Still sitting here....
Mood:  energetic
Even though I said I was going to get up and get to work, I'm still sitting at the computer. I've looked again at all the mosaic materials on the Blick website, designed a possible wave pattern for the river rock stepping stone mural, and looked at watercolor pre-stretched canvases because I've decided that if I'm going to create visual art rather than language art for awhile, I may as well use some of the materials I already own.

I am hopeless!

Sleepless and Up to My Eyeballs in Venetian Glass
Mood:  energetic
Topic: Daily Eruptions
My moods have been cycling really fast this week. Thursday night I came home and felt the most desperate and depressed I have felt since moving here (after having a productive day at work). I have been binge-eating fast food all week, and Friday night I came home and a true manic episode set in.

I have been having ideas for a dress I want to design for myself and the glass beads I want to use to embellish it. On Thursday I decided I needed to buy the lampwork kit and start learning to make beads because I was going to make the beads for the dress as well as a pair of matching earrings, a necklace, and a bracelet. Yesterday morning, I started having ideas for mosaic projects I could do. I started in the kitchen with the beach/marine motif but by the time I got home last night I had expanded outside the house and started thinking about a mosaic door hanging and mosaic stones I could use in the front flower beds or to line the sidewalk coming up to the house and had two ideas for mosaic murals to completely cover the back patio.

Hans and I went to bed at 10:30 last night and I slept for awhile, but then I woke up sometime around 3:00 or 4:00 with new ideas and haven't been able to get back to sleep. Damn you, Dick Blick!

At some point, I stopped thinking about glass tile mosaics in the flower beds and switched to river rock. This would carry the water motif and be more natural, but still unique. It occurred to me I could make river rock stepping stones (square) and use them end to end to make a moveable mural. We own the property three feet beyond the far end of our patio, and I've been trying to think of a way to visually claim that space without putting up a fence that would block my great view of the woods behind the house. I could do that by laying these stepping stones down flush with each other and the edge of the concrete. Then we'd have a surface on which to place flower pots or the grill, the patio would look more expansive, and I'd get to use the river rocks but not in a location on which I would want to walk or sit frequently. (They're flat, rounded stones, but you stand them up on their edges and they aren't much fun to walk on, so I don't want to cover the whole back patio with them.) Then, I could still do a glass and/or ceramic tile mural to cover the concrete patio. I'm considering a sunburst pattern in reds, oranges and yellows against a cobalt and powder blue background, or, if I decide I want something more serene, more zen, a spiral that covers the entire space. I could do this in muted colors, add a fountain to one side, maybe a rock cairn altar to hold a candle, and use natural wood furniture. The space is too small to make the spiral practical for walking meditation, but I could sit at its center for sitting meditation.

It's awful! I have ideas for mosaic coasters (for indoors, although I'm still thinking about ways to use them in multiples for purposes other than holding drinks) and a lazy susan and glass mosaic votive holders I can hang from wrought iron lantern hooks all along the edge of the front patio. And now I'm on the hunt for rectangular mosaic molds because I've decided I want to make mosaic landscaping bricks, probably also out of river rock, to line the front flower beds. There's a tree ring mold I know I already want to use to encircle the crape myrtle in front of the living room window and I've been trying to figure out how to use the gentle curve of that mold to make all of my edging bricks, but that would require altering the shape of the beds to a wavy pattern, which I might really like, but I'm not sure the homeowners association would allow it without my having to get permission first. Rectangles would be easier.

This is, of course, after deciding last week or the week before that I was going to plant the front bed next summer according to a feng shui BaGua using native plants that attract butterflies and birds and hopefully also need little water.

The thing is, I need a second job to pay for all of these little projects because the current budget doesn't allow for any of them. And, of course, a second job would eat up the time I have available for actually completing any of the projects. So what I really need is a sudden, but steady, influx of new money that requires little or no effort on my part. Exactly what everyone is looking for, eh?

I'm a little disturbed about this particular manic episode because it makes it difficult to deny that I might be bipolar. As long as I wasn't having huge bursts of energy that kept me awake without feeling tired, it was easier to say I wasn't having manic episodes. They say that manic episodes, for some people, are productive and enjoyable times, and for an artist, I can see that that might be true. The only real problem comes if the manic episodes interfere in a significant way with your life.

Hans is awake now, so since I'm also up, I guess it's time to use some of this energy in a constructive way. I promised Hans I'd get the few remaining moving boxes emptied and broken down and their contents put away today in exchange for him putting up with the paint smell while I finish painting the downstairs this weekend. My family is coming out next weekend for a barbecue--it will be the first time my sister and her family will have been here--and I want the place to look as good as it can. I'm having three six-foot bookcases delivered on Monday and that will make a HUGE difference in the useability and appearance of my office. I haven't had a true bookcase since I left Seattle, and I'm very excited!

