Road to California 2014

I know. It’s taken me a while. It’s been a rough month. Too much stuff going on. When I found out my piece was going to be in Road to California, I set up a road trip with Julie and my mom…Julie was really nice and drove us…first stop? The bathroom. The mens’ bathroom, which is kind of underutilized at a big quilt show, so they had made this one into a womens’ bathroom…complete with flowers in the urinals…you know, like you do.

Julie and I set out to try to understand the various categories of the show…I had entered Art, People, since, as it lists, “quilts in this category must illustrate some recognizable aspect of human form.” I think most of my quilts do that, but you have to watch Art, Pictorial, because it might be Naturescape AND People. In the beginning, we weren’t completely jaded about the categories…this is Sandra L. Nehlsen-Cannarella’s My Palette, which actually has a 3-D arm coming off of it to paint the still life.

And is Art, Naturescape. OK. I accept that. I liked the arm too. Even though it’s cut off. It’s one of the winners…this link takes you to information on all the winners.

Then I had to photograph this Sue Spargo piece all in wool…this is the block-of the-month Imperial Blooms, now available in book form, this version sewn by Diana Tatro.

This is when I remembered that I was at a regular quilt show…because this is a pattern and it won an award…and it was even the BOM fabrics, so the maker didn’t even pick those? It was beautifully made, don’t get me wrong. It was under Innovative, Applique. Yes, Sue’s stuff is not traditional applique, but who exactly is being innovative here?

I photographed just one piece of this one, Magic Carpet Ride by Janet Wilson, because I liked the edge treatment…it was different.

By the way, I would love to link for websites on all these quilters, but if I can’t find them, I can’t link them. If yours is on here and I missed your site, please let me know and I will link up to it.

Always a crazy quilt fan, this one was a little too regular for my tastes, but I did like the edge treatment (there’s a theme here)…this is Gypsy Rose by Patty Johnson.

Here’s my mom’s head examining it up close…

Two quilting friends with their pieces hanging side by side, Linda A. Miller’s Linear Moves and Sherry Davis Kleinman’s Geisha.

This struck me because of the triptych and the movement of color…this is Monument Valley at Sunset by Cathy R. Geier.

And these fish were very cool…this is Aqua Meets Marine by Gail Wax.

Lots of beads and scales on the fish.

These three caught my eye because of the metallic fabrics and the tight, very controlled and detailed quiltings…this is Odin’s Trilogy by Linzi A. Upton.

Really, you should go to her website just so you can see her quilted yurt.

I think that was the point at which Julie and I became jaded…for instance, there were lots of little quilt guild or group challenges, which I have taken part in at times in the past, but this one…it’s hard for me to be intensely critical because it’s not meant to be art, and the maker is certainly messing around with materials in a creative way, but I’m not sure whether Road wants to be a local quilt show (like the San Diego Quilt Show, which pretty much shows anything and anyone, except nudity) or whether they want to be an art quilt show. They’re not IQF…they’re more of a Mancuso show. I hadn’t been to Road for a while, and I used to go way back when it wasn’t juried, so it has improved, but I guess that’s it…it doesn’t want to be a big art quilt show. It wants to attract a lot of art quilt wannabes and traditional quilters…so I’m not sure I belong in it, honestly.

This is Bread #2 by Barbara Ulrey Schafer…a reminder of communion time…please note that the plastic tabs form the shape of a cross.

I’m hoping she collected bread bags from friends, because that’s a lot of carbs.

Sheila Frampton-Cooper’s piece on the left, The Ray, The Roses, and the Portal, actually worked quite well with the more traditional piece on the right, Hexahedron by Cecile Choi.

Two things going on here…first of all, Frampton-Cooper’s piece is Modern Piecing, a category that “should utilize improvisational piecing techniques,” and Choi’s is Modern Negative Space, which “should be set with large amounts of negative space.” I think this is where Road went a little bonkers…I’m not entirely sure where the lines have been drawn between art quilts, modern quilts, and innovative quilts, let alone traditional quilts with a modern look, like Amish quilts or even Gees Bend quilts can be. Maybe it doesn’t matter unless you’re crazy like me and Julie and you’re trying to see what is in which category and WHY.

The second issue was the fold marks…see the folding down the center horizon of both the quilts? Word is that those hanging the show had the pieces folded in half on the floor, so if you spent a lot of time ironing all the wrinkles out, it was to no avail.

This is Valley Snapshots by Timna Tarr, Modern Piecing. Why is it not innovative? Not sure. Don’t know what the difference is.

It’s pretty, but…I don’t know what makes it modern.

This one is more modern to me…I actually really liked this, until I saw the orange…the orange was too much of a gimmick. This is Didn’t Get the Memo by Alissa Haight Carlton. I like that the triangles are more regular in some spots than others. This is Modern Piecing.

This one is Bias II, also by Carlton…this also has a more modern feel to me…this is Modern Negative Space. Sigh.

There’s some awfully arbitrary designating going on here. Because the one below? It’s Resonance by Heather Pregger, Art Abstract.

Don’t get me wrong; I like most of these quilts. I don’t like the categories. I guess if we just look at them as ways to give out more awards and more money, and maybe that gets more entries into the show, then maybe that’s a good thing, but I think it’s unnecessary categories that don’t really make sense. I can see trying to figure out what category to put an abstract piece into based on where you thought there would be fewer entries, so you’d be more likely to win money.

And here, to confuse the issue even more, is 369 Gees Bend Road by Rachel Keller, Innovative Pieced. It could have been Art Abstract. Someone might argue it into Modern Piecing. Who knows?

I put this in here so you could see the BACK of Alsea Highlands Falcon by Karen L. Donobedian.

Here’s the front, but I really liked the back.

I put this one in here for two reasons: cool thread-painted raccoons and funky quilt shape. This is The Birds’ Perspective: Life at the Water’s Edge by Ann Horton.

This one was quite beautiful…at this point, Julie and I would walk up to a quilt and try to guess what category it was in before looking at the signage. This is Basket Weave II: SeeSaw by Ann B. Feitelson. This is Innovative Pieced, based on a traditional quilt pattern.

This…well, you had to put this one in…although the fuss about quilted toilet paper is now years old…this is The Real Quilted Northern, and strangely, it’s in the Miniature category, where it so does NOT belong. This is by Jerry Kay.

This was a beautiful painted bird, with lovely quilting lines for the show and the trees in the background. This is Winter’s Veil by Patt Blair.

