It Just Is…

OK, so remember that post-it from yesterday that had all the quilt stuff prioritized on it? I didn’t even write two (three?) things on it, because they were weighing on me so heavily, finishing these two quilts before Sunday, that I figured I didn’t even need to write them down. And then I got an email that has added to the priority list. It’s getting a little hairy here, but I think I have it all under control. I’m just one crazy tense mama at the moment. Seriously tense. Hate that feeling. It’s been stalking me the last two months. Won’t go, except after a hike or the gym, and even then, reluctantly. I don’t like being this person. I want to be more mellow. I don’t know how, especially with all this riding on my shoulders.

Anyway, I did manage to make it to the quilt store after school to buy binding for the Celebrating Silver quilt. It was a pain in the ass picking a color, though. I thought a gray to match her hair, but it was dead-looking. So then I tried a dark reddish brown, which worked near the base of the quilt, but was a problem higher up. So then I thought I should head for the batiks and see if I could match the brown batiks that are in the staff. Couldn’t find any that worked…nothing was dark and moody enough. So then I tried oranges and red-oranges and red-browns and reds and oranges with greens in them and then just plain old red. Even some blues. Nothing. It all sucked. I found one dark brown that was eh, so I grabbed it, feeling desperate, because here I am tossing my naked-women quilt on the ground in the store and hoping some woman with a nudity issue doesn’t come around the corner and ogle my uteri while I’m doing this. I go back to the dark browns, out of the batik section. Ugh. It all sucks. Browns are always an issue. It’s all wrong. Too many different browns in the quilt…they work together fine IN the quilt, but you can’t just pick one for the binding. Back to the grays and blacks. There we are. A dark gray. It’s not in the quilt, but it seems to ground it…not to drag too much away from the quilt itself, which is what the reds and oranges were doing. It works in some quilts, but this one is way too busy for that shock factor. Dark gray it is.

It’s such an intuitive process. I don’t think hard. I just grab and throw under the quilt and reject within seconds and move on to the next. I love that part of my brain, the part that can improvise and travel so quickly from one place to the next without a lot of introspective thought. It just does. It knows. It’s the good part of my brain.

I talked about mental illness at school today. We teach the nervous system, but it only focuses on physical problems: strokes, epilepsy, spinal-cord injuries. Why don’t we teach about mental illness? I have students who have been diagnosed bipolar, depressed, anxious. WHY THE FUCK don’t we teach this stuff? Girlchild says she got a little of it in AP biology in high school, but mostly in terms of genetic mutations. We need to teach this stuff so it’s not so confusing, so magical, so scary. I want my kids to know that this is actually somewhat normal. I heard one kid ask about bad stuff that happens to kids, can it cause XYZ? Well fuck yeah, it can! So besides the zombie unit I’m developing, I’m trying to fit mental illness into the content standards? Seriously, though…let’s teach what they really need to know.

Can you imagine? I teach depression and say, hey, your teacher suffers from this. This is why she has lost so much weight. This is why she cries in the classroom when you aren’t in there. This is what makes her the teacher who stands in front of you…it’s OK. You can get through this. Or you can’t. Do you know how many of my kids have been affected by mental illness, whether their own or their brother’s or their parent’s or whomever’s? And we don’t teach it. What the fuck is up with that? No wonder people can’t deal.

The binding fabric is washed and dried and ready for cutting. I needed to buy it today before the girlchild’s game, because the quilt store doesn’t stay open late tomorrow, and I was hoping to finish the quilting tonight so I could put the binding on tomorrow, and then do the hand-sewing on Saturday. I could have bought it Saturday, but then I would lose tomorrow night’s hours. Yes, I’m thinking that crazy at the moment. Can’t afford to lose hours.

