it's funny, i thought my "portrait project" would only include people, but yesterday i found myself in a beautiful old church with some time to kill. it felt funny, taking photos inside a church, but really, why should it? it's not illegal. and i wasn't doing it for the wrong reasons. i just wanted to capture the beauty of it all. i love stained glass, and have always been fascinated with religious statues.
i had this stool as a child. when i was having blood work done yesterday, i noticed they had the stool in the corner. it was a nice little random childhood memory.
Here's a link to an interesting article on insomnia.
"In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep."
This describes exactly how I sleep!
The article goes on to explain that this way of sleeping (a first and second sleep) was the normal back in the old days. And how the modern thinking about people needing 8 hours sleep in a row is crap.
I've been off Ambien since August, and I'm still trying to figure out how to sleep. I've stopped trying to sleep for 8 hours. 5 or 6 is fine. If I wake up after 4am, I just stay up.
And now I'm using my weird sleep patterns to go swimming. I hit the pool as early as possible, then take my time in the sauna and getting ready for work.
I like thinking that I can find new & better ways to sleep, and that the pressure to sleep 8 hours in a row isn't the only way to sleep.
I'm going to sleep like the people did in the old days!
carol is the first person to participate in my photography project. it was so much fun taking her picture! i have ideas for dan, chris, david, mark, rachel and my mom. i'm also going to do some self portraits.
I've wanted to blog about this for days. I know my thoughts are not important to anyone in the grand scheme of things. I just want to say my peace.
It's just so damn sad. But seeing how the community has really come together is sweet. And the families who lost their kids are being so strong, even forgiving. Also, seeing mr. Bergant (my old junior high band director) holding those sad press conferences, it wrecks me.
A friend I used to work with, someone I kept in touch with, her cousin was the first boy to die in the shooting. She comes from a big, close knit family and they are completely devastated.
It also brings back memories of the boy I was friends with who got his dad's gun and accidentally shot himself in the face. We were both 5 years old. He lived around the corner. He survived. But was really damaged. In a wheelchair with most of his brain gone. A tracheotomy tube. Just a vegetable.
So yeah, I'm not a fan of guns.
And the kid who did the shooting in Charon, boy did he have a rough life with some messed up parents.
I keep using the word "senseless", but that doesn't feel right. It happened for a reason, or a "perfect storm" of reasons. These school shootings keep happening, and we need to understand why.
To me, it seems like a combination of way too easy access to guns, and very little understanding about mental illness.
The guy who killed one person, wounded some & held my husband hostage, the guy was clearly unstable. He made everyone in the computer dept nervous. His neighbors knew he was crazy. But what can you do for someone clearly disturbed? There aren't many mental hospitals these days. And how do you force someone to get mental health help?
My dad was most likely manic depressive. When I was in college, I begged him to get help. I offered to try and pay for him to talk to someone. He'd just hang up on me, and a few months later I'd get another call from him, and it would end in another hang up.
So what am I trying to say? That we need more gun control. And we need better options for mentally ill people.
Here are some kids from my old high school, in the band room I spent 4 years, singing for the kids at Chardon:
good lord! i'm so open and honest about the embarrassing things in my life... i need to think about this one for a moment...
i once poked a blind lady with a pen.
she was a client at the group home i worked at on weekend. she was the meanest fucking lady ever. she'd attack people, throw used maxi pads at staff.
she also loved to tell people how they were going to die. one morning, waiting for the bus to pick her up for the open workshop, she told me that she saw me in a dream, and the sky was on fire, and that i was lying dead in the road.
i was so annoyed with her, i poked her in the leg with my pen. not too hard. but it made me a little happy to do it. and i'd do it again.