This one is strange…I’m not against strange. Y’all know that. But this was strange. This is In the Beginning by Robert Hix. Aah. Makes more sense, hate to say…but here’s some freaky on this. I would totally put this in the Art Abstract section, but it’s in Modern Negative Space (say WHAT?). And then the statement…the statement says, “Sometimes simple designs are encouraged by a lack of decorations. Simple visual effects can be rendered quite tedious by actual techniques.”

Huh? OK. I’ve written some oblique statements in my time, but…I really want to know what this thing is about, and all I know now is that it’s tedious. And it reminds me of my new leach field.

This quilt, you couldn’t get far enough away to photograph the whole thing…it was hanging in an aisle space and 400 people were crowded around it…it was a prize winner though, so you can see the whole thing on that site above, but I really loved the quilting. Amazing. Not sure I care for the rest of it…it’s OK…but the quilting was amazing. This is Time to Catch a Dream (sigh…here’s where I give a big collective sigh to the need for quilt artists to have puns or crafty word use in their quilt titles) by Claudia Pfeil, Innovative Mixed.

Here’s part of it…like I said, you couldn’t get a whole picture of it. But Innovative Mixed? OK. Innovative is supposed to “implement fundamental deviation from traditional patterns and settings and should reflect growth through tradition.” Sigh. OK, if I stretch that definition, I can see innovative parts of traditional blocks and piecing throughout. I would still put it in Art Pictorial though…or something in the Art categories…although she won a big prize, so maybe I’m all wet?

Naw, she was fine…Best Embellished Surface…she could have won that from any category.

So here is my crappy picture of where my weirdo art quilt ended up in all of this…and I never got a better picture of the stuff around it. I think I was so confused and irritated by all the categories by then that I didn’t really care.

II was surrounded by Marvin and Ruffie (the dog) on the left and a dragon on the right. Where else do you put the only uterus in the show?

This octopus was great, but I do not like the background…it’s way too busy and detracts from the creature. This is Mischief Maker by Sue A. Wilson.

This is actually an old redwork quilt of signatures, part of the Lest I Shall Be Forgotten exhibit.

Here was a crazy quilt on a strange hanger in the same section…it would have been nice to be able to see it better…

OK, here’s a modern quilt, surely. Hell yes, this is Pods by Heather Grant, part of the QuiltCon exhibit…a modern quilt special exhibit separate from the modern quilt categories in the show itself. Grant is one of the founding members of the Austin Modern Quilt Guild, so she is sure she’s making modern quilts (and I agree with her).

This quilt was cool…Sushi III by Mary Kay Price…Innovative Mixed, in case you were wondering.

These two little sorta creepy dolls were by Nola Hart. I’m not usually a doll fan, but these were just creepy enough.

My camera had a hard time with this quilt because of the bright colors…but I loved the birds. This is Bad Hair Day by Martha Nordstrand, one of the Road Faculty. The birds are based on molas.

Here is David Taylor’s Maynard…nice use of negative space (but not modern), and you can’t turn away from a dog butt quilt.

So the quilt show wasn’t just in the convention center…some of the vendors were out in the parking lot under these big tents, but the trees of the parking lot were in there too.

And some of them were a little worse for the wear (the sides of the ceiling sloped down near the edges and the trees no longer fit.

So. What did I think? I bought nothing. The vendors were a lot of the same stuff, geared more towards traditional quilters. I didn’t buy much at Houston either, though, so you shouldn’t hold that up as a pro or con. I thought the show itself really crowded the pieces in, I didn’t like the categories at all…I thought they were confusing and fussy and made very little sense. It was more a popular quilt show than an art quilt show. I’m not sure I’d enter again…is it really worth all that shipping and time and effort for only three days of exposure? If it were IQF Houston, I’d say yes (a lot more people and a higher level of art, I think), but I don’t think my stuff really belongs there. Will I travel up there to see the show again? Maybe. I’m not highly compelled though. It was worth the drive because I got to hang with Julie and mom and we saw quilts, but I don’t know that I would be that motivated to do it again any time soon. Your mileage may vary…I’m obviously kind of a fussy art quilter.

My Still Quiet Calm Is a Rabid German Shepherd

A student today was asking me how I dealt with the really annoying obnoxious students. She said to me, “Ms. Nida, I know you always say it’s not worth the energy to hate them, but how do you NOT?” It’s true. I do say that. I think you would have to do something truly heinous for me to hate you, like kill one of my kids maybe. Even then, I’d probably be analyzing your childhood and wondering about the chemical imbalances in your brain that would make you think it was OK to do that. Then the students wanted to know how I stayed so calm, so patient…and I told them I meditated. For some reason, that amused some of them, amazed a few others, and then a couple just nodded their heads, like, Yeah. She meditates. Makes sense.

It was an extremely difficult day. My patience was worn incredibly thin. I need to find my way again. I think I can, maybe even tomorrow. I know I was making parent phone calls from my daughter’s soccer game today. I don’t know if it will help. I do know I don’t hate a kid who is acting out. They have reasons…not excuses, but certainly reasons, whether they know about them or not. It’s better that they get it out of their system and learn how to cope with it in 7th grade, rather than waiting until they’re in their 40s and inflicting that on the world then.

So I meditated tonight and I am still dropping the black oily blob of my depression into what he calls the stillness and clarity of the light within me. The light is supposed to melt or dissolve the question or the problem. I’m visualizing the light like melted butter, trying to melt down this black goo, and sometimes I can make it work, but tonight…tonight it’s not still or calm, there’s no quiet confidence, as he projects…there is nothing but a savage dog (the color and smell of melted butter) grabbing that bitter-tasting black ooze and piercing the outer coating with its sharp canines, throwing its head side to side in a frantic attempt to bleed the depression blob of all its power and lifeforce. It’s growling menacingly the entire time, planting its front paws firmly on my heart and shaking hard again, trying to dislodge the black tar from my parts…it keeps sticking to my organs, trying to grab on, take hold, grow like a parasite.

My still quiet calm is a rabid German Shepherd.

Tonight? Tonight I’m OK with that. Sometimes the visualization does what it needs to do, and apparently tonight it needs to beat the crap out of something.

I was supposed to have quilt class, but the teacher wasn’t feeling well. I was hoping to get a lot of Wonder Under cut out, but in the end, I graded a bunch of stuff just to get it out of my hair, and then I cut stuff out for a short time…

I wanted to draw too, but decided it was more important to try to get to bed at a semi-reasonable hour (which I didn’t do).

I stitched at the girlchild’s soccer game…

These are Month 4 of last year. Her team probably made it into CIF, so there will be at least one more game next week. Honestly, I’m looking forward to a break after that. She will go back to club, but will not play for three months due to the back surgery. I think there’s one possible tournament in there before the surgery. Unfortunately, she says she wants to travel to the other tournaments anyway…someone needs to tell her that driving to Arizona the week after back surgery is not happening. Both her dad and I have tried, but she’s not listening. Reality will kick in eventually.

