New artwork. Larger version found at DeviantArt.

I finally gave in to my little obsession with the concept of flying frogs. This is the Dendrobates Azureus, more widely known as the Blue Poison Dart Frog. I chose it for the name, of course (my own name being Azure), and simply because I think it's beautiful.

New artwork. Larger version found at my DeviantArt.


Joy In Colour

Yay, the stray kitty came by again. I was at the kitchen sink and glanced up.. to see a pair of kitty feet on the outside sill of the window! I lifted up the blinds and there he was, just silently saying hi. So I went outside with some cat food and fed him. He was obviously hungry, going through a couple small plates. He paused frequently to get attention from me, so I don't think he ended up bolting down the food too quickly that way. Don't want him getting an upset tummy, after all. I also put some high-calorie gel in there for underweight cats and dogs. He could use a little boost, the poor skinny guy.

Next, to name him. Teehee.

Mom was watching Cats 101 on Animal Planet and it went into Siamese cats. She saw a flash of the Lynx Siamese and excitedly told me that I'd have to look it up later, because she thought that's what Sasha (the family cat) is. We've come across some cat breeds here and there that we thought were similar, but not enough. We've figured she's some sort of exotic, as she has huge, intense blue eyes. She's gorgeous, to say the least. She certainly has the Siamese personality, too.

I looked up the Lynx Siamese and.. bam. Totally her. I'm 100% certain that she's purebred even, because she just fits completely. I wish I had a pic to show in comparison, but honestly, there wouldn't be any difference anyway. The markings, colour, everything is spot on. It's very cool to have found out.

I may not have any pictures of Sasha directly, but here's some generic Lynx Siamese pictures. I'd swear that first one was her, if it had the darker back and ears of the last one.

These are my tiny Twitter stories, which means that each one has to be 140 characters or under. The few at the beginning were made on my personal Twitter, but now I'm exclusively posting any such stories to epigraph. I'm generally attempting to make at least one per day and also to form each with a beginning, middle, and end; complete stories. I'm sure many will fail. This is a good exercise in teaching me to strip down to the bones of a story, which is something I sorely need in my writing.

I'm going to start making a summary post of them every so often, probably every couple of weeks to a month. I'm trying to avoid their being an overwhelming amount of them here all at once. Don't feel any obligation to comment either, I'm perfectly fine with only posting them here for my own archiving benefits.

My family is so loud. It seriously gets to me way more than it should. I feel like I am constantly cringing inwardly, scrunching myself up with each burst of noise, desperately wanting to just get away from it. Yet I never react to things outwardly. Anyone watching me would probably swear that I don't even have a startle reflex. I guess that's for the best, or I'd be twitching all over the place and everyone would be looking at me funny.

I am really fucking sick of being exhausted all the time. Lately, it's making me depressed more than it usually does. I sometimes sit there and want to cry because I hate the feeling so much and I wonder if I can even stand another minute of it. I always do though. I'm tired and I just want to sleep forever.

But I managed to stay awake last night long enough to watch Castle, the new show with Nathan Fillion. It is seriously win and I'm hoping it's successful. Great dialogue, story, characters. I really just had fun watching it. In other TV news, I feel that Dollhouse is improving as it goes along. It's getting interesting.


Sarah and I have started sharing a Twitter used exclusively for writing tiny stories. She's always the person that I end up doing crazy fun creative things with. @epigraph

I'm working on a couple of drawings now. Both are connected to my spirituality, which is not something that I typically address in my artwork. I'm excited about both pieces and have a couple more in mind to work on after these. Both pieces actually also involve bone. I've always felt intensely pulled to bones.

I had a tiny bird skull I found years ago that I felt awe over finding in such good condition. It was random, not even with any other bones in the area. I kept it in a jar, well cushioned in cotton. I kept planning on drawing it someday, but never got around to it. Then one day I decided that it was really creepy and stupid that I had so faithfully held on to a skull for years. I compulsively got rid of it. I really regret that. I've mostly gotten over considering my attraction to bone creepy. Mostly.

