Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Respecting Religion? We Have A View On That

What better topic than religion. Really.

We've actually written about it a few times here (Religion, You Say? We Have A View On That), and addressed a series of questions that were e-mailed to us last fall (Religious Debate...or Something), our thoughts and opinions on religion.

Religious debate is indeed one of those "hot topics" people are taught not to discuss in polite company, but we're not overly polite, or subtle, and are not afraid of what people might think about what, and how, we choose to believe and live our life. Mostly because we (most of us, anyway) have found happiness in not caring if people judge us; because who do they think they are? That doesn't mean we are not without struggles that make us unhappy, but religious struggle is not one of them. The Father still has the church praying for us, of course.

Today while walking around town center, listening to our music, minding our own business (only moderately scowling at people, hard for them to see behind big sunglasses anyway) a Mormon missionary honed in on us. He crosses the busy street full of pedestrians towards us. You can always tell, they come at you with an open smile, which immediately looks suspicious.

We took out our ear buds out of our ears (meanwhile, when someone is wearing ear buds it's usually an indication they are not interested in being talked to), raised our sunglasses, and before the words, with their American accent, were out of his mouth, we knew.

Having been a missionary in our younger days we know the spiel, and it's pretty much starts out the same across denominations.

"Have you heard...", he starts.

Right away we are laughing, and we stop him. We smile and we tell him upfront that we used to be a missionary and we are not interested. As we are ready to turn away he starts asking questions.

"Do you believe in God though?" he inquires, he wants to chat.

"No, I decided to go another way, and be happy", we explain to him.

He asks what happened to make us no longer be a believer, and if we don't question why "we" are here? With a discrete explanation we gave him a satisfactory answer.

We continue our short conversation with him, he asks where in the states we are from, he replies he is from California (for those who don't know, we are an American temporarily residing in the UK). He is friendly of course, and invites us to his church, asking if we could find the answers we were looking for, if we had proof that God existed, would we follow him (God)?

We simply said "No", explaining that we don't need religion to live a happy life, that we have decided that we can live without the answers we were looking for, and we choose to resolve to the fact that bad things happen to all people, in varying amounts, and that we'd rather learn from them, find a way to turn them into a positive and try to enjoy life, rather than seek out a "creator" to give us the "answers" so that we live by his/her/their rules.

We parted ways being proud that, while we did indeed laugh and smile we did not do it in a condescending way; sometimes we don't come across the way we think we are, but his friendliness confirmed we were "doing it right" today, which is an achievement for one of us residing in the head today. We treated him with respect by explaining ourselves simply and by not making him feel like his decision to follow religion made him ignorant or any other things people like to make religious people feel.

We guess when it comes down to it, if we are greeted with respect for not being a "believer", then they should be treated with the same. People are entitled to their beliefs, it's what gets THEM through their day, and makes them feel they have a purpose. Though we do have a problem with fundamentalists, but that's another story. It's the pushing of it on others that we don't appreciate, but you can't blame them too much for trying, they think enough people haven't heard "the word", or can be happy without it.

At the end of the day who are we to step on the stones that build their support, that give them the strength to see another day?

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Projects: A Journal Entry

We have a culinary degree, well some of us. Never is there more indication of our varied abilities and education variances than when we can't remember the proper way to boil pasta. Do we put it in cold water and bring it to a boil, or boil the water and then add the pasta?! That's culinary school 101 for fuck sake.

That was yesterday. Maybe she (Ivy) can't cook, but she's an artist, and definitely can inspire some of us in our cooking. She started working on some cool new projects, which we're mostly keeping under wraps for the time being, sharing it with key people we trust, before we unveil it here. What we can say is if you are a person who uses creative therapy (writing, poetry, art, music, dance, etc.) to manage and express your struggles, or experiences, with mental health issues, then we're going to want to hear from you, whether it's a blog, or you want it to have a presence on the web. That's all we're saying about that, for now.