Besides, I can’t afford the hotel and gas at the moment.

My leach field is done, but I got home in the dark, so I haven’t seen the final product yet…tomorrow morning. So that was the cost of a new car. Bad timing.

Her game today was on a blue turf field…

With their orange uniforms, it was very pretty…

She did get to play a little…it was a fairly tense game, but they won.

Sometimes they do know how to pull it together.

Sometimes I do too. Although it doesn’t feel that way lately. I have to say that the hormonal crap that goes along with perimenopause makes it really difficult to fight sadness and depression. You’ve got these hormonal swings that are too frequent to modulate well…and they are often extreme and unexpected. If you’re already feeling low, it just fucks with you in a major way. I can be real intellectual about it here, now, but knowing what’s happening doesn’t always stop it from happening. You just understand what it is. You can’t stop it. I do everything I’m supposed to do (except get plenty of sleep). Maybe it helps in the long run, but in the short term? Not so much.

I am not looking forward to anything in the next three days except sleep. And that is not a sure thing. I’m going to try to change that mood…art is in the works, as is exercise of some sort…and catching up on grading, which is not very nice or exciting, but has to be done…and since I know I have two hiking weekends coming up right before grades are due, I should try to be focused on it this weekend. I may take the boychild out for a hike. I may sit in a hole with my depression and observe it (aka draw). I may discover a cure for cancer. All these things might happen.

Drawing It Out…

Sometimes, the mood I’m in, it requires me to draw. There’s not a whole lot else I can do. I just need to draw it out. It could take days to get it all out. Sometimes I can do it in one night. This is not one of those times. First of all, this is a big drawing. I’m now on the third page…if I enlarge it 200% (and I usually enlarge 250-300%), it will be about 35″ wide x 84″ high. That’s big. If I go bigger? Holy. It won’t be able to hang anywhere.

I was up super early to take the girlchild to the doctor; then was at school way too early as well. When it’s bad there, I turn the music on loud. Well, not too loud, because there are classrooms around me. The music helps, if I pick it right. Play the right song and the mood picks up a bit. Teaching right now is hard…the content I’m teaching, light and the EM spectrum, it’s hard for kids to get. I do my best, but it can be a slog at times…and this time of year is always tough. It doesn’t help. Plus my mood sucks. I need to work on my patience, my endurance. Meditation has really helped with that this year. I think I am a much better teacher and human because of meditation. Strange that.

So after school, after I watched my son rock it at Academic League and came home and made enchiladas from scratch (well, sort of, since I did buy a pre-roasted chicken), and then we watched Merlin together and made fun of Merlin’s ears and Arthur’s dorkiness, and then I started to fall asleep, but realized that I wouldn’t have a chance to copy the part of the drawing from before until Saturday some time if I didn’t do it tonight, so I went out and did that at 8:30 at night, after getting about 10 texts from my co-teachers about one of our kids, stuff I wish I’d known earlier…I would have dealt differently…after all that, I sat down…oh wait, first I graded because I’m trying to get caught up (story of my life), and THEN. THEN. Then I drew.

First I had copied the bottom of the drawing from the other day, so I taped it to a third page and started drawing down…

Not sure where all that is going, but she wanted legs. So now she has them. You can see the taped line right across her breasts…I have to be careful about the stuff that overlaps, because when I copy the drawings, I have to pick one to copy. At some point, I think I’m going to have to enlarge this one and add stuff at full size (which always gets me into trouble, because I put too much detail in and it’s tiny). I’m thinking that might happen this weekend. Maybe. I don’t have a hike this weekend…there isn’t one that works for me…plus I think I’m going to have to go to urgent care…yeah, it’s really urgent if I’m planning to go three days from now, but I tried to get a doctor’s appointment today, and unless I take time off work (I’m a teacher…it’s half days or whole days), I can’t get in until mid-April. Seriously. It’s hard, because I know I’m putting my kids and job ahead of my health in some way, but the thought of taking a day off work sounds more painful than going to urgent care on a weekend. The nurse I talked to today actually suggested urgent care instead of a regular appointment because of my crazy-ass schedule, and I was going to go today, but by the time I got dinner done, I just couldn’t handle it. I exercised instead. The thing is, I know what they’re going to want to do, and it will be yet another day off work and time spent and I just can’t handle it. I can’t. I know that I need to deal with it, I know I need to go to the doctor, but it would be so much easier if it would just go away. That’s true of all the hard stuff at the moment. Just go away. I can’t deal with you. There’s too much. I don’t have the outlets for stress that I used to have…now it just compounds and multiplies and reverberates inside me. I don’t have the support I had to deal with anything that might upset the apple cart. I’m afraid I will just completely lose it. This is not a good place in my head. It’s a fucked-up mess and I don’t want to spend much time in there.

So fuck it all. I drew instead. Once I had her legs in, I went back up to the previous page…

I added some water stuff and worked on her upper chest area…she has a heart now (important). Still thinking it through, deciding what will be there, what needs to be there. Sometimes I just stare at the page, willing it to draw itself. I mean, they do draw themselves.

I started watching The Following, because I had Tivo’d a few episodes from January…and I realized I had no idea what was going on…so I logged onto the girlchild’s Netflix account and found the rest…realized I had watched the first episode last year some time, but no more. Not sure why. Probably had too much other stuff I was watching…stuff I can’t even watch now because it reminds me of the person formerly known as Kathy, and I can’t deal with her and all her shit. Kevin Bacon’s got some angst going on there. Impressive.

So I kept drawing…

I don’t really know where it’s going, but I know it’s about menopause and all the shit running up to that phase of your life, and it’s about depression and all that shit, and it’s about what my life is doing, was doing. I don’t even know what else. Girlchild gave me shit for saying I would be alone forever…but it’s so hard to look at the future and see any hope right now. That’s really the depression, how it works…you just CAN’T suck it up and make the happy. There’s nothing in the head that allows it. The head is full of dark and damp and tears and sad and grief and anger and hopelessness. You look at yourself in the mirror and you don’t see yourself. You see someone who is sad and strange and alienated and alienating. I go on these hikes and connect with so few people. I feel like I’m in this vehicle that is glassed off from reality. Probably I’m not even here. I’m only virtual.