I took the other quilt to the soccer game and sewed the rest of the binding and most of one sleeve on…nobody even asked me what I was doing. I love that. Two older ladies gave me an eye, so I’m glad they didn’t ask to see what I was working on (yeah, not flashing that vulva on the bleachers of the high-school stadium). I had it folded up so you could only see the back of the quilt. I don’t have a lot left to do, so that’s good. It was a tough game, so I didn’t sew particularly fast…unlike Tuesday’s game, which was incredibly boring (9-0 score). Tonight they played one of their big rivals, and they did freakin’ awesome until about 14 minutes into the second half, and then it fell apart…

Girlchild didn’t get to play much…this coach just confuses me. But when she did play, she was basically covering one of her good friends…it was getting dark, so my photos are crap…but you can see them here fighting over the ball. The high-school team is not a great fit for her, and the coach is not what we would like, but I guess it teaches her resilience in the face of adversity. They ended up losing 1-4, which just sucked, because they did so well for the first hour. Frustrating to watch…this is why I sew during games. It keeps me from getting as tense as the other parents, who end up yelling stupid things like, “Hit the back of the net!” Dude. Really? It just needs to go over the line. We also have one parent who is apparently a professional hog caller and practices her talent at the games. You think I’m kidding…I’m not.

What I really love about high-school winter soccer in Southern California is that the weather runs the gamut from requiring you to wear 4 warm layers, Ugg boots, gloves, a scarf, and a blanket one week to flip-flops and short sleeves the next week…it was 85 degrees at the beginning of the game. I did put the sweatshirt and the boots on for the second half (in January, it cools down very quickly), but it was nice otherwise to not be freezing by the end of the game. We have another week of nice temperatures here in San Diego, and then it will go back to cold (which yes, means like 50 degrees when the sun goes down…you do not need to mock me).

I think I’m still having anemia issues, because I’m still freezing all the time. Or it’s the thyroid. Whatever. They’ll get tested again in April. I do take my meds.

I was hoping to eat when I got home…had the boychild put the casserole in the oven when he got home from piano (they really are having to pull their weight at the moment…and I am so glad I don’t have to do this every day, all the time), but girlchild had some secret sisters thing for soccer that she had to do. She drew the name of someone she really doesn’t like at all, but she prides herself on being a really good secret sister, no matter what, so we hit the 99-cent store (candy is cheap!), where I was oh-so-glad to score my 2014 Baby Animals calendar (OK, it’s not THAT bad) for school…because I needed a calendar and it was on my list, but it wasn’t a supreme priority, so it was WAY DOWN the list. And I get to look at baby animals all year. Plus secret sisters wasn’t as expensive as it usually is.

Finally we got home and ate and I exercised, and then, finally, got to quilting…

I was right. I needed another 2 hours.

This thing took a little over 14 hours to quilt. I can’t post full photos until the exhibit opens in late October at Houston, but I took it to school today so I could get the binding, and for the first time ever, showed one of my quilts in person to the team…I got oohs and aahs and even a couple of dangs. Dang is good. DANG. I like the sound of that.

Anyway. I’m relieved to have the quilting done. I kept saying to myself, you need to stop. You need to go to bed early. You’re tired (I was yawning…it’s been a rough week). But in the end, artist brain won that war and bullied through all the stupid-ass thread breakages and slow quilting speed and just got it the fuck done. That’s what I needed. Then I meditated and soon I will go to sleep, yes, too late, but fuck it. I needed it to be done. Tomorrow night will not be easy either…trimming and binding does take some significant time and energy, but I feel much better about where I am on the to-do list with that step done.

Maybe all I get at this point in my life is short respites. No happy. No joy. Just relief for a short amount of time, until I turn to the lime-green post-it note of TO DO and freak out about the next big thing.

Actually, I’m hoping that the next big thing isn’t a freak out. I do have a piece I have to do by next October or November, but I’m not ready to draw it yet. I think I’ll aim for Spring Break for that one…except I want to do another big one over summer again. I’ll have to think that one through. I figure I’ll be starting a new quilt, tracing stage, by next weekend…I hope. I do have some significant stuff to do before then, and Road to California is next weekend (yay Julie for wanting to drive me up there!), so that may get pushed out a bit. I wonder if I am becoming this artistic hermit…I seem to only do the art and obsessively so. Is it all I am? All I have? I don’t know. It just is at the moment. Everything else is just stupid and lame.