Trying to Find Normal

Being home from hospital and going back to work doesn’t equal normal. Work was a little crazy…apparently my guest teacher was ALSO a little crazy. I got desperate hugs from my students. I guess they missed me.

The good news is that, although girlchild doesn’t think she’s getting better (it still hurts a lot), I could see improvement just in the 20-odd hours she was with her dad. She can walk a lot further and she’s a lot more alert. So those are good things. She chose to come to my house (and walk up the stairs!) last night, and she ate a real amount of food for the first time since Monday night. Her med schedule is still fun for ALL of us. I got up at 12:30, 2:30, and 4:30 to medicate her, and then I was up at 5:30 because I’m some sort of crazy and I’m going on a hike today. I NEED to go on a hike today. So I am. So no post last night…too tired. Managed to cook dinner, exercise, meditate. Stared at artmaking supplies. Accomplished nothing. I don’t need to accomplish anything right now. It’s OK. Soon, but not right now.

Boychild is relieved that he got into one of his backup schools. There’s so much negative crap about smart white boys not getting into good schools that I think he was worried (I know I was). So we have started the acceptance/rejection round as of last night (one of each)…in another 10 days, we might know where he’ll spend the next 4 years, but as he said last night, now that he has ONE acceptance under his belt, “I can go to college!” Yay. I think he thought he would be stuck here forever. No worries kid.

More later, assuming I survive.

Expressions in Equality Exhibit

Sheila Frampton-Cooper is curating an exhibit titled Expressions in Equality, to open at the Visions Art Museum in San Diego, California, January 17, 2015, in honor of Martin Luther King Day. The idea for the exhibit comes from Sheila’s statement below:

What drives people to undermine whole populations that they deem different and therefore unacceptable? From racial, gender and sexual inequality to ageism and classism, progress has been made, yet discrimination still abounds. This show begs the questions: What are the issues we’re challenged with, and what would a perfect society look like that’s sustained by pure, unconditional love?

For those that know Sheila, it makes complete sense that this is the show she wanted to create, and I’m glad to be a part of it. Here are the participating artists she’s invited to make a piece specifically for this exhibit:

Alice Beasley

Carol Beck

Jenny Bowker

Dawn Williams Boyd

Blake Chamberlain

Hollis Chatelain

Shin-Hee Chin

Marion Coleman

Randall Cook

Ife Felix

Sheila Frampton-Cooper

Laura Gadson

Valerie Goodwin

Jerry Granata

Deborah Grayson

Sandra Hankins

Pam Holland

Sherry Davis Kleinman

Pauline Karasch Salzman

Patricia Kennedy-Zafred

Judy Levine

Kathy Nida

Mary Pal

Pam RuBert

Susan Shie

Susan Wessels

So this will be my summer project (or at least one of them), although what I show on the web will be limited, per instructions, so if you want to see the whole thing, you’ll have to either come to VAM in January/February next year, or apparently this show will be traveling for a year after that, so you may have another opportunity to see it. My plan is to start drawing over Spring Break. It is always nice to be asked to be part of an exhibit; with my subject matter, it is not often the case. I will be doing gender equality (no shocker to those who know me), and have been letting ideas percolate since I knew about this months ago…it should be good.

Recovering at Home

So I finally got the girlchild home tonight around 7 PM. It took some persuasion, but I was fairly sure she would recover faster at home away from the easy stuff at the hospital, so although she was scared to walk away from 24-hour care and access to better pain meds, we went home. Home, of course, in a divorce is a difficult concept. I did leave her at her dad’s, because he actually has a hospital bed in her room with the adjustable top and bottom (remnants of the marriage…I have one here in my garage as well, gifts from my grandmother to fill out our guest room, back when we had such a thing and she was getting rid of furniture she no longer needed). Plus I need to go back to work tomorrow and he is taking the day off to take care of her, so it makes more sense to not move her more than we have to at the moment.

Here’s where we spent the last 50-some hours…

in the Acute Care Pavilion of Children’s Hospital, the big glass building in the background. I wish I could say I wandered around and took lots of pictures of all the art that was there, but mostly I stayed in the room with her, barely able to concentrate on anything longer than a blogpost. There was some possibility after this morning that I would have to spend a third night, so midday, I went home and showered and packed another bag for tonight, thus guaranteeing that I wouldn’t have to spend the night, right? Oh well…it was better to plan for it than not, like the night before. I think I’ve been home a total of 4.5 hours in the last 50.