We only fear for anything we start because what appears to be procrastination to others is more of a struggle between us, some of us don't want to have any part of certain projects we undertake, particularly this one,  which some of us wanted to start almost a year ago, in a slightly different form, meaning it's hard to get some of us to work on the things we need to work on. This blog is really the only exception, and some days it's a struggle.
Untitled India Ink on paper
by Frank et al,  2003
We're hopeful though, that we can find a partner outside of ourselves, down the road, to help work on the project.

We have too many projects.

Yesterday Ivy bought some India ink, and the appropriate nibs and handle for doing some artwork. We've only done a couple India, our best being Untitled. It's been almost years since she picked up the ink.

Meanwhile, our sleeping schedule is off the charts again. Thankfully we're getting 6-8 hours, which is awesome...but it's turning into a 4am bedtime...we'd like to blame Twitter, but we really can't. Our mind reels with communication, the good kind lately, for the most part, but also massive headaches.

Thankfully writing helps, and we can go back and see what we've written to each other and try to find some understanding.

Tonight after James gets done with work we'll be off to get the car he purchased Monday night on Ebay. We have to take a train to a nearby village where the man we bought it from will pick us up at the station. We're pretty excited for wheels.


Sunday, February 26, 2012

Wheels For Exploration

(Not an image we own...)
James/The Boyfriend bought a car today (on Ebay of all places), it's a manual of some sort, and of course made for Britain, so it's likely we won't be able to drive it because a) we don't know how to drive a manual (though an ex boyfriend tried to teach one of us back when we were about 20 years old) b) the steering wheel is on the opposite side as it is in America and c) well...they drive on the other (left) side of the road here too. While we spent weeks driving around Germany in 2009 (?), the cars there have the steering wheel on the same side as the cars in America, and they drive on the right ("right"?) side of the road. So we get to be a passenger. We're good at that.

He decided that rather than spend money on rentals (which would be more expensive than the car he bought) it would be a better idea to buy a car, and then sell it before we leave in a couple of months, or store it at a friends house, until we come back in for awhile in September.

It's good timing too, the car purchase, because any day now the flat sale will (finally) be completed and we'll have to move out...and with the need for a place for only a month or so, and not being flush with cash, we may end up spending a couple nights in the car until we can figure out how to work around the issues of leases, or very expensive extended stay hotel options. On the upside maybe we'll be somewhere with a fridge so we can stop worrying about the state of the meats and dairy products not being chilled properly. Good thing most of us have a stomach of steel. (In DID/MPD it is not unusual that some of us have different allergies, different intolerance levels, or different sensitivities, some of us also have massively different pain thresholds, which is extremely common with the "disorder".)

In the meantime now we can be more mobile on the weekends. Time to explore Britain!! And take more pictures! If you want to see some of our most recent pictures of England head over to Our Frank Adventures (http://ourfrankadventures.blogspot.com/), the blog dedicated to the next year plus of our travel experiences.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

A Candy Shoppe Day

We spent a lot of time walking today, which is not unusual, but soon it may be less usual. We walked around some nearby villages all afternoon to look at used cars because James figures it will be cheaper to get a car for the next month and a half or so, rather than rent one. This way we can go exploring even further on the weekend, maybe take a weekend trip to the North Sea, and most importantly go to Northern England to visit Kerry Stott, our guest blogger.


Sugar Mice
We stopped at a sweets shop in town center today, it just re-opened - we missed the Oompa Loopas that were coming with a photographer to celebrate the opening by an hour, we we're a little upset, we would have loved to have our picture taken with an Oompa Loompa.

We got a couple cool candies we'd never had before; flying saucers, which is an edible coloured rice paper candy with fizzy white sweet and sour powder inside, they call the powder 'sherbet'; and sugar mice, which is a candy made of fondant (sugar and glucose) containing no artificial colours or flavours. (which is common in candy here, they use fruit and vegetable based colouring agents in much of their foods). They are adorable, but we didn't like them as much as we thought we would, which is surprising because...sugar. We thought it might be fun to make a cake that looks like Swiss cheese and use them as decoration.

