The internet is the shizzit.

I've been interspersing getting moving and work to-do-list things done with dreaming about how to decorate our new apartment. Now, in my brain, this can range from casual thinking all the way over to crazy obsessing and not sleeping as a result. I get antsy. I get unsettled, until things are most put in place and decorated.

In the process, I find website like this one, with 100 things I'd love to remember to think of doing with or for A, and another 100 that are just "c'mon, who has the time?" ridiculous.

I've also seen a lot of artwork. Again. On so many websites. I now belong to DailyPaintworks.com and have a variety of still lifes (I have yet to buy one, but food still life paintings intrigue the heck out of me), clouds, and trees marked. And some landscapes. Wow, are there both extremely talented painters (two of my favorites are Carol Marine and her still lifes, and Karin Jurick who I just found today and whose composition and colors and all of it have me really inspired), and the not-so-talented. The latter is the category my art would fit into, if I were a painter, and that's just fine. Perhaps not so much when you're charging as much as the more, what, talented? creative? folks, but whatever.

I've also been all over Etsy again, where I think I first saw Carol Marine's work. Again, wow the range of people painting and then asking others to pay money for their results. And again, I find myself thinking "man, maybe making a living as an artist isn't quite for you, huh? maybe just do it for yourself."

But then again, I can be a downer like that.

Sometimes it isn't about actually sending out the cards

There was just enough time, on a sick day at home, to try my hand at a linocut.

  

There they are.  I had time to make 'em, but not really much time to find addresses or get to a post office.

Consider yourself greeted.

Vincent van Goat

We are increasingly using videos with A, but she is still unused to much of the kids' cartoons. They make her upset, or they are too fast paced. And I really wonder who is producing this stuff for kids. The themes are pretty grown up, and take us to discussions I don't know she is ready to have.

So we stick to Sesame Street playlists online, which M watches and plays with her, some iPhone and iPad books and stories, and the Baby Einstein series videos. They are just slower.

Today we finally broke out the Baby Einstein art video. It was all about colors, and Vincent van Gogh's paintings (for the purpose of the video, he was a goat).

Afterwards, we rolled out some white IKEA drawing paper and M, A and I went looking around the house for objects of each color. A also had the responsibility of checking through the dog's toybox to find an object for L.

It was a pretty fun 20 minutes. I give you our collaborative installation pieces.

Art week

Sometime during my cousin's visit with us, she mentioned wanting to get back to more art in her life, and we talked about how we wished we did more creative things as kids. And I remembered that A loves painting at daycare, and that I hadn't yet broken out the watercolors I bought her a few months ago. So there we were, the whole family, sitting at the dining room table, painting.

From the fingerprints series. My cousin L, the interior designer, has always said that A has a great sense of color. I agree. Just wait, it gets better.

L and I agree, we're not so enamored of water color painting. It's hard. Not to overlap colors, to get the right thickness or watery-ness of paint, is not easy. And, although I can pencil-sketch the heck out of a portrait, I'm no color expert. Color is my weakness. Luckily, my child is a natural, and has been putting together great color mixes since she started mixing Lego Duplo blocks into towers.

I'm a better copier than "out of thin air" artist, so I started pulling out some art books from our shelves. M found a book of O'Keefe watercolors and we looked at it a few evenings ago with A on the balcony. We talked about the colors with her, and talked about what different paintings could be of.

At that night's painting session (which M was in on, too - we are officially water coloring fools over here in Switzerland, at our house), I mixed a bit of purple up, and check out what my kid produced, yet again, with no input from me. Suddenly, she's filling up the paper, horizontally.

That's my kid's painting. You can tell because it has an interesting combination of colors. If I was going to push this whole point, I'd call this her landscapes period. If I was going to obnoxious about it, I'd call it her "young O'Keefe" stage. 

Art week has been a lot of fun. I hope we do it again soon.

Always wondering, not often saying it

If this is not the first blog post of mine you have read, chances are you know already that I am fairly open about my depression, about anti-depressants, and issues surrounding both. And I stopped taking anti-depressants again, after almost a year, a few weeks ago.

Like the last time I did this, there was the feeling that life was way more bearable and stable, that enough things had changed in those 10-11 months, that it was time to try without the medication. And as last time, there was a tiny fear of taking off the training wheels I'd been happily tooling around with for almost a year. How would I feel? Would I start getting angry with A again? Would I start crying again? Would it have been a mistake, and maybe show me that I'll likely be on the medication from now on, at least until my daughter it a lot older?

I probably told 3-4 people that I went of the medication. I told M, my cousin, and a few friends here in Zurich, one of whom has gone through a lot of similar ups and downs as me. They are people I trust to know this, mostly because they have been the ones I didn't get the pity looks and the "ohhhh, you're still on the medication, huh? That's too bad..." vibes from whenever I spoke of how I was feeling. Just a suggestion, if you have a loved one who is on anti-depressants, and is speaking about it openly, not with shame (even more so for those who are ashamed of it), talking to them like this does not help. It isn't nice, it isn't kind, you're not really interested in their well-being if you haven't taken the time to realize how monumentally their struggle was before the drugs and how much better they feel now. So stop it. It is not that different from "ohhh, you're still single?" or "ohhh, you are still in that relationship you hate?" No matter how nice a tone a person tries to put on those statements, they are all, still, essentially, judgmental. They show your disappointment about something in the person's life.

