Stop trying to be the best all the time. Never stop trying to be the best all the time.

My mother is the queen of all tough love. Shake it off. Get over it. Get over yourself. Stop trying so hard and it will be easier.

How can I be a good girlfriend if he isn't even there? How can I stop beating myself up for him leaving if I am not the reason. How can I keep reading his Facebook about how happy everyone is about something that makes me so sad? You know that feeling you get like you are being shot with an arrow through your heart? I feel that every time one of his friends I'll never meet who he will spend all his time with in Antarctica virtually high fives him and talks about how glad they will be that he is coming back. People that have lived in the same place with him, and I never have. People that seem to know him better than I do somehow, even though I've been dating him for a year. And they all sound so encouraging. "I knew you couldn't stay away" they say. Well how come I didn't even know? Am I a fool?

My dreams haven't changed. My dreams are to have a family with him. To live with him. To have a good life for me and my daughter and him. His priorities are now to go there and be happy and he seems so happy and I am so sad.

Stories about courage and strength and Kick Ass

I was in labor about 5 years ago for 12 hours with Ella. I'll spare you most the details, except for the important points for this story with the title of this blog post. Unfortunately it is a very long entire story since I was in labor for 12 hours. I had to have a C section late at night when she wanted to be born but it wasn't happening.

I was pissed off when it was over. They take your glasses when they put you in the OR. I had not yet seen my baby even though she was out and alive someplace. I could hear them sewing me up even though I think I was supposed to be unconscious. When I was being wheeled down the hallway I shouted for my mother to GIVE ME MY GLASSES! I wasn't going to see Ella. Her Apgar score was too low.  I wasn't happy. People kept telling me to go to sleep. I had major surgery. I was anesthetized. Shouldn't she be asleep? Passed out? NO! My best friend who knew I wouldn't rest until I saw her went to get my midwife. My midwife signed for the baby, and they brought Ella to me so I could see her WITH my glasses on. Then I was happy and passed out. I woke up to feed her a few hours later, and was able to ask for them to leave her in my room when she could be there. But she needed the lamps because she was jaundiced.

I woke up in the morning and asked the nurse to take off my IV and my catheter. I was ready to get up. I was met with a nervous giggle. Really? No one ever has asked for that so soon, they said. We have to ask someone. The head nurse took one look at me and knew what had to be done. She took me off the catheter. She watched me pee. Then I walked to see Ella. No one could keep me down. I had a mission.

Today I was very impressed with how Ella was dealing with her stress before her surgery. When we got there a co-worker friend of mine was there with her daughter to have their 4th procedure. The girl was upset and Ella walked right over and comforted her. She told her that both of them were going to be ok. Ella had never had surgery before and was already acting like it was no big deal but only in front of the other girl. But it was amazing to see her ability to help the girl cope. Ella only cried coming out of the anesthesia. She felt like puking for a little while, then ate two ice pops before we left. She was irritated, took a long nap, and then woke up 5 hours after the surgery and is acting as if nothing is wrong. "I was sick, now I am better." She said. "My soul is good."

I have to remember who I am, how I am, and where I come from when I am upset about things. I have to remember that I am strong. That we are strong. That bouncing back means you deal and you live and you get better. That just because things are not going the way you planned them, that things will still be ok and recovery happens. First ice pops, then ice cream, then soft foods, then pizza time. It's easy.

Why I Don't Have a Partner

Why I Don't Have a Partner  by Erica Manville

I won't settle for less than I deserve.


Look for the sequel : Why I Never Really Had a Partner Even Though I Tried To A Few Times coming soon


It's a real tear jerker.

Pop, lock, and drop it like it's hot, lean back, and get jiggy with it

Ever since I was a young girl I have been itchy. My mom is super itchy too. We live in a constant state of itchiness, nothing makes it better and only makes it worse. The side effects of the stuff that does work isn't worth it. My mother's symptoms have gotten worse over the years, she gets hives that look like ringworm (big, puffy, and circular) and the only thing that works is heavy antihistamines so she takes nothing. A symptom for me is that I have irritations all day long and I am so used to it that I don't even realize that my knuckles are so dry they are bleeding and so tonight my hands are burning, itching, and bleeding. Creams just make it feel worse. Typing= not a good idea. But this is a sign that I need to take care of myself and my needs. Thanks, my body, for reminding me that you are there. Yes yes, I will try to take better care of you. Sleeping, exercising, and pampering are on the calendar, right along with MOVING, which is the big suck. Worse thing ever, we all know it. Listen Carlin,  I know it's all just shit, ok?

Someday, somewhere, somehow. day, where, how.

I have boundless energy and everything is wrong

I was about to leave a post about my boundless energy about how everything is wrong and how I woke up and need to change it. I read my cousin's blog, and realized she already wrote it. We have this parallel thing....blood relation connection thing.

