Killing me with kindness

I have come to the conclusion lately that sometimes I am too generous.  I hit rock bottom this weekend. I was furious with the world for life being difficult, unfair.  But I climbed back out late Sunday and realized there are little reasons as well as big to want to live life, and be thankful and joyful in it.  Maybe these are all just generalities but in this instance I don't think that makes them less true. At any rate, sometimes I kill myself over the kindnesses I offer others.  I offer them because I believe in life's beauty, but when my generosity and efforts are discarded, or unnoticed by human or fate alike its a morale killer and morale was definitely low this weekend.

My life is a carousel of shit right now, but at the same time, maybe it's a carousel of diamonds -- life's lessons are priceless after all aren't they?  And difficult situations build character.  Make great paintings.  Interesting stories to tell at the bar. . .

Look I am eating caramel delights. I feel better already.

sick day

Today I had a sick day. I could feel something coming on yesterday, but thought maybe it was just dry air.  But as I tossed and turned all night I realized I was coming down with something.  So instead I stayed in today, but it was a close call as Wednesdays are one of my shorter days I almost justified a six hour school day plus gym as not that tough. But waking up was hard enough so I did myself a favor and I am happy to report that I am glad I did. It was a mental health day as much as a sick day I think since my life lately has been, to put it mildly, complicated.

So watched Lie to Me, The Office, some youtube stuff, chatted with a beauty school friend and drank hot tea and even got in a hot bath in our newly scrubbed out bathroom thanks to Ashley.

Am tired of the mouth breathing though, my lips are really dry. Bummer dude.

new hair

the photo is a little melodramatic. but i think my shower curtain gives it a post modern feel.

went to pisgah brewery last night. i managed to not get drunk and try running but i still got a hangover. so i went to school and did absolutely nothing but get my hair done. and then i went to the gym and sweated purple. (the bottom of my hair is purple all the way around)

going to work tomorrow. blar. life.

john adams snow day

So last Wednesday I had a snow day.  It was tremendous.  In the morning I read a book and played with Bella and Pablo. Then I drank copious amounts of hot tea and chocolate. Then I made a really delicious potato soup with many extraordinary embellishments. Then Joe, Ashley and I watched a marathon of John Adams, the HBO series about the man of the same name. If you haven't seen it I'd suggest you watch it, it's awesome, very well researched and to top it off engaging and entertaining.  A bit gruesome but I guess that was the time period. We are living in a bit more tame era, although we deal with cancer the same way -- barbarically. Anyway, that factoid will make sense if you watch the last episode.

Check out Bella's mouse obsession and then aversion to snow.

Bella's mouse from tina Ford-Cox on Vimeo.

Bella hates snow from tina Ford-Cox on Vimeo.

Last night I drug Ashley to a work party I had for a departing stylist at Beauty Parade. Morgan, who is my grandmother's stylist of choice, is moving to Austin for better prospects and because Asheville can be pretty stagnating.  As Ashley aptly concluded, my coworkers are all very strong personalities, which may explain why I find them very exhausting, although I do enjoy their company.  Then Ashley and I hit the town, going from Ed Boudreux because our mutual friend Brent was bartending, to Fred's Speakeasy, a shabby but cozy basement bar where a friend of ours was strumming.  The great thing about Fred's is that they give very generous liquor shots in all of their mixed drinks, and all of their mixed drinks are four dollars. Which explains my hangover today. Below is in my kitchen around 3am last night.  I don't recall making this video or what my intention was -- besides capturing my experience as I apparently keep repeating.

Drunk from tina Ford-Cox on Vimeo.