And then I go to work and some people have seen my work at the Visions Art Museum and they tell me how cool it is and that feels OK…it feels like, OK, you’re not doing everything wrong (although school and parenting feel wrong at the moment too, like I can do nothing right…girlchild in tears tonight and that’s probably my fault)…maybe the art is the only thing I can do right at the moment. I feel like a hollow vessel. I make the art but I don’t feel the art. I think everything I feel is in the drawings, like I actually cry sometimes while I’m drawing…but I don’t see the work and feel anything. Feeling is shut down, protected by the brain, which thinks I should maybe crawl into a hole for about 5 years and then come out and see if the nuclear winter is over.

In the YA novels, that never turns out well, though. Life. Piteous cry. Sucks. And then you die.

Dissolving Problems

Apparently Mr. Meditation is stalking me and listening in on my conversations. We are supposed to be visualizing being filled with light and then dropping a problem or question into that light and watching it dissolve. Last week, getting the light to fill me up was difficult; I seem to have managed it for this week, and then I drop this problem of depression into the light…it’s like an oil slick, black and globular, dense, spreading, trying to take over the light. Sometimes it succeeds and I have to start over, sweeping the black away and trying to refill the body with light and trying again to dissolve its greasy self into the golden light. Sometimes I manage to break it up into smaller and smaller black blobs, but they never go away; they just float around like errant black tadpoles. I guess that’s all a very realistic interpretation of how I am dealing with the depression…I try to break it up, destroy it, and it either grows and grows and takes over everything else, or it breaks up into smaller bits that still color my daily existence. There’s no escaping it.

So Mr. Meditation tonight is talking about how we deal with difficult things in life, and he says that people generally try to move quickly past challenges in life, to get through them as easily as possible, that we like security in our lives, we like things to be definite. He suggests instead that we sit with difficulties. Allow them to dissolve. Watch them dissolve, even if it’s slow and tedious and sometimes unsuccessful. He says we need difficult situations in life to practice, little challenges to be embraced instead of running away, so that we will be able to deal with whatever life throws at us. Ironic that. I’ve had enough of those. I need those around me to deal with their difficulties so they don’t make MY life more difficult. Dude. I think I’ve had enough difficult. Cut me a break for a while, eh? Bring on the security, maybe some peace, some joy, and don’t tell me I just have to make my own joy. If it were as simple as buying the ingredients and mixing them together correctly, don’t you think I would have done that already? Yes. I drew again tonight. I didn’t have much time in the end…

Grading sucked up some time and there was another soccer game, plus exercise (in the end, I did not make it to the gym). I worked on one piece of it, the drawing. Not much. Girlchild got to play some soccer tonight…

It’s been a rough season for her. She’s freaking out about the back surgery, understandably, getting cold feet. It’s hard to be the mom right now, to be the always-responsible one. There’s a lot of grabbing and pushing going on here, with no ball in sight.

They won. This picture looks like the Hokey Pokey (put your left foot in, put your left foot out…)

What can I say. It’s late. I’m not sleeping well. I was cranky today. One kid asked me if I’d taken my pill today. WTF? Sometimes teaching middle school is really difficult, challenging, in your face. I did do a color chromatography lab today, and the coolest part is when the ink (which I have them make in class) starts to move and spread the colors up the filter paper…they actually OOOH and AAAAH. It’s very cool. That’s when I know I’ve got them. Now if only I could persuade them to do their homework. I have been stitching anywhere that I sit down for any period of time…last night at the quilt meeting I got all of this done except for about an inch of the wing before they turned the lights out for the presentation…

Damn! But I finished it at the girlchild’s game, so that’s all of Month 3 from 2013 completed…

And I started Month 4. Yes. I’m behind. Welcome to my world.

And Sunday night, I started cutting out Wonder Under for the Mammogram quilt. I didn’t get very far…

This is going to be a troublesome piece. There aren’t very many pieces, but many of them are bigger than I usually do, so they will need big honking pieces of fabric…and since I usually only buy 1/2 yards, that might be a problem. I do have lots of flesh fabrics though, so maybe I’ll just go all out crazy on this one and pick really wild fabrics for the body, like 30 of them. Maybe. Or not. I have a while to decide…I have quilt class on Thursday, hopefully, and will be cutting these out and the wool pieces for Ivy’s memorial quilt. But if I keep drawing every night, then that will slow me down. The drawing really does help me process some of the ugly tarry crap in my head…anger and stress and sadness and those repulsive black thoughts that try to take over your brain in the middle of the night (during which I am always apparently awake, even though I told myself I needed to go to sleep early tonight…early wakeup tomorrow for girlchild)…if I can just draw them out, literally, on paper with black ink…then maybe they will haunt me less. Maybe I will be able to keep some of them from slipping back in to the unconscious and continuing to fuck with my barely stable equilibrium. It’s hard to say.

I’ve been reading The Dresden Files by by Jim Butcher…I have a 3-book volume of Storm Front, Fool Moon, and Grave Peril, and I’ve made it through the first two…

They’re pretty good…formulaic, but interesting light reads in the urban fantasy realm. Apparently I have 12 books to go. The proof that they’re light fiction is that the publisher pushed a bunch of them into omnibuses instead of letting each book stand tall on its own. I don’t know if I’ll get through all of them. What’s interesting is that I ordered the 3-book omnibus from the library back in June or July, and it only showed up in the last few weeks. Now that I know that the word omnibus does not mean a really big bus, I’m going to use it all the time. So I guess this is either the only of these omnibuses in the system, or it’s really popular. It’s similar to the Iron Druid series, in that the male protagonist is sort of obsessed with breasts and how women dress, and there’s lots of weird magic and creatures and potions and getting your shit together and ending up naked on the side of a road with big purple bruises a lot. Seriously. But like I said, a light read. I’m sure I’ll move on to serious fiction soon.

Actually, I need to read the book club selection by next Wednesday, and it’s still not here from the library. I might have to suck it up and buy it…which would mean finding the money for that. Sad but true, a single book purchase is an issue.

My SIL, whom I love very much, sent me a V-day card with the F word in it (actually, it was just the letter F as a stand-in for the F word, which I type here all the time) and gift cards to go buy a little black dress. Hmn. Where does she think I will wear such a thing? On the hiking path? It’s sweet. I might actually buy something useful with it. It could happen.

The girlchild was doing a project today on Magnum Opus, and she was thinking of art and painters, and suggested a shirt like a Jackson Pollack painting. Mom to the rescue. I actually OWN a dress that I painted about 10 years ago to resemble a Pollack painting…I went to Halloween post-divorce as a JP painting. Yup. I did. There is no other household IN THE WORLD where that same conversation happened. She said, “what about a shirt like Pollack?” and I said, “come here, my pretty…it’s been done.” And what did she do? Did she take it with her to wear to school, as her mother would have? No. She did not. She said it was shapeless. Sigh. I was impressed. So were my son and ex. Girlchild? Not impressed. Oh well. I tried.

