That Distant Feeling…

There are many questions and issues running through my head, and yet it is completely empty. It’s like a river running over there and I’m standing over here on the rocks, where it is dry and dead to the touch. I’ve pushed it all off over there, the water rushing past and tumbling over stones and making loud noises…but it’s all over there. I think that’s the meditation…watching from over here. Not judging it, not trying to fix it, just watching it. It’s one of the benefits of meditation, but I’m not sure it ever solves anything. Mr. Meditation talks about not judging how you feel, not wanting to change how the mind or the body feels, but just accepting it, being with that feeling.

Yeah, but that sucks, Mr. Meditation. I mean, I feel like I’ve been with this feeling for an awfully long time now, and I watch it, and it’s still the annoying asshole who doesn’t put the dishes in the dishwasher, who leaves trash out on the counter (hey, I’m describing my teenagers…my depressed mind is just like a teenager). When will it move out? When will it wander off and harass some other poor soul?

You don’t have an answer for me, do you?

Anyway. So I read and I meditate and I exercise, and today I can get the point of light to expand to my whole body by tricking my mind into not thinking about it, not forcing it. Somehow it works…for about 5 seconds and then the dark sucks back in.

When I left for school this morning, Midnight was sitting on the light table, right on top of the drawing I’m tracing, staring at me.

I’ll guard this for you. OK? When you come back, it will still be here (with my black hair all over it).

You can’t disappoint a cat like that. So I started tracing Wonder Under around 10:30 PM…

For a little over an hour. I’m up to piece 135 or so. There are only 300 and something pieces in this quilt. It’s not small, but the pieces are big and fairly simplistic. It’s not a bad piece to work on after all the monster hours of the Celebrating Silver quilt…none of the steps will take super long because there are fewer pieces. That’s probably a good thing. I will eventually have to plan my summer quilt…I’m still debating on that…internally. I have one that needs to be done by November, but it’s not super big. I like to do a big quilt over the summer. I might be able to do both…I haven’t figured that out yet.

I’m still sick, but not bad. It’s really far, over there…hey, like the issues and crap of the river. Maybe meditation pushes EVERYTHING over there. Bet that missing sock is over there too.

The problem with this state of mind is that I don’t like that distant feeling…it feels like I’m not in touch with anything, it’s all shaky and unreal. There’s nothing to ground me, to hold me to the earth. There’s nothing to hold onto. I’m a helium balloon floating away. The sky is endless. Not even the clouds will stop me. It’s like I don’t even exist.

So I keep making art. Maybe it will hold me to the ground long enough for my brain to come back. Maybe it will prove that I exist.

A Plethora of Shows

I keep forgetting to post about all the shows I’m in that have just opened or are about to open…I’m too busy writing blogposts for that group to post them on my own page (sad but true). In January, the California Fibers exhibit at Soka University in Aliso Viejo, California, opened. I have two pieces in that show, Earth Mother…

And Untied…

The exhibit runs through May 8. It’s only open Monday through Friday from 9-5. I haven’t even seen this exhibit, except in photos…it does have 66 pieces in it, so it’s a fairly large exhibit.

Then just opened this last weekend is the California Fibers show in Ojai, California, at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, a much smaller space. The juror for Soka liked our work so much that he invited us to put a second exhibit on in a space he works for at the same time. Here is in Ojai at the moment.

NidaHere

The Ojai exhibit runs through March 30 and will include an artists’ panel on the closing day. I don’t think I’ll be at that…it’s a long drive and girlchild’s back surgery is only about a week before that. I can’t really commit to anything right now.

Then opening this Saturday at the Visions Art Museum is Coast to Coast, a joint juried exhibit between California Fibers and a group back east, New Image Artists…my quilt Buried Under is in this exhibit…

I will be at this opening, Saturday from 5-7 PM. This exhibit runs through April 19.

Then I also have two quilts at the Texas Quilt Museum in La Grange, Texas, as part of the People and Portraits exhibit. Both I Was Not Wearing a Life Jacket…

and Fully Medicated will be there through March 30.

I haven’t seen photos of this exhibit in situ yet…and I’m unlikely to make it to Texas in the next 6 weeks unfortunately…so will have to imagine what it looks like in a museum setting.

Anyway, if I seem a little off my head sometimes, more than usual, it might be because I’m trying to manage a lot of shipping of quilts and posting about shows for my groups, since I seemed to end up on publicity for both. It’s been a bit much the last month or so. But being in exhibits is a good thing, so you deal with the other stuff by telling yourself that. Some people say, well isn’t that why you make the art? So you can get it into exhibits? Actually, no. I make it because I have to…because I’d go truly crazy otherwise. The exhibits are just the thing you’re supposed to do when you’re an artist. Plus sometimes it actually makes me feel good to know my work’s out there.

