The headache has been a 10 on a scale of 1-10 for about 2 solid days now. The past 2 nights I got very little sleep, and the exhaustion is wearing me down. I'm supposed to see Lisa tomorrow, but I really would prefer to spend the day in bed listening to old, familiar podfic & hoping that it might put me to sleep.

Right now, I would sleep for a day straight if I could. I'm just exhausted all the time.

I've started a new self-portrait, using collage on a base of watercolor. The collaged bits are cut from pages of Robinson Crusoe, because I feel stranded in this headache with no rescue, since there's no medication to help me and the doctors seem lost. I've painted the book pages with a mixture of watercolor paint and watercolor oil pastels (a lovely gift from my friends Mary and Donald), but I think I'm going to mix in some bits that haven't been colored, as well. I'm using the pieces of text, most of them partially obscured by paint/pastel, cut up into jagged little excerpts that make no sense on their own, with some of them overlapping with others, obscuring the meaning even more, to express the fragmenting of my own thought process right now.

I didn't think of it all quite that clearly when I started. I was just trying to express how I'm feeling: chose a book that felt right, chose media that felt right, chose a composition that felt right, chose shapes that felt right. It was only as I began assembling the pieces that the feelings I was expressing sort of coalesced for me. That's why art rocks so hard. I find self-portraits particularly useful.

I haven't been able to work on the afghan for the past couple days, because I feel like I'm at the stage where I need to start problem-solving the trapezoid problem, and I just can't think clearly enough to be sure I'm not going to mess it up. I'm waiting until the headache subsides a bit so I can think well enough to be sure of my plan.

I got an email from my Mom that annoyed me. Maybe I'll write about it tomorrow.