The Place You Go…

I’m sitting here (Sunday night) waiting for the laundry to finish so I can put the girlchild’s soccer stuff in the dryer for tomorrow morning. I’m actually kind of wide awake…must have been that 26-minute nap I took this afternoon when I realized I couldn’t keep my eyes open. That’s the problem with hike days…they do kick my ass and I get very little else done, which is why I can’t do them every weekend. I can’t lose a day every weekend.

This is a 3-day weekend, though, so I still have tomorrow (Monday, yes I started this on Sunday night) to play catch up. I had a rough day yesterday. I actually cried on the hike…usually I don’t, but strangely, being in a group that large was isolating for someone like me. I’m not an extrovert at all. I need space, both mental and physical. I felt like some alien creature. It was so loud and raucous and overwhelming…I had to strike out on my own and physically super-challenge my body so my mind wouldn’t freak out. I have an event coming up with a lot more people than that…and I’m worried about my ability to deal. It’s strange…I spend all day with tons of people, but I don’t feel so out of place with my students…they are safe. I can handle interactions with them. Interactions with large groups of strangers? Fuck that. I’d rather stay home. I will be that crazy cat lady who never leaves the house if I’m not careful. The hike was redeemed slightly by the last 30 minutes spent talking to one other person. I can handle interactions like that, but you have to have something in common or at least something you can talk about.

It was a relief to come home after the hike and space out for hours, grade some papers, hang with my kids, cut out some Wonder Under. I appreciate the physical exertion and being out in nature, but hanging out in groups isn’t making me happy. Then again, nothing much is making me happy.

So in the middle of this post, the rant came through and became its own post, and then I went to the gym to try to leave some of my irritation and anger there instead of carrying it around. I’m debating calling the doctor (hemorrhage!), I need to find eye doctor paperwork for the kids, I haven’t prepped for tomorrow, I need to go to school to check for lab supplies, but I can’t get out of my driveway, because they are in fact digging holes in my front yard so my toilets might work properly someday. I’m wondering if I will ever stop grinding my teeth, if my eyelid will ever stop twitching, if I will ever sleep properly again.

The part I was having issues with was people making assumptions about other people based on how they behave or look or are labeled. I’m constantly amazed by how different people are than what they project…my leach-field guy looks like a redneck, talks like a redneck, and then starts talking to me about the Lord of the Rings trilogy and how many times he’s read it and whether Smaug is the coolest dragon around or what. The guy is 64 and you’d never think to look at him that he could have slogged through that series (god knows I haven’t been able to after multiple tries). You cannot make assumptions about people. You have to talk to them and listen to them and turn on the part of your brain that pays attention to someone besides your arrogant self, and only then can you make any decisions about people, and you still have to leave open the possibility that you are completely wrong. Maybe I know that from teaching middle school for so many years. Maybe I’m just that kind of tolerant person. I don’t know. I just know that it’s not OK to hurt other people. And sometimes people think your emotions are hurting them, but it is really their response to your emotions that’s the issue. I had the girlchild full on screaming at me this morning and I realized that she was having the same issue…her emotional reaction to what I had said was hers and hers alone. I was not the cause of the screaming. She was. Granted she’s a teenager and doesn’t modulate her responses well…she’s not Asperger’s, but teens often have this idea that they are the only people on the planet (shocking!) and it can manifest in similar ways. “My way is the only way.” Boychild and I often have discussions about her inability to realize there are other people in the world who might not have the same priorities as she does. In this case, I let her stomp off and slam a door, and then she came back and it was eventually all OK. I wonder what it will be like when they are both gone and I no longer have to tiptoe around those kinds of emotional outbursts. I wonder if her roommates will survive! I wonder if having the girlchild as his sister has helped the boychild navigate emotions any better…god knows they are full on in his face on a regular basis. His sister screams. His mom cries.

Wondering about my own sanity. Wondering after reading someone else’s blog if there is actually always a way out of depression, or if it just becomes something you live with for the rest of your life. After this weekend, I don’t see a way out, I don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, I don’t feel like it will ever change. It does not help that my hormones are going ballistic. I could really live without that additional mess in my head…hence the thought to call the doctor…more because of the physical symptoms than the mental…the physical symptoms set off all the alarms on the stupid online symptom checkers. But I already know what they will say, what they will want to do. They’ll use the words ‘abnormal’ and ‘dysfunctional’…ironic because those can apply to my physical symptoms and my mental symptoms. OK, not fully dysfunctional, because I do manage to function fairly normally…I’m just patently aware of how nonfunctional my functioning is.

Anyway. I find the solution to all this angst, short-term as it might be, is that silly thing called art. My brain wandered about a bit, trying to figure out what it felt like doing, until that urge to draw came a banging at the brain door…so I pulled this one out from before, in December sometime (was it really that long ago?)…

I had copied it and taped it to another page, so I found that and started drawing downwards…

Shades of the Celebrating Silver quilt…I still need to put yet another page on the bottom…

because she needs more room. She wants the rest of her body. She told me. She demanded it. I listened. And I need to figure out what else is happening here…maybe more of those crazy birds. Who knows. Draw, Kathy. It gives you some peace. Draw the assholes out. Draw the arrogant jerks out. Draw the emotional reactions and put them on paper. Make someone see what’s in your head. Make someone feel what’s in your head. Make.

I made it to my quilt guild tonight, for the first time in 12 months, I think. Mary Pal was speaking and she and I had seen each other Saturday night at the Coast to Coast opening. I think we might be sisters from another mother…we are in the same shows, feeling some of the same artistic angst. I hope for her sake that she is not feeling the rest of my angst. It was nice to hear her talk, to feel her deep hug again, to feel a connection to a fellow artist who plumbs the depths of her artistic self to make work in the middle of the night, by the skin of her teeth, in the early morning light. To feel a connection that deep to someone you barely know…simply because of the place you go when you work.

Art can be amazing that way.

