Ramblings

I am drinking iced coffee with rice milk, because that is what I do now.

Caffeine is my only vice, if you can call two cups a coffee per day a vice. I don't. It is survival for someone who hasn't slept for more than three hours straight in three months. The rice milk mocks me. Sure, it swirls around the ice like decadence, but the taste is reminiscent of dirt. Funnily, I drink my coffee black and unsweetened anyway, but every so often, when I am sleepless and down, I add some half and half. It tastes like Indulgence. I should drink it black, but I keep insisting on adding the rice milk in some desperate attempt to feel satisfied. I think this is technically called wallowing in my misery. This coffee now tastes like Angst.

There is a wicked heatwave in the Northeast. It is the lead story on all the news outlets. Women with perfect hair across America are stating the bleedingly obvious. "It is HOT! Stay in AIR CONDITIONING, if you have it."

It feels like the warning on my egg carton.

ALLERGENS: eggs.

I fear the world we live in where people need to be told that eggs contains eggs. Or that there is a heat wave when they are sitting in one hundred degree weather.

I have been on this diet for three years, I imagine, but no, in reality, it has been a week. One measly week. I have the cellular memory of eating like this from last summer, so I am already pissed off. I have lost a few pounds, a few IQ points and my good nature. I am in a perpetual state of hunger, hate and snarkiness. Or as my ex-boyfriend used to say--the Angie Terror Alert is on red: Absolute Stroppiness. 

We have a houseguest. My Good Angie persona is trying to talk Cranky Angie down. Cranky Angie is stronger and more determined. I admit that I am sleep-deprived and crazed enough to find this all very interesting. How will it end? Let us wait and see.

My visitor told me this morning that someone was at her house and saw an illustration I did of Beezus with a radish. Her visitor, she related to me over my first cup of coffee, is an artist herself. Quite a good one who has even sold a painting. This artist who sold a painting asked if my illustration was painted by a three-year old. If so, she said, it was quite good for a three-year old. The story ended there. My houseguest just stared at me after relating the story, then took another sip of coffee.

I suppose it would be incredibly flattering to hear this if I were say, two years old, but as a thirty-six year old woman, I wanted to turn away from the breakfast table, put my hand up to my face as I cried, "I am a monster." Then torch my art studio. I have largely ignored the inner demon of self-criticism since Lucy's death. I felt free to explore art and creativity willy nilly. But this morning, I just felt fucking stupid.

The emperor has no clothes. The illustrator has no talent.


I shuffled off eventually. Not too soon after her story to show anyone that it hurt me, but not long enough to hear anymore. My open art journal with a Lucy grief painting greeted me in my studio. I slammed it shut, not sure what to make of my pathetic life. Sometimes I feel pandered because of Lucy's death, like others are simply encouraging me because I am grief-stricken and desperate and art pacifies me.

Wow. That is beautiful. What is it, honey?
It is me. Very cranky and hungry.