The Art Gallery of Ontario

I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario today and was hoping to see the Picasso Exhibit but I was told that that Exhibit was already gone but that there was a photographic exhibit of  his life or something.  I never did find it.

But I did see ancient art, carvings, classic painters such as Picasso (two one from his “pink” period and one of his cubism paintings), Manet, Monet, Group of Seven, lots of painters I didn’t know.  A lot they never labelled for whatever reason.  Maybe they don’t know who they are or maybe they figured it wasn’t worth it?  Early Canadian, contemporary Canadian,  Indigenous art.  I just wandered from room to room.  Looking for a connection but not really able to find one.  There were some I liked more than others.  Some were violent, some were nudes, a lot had biblical themes and Catholic themes for which you’d probably have to have a good understanding of the bible to appreciate which I don’t.

I went about myself.  I should have maybe taken a tour so I could ask questions.

I feel a bit lost now because I don’t have anyone to talk to it all about and I don’t feel I appreciated or understood it enough.  If I could have just seen the Picassos I thought I was going to see, I might have had a chance.

Years ago I saw the Barnes Exhibit and I feel I did appreciate it more.  There were so many of the old masters.  Maybe it’s the Gallery I didn’t find impressive and they way they had everything arranged.  It has relied on many donations and each room seemed to be donated by one person or another and was named after them.  There was very little theme and in most cases very little about the painting other than artist name, year and media.  Not what it meant.

Most of the so called modern art is just crap, at least their pieces are.  A bookshelf made of plastic.  A wooden ramp and a ramp that looks like a case.  A roller coaster made of couch cushions with a bed at the end?  A girder you are supposed to sit on.  A metal window with a slit in it.  Just silly crap.  Oh and a painting that appears to have been done with painter’s tape in different coloured blocks and one just blank canvas, all white.  No name.  Perhaps the artist was too ashamed.  Or maybe it’s invisible and we’re supposed to imagine our own painting.

They did have a rather good selection of ship models.  None of the Picton Castle or even The Bluenose.  But there lots of nice war ships and models of ships long since destroyed by war, fire or just broken up as they got older.

Anyway it was an experience.  There ya go.

Picton Castle? Who Am I Kidding?

I just tried to crunch some numbers for sailing on the Picton Castle.  Wow who was I kidding?  How am I going to raise that kind of cash, pay off the debts I do have, up end my life and just do it.  I know it takes an immense amount of courage.  Younger people, people my age and older people have done it.  But yet I know with all my heart, with every cell of my being that I need to do this.  I want to do this.  I want to learn how to sail.  I want to learn everything about being on a ship.  And I want the life experience with a group of people working towards a great cause, working together for the greater good.  A team in the truest sense depending on each other for life.  The stakes are high and I want to be part of that.  If I cannot do this, if I don’t find a way, I think I’ll be crushed.  To all those who read me.  For whatever reason, if you could just leave a comment of encouragement, it would mean the world to me.

Thank you!

The Picton Castle Calls to Me

This is the Picton Castle.  She is a training sailing ships that sails out of Lunenburg, Nova Soctia.  She calls to me like nothing else has ever called to me before.  And I don’t know why.  I’ve never been on a sailing ship before, not much of a swimmer.

But once I started reading about the life experiences that the trainees had. The friendships they made.  The good works they do.  I knew I wanted to be part of something way bigger than myself.  I knew I wanted to step totally out of my comfort zone and do this.  Somehow I will find a way.  Somehow, I will raise the money, kit myself out and take the journey of my dreams and my life.  If it is the only thing I do.  If it is the last thing I do.  I will do it.

Start of a New Journey

Well tomorrow starts a new journey in therapy for me.  Hopefully a good one.  This latest bullshit with men and actors and the Internet really started me looking at what’s wrong with my life and there is a lot. Life has decayed to the point where I’m mostly just a shell.

I’ve spent so much time just trying to keep my head above water and survive.  I’ve let friends slip away, I’ve shut off the joy part of my life or at least I’ve lost the ability to feel joy.  I just exist.  I want more out of life.

So I’ve sought out a new therapist.  I’ve applied to be a trainee on the Picton Castle.  Not for this coming voyage but for the next one if there is one.  Just to say I’ve applied and am willing to go through the process.

I’m almost 50 and if it’s not too late, I want to start living this life.

Wearing My Heart On My Sleeve…

I don’t know what to say about this except that in real life other than in work I don’t meet too many men.  And since I spend a lot of my time on Facebook and Twitter and watching TV and going to movies that’s where my head is.  But because I’m personable and some of these guys talk back to me, I grab onto that and I fall in like very easily.  That didn’t go so well with Colin Ferguson and I caused a big mess there and managed to clean it up by apologizing in person.