Playing Domino's at The Anchor 
So we walked all over the place today, we went to a village called Rowhenge and had dinner [we wrote a review, accompanied by lots of photos, of the village and restaurant on our Frank Adventures blog: http://ourfrankadventures.blogspot.com/2012/02/anchor-of-rowhedge.html], playing a game of Domino's, both James and us agree we probably played it the wrong way, but it was still a fun distraction while we waited for our food.

We were going to go to a movie tonight but I was too tired, and didn't want to go to a 9pm movie, so here I sit. James got upset at me for something silly and went for a sulk, and now he's taking a bath. I'm feeling too sad to play on Twitter tonight, though I might try to peak in and out later...who knows. He'll probably be upset we put that in the blog, about the sulking and stuff, but it's a  part of our day, and people shouldn't think our relationship with him is always perfect. Not that it should be, because perfect relationships don't exist.

Anyway, today was mostly a good day, the village is beautiful that we spent the most time in, and we had a mostly consistent day among ourselves after we stopped feeling sluggish from our adventures last night. The book we have from the pub we went to is sitting here, hopefully we get around to reading it, it is in a terrible state. Damaged on the spine, missing a page inside...but it just makes us love it all the more.

~ Cassandra et al

Friday, February 24, 2012

A Drunken Update

Weeeee. We pub crawled, in the small town where we are temporarily residing, with James/The Boyfriend tonight.

Yes, I indeed "procured" a 1865 edition of a Dickens book entitled  'Our Mutual Friends'...volume 2 of The Novels of Charles Dickens, from a pub this evening, as indicted in a Tweet. Or as, tonight, we, mostly, like to say, LIBERATED...

I shall read it when I can. I am excited to do so, simply based on a couple of sentences.

While we fell and injured our hand on the walk home, we are thankfully okay, despite some tears. We don't drink much these days...so that's probably why. We are currently plagued with hiccups but hopeful for respite.

Inebriated I shall sleep, with happy dreams, hopefully.

~ Ivy

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Sacrifice of Love: A Journal Entry

The weather has finally turned a corner in the town where we have been residing in England for just over a month, for now anyway. I won't get into the concerns over the warmer temperatures it's creating in the flat, and what that might do to the kitchen, which we've been using as a refrigerator, not having one. Or the slight worry over potential food poisoning, some of us tend react to even the best and freshest foods in negative ways.

Walking through the park today, passing through the opening of the ancient Roman wall that surrounds city center, and passing the castle we have become so familiar with, we were struck with the massive beauty of this English town. So much ivy, our favourite plant, grows heartily in such variety of versions and colours everywhere, among the branches and plants made dry and dormant by winter temperatures.

Flowers are springing up all over town, bird and squirrels move around everywhere.  People are out in droves, children playing on the playgrounds, mothers with strollers. An old man sits on a bench, his motorized scooter in the distance. A squirrel jumps up on a bench we were sitting on, approaches us, begging for food. We pet its nose, and upon realizing we didn't have any treats to offer today, departs. We often walk through the park and have conversations with some of the squirrels who sit on higher structures, while they nibble on food manically. They are all friendly gray squirrels, not afraid of people or ashamed to beg, who are not native to England, but were introduced in the late 19th, to early 20th century, and have wiped out  most of the red squirrel populations that inhabited the area. Sometimes we laugh at the analogies of this happening that we create in our head, and the similarities between animals and humans (animals).

On the way home, carrying our shopping bags and enjoying the solitude provided by music on our iPod, we pass over the small bridge of the narrow river we are required to cross in order to get in and out of town from "home". I stop and watch the swans, they might be my favourite thing to see with each trip into town center. Their interactions with the other birds, various breeds of ducks, coots, moorhens, and the occasional heron, are interesting.