Okay, now to work.

Reader Privacy - Extra Help
Mood:  rushed
If you are a busy person with limited storage capacity in your overcrammed brain and don't know who your representatives and senators are or how to contact them, no worries!

You can find them easily by plugging your state or zip+4 into the locator functions at:

www.senate.gov

and

www.house.gov.

The locators are prominently placed on both home pages, and your message to the person who answers the phone in your elected official's office only need be one sentence long!

Your Reader Privacy Still in Jeopardy - Act NOW!
Mood:  rushed
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Here is a press release from the Campaign for Reader Privacy.

If you value your right to expose yourself to new ideas, shop for books without Big Brother watching over your shoulder, and use your library card--you do have a library card, don't you?--to explore your world, then this is an issue of concern to you.

Please read the press release and make a phone call!

P.S. The bolding is all mine--I may have gotten a little carried away with it, but I'm just trying to make it easier for you to get to the heart of the matter. I know you'll forgive me!

Campaign for Reader Privacy
American Booksellers Association, American Library Association,
Association of American Publishers, PEN American Center
www.readerprivacy.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For information contact:
Oren Teicher (ABA), 800-637-0037, ext. 6611
Larry Siems (PEN), 212-334-1660, ext. 105
Judy Platt (AAP), 202-220-4551
Bernadette Murphy (ALA), 202-412-7928

BOOK GROUPS URGE SUPPORT FOR HOUSE AND SENATE LETTERS

Washington, DC, August 24, 2005
In the final weeks of their two and a half year battle to restore the protections for reader privacy that were eliminated by the USA PATRIOT Act, organizations representing booksellers, librarians, publishers and writers today urged their supporters to continue pushing for the Senate version of legislation re-authorizing expiring sections of the PATRIOT Act. That version, in contrast to the unacceptable House bill, includes significant new protections for bookstore and library records and resets the clock for the records section to expire in three years. Supporters of reader privacy should be calling their House and Senate representatives to ask them to endorse letters being circulated by Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Larry Craig (R-ID) that call on members of the House and Senate conference committee to adopt the Senate bill. The conferees are expected to meet soon after Congress returns from its August recess.

Although S. 1389 (USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act) does not address all of the book community's concerns, it provides a more stringent standard to which the FBI must adhere when seeking bookstore and library records under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Under Section 215, the FBI may demand any records that are "relevant" to a terrorism or espionage investigation, including the records of people who are not suspected of committing a crime. While the House bill maintains this overly broad standard, S. 1389 requires the FBI to provide facts indicating that the person whose records are sought is a terrorist, the agent of a foreign power or someone who is an acquaintance of a person suspected of terrorism or espionage.

The Campaign for Reader Privacy strongly believes that S. 1389 is the logical choice of the conferees because it passed with the unanimous consent of the Senate, while the House was deeply divided over its bill. Indeed, the House had voted 238-187 on June 15 to provide greater protections for reader privacy. However, the conference committee can adopt the House bill if it chooses.

The Campaign for Reader Privacy is urging its supporters to also contact the Senate conferees to urge them to push for S. 1389. They are Arlen Specter (R-PA), Pat Roberts (R-KS), Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Michael DeWine (R-OH), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Carl Levin (D-MI). The House conferees have not been chosen yet.


Christopher Finan, president
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression
139 Fulton St., Suite 302
New York, NY 10038
telephone (212) 587-4025
cellphone (917) 509-0340
fax (212) 587-2436
www.abffe.com

Lucky Clovers
Mood:  lucky
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Soon after we moved into the new house and Hans came home from Seattle, Sudie had a commission for a drawing that included a clover blossom. I went online to find her photos to work from and then when I was out walking Kaija after work, I started looking at the clover patches around the neighborhood. Without even trying very hard, I found 4 four-leaf clovers! I brought them home and put them in a teacup of water on the kitchen counter.

It occurred to me, partly because things with Hans still looked so bleak and unhappy, that that was a very hopeful act. I considered making it a goal to always have a four-leaf clover in that teacup, but dismissed the thought, deciding it was unreasonable.

Ever since, though, the cup has had at least one 4-leaf clover living in it. One even grew roots and I determined to plant it in a pot so I could perhaps grow my own lucky clovers, but I think I waited too long and the roots have atrophied. Still, there are 6 four-leaf clovers and 1 five-leaf clover--what does that mean??--in the teacup downstairs. Hans suggested when I brought the five-leaf home that this place must have been exposed to radiation fallout, which I had already considered but decided not to think about. Afterall, I don't think this place is a twin cluster site the way our neighborhood in Wake Forest was! (Including my nieces, I can think of four families with twins in our old subdivision without even trying.)

