I entered this world on the day before Christmas in the year nineteen hundred and sixty-nine. The place was a hospital in Charleston, West Virginia. They brought me to my mom wrapped in a holiday stocking. It became a tradition for me to receive gifts in this stocking each year, and at some point my childhood name ("Jenny") was written on it in big cursive letters with glue and glitter.
I am married to a man named Mathew. We share with each other the joy and pain of our journey through the days, run an efficient household, and try to help each other as best we can. We met when we both worked at an ISP in West Virginia, and were wed soon after. Moving to Seattle has been a great adventure for us.
My favorite dog is my Schnauzer, Ginger. She is my best friend and I often feel that I don't deserve her love and devotion, because I leave her alone all day while I go to work. But what can I do: I have to make money. She doesn't like other dogs very much, so day care seems a less than optimal solution. So I pay a nice woman to come walk her and spend one-on-one time with her during the weekdays.
Appreciation of animals, in general, seems to be central to my nature. Moving to the Pacific Northwest has introduced me to exciting new ecological surroundings. My favorite mammal at the moment is the
Hoary Marmot, followed closely by the adorable little lagomorphs called pika.
One of my favorite things is an art supply store. The smell reminds me of the shop my grandmother used to run when I was a child. I don't do much art work with analog tools. I do like to have them around.
When I was born, the doctors removed me from my mother with forceps. This caused damage to my spine which took me 32 years to identify and begin to correct, via the NUCCA school of spinal manipulation. Say what you will about chiropractors but after treatment the intense headaches and left-sided pain and tingling left my body, hopefully for good. Also, I am no longer pigeon-toed and am able to pull my shoulders all the way back, a position which was impossible for me to assume my entire life, despite countless efforts to "stand up straight."
When I was sixteen a terrible depression fell upon me. My world lost much of its color and emotional pain became a daily companion. I diagnosed myself with mental illness and went straight to psychiatrists who gave me drugs and said I'd have to be in treatment for the rest of my life, comparing depression to diabetes. The pain got worse throughout my twenties, despite an ever more formidable array of methods of self-medication. Finally, when I was 32 and living in Seattle, the depression turned into anxiety along with a host of other more "physical" symptoms, including insomnia, loss of appetite, and exaggerated thirst. My GP ordered a battery of blood tests which uncovered a long-standing hormonal disorder called hyperparathyroidism. I underwent a six-hour-long surgery to remove the faulty gland from my neck. Due to the pronounced drop in hormone readings seen during the procedure, the surgery was deemed curative, which I would agree with, now that I have had several years to recover.
I am working on healing the damage done by fifteen years of choosing pleasure over health.
I feel an overwhelming amount of anger toward the medical profession, psychiatry, and the food industry. I try to only eat organic foods, free of sugar, preservatives and other artificial chemicals such as aspartame and MSG.
For all of my adult life I have ruled out reproduction because I bought into the myth of biological psychiatry. Demolishing this world view once and for all during the crisis has caused enormous amounts of pain and regret, but on the other hand, it has opened up the possibility that having a child would not be an irresponsible thing for me to do.
During the crisis I turned to as many modalities of healing that I could muster. One of the oddest was extensive neurofeedback treatment. I have no idea if it was effective or not.
I believe in the existence of the paranormal, and I recognize in myself a moral imperative. I am considering uniting the two in my mind by going back to church, although this alienates and frightens my atheist husband.
I have had an un-stoppable song in my head for years. I rarely sleep through the night. I often feel scared for no reason. I am deeply disturbed by my own (and others') mortality. My first awareness of death occurred in a building on the campus of WVU, when my mother held me up to see a human skeleton laid out for display under glass. I suppose I have been somewhat disquieted ever since.
I tend not to think I have a very attractive smile, and I feel too self-conscious to be truly happy when I am pointing the camera in my direction, so most of my photographic self-portraits make me appear gloomy and pensive. In real life I probably most often appear annoyed.
Walking is my most successful method of meditating.
