I’ve been thinking about this film a lot today. It was really tightly woven and also loose enough to sometimes feel trippy. Everything fit together, russian dolls inside their bigger doppelgangers, the real and surreal and hyperreal connecting. Like my drawings, the drawing of the thing wanting to become the thing, and the frustration and beauty therein. We started this movie at 10 pm and it ended at 12:30 in the morning and we weren’t sure for the last hour if maybe the end was near, it did feel like it (intentionally) unraveled to its close; we just followed the thread along until we had nothing else to hold onto. With cool whip and ice cream, of course, to keep me awake.

March 31st, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

March 31st, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

When he does the shot he has to wash his hands and roll up his sleeves, which is when I get to see his forearms. I can feel numb in my heart and all he has to do is roll up his sleeves and I am disarmed. I don’t know why I love this look, but it might go back to Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. Or else it is just about work, raw, ready.

We do the shots at night at the dining room table where the lighting is soft, almost too soft to measure the liquids. Not the green fluorescent light of a facility.

Lying in bed with a pain behind my heart or too exhausted to get out of the dog bed, the dog bed. When everything feels soft. Even the tines of a fork could feel soft against my cheek. The to-do list backwards on my cheek. In bed, the sky gray of not-spring.

Drawing rotten oranges, those irregular eggs, totally infertile with gorgeous mold.

Feeling somehow brave. Looking for poetry.

The way when before he puts the needle in my thigh he says I love you, that soft light again making shadows of his eyes so they are almost black holes, no color, into which I can disappear.

The drawings on my body, tattoos of forced happiness. That contrast of pain and laughter, the angel smiling like schadenfreude at the needles, pretty bruises discoloring the red ink.

March 30th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing, written | Leave a comment

We started with a red rectangle, but it is much more fun to say “Can you shoot me where the nose would be in the smiley-face?” or “I’m going to shoot you to the right of the star.” Also, I’ve found that if I read a book (or take pictures) while he does the shots, it hurts much less.

We’re ready for when he does the shots in my hips. The circles the nurse drew have turned into an angel and a devil.

(Note: I have it rigged that the small photos when clicked do not take you directly to flickr, they just pop up a bigger version of the photo, which I prefer. But I don’t know why this function doesn’t work for the bigger photos, I’m working on it.)

March 30th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

Yesterday we went for our first ultrasound to determine if my body is ready to begin the onslaught of drugs. They confirmed that it was, so tomorrow I begin the stimulators. Not that I have been shooting saline water all this time: the Lupron is known to cause cancer and irreplacable bone loss, and quite obviously weight gain. Last night when Steve shot it into my thigh, it squirted out and left an itchy rash. Tonight it stung as if I were allergic to it. I think my body is growing tired of it, as wary of it as my brain is, and as overloaded.

Yesterday during the ultrasound they put a needle in my arm and took out two vials of blood to test my estradiol levels. This is standard, and really I would be a horrible diabetic, but it left a bruise and a dark purple needle hole that I keep inspecting. I was cranky all that morning, unhappy about the intrusion of the dildo ultrasound and the pain of poking through skin and flesh, pushing plastic cameras against my ovaries. It was very early in the morning and I was tired. Sometimes you can withstand pain no problem, and sometimes all your defenses are down.

I want to believe that I only do in my life what feels right. I don’t know how to listen to my intuition anymore because I have had to push it aside in order to do what I have to do. It is exhausting to push away intuition. I fell asleep again in the dog bed. So I don’t think anymore that life is about being a ball of nerves directed here and there by attention and desire. Right now it is a moment of extreme heights: choosing to step into a dangerous situation that feels completely wrong in order to leap to another level. I have to accept the beauty in these feeling of discomfort and fear, the glory in the wrong way signs pointing at my car.

March 27th, 2009 | Category: written | Comments (1)

We were walking back to our car after the film festival tonight, and we heard this 50-some-year-old woman say earnestly to the man beside her, “What does it mean when the red hand starts blinking?” I felt like I saw the world for the first time.

