Just as I was getting everything in order in my attempt to find some kind of a routine, I was blind-sided by the flu of the century.

I feel icky.

Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. Sniff. Sniff. Cough. Hack, hack.

Super Paper Mario and orange chocolate tea (tastes like a Tootsie Roll… mmmmmmm…) makes it a bit better though. And tissues with moisturizer is good too.

And cuddles with kitties. Lots of those.

In conclusion, I blame my illness on The Spring That Just Wouldn’t Arrive.

Where is my Sunshine?

Where are my flowers?

Where is it?

Where am I?

…?

Oh. Man.

It would be enough to say that I had major assignments due in two ginormous stages (worth from 10 – 25 percent of my final mark) in each and every one of my classes for the past two weeks.

That would be more than enough.

But then I got into a car accident last Wednesday.

I am fine – the car is fine. It seemed like a bigger deal at the time, than it actually was.
It was just a little fender bender – actually, not even – no fenders were actually bended.
But the airbag went off and cracked the window shield, the dashboard, and hit me in the face like a bad boyfriend – in the middle of the downtown core at King and University – right on my way to class to hand in some work that I needed to get critiqued so I could know what to do to complete the next stage of the assignment.

There I was, gawkers coming out of the underground stairs to the subway every other second with blood and tears dripping down my face, and a lip the size of Angelina Jolie’s – but only on the bottom right side.

It cost me a good day, day and a half of work – not good. It may not sound like much, but I needed that day and a half. Although I did get to have a lot of popsicles (they brought down the swelling, and tasted yummy too!).

Because THEN, this week, Liam’s parents drove all the way down from Thunder Bay to visit. Why? Oh only, to take care of Liam when he got surgery.

So to re-iterate: the equivalent of 9 assignments to complete (plus a novel to read), visiting in-laws, automobile altercations, classes, art supplies to be hunted down and purchased for said assignments and classes, major surgery for the boy – oh, yeah – and a bit of surgery for the kitten. She finally got her ovaries removed, poor darling.

I capped it all off by making my very first fancy Friday night dinner for Liam’s Parents – A humungous roast beast with green beans, garlic roasted potatoes and a crudites platter with home-made hummus.

I try to pretend I’m their peer, and not the academic equivalent of a much older sister (maybe like a TA or something) – but I can’t see the seventeen year olds I go to school with having to go through with something like that.

So when it was all finally over yesterday (in theory anyway), what did I do?

I continued to care for the invalid by making him snacks and dinner, and went to Ikea to get organizational furniture for my office/studio so that I could spend a few hours waffling over colours of acrylic plastic, and slotting and screwing things together.

That was relaxing for me.

Comparatively speaking.

Now, tell me. Would you have blogged at all during two weeks like that?

No?

Didn’t think so

I’m hitting a bit of creative block. I wish getting out of ruts were as simple as finding something inspiring, but I’m pretty sure my blocks are caused by a greater, more impenetrable problem. That of my brain, and it’s current condition.
Every now and then I descend into a fuzzy fog. I feel removed and disconnected from things. It’s hard to plan, or think, or create. It’s not as simple as being sad, it’s more like a few wires have jiggled loose, and I have to work harder to… well, work hard.
This is often accompanied by a headache or two. Thankfully, those have yet to hit me.
I’m hoping this is just a bit of exhaustion left over from a busy Thanksgiving spent with my family this weekend. Or it might be an on-coming flu.
I need to work on my portfolio, so I’m forcing myself to draw.
Which I hate to do, because the results are sloppy, uneven, and simply not as good as when my brain is not feeling like this.
But I know that practice (even when it seems pointless) is important. Even my sad, brain addled scrawls make me better in the long-run.

