The blurry crack of colors

I wrote to my friend Cara tonight. By hand. With a pen. It felt pretty good to do that. I can't remember the last time I sat down and wrote a letter to someone with a pen.

I know I blather about color a lot and how it affects me. Allow me to blather further. My left ear has been ringing for the past three weeks. I don't mean little annoying ringing. I mean loud, painful ringing that comes and goes--it's always there, but sometimes, if there is silence around me, it's so loud it feels like there's an awl in my ear piercing the eardrum. Some sounds are very difficult to hear out of that ear now, but some are so crystalline that my entire body feels made of glass, that if the sound changes in pitch just the slightest bit, I'm going to crack all into bits and be a mess on the floor for someone to sweep up.

I know I should go to the doctor about this as I think that ear is infected, but there currently is no time in my schedule for a doctor visit. Unless a crisis befalls me, I'm taking my ridiculously-ringing ear to South Dakota with me.

Since this ear-ringing began, color is having even more of an effect on me than usual. It's not always consistent, so I'll probably fail miserably as I try to explain it. Usually when I get all colorfuled-out it's because I'm seeing two colors right next to each other. It can be mundane things, like when I look at the bookshelf to my left, there's an orange CD case right next to a green DVD case. And that has a feeling. Like a physical sensation inside me. Like two things blurring together inside my chest. That feeling has a shape and a sound and it gets all tangled up and blurred into one weird thing. I did this picture tonight to try to fuck with color my own way, on my terms, but it didn't work out and I felt even weirder after I finished it.

I feel pretty much just weird and as though my memories are more real than my life that I'm living. When I wrote to Cara it was all about a trip we took last year to Big Bend National Park in Texas and some of the things I remembered with a great degree of clarity from that trip. I also made this picture for her and put it in the envelope--it's a shitty black and white printout that I added color to.

I hate working this much. Today I found out I have to go in over the weekend, most of the day Saturday and possibly Sunday as well. Being a responsible adult is not all it's cracked up to be, all the time. If I refuse to do all this extra work, a lot of someone elses get screwed. And of course I won't let that happen. I'll go and do my civic proofreader-ly duty and come home and kvetch on my blog about how taxing my brain like this makes me feel all strung out and stupid. And, I will not look for another job, because when this one isn't sucking, it's great.

I hope I can chill out for this vacation. I've been keyed up.

I really need to thank all of you who provided encouragement after I wrote about my big fat agent rejection. I felt pretty damn low about it last night, as you might expect, and even lower today when I was getting ready for work and looking at the box it shipped in sitting on my floor. I had to put it out of sight so I could just get on with my day. I still have confidence in my own writing, but I'm not going to lie and say it wasn't shaken pretty good yesterday. But reading all your words has buoyed me a lot. I greatly appreciate everything each of you said. I am sure I will go back and read the comments on yesterday's post many times when I am feeling discouraged...so, thank you all again.