March 27th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

I’m like Nicolas Cage in Face Off: I look like John Travolta: John Travolta’s wife lets me into their home, everyone who loves John Travolta gets close to me, and then the monster behind the face they love comes out. I look like my usual self — or until this week I did — but I don’t behave like the person Steve loves, and this is because of the drugs.

And now I look different, too: the drugs caused me to bloat up enough to weigh six pounds more than I weighed last week. I keep bumping into things.

The drugs explain the fatigue — I can fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon, every afternoon. I have been known to fall asleep in the dog bed in my studio. I come home and the writing on my hand — all my to-do lists of the things I have slept away — ends up imprinted backwards on my cheek.

Steve says if this cycle is cancelled or doesn’t work, he may die of alcohol poisoning. We have had difficult moments before, but I haven’t wanted to disappear before. I want to run away from all this ugly chemical pain. Run away from myself, unrecognizable. Two years of swirling tightly in a holding pattern.

I want to remember to be grateful, and sometimes I can, but it is difficult when the drugs injected into my thigh shut down the putuitary gland in my brain and take the muscles out of my arms, turn my flesh to jelly, make me forget, and insert a sadness that sucks the sound out of where I used to hear singing.

We are so fragile, carefully composed of chemicals, hormones, synapses. One shift and all shifts. Maybe more sugar will right the balance inside; now maybe more salt.

March 26th, 2009 | Category: written | Leave a comment

(I was thinking today that ‘right now’ is sort-of like a facebook status update or like a tweet, but without keeping to their character limit. Status updates are my favorite part of facebook, but I cannot get into anything called tweeting.)

- I am researching an alternative veterinarian in Ann Arbor. Moby eats really well, but his eyes sometimes look foggy to me. And Joon keeps getting yeast infections in her ears and I don’t want to give her any more antibiotics. Roxy will live forever.

- Laundry day, and Steve put in a load when I went to the acupuncturist, but I came home to find that my beautiful wool scarf was now felted. It’s okay, I’ll be okay without it, but it just looks so sad twisted and tight and irregular. Though it also looks extremely clean.

- I was just about to record another event happening right now, but I got interrupted by Steve who was apologizing again for ruining the scarf. Now he is online trying to find a replacement, which I already did briefly when I came home from acupuncture, but it is not even on sale anymore. It’s not a big deal, but in truth he has shrunk a whole lot of my sweaters and scarves, which is very easy to do. We clearly need a new system.

- My computer sounds like Arnold Schwarzenager, that’s what a friend said recently, because it’s whirring, working so hard.

- Because of the fertility drugs for the first time in my life I know what it’s like to be bloated. I never knew what that word meant. The acupuncturist put needles in particular points of my shins that are supposed to clear the bloating. And one point at the top of my head and one point in my forehead. Plus points in my feet that hurt my stomach they hurt to go in. I levitated.

- Steve just showed me a funny video on failblog.org. I do love that website when nothing else can make me laugh.

- In the studio today, I felt like an old lady painting dead flowers. It felt better to assemble my new scroll saw, which has taken me two days. I thought I tightened the bolts as best I could and then I bought a wrench. Amazing what a wrench does that my hands couldn’t! What felt tight to my hands was loose to a wrench, and somehow that was a miracle.

- Right now Moby is bugging the white cat and the more I yell at him the more his tail wags.

- The scarf is beside me here at the table, and it actually looks pretty right now, maybe it will just be a smaller, warmer scarf.

- I have to write this because I am being honest, but Moby just farted and I have heard him fart maybe one other time in my life.

- Steve is reading, drinking his tea. He keeps jumping up to get on the computer. His computer makes cricket sounds when he has mail.

- In the other room: the sound of the black cat coming through the cat door into the warm house.

March 25th, 2009 | Category: right now | Leave a comment

www.radiologyart.com

This person uses a radiology machine to see the insides of everyday objects. I love the hamburger. After having hummed through the CT scanner and the MRI and the X-ray machine, feeling like a see-through hamburger, I want to see the insides of everything.

March 24th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Comments (1)