Ashley and I have been hanging out a lot more since we are newly 'single'.  I confessed to her that I really wanted to make a point of hanging out less with Joe, even though it's fine that I do, it's just that mostly I don't. Mostly my schedule is school, work, the gym, errands, and then home.  Once home I find myself in perplexingly the same situations that I did when Joe and I were dating and it's becoming difficult to move on.  I know what you're thinking, why doesn't he just move out, well if he could just move out then he would probably have a fairly large sum of money in order to pay rent and deposit at another location, and if that were true he would have probably also had enough money to get his license straightened out, and pay for his own groceries, and be fairly independent of me and probably would still be going out with me.  Or maybe he could move in with family? Let's not even go there, this is not where I wanting this blog to go anyway. If I had $10 for every time someone asked why he doesn't move out I would have a large sum of money that I might be tempted to help him move out with.  But seeing as how I am rarely reimbursed for revealing mundane knowledge about my life, I remain with my complicated downstairs tenant.  Besides I'd rather have an ex-bf I get along with than a random person.

Anyway, post break Ashley is more of a rager as far as going out and socially masks her pain by inviting new ones in, ie is already inviting old flames to come hang out, like this weekend.  I am not against moving on, in fact I am all for it, but I have come to realize that in a lot of ways when our life fucks up, and we ask ourselves why, we usually only have ourselves to blame. That pretty much sums up the situation a la this weekend with ex-flame. But, fate has shown that I am often a poor judge, so maybe this is unfair of me, and this will be really good for all involved.  We shall see.

Ashley is one of my best, closest friends although we don't often stop and ponder to each other how important we are to each other -- I have a kernel of sadness, and its growing day by day, to know that she is going to be moving back to Maryland next August.  Ashley to me has always been one of the extraordinary people in my life that I always thought was beyond reach because they are so extraordinary that I am unable to understand what they would get with hanging out with silly, bumbling, raving me.  At least that's what I thought when we met 6? or maybe even 7 years ago now.  We've had some great adventures and now it seems we are handling the dissolution of our relationships at the same time but in vastly different ways.  My break-up is simmering away but never quite evaporating, where hers packed up and left in the night weeks before she physically left.  Ashley was dumped, I am the dumper.  We have perspective to give each other.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the videos. It was my hungover on Sunday project. Wee.

weighted

I was really excited to blog about something tonight but now that I am sitting in front of this blank screen I am at a loss for words.

Tonight when I was driving home from my Grandmother's, as the 'snow storm' was starting to spit down I was looking for an adjective to describe my present state of mind/mood.

And there it was on the commercial license plate in front of me. 

'Weighted.'

I have so many concerns right now, from my evolving relationship with my ex-boyfriend, to the dramatic and dynamic school environment (talk about negative energy), to my petty annoyances at my grandmother, to money, to neighborhood psychopaths, to hackers infiltrating some division of division of Visa which my bank uses and now I am getting a new pin and debit card -- to wondering at the future and watching the days slipping by wondering if I am on the right path.

Maybe now is my "archetypal" moment in my story to doubt my intentions. Everyone at Beauty School seems to be.

We got a new teacher there, Ms. Campbell, like the soup. She is Jamaican, which I think is cool but she definitely is not like any Jamaican on the coconut rum commercials (which is the extent of my knowledge of Jamaica). We definitely got the most conservative Jamaican. She even said today that she likes order. Needs routine. Structure.

So here we go, a whole new architect, we reassemble ourselves for whomever is in charge.

I actually think she is an excellent teacher, pushes you and if you follow through you can accomplish a lot.

But you can imagine the growing pains to get there.  Especially from 'lax-ville where for the last three weeks of school I have been doing whatever live performances I want despite the syllabus because we really had only a skeleton of direction. (Live performances are salon services you have to complete along with contact hours to get your license.  I have somewhere around 150-200 to do before graduation, but time, it sneaks up on you...)

My small class of 14 is hemorrhaging with at least 4 or 5 girls wanting to transfer to the private beauty school or to drop out completely.  You'd think a program with so much to hammer out as far as logistics might make student turnover a number one priority.

Seriously, beauty school is hard. Really desperately hard.

And no one understands this because they are like, "Oh, beauty school, yeah."