Something in my brain is clarifying today.
I actually feel like today might be one of those days when I can express myself, and actually end up meaning what I say.
The English language makes sense to me again today.
I feel like it hasn’t for a while now.
I will look back through my scattered writings and only some of them will make sense, or be as grammatical as I would like them to be. Actually, today I edited things up a bit. Cleaned house around here.
It’s annoying to know that you could write in perfect grammatical and decently spelled English if only the right side of your brain got up and did something every-once-in-a-while.
Because I can, and I often do, but I often sound like a babbling idiot too.
It’s like having a split personality.
It doesn’t help that the babbler tends to come out in important, nervous-making situations. Like auditions, or talking with celebrities or professors, or other people I immensely respect. Especially when I need to write something important, like an essay, or an article on a deadline.
Then the smart girl tends to pop out when I least expect and need it. Like when I’m trying to make friends with perfectly normal people who I don’t want to talk down, or sound pretentious to.
I have a theory. It is backed up by my boyfriends observation of me.
We think that whatever the brain slug is doing in the right (logical) side of my brain, it manages to do it mostly when affected by my emotions.
So I will literally have good days… and bad ones.
It seems my days are often triggered by sense-memory experiences. Moments where I experience something, sensually (in the sensory, not the sexy, sense), that remind me of another, happier time, and plunge me into yet another wacky mindset.
If you weren’t already aware at this point, the brain is a really, really, really weird thing. I would seriously recommend not having one, if at all possible

I was watching Six Feet Under last night when I realized that I have more in common with the character of Nathanial than (the more obvious choice) Claire.
If you have ever watched the show you will remember that the second season closed with Nate finding out he had a blood filled brain lesion, and then having surgery to remove it.
If you saw last night’s episode (spoiler spoiler spoiler) than you will know that it ended with Nate having, what appeared to be a stroke. Liam’s first reaction was: “yeah, right… what won’t this show do to be dramatic!” But I was immediately reminded of all that stuff that happened in the second season.
At which point I realized that all that was incredibly similar to what’s happening to me.
In fact, when a blood filled lesions bursts it is called a hemmoragic stroke, and it’s symptom’s are exactly the same as the stroke that occurs to much older people (who smoke and have high blood pressure).
If somebody has one lesion, than there is a higher likelihood that they have more. It’s actually quite likely for Nate to have had another hidden blood filled lesion hidden elsewhere in his head, and for it to burst giving him a stoke.
So, it also turns out that what I have in my brain is very very similar to what Nate has in his brain. What I have is, in fact a rare form of it. I’m not likely to have a stoke anytime soon, but it being mentioned on a TV show makes it much easier to explain to people.
“I have a rare disorder that producers give characters on TV show’s to make their characters go sympathetically crazy.”
Much easier to explain than what a cavernous angioma is.
In other news: I am sick with a monstrous cold. It tackled me overnight. I will persevere.

I haven’t posted much image wise in a while, so I’m putting up some of the images that resulted from my gouache play-time while Liam was away. I popped in my Breakfast at Tiffany’s DVD ’cause I figured it would give me a wealth of brightly coloured and striking images to work from.
At some point I’m going to go through that movie and catalogue all the hats – there are some awesome hats.
So these were all painted with my gouache and inked with a Staedtler permanent marker (fine) – because I’ve broken or used up all my other drawing pens. The only problem I have with the Staedtler is that there is no character to its line, and it tends to leak through the page. Other than that it is probably the most waterproof thing you can buy, so it works quite well for water-colour.
I just worked in my sketchbook. It has fairly thick, textured pages. Not water-colour paper (as you can see, the pages wrinkled) but these were just quick studies, I didn’t feel like going to the effort of breaking out the expensive stuff.
Now that I’ve dealt with that, it’s on to other matters.Like my brain meats.
It turns out, what has been causing my poor little head all this trouble is something called a cavernous angioma. It is a cluster of blood filled cells, rather than normal functioning… brain meats. These “cavernomas” can be especially problematic if they haemorrhage, or leak out that blood. They can also cause seizures, headaches and general neurological problems.
So, it’s still not great, but at least it’s not growing. And, hopefully, it can be removed. Of course that means brain surgery but… all the more reason to catalogue all those hats.

