"i love your depression and i love your double chin"

I'm eternally grateful to my little brother who introduced me to Damien Rice's first Album, "O." It has carried me through happy days and sad days. It is one of the few albums that i fell in love with immediately. I was playing it in Denver one of the first nights that Sam came over to visit. He says that he fell in love with me to "The Blower's Daughter." That makes me so happy. "I can't take my eyes off of you."

I've waited for years now for him to release something new, yet never tiring of, "O." He will release his next album in the U.S. early next week. In the meantime, he allows his fans to hear the album in it's entirety online. Though I wanted to hear more from him, I have to be honest...I was worried...I thought there was no way he could make an album as beautiful as his first.

I was wrong. Happily wrong.

I don't claim to be any sort of music critic. There actually isn't that much music that I would be inspired to critique. But here's my review: wow.

It awakened in me something that had been asleep for a long time. The album made me want to start painting again, to take photos, to write, to create. Those are the things that make me happy and I had not been inspired to create anything new, until I heard this album. So I don't think it's a stretch to say as Jack Nicholson once said in a movie; it makes me want to be a better person.

Pain

One of mine and Sam's favorite shows is Grey's Anatomy. Yes, we know it is soap-opera-ish, but we love it nonetheless. In a recent episode, a little girl came to the hospital because she had badly hurt herself. She was banged and bruised, but claimed that she was a super-hero because she was unable to feel any pain. She would try to prove this to people by asking them to punch her as hard as they could in the stomach. When kids would take her up on this, she felt nothing. But after an X-ray, it became apparent that she had major internal damage. The show ended by saying that pain always serves a purpose.

It lets us know we are alive.

To not feel pain may actually do more harm than good.

My sweet old grandmother is in a lot of pain right now. It saddens my family deeply. My mom has been helping her sister care for my grandma in Mississippi for the past week now. Today she is driving home in hopes of getting some rest so that she may return to again very soon.

My grandma has always been a strong woman. She is small and fraile, yet she has lived alone for almost 2 decades now since my grandfather died. She is cared for mainly by my aunt and uncle who live near her. But though most women her age are living in nursing homes, she still dressed herself, bathed herself, prepared her own meals, and even drove herself to the beauty shop once a week...until she fell a couple of weeks ago.

She got up in the middle of the night, lost her balance, and fell. My aunt and uncle drove her to the hospital and found that no internal damage had been done. She was banged and bruised, but was not critically injured.

Now, weeks later, she's in a lot of pain. She can no longer care for herself and someone has to be with her at all times.

My mom says it's hard to watch.

No doubt.

So how do you watch someone you love suffer? How do you look on the positive side of this pain?

I guess for now, at least this pain means that she's alive.

Too Long

So i've been in insurance education for too long. The most creative thing i do in a day is choose which color highlighter to use on my Notebook Due Date page. Today is blue. Actually, this whole month has been blue. I need to break free from the monotony of it all.

I need a creative outlet. I need to write again. I need to paint again. Maybe this will hold me accountable...and maybe i will overcome my fear of sharing with other people this way. My writing and art has always been very personal. I don't even always understand what comes out of me but i do know that i need to let it out, or my creativity will dry up. I worry that might have already happened, but why not push myself again?

Yesterday, I told my friends about the english teacher i had in high school that gave us one day a week to write in a notebook that she never read. She gave us topics to write on, but made it clear that she would never see it, so it didn't really matter if we stayed on topic. She just told us to keep writing--don't pick up our heads--don't pick up our pens--keep writing.

I was a person who tended to worry so much about doing the wrong thing, that many times, I would do nothing. She wouldn't allow me to claim writer's block and to stare at a blank page. She taught me to push through the fear.

My freshman year in college, I had a similar experience in a beginning painting class. I would stare at my blank canvas for an hour or longer. I'll never forget what my teacher told me one day. "Make a mark and react to it." I thought that i had to know what the finished product would look like before i did anything. But that's not how life works. You can't know the end from the beginning, so all you have is what you do in this moment. Make a mark and react to it. I did...and how I paint today looks nothing like how i used to paint. And how i live today hardly resembles the way i used to live.

I had to force myself to do something drastic. I had to stop living so "safely." I had to make myself do something big and scary--having no idea how it would turn out. So after living my first 26 years in Austin, Texas, I moved to Denver.

I'm back in Austin now. Happily married, less happily employed. It works for now, though. It works for now because one day I will do what I love to do. One day very soon. And in the meantime, I will write and paint and live like I don't know the outcome.

And maybe tomorrow i will use the pink highlighter.