She finally allowed one token photo of her in the room, about an hour before she was discharged…

The painting behind her? I cannot say. I can tell you that we were on the air or sky floor, so all the paintings and art were related to the sky.

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Like this one of pigs flying…

There were lots of whimsical things going on here. It was interesting, though, to walk into the family waiting room next to her room (she was sleeping and I was on the phone with work people about the chaos I missed but still need to know about), and to look at the giant photographs in the room and realize you know the artist, that she’s in one of your art groups. Wacky.

There were a lot of mosaics, which I’ve always loved, especially the irregularly shaped ones like this spiraling ocean of life that wandered through one of the outdoor gardens…

The ex and I actually sat outside near this mosaic for most of her surgery. It was better than being inside. I’ve spent the last 3 days inside, I think. And this tile (and others like it) were in the main bathrooms scattered throughout…

The animals were happy and calm…meant to make us feel the same way (except for the terrified puppies in hot-air balloons, of course).

Anyway, I left the meds and instructions with dad, and he can be in charge for the next 24 hours…we’ll see where we’re at after that. She can walk for short distances, but it hurts. She has to wear a brace while “ambulating” (doctor’s words) for the next three months. No soccer for three months. She has a ton of schoolwork to get done, and we need to get her back to school ASAP so she doesn’t miss too much.

I’m feeling a little distant from everything. I got very little done for all that time. Couldn’t stitch or read anything long at all. I finally managed to input grades today when I knew she was coming home. There’s something about that waiting state that doesn’t allow anything decisive to happen. I’ve accepted that as lost time. Moving on now.

I came home and did some dishes and ate and exercised and meditated (the first time I’ve done the last two since Monday night), so that was a relief. Now I’m going to sleep in my own bed with enough pillows and no one coming in every 2-4 hours to check vitals or give meds. What a relief. I’m hoping to get my art/creative brain back tomorrow, or at least be able to number the newest drawing or cut out pieces…pretty brainless stuff, but still on the artmaking spectrum.

She’s home. It’s good.

The Burning

I recently read The Burning by Jane Casey, the first in her Maeve Kerrigan series…

It was offered through NetGalley…presumably to persuade people to read the rest of her Kerrigan stories. Maeve is a detective constable in London who is helping to investigate a serial killer who is burning women. The most recent victim, Rebecca Haworth, doesn’t seem to fit the mold for these killings, and it’s Maeve’s job to figure out what’s going on.

I’m a sucker for a good forensic mystery, which this is. It’s not super-heavy lit, but it definitely held my attention and kept me reading. I would read the rest of her books; the characters are somewhat typical but their stories are interesting enough to get me to read #2. Maeve has some version of a personal life and has to deal with sexist power plays (this is the police in London), plus like any good British detective, she often breaks the rules to solve the crime.

The 4th book in the Kerrigan series will be released in the US this May, and is already out in the UK. Casey also writes crime thrillers that aren’t about Kerrigan. The older books, like this one, are also available for a good price on e-readers.

Living in a Hospital

So I’ve spent the last 36 hours in a hospital, minus two hours for a quick trip home…got a shower, some real tea, checked in with cats and boychild, emptied the mailbox. Girlchild’s surgery went well, but dealing with pain and all the other fun post-surgical stuff has been difficult. I had a deal with my ex that if there were a second night, he would deal, and he was willing to do so, but in the end, she didn’t want her dad to be the one taking her to the bathroom in the middle of the night. So I’m here on the couch again.

Unfortunately, I had by then left the overnight bag at home, but he brought most of it…and a glass or two of wine, which was a plus. I graded during the surgery, but quit when it required higher orders of thinking, because I didn’t have that available. I stitched a little bit while waiting for her to come out of recovery. But since then, all I’ve managed is blog-reading. I can’t handle a long story, I’m too tired to have enough manual dexterity to stitch. I brought back a sketchbook and haven’t touched it.

It’s kind of exhausting just being in a hospital. I’ve switched into efficient mom mode, learning how to switch off that fucking annoying alarm that indicates her IV needs something. I’ve dealt with rolling her, feeding her, medicating her, and a wide range of bodily fluids.

She’s better. I’m hoping we get out of here tomorrow. I wanted to sleep in my own bed. I promised Kitten I’d be home tonight. Boychild has been on his own for days. School is a freakin’ disaster, don’t even ask.

But her back is fixed. It’s a solid fix. I’m hoping it was all worth it. I can suffer nights of barely any sleep and all that if it means she has a good final season of soccer. Pain free. Here’s hoping.

The Valley of the Moon Hike

Last weekend, I went on a hike in the The Valley of the Moon, which is about an hour east of Lakeside off of Interstate 8. The parking lot is a lonely beast right off the freeway.

There’s a “road,” if you can call it that, going up and down into the valley. It’s dirt, then gravel, then some weird concrete texturized stuff. The road is fairly awful.

We hiked up it anyway; it wasn’t particularly easy or pretty.

In the distance is an ex-volcano that blew its top a good long time ago.

The geology of the area is awesomely cool…lots of weird veins of stuff and sparkly mica with rock that cooled awfully quickly and still looks liquid.

Once you get yourself up and over the first hills, you come down into the Valley of the Moon, which is all remnants of volcanic activity mixed with wind erosion.

The valley is surrounded by rock formations…those big granite rocks were originally formed underground, pushed upwards, fractured under the pressure, and the covering sediment eroded away.

There’s plenty of desert plant life, from chollas to yucca.

This valley is nicknamed San Diego’s little Joshua Tree, as the rock formations are similar. It’s very close to the Mexican border, and is cooler than the desert below. El Cajon was in the 90s on Sunday, and I was worried about the hike at that temperature, but it was in the high 70s with a breeze, which was fairly perfect…

Enough to make you sweat but not be miserable. In about 6 weeks, it will be too warm to hike there comfortably.

These strange holes look like animal caves, but are probably formed by wind erosion.

The rock formations want me to draw them…the way the rocks slot together is really fascinating.

Everywhere you turn, there are more piles…apparently the photographers prefer those last hours of the afternoon, when the light is warm and gives the rocks their best color.

One of the guys on the hike was knowledgeable about geology and gave us info about types of rocks and formations, which was great.

I suggest everyone bring a geologist on this hike with them. We spent some time seeing things in the formations, like this cat…someone thought it looked more like a sphinx.

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If you have 4-wheel drive and can drive further in (there was a Rubicon wandering all over the valley while we were there), you could bring kids on this hike. The hardest climb is coming in.

We did a little rock scrambling at this point to get a good view of the surrounding valley and to eat lunch.

This is where my camera randomly died…I don’t really know why. I charged it the night before. So all the pictures from here on out are taken with the iPhone…not the best camera in the world.

Except this token group photo, which someone else took…we look like we’re about to draw our guns against a rival gang.

This panorama shot was taken from our lunch stop…the rock scrambling is apparently not my strong point…some people climbed higher.

The reason we did the scrambling is so we could see the valley below…

Once we’d eaten, we wandered around the valley a bit, trying to find the path to the mines. We walked through some campsites (aka, places people had obviously camped…nothing fancy).

This shot is from the path that circles the peak where the mines are located.

This was the first mine opening we came to, the evidence of copper being the green tinge to the rocks lining the opening, according to our geologist. Reading online, though, tells me this area is the now-abandoned Elliot amethyst mine.

We hiked further up to another opening, where I took this shot of three different rock layers (I tell you, this area is a geologist’s wet dream)…

And another panorama facing east and south into Mexico.

Some of our group went into this mine for a ways….

I went into this one, which required a little squat-crawling (technical term) until it opened up into this cavern with a chimney opening in the top…

Giving enough light to actually see where humans had dug out more tunnels. I’m not a fan of being in small tunnels, personally.

From there, we climbed up on this rock pile for a view to the south of Mexico.

There was a painted marker for something on the top…

Looking south…

And looking north, where we saw some black smoke from a fire. We never figured out what was burning…you can see the paths through part of the valley below.

Here’s the whole group…

And another view of the rocks to the east…

Rocks eroded to look like teeth…

And a very skinny mine opening…

The hike was about 8.4 miles and we spent about 4 hours on the trail, stopping once for food and a few times to explore rocks or mines. There were a few other people out there hiking around. You can make it as short or long as you like, due to the many trails criss-crossing the area, as long as you realize it’s a bit more than a mile of serious uphill to get in, unless you have 4-wheel drive. Rock-climbers also love this area for all the climbing opportunities.