1) Liam is back from Thunder Bay.
2) I DO NOT HAVE CANCER. It has yet to really sink in.
Everybody say yay!
There is still something troubling in my brain, (I will probably say more about it later) but it IS NOT a tumour, it IS NOT growing, and it IS fixable.
Nah-nah-nah to my neurologist.

I have hit a wall. A big flu virus shaped wall.
This happens to everyone, I guess. I just can’t seem to sleep, and when I can’t sleep, my mind goes all kinds of strange places.
I keep thinking of all the people that were forced into my life against my better judgement only to slither out of it after injecting some poison into me (just like I always had a feeling they would). It’s not nice to feel like the world is out to get anyone with the slightest bit of enthusiasm.
I wonder if those people know that my poor broken brain can’t help but obsess over every occurance, replaying it over and over until I want to bang my head against the walls. They probably don’t. They are probably just going on with their lives, living as if they are the only ones that exist.
Which, as explained by Decartes, is the only thing we can be sure of. So I can’t really blame the world for not knowing the next part where he goes on to explain that we should all be rational and nice to everybody.
We’re in more of a Hobbes era anyways.
So, my creativity is on a down swing. As, I think, happens to most creative people. Creativity has a tendancy to ebb and flow just like life and most natural things do, I think.
Last night, as I was going to bed I decided to be honest. It’s always been a silly pet project of my own, that honesty thing. Honesty doesn’t really have anything to do with art (I guess you could consider it performance art).
Art is communication, sure, but let’s face it, if we really wanted to to be honest with people, we’d tell them instead of turning it into an allegorical painting.
However, as an artist I believe that every once in a while it’s nice to come clean and state, for the record, that you occasionally worry about things.
Occasionally I dishonestly attempt to squeeze sarcasm and humour out of the fact that I have a pretty good chance of dying someday soon.
Not “in a sense everyone dies eventually” dying.
My neurologist believes I have cancer dying.
As much as I am funny and find the world humorous most of the time, occasionally I am serious. Occasionally I lie awake at night wondering about all the stupid people and the dumb things they do. It bugs me. It makes me worry. It makes me anxious. It makes me want to curl up under my bed, on top of luggage, with my cat, and get Liam to occasionally place a tray of sandwiches within a reachable distance.
This is what life is from time to time.
Particularily when I don’t feel well.

This week has been, and will continues to be insane.
I just got back from my MRI. Not as freaky as I thought it was gonna be, but still plenty weird. It was actually nicer than the CT scan, just because (even though it’s upwards of 20 minutes instead of just 5) they make sure you’re comfortable, give you comfy cushioning, headphones with music (even if it was John Tesh… and I couldn’t hear it because the machine was crazy, scary loud) and a panic button just in case the super-magnetic rays start melting your brain or something.
Tomorrow Liam graduates, which is exciting (although the ceremony won’t be, I’m sure). So his parents are in town, which is always nerve-racking for the significant other (me). On top of that I have been finalizing my illustrations for the Very Big Project, plus with the on-going medical stuff… I’m not so much busy as incredibly, incredibly stressed.
On the upside I rewarded myself with some new process coloured gouache (cyan, magenta and yellow – just like they use in printing) and a disposable Coptic fountain pen (which are my favourite to draw with, and incredibly hard to find these days). I’m movin’ on up in the world of art supplies. I now feel like I should be buying “artist’s” quality as opposed to “student” quality.
Here’s my rationale: If I’m selling my stuff, I don’t want to give somebody something that I painted with cheap water-colour that will fade in a couple years.
When I was younger I didn’t notice the limitations of cheap paint, or the muddiness of the colours. Since I do now, I think it’s worth it to me to be able to get the exact shade of blue I envisioned. Not that I’m throwing out my Crayolas or anything. But it’s nice to have something a little nicer around to encourage me to draw more in reality, and a little less digitally. Cross your fingers for a old school work of art for this upcoming illustration Friday.
We’ll see if I get lazy or not.