There were a few drawings of bones in college that are still amongst my favourites of my work. Once my professor told us to draw anything in the room we felt like, as opposed to working off of a still life set up by her, as was usual. There was a model skeleton (like you might find in a doctor office) in one corner and I ended up drawing a part of that. There was a second time where -- she was so funny and crazy -- she seriously saw part of some raggedy animal skeleton, mainly ribcage, on the side of the road and forced her husband to stop the car. She tossed it in the trunk, then brought it into class one day and plunked it down on a table for us to draw. The memory still makes me laugh. There were a lot of students finding it sort of creepy and some asking her hesitantly if she'd washed her hands. But I was excited, because it just looked so interesting and I knew it'd be fun to draw.

My silly glee over drawing bone again has been helping to enforce and broaden some of my thoughts lately on my art. My enjoyment in drawing has lessened and I do not draw as often because I place many restrictions on myself that I am realizing are downright retarded and needless. I don't even know how it started, but I came to believe that each piece had to have a different concept than the previous, each one had to be unique, had to mean something. Everything had to be new. If I thought of a concept with multiple possibilities, different ways that it could be portrayed, I would take a while to carefully figure out in my head which aspects were best and then I would only draw what I considered the best choice. I've avoided the possibility of instead taking those varied concepts and making series of connected drawings. For example, I like drawing frogs, so I could actually draw various frogs, but I avoid that and only draw one, because otherwise I'm straying away from making something new.

Ridiculous.

It's not even something that I remotely look down on other artists for doing either. I love series in artwork. So why do I have such different, insane standards for myself? I restrict myself, when I could actually be drawing what I enjoy drawing. And I'm not going to do that anymore.

Overall, it was a pretty good, calm, very creative day; though I was getting sort of irritable in the evening. I went and watched TV in Mom's room as soon as possible. Isolation always helps. It seems rather like the irritability is often a reaction to a sort of sensory overload or something.

I learned the hard way that dark blue and green eyeshadow makes circles below my eyes really stand out. Oops. No more of that during severe insomnia periods like lately.

Yes, I'm having insomnia again right now. Rapidly nearing 26 hours and counting. I've literally been having an insomnia attack every other night. And all that means is that it just hasn't been straight days of no sleep at all. I can't sleep for several, several hours, then I crash for a while. I get maybe 6 hours and sometimes I'm lucky enough to nap a bit later to get a couple more. Then I can't sleep forever again, crash again. It might be better said that I'm having insomnia every night? I don't know. That equates to zero sleep in my mind, but these things are difficult to define and I really don't give a fuck, so I have no clue why I've written even this much on it.

Whatever. Fuck it. I hate sleep. Forever and ever. Commercials for sleeping pills make me feel a longing that one should have only for a lover.

I've also returned to biting my nails terribly, which pisses. me. off. I'd actually been pretty damn good about it for over a year. An exciting accomplishment to silly me, after a lifetime of nail biting without pause. I had finally realized that it's mainly an OCD thing for me and the very slightest snag or whatever in a nail will make me start worrying at it and the next thing I know, it's been destroyed entirely. I can't even force myself to wait until I get to a pair of nail clippers later, I instantly just can't leave it alone, despite knowing that it never ever ends well. Compulsive behaviour is really stupid. But I started carrying nail clippers with faithful constance to more neatly deal with nail flaws and it worked wonderfully at saving my poor nails from their previous certain doom.

I think anxiety has reached a point that it's bypassed it all and nearly all my nails are nonexistent yet again. Chewed at times to the point of bleeding and then being kept that way without any real chance to grow back. Poor little things are screwed. For now. I'm tacking on that hopeful 'for now.'

I'm chewing up my lip a terrible amount, too, but that's one habit I hadn't broken anyway, so there's less boo-hooing over that.