On the way out and back, you get a good view of one of the back-country wind farms.

Oh yeah…evidence that I’m not a rock scrambler…this was from a kind of flying-squirrel maneuver I had to make to get from one rock to the next because I’m not as tall as the rest of the other hikers…

Oh well. It’s not the first time I’ve had scabby knees and it probably won’t be the last.

It’s Not Pretty

My head’s in a weird place tonight. Girlchild’s surgery is tomorrow. I’m off work for at least three days. Work is absolute chaos with Chromebooks arriving and testing starting, but the plan is still up in the air and nothing is working right…and I’m not even there to mess around and try to figure it out. I don’t know if I’m testing or when if I am or how or what. I play my entire life by ear. I know I will be staying in the hospital overnight tomorrow. I have grading, stitching, a few books…I will preload some photos for the blogpost on the hike I did Sunday. I need to deal with food too. It was an incredibly stressful day. The kids were not focusing. They channel the nervous chaos that the teachers are projecting, because we are up in the air, no plan. So that didn’t help. I drove off, thought I had left all my plans and everything set up right. Went to the post office to pick something up and realized I had left my computer and hadn’t hooked up the guest teacher computer (mine won’t work for her). Dammit. Drove back to school. Had the wrong dongle (huhuhuh…dongle…). Another teacher had one I could borrow. Set THAT up. Went and copied the two sections I fucked up on Saturday night…they worked this time…

The whole thing is about 34″ wide x 73′ high. Not a small beast. What to do next? I have two quilts to cut out (hey, I could take one to the hospital…). So I started numbering the big drawing…there’s three weeks until Spring Break. That’s enough time to trace this sucker…maybe. Have a plan, Kathryn. When you have a plan, you function better. Not normal. There’s nothing normal about my staying up until 2 AM some mornings on a work night tracing Wonder Under or ironing fabrics. It’s not a BAD thing…it’s just not normal.

Meditation right now is all about putting happiness on other people, on trying to see what other people look like when they’re happy. You’re supposed to pick someone you respect and then someone you deeply care about. I had a hard time with these at first. I would try people out in each position and see if they fit. I’ve jumped around on the people I respect. I picked women who are strong but who need support, who have talked to me about needing support. I don’t know if I really provide it, but I imagined them filling with happy warmth, like Mr. Meditation told me to. It’s finally getting easier (like 18 days into it). The other? I picked the girlchild. She needs it most at the moment. She needs to feel the happy. The boychild seems more stable, more OK with his existence. Although he’s hiding what he really thinks and feels, because that’s what he does. Hopefully he won’t do that when it’s important. I hope I’ve gotten him to think that through…to avoid what happened to his mom. God knows I’ve talked to him about it. Who knows what sinks in.

My right eyelid is twitching like a bitch. Oh yeah. There’s some stress. Damn surgery + school. I take deep meditative breaths all freakin’ day long. The only time it stopped today was when I was putting the damn drawing together and numbering it…so I started numbering.

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It’s not rocket science. There’s some thought of the order of pieces…because I lay them out in the 100s…trying to think about how I will iron pieces is kind of important…not REALLY important though.

I made it through the 500s somewhere about a 1/3 of the way up the drawing. You can see the thicker black lines where I had to transfer something I had drawn on an overlapping piece between two pages.

I’m not sure what I will do about the octopus tentacles. Those sucker pieces are freakishly tiny. They may need to be embroidery instead.

I added some stuff on the sand after I taped everything together…

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It was looking too empty down there. I’m guessing there will be about 1600 pieces. It’s not a small beast.

It’s not going to fix anything, making this quilt. It doesn’t stop me from hurting. It doesn’t bring world peace to warring nations. It won’t provide anyone with clean water. It seems kind of pointless when I look at it that way…like what is everyone else doing with their Monday evening? Did they finish all the dishes in the sink (I didn’t)? Did they straighten up the living room (I didn’t…you can see some of the messy floor in one of the pictures above)? Did they write part of the Great American Novel (is this my novel? This blog?)? Do you know that on these hikes I rarely meet people who talk about books they’ve read (I will start asking this, I think) or people who show any interest in art or people who seem to do anything but hike. And go to work. Don’t get me wrong…I love to stomp around in nature on hikes, but it’s not the biggest part of who I am. It’s not all there is. It’s a tiny piece.

I don’t know where my people are. Well, some of them are on the Interwebs. I hear from them occasionally. Pretty often.

Girlchild has spondylolysis, by the way. Hardest word in the world to spell. Genetic abnormality in the vertebrae. She has two fractures that kinda look like this…

Tomorrow, they will put two small pins in across the fractures, then put bone grafts in from her ileum, plus some growth factor to promote healing. She wears a brace for 3 months and then should be able to go back to everything she was doing before…no fusion. It’s kinda scary. But she’s been in pain for almost 3 years now and they won’t heal, so it’s time to fix them. Here’s hoping she has a pain-free senior year. Here’s hoping I don’t have a panic attack in the waiting room.

Boychild is watching for college admissions. Some of the UC schools have notified, but not the two he applied to, so we wait. These are his backup schools, so he needs to get in to at least one of them.

There is a lot of wine in my house right now. I’m sure you can see why. I wonder if the hospital has a workout room? That made me laugh. Of course they don’t have one.

Sigh. Big deep fucking sigh. I’m surviving. It’s not pretty.

In Which I…

I’ve read a bunch of books lately with chapter titles that all start with “In Which I…”, as if someone asked what you had been doing and why, and you tried to come up with an explanation for your behavior of the last two days, 15 minutes, 43 years of your life. It made me start to classify the parts of my day, my life, into things I could explain with a phrase starting with “In Which I…”. It’s an interesting exercise…maybe silly also. It’s OK to be silly occasionally, as I remembered during the 2+ hours I was in the car with the girlchild yesterday, and the 2 hours I was with myself in the car today, because everyone else fit in the carpool car but me. Sigh. Because I didn’t yell loud enough fast enough. It’s OK. That’s who I am. The loner. The chick who drives by herself. I can be that person. “In Which I Carpool with Myself…” (cue Billy Idol…)

Oh yes. That was worth it. “In Which I Learn to Sneer like Billy…”.

Anyway, the hike will be posted later, when I can rip off the group photos that someone else took, because I never take those. Strangely, although I made sure to charge my battery the night before, it looked uncharged when I started taking pictures on the hike and died about halfway through. I had the phone with me, though, and took OK photos with that. Me and my birthday money are looking for a new camera, although the one that was recommended to me is way out of my price range. I’ll figure it out, though. Gotta go read some websites. “In Which Kathy Buys Yet Another Camera…”. Seriously. I’m deadly to cameras. They just don’t last.

I managed to keep the blood sugar under control today, unlike yesterday. Ironic in that I could do that while burning a million calories on a long and strenuous hike, but couldn’t manage it while sitting on a soccer field watching the girlchild play. Stupid that. Oh well. I emailed the doctor finally. I had talked myself in and out of sending the email about 10 times, and finally did it so that if more tests were needed, they could be done at the same time as the others that I have to do, and I won’t have to go in for the bloody poke more than once. Hopefully.

Most of the rest of the day was the Have-To’s…”In Which Kathy Does the Shopping…”. Not exciting. Annoying really. I graded a bunch of stuff. I got ready for having three days off of school, the longest I’ve ever been gone in a row. I tried to get the girlchild to calm down enough to go to sleep. She won’t admit to being worried about surgery. I’m worried, not because I think something will go wrong, but because I just worry. I wish I didn’t. “In Which Kathy Worries about Worrying…”.

Then after all that stuff was done and I had meditated, I decided to try to finish cutting and taping the newest drawing, just because I know I have to copy one piece again, so I wanted to see if anything else didn’t match up…

It didn’t. Sigh. Oh well. I’ll do it tomorrow afternoon. I want to get the Wonder Under traced and cut out before Spring Break, so I can iron all the fabrics down in a concentrated chunk of time.

Then I came into the studio to try to deal with that damn bird, get it ironed down. Apparently I hadn’t ironed the lips or the eyeball either. It didn’t take long for me to be done…here’s everything ready to be cut out for the Mammogram quilt…

I should start doing that this week. So that means I finished ironing all the fabrics for that quilt. Someone said something to me about artists being free spirits. Well, yes, but then there’s that other part of my brain that likes to record and document and catalog everything. The part that keeps track of how much time I spend and how many fabrics I use…that’s a bit more of the OCD or at least the controlling logical part. “In Which Kathy Uses Both Sides of Her Brain…”. I won’t say I’m using ALL my brain, because obviously that’s not true.

