position to deal with the situation. I feel terrible, because there's nothing I can do in this case--I can't be there to help pick up my stuff, so I'm totally depending on Casey. Even though she's being an angel and is okay with taking care of everything, I hate to put her in that position because it's just not fair to her. Ideally I would have had a chance to tie up loose ends like this before I left......but I wasn't exactly aware that I would be leaving. So.....great. And res life was a big headache to deal with today--any time I talked to them it was a sort of "shame on you for leaving your shit you shouldn't have done that" kind of tone, which wasn't exactly encouraging. Originally they were threatening to throw it all out, but they can't rightfully do that since my stuff and Casey's stuff are so intermingled. If they had thrown out something of Casey's, she would have had the right to sue. So I guess the deal now is that we have until Sunday night to get my stuff cleared out of my side of the room. Casey is going back early on Saturday to try to pack up my stuff and get it suitably hidden (uhhh.....I mean stored) At that point the res life chick is going to come and okay the space. That means that the new girl would have to move in on Monday, but if she can't manage that they'll place her somewhere else. Hopefully she'll just go to another room and it won't totally mess up our rooming situation. There's nothing else I can do. I feel so crappy and helpless about it all. :(

In addition to all of this, my Dad went into the hospital tonight for the next 10 days or so. We've known that his transplant procedures would start today for quite a while now, but it's still distressing to have him there. Our uncle, Eliot, came in last week to do the cell harvesting stuff. He's a perfect genetic match for Dad, so we really lucked out there, and his afaresis went really well. Actually, hes a medical engineer, and he spent about 10 years of his life working on the machine that was used to harvest his cells--how's that for irony? He got back home yesterday before the storms hit. But anyway, the scary stuff starts now.....there's all kinds of things that need to happen before the actual bone marrow transplant on the 22nd, and then it's runs to the hospital every day for the next 100 days. It's going to be a long time before Dad is well again.

And today was Valentine's day too, apparently. Though I haven't had much chance to think about it with all this other stuff coming down. I went up to visit Adam last weekend, but even that wasn't so good, since he had a fraternity work-on-cleaning-the-house sort of day on saturday, and sunday it was his turn to cook dinner for everyone. I brought stuff up and helped, but I hardly saw him, and the only time we actually got out of the house was to see Pan's Labyrinth late Saturday night........which was really cool, but HORRIFIC. The flesh zombie gave me nightmares. I ended up hanging out with Maren on Saturday evening, which was nice to see her, but I didn't actually see Adam that day until about 9pm. We had intended to do something then for Valentine's Day, but it just didn't happen, and I'm not sure when the next time I can get away is. This week triangle (his fraternity) is hosting their sweetheart week....which apparently involves a lot of hanging out with sorority chicks and not a lot of doing nice things for your girlfriend for V-day. If I wasn't so freaked out, it would probably bother me more.

So yeah, my life is sort of a mess in general right now. I need to try and get things organized, but I can't seem to make much progress because every day is something new and depressing. I need to send off contest and scholarship applications (since I need the money now), figure out my flight plans and housing for next year, take care of Michael and the house, and still find time to work on commissions and this extended wintersession project......which seems to have stalled out for the last week.

I'm out of stuff to complain about now, so I guess it's time to end the journaling. I feel like taking some sedatives and checking out for the day.

I got a big cardboard box in the mail earlier last week. It was full of cookies (which I ate way too many of) and cards and stuff from my friends back in RI, as a sort of care package thing. They even got my professor friends to send notes and gifts. It just made me cry. There are parts of being in Rhode Island that I miss, and it's not the classes or the city or my lifestyle (all of which usually make me miserable and strung out), I think it's really just my friends. I really miss them. I get along really well with my Mom and all, but she's often busy with Dad and doesn't replace my girlfriends. As my hermity lifestyle continues uninterrupted here in Minnesota, I find that without even the smallish routine peer contact I had at school I'm actually sort of lonely, which isn't something I can say I often feel.

I miss you guys.

And my chinchillas love yoo too!!!




Fuzz and raisins for all!

In other brief news, my Dad is doing really well with the chemo so far. He's lost all his hair and is tired all the time, but his blood counts are responding better than the doctors were expecting, so it's good. Also, both of his brothers are HLA matches to be his bone-marrow donor--which is apparently really unusual. The doctors say that that only happens when the parents are related. 0_0 So somewhere in that tiny little Jewish village in Romania that both my Grandparents are from, someone, at some point, married a cousin. We're all quite amused.