Having gone to London last weekend we realized why James, our boyfriend, chooses not to live there, and instead choose to stay here, in this town he loves. Overtaken by it all we realized how much he must truly love us, to be willing to leave this beauty, this town he has lived in almost his whole life, to be with us in America, a place he is not overly fond of.

It sacrifice he is willing to make, makes me sad, and happy, overwhelmed and thankful, that we have found someone like him, even if we don't all love him like he would like us to, most of us are pleased to call him our boyfriend.

~ Frank

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

London: Part 1 - Hangin' with Dickens' Ghost at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese

Our newest entry, written today on our Travelogue...we'll start you here and it will bring you to the entire entry*, where there are some pictures and the rest of the story...
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We went to London for the first time this past weekend. 
To say we had a good time IN London would be an overstatement, though it wasn't all bad.
Sorry, we love to travel,  but many of us detest tourists, and while there are a couple of attractions we'd like to see eventually; mostly museums related to art and history, and a cartoon museum...that off the top of our head; there just was no patience within us Saturday to do any of those things. We cannot tolerate long lines full of strollers of crying children, and unaware parents. 
We made it as far as going into the Tate, The British and International Modern and Contemporary Art, only to end up turning around and leaving before seeing any art. 
We will go another day, not on a weekend. We'll be able to do that since after we leave England in April we will have to come back in September, at which time we will stay in London and be an actual tourist. 
One of the best things we did in London was eat. Of course. Eating was something everyone involved that day could agree on, as well as loads of walking. 
For lunch we ended up at a gourmet hamburger shop called The Gourmet Burger Kitchen in the shadow of St. Pauls Catherdral. GBK is actually a chain restaurant with 57 locations, and to the average Londoner, or European, it probably has mostly average burgers; however, as an American, and a foodie, one of the...
<read more....>
*the reason we only put a partial here, and send you to the blog where the whole text is, instead of copy it all here, is because when Google crawls websites it searches for duplicated content and if it finds too many entries that are duplicate they sometimes refuse to include you in their search directory.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Associating with Dissociation


We started this entry in a couple of different ways, but in the end we almost wore out the backspace key.

Starting blog entries, like with any writing, is the hardest part.

The topic today is sort of disorganized. Hopefully at some point it will be cohesive, we started writing it last week in a coffee shop and it was originally in two documents...so we have to sew it together somehow.

Our day-to-day life isn’t packed with feelings of massive regret, guilt, sorrow, sadness or fixation on the amount of terrible, unfortunate, and/or negative things that have happened throughout our entire life…even things over the last year we find some of us working to dissociate with. Some of us would state matter-of-fact that DID/MPD is a walk in the park, at least by the comparisons of some other disorder(s), but then one of us will pipe up and say..."Don't you remember how I was feeling over a year ago. Don't you remember the confusion...The Other Girl...anything?!"...and then we remember...but we don't associate ourselves with it. This happens because not all of us want to associate with it, we don't feel like we want it to be a part of us. While others do, and were there, and felt those months of agony. It's like taking a piece of a crap pie and dividing unequally it among friends, for lack of a better analogy.

Dissociation is a coping mechanism, as we’ve written before. It’s a strategy of survival by the brain that develops in the early years of infant and childhood development, much like the coping mechanism of alcohol and drugs by people whose brains have not learned how to cope. (that is only one of our opinions, we're sure not a popular one...)

People with DID/MPD, people who dissociate, aren’t crazy, we’re not crazy anyway. Okay, some of us might appear a little wacky, but we’re each just like anybody else, and each of us have strange behavior, that to the outside world looks "off" simply because it appears inconsistent with our other behavior.