What the hell? I said it was a decent day and then I pointed out crappy things. Murr.

Fine. In super good crazy awesome news (not sarcasm), the severe pain that I've been experiencing in my hands has been greatly lessened! So it's nothing that's permanently sticking around and I breathe a huge sigh of relief. I've even been drawing some today. Glee. I'm still keeping it light work right now, no heavy shading that puts extra pressure on my fingers. I'm a good girl.

An animal had gotten into our house and was wandering around. It was up to my knee, mostly black with some tan. Long, soft, shaggy fur. It seemed almost like an anteater body but the neck and head were structured closer to... I don't know, a dog or something, but not. I just know that it had a more normal neck and head than an anteater does, but it still had a particularly long-seeming snout to me. Shorter and thicker than an anteater's still, with rounded ears almost like small bear ears.

Another one was outside and was significantly more pissed off than the one in our house. I was trying to figure out how to get the one in the house back outdoors without letting the other one in. Before I had the chance to try anything, the one outside rammed into the screen door, making it pop open. I tried to fend it off with a full water bottle (...why on earth was I holding one?) and it luckily bit the bottle instead of me.

My family was asking what these animals even were and I knew what they were, but was blanking on the name. I said, "Um... um... not Bearcats." I'd seen an art piece from Ravenari recently of a Binturong (aka bearcat) and thought I'd seen this animal from her work as well. Then the angry one got a hold of the one wandering through our house and calmed down, leading it outside.

Some guys showed up that explained the animals had gotten away from animal control. I knew one of the guys. Even though I hadn't been thinking on it earlier in the dream, it was now apparent that I was the person who had rescued these animals and handed them over to animal control originally. So we sat down at a picnic table that was suddenly in our yard and discussed where I had found the animals. I was trying to describe a river to him, with some rocks set up almost in a square with one separate, above the square deeper into the river. The rocks were very important to me to describe and he recognized the ones I was talking about.

There were some pictures from animal control that when laid out would have shown the river properly, but they were all out of order. I was trying to shuffle them correctly, knowing the rocks were the start. There were also pictures of me, for some reason. One struck me as strangely beautiful and I was surprised to see such a nice picture of myself. I was underwater, bubbles trailing up, and it was a close up of my face. Very good, almost surreal lighting, with my eyebrow piercing glinting (though it was actually in the wrong eyebrow).

The guy was talking to me about how I'd borrowed his boat to save the animals. I hadn't and was confused, but didn't know how to go about explaining to him that I'd just found them wandering on the river bank. For some reason, I didn't want to let him know his boat wasn't involved (maybe he had some sort of pride for being involved indirectly and I knew that? It wasn't apparent in the dream though). He was asking me how the wheel had handled and if I'd done well driving a boat for the first time. I told him that I wasn't thinking about it at the time and could barely remember.

Continuing to look through the pictures, I came across pictures of the animals and found out where they'd come from before I rescued them. They were stuck in a tiny, terrible zoo. The cage had thick black bars and like the zoo, was far too small for the animals. I also came across a picture of a tiger in a similar cage and murmured to my Mom that we couldn't let Violet see it. She's a tiger fanatic. Mom made a comment about how we could take it in, if only it weren't winter (I don't know why the season matters, we'd never be able to afford a tiger anyway). Violet asked what we were talking about and I just shook my head. The guy was talking to me about us going to the zoo and rescuing the rest of the animals.


I've been looking through Ravenari's art and am not seeing an animal remotely like the one in my dream though. Hmm.

I'm trying to look into dissociation a bit more. I'd like to look into PTSD more overall, but dissociation is forcing itself into my main focus for now. It's a symptom I've been paying more attention to and becoming more open about here in my journal. I don't even know that I'm looking into it in terms of a definition, since I'm not sure how much can necessarily even be said about it. I perused through some PTSD books at the library and found myself pretty quickly bored with the few that were there. Not what I'm looking for at this time, at the very least, and each only had maybe a page or two about dissociation at all.