Aaaaanyway, the withdrawl from the Cymbalta sucked. Lots of nausea, even now once every few days, out of the blue. A nasty 4 hours of stomach cramps, maybe. Other than that, I'd love to say I didn't notice any change, but there were small ones.

As I was boarding the plane to Copenhagen a few weeks ago, I could feel a little wave of sadness about something I had been thinking or reading, when I said "goodbye" before my trip to A, I cried, at the thought of something happening to me on the flights and not coming back, and every few days, I can feel the not-so-happy hormones surround my thoughts. It reminds me of the swings in the park. When A sits on them, her feet wave freely about, high above the gravel. When I sit on them, if I don't lift my legs, my feet drag in the gravel. Being on anti-depressants was like having shorter legs for a while - I didn't have to put in effort to lift myself out of the sad gravel, and pretty much every day my feet were clear of it.

So, for a few weeks, I've felt my long swingset legs come back, and that has been ok. Sure, I wish I was a more unflappable person, but my brain doesn't work that way. And it is the reason M and I always kiss goodbye when we part in the morning, because many years ago I was keenly aware of how fragile life is and I wanted to make sure we had a proper farewell. Every day. Now it is just habit, and a nice one, even if one or both of us it upset with the other.

Then a few days ago, Monday afternoon, I had to get A from daycare early because of a holiday, I had stupidly brought her big tricycle for the park but not thought about having to corral that and the stroller on the buses and trams, she was on day 5 of a nap-strike (which is now over, thank everything!), I hadn't napped, and I almost lost it, 5 minutes after pickup, on the way to the bus. I couldn't find M on the phone or text, and his building was locked (because of the holiday) so I couldn't leave one of the vehicles there, or even go cry in his office for 5 minutes.

Shit. Shitshitshitshit. I don't want to cry. Why do I feel like crying? Do I have to go back on the meds again so soon? Can I not even handle one messy 30 minutes? Shit. Don't cry! That's dumb, not actually crying doesn't mean I'm not depressed if I then spend all my energy trying not to cry. How will I know if I have to get on the meds again? What limit of shitty behavior or mood will I set this time? I don't want to wait too long? Oh, I'm so disappointed in all of this. Crap!

It passed. I went about the rest of the afternoon, lugging that tricycle around, and then catching A as she sped across the park and down the block, and it was tiring, but fine. 

Last night I got my period. 

Big, huge, loud sigh. A once a month, weepy afternoon, I can handle. I can learn to take more easily and gently. I can cancel all plans but those that help me out. It is probably not the depression again, after all. But from now on, now that I've realized that I might have this tendency long-term, now that I've been on medication twice, I'll always wonder.

(The image is a painting by Chris Bellamy. It is already sold, but if I weren't I would want to buy it. That is what it looks like to me when I walk in the forest without my glasses on.)

I'd rather not spend $5000 on your painting, thanks.

I've been spending time on Etsy, lately. The website where people sell all sorts of handmade stuff. Great website, lots of things I've put in my "favorites" file, but only a few things I've ever bought. Anyway, this site is HUGE. Full of all sorts of great (and horrible) stuff. And pretty hard for me to navigate some things.

Like jewelry. How do you manage to do a web search on this site for "not ugly, tacky jewelry, and not stuff I won't like" ? There is a lot of chaff to get through for a few bits of wheat. I recently bought a great necklace from this seller.
But her crochet stuff is listed smack dab in the middle of a lot of boring crocheted jewelry. I can't even remember how I found her. I certainly didn't go in there with "crochet" and "necklace" in my list of search terms.

There are so many little gems of shops on Etsy, but it takes a lot of time to find them. Like this one with animal silhouette pictures and handmade stuffed animals. How cute is that?

And then there is the artwork. Original artwork. Thousands of pieces of oil paintings alone. Just for fun I ordered them from most to least expensive. Let's just say the $100,000 pieces are not encouraging. And that at almost every price, the naked woman's body art is....meh. And then at the $200 range, where I could seriously consider a purchase, again, some horrible stuff, and some cute things. One woman does a still life painting every day - I read about her in some magazine and accidentally stumbled on her page on Etsy.

I've moved from general oil paintings to still lifes, in the $100-$200 region. Not sure why, but I think I like the black and dark colors in many of them, with the surprise of orange for a piece of fruit, or sky blue on a bowl. I guess you need to go into Etsy with some pretty specific items in mind, and then it isn't so overwhelming.

(20 minutes later)

Ok, I went back to my still lifes on Etsy, and realized what I need to do. I searched on one type of fruit, I chose the lemon, and there they were. The super realistic, the too dark, the ones I thought were boring, the ugly, the intriguing. It was easy to find ones I liked and see what else the artists did. And it turns out many different artists do this "one painting a day" thing, and there are actually a lot of $35-50 still lifes I like. A lot. How cool.