It’s the misconception about people with the “disorder”; while they may occasionally appear “eccentric”, “strange” or “odd”, as a whole they do not appear unstable, particularity once they come to terms with what they have been dealing with, and grow to understand and accept it. They are not prone to being overly emotional, or overly dramatic. They aren’t sedated on tons of meds, (unless they have some very severe symptoms, which generally mean they need to be institutionalized) – they walk among you, in positions of management, and supervisions. They are successful and can support themselves.

Dissociation, through multiple personality structures, is a result of abuse, many times repeated and varied in type, and is a coping mechanism of the brain and body, in order for the core (the personality who is born into the body) to overcome depression, difficulties, feelings of worthlessness, sometimes guilt (which is a common feeling among abused individuals) and all the other things that people who come from a history of abuse feel. Dissociation can help keep the core from hurting themselves, causing injury, preventing suicide. While people who experience dissociation may attempt suicide at some point, mostly due to disorganized thought and the feeling that they are hearing voices, and are therefore "crazy", suicide attempts are not generally repeated. Not all people who experience abuse disassociate, it’s more common for those who experience abuse before the ages where the development of self begin. Development of self begins from birth and peaks at age twelve(1) and how people develop from there is moulded by experiences. It’s part of developmental psychology that is a vast topic and beyond our writing and research capability today.

Bottom line, our opinion, based on scientific study, is that DID.MPD is survival tactic the brain forms during the ages of primarily development in an otherwise mentally detrimental situation (as a form of childhood Post Traumatic Stress [PST]), it is not a naturally occurring phenomenon of the brain according to any studies of psychology or psychiatry; while there is scientific data that demonstrates the existence of psychophysiological(2) "symptoms", in addition to data collected from neuroimaging studies(3), that provide a solid case in trauma based instances/expression.

Wow. Ick. That was a seriously techie and grown up paragraph.

Living many lives in one is not an easy condition to try to manage your whole life, imagine a room of friends, all differ, vying for use of a single body for their own purposed; which is why as the core gets older the more they struggle with it, the appearance of normality and consistency falls aside. While it’s initial purpose is survival, it’s not logical to think that living as many holds no challenges, like having many roommates that are friends; and anyone who has done that knows the difficulties that can arise in those situations, sometimes resulting in the lose of friendship. If you have multiple people in your head, many talking at once, there is no way you are dealing with that without occasional struggle. Like standing in a room of several people all talking at once and trying to focus on only one, it can be maddening.

Like we said, imagine a roommate situation where it's sometimes hard to get the person to leave (because by God nobody loves anybody enough to never want to be apart from them). Nobody gets along with everyone all of the time, even if the everyone is part of you, it's just not logical. For exmaple, one of our personalities (Brooke) isn't the nicest, to us, and there were several times in the Spring of 2011 (as well as times in our life) where she’d try get us to hurt ourselves, to try talk us into stepping in front of buses, putting our hand in a deep fryer…she still does it, but it scares us a lot less now than before, now that we understand. She used to tell us to throw our cell phone over the bridge we crossed daily to go to work. She’s not nice. She hates our boyfriend. He knows it. He loves her anyway. She is part of us.

We often think about the structure of DID/MPD, because the options once you become aware what is “wrong” are pretty cut and dry; either you do nothing and let the personalities run wild, which is doing nothing and is a cop-out as far as we see it, because often a person can deny responsibility for the personalities and it can lead to an excuse for bad behaviour and acting out, in addition to massive confusion; living cooperatively, which is what we do, and is a demonstration of working together as a team, working toward communication and understanding and compromise; or finally merging, which is what some people do when it’s extremely hard to cope, or there are personalities within them that they find unpleasant to deal with. (more on our entry about Treating and Healing Dissociative Identity Disorder)

We’ve weighed the options, we are too responsible (though to many people it would appear the opposite), to let us all run wild, we can recall how that worked before. The cooperative is working well for us, but it’s a lot of work, and some days it’s taxing.