I gave up my search for a while, not sure yet what I was even seeking. Then I searched through Amazon for dissociation and naturally came across a lot of books for Dissociative Identity Disorder. There's a handful that I've read before, because I've always been quite intrigued with the disorder. If I thought I could actually handle being a therapist, I could have easily seen myself specializing in it or something. In the list, I came across a memoir that I recalled really touching me back when I read it and it's always stuck with me. The Magic Daughter: A Memoir of Living With Multiple Personality Disorder by Jane Phillips.

I requested it through my library, partly just because I've been feeling sort of nostalgic for a few books I haven't read in years. As I read it though, I noticed her descriptions of heavy amounts of 'regular' dissociating even more than I had in the past. Her therapist frustrates me, at first, because he's somewhat callous about her PTSD needs -- like when she's uncomfortable to the point of paranoia with a new office he moves to, he essentially tells her 'Deal.' He educates himself for her though and eventually learns much better how to deal with some of her requirements and unique problems. She also relays much of how she handles day to day life with the DID, including managing a full-time job as a college professor. I suppose you could say it's a bit of a how-to book. Heh. More than other DID books I've read, at least.

Oh, and how I mentioned in a recent entry that I love finding evidence of another person in a book? Whoever had this book before had jotted down notes throughout the book. Hopefully it was just the book's previous owner doing this before donating the book to the library, because -- book desecration! Shudder. Writing on the pages goes beyond finding notes on separate paper simply tucked into the book. But still, I had a whole extra level of intrigue as I went through, pausing to decipher handwriting in the margins.

This is satisfying my needs, for now, hearing others' experiences with dissociative episodes. I consider DID and Dissociative Disorder as being on the same path, with DID simply being a step further than DD. That might be oversimplification, but the idea's there. The Magic Daughter is also reminding me how much I enjoy things like memoirs, too. I used to read biographies constantly. I didn't even have to know the person before I picked the book up, I'd just find them interesting from the book flap. I like stepping into someone else's life, their head. Perhaps that's also why I enjoy reading online journals.

Therefore, I'm going the path of DID books. I'll also continue trying to find some PTSD books that hit more on what I want, but at least I'm not feeling completely frustrated this way. I did finally find one book specifically on dissociating and will be reading it soon. I'll probably relay if it was any good or not. The Stranger in the Mirror: Dissociation, The Hidden Epidemic.

I also let my Mom know what was going on, why I was reading this specific subject again. No need to get concerned as DID books start to stream in and out of the house. Heh.

The House episode last week got me a little heated over the talk running throughout it against bisexuals. Geli mentioned that they were being such guys about it and I said, "It's not just guys though. Tons of people act like just because someone's bisexual, they're a sex fiend incapable of not cheating. It's a terrible attitude no matter who it's coming from."

Luckily it's not unusual for any of us to have little rants or go on about something on TV. I was sorely tempted to also burst out with the fact that I've heard many of the same, unfair things being said to/about 13 directed at me, and that was why I was so bothered to hear them.. but I resisted. I haven't exactly come out to my sisters. It took me years, until I was 19, before I even told my Mom. We'd had a very short discussion once in my early teens, where homosexuality came up.

Mom: "You're not a lesbian, are you?"
Me: "Um.. no.."
Mom: "Thank goodness."

Seriously, who's going to want to come out to their mom after that, whether it's bisexuality or lesbianism? I figured she was one of those people that's super pro-gay, except when it comes to their own child.

I finally felt like I had reached a personal point where I could tell her and e-mailed her a confession. I was all nervous and then she e-mails me back basically saying, 'So?' She said that I was married, so she didn't see how it mattered any. I replied that it's important to me because it's still a part of who I am, married or not. (Also, my marriage was open, but I wasn't about to launch into that explanation!) I cited that previous conversation as why I had never said anything. It turns out that she only said that because she didn't want me going through the hardships that being a lesbian can visit upon you, on top of all the other shit I was going through in life.