I have a love/hate relationship with the memory of Carl Sagan. Other departed heroes: Flannery O'Connor, Stephen J. Gould, Douglas Adams, Virginia Woolf. Still living: Douglas Hofstadter, Rupert Sheldrake, Oliver Sacks, Lynda Barry.
I love my parents very much. They live in West Virginia, in the small town where I grew up. When I visit them I see the world covered in onion-skin layers of memories, with each street and storefront appearing as it does now, as it did to me as a teenager, and as I saw it as a child. The mountains rise up all around and you feel held by the land itself. The sweet smell coming from the hills at night and the security of being surrounded by a great wilderness are sensations I will miss and long to return to for the rest of my life.
Life can seem to be too much with us, precisely because it is so fleeting.
I think that plants are smarter than we realize.
I believe that each person's creative capacity is infinite, and that the desire to be creative mirrors the will of our creator.
The existence of an aesthetic sense does as much to demonstrate to me our divine origins as does the moral imperative.
I prefer the look of hardwood floors but I enjoy the comfort of carpet. I hope to create a perfect compromise in my new home by installing on the ground level an engineered hardwood floor made of quarter-sawn white oak planks, which I will then scatter with assorted wool rugs. The upper two floors are covered in a thick, dense, dark-green carpet which bears some resemblance to the hills of West Virginia as seen from several hundred feet in the air.
I collect ferns. They thrive in the cool wet climate of the Puget Sound. They don't mind pots, even colorful glazed ones that drain poorly.
The Olympic Peninsula is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. The best thing about our last rental apartment on Beacon Hill was its view due west across the Sound. I used to like to watch the sun set behind the mountains. Once I saw a bald eagle fly by, straight into the wind, fighting to move forward with every beat of its wings.
We live in a yellow townhouse in Madison Valley. It is a good neighborhood, close to downtown, the U-district, and Capitol Hill. Instead of bald eagles I see out my studio window a low ridge studded with the lights of hundreds of houses. Sometimes it feels too crowded, though, and I long to live somewhere surrounded by enough land to protect us from the noise, smell, and sight of other people. This wish is both hopelessly elitist and financially improbable.
My favorite sport is Ping-Pong.
I eat red meat every day. I think vegetarians are totally misguided. Only to an atheist is death the ultimate injury. To take up arms against such a central fact of our existence seems as ridiculous to me as foot-binding.
Lately, my theological views increasingly resemble a Phillip K. Dick novel, specifically Valis. As a friend put it, our ultimate reality may be that "...we are puzzle masters that have locked ourselves in a maze of our own creation but have made escape more of a challenge by erasing all knowledge of the maze and breaking communication with the outside."
I own, along with Mathew, enough books to fill six floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. They make moving difficult. I hope to get rid of around 10% or more during our upcoming move. I plan to separate them into fiction, art, non-fiction-by-subject and multi-volume sets. Over the last year, I have kept two special shelves: books I want to read and recently-read books, in chronological order. Friends have suggested that getting rid of them is a rite of passage and that it might make more sense to simply keep a list and let other people handle the storage issues. I resist this idea because I have seen my father surrounded by his collection all his life, and because my books feel like an extension of me, representing the possibility of sharing with others and re-visiting previous moments in my life.
I am a dormant stamp collector.
I love to cross-stitch, but have not done so recently. I tend to think of it as a reserve activity, something to do if I get really bored, which is silly, because I enjoy it so much. It calms my mind and it creates a record of my activity which is intricate and (to me) beautiful. I do find it difficult to find pre-existing patterns that I think are worthy of stitching. Currently I have an elephant that needs framed, parrots that need their mounting repaired, a beast from Saturn that has only barely begun, and a large Northern European-style sampler in progress.
I belonged to a book club for a short time recently but had to withdraw from the group because I found I was not interested in reading the fiction that the other members found intriguing. It is very difficult for me to want to take a novel seriously but after many years of dismissing their enjoyment as a lost penchant from my youth I have been on the lookout for stories everyone is talking about and when I do read a good novel these days, it tends to change my life. The last one of these was Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
I dislike tight necklines and shoes with laces.