Insert Rant Here

Sometimes I read things, almost by accident, that make me really upset/angry. I’m mulling over one of those incidents right now, where someone claimed that Asperger’s-designated people were “more evolved.” I’m not Asperger’s. I do test fairly close to that range, but think it is more a function of being an introverted antisocial artist-type. I do however have many years of experience living with, loving, and raising Asperger’s-designated humans. I’m a pretty empathetic and intelligent person…I’m actually really good at figuring out how other people are feeling most of the time, although I’m not always right on the money…I do know when things are not right (sort of the anti-Aspie in that realm). In dealing with Aspies for the last 25 years, I have realized over the years that it often takes them a long time to process feelings and emotions, and I have learned with the boychild that “long time” could be weeks or months, sometimes maybe years, if ever. I do know, however, that the inability to process those feelings has a real-life consequence sometimes of hurting the people around you, those who love you, because Aspies often cannot handle what is going on right now, right then, and by the time they can handle it, they might react quickly in a way that damages those around them. I’ve tried with the boychild to keep him aware of what he is doing and how he is doing it and more importantly how it makes others FEEL, but know that he will have to find his own way in that as an adult. I’ve had to suppress some of my own emotions in dealing with the boychild, realizing that his issues are not directed at me and it is my job as his mom to help him find a less-hurtful way to express himself once he realizes what he’s feeling. I know he loves me. I also know he will probably never tell me that in those words. I’m OK with that. I can see he cares in how he acts and what he says. It will make it more difficult for him in future love relationships, but he will have to deal with that.

That said, I didn’t raise the others I’ve had relationships with, and their parents were not aware, and so they have both caused me significant damage…because I am apparently not “more evolved.” I refuse to believe that an inability to deal with emotions and the people who may cause one to have those emotions is fucking EVOLVED. I am fully a supporter of there being a continuum of “normal” range of the human brain and that Asperger’s is merely one end of the spectrum, with a huge variety of types of function all across the spectrum…but it is never a good excuse to hurt other people because you cannot handle your own emotional angst. That is not evolved. That is immature, if that’s how you present (and not all do). I heard the words “emotionally incompetent” to describe it once, and I have issue even with that, because it implies that you just need to take a class or read a book, and for some Asperger’s, that might be enough, to try to be aware of one’s shortcomings, just like I have to be aware of my own issues and shortcomings, to teach oneself the appropriate responses even when you don’t feel them until later, even though I am apparently “normal”-brained…for some, I think “incompetent” is not even a good description, because I am not sure that competence will ever come for some. I hope my son figures it out. I hope he locks away in his brain the pain he’s seen his mom go through because of this apparently MORE EVOLVED state. He says he gets it. And I have friends on this end of the spectrum that are, at least to me, some of the most emotionally aware people I know, so I know it’s possible…but I think it takes a lot of self-reflection to get there…and to be honest, the ones I know who are aware are all female, not male. That may be the difference right there; it’s hard to say. Most of my experience is with male Asperger’s.

I tell myself I have done my best to raise my son to try to be aware when he is hurting people (he is much better than he used to be), and to never ever run away from difficult emotions…that it is OK to say you are having problems dealing with this and you will come back to it, but you have to open your eyes and SEE what you are doing to other people when you behave that way…that it is NOT OK. Get out of your head. Look around you. You cannot hide. It is not MORE EVOLVED. A world without emotions or a world where emotions are so locked up inside you that you deny you have them, that is not a more evolved world. That is a world without music and art and dance and color, and I don’t believe that is a world I want to live in. That is a world where people hurt other people because they can’t deal with their own stuff. That is not OK. It’s not the world I want to live in.

The More Evolved comment is shades of sci fi where the alien species believes humans are lesser beings who do not deserve to live because we have not evolved to higher functions of logic and precision of thought. Hell, humans are nutcases…we’re giant fuckups in the world, no doubt about that, but as our higher functions have evolved beyond many of the living species on earth, so have emotions. Earthworms aren’t showing emotions…nor are they solving the issues of clean water at the moment or designing a new spacecraft. I can’t help but think the two things are connected, and that ability to show emotions and even occasionally control them without having them eat you up inside or slam into the people around you (I live with teenagers…I see the spectrum) doesn’t seem to be a completely negative influence on the world…unless you want a world that never confronts you (see comments above about art, music, etc.).

This is not a rant against the Asperger’s-designated person…it is probably a rant against One Specific Person, who in typical Aspie fashion refuses to talk about it. Because it’s too hard. Because not talking about it makes it better. Because he claims incompetence. Because running away fixes it. (It doesn’t, by the way. My less-evolved brain knows that and knows it very very well and has spent the last 7+ months trying to deal with it.)

Speaking to you from the other planet…no it doesn’t make it better. It means you damaged another person in your apparent evolution away from us lesser beings. Congratulations. You don’t win.

This is the article I was reading, which is not at fault at all for my rant…it is actually an interesting list of things to look for, which as a teacher who identified (while getting yelled at by her admin and school psych and told she didn’t know what she was talking about) a female student correctly as Asperger’s. I put it here because I think it’s useful to read if you think you might be on that end of the range or be dealing with someone who might be Aspie, because females do present differently, just as they do with ADD, another lesson I learned the hard way. I actually don’t like the term Aspie at all…but it is strange to me to use the doctor’s name to describe the syndrome…seems we need another designation…especially now that it’s not in the DSM any more, which is a whole ‘nother issue.

Sorry for the rant. Sometimes there’s only one way for the anger to go in a healthy way and that’s out (because I’m less evolved and realize my emotions and deal with them instead of letting them destroy other people). Plus maybe you have something to say about it too. I’m willing to listen…I’ve got my non-Aspie ears open and ready to hear. I know that term encompasses a wide range of experiences and behaviors, just as the term “normal” does (whatever the fuck normal means).

Mule Hill Trail to Raptor Ridge

I spent about 3 1/2 hours this morning hiking Mule Hill Historic Trail in the San Dieguito River Valley to the beginning of the San Pasqual Valley Trail, going through Raptor Ridge (over? through?) on the way. The trail map is here, if you’re interested. We started in Escondido off of Sunset (across from the mall), and there happened to be a very small farmers’ market taking place, so traffic was a mess. I’m fairly sure I did a hike out of here over 10 years ago, but going the other direction, under the freeway towards some hill on the other side.

This is part of the Coast to Crest trail, which will eventually be 55 miles from the coast near Del Mar to Volcan Mountain near Julian.

We didn’t do the whole thing…went 5.9 miles out and back. I guess the whole thing of that section is more like 24 miles…11.8 seemed plenty for one day.

It was a little on the warm side, certainly in the high 70s/low 80s for part of it, although there was a decent breeze, and the clouds kept it a little cooler. You could totally feel the potential for nasty summer heat baking up off the dirt when the sun was shining down on the eastern side of the ridge, though. I mean, this is February.

The skies were amazing today.

The trail is mostly flat and fast through the valley, although there is a lot of competition with mountain bikers. In general, the bikers are good people, respectful of trail rules (everyone yields to horses, bikes yield to people). We didn’t see any horses today, although they are allowed on the path.

