Goodbye 2015. On to 2016: Better, Smarter, and Full of Potential and Possibilities

There was supposed to be more time in this day to write this post, but as with most days this year something came up, or there just wasn't enough time in the day, or, as was more likely, blog posts were running through the brain as the body lay all warm and comfortable in bed. Thoughts, feeling, emotions, words, unable to escape into the internet and land here where they wanted to be because life gets in the way (or a comfortable bed).

2015 was an amazing year - amazing good and amazing bad - full of achievements...like graduating from University with academic honors (magna cum laude), having the opportunity to spend several weeks traveling to a few locations in Canada, starting a new career as a self-employed contract worker, growing a great garden and learning more about the ins-and-outs of that hobby, and while we only completed one painting this year, there is confidence that will pick up when our new studio space (dubbed on Instagram [Yes, this year we "finally" got an Instagram account] and Facebook as 'Frankie's Lady Cave).

It was also a year full of seeing friends, like Club Nette (Skittles, aka, Annette Ford) and Synthesised (Cliff) in Toronto at the 2015 Toronto Tweetup (as well as a slew of others who just won't appear here - but shout out to Blonde Calamity!...sorry everyone else).
And then there was the summer house guests like Cool _Jesse (Jesse) and Synthesised (Cliff). And a road trip to Minneapolis to the Minnesota State Fair where we hooked up with Pudding Boobs (Kim) and had a great night of drinking and catching up.
And then in October, Father, and Baby Brother and his wife came to help put up a large portion of the new garage we're building (well, at this point James has been doing most of the building while we feel useless ...at least until the electrical, insulation and drywall is ready to go up, those we can mostly do solo), and Mother and Angry Brother came too. It was the first time the entire immediate family had been together in such a way in over ten years, since the car accident. (current memory cannot recall if every member was accounted for on Baby Brother's wedding day, but if they were it was certainly not in such an informal familial way).
Dad came two weekends in a row and it was really nice spending that time with him. It was great fun cooking for everyone and connecting with some members of the family we haven't gotten to see much over the years. Baby Brother has turned out to be an amazing man of strength and intelligence and wit (he's a grade A smart ass, and we love it), and he and his wife are perfect for each other in ways that are undefinable.

But

The year was also not so great, as the death of our dog came quickly around graduation time. We lost massive hours at a job we were working at and got denied a more permanent position (such is the bureaucracy of a University in this day and age)
Then later in the year the most tragic of all, the sudden death of Club Nette (Skittles, aka, Annette Ford). Nothing has felt the same since, like there's a considerable amount of air and light missing from the world, the sun only shines half as bright. Given our peppered past of people who have suddenly (and not so suddenly) died, like the first boy we ever liked, cousins, uncles, grandparents, friends...we thought this would be easier to get passed. It's not. It was a massive hit to the heart and soul.

From a mental health perspective it's been up and down a lot, definitely some bad, but there's never enough time to write when the mood strikes to define the bad, or work through the bad like we used to - luckily a trunk full of culled coping strategies over the past couple of years mitigates the harm, pushes it back for some reprieve.
Physically we've managed to stay in pretty good shape - though after the death of Nettie there was a severe uptick in alcohol consumption and we've been working on getting back to better levels because alcohol will straight up fuck with your metabolism and any weight loss attempts. During a full physical (EKG and all) the doctor guessed that we must run because of the low resting heart rate. Not really sure if that means healthy, or is just a symptom or catalyst to the poor circulation. In any case, despite the extra pounds we're as healthy as they get. And the plan is to continue that into the new year. The greatest physical achievement this year was establishing a top run time (of an average of 7.04 mph for 30 minutes) - a run time we have not been able to near in awhile even after being in the gym 3-4 times a week, even when traveling. But that just gives us a goal. In addition this coming year at least one 5K, and maybe a 10K, is planned, which has been sort of a bucket list item since losing a massive amount of weight about 11 years ago and keeping most of it off over the years. It's not really a new year resolution, because those beg to be broken, rather a desire, a goal, a hope, that if doesn't happen, doesn't happen, and there will always be the next year.

This coming year is pretty scary, as uncertainty being self-employed causes much undo stress, but if it continues on the path it has been on it will be amazing. This new venture affords plenty of free time for painting and reading in the winter, and gardening and painting and travel in the summer, and cooking all year round. Plus it brings in more money than we've made at any point in our life...jutting us into a new tax bracket. (also scary!)