My next attachment has not gone much better.  I wasn’t even a typical fan of his.  I actually started to follow him on Twitter because of Colin Ferguson and then I found out he loved sailing and was a crew member on The Picton Castle.  Then I found out more about the Picton Castle and that you could become a trainee on their voyages.  He offered me some encouragement.  Then I started to watch his show The Killing and started to follow his sister’s cafe and I got more tweets back when I complimented his pictures of his family and then I donated to his film Fat Kid Rules the World and then got tweets back just for being normal I guess and just joking around with him.  I also admired his sense of humour, his goofiness, his sense of adventure and his attitude.  He really moved me in Fat Kid as well as a father who was just trying to cope with two kids who’d lost their mother and he his wife.

So you know where this is going.  Then I did something awkward.  I don’t know if it’s over the line.  If he was a civilian and I liked him and asked his sister if he was single and what advice she would give would that be normal?  but as he’s not a civilian, writing his sister out of the blue I guess is considered stalkerish to ask the same thing.  To her credit and his, neither of them have blocked me and I never wrote her more than once.  I’m sure she told him but he never reacted either angrily or positively.

Then I got really drunk one night and drunk tweeted him with my phone number which I’m sure many people saw. To everyone’s credit no one called me.  Not sure if I should be insulted or glad.  I also wrote him on Facebook and asked him how his heart could be won.  The next morning I got a Tweet of what I think is disapproval from him.

Then he launched his own Schooner The Martha Seabury named after his grandmother.  I didn’t know what a Canadian connection he had despite being born in Virginia.  I asked him about the boat and I thanked a couple of people who shared pictures and I think may have been mates on the Picton Castle and who were friends of his on Facebook.  Then he flew straight back from Lunenburg to Vancouver.  I said you left your boat already and he tweeted back “I did”.

Then I realized how unhealthy this was becoming and that I was seriously falling for a person I had never met and who is not interested and for all intents and purposes can get all the women he wants.  Let’s face it, I’m not beautiful.  I’m sure he gets a lot of  “tail” for lack of a better word.  So I wrote him a break-up Facebook note and told him I wouldn’t be bothering him anymore.  Yeah you read that write.  I was breaking up with an actor I wasn’t even seeing.  As I write that I see the craziness of it.  But I felt I had to make the statement to myself and to him out loud so there was no going back.

I didn’t get an answer, and I’ve been checking his Twitter to see if he’s tweeted since.  He has not.  Hopefully that urge will go away.  I need to try to make relationships with men I can actually have a chance with.

And with that I am on eHarmony and talking to this guy named Steve.  I’m scared to death.  But can it be any scarier than telling  a tv and movie star that you are in like with him?  Hell yeah.

Anyway, if we agree to go to dinner I have an outfit picked out and my toes are painted a nice neon pink colour.

But I worry too.  I’m 48 and I put out smiles to 42 men and only one contacted me back.  This will be hard.  I also do  not photograph well at all.  I’m hoping the guys can look past that.

In other news I got to meet The Bloggess Jenny Lawson.  I read her book Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and unbelievably she follows me on Twitter.  So she came to Toronto for a reading/book signing.  And I went and met her.  She is the sweetest person.  Got a picture as well.

Going further back I also talked to my father…on Father’s Day.  My uncle emailed me about an operation he had for cancer and I assumed I knew.  When he told me that it was for lung cancer and that he had part of his lung removed I freaked out.  Luckily that weekend my mom and stepdad were here and mom sort of held my hand while I called him.  It actually went well.  They had been watching the tumour for awhile and saw that it began to grow.  So they went in and got it and some lymphnodes and seemed to have gotten it all.  I told him I was not making him any promises for the future.  He said he was glad I called and that he loved me.  And out of reflex or guilt or maybe because I really do, I said I love you too.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do about it.  If I will be pursuing it.  Part of me wants to make some sort of peace with him.  But the stronger more prideful part of me say hell no.  He won’t acknowledge my pain or apologize why should I reward that by seeing him?  They say pride goeth before the fall right?  That’s sometimes where I feel this is headed.

My old friend Nathan from NZ is being kind of cagey.  We once professed our love to each other and used to chat online almost everyday.  And then once a week, never missed.  Now he’s always busy on the one night a week he makes himself available.  I think I confessed too much to him about other stuff and that put him off me.  We have been writing and chatting for over 10 years.  Maybe things have just gone past their due date.

Well that is me all caught up.  Ciao for now.

Chupa mi verga

Spanish for suck my dick.  I’m sure there’s a lot lost in translation but it somehow sets the tone of how I feel and what I wish I could say to so many people.

I’d love to say it to so many members of my “clan”.  I won’t say family because family doesn’t do what they’ve done and said to my mother or me.  Well won’t they be surprised soon.  Karma is a bitch baby.

