Tomorrow probably won’t be the end of the election season trauma no matter who wins. I expect it to be ugly for a bit whether McCain or Obama comes out ahead, plus here in Georgia we are in real danger of a runoff for the Senate race.  Ugh — both Saxby Chambliss and Jim Martin (and their supporters) have filled our airwaves with negativity.

I’m so glad we advance voted last week so we don’t have to fret tomorrow.  For the rest of you out there, though:

Signing up for the latest swap on one of my Yahoo! groups was a mistake, I figured, but I went ahead and did it anyway.  I was right.  It was a round-robin, on a strict deadline, and I do not do terribly well with strict deadlines at the best of times. Right now, with my Muse on hiatus, a creative round-robin was doomed to not go well and it didn’t. No creativity, no motivation, procrastination on the mailings (I really do loathe going to the post office), and no real explanation for any of it — just mental and psychological inability to do anything, or to even talk about it to anyone. So I was dropped from the swap, got my book mailed back to me, and finally got the book I still had into the mail (without any contribution from me, sadly).

Naturally I feel like a total shit, to the point where I have avoided emails and group digests because they just worsened the spiral. I really need to not participate in swaps and round-robins until I can get my procrastination and avoidance behaviors straightened out.  Next time I’ll  listen to the little voice in my head that says, “yes, it sounds cool, but remember, you usually manage to screw these things up despite your best intentions,” and stay out so I don’t piss people off. Just another lesson I’m kind of slow learning, eh?

In between computer maintenance tasks and upgrades, I pause to bring you the Best of the Week!

• At Ghost Town Glass, Janine videos John creating a border collie in glass.
• Marcy Lamberson shares her Picasso-ish homework assignment from Sylvie Lansdowne’s creativity class.
• Lydia Muell turns her love for roses into a new series of beads.
• Lori Greenberg politely gives the lampworking forum world an etiquette lesson.
• What does a lampworker do when she’s in a creative slump? Ask her fellow lampworkers for homework, and find some new glass to play with, or at least you do if your name is Andrea Winkler.
• There’s an interview with lampwork/jewelry artist Kerry Bogert at Art Bead Scene, complete with colorful eye candy.

Yep, even though the NaBloPoMo group is active all year around, November is officially National Blog Posting Month, with the challenge of posting every day for 30 days. I did it successfully last year (yay me!) and I do believe I’m going to give it another shot.  This time might be a bit of a challenge since I’ll be in Augusta visiting with Dee from Thursday to Sunday next week, but since I won’t be totally without computer access I think I should try. Doing it was good for me last year; I think it will be good for me again.

I do NOT promise to stick to any one subject, though. If I feel like writing about lampworking, lampworking it shall be. If my cats do something wonderful/stupid/funny/cute, they’ll be the subject. Shoot, they may write the Thanksgiving Day entry again for all I know. I will TRY not to get too political, but how can anyone help commenting on politics a little bit THIS year?

Stick with me — I’ll try to amuse or entertain you, or at least make you feel like life doesn’t suck as much as you think it does.

As I said in my last post, the lampworking community and my place in it has a lot to do with my current state of mind. Last year I started the Glass Haven as a response to what I thought was what people were saying about the existing forums:

• The Big Forum (BF) is too big, too snarky, and has a ridiculous signal/noise ratio and way too much drama.
• The Old Forum (OF) is not very friendly (they ran off the BF people) and a wasteland.
• The Hostile Forum (HF) had gotten, well, really really hostile and full of drama as well.

People were saying that they wanted a friendly place to talk lampworking and hang out, one that was moderated just enough so that you could freely express yourself as long as it was done in a civilized manner. They wanted a place where you weren’t going to be viciously attacked just for saying something that someone else disagreed with, a place where name-calling and gratuitous insults weren’t allowed, a drama-free zone.

So I set up the Glass Haven. People came, for a while. But after six months or so, the traffic started to dwindle, and by now is down to a slow crawl. So now it’s a catch-22 situation — I’ve been told by a number of former regulars that they don’t visit because it’s slow and there’s not that much to talk about, but it’s slow because people aren’t visiting and talking!  Hel-LO!!!  Tell me, just what am I supposed to do about that? Talk to myself all the time?

Instead, they spend their time at BF and HF, and they are still griping about those forums’ same old flaws. I feel like a lot of the people who claimed to want a friendly drama-free zone to actually discuss glass really weren’t telling the truth, and that the drama is a huge part of the draw of those two forums. People say they don’t want it but they are almost like junkies.

I’ve invested a crazy amount of time over the past fourteen months in TGH, and now I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if it’s worthwhile to continue, or to scale back, or just let it go. It makes me want to cry (or maybe throw up) when I think about all that I’ve put into it, at the expense of my own lampworking and growing my own business. The rather small amount of money I’ve invested isn’t the issue — it’s all about the TIME.  With all that time I could have been melting glass, experimenting with new techniques, taking photographs, getting my own works out there on the Web and advertising them so people would be aware of them and BUY them. But here I am, frustrated and disappointed.

I know better than to make any major decision in the throes of a depressive episode, so nothing’s going to happen right away.  But still…