The non scary part of the year will be when the garage is complete. This project has taught patience this year, as the hope was that it would be fully complete by October. Unfortuntaly the concrete didn't even get poured until then, and then before anybody knew it there was cold, and snow, and the challenges of building a huge structure (and James is not familiar with how things are built in the USA, as building in England are put together differently).
Plus the garage is massive a massive project. In-floor heating, multiple access doors,six windows. a 34 x 24 structure with the back 12 x 24 space (Fankie's Lady Cave) serving as a painting/writing studio, and workout/yoga space, a gardening space (until the garden shed is built), a hangout space, and a guest area for the friends we've made on Twitter so they can have a nice space to relax and sleep while visiting. There are new visitors planned for 2016 too, so hopefully this all gets done in time! :-)

Before the garage

After the garage (34' x 24')

Meanwhile, all year there have been so many topic we would have liked to write about. 2015 was CRAZY - especially in politics and social issues, and we're always paying attention (thanks to social media it's hard not to), but then sometimes it seems like it's all really been said by everyone, because, well, it's the internet and it probably has all been said, or said faster than someone with a job, a spouse, and hobbies has time to compete with. Writing just falls to the back-burner (hence the scant few blog entries here this year compared to other years).
The one thing that's disappointing about classes being over, having graduated, is that it's harder to sit down and write with no grade or deadline looming over the head as motivation. If there's anything we can be hopeful about for 2016 it's that we can get back into writing, and not just sloppy shit like this blog post, but quality content like the academic papers we've shared with you here over the last few years, or travel entries.

2016...it's peeking right around that corner, mere hours away...full of possibilities...full of potential...potential sadness, potential happiness, potential success, potential failure...how you look at those things, how you act on those things is up to you. Make the better decision, the smarter decision, the healthier decision, and just try, day by day, to be a better you, inside and out. No, it's never easy, but what else do you have to do but try?
Don't let the rampant hate that saturated 2015 via social media and mass media and the internet in general leak into 2016 and overtake it. Hope for better, strive for better, be better.

Happy New Year, family, friends, readers, lovers, haters...May 2016 bring you all that you deserve.

Relationship Communication Issues

Where to even start.
Yesterday sucked. Like, sucked bad. A big unbelievable suck vortex. From what I've heard. One of us had a really tough day (and due to conversations she had with James, of sensitive nature, we're not tattling on who of us it was who had the bad day).

Sunday started out fine with James pleased with the city we had left that morning, after having a hearty breakfast at a little organic-vegan friendly joint (way better than it sounds!) in the downtown region of the city where we had stayed the night after having dinner at dad's (The Father) house. We arrived in Chicago at the time we had hoped we would, exhausted from the eight hours of shared driving duties and traffic. We checked into our hotel and figured out directions to Giordano's Pizza. Having lived here in Chicago over ten years ago for a short time, we recalled that they had great pizza (turns out it's not that great these days).

Somehow there was some miscommunication between James and one of us when we arrived at the restaurant and it resulted in arguing and then escalated into her crying at the restaurant quite a bit (there were some angry issues with Brooke, who was angry, taking place internally, which was part of why she was crying). After a little talking with James it got better and I guess they decided to drive around Chicago. But then there was more arguing as we tried to make our way downtown through neighbourhoods, where we ended up turning around because the G8 Summit anti-war protest that had taken place earlier in the day was still experiencing issues with the protesters and there were loads of yelling people and marching, loads of police officers and general havoc moving about Downtown Chicago, even at 11:30pm, hours after the Summit had concluded.

After a few wrong turns in the darkness and rain of Chicago, we got back to the hotel, on the outskirts of, amongst silence. She has been crying much of the drive home, even though she had actually been driving.

We are all required to drive while in Chicago, (if we can...Bethany cannot, obviously).

Once we got back to room she lay on the bed full clothed and cried for what must have been a long time, eventually she told James what was wrong, starring at the bumpy white ceiling of the hotel room. Without getting into too much detail, the issue was related to thoughts of no longer wanting to live. (Please don't be alarmed by this, it's a statement of fact. We do not all feel this way.)

Obviously this upset James, he lay still and listened while she talked, asking questions. Things got a little better but eventually topics got changed and then there were more arguments, and by that time 4am rolled around there was still James and some of us, by this point, arguing about communication.

Four hours later we all woke up and it seemed to have gotten better. But then it wasn't again. Crying in the shower, and James with his lack of sleep was grumpy and tired. Then we had a long talk with James. Private conversations about the future of our relationship. It got scary and sad before it got better.

It was a really tough morning.