I don't know how long the clovers will continue to grow--do they die in the winter?--but I think they'll make an interesting story element somewhere down the road. I just have to make sure that I don't make keeping them in the house into a compulsion ;) ! From what I've read, I currently see myself as having some obsessive behaviors, but no real compulsions (we're conveniently ignoring the fact that I have called myself a compulsive overeater), and I don't need to develop any.

So, if I interpret my heads-up, heads-down pairs of pennies as meaning that I choose my own luck, what does finding multiple four-leaf clovers in my neighborhood every other evening mean? I think it means I find my luck in places no one else thinks to look.

Writing My Own Permission Slip
Mood:  energetic
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I had my second therapy session this morning, and it felt really good. The woman I'm seeing is very skilled at honing in on the important parts of my ramblings and mirroring back exactly what I need to hear. She told me just a tiny bit about some of her family and friends and it feels like she gets me and this weird, circuitous journey I've been on. She had read the lists I took her last week and came in with the exact right question today, "So how do we get you back?"

I'm not sure the real me ever really left the Big Ride although I have approximated the real me intermittently in the seven years since. I do think the real work I've been struggling with is, how do I bring her home? How do I give myself permission to be her all the time in my real life instead of just bringing her out when I'm on novel adventures where the every day world "rules" don't necessarily apply?

What I've been realizing lately is that it has been convenient for me to be in jobs where my boss didn't exactly see my potential, because I could always complain that I wasn't succeeding because my boss wouldn't give me the opportunity to grow and try new things. It has also been convenient that I helped to set Hans up in our relationship as the rule maker--then it could be Hans's fault that my life didn't look the way I wanted. But now I have a boss who does see me and who has given me all the freedom I could ever want to succeed and to try new things and learn anything and everything, and Hans and I are both sick of him holding the power position, so now it's up to me to go out and make my life what I want it to be. So why am I hesitating? This is what we've set up as our topic of therapy discussion for next week.

I left feeling relieved, energetic, and optimistic today. Basically, she warned me to be careful of the stories I tell myself--something she recommended from Joseph Campbell--because it is too easy to believe them and therefore get trapped by them. (There is what happened and the story we tell of what happened and they are not the same thing.) And we talked about energy dissipation. Essentially she gave me the reality check that Hans has been trying to give me that it may be important for me to engage in all the activities I choose to engage in, but it is not realistic for me to hope to engage in all of them and lead a highly productive life all at the same time. So, if I'm going to train for a marathon and hold a full-time job and work on myself and my marriage, maybe I should cut myself a little slack that the new house is a mess and I haven't been writing.

Through talking to her I realized also how much progress I have made and the small things that are happening every day. And, I need to do a better job of seeing the continuum of my life. I tend to view my life as a series of starts and stops and every time there's some major stop, I freak out and think I'll never start again. I think that's part of my whole perfectionist thing. I keep expecting that I will find some kind of smooth balance where all the things I want will be consistently present in my life and that I will be able to maintain this balance and the schedule needed to support it through all the unexpected things life throws at me. Somehow, I need to get over that and realize that the things that are important to me will stay with me and the stops are just pauses. The therapist told me a really great story about one of her writer friends who is also an experience junky who needs to do something cool and new and exciting every year or two. The writer always expects that she's going to write while she's off having her new experience, but doesn't. And when she comes home, my therapist says the way it appears to her is that it takes the writer 6 months to a year to gather all of her molecules again and put herself back together in her "real" life. I love that image of gathering molecules! You can't be expected to stick to schedules and be wonder woman when your self is scattered across the landscape and you aren't fully inhabiting any one place.

Tad has been warning me for years not to tie my self-esteem too tightly to my ability to follow schedules and meet deadlines and keep to my lists. I thought for a long time that he was criticizing the process of making schedules and lists, but I think he's just been saying that those things might be helpful tools sometimes but not always and that if I'm not careful I will set myself up with unrealistic expectations.

Which is exactly what I'm carrying around: an unrealistic set of expectations, but even knowing they're unrealistic, they're still hard to give up. So hopefully I'm going to get the reality check I've been needing for a very long time and learn to deal with the crazy rhythms of my life in a more healthy way.

