CW: I discuss Season 2 of the Telegraph’s Bed Of Lies podcast which covers the AIDS Epidemic and contaminated blood plasma cover-up in addition to Stephanie Foo’s non-fiction book What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma about Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. There’s also a brief discussion about tarantulas, but there are no pictures!
This month’s entry is going to be a bit shorter (note: I think it’s actually the same length as all of my other entires!) because I’m pretty busy and frankly, with a broken foot, I don’t really have that much going on.
My big April Highlight was most certainly getting to complete my knight drawing, that’s for sure. What a drawing!
I will be milking this for a while, you can be sure of that! I’ve been thinking of giving the lineart file to a few friends and/or my sister to see their take on it, but I also feel like I don’t want to inflict this beast on anyone else, haha.
I’ve kind of just taken to calling it Sleeping Beauty or Dornröschen after the original Sussmann-Hellborn sculpture. Back when I was still about halfway through with it, I had a bit of poetry take form in my head about the illustration, inspired by a podcast I was listening to at the time (more on that later). I didn’t stop to write the verses down, however, so it’s lost to me at the moment. Maybe (hopefully) it will pop back up in my brain at some point!
(I also found out why some of my notes had Louis Sussmann-Hellborn and some had Ludwig Sussman-Hellborn! I thought it was an autocorrect thing but turns out Sussmann-Hellborn was born Ludwig but went as Louis professionally? I don’t know, glad I figured it out. I was so unsure of how Ludwig transformed into Louis in my notes…)
I am torn between LOOK AT THIS THING I MADE and simply never wanting to talk about my Sleeping Beauty illustration ever again because I am so tired of it, haha. I had an art professor in college tell our class once that you should spend the same amount of time looking at a piece after you finish it as you spent working on it. I’ve been trying to take that to heart but also not overdo it and get burnt out!
Yes, I’ve still been slowly re-working my 2024 illustration The Liminal to prepare it for a watercolor painting. I’m still at the drawing stage in the Procreate App on my iPad; I don’t think I’ll start actually painting it until I get my medical boot off later this month/early next month, but we’ll see. I’m trying to be Good but I’m also Impatient.
I fixed the issue with the figure’s hands/arms that always seemed off to me in the original, but I’m still working on the car. The background will mostly stay the same, because with watercolor I’ll be able to do a much better job giving texture and depth to the sky and trees. I’m very excited to work on it, but I have to remember to stay off my foot as much as possible and not walk around carting my watercolor supplies back and forth. (Please remind me of this, I need to make sure I recover in time for my wedding!)
Speaking of my wedding…! Another reason I have to wait and start on the aforementioned painting is because I’ve been working on a lot of art stuff for my wedding at the end of June. Some of the things I’ve been creating still feel too personal to share at the moment, but I did want to show you all our favors that I made. Garrett and I saw that some couples giving out seed favors during our Wedding Research (yes, this is A Thing) and with the devastating wildfires that plagued Los Angeles last year we thought fire restoration wildflower seeds would be a lovely idea. They’re viable in all 10 planting zones, not just Southern California! I designed the graphic, but the stickers I purchased from Amazon… I know, I wanted to design and print my own stickers but we just don’t have the time/budget.
The plan is to display them in a gardening wheelbarrow one of Garrett’s aunts is lending us. A lot of the logistics of the wedding decor are still coming together, I got pretty set back with my foot unfortunately, but I’ve had a lot of wonderful folks offer their help and support which I am so grateful for! So I have a good feeling everything will be done in time.
If you read my blogs (and thank you so much if you do!) you’ll remember that for Christmas I made both of my siblings photo albums with childhood and baby photos I found in my family’s storage unit. WELL, I continued making photo albums and I have five that I’m trying to complete in order to display them at the wedding for my family to look at. There are some photos we haven’t seen in ages or have completely forgot about! It sounds like a lot, I’m aware of this, but I’ve already got three done and the other two are about halfway there. There are so many wonderful memories… some photos bring back memories of just like, general objects that I completely forgot about, like these metal wall planters that my grandparents used to have on their walls! Here they are in a photo of my mom! Looks like this was taken on one of her birthdays in the 1970s.
Besides art and the general wedding planning stuff, and like, a looooot of FB Marketplace and EBay, like I said… there’s not much going on with me lately (I wish I could have gone to FanFest, but even if I had gotten tickets, there’s no way I could have gone with my foot!). I did mention a podcast earlier that partially inspired that line of poetry that slipped out of my head while I was working on my knight drawing… that podcast was definitely another highlight of my April, even if it was a more somber highlight. The second season of The Telegraph’s Bed of Lies series, which covered the worldwide contaminated blood plasma crises and cover-up during the AIDS epidemic, really blew me away— I can’t really think of another way to describe how I feel besides cliches because it’s all so beyond words.