So there we are.

A Gesture of Release

Girlchild got me sick. I knew it yesterday, felt it lurking. This morning, I felt spacey…all day, spacey…but not really sick. Still a sore throat, headachey. I’ve had my flu shot. Think this is just a cold, but it’s holding off…maybe I’m actually fighting the damn thing. Maybe I’ll feel like shit tomorrow…maybe not? I don’t know. I debated going to the gym…for two reasons. (1) I didn’t feel great and (2) I didn’t want to infect people. In the end, I went. I needed it for my mental and physical state, and honestly, I felt better after I went. I disinfected every machine I was on (but I made sure I touched every kid who is annoying at school…OK, not really…but we did joke about it). I got to work out and read, and I came home and felt OK for about 2 hours before the spacey/sore throat stuff came back. We’ll see what tomorrow feels like. If it’s going to take me down, I want it to do it quickly, so I’m better before my weekend hike (priorities).

Girlchild had a soccer game, but she didn’t go to practice because she was sick yesterday, so she didn’t play…I did watch the sky…

It was beautiful…although apparently I should have been looking behind the bleachers…

I stitched during the game…

I think these two are almost done…I think all I have to do is stitch around the eyeballs and put the eye buttons on. Oh wait. They need feet. Damn. That’s a bunch of bullion knots. That’s time. Then there’s only one more of the Month 3 birds to finish. Then on to Month 4. Yes, I’m slow, but guaranteed I was the only person stitching palestrina knots in that stadium. It’s progress…on something. I measure my entire life a little tiny bit at a time, progress on this project and that project. I got one stitch done here. I got 30 minutes done there. It’s proof that I have things to do, to keep me going.

Some days are like that. What’s the one thing I can work on today that will let me feel like I’ve accomplished something decent? Not grades. Not dishes.

I came home to this…

There was a phone number too. It was shoved in the door handle. I too need joob and don’t know where to look. Lupe needs to be more specific.

After dinner (late), I organized all the financial aid paperwork; I’m missing three signatures from the boychild and then everything can go. Then I ironed his interviewing clothes…it’s Columbia tomorrow, he hopes the last interview. Probably true. Who knows. Then we wait. Apparently my brother and SIL are placing bets on what schools he will get into of those he’s applied to…better than the woman I hiked with who was the Queen of Negative Thinking about college apps. Whatever. He’ll get in somewhere, and that somewhere will have to be good enough at least for the first year. Am I worried? Of course. I’m mom. I worry. I’m Kathy. I worry. I will worry less in a couple of days when these damn envelopes are gone.

I meditated. That was not-so-good. I’ve spent the last 10 days trying to visualize a point of light in the center of my chest, warm and bright like the sun, which is supposed to expand and spread to fill my whole body. I suck at this. I start the spread and then black tarry stuff from my fingers and toes starts to encroach on sunny brightness and swallows it. Yesterday and today it was tears, oceans of tears, turning the sunlight into steam, covering it up, drowning it. I was trying so freakin’ hard to force the light to spread, and I finally stopped. I let it just sit at the size it could be in me right then, about the size of a cantaloupe. Interestingly, this is supposed to be an openness to creativity, which is not something with which I have a problem…so there’s just something about that meditative avenue that is causing me grief. Seriously weepy grief. Sometimes you just have to let the mind do its thing and you watch it and try to learn from it, but trying to force the change is not going to be a successful endeavor.

Then it was late and I had to choose…sleep? Or artmaking? I learned my lesson last night…I didn’t spend much time tracing, but I did spend some…

I got motivated after working on that drawing last night to finally restart the tracing on the mammogram quilt. I think I just need to have multiple projects in the works so I can pick and choose when I’m in a mood…something easy, something hard? Something that is totally engaging vs something that is more light and simple? Tracing isn’t usually easy, but it is engaging. And it helped. I was already a bit distant and numb from the gym experience (too many days of crying at the gym lately), so I guess I’m even more into that hole, but I’m not sure it’s a bad thing at the moment. It just is.

I committed to another challenging hike in March…looking forward to it, although I’m a little nervous about it…less so now that I know it is less elevation gain than San Miguel, but I don’t kid myself…it won’t be easy. It will be worth it, though. I made a comment on the last hike about dispelling demons from the tips of my fingers as I walked, and I think maybe I need to think of a way to do that for real, like a symbