I don’t want to go back to school yet. I guess I have 4 1/2 more days, but this always feels like such a slog from January to Spring Break…even with the three-day weekends. The Five Weeks of March (not the Ides, but the Weeks…all you teachers know that awful stretch of time) are coming. You know the kids’ brains are going to be all damaged by three weeks off, and by the time you get them back, they’ll be affected by whatever weird pollen that causes teenaged brains to go all hormonal in Spring. We see it every year. This is the hardest trimester in terms of content, for science at least, and after grading all their science journals yesterday (that was 5 hours of my life I’ll never see again), their grades will show it. I know I should be planning today, setting up the next unit, writing the next assessment, making sure everything’s ready to be copied, but I just can’t do it. I can’t immerse myself back in the slog yet. My art brain wants to play…it wants to wander about outside and draw things. It wants to be free for just a bit longer.
It’s OK. I go through this every year. I am pulled screaming into the first week of school in the new year. For some reason, Spring Break doesn’t do the same damage…I think because it’s close enough to the end of the year that you can smell it. See it. Feel it. I don’t want to deal with grades or assignments or even kids. I just want to stay up late and make art and hang out and be a human without a job that sucks so much energy. Back to that balance thing. Constantly on my mind.
So what all that really means is that I’m procrastinating. I’ve been grading stuff, but not killing myself (OK, yesterday was a stretch, but I wanted the damn things done). And last night, when my brain was racing, totally wired, I let it iron stuff together that is totally irrelevant, not a deadline, nothing that needs to be done. I just wanna make this little quilt. I got to here before I needed to go to sleep…
Because I knew I had to be up early. And the left eyelid is already twitching with either tiredness or work-related stress, hard to know which. It’s not like there’s a different twitch for each. So maybe both.
This isn’t a big quilt…it only has 160 pieces in it. I thought about doing it for the FFAC cancer donation quilt, but it’s way too complicated, too many hours. It’ll finish up about 20″ square and I already have over 8 hours in it. For those who are always devaluing an artist’s time, consider how much you get paid for a day of your actual real-life job. I know what that amount is for my job…in fact, I know my hourly rate. Now add in the cost of materials and a 40-50% gallery commission. And taxes. Now you know what an 8-hour quilt is really worth, and this will have more than 8 hours in it by the time I’m done. They want the cancer quilts to come out to about $100, so I need to draw simple and keep it small. I’m hoping to do that today too. Later. (Procrastinating…small and simple is HARD for me.)
This morning, what I SHOULD have done, if I were a good little worker bee, is do the next batch of grading. Ugh. Could not do it. Not after yesterday. I have grading PTSD.
So I finished ironing…
Again, I could have stopped there, been responsible. Hell, I am being responsible…just responsible to my own self. Sigh.
Found a background…ironed it down…
Again, I could have stopped there. I could have.
Fuck it. Stitched it down and pinbasted it. Ha!
Then I stopped. Before the quilting. But it was hard. Now I just want it done. And if I didn’t have any other have-to’s today, like getting a new stove to replace the one girlchild killed, or going to her soccer game, or grading freakin’ papers, I would get it done.
But one of my have-to’s is the donation quilt drawing. Plus there’s another drawing lurking in my brain. Maybe an hour or two in front of the telly with my sketchbook tonight? Balanced by some grading (fuck grading). Sigh. Yes, the art brain is STRONG in this one. As I get older, I am less likely to say no to it. But the kids are getting older and are way more self-sufficient than they used to be, so I can ignore a lot of stuff that I didn’t used to be able to ignore.
And I can grade for a bit at the soccer game…until it gets too dark…
Because it gets too dark to take photos too…except I keep tracking the sky for clouds like this…
And this…
So I’m procrastinating, yes. But not in a bad way. There’s certainly something to be said for not getting too far behind in your job responsibilities, but I will always argue that once you’ve put in an hour or so on that crap (because for a teacher, it could be hours every night if you let it), it’s time to let your brain does what it wants. And mine wants to make more pictures.
Kathy Nida 