5 x 1 mile
Mood:  happy
Topic: Marathon
I got up early this morning and managed to get my workout in before the sun was too high in the sky. Today was a simple 5 times 1 mile workout, and it was fun. I did the first mile following a 1 min. walk, 1 min. run sequence. Mile two was run two minutes, walk one; mile three was run three minutes, walk one; mile four was run four minutes, walk one; and I ran mile five without a walk break. With each minute of running that I added, I took between 30 and 45 seconds off my mile time, which doesn't seem like very much. Turns out I ran mile three at about the same pace I ran mile five, so it obviously pays to take walk breaks. Today's optimal ratio was running four minutes and walking one.

Unfortunately, my time for mile four was still well over 14 minutes per mile, so it looks like I have to get used to the idea that I may need to be bussed over the bridge at mile 20 in the marathon. There is still some time that I think I can shave over the next ten weeks, but it's going to take discipline. Next weekend I increase the mileage to 23. I'm hoping to do 23 in the time it took me to do 20 two weeks ago.

Despite the humidity that was already present at 6:00 a.m., I really enjoyed the workout. I think making a game of it with each mile being a different ratio made it more fun. Mentally, it was easier to run five miles that way than it would have been if I'd just set out to run five miles. And I had no asthma attack, so I'm considering using this same build-up strategy in the actual marathon, peaking at run 4, walk 1 and holding that pattern for as long as I can. (I'm going to experiment with run 5, walk 1 and run 6, walk 1 this week to see if they improve my time enough to warrant using either of those ratios.) I'll try that next weekend and see how well I hold up.

And in other news, I think I have to somehow find the reserves to hold myself to a better eating plan. After two weeks of feeling fairly strong, confident, and optimistic (what Hans has labeled a manic phase), I crashed on Friday night and the slump lasted through most of Saturday. It started with me feeling what I refer to as "free floating guilt" which is just a nagging feeling that I've done something wrong, but I'm not sure what it is. This usually happens if I've had too much caffeine to drink. I've given up drinking caffeine, with the occasional exception of a single 20 oz. bottle, because I've tested this theory enough that I've finally convinced myself of its truth. However, on Thursday and Friday I binged on chocolate covered donuts and then was surprised to find myself responding to the caffeine from the chocolate when I got home Friday night. I'm going to talk to my new therapist about hypnosis, and then either try to schedule a few sessions with her or with the therapist in Carrboro that I met at the Book Festival back in May. Either that or look into a Greensboro meeting of OA, but if I can avoid that, I want to.

Today has been better. I think the run was a great way to start off the day. Then Hans and I went to see The 40-Year-Old Virgin this afternoon, which was a lot of fun, and a good way to relax. I'm a little nervous about my therapy session tomorrow morning because I have less of an idea what to expect, but I'm looking forward to this week. Sudie and I have been getting a ton of work done, and I've got some good momentum with the marathon training, and I'm hoping that this week will just build on all of that.

I Take That Back
Now there's an ad for a "natural" lithium product posted, so I have to take back what I said about there being no drug offerings....

Targeted Ads on This Blog
Mood:  mischievious
There aren't enough emoticons available to me! Where's "amused" or "thoughtful" or "serene"?

When I checked the ads that run atop my blog the other day, there was a nice mix of heart rate monitors and virtual coaching and running sites listed. Today, however, I notice that there is a straight across the board listing of mental health support sites! Thankfully, no direct advertisements from drug companies, but the ads clearly let you know you've crossed into crazy person territory!

Yes, where is that "amused" emoticon?

Savannah Blue's Activity Book is here!
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: Books
We received 4,000 copies of Savannah Blue's Activity Book from the printer on Wednesday. They look fabulous! We sold our first copy, without trying, that very day!

This is the first book project Sudie and I have completed together, and it is very exciting. My first assignment when I started working for Sudie was to find a bilingual editor, and then a translator. That involved a very steep learning curve, since I don't read, write, or speak Spanish, as did trying to figure out how to communicate regularly and inexpensively with an editor who lives and works in the Southern Hemisphere! Oh, and, of course, we can't forget having to untangle all of the details of the ISBN number--apparently, the U.S. has decided to join the rest of the world in using a 13-digit ISBN by 2007, which is a change from the 10-digit we currently use. This sounds fairly straightforward, except that no one in the industry really knows the transition is happening or how to deal with it. (Except maybe Bowker and us, finally.)

I spent most of yesterday creating a map that covers Sudie's whole kitchen table outlining our domestic and international marketing plan, so she could see all the pieces. She asked me when it would all be accomplished! She should know as well as I do that, as long as you have product, marketing is never finished. This is especially true when she wakes up at 3:00 a.m. and starts scribbling notes about needing to break into foreign markets that I find on my desk when I get in in the morning. Right now I'm working with our graphic design geniuses on a new ad campaign, and with our web designer to get an announcement up on Sudie's website. I'll post a link to the new book as soon as it's in place!