In the past merging has been the most viable means of healing for people who experience DID/MPD (or whatever fancy title the person who lives with it likes to place on it), the onset happens primarily in young childhood, at the time of initial abuse (whether it be physical, mental, emotional or sexual). Increasingly it is becoming less popular with those experiencing it, particularly for those capable of handling themselves as a unit.

When we think about merging, becoming one…what that might be like we reflect on society and people who are medications because for one reason or another their experiencing something, or have experienced something, so terrible that they need to be on medication, to be sedated. We feel like our body, our brain, this “disorder”, is our natural defence against the alternative. Sedation, medication, and the same amount of unhappiness that people in the "singular world" deal with as a result of life experiences makes merging look unappealing. Why work to destroy our bodies natural defence system.

So, when we discuss the option of merging with ourselves, which has happened a few times recently…we only see potentially increased unhappiness, all of our issues compiled into one, and a life of medication.

For us, learning about our disorder was a great help. While we had struggled on and off throughout our life, we knew something was strange about us…until we met Marissa (@IAmTheCrew) in Spring of 2011. Prior to that our core spent many months floating about, confused and scared,, thinking she had been past “the voices” as many of us became stronger and formed a mutiny against her, and then started learning about what our "symptoms" meant.

Part of the many reasons we write this blog, and share our experiences, as we've stated many times, is to help people learn it's not as strange as it sounds. Whether from the personal/multiple standpoint of someone trying to learn in order to come to some harmony; as someone who knows a person, or has a family member, with DID/MPD who wants to be more understanding and accepting; or as a person in the public who wants to learn and discover in order to be less judge mental and fearful.

The only way to gain acceptance and dissolve stigma of mental illness is to show people that those who deal what is perceived as a mental health issue, or may appear different, are just like the rest of society, but perhaps work a little harder to appear "normal", even if it doesn't always work.

Hopefully by the end of this entry there was some cohesion. It's one of the first times we've revisited texts that one of our others had started, often times we don't bother because what one writes, the rest are unable to finish, or understand the main points of.

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(1) Developmental Psychology Childhood & Adolescence Fourth Edition, David R. Shaffer & Katherine Kipp, WADSWORTH, 2002, 2007, pg 4

(2) Psychological Aspects of Multiple Personality Disorder, Dissociation 1:1, Philip M Coons, MD, MARCH 1988,  Pg 47-51 https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/1330/Diss_1_1_5_OCR_rev.pdf?sequence=5
(3) Psychobiological Characteristics of Dissociative Identity Disorder; Reinders, Nijenhuis, Quak, Haaksma, Paans, Willemsen, Boer, Biological Psychiatry; Elservier, 1 October 2006

Monday, February 20, 2012

Off

The problem with taking a couple of days off of writing is that it takes more will to start again then it does to continue.

Like hiking up a hill, once you have built up steam it`s easier to keep going, if you stop...you`re fucked.

We`re just feeling terrible today, mentally unable to write, so that`s pretty much where we stand today. Fucked.









Later:
You know what's not fun about how we are feeling right now, today? The feeling. The one we have no name for.
We're short on patience.
Our fingers keep typing things wrong, our head hurts, we feel like we want to sit in a corner and rock ourselves. It's all we can do to control it.
James will be home soon, and it's making us anxious because we can barely give ourselves the attention we need, let alone give him attention.
We turned to Twitter late in the day, after a couple of failed attempts, it was about 5:30/6pm...it started to help but now we have to go make dinner...hopefully things will level off because we've just wanted to knock our head against the wall today, we may have jabbed our elbows into it, gritting our teeth and closing our eyes. It's surprising the laptop hasn't ended up smashed to pieces today.
There's no reason for this, none that we want to explore today anyway.

Friday, February 17, 2012

We Get Graphic

Misleading, we know. You're thinking...were's the boobs...this doesn't look graphic.


Play on words is fun. We're sometimes a smart ass...when we're not a dumb ass.

