This Is Where Things Are Right Now.

It’s been a rough few days, physically and emotionally. I’ve been running microscope labs for three days and then went right into frog dissections. These take lots of time, energy, class management, cleanup, and dealing with squealing teens, which I just don’t have the patience for right now. I suspect MOST teachers are running low on patience at the moment. There’s nothing abnormal about that. But Tuesday night at the gym, after spending over an hour with the boychild and his dad, trying to navigate through college and immunization crap, I hadn’t apparently eaten enough and my blood sugar crashed at the gym. Badly. I didn’t have my tester, but I did have glucose tabs with me. Here’s a sign of how your brain doesn’t work when your blood sugar crashes: I kept exercising. I know. Silly. It was OK in the end, though…although I felt like crap for the rest of the evening…that’s also unfortunately normal. So I didn’t have the energy to stand and iron…I cut pieces out instead. Silence abounded. Sadness followed.

It’s OK, the next day, right?

Fuck that.

My cutting view: TV, messy house, pajamas on, single glass of wine. I get my hour in, then I go to sleep. The sleep of the exhausted. That’s what low blood sugar does. Fucks with me.

And I keep getting emails from places that annoy me…like Good Housekeeping, why? I don’t think that a new everyday hairstyle or a pop of color in my bathroom is going to change my mood…although the bathroom is on my list for the summer. And House Beautiful? What the fuck? I’m not into that stuff, reading about it, it’s just depressing and reminds me of how lame I am at the moment. Comedy shows? Not my thing. Delete delete delete. Comedy shows are full of mean people being mean to people. Fuck them. Take me off your fucking list, unsubscribe over and over again. Just leave me the fuck alone. Comedy isn’t funny.

Deep breath. Normally I would take a weekend or a short vacation right after school got out and clear my head. That’s not happening this year. No money. Nowhere to go. No one to go with. One kid will apparently be in Palm Springs (or Palm Sprongs, which is what I’m calling it now), which is fine, or it WOULD have been fine if someone had actually talked to me about it instead of assuming that because I have no life that there doesn’t need to be communication. I feel like I need an artists’ retreat or a self-reflective place with lots of meditation time, but I think that would also be a mistake right now. I don’t have enough emotional support to do that. Maybe what I need is to be in my own space, cleaning and rearranging and painting my own life so I can move on past this mopey shit. Damn mopey shit has tentacles that don’t let go. Release me, you fuckwads. Let me be someone else, someone who is not this sad person. I’m tired of her. She’s not fun to be around and she just makes me feel worse.

Funny that the me is still me. Can’t get away from me. Me me me me…fuck me.

So yesterday, I knew it would be rough…first day of frog dissections, plus I had a 2-hour science meeting right after school and then I had to sit through a 2-hour teenaged driving course (required by the school so the girlchild can drive on campus next year without her brother around, who already sat through this). For those of you who remember Red Asphalt…I just saw Red Asphalt V. Sigh. And three other videos that I show my students every year about driving and drinking and texting and all that crap. So I packed food (I learned from the day before…this is my new existence. Eat or pass out.) and I drew during each meeting, because otherwise I would have fallen asleep…

Post-it note with ballpoint pen: not my favorite materials, but I left the sketchbook in the car.

Then I drew during Red Asphalt…

She’s remarkably calm-looking, considering what I was there to see and listen to. Surprisingly, girlchild got mad at me for reading on my phone during the presentation, said it was rude, but had no issues with my DRAWING during the sheriffs’ talking. Not rude to draw.

So Tuesday night, this is what it looked like after I cut pieces out…

And this is after Wednesday night…

Can you tell the difference? Sigh. It’s no wonder I’m depressed. It’s fucking neverending. I mean, I can look at those two photos and see that I got something done…but it’s taking for-freakin-ever. I’m at 11 hours and 38 minutes. There is no way I’m finishing in a couple of hours or so.

Same with this post. I need to go to school. Who knows when I’ll finish.

From meditation, the title. This is where things are right now. Live in the moment. In the moment, I am tired, frustrated, dejected, sad, depressed, overwhelmed, disheartened, anxious, stressed, barefoot, drinking tea, reminding myself I need to iron the boychild’s clothes for the awards ceremony. Mr. Meditation talks about opening a space where we can envision change, even if change is not happening right now (I imagined a mountain meadow with peaks and trees all around, because he said to open the space). Lifting oneself out of the depressed space. Can’t do that. Fuck you. But now I’m sitting in a meadow with all that other shit towering around me. I don’t know if that’s better. It’s easier to hide in the trees than out in the open.

Frogs are done. I even did the dishes already (science labs=dishes). Tomorrow we start sex ed. I don’t know that it will put me in a better mood. When you read all that futuristic and dystopian fiction, there’s always pills or medical conversion chambers or genetic engineering that makes sure that people don’t feel bad or sad…OR…they kill all of us mutants and don’t let us reproduce and make more deep reflective thinkers like us. Society doesn’t want to deal with the likes of us. Even though we make amazing art, visual, verbal, musical, dance…they don’t want to admit that the brain falls so deep for so long. This is where things are right now. Tomorrow maybe I will have a donut and they will be somewhere else.