I have been waiting to act. I have been waiting for someone else to help me. Needing help is fine, I am totally ok with needing help. People can't do things on their own, that's why there are millions of us. And there are millions of us, yet we still feel alone sometimes.

It was nice to think about and I really thought it was going to work. I had been dreaming up plans with the man I love for about a year now and now that isn't happening the way we discussed. It's still possible, maybe someday.  Last time my plans went to shit I walked up a mountain by myself without training: a really big steep mountain. It was the best thing I could think of to prove to myself that I could do it. And I did it. And it helped. I have boundless energy sometimes.

This time I will have other challenges.

One Line.

This is how I feel today

I met Louise Bourgeois 10 years ago in her studio and at her home. It's a long story as to how I got there, but a bunch of us from Columbus were chosen because the Wexner Center gave her a prize of lots of money and she was too old to come and get it. So we got a studio tour and sat in her house and showed her slides of our work. She was quite old even then, and couldn't see the slides of our work very well. Her only critique of my work was to say, " finally, here is some good work about love. Love is the only thing worth talking about in this way." And that was it. It was nice because the other grads there had made more "acceptable" work according to our local  crits in grad school, she was sitting there railing them for what their work was about,  and yet my work was approved by this wonderful old amazing artist immediately. She sat in awe of my paintings and even giggled. That was the best day.

Today I feel like this.

super effing fragile istic

sofa- king better than yesterday.

My heart is warmer, I can feel the heat from the cold, yadda yadda.

If you have whiplash from the 27 different stories about austerity measures you hear every 2 minutes, your boyfriend wants to move to Antarctica for 6 months in March, you have to have a biopsy in a week, then go to a family wedding with no date a week after that, and your daughter needs to have her tonsils out, then you know approximately how I feel. Sometimes I let it all sink in and feel sorry for myself.


Instead sometimes I look at the good side. Protests are ways that the oppressed turn the tides and fight for their rights, which is good. My boyfriend loves me and I love him and we met while he was in Antarctica.  I am probably going to be ok, and if not at least it's caught in time. The wedding isn't about me or my dates, it's about my cousin and I need to stfu and deal. My daughter has had strep 9 times and needs to feel better and get rid of her tonsils.

Libras. Always needing balance. ALWAYS.

fiber=good for you= smelly farts, so smelly farts=good for you?

Things are never what you think they will be.
I was talking to someone recently about understanding feelings. We should just be able to understand them, he said. But then I realized that:  no, we don't, we shouldn't. We feel the feelings, we don't always understand them. And that's important. We can try to suss them out and make them logical but really our feelings aren't and should never be logical. Also, they are not logical on purpose, or else always understanding everything would get super boring. We need to know what cold feels like to feel warmth. Logic is meant for the mind, and the pursuit of logic is a fine course to map out.

It's a cold planet of freezing ice balls inside my heart right now.

making things makes things easier

Holding crumbling butter, sugar, and flour in my hand was the best therapy. Making shortbread is always a delicate endeavor because it had to be just right out of the refridgerator and if you take it out before it's chilled you have it too warm, too cold and it crumbles and won't form the cookie. I got it right after a little issue with some over crumble. But it was the best I felt all day. Concentrating on that stupid crumble and how to fix it helped.
I never wanted to be a famous artist, because people that are famous for their art are usually just lucky or really lonely because they forsake all others and other things. But I love making things. And I don't even believe that making things is really always the key to art, I'm not at all a person that would say craft isn't art, or art can't be craft. But the process sure does help take my brain and put it to rest better than laying in my bed does.

What I look like after big change.

Wall Street my street

I did not go to Wall St, I am sorry about this. Another time perhaps.

I ruminated the topic of Occupy with Seth Brown last night. It's made me thoughtful today about the topic while spending a rare morning by myself in an unfamiliar NJ town. It is good to visit a place I have no visual memory for other than good thoughts with my friends. My mind is a visual mine field, and I needed a break from the places I have visual explosions.
I just read this article which helped me to put Seth's words into perspective.

When studying the hegemony of our richer/poorer society and how dominance forms, I know that the dominated and oppressed can then become the dominant force. I know that through a sort of Hegelian model the thesis and antithesis can merge becoming the synthesis. (which isn't where it ends, but that's a whole other story)  I joke about my evil plans because I know that there is not real Good and Evil, it's a sliding scale. I know I'd like to side with good, but it's all on a scale that can switch. Would the poor people like to be rich? Being poor makes one very tired. Working hard can apply to a rich person that makes it rich by working hard. Who works harder? Who is more creative? Who is oppressed? Both? And once you have reached the other side, would you like to ignore the fact that you were once on the poor side? How about the other way around? Doing fine financially, then slip back into the uneasy burdens, the market gone wrong, the mistaken choices.  Obviously I question mark for the point of a question mark, to raise the question that I can answer myself with many many words and thoughts here. But it's really not up to me. It's up to Us, and We can't really make choices. But being blessed/burdened by seeing the big picture only helps perspective, not the causes. Not the winning teams.