Only 44 fabrics were used…

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And it took 6 hours and 18 minutes to pick them all…that’s kind of long for me. I usually can do about 100 an hour. I think it’s because I did it in small chunks. It takes longer to get my brain into the right place to pick stuff on weekdays too. “In Which Kathy Tries to Make Art and Be a Responsible Teacher…”. Yeah. And add “Mom” into that as well. Consider “Homeowner” (no yardwork done at all this weekend, despite oath taken to self LAST weekend. Yes, I am that lame.).

OK, I need to do that sleep thing again. Make art? Don’t sleep. Don’t sleep? Get depressed. Don’t make art? Sleep. Get depressed because not making art. Damn vicious cycles. “In Which Kathy Does Her Best to Make Herself Insane…”.

The Rabbit Hole of Grief

I posted yet another picture today of my feet on a soccer field…where they often reside. I was grading papers. It’s girlchild’s last tournament before her back surgery, so some thoughts were going through my head. I noticed an old friend had commented on my Instagram account that I should hashtag my feet photos as #kathynidasfeet, since I keep taking these photos…and I was curious if I really HAD taken all that many Instagram photos of my feet…so I went searching through my account…which was a path into the rabbit hole of grief.

It seems that I will never escape this mess, as photos are everywhere that remind me of things that make me inexorably sad, so sad I fall deeper into a hole. I feel like I’ve got a grip on the edge of it at the moment, scrabbling at the muddy and slippery edge, ripping off fingernails as I try to hold on, gripping the sides of the wall with my knees, trying not to fall back down, to roll back into the gunk that fills the bottom edges of my brain. I hear the grief, like black dogs, vicious ones, Dobermans, not kind black labs…scratching at the sides of the hole, leaping up so close to clamp their jaws on the air by my calves that I can feel the rush of hot dog breath on my legs, smell their rotten dog food air. I’m trying to get out. I am.

So seeing photos of a former life, dead dogs, people who might as well be dead, a whole dead life that no longer exists and never will, a life I never asked to be removed from, never expected to lose…it’s difficult. It pushes me down, holds a pillow over my face, tries to suffocate me.

I can’t say that I’m all that successful at fighting it. My counselor says that I have a life. That I have a hold on things. That I have it under control. That I can control my stress reactions. And sometimes I can. Sometimes I take a deep meditative breath and I move on, I push the bad away, I breathe through the scary and come out the other side calm, ready, poised. Well, as poised as I ever am. Yeah. That’s not so much poised as Girl Scout readiness for disaster.

But it still doesn’t feel OK. Very little does. Last night, for an hour, a conversation with the boychild about poetry and literature, authors and types of poems (I have been categorized by my preferences, and I’m OK with that). At the end, he borrows a huge pile of my poetry books, including one volume of lesbian poetry that gets me a funny look. Then again, he’s used to my feminist rants, and this doesn’t fall far from that. I’ve told him that being a woman is different from being a man. We even talk about his childhood, what he remembers. I’m tired, lying on the couch in the dark post-exercise, deciding about sleep. I’ve been tired all week. I have stuff I need to do. Stuff I want to do. But this is more important. He will remember this feeling, if not this particular conversation. It will be part of what he remembers about his mom…much better than remembering her crying for the last 8 months. That can’t be a good memory. Will he describe me as the artist? The crazy sarcastic creature who draws all night? Or as a depressoid? I’m hoping that is just one short chapter (it doesn’t feel short at the moment) of a longer, fuller life. I don’t know. It probably doesn’t matter…but as we get to the end of his being the kid at home, with college notifications happening in just two short weeks…I spend a lot of time wondering what my life will be like without these two around all the time. It was so hard when I divorced to lose them at all…it was the worst part of the divorce. I had been their primary caregiver every day for a very long time, and all of a sudden, they would go off with their dad and have a life without me and I would be alone. There’s a lot of that now. There will be more in my future.

A lot of this angst is trying to look into my own future and feel hope or excitement or a chance at happy. I can’t get there. I can deal with one day, sometimes a week. That’s it. Hiking really is only a delaying tactic, a way to psych my brain out from looking at the future. I can’t think about all that crap on a hike…I can just think about the step ahead of me. It’s an immense escape. I guess it’s a healthy one, but who knows.