Back in November we wrote about some of the stuff we do in our spare time, notably graphic design stuff using our Tweets and some design ideas we come up with, to be put on products and such, because, well...why not? When we don't have access to canvas and paints we need some alternatives.

What, you think we just sit and waste time on Twitter all the time? Though it's no secret that we love Twitter, we do other stuff, besides play around on it, and other social media, and write...we draw, sketch and paint, learn stuff, play around with computer software, work on our therapy, come up with recipe ideas - we're not very good with just sitting and doing nothing, it causes an overwhelming feeling of ick and a little depressed, makes us feel like we're wasting our time, life and creativity. That's just us though, we're odd and mentally "ill". Creativity keeps us stay sane...as much as we can manage some days. Boredom? What's that?

We wanted this to be about why you shouldn't steal people's Tweets, about how they are intellectual property, but you know what...half the people aren't going to care. You don't...until you find one of your Tweets on a product one day, anyway, and someone is making money off of it. Then you might care.

Of course if we ever find our Tweets on products where someone is making money, well...the Library of Congress has a neat little data system where we can prove the Tweet is ours...eventually (it's called a copyright), and sue. Why not. We're American. It's the American way.

Or maybe we're not that petty. We're probably not.

The point is, Twitter is a micro-blogging website, much like this site is a "macro-blogging" site. And as such things written there (and here) are protected by copyright.

We're not going to get on a high horse about copyright infringement, though, we fully admit to the "occasional" multimedia download, it's a great way to discover new music. Don't fucking judge us...and don't steal our fucking Tweets, we use them for shit

We decided a couple of months ago that we can do fun things with the 140 character spew we create known as Tweets, have some fun, be creative, and so, we created Frank Graphic Apparel.


We decided to use a website called Printfection for the clothing designs, instead of the more popular Cafepress simply because they have a lower base price by an average of about $2 per product, and much more customization ability, which means if someone wants to buy one of our products the price for them is lower than it would be at Cafepress, and each product has the design placed where we want it. We plan to use Cafe Press for buttons and bumper stickers someday though, because Printfection doesn't have those as a product option.


[Added February 20th: Why did that paragraph get crossed out? We decided to use CafePress anyway - they have a better reputation...so while the designs below will be available through Printfection for now, while we set up shop, they will also be available on even more products at CafePress soon. We're always evolving over here with stuff...sorry for any inconvenience.]

Anyway, we finally completed a nice "showcase" page for Frank Graphic Apparel http://frankapparel.blogspot.com/ because one of the gripes we have with Printfection is an ugly "store front" with poor design options. We find that what we created using a customized Blogger template looks better.

The following is an example of some of the designs and products we've created in the last couple of months, there are many available, thirteen graphic designs in total, in different sizes, colors, on a variety of different products and apparel.
Women's Fitted Cap Sleeve Tee
FoExamples of more products with this design...
Men's Form Fitted Tee
Examples of more products with this design...
Jumbo Tote Bag
Examples of more products with this design...
Women's Fitted Cap Sleeve Tee
Hooded Sweatshirt
Examples of more products with this design...
Women's Fitted Tank Tops
Examples of more products with this design...
So there you have it. Some of our designs. What we do in our copious spare time. They are all one-of-a-kind, only available through our Printfection store, and great gifts for the person who likes to have something not everyone has, and the prices are pretty good. 

Before you think we're going to make tons of money on this venture, know that we only profit $2 USD or less per item; Printfection charges a base price for the raw product and printing services. This is just a hobby, as is everything else we do. We've got other fun ideas up our sleeve too.

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We're off for the weekend. We'll be back to blogging on Sunday or Monday, we're off to London to stay with a friend for the weekend and go to an art museum with James/The Boyfriend. Eat some yummy food and take a load of photos for our Adventure Blog.

It would be a great time to catch up on our blog, if you feel like it...we produce writing nearly every day and some people have told us that it's sometimes hard to keep up.