I’d love to say it to the people who try to make me feel crappy about myself and the work I do, like when I’m trying to help them but they are too stupid to listen.

I’d just love to say it to people who piss me off.

I’d like to say it to guys I’ve liked who just look me over because I’m not pretty.  Everybody tells me I’m a good person and any guy would be lucky to have me but so far no takers.  I’ve lived alone and I’m going to die alone.  No amount of prayer to God or putting myself out there seems to make a bit of difference.  Not everyone has a someone.  And I’m one of those people I guess.  It doesn’t matter how good my intentions are or how deeply I feel things or how good I think I could or would be for a person. I’m not their “one”.

Most of the time it’s ok and I can pretend.  But then real life leaps up and hits you right between the eyes and you get crushed again.

It’s hard and I’m tired.  But still I make myself an eHarmony profile.  Bring on the humiliation.  Prove me right…again.

I hope before I die I can just find out why.  People reading this will think it’s my negative attitude.  But I’m not my blog.  I’m funny, warm, flirty, I talk to people all the time.  Love to laugh.  Am well read and have a lot of interests.  Love to eat out and enjoy fine wine.

But why God.  Why do you want me to be alone.  Just let me know why. I can take it.  It can’t be worse than what is already happening.  The loneliness hasn’t killed me yet.

In other news.  I found out my Dad (who I am essentially estranged from) had part of his lung removed due to cancer.  My uncle told me.  I hadn’t spoken to him in years.  Because he’s a bad drunk and I cut him out of my life because he never took responsibility for how he treated me.

It happened that my mother was up with me when I found out and I didn’t know what to do.  And finally I just called him.  I was prepared if he hung up on me.  At least I had been the bigger person.  We actually had a good conversation.  I told him I wasn’t making him any promises for the future but I just wanted him to know I was concerned.  He seemed to accept that.

I don’t know what the fuck to do about that.  It’s just so all messed up.  I put all this energy into making him the monster and justifying his excision from my life.  And then I called him because I didn’t want to be that person who has no compassion.  Who’s dad died thinking that she hated him.

I guess when it comes down to it I don’t really hate him.  I am just tired.  Was just tired.  Hated the drama.  Hated the drama.  The lies, the abuse the blaming me for how you are treating me.

But me calling him…wow.  I don’t know if I have anything left to give him and he could try to take everything.

It’s Been Far Too Long!

So this happened.  Sometimes forgiveness happens and anyone who read previous entries (now locked) will know what this means and why my joy is the result.

But it other areas it is not.  Still having issues with my family.  Shortly after the above even happened I found out that one of my cousins started a group for the “family” but I am not allowed to join. This is payback or a continuation of drama that happened six years now, when I wrote a note on Facebook about a cousin who very rudely and ungraciously made valued private time with my grandmother and parents all about her.  My parents live in Nova Scotia and I only got to visit them once a year…at Christmas.  This cousin who lives 5 minutes up the way stormed our Christmas meal…and when told we had just said down rudely said, we’ll just wait in the living room for yo to finish an pushed her way past my mother and me with her husband in kids in tow and did just that. This despite the fact that she lives 5 minutes away, had 364 other days a year to visit our grandmother but never did.  She just wanted to be “seen” on an important day so she could forget about her on the rest of the days.      I was outraged and felt totally disrespected.  When I vented on Facebook about it a year later because a new Christmas was coming up, it became this whole thing.  I didn’t even name her or tell the gender…she outed herself and since then has made it her mission to turn as many of my family members as she can against me.  The cousin who started the Facebook Group is one of her recruits.

I was told this would happen because I’m “from away” and don’t understand their ways.  It’s amazing how much many of them can hurt my  mother, insult her, start rumours and untruths about her, despite the fact that she sacrificed everything to give up her life and take care of my grandmother (her mother) when none of them wanted to do it and weren’t helping out an obviously ailing woman, but you hold up a mirror to their behavior and they get all bent out of shape to the extent that you could call them batshit crazy.

The best thing about visiting my parents is that I got to spend 24/7 with my grandmother as her life was ending.  Soon after my parents took over her care it became clear that she was developing dementia.  But it was my total pleasure and honour to spend such quality time with her in her last years.  Even if I had to answer something 100 times or hold her hand or sit with her while she napped, it was my pleasure and honour.  I loved her and until the last time I saw her, she knew who I was and she knew that I loved her.  And she knew that my mother helped her to continue living in her own home with dignity.

And this cousin who is doing this is obviously a bully.  But as with most bullies, she is also a coward.  When this first happened she could not go to my mother and tell her (I’m in my 40s btw and they think telling my mother somehow shames me…they so don’t know my mother and I), she got my aunt to do it.  Then when my grandmother died, and she wanted one of my grandmother’s tea cups she asked another aunt to ask her.  She couldn’t, again face my mother, I gather because although she continues with her campaign she knows what she has done is wrong and she cannot face my  mother.  So my mother told her that the teacup and saucer that she requested was put aside for her to come and pick it up…she sent her father to fetch it for her.  Little bitch.