I say change needs to happen, and will.

I received bad health news in the mail on Friday and need to have tests. A couple of hours later the man I made dreams with changed his mind and finally told me. What I thought was happening and dreamed of happening, won't. The happiness I built has been replaced with a new reality. That new reality is undefined, but just as real as the future plans I had built through love and respect and admiration. That doesn't make those plans any less real. They were real until Friday. They were what I wanted until Friday. I cannot erase them. I've been alive on this planet long enough to understand change, and when to cry and how to cry. I've used this opportunity to mourn what I once dreamed. The news on Friday changed me forever. So I will become a new person, and in that becoming I will learn to be stronger. I can only be stronger and I'm not going backwards.

I've been told that I sparkle. That I have conviction: attractive conviction. I believe it is because I use change to become stronger. I believe it is because I embrace change. I believe it is because I embrace life, even when days like Friday happen. I can learn to make a new dream and become just as happy and mystified as I was before, I can use my thoughts and visions and dreams and use this to change. I think the people that see that in me and are not frightened by it are geniuses.

Fried is my favorite flavor

It is mostly easier not to try to get off the couch when hit with triple whammy forces of evil: to succomb to the earth's forces that drive you to sit motionless, inert, one with the couch. The couch is a force of comfort and add a blanket and you are just done for. You will be lost. and what I mean is WHAT IS ESSENTIALLY YOU will be lost on the couch not making an imprint at all except for your ass into the cushions.
OR
Get up and make some noise. Counter act that force with an unequal force. Shout into your car speakers the words to songs, shout them back with more force than is coming out to make sure you can. Because you can.
I hope you know I am telling myself all this. This is meant for me to re-read. I'm sure it could help you out a bit too. My reasoning is the same as what is on a banner in my living room: "You can't mope forever". I must also point out that you most definitely CAN mope forever but my loving friends know that EYE can't mope forever because I am SuperManvillian and it would just be a tragedy to mope forever.

So I am off to Wall St, then back home to Massachusetts.

17 Favorite Things

When starting an evil plan: I do not actually plan. In art school I refused to use sketchbooks.  I like the books themselves. Libraries are beautiful. Books on shelves are beautiful. I think blank books are really white surfaced books and not blank at all.  I want to write in them. But blankness annoys the hell out of me so I usually create a dirty surface and layer my shit. I paint my canvases colors first, I can't start on white. White surfaces suck. They suck light, they shine light, and they suck. I cannot communicate on such a surface, because it's just not how the world is.
Transitively I also like casting instead of metal fab, because fabricating out of blank space is really not my style, but creating the mold out of sand makes more sense. Gestalt shift.  It is easier than blank mock ups from nothing comes something.
My painting teacher walked into my shared studio my senior year. I was painting and alone, she was obviously upset. Raving mad really. I went into her corner office, which was a corner triangle that had 4 corners because of some Pomo architect had remodeled the space, and she said: "Erica, I will probably be fired." I stood as she got red in the face, this porcelain faced cute blonde who didn't seem capable of any mean thoughts. When she would answer the phone at home people would ask her if her mom was home. She sounded 10 years old. Yet the expletives were spewing forth. I was a mute listener as usual, using my nods in support. She said " I told them art wasn't meant to be made by themselves, that would be MASTURBATION. I told them to HAVE SEX, that is the WHOLE POINT." Then she ordered me to go in and tell the sophomores that class was over and to go try to make some art that was more akin to having some kind of communication, which is how I decided to say it instead of what she was screaming. (That was the old me.)

I do marvel at plans. I see DiVinci's notebooks and things and get all googly eyed. I watch The Way Things Go and sit in wonderment about how much time and thought went into planning such an epic spectacle. I watch movie credits and story boards and get emotional at how much planning went into the planning. This is especially poignant when I see the "baby list" on some movies for the babies that were born during the making of the film. Makin and cookin a baby takes TIME. All the while I am sitting in the wonderment, contented to be Miss Viewer, I am subverting my own plans and creating my art inside my head, which is maybe mind masturbation and perhaps worse than what those sophomores were doing all those years ago. But no, I actually LIKE it, so whatever. This is how it's going to have to be folks.

I am a firm believer in cherishing what is worth cherishing. Highlighting the good things. I am good at this non sketchbook planning. Just most people wouldn't use the word planning; more like speculating concretely and thrusting forth into life as if I were caped with magical powers and winged thunderous abilities.My visual memory has been cultivated and I can now use it to plan. I can see things. I used to try to get rid of those visions. I'd force them out of my mind. Then of course I tried to deny they existed. And now I try to share them. Because my painting teacher was right. My brain is beautiful, and I'd rather communicate. It's trying to tell me something. It's trying to tell you something. But it is more like a caress than words. I will snuggle the visions and shit I see into your brain. I will kiss you with it. I won't edit much. I just hit the publish button with a squinty cringe sometimes. Like now.