One of our favorite songs...just to share, for fun.

Highlights of what we wrote in 2011, and new stuff from 2012.
We write about sexlifemental ilness/healthrelationshipscurrent eventsartphilosophyfood, and more. Did we mention sex? There are some repeated under different subjects, because some blog entries deal with more than one subject matter. Read as little as much as you like.

The Mental Health Entries:
Dissociative Identity Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder
2011
·      We Chat With The Father About DID (this post contains information on what DID is)
·      Frank Gets Candid (We talk about Catherine, one of our alters)
·      **We Freak Out** (this was a very important day, the day we met Marisa, recoverer of DID)
·      We Are Fragments
·      Frank Gets Candid, About Memories...and Bethany (we talk about one of our alters)
·      A Note From Frank, and ONLY Frank (actually not written by Frank)
·      Standby and The Death of the Other Girl: Part 1 of 3 (we start talking about the death of one of our alters [our core])
·      Our Ears May Be Burning (we talk about what people we recently knew might be saying over Easter)
·      We Just Need A Good Map (Mental Health Awareness Month Post - Frank talks about DID mapping)
·      We Don't Do A Blog Post (we talk a little about mapping, Bethany, unicorns & stuff)
·      The D in DID: Dissociation (written by Cassandra)
Other, Not As Much DID related, Written By Alters though there is a lot of other stuff on this blog written by them too:
2011
·      A Day In The Room (Writing done by those other than Frank et al)
·      We Have Nothing To Lose (Cassandra talks about the death of a mentally ill "friend")
·      Frank Lets You Know Bitch (me!) (Bethany got to write her very own entry about herself)
·      Sam Gets Angry About Ignorance  (Written by Sam)
·      A Little Bit Of Emmie (Written by Emmie)
·      Sam Gets Set-Off (Written by Sam)
·      Cassandra Writes About 'Someone Special' (Written by Cassandra)
·      One of Us Has Sociopathic Tendencies (Written by Melody
·      Just Another Fucking Friday Night In The House of Frank (Written by Cassandra)
·      Emmie Writes About Sex & Erotica (Written by Emmie)
 The Other Girl - Stuff She Wrote:
Health:
2012
2011
·      When Anxiety Attacks 
·      New Pain and Old Fear
·      Anxiety, Revisited

·      Our First Girlfriend

Standby:
·      Standby: The Final Chapter (3 of 3)

Fuck Face:
·      Fuck Face: Who He Is (also work related)
·      Situation Stand Still

James/The Boyfriend:
·      Our British Invasion

Friendships:
Work:
·      All In a Days Work
·      All In a Days Work II
·      All In a Days Work III
·      A Day In The Room
Life:
2011
·      All We Have Is Hope
·      ...More Ass Kicking From Life... (3 of 3)
·      Good Deeds & Old Jobs
·      Cracks In The Dam
·      Our Tree Of If

Travel:
2011
Food & Cooking
2011
·      Cooking With Frank
Opinion/Philosophy:
2011
·      A Word On Bullying
·      Thanks For The Freedom
Art/Poetry:
2011
·      Saviour: A Painting
·      Pretty Things: A Poem
·      Erase This Poem
·      Envisage of We: A Poem

Humour//Fun/Sex/Random:
2012
2011
·      Love Juice...We're No Cosmo Magazine But... (ADULT RATED)
·      Emmie Writes About Sex & Erotica (ADULT RATED)
·      The Flavours of Emotions


Social Media:
·      Open Up Wide For Twitter

Guest Bloggers:
·      Our New Guest Blogger
Imported From Our Boyfriends Blog:
2011
·      'Who's Here Today'
·      'I Talk to Cassandra'
·      'Nine of Nine'
·      'Today Was A Good Day'
·      'They Are One'
·      'They Are Nine'
·      'Perfect Ten'
·          'A Day With Melody'