So when this Facebook thing happened I just blocked the perps.  Including a cousin who wrote me accusing my mom of being a thief.  When she attacked me on Facebook twice a couple of years later I brought this up to her and she called me a fool saying she insulted my mother to get to me.  The mind of a person with an unfortunately very low IQ.  And she’s in the armed forces…I pity Canada.

Moving on now…just had to vent a little.

I have been developing a new relationship with my uncle on my father’s side.  His youngest brother.  A bit of a mixed up boy but still my uncle and at least one of his relatives that I can talk to.

Had to put a mean girl in her place and she did not like it.  I don’t feel guilty about it.  Ever meeting one of those girls that exude postiveness, new agey, change your life crap but when you catch them in their stuff they do not like it one bit?  Their “niceness” goes out the door.  This happened with someone that I had used as a professional but not like a doctor or anything and she allowed, I feel, the lines to be grayed as far as socializing.  She had been leading me on for months promising that we would get together for a meal, which got downgraded to coffee, etc.  So I knew two other girls that I had taken a class with and this professional.  I had had dinner with two of them.  I tried for weeks to organize a dinner with these girls.  One said yes and reorganized her schedule a couple of times to accommodate the other two that were coming up with excuses.  Finally the professional said to go ahead without her because she’ll be busy for the foreseeable future and the other one said she had like 5 jobs now and wouldn’t be available but then she wrote me an email telling me how to make friends (I had put the invitation in the manner of wanting to enlarge my social circle). The one who actually did say yes then cancelled saying she would wait until the others were available.  I told her that wasn’t going to happen because it appears that it was me they didn’t want to have dinner with.

After this I got kind of pissed and unfollowed the “professional” and the other one.  Then a couple of weeks ago some tweets made it in my feed where they were organizing a dinner with each other on Twitter!  Something the “professional” had chastized me for saying there were a lot of weirdos out there.  So I posted my own Tweet saying how disappointed I was in this situation and at then end put in this professional’s name.  LOL She didn’t like that.  First thing she did was block me on Twitter.  Then the next morning she wrote me telling me how surprised she was because she had been nothing but kind and helpful to me and that not everything has to do with me and that people have the best of intentions and how surprised and disappointed she was with me. Yada yada yada.  Perfect girl speak for who did I think I was calling her out on her shit.

So I wrote her back telling her that I had worked long and hard trying to organize this dinner and was lead on for a few weeks until she finally said a definitive NO and then it fell apart and I didn’t appreciate it.  Then she goes into “professional mode” as her last line of defence and says that she doesn’t as a rule socialize with clients!  And I said well isn’t that interesting because up until that time you had been promising me that we would go out together.  And I’m disappointed and feeling rejected because I was trying to get to know a few people better who I admired.  Then she says to me “No Hard Feelings”?  Mean girl.

So when it became obvious that she wanted the last word I just deleted the email and blocked her on Twitter.  So now I have to find other ways to make friends.  I  have a stellar Internet social network…not so much on the personal side.  I have started trying to maybe socialize with them personally.  I met up with a few of them at Wizard Con and a couple of them go to the zoo a lot and I’m hoping we can go to the zoo together.

I’ve also started filling out my eHarmony profile and I hope that I can get a good profile going so that I can start socializing with the men folk a bit.  I feel like I am open and ready for life.  Without tempting fate I hope it is safe to say that I’m at a good place in my life and I want someone to share it with.

On another sad note.  I had to give up a friend due to drug usage, hers not mine.  She started doing cocaine and I told her daughter because I couldn’t deal with the what ifs of something happening to her and her daughter not knowing.  That backfired of course because she’s an addict.  We kind of mutually ended things after that.  I feel that she was also paying for her cocaine with sex.  She doesn’t make enough money to buy cocaine herself.  The guy she was sometimes seeing was giving her cocaine in exchange for sex and in exchange for her having sex with other people.  This is her being a “big ass woman” and “taking care of herself” as she puts it.  It breaks my heart but I cannot be part of an addict’s life who is in denial.  I’ve got my own problems.

I’m very happy because my mom and stepdad are coming up in a couple of weeks and he will be here for Father’s Day so I can treat him and my mom out to an evening.  Dinner and a movie!!!  Of course my mom will want to see the bill and want to leave the tip.  I’m 48 but still her baby you know?  But that’s ok.  I like being her baby and having her as my mom!  My stepdad is a great guy.  He definitely stepped up where my own father did not.  They’ve lived in Nova Scotia for about 7 years now, it will be good to give them some special treatment.  Well ciao for now!