I’ve been avoiding this.
Coming here, saying things.
My creativity is momentarily shot. I find myself needing others to make an effort to communicate with me, any incentive for relationships left foggy and insubstantial. But I know I can’t just shut the world out. So I am forcing myself to do this.
All I have left in my brain are the same few noxious facts and concepts bouncing around. Well, them and the lesion.
A lesion being some kind of physical anomaly that shows up on a CT scan and got me referred me to a neurologist last week who was an insensitive jerk who told me that I probably have an malignant tumour in my frontal lobe. Then he told me that my head will be poked, prodded, drilled into and cracked open to remove said tumour. Then he changed his mind and told me that nothing’s for sure until I get an MRI, but that it could be much bigger than the tiny one centimetre in diameter dense white spot in the front of of my frontal lobe that showed up on the CT scan.
Then he told me (but only when prodded) that it also may very well just be benign or even scar tissue from the few times I hit my head as a child (which is what I’ve thought all along). In which case my head stays intact and it stays in. No surgery of the absolute most invasive kind there can possibly be (of which I’ve had a fear of for pretty much ever, since I found out they very often keep you awake while they do it).
Needless to say, I cried in the stupid waiting room filled with old ladies who are 3 or 4 times my age and the receptionist had to pass me tissue while they arranged to bump up my MRI to an earlier date. The waiting room looked just like that scene in garden state where Zach Braff goes to a neurologist and there’s about a hundred documents and diplomas on the wood panelling (Its weird how much of my life has been haunted by Natalie Portman. When I was 14 and heard about the open casting call for the first Star Wars movie I wished there was a way to get to New York to audition because I knew I looked enough like Carrie Fisher to play her mother. Then it turned out I went to grade school with Hayden Christiansen, and then in high school sweet nerdy boys had crushes on me cause I looked like her).
The internet (which is more and more my most trusted ally) tells me that since the lesion is dense and ‘calcified’, and uniform in shape, that it is most likely not malignant and that the doctor was most definitely an overzealous idiot who is used to dealing with old ladies with dementia, not young ladies with brain damage… or… well… brain cancer.
My mother who is a administrative nurse with many connections talked to her friends and then reinforced my belief that the specialist was stupid, by telling me that I should really be seeing a neurosurgeon, at this point, not a neurologist. Because there’s something physical and visible inside my brain, and that’s a neurosurgeons speciality – finding it, identifying it and deciding if it needs to come out. Not just general afflictions of the brain.
Its very strange to realize that in the right (or actually very, very wrong) circumstances my sickly brain is a hot commodity that young overachieving doctors with something to prove would love to experiment on and crack into. I’ve found out the hard way that doctors are not like Zach Braff.
I have been going through this stuff for so long now finding out this new stuff doesn’t even effect me as much as it should, I think. That probably has something to do with the antidepressants I’m on. They are pleasantly numbing at times. Eventually you even get used to them and forget they’re there. I probably don’t actually need them, but I think they might be making things a little bit easier to handle. For the last year its been nothing but blood tests and doctors visits and vague explanations and assumptions that I should just go on antidepressants already by everyone from ignorant doctors to well meaning professors. Stupid people are everywhere. Quick fixes are too easy to come by. Imagine if 6 months ago my doctor put me on Wellbutrin and kicked me out the door? But I kept telling them I didn’t feel depressed. Didn’t fit the symptoms, the clinical definition. Thankfully my doctor listened. That has taught me that the patient is always right. You know your own body better than anyone else, and if your doctor won’t listen to you find anther doctor. I think that lesson will come in handy later on.
But. There is actually nothing I can do about this. A chunk of my brain is just gone, gone. Never to return, to heal, to function. To be chemically altered back to normal. Whatever happens, whatever ends up being wrong with me that’s what’s true. I am not a whole person. A very small but significant part of me is missing, and I think the only thing that makes me feel a little bit good about all this is that I can no longer be expected to be that whole person who can deal with the world around her. That part of my brain that makes the world easy to deal with is damaged. I may look fine. I may act normal. I’m not. I need help to make it any farther.