I did post about S2 of Bed of Lies online as I was listening to it because while I did know hemophiliacs were affected by contaminated medication, I didn’t know the magnitude and scale of which it all occurred— I had no idea. Back in my 7th grade science class we watched a documentary that has stuck with me to this day about Ryan White, an American teen and hemophiliac who contracted and died from AIDS due to his Factor VIII, a life saving medication for hemophiliacs like him, being contaminated with HIV. Like… I guess I thought, he was the only one? One of a few? I learned It was thousands of hemophiliacs across the globe who died and contracted HIV from contaminated Factor VIII. Cara McGoogan’s reporting on this podcast about the scandal, cover-up and subsequent trials for the victims and survivors (which are still happening today) was incredible. I know she has also written some books on the subject which I definitely want to read as well.
Here is a link to Season 2 of Bed of Lies. It’s not an easy listen… but I think it’s an important one. I was born in 1989 (when Ryan White contracted HIV form Factor VIII, coincidentally) so I did technically live through the AIDS crises… but as a baby at the time so obviously there is still so much I don’t know. Honestly though, the AIDS epidemic is just not talked about enough. This is just one tip of many, many tips of a giant proverbial iceberg; the podcast also touched on how woman’s reproductive rights were violated during this time which like… is Not Surprising but also something I was largely ignorant about. Anyway, go listen. You can find it anywhere, but I’m an Apple user so here’s an Apple Podcast link:
Documentary Podcast · Weekly Series · A taxi driver is shot dead in front of his children. A high-security room goes up in flames. Then terr
While on the topic of Difficult Topics, after waiting two or three months on a library waitlist, I at last got to read What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo. The book chronicles Stephanie Foo’s life journey and her battle with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) and it was absolutely worth the wait. (When I have a little extra cash, I’d like to buy a copy to for my bookshelf and support Foo!) As with Unseen by Molly Burke, I wasn’t super familiar with Stephanie Foo’s reporting and podcast work… I just saw the book and was intrigued by the title… and the gorgeous cover!
A little personal tidbit about me, which I don’t mind sharing because I believe strongly in being open about mental health, I have been diagnosed with and treated for PTSD by therapists and psychiatrists. I’ve long suspected that I, too, have C-PTSD, but since it’s not in the DSM-5 (the psychiatry diagnosis bible, basically) there’s no way for me to get an “official” diagnosis. Which doesn’t bother me— psychology is a relatively new thing in the span of human history, I’m sure we’ll figure it out sooner or later. I also don’t particularly find labels and terminology very helpful, personally; for me, reading or hearing people’s stories, like Stephanie Foo’s, is validating enough.
There were a lot of great things I got out of What My Bones Know, but the Pride Journaling in addition to Gratitude Journaling was something really positive that I hadn’t thought of and incorporated into my life right away. I now do Gratitude and Pride journaling at the end of every week, recognizing the things I’m grateful for, but also the things I have done that I should pride myself for. I have a lot of cute stickers for my journal/planner too, so that helps!
I’d like the later half of this blog entry, which is definitely becoming longer than I intended, to be a bit more positive! While recovering from the fracture in my right foot, I’ve been watching a lot of animal documentaries. Some of note were The Secret Lives of Animals (Apple TV), Born To Be Wild (also Apple TV) and Cats of Malta (Kanopy). The Secret Lives of Animals covers a single topic each episode with animals that have unique behaviors that reflect that topic. For example… one of the most interesting ‘Secret Lives’ of an animal for me was the symbiotic relationship between frogs and tarantulas in the episode about animal friendships! If, like me, you didn’t know: frogs have been observed traveling on the backs of tarantulas in jungles around the world. The frogs can reach parasites on the tarantulas’ backs that the tarantulas normally can’t reach so they don’t mind ferrying the little guys around, it’s a win-win situation. It’s hard to find a good picture of this relationship, so I recommend watching The Secret Lives of Animals or seeing if you can find this behavior on YouTube or something! I think it would make for a charming illustration if I’m being completely honest!
There’s also a featurette at the end of each episode showcasing how the wildlife cinematographers achieved the shots they did. I love behind-the-scenes stuff personally, so this was really neat to see.
Cats of Malta was a lovely little doc about the stray cats of Malta that reminded me of one of my favorite all-time documentaries Kedi, which is also about stray cats, the stray cats of Istanbul. Born To Be Wild is about the global effort of animal conversationists to help and prepare endangered animals born and/or raised in captivity to be released into the wild. It had a wonderful soundtrack by David Schweitzer as well! This little theme for Sagalee the moon bear cub is my favorite.
My other recovery activity has been playing Pikmin 4… some of my favorite weird little guys! Seeing all the miniatures and the tilt shift effect that is used to make things look tiny reminds me of how much I’d love to get into miniature building someday… it always makes me think of those I Spy books! I still have one of my copies from when I was a kid.
And of course the 7.5 patch for Final Fantasy XIV. I won’t say much because Spoiler Embargo (it hasn’t even been a week!) but I loved it. I’m excited to see where the story goes next. I CAN share this screenshot I feel, because Zero was in the trailer for the patch. All the FFIV/Cecil feels… 🥲
Was this blog longer or shorter than my others? I don’t know! But thank you for sticking with me and reading it. I will leave you with a fun new sticker I got from MollyIllustration on Etsy!
Here’s to a marvelous May!
Mattie