I've been doing as well as can be expected, I suppose. I tried to set up a way to make up all the credits that I'll be missing and still graduate on time, and I took classes at a local community college for about two weeks. But RISD couldn't tell me whether or not I would in fact receive credit for those classes, and I couldn't push through an academic appeal to take on 3 credits of independant study without having to pay the full spring tuition in time for that other college's withdraw date, so I ended up dropping out of everything. I'm just going to work straight through and end up taking an extra semester in the fall of 2008. I won't graduate on time, but these things do happen and I'm trying to make peace with it. Right now I'm mostly taking care of my little brother so my Mom can take care of Dad. It's been a little tough to get work done though, since I'm always running him somewhere, I never have more than an hour or two in a row during the day to get down to it. Of course, if you want to read up on my Wintersession, I've been updating the Wandering blog pretty regularly. I'm flying back to RI in approximately a month now, but I have yet to decide if I'll stay for a couple days or a week, or more--so it would be cool if you RI folks wanted to plan something so we can hang out for a while before I book it back home for 6 months......since I kinda miss you guys. :(

My love to everyone,
Beth

I forgot--I've been keeping a daily blog of my exploits related to my wintersession study in wildlife painting. There's lots of neat pictures and more details about my work for those who might be interested.

It's called Wandering in the Midwest, for lack of something more interesting to call it, and it's open for anyone to read or comment. Eventually there will be fairly current updates of my paintings in-progress as well.

I am a bad journal-er. I don't update for months at a time, and then it's only to complain about the things that are going wrong or frustrating in my life. I had intended to write an entry about how the semester went, but stuff has happened that makes that not even at all important. So, not to break my long series of angsty posts, here's the latest batch of shit that's been raining down on me lately:

Things have been happening here so fast in the last week that I feel like a year has gone by and I am always surprised when I forget that people don't know what's going on. I feel like it should have been on the national news or something. Not to be too abrupt about it, but about two weeks ago (dec.21) my Dad was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. Apparently it is a possible side-effect of the chemotherapy he went through last year that they noticed during one of his routine 3-month checks in early December.

I don’t know how to really explain it, because I don’t think I've been so good at keeping you occasional readers updated. Some of you may be aware that my father had a relapse of Hodgkin's cancer last summer. But it really starts 18 years ago when my Dad was first diagnosed with Hodgkin’s cancer. My mother was pregnant with my little sister at the time, and I was only two, and we stayed with my Grandmother here in Rochester when they emergency-transferred Dad here to the Mayo clinic as a sort of desperate last resort (which is how we came to live in Minnesota). Somehow he pulled through that, but it was really bad then. When his Hodgkin’s relapsed last summer I was so scared that it would be bad like the first time, but the treatment was totally fine, easy almost, and dad was hardly slowed down by the chemotherapy. It was a sure-thing that he would be fine, but the treatment then wasn’t totally done when I went back to school last fall.

But this is so much worse and has totally changed things for us—it’s certainly taken the shine off everything for me. They hospitalized dad that Thursday night and started him on heavy doses of chemotherapy by the weekend. This leukemia is pretty much one of the worst types, it’s a rapidly progressing type, but they caught it relatively early and we’re all trying to be optimistic. I've heard people say that the faster the cancer grows, the faster it dies...but that might just be bullshit to make us feel better. He’s done well with the first week of treatment, but it’s going to get worse before it ever begins to get better, and they’re telling us it could be as long as a year before he’s back to 100%. And they won’t really tell us much more than “there is a reasonable probability that we will be successful.” The treatment process alone is expected to take 6-9 months, ending with a bone-marrow transfusion--hopefully from one of his brothers, but we don’t know if they’re an HLA match yet. It's something like 6 sets of a 14-day cycle where he's hospitalized for 5-8 days at the beginning of each cycle. We're lucky though that my mother is a registered nurse, and we're able to do a lot of things outpatient, so dad can be at home.

I’ve had to do a lot of hard thinking in the last week, and right now my plan is that I’ll be taking this spring semester off to help my Mom and little brother (13 years old) and possibly graduating a semester later (after summer session of 2008 maybe). Jessica, my little sister, is a freshman at a college only 3 hours away, so she’ll be going back. I just can’t imagine trying to do a demanding semester at RISD with all of this coming down at home. I;ve been looking into the possibility of taking classes at the local community college and over the summer (maybe at the U) so I can graduate on time; or can stay home and work (I have more murals lined up, as well as a long list of commissions) so I won’t just sit around and worry, but I need to be with my family through this. However, there is still a small chance that I’ll be going back to RISD at the last minute (I’ll probably decide around February 10th or so), but they would have to have Dad in remission by that point, and there isn’t really a good chance of that happening. I fully intend to resume my RISD education at the normal time this fall.

I don't know how the hell I managed to orchestrate a wintersession study that lets me stay at home and still work through all of this. It's really some kind of freak miracle, I guess. Although I intend to go through with my plan for this wintersession, I’ll also be taking on a lot more responsibility for my family, and some of the things that I had wanted to do during this period are unfortunately sort of not going to happen. Obviously it hasn’t been a very relaxing holiday break for us, but I’m so grateful that I can be here with my family now and still do work for my RISD degree.