When it was all said and done it boiled down to the issue of communication styles, and us not expressing ourselves in a manor in which he understands, or interprets well. Meaning, he reads into our facial expression and tone, and often times those two things do not coincide with the words that are coming out of our mouth. This is not the first time we have had this problem over the last year and a half.

We know all about non-verbal communication cues, of course, we've studied communication in University. We used to be a lot better at it, or at least we thought we had, but these days it seems like even when we try to use them they don't come across clearly. We wrote about another time we had an issue with this back in January of this year ('A Face Full of Emotion: A Journal Entry' http://just-call-me-frank.blogspot.com/2012/01/face-full-of-emotion-journal-entry.html). Our occasional difficulty expressing many things verbally is what eventually drove us to writing this blog.

All we can do now is resolve to learn the different ways he communicates and we communicate, as we have discussed over the last 24 hours, and share how we interpreted what was just said without jumping to conclusions or assumptions.. Some of us are way better at it and that's where he gets confused.

Another reason she was upset, to add to the tangled destructive episode is that she doesn't understand why he wants to deal with us, why he loves us, why he is willing to put up with so much. The words "Because I love you"...just don't seem enough...for her.

Anyway, with that over we finally made it out of the hotel around 2pm this afternoon, real estate route in hand. We had noted some houses on the market we liked, and so we went to look at the neighbourhoods of around eleven different properties.

While most of them were clean neighbourhoods, there were elements that didn't make James feel safe, and many times those elements didn't make us feel safe when we thought about prospects of living in them for an extended period. Begging and pan-handling on one corner, and then on another, inside a northwest Chicago neighbourhood, a group of young black men cat-called and whistled to us making mention of how we, a white girl, must like us a black man...guess we were in the wrong neighbourhood. (we have some other impressions that formed throughout the day, none pretty or those we are currently willing to share.)

There were many neighbourhoods like this. I wouldn't have felt safe walking down the streets in these places, though surly some of us would, and slowly each neighbourhood on the list got a fairly firm "no" from James, until 7pm rolled around with one last neighbourhood in the far south of Chicago, near West 99th Street and I-57. The neighbourhood was nice enough but was car-dependant. One of the things we are looking for is being able to walk to a grocery store/bank/etc., so we don't have to drive too much.

Heading back to the hotel we and James came to the hard decision that Chicago, as it turns out, is not the city we'll be moving to. We can't afford to live in the areas that feel safer. So, with that our fantasy/dream/desire is now dead.

In the end that's the very reason we took this trip first. It was only fair that he see the city a bit before we made/asked him to live in it.

Now we're back to the drawing board of "Where will Frankie and James live"...but at least we're getting along and will try to work hard at communicating better, which means he also has some work to do, because it's not just us...he's a bit short on patience sometime...but not, he just comes to a breaking point because he bottles it all up.

Tomorrow we're moving to a different nearby hotel, the one we are staying at smells bad, and may have some mould problems, and what with all the arguing and crying that's gone on in it, it's got bad ju-ju as well.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading about our day. Tomorrow will be better...we're going sightseeing!!

~ Catherine et al

A Face Full Of Emotion: A Journal Entry

We're not sure what our face is expressing at any given moment (how could we, really? And we're not prone to looking into mirrors often), but today James asked us a question while at the library, and we looked up to him, intent to listen. He became dejected.

He claimed we were looking at him with an expression of contempt, that we were looking at him as though we were angry (there were other descriptors that have faded from memory over the last couple of hours). We were merely looking at him to listen, with nothing strange, that we were aware of, passing through our mind at that particular moment, or the ones preceding it. This is not an uncommon problem in our relationship.

This is disconcerting, not only because of the effect it has on James, but because of the amount of people that look intently at our face, until we lock eyes with them, when we are out in public.
What are they seeing? What are we portraying? And how do we control it. Should we control it? Why do we seem to be so... disconnected from it sometimes?

Is it a matter of the lack of a smile on our face simply indicating to people that we are angry, or displeased? That seems unfair because most people do not walk around with a smile on their face. Or is there anger in our eyes?

James has told us on more than one occasion that we can nearly cut a man down with just a look. It's not intentional 98% of the time.

We know we have never been able to hide what we are feeling with much success, and have been told that the air around us, the look on our face, no matter how much we try to hide or mask it, gives away more than we ever want. Many of us have been told this by countless people throughout our life. Is this happening without us being aware, at the moment? Is our face more in tune with our emotions than we are? Is that even possible?

This entry really turned into a butt-load of questions, but it's something we need to work on, we suppose. At least for the sake of our relationship.

Overall today ended up feeling like falling into a deep hole...with anger and sadness at the bottom.

~et al