Sigh. I am too tired to even communicate the difficulty. I would take another four year degree any day. A four year degree in Anthropology and Psychology. Over hair. Because it would be easier.

Then there is my depressed friend who is more absent than not. I see the depression as a chasm between us, she gets more and more self involved with her "disease" and less and less involved in anything else.  She is on her Welbutrin, first day today and says she thinks she feels better but maybe it's too soon to tell. Today she left at 10:30 because the dr. at the health dept said there might be a side effect of nausea at first. Might be.  She left because she might have gotten nauseous.

Yaargh.

I mean, feeling better the first day you take a mind drug sounds like placebo affect to me.  Sometimes I think higher medicine is mind over matter and most people are as happy as they make their minds up to be anyway.  But again I will admit to being uneducated in the world of medicine, and depression.  I mean, I've gone to therapy for a year and a half now and not once ever has my therapist ever recommended any type of pill and yet my friend's therapist recommended it right off the bat.  We probably have different problems. I am just so puzzled. And quick to judge without all the facts. But anyway.

Then my ex-partner. Who lives with me. I think I am in a quagmire.  I am well known for my inability to break up with my partners, I would rather be dumped but I am continuing my engagement in rejection despite this fact.  Most of the time we get along fine but sometimes the claws come out. And I have to re-dump, even though we haven't re-gone-out. It's the proximity and being pretty amiable friends most of the time thing.  I am in this weird limbo. I hate this.

I guess what I am saying is I am tired.  And I missed the bachelor* last night for a dumb fight, dumb and petty and heartbreaking and passionate all at the same time fight. Sigh again.

*Don't judge me for liking trashy television. I am an intelligent, articulate lover of celebrity smut and filth, mainly because it's ironic and I don't really have to care, I just get to pretend and be relieved that at least I am not living my life like that. 

The money would be nice though.

every little thing is gonna be alright (and just ignore those cosmetology bitches)

So I have been away from the blog for what seems like forever and a lot has happened.

Joe and I are doing a lot better, he has found a new job and I think he is feeling really positive about it. We are still broken up and a new job isn't going to fix it.  I think he is accepting our friendship, because in the end, as he put it he "has to accept it".  I feel good about it and have found more Tina time which can sometimes can be a hard thing to fill, but the opportunity is exciting.

My closest friend at beauty school is having a really tough time with depression. I don't really understand depression as a disease, more as a feeling you sometimes have. I keep wanting to tell my friend to just snap out of it, which because I am an empathetic and tactful person I do not, but I do give suggestions like to hit the gym more because that naturally boosts your mood, as well as drinking water (the number one cause of afternoon fatigue -- dehydration) and to spoil yourself and watch a good movie with a jar of olives (something my sister continually recommends when I am upset).

However, my friend doesn't like olives.  

Normally I would take this as a character judgement, but she isn't feeling so well so I will tell her at another time that not liking olives is similar to not like fun, or italians and she may be either a stick in the mud or a bigot.

And I think she found my thought that her depression just added to simple dehydration a bit naive. In my defense she did complain of being chronically fatigued, unable to get out of bed, etc. I'm not a jerk, I just think a lot of Americans are dehydrated.

But she did take up the exercise suggestion and it has helped. However she is still going to the health department to get on Welbutrin (sp?). 

Which is strange to me because she is constantly anxious about getting pregnant with her new bf  and I am always like get on birth control, dude.

But she is afraid of synthetic hormones. 

Hopefully the irony of this statement is not lost on you.

I mean,  isn't Welbutrin and other antidepressants kind of the same thing? I just always imagined that antidepressants can rob of you of something sacred, but maybe if you are depressed chronically something sacred has already been robbed from you.

Prevention magazine also recommends knitting, its meditative mind state helps ease depression symptoms. I mentioned this to her as well, seeing as how I am a vat of  random knowledge.