There is a section of the trail that travels next to farmland, mostly strawberries it looked like.

You can see the plastic covering some sections. When you get further out into the valley, you can see the beginning on the left of the hills that lead into Raptor Ridge, which peaks out at 1000′ in elevation (not super high, eh?).

There were very few trees on this trail…so very little shade. Summer would be difficult.

Once you get out of the valley and start climbing into the ridge, there is some green and trees to shade you for the first part…

This is also generally where the mountain bikes disappear. It’s a one-track trail at this point, and it climbs fairly steadily from the valley up to about 600′ elevation, maybe a little higher. You can see the San Pasqual Valley from this section.

In the beginning of the hike, I was out in front with about three other hikers. It was a really big group, about 36 people, and it was just too many people and too loud for me. I guess when I’m out in nature, I want to actually BE out in nature. I don’t mind talking, but it was just too many live bodies in one space. At this point, though, when we started to climb, somehow I ended up being first, so once I got into my rhythm, I just kept going.

They’re all strung out on the trail behind me…not too far behind…

More of the San Pasqual Valley, sort of towards the Wild Animal Park.

I wasn’t trying to be antisocial. I just find it hard to hike slowly. Or behind people who are slower than I am. Or in huge groups of people. Sigh.

There are a few viewpoints on that side of the ridge…this is looking up to the peak, although apparently the trail doesn’t go up there…you have to bushwhack it.

We kept going around the ridge to the San Pasqual Valley side looking for some mythical bench that never appeared. Once we realized we had hit 5.9 miles…this is where you remember that however far you hiked out, you still have to hike back…the organizer decided to have us go back to the viewpoint.

So we did…took the obligatory group photo and snacked a bit. After about 10 minutes of drying the sweat off your back and eating something, a couple of people said they were taking off, so instead of being a social butterfly (I’m not), I took off after them.

I was kinda tired of hearing boys tell girls to “work it.” Sigh. Sometimes. People.

There’s the rest of them at the viewpoint…they never did catch up with us…to our credit, we were moving pretty damn fast.

It only took about an hour and a half to get back to the parking lot…about 5.5 miles

I eventually caught up with the three ahead of me (garter snake on the path stopped them for a bit, just to move him out of the way) and hiked out with one of them, who is a high-school teacher…so we had lots in common. That was pretty much the only conversation I had.

I do better in smaller groups. This is a pretty easy section of the trail, even with the climb up to the ridge. Certainly, you could wander the river valley for a while with kids or dogs and have a good time, turning back when you’re ready, although I suspect it gets quite warm sometime in June or July through late October. Someday I will do the next section, across the San Pasqual Valley…maybe with someone to pick me up on the other end. I can do 12 miles…not sure I can double that though. The hips and knees eventually complain.

It was a good workout, a good day for it. Not sure where my next hike is…I don’t have one planned for another 3 weeks…will have to see if I can do something before that.

Crazy Mess

You know what’s a hard word to spell? Hemorrhage. Really. It took me like 4 tries and then I finally looked it up, and then I had to look at it twice and finally say it in my head as Hem-Or-Hayje to be able to spell it right. I’m usually a really good speller…I mean, yes, I make words up and sometimes I spell stuff wrong on purpose, and as a former editor, sometimes the left side of my brain almost has a conniption fit (did not have to look THAT word up) when I purposely fuck with grammar…but I figure this isn’t formal writing…it’s a journal, but even fiction has its way with words, messes with the structure of language, because how we talk, think, is different than how the rules of language try to control how we talk, think.

Why talk of hemorrhage? Sigh. Perimenopause. So tired of it. Girlchild says to stop googling stuff…but that’s how I learned to spell hemorrhage! I’ve got another drawing in the head…and it ain’t pretty…which reminds me of a conversation I had tonight with another quilt artist who said that she likes my work, but there’s always something in it that disturbs her (in the case of the piece she was looking at, it was the snake…and there are often snakes in my work. Snakes bad. Christmas lights good.). I had a bunch of people ask me tonight about particular symbols, about what they meant. Hell. I draw. Sometimes I draw something that has a particular meaning. Sometimes I don’t remember that particular meaning 4 years later. Sometimes I just have a feeling, a sense of bad or good or evil or pain or whatever. But why are the lungs red and green? I don’t know. Contrast? I don’t necessarily think of colors in the same way…well with some I do…I don’t know.

Anyway. The experience of being a woman of a certain age is not pleasant in many ways…and I have an 11-mile hike tomorrow, so this could be an issue. Certainly feeling like you’re bleeding to death is an issue. Knowing that you’re already anemic, despite taking iron…sigh. Whenever I get frustrated with this stage of my life, and I think about how intolerant some people are (men) of this stage…like I CHOSE this? Are you kidding me? Not only did I not choose to be female (although I’m OK with it, honestly), I would have no problems with some sort of switch you could flip once you were done with the babymaking so that this would stop, but I also know that the menstrual cycle and the hormones that come with it do help with a variety of other biological functions…bone density, longevity, even digestion and sleep, but hell…I didn’t choose to bleed every 23 days, or every other week, or whatever my hormones seem to think might make sense. So unintelligent designer aside, it would be nice if there was more empathy and understanding for women who are going through this. It isn’t fun for us either. Try being a teacher and being unable to use a bathroom for 4 hours. Think on this…all of us of a certain age have spare clothing, like sweatshirts we can wrap around our waists just in case.I just packed a whole container for tomorrow’s hike of what I might need to get through it…because we are a society that doesn’t appreciate an aging woman and her needs…that decides that’s the best time to start ignoring women. They are no longer of childbearing age. They are no longer useful. They are just troublesome.

This is a lot of what my Celebrating Silver quilt is about…but there will probably be more drawings about all this fun stuff as the biology in me continues to change. Our bodies take us hostage. Or maybe we’ve always been hostage to the period, to the possibility of pregnancy. Maybe menopause will be a relief. The getting there may kill me.

So yeah, there was an opening tonight and I went and I talked to a lot of people and in general that was good…sometimes even funny…or supportive…and even inspiring. I mean, I cried all the way there (this Saturday night thing still fucks with my head…I am much better if I just stay home and be Kathy the Hermit), but on the way home, I was inspired to work on the current quilt…

I traced Wonder Under for a few hours and got through all 364 pieces (small, by my standards)…

It took almost 5 hours. Now I can cut them all out.