I keep getting lost in the rabbit hole. I keep getting stuck in some room. I draw those rabbit holes, you know. They’re in my quilts. I just realized it. Are they hiding places? Or are they traps of some sort? Are they somewhere to go when you can’t handle anything? Somewhere to hide what you want no one to find? Or do I fall into them and find myself unable to back my ass out?

No telling.

I was in Temecula all day at the girlchild’s tournament. I have photos, but don’t feel like dealing with them now. Then I came home and got ready for tomorrow’s hike, and went to FedEx to copy that 3-page drawing…I seem to spend many a Saturday night with the other losers in FedEx copying stuff. Tonight it was an older couple copying receipts…he was wearing suspenders and glaring at me (and my naked drawings) from under thick gray caterpillars of eyebrows.

I came home and exercised and meditated (cried through the whole damn thing)…and then started to tape the thing together…

There are two pages that just aren’t fitting together right…I think it’s because I didn’t push the sketchbook down hard on the copier. That seems to help everything line up better. So I’m probably going to have to go back and copy those two pages, or at least one of them.

I got about 2/3 of it put together before I realized I was tired and I have to get up early for a hike tomorrow.

I’ll finish the rest later. It’s not crucial. Nothing is. It’s going to be about 35″ wide x 80″ high. I enlarged it only 200% because otherwise it would be really massive. It’s already big. And complicated.

I have almost dropped out of tomorrow’s hike about 10 times. I’m worried about my blood sugar, so I decided to be much better about packing a variety of food, including sugar, just in case. I had another low blood sugar incident today. I’m trying to figure out what’s causing them so I can prevent them. I didn’t have an issue last weekend on the hike, so I will think positively about tomorrow. Plus it’s a hike I really want to experience…mostly for the location.

As for that damn rabbit hole…there weren’t a lot of foot pictures on Instagram, so I guess now I know she reads my blog probably…that’s where all the foot pictures are. It’s silly that my trying to assess the number of foot pictures caused me to fall backwards, to slip downwards. What a stupid trigger. In reality, I was already slipping, been slipping all week. I’ve been quiet on here, inwardly processing some level of worry and panic about balancing school and the girlchild’s surgery and subsequent needs. Being the mom means you have to hold it together and I seem to suck at that lately. Or do I? I don’t even know. I do often feel like it would just take one more thing, one more task that needed completion, one more responsibility loaded onto my shoulders, and it would all come tumbling down.

Except that’s just life. Life says, “Do this.” “Deal with that.” And you do. And then you move on. I’m trying to really adopt that attitude. Counselor says I have to. To survive. The blood sugar thing? It’s not the universe trying to take me down. It’s just a combination of medications being off and probably menopause creeping in and doing its thing. I can do my left-brain control thing and collect data and control it the best I can with that information, and prepare for its vagaries when it’s uncontrollable. Trying to plan for school over the next few weeks with the surgery and not knowing when I’ll be back at school and with testing starting? Fuck it. Does it really matter? I can wing it this week. I will deal with next week when I have to. The world will not end if we don’t finish DNA before Spring Break. Seriously. It doesn’t all have to make sense. I can give them a packet and it won’t even matter.

So yeah. I’m trying. I’m trying to let things go. I’m trying to let the crying happen when it needs to, because obviously it needs to. I’m trying to put the art front and center and not worry about the rejections, because they don’t really matter. I’m trying to stay out of that damn hole.

The Frangipani Hotel

I recently read The Frangipani Hotel by Violet Kupersmith.

It’s a collection of short stories about Vietnam and its myths and legends. It’s obviously colored by the influence of the Vietnam War; many of the stories are ghost stories of fantastical creatures who have followed Vietnamese characters and haunt them in a variety of ways. Kupersmith’s grandmother’s folk tales are the basis for many of these stories.

This is Kupersmith’s first book, and it is very well-written. As always, though, with short stories, there are some that are amazing and some that are not as amazing; these lean towards almost all amazing, which is nice. I did think the collection was very good and hope to see a longer book out of her in the future. Her ability to turn the story around, to make you wonder what just happened, and her characters’ abilities to deal with the crazy and the scary were definitely worth a second read. Most of the characters lead fairly normal, boring lives until they mix with the supernatural. The connections to Vietnamese culture and the shadow of the Vietnam War are also intriguing. The book is due to release April 1.