Well, christ. Understandable, but future moms, watch how you phrase things like that to your kids!

I haven't come out to my sisters for similar, though less blatant reasons, though I would like them to know. They've said little things here and there that simply make me very hesitant to reveal to them that I'm bi. Evan was really pushing me for a while to tell them because he was convinced that they'd be better about it than I feared. That was actually one of the few things we got into an outright argument over. He simply could not understand how I could say 'no, I'm not ready to chance it,' and refuse to budge. The last thing I want is to risk experiencing my sisters being uncomfortable with me or even hinting with some of those discriminatory things that people can say and do. I could've stood it from my Mom at the point that I informed her, which is why I finally did, but it's harder to face the possibility from my sisters. And I figure if I'm not prepared for the worst case scenario, then I'm not bringing it up. This is how I handle many things and it simply works for me. If I don't feel I could deal with the worst possible answer, I am not going to ask the question.

I certainly have been discriminated against before. A lot of people act like bisexuals never face that sort of thing and I hate that attitude. Sure, some people very luckily never experience it, but that's not always the case. I've actually seen the potential for things to be even worse for bisexuals than outright homosexuals, because there's essentially no safe haven group. They don't fit in as being quite one way or the other; not different enough to count, not 'normal' enough to count. They fall somewhere in between.

I've faced harsh remarks and attitudes from both straight and gay people. Both can act like a bisexual person is simply greedy, undecided, or confused. I've encountered homosexuals acting like coming out as a bisexual is fake as that person must actually homosexual themselves, riding the fence to avoid fully coming out; or that a bisexual's coming out isn't even valid, because it couldn't have possibly been as hard as coming out homosexual. Yet it can be as hard, when they are plenty of people who don't care if a girl's dating guys, they're still going to zero in on the fact that they're also dating girls. So you might as well have simply come out as a lesbian, the way they react. You're often still facing the same things and I know of bisexuals having to face a sort of 'mini coming out' every single time they go from dating the opposite gender to getting a new significant other that's the same gender.

It can be quite hurtful to have someone you've considered a friend, a gay male, tell you right to your face, "Oh, you're not bisexual. That doesn't even exist. You're just greedy and gotta have 'em both rather than pick one." This happened to me in college and was the first of a series of derogatory remarks I heard from homosexuals. It stunned me, because I had naively thought up to that point that someone who was gay would automatically and always be understanding. I assumed that they wouldn't have dreamed of telling anyone their sexuality wasn't real, because that's something they might have gone through hearing themselves. It was almost more painful to hear that from a homosexual than from a straight, especially that first time, as it ruined my view of what I had considered a common bond of experiences. I almost dropped out of the GLBT (Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender) activism group that I was heavily involved with on our college campus.

It's even the 'little' things that can be hurtful, the views that have become popular and often accepted in our culture. I can't count how many times my boyfriends have received high-fives or been winked at by people, often accompanied with remarks right in front of me about threesomes and how lucky my boyfriend is. Some even acted like my boyfriends had actually convinced me to delve into bisexuality themselves, congratulating them on a good job, or asking how they'd managed to get me to try it out. They take my own sexuality right out of my hands and credit someone else for it about as sleazily as possible. It's insulting and the possibility that it could be never even seems to occur to them.

A lot of people act as though being bisexual is no big deal, that it's accepted by most people these days. It's the 'cool, hip thing' that all girls are doing to fit in. But I really don't think it's necessarily achieved more acceptance than homosexuality has. Both have taken certain great strides, overall, but there are still many misconceptions, stereotypes. Politically incorrect things can be said with no one batting an eye at it the way they would over something of an equal level said to a homosexual. I won't say outright that bisexuals have it harder or anything, but they can face some different things that make it at least as hard for them, yet they may receive no understanding or credit of that from either 'side.'