I had another conversation with a quilt artist who has been in some of the same invitational shows as me who is going through the same sort of brain issues I am…we spent so much mental energy getting Earth Stories and Celebrating Silver done (and in her case, one other…I guess I did one other, but it ended up not being in the show it was originally meant for), that it’s been hard focusing enough to get back into creating. It’s a push. We had to laugh when we realized we are both in the next invitational as well…and another quilt artist told me someone had told her I was going through some hard times, that they had read it on my blog. Sometimes I forget there are actual people reading this who might talk to me. I notionally understand that I have readers, but I’m really only talking to myself, talking it out, processing, trying to motivate myself to do better, get better. Stay focused. Make art. It’s weird when someone admits that they’ve read it…I have to wonder what they’re thinking. Wait, dammit, they know EVERYTHING (OK, not everything…believe it or not, I don’t write everything). What do I say now? Fuck.

I was surprised to see my quilt on the wall at the exhibit. It was bigger than I remembered it. Hanging on a big white wall…it had a presence I didn’t remember giving to it. I mean, I made it. I drew it. I put it together, sewed it, quilted it. I actually don’t remember much of the latter stages…happened this last summer. It was a filler quilt, filling up all the empty space in me, trying to keep my brain occupied so it didn’t jump over the edge, never to return. Watch the squiggly line, the thread running in and out of the fabric. Keep it occupied…keep it tied to reality, best you can. Quilting, for me, is good for that. My art is good for that. The one artist said that it had been like that for her, and then it stopped working.

I couldn’t handle that. I mean, maybe in the future, when I am stronger, when I am less broken…but I hope it never happens. This is my lifeline. This is all I’ve got. This is it. It can’t stop working.

We also talked about taking pictures from cars…

I do it all the time; so does she. People tell us we’re being unsafe, but we’re not. I drive with one hand, point the camera with the other, often on the steering wheel. It seems crazy, I guess…but it works. I wanted a picture of the rising moon in the clouds. I knew it would be gone by the time I got home, and it was. Not a great picture of the moon in the end, but maybe a good picture of the night…and my brain…that’s kinda what it looks like a lot lately. Squiggly lines. Crazy mess.

I’m taking the crazy mess to bed now…up early for hiking.

Make the Head Fit…

I drew…

Feb 14 14 004 small

It’s not done. I don’t know where it’s going. I had to make the head fit. That was fun. Or weird. Or something. I drew for like an hour or so…like right when I came home…well, after I talked to my philosophical drainage guy, the guy who is charging me more than my car is worth to redo my leach field and quotes Khalil Gibran while I’m signing papers. Exciting stuff. He gave me marital advice. Whoops! Too late. I don’t think that’s on the menu any more.

I drew because my head was in a bad place…had been for a couple of days. Hormones are out of whack…I mean, they’re really out of whack. Love being a woman of this age, perimenopause hitting me upside the head. Body doesn’t know what it’s doing. Fucks with the mind while it’s at it…and the moods. It’s annoying. No way to control it if you can’t take estrogen. You just have to ride it through.

So I drew and made dinner, and then I traced Wonder Under for over an hour…

Because I could. I mean, I could also grade, but there’s only so much suckiness a day can hold before it can hold no more. And I had reached my limit. The problem is that I don’t have moments of joy at the moment…I just have more or less of the suck. So I have to do things to make it more on the high side of the sucky wave instead of the low side. Artmaking. It’s what’s for dinner. I traced through about piece 240…so about 100 pieces to go. I need more Wonder Under (errands…hate errands). I need to stop being sick, even though it’s really low-level sickness…it’s messing with my head.

I put feet on them…

The two on the left are almost done…they need outlining around the eyeballs. Not sure what the one on the right needs. A life? Oh no…that’s me.

I don’t really know what it means…

But you should watch it anyway.

Yeah, it’s long, but you know what? Most of the good stuff is longer rather than shorter.

Art opening at VAM tomorrow…I will be there. Hopefully I’ll be well enough to hike on Sunday. I’m sure there’s other things I have to do. I’m trying not to think of them.

Beauty Is…

in the eye…

Of whomever is awake?

When I’m depressed, I stay up late and try to distract myself or make sense of everything. It’s hard to say sometimes which I’m actually doing…distraction or making sense. Maybe they are the same thing. If I try to trick myself into going to bed and falling asleep, my brain gets all ninja on my ass and won’t even calm down for sleep…it keeps kicking the shit out of me until I finally mentally collapse at like 2 in the morning. The alarm goes off seconds later, it seems, and I get up and do it all over again.

I read someone’s description of their life in the last year and they described it as having their heart shattered. Yeah. That. That’s the word I use. And destroyed. Damaged. Dropped. Broken. So going into V-day, a day I’ve never really liked or appreciated, with that feeling kinda sucks. Big time. I was going to draw tonight…there’s actually most of a drawing, the central portion anyway, fully formed in the center of my prefrontal cortex…is that where it belongs? It totally feels like it’s sitting right there in front, waiting to spill out of my eyeballs, but…from Wikipedia (sometimes a good source): the prefrontal cortex is associated with executive function, which relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social “control” (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially unacceptable outcomes). Many authors have indicated an integral link between a person’s personality and the functions of the prefrontal cortex.

So is that where my drawings belong? Probably not. I’m storing this one there though. Maybe there’s lots of storage space in there.

These pictures are from the Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus, Ohio. I was there last May. OK. I wasn’t there. Some previous iteration of Kathy was there and she took these pictures and never got around to posting them and then her life exploded and the pictures are still there, because they survive life explosions whether you like it or not, and the pictures are still beautiful, even if the being at the Conservatory, thinking about being there is painful. So. Here they are…because interspersed about the pain there might as well be beauty. If I can stop the painful stuff and stare at the beauty, I might just get through yet another day.

Actually, I did today quite well considering. I am still sick, but really strangely…it’s in my ear canals, not my sinuses, so my balance is off and I’m still really spacey. It’s like being on mind-altering drugs mostly, and I get a little giggly. The kids think it’s funny, but honestly, it’s better than crying or being angry. I just couldn’t help myself today when kids were describing light vocabulary and were completely and totally off the mark, and all the kids in the audience would look at me confused, and I would just start laughing. So yeah. Maybe the best place to be on V-day is with a bunch of 12- and 13-year-olds, who still think that true love and your soulmate exist, and live for that one piece of chocolate or a little paper V-day card from that really special person.

Occasionally my piece-of-shit camera takes a decent photo.

Most of this is Chihuly glass, in case you don’t recognize it.

Anyway. Taking the ninja, drawing-storing brain to bed. It will have to deal. I still don’t feel well…but hopefully will feel better tomorrow. V-day and my lousy depression can kiss my ass, along with a few other things on the planet.