Trying to organize how I'm going to do this with the RISD administration has been another headache, though. Robert Brinkerhoff (our illustration department head) has been so SO nice about all of this and has given me his full support and any help he can offer. I wish I could say the same for the Student Affairs office, which has been throwing around 4-7 different forms that I may or may not have to fill out. Rob has given me his permission to try to organize 3-6 credits of independent study for the spring semester, but I won't be in Rhode Island during this time, which is why this is such a bitch. I can file an academic petition and take 3-6 credits, but it will mean that I have to pay something closer to the full tuition than what I'll be getting out of it. Technically I need to withdraw in order to not have to pay for my meal plan, housing, medical, blah blah blah.....but I can't withdraw and still take the 3-6 credits. Thus, the red tape. I don't know what I'm going to do yet. I'm pretty sure, however, that I will be able to transfer in credits from another college if I do classes--so I've taken steps in the last week to get myself admitted and signed up for classes at the local community college. I'm taking French and Ceramics and they start Monday, but I don't even know for sure if they'll work. Most likely. Somehow it's easier to take these credits here than to do the 3-6 at RISD. I guess I'll try and keep updating more regularly since I won't really be in contact with many of you folks.

On that note, the other end of the airline ticket from December goes back to RI on Febuary 16, so I'll be back then either way. Either to pack up my stuff and finish the wintersession, or to be back for the semester....but I don't think that's likely. I'm thinking (since I have yet to buy the ticket back home) that I may just stay there for a week or so, to finish up stuff and to hang out with my friends who I won't see for 6 months.

Thats pretty much most of it for now.

Status Update, (wee hours of the morning): Second Design is shitty but more or less finished; can't keep painting, am going to bed.

If I were a steak, I would be well done.

I am so fraking burnt out right now. I wish I could just curl up in a ball and die. I've been working on these mural designs since 1:00 pm, pretty much solid, with a short break to eat some shitty portfolio food and take a shower. I skipped my studio class so I could WORK MORE. Other than that it's been almost 12 hours straight. I have not started to paint my second composition for a client review at 2:00pm today. Actually, it needs to be done by noon so I can meet with the internship coordinator to try to set up an internship that I want to do this summer and mat these bitches for the presentation. My shoulders and arms hurt from being hunched over a desk all day, and my eyes don't focus right anymore. Well, the eyes problem is really something that I've been noticing for a few months now, but I'm too stubborn to wear my glasses. It doesn't help that I've been marginally sick for more than a month, and it hurts to swallow. My sense of humor is all but gone, and my nerves are so raw that I want to bite the heads off of people that I don't even know just for being happy.

But I am so sick of this class. I hate when I fall for good advertising, because that's all this class had going for it. So far, every week is a bigger disappointment than the last. I hate feeling more responsible than my professors, let alone the rest of my classmates. I hate busting my ass to do superior work for people that I don't even like, let alone respect. I don't even do it for myself anymore, because if I had a choice, I'd rather be sleeping. I hate it that I cry more than three times a week.

I only have to get through another 18 days......

It will be a miracle if I get through this semester in one piece.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20349888-2,00.html

Oh God. I feel like an important part of my life has just gone away. Steve Irwin was my first crush. I've been watching Steve since he started on animal planet--back when CH was only on Monday nights at 7pm. I don't know what to do with myself. Crikey. What am I going to do with my weeknights now?

Have you ever had one of those dreams where you wake up and wonder what the hell is wrong with your head, and why unrelated things congeal in your subconcious that could only be otherwise reproduced in the insane dribblings of a mental patient? I did. I have no idea why, but during the course of my vacation last week (which was otherwise lovely, btw. I fed wild stingrays raw squid and got a chunk of my finger ripped off in it's mouth--it was awesome ^_~) my fantastical brain managed to put my friends together in some sort of Arabian-nights styled opium den, naked, having some kind of drug-induced orgy. Imagine organza silk, dim light, and a two-foot erection, plus some faceless guy that kept trying to forcibly seduce me and steal me away from it all. Frightening. It scared the hell out of me, and I woke up in one of those 'where the hell am I' type panic fits and hit my head on the wall next to my cot. I hate it when that happens.

Anyway, vacation is over now and I am back to work again. I finished the first panel of the Rainforest project (photos to come god knows when) and with my last two weeks I am endevoring to put in another batch of panther decals in Century, finish two commissions, and start something for the damn BLZ contest.....which has a deadline coming up in September. All this, while trying to spend as much time as possible with my boyfriend, who starts school before I leave. Oh yeah, and I need to pack my life back up into cardboard boxes and ship it half way across the continent. On the plus side, Ren-fest this weekend! YAY. :) That and I still need to see SOAP, so no spoilers folks.

I just finished the designs for said panther decals a little while ago.....which is good, considering my clients are expecting me to start painting tomorrow, a process that Adam has graciously agreed to help me with for the set-up stuff. How did I get so lucky? This summer has been wonderful, but I feel like it's just gone in a flash. I have no idea where all my time went. I can't help but feel that the impending school year spells some kind of doom for our relationship, too. I know that's illogical and depressing, but I can't seem to get that voice of doubt in my head to STFU. But I suppose that eventually all things must change, even the ones I hope never do. All I can do is that best I can do. I hate to be such a cynic, but if I don't give voice to my fears, or at least acknowledge them, then they become great unspoken monsters that come to swallow up my security.