 I just found the comment ironic. I think she is also afraid of weight gain. Today a girl commented that she looked like she gained a little weight and my friend lost it and went home. 

But why are bitches saying that anyway? I wouldn't tell any of my girlfriends they looked like they had gained weight, unless I was a sadomasochist or something.

Which I'm not. I like eating olives and watching movies. Chihuahuas. Yogurt. Pilates. Kites.

Sadomasochism?

No thanks.

(P.s. If any of you reading this have suffered from depression I apologize, I am just venting and am sensitive to the devastating nature of the disease, even if I don't understand)

Speaking of sadomasochism sans the sado, the other burning topic was that I officially have known (as an acquaintance in my early college years) a serial rapist/potentially brutal murderer. My life is turning into a Lifetime movie!

I didn't know him well, always thought he was annoying and weird. A little full of himself (massive insecurities?) and kind of a pathological liar.  The even weirder thing is that months before when these prostitutes were getting raped and stabbed (And if you don't think a prostitute can be raped shame on you, read Cunt, watch that Charleze Theron movie and change your mind please) they put out a profile, they recruited these out of state profilers, like that tv show The Profiler, except these were from SC because NC just thinks they don't need these kinds of special people, anyway these profilers gave the exact description that I just gave you of this guy, plus that he would live close to where the assaults happen (he does) live alone (does that too) and have an employment situation where he answers to no one as well (checkmate).

  Now that the truth is out I keep thinking that all the weirdos and people who stare or are just giving off the creepy vibe are potential psychopaths.

Seriously, when CSI is done with the remains found in different locations and matches the bags of hair and box of teeth confiscated in his house...

But that could take months. I am so totally grossed out. I can't stop thinking about the girl he "person of interested" might have killed and cut up and thrown in the river.  

I just think about if Liz had gotten to rent that room in the Future of Traditions studio instead of him how things might be different.  I mean he hung out in that place all the time, doing odd jobs, pretending to be normal.  Asheville boasts of being such a progressive community, but no one in that hoity toity fucking stupid arts community even realized that he sexually and physically assaulted his ex-gf. (And you don't think your sig. other can be raped then you must reread Cunt and perhaps take a class in Humanism) It makes me so angry, that whole scene gave off this creative holier than thow above this bull shit but they are in it. They are in the shit.  I feel for them, God, what a violation. That secret double life.

Here is the full gruesome story if you're interested.

I mean this guy hit on me a few times (or in this weird, cocky, I am a woman magnet kind of way that totally backfired because he was awkward and weird, just weird  -- Thank God I was not a complete idiot and followed my bad vibe feel on this one. Its weird that some people say they were surprised by all this -- seriously, I'm not.) We had conversations. We smoked together on a tree beside the river where he may have dumped this prostitutes body years later, maybe he was doing that then, this train of thought could just keep on going. I  gotta stop typing about this, Bella is picking up on my vibe. Chihuahuas are very sensitive. I'm bringing one on my next date.

On a lighter note, I still find watching/listening to my grandmother eat without glueing in her dentures extremely annoying/stomach churning.  I am finding a lot of things she does exasperating and maybe I am losing sight/taking too personally many of things she says, and am also jealous I didn't inherit a large sum of money upon turning 21 so I could fulfill my dream of traveling around the world (think cousins, not grandma, although she does live off of a trust fund) instead of cook my grandma meals, clean house, take to the salon, library, grocery store all because I just don't have enough for gas, even when I was bartending.

However, my friend Morgan had a good point when I told her why I was grumpy (and I am jealous, downright fucking green) that if my mom had it she would would give it to me. And she is right.  But that brings up another point, I am really rich in family, no matter how dysfunctional, awkward and unable to glue their dentures in, I have a great family that will support me and just wants me to be happy and that's not something money can buy.

 But that's why I am in beauty school. To make the big bucks. And travel. Before I am too old. You know I wasn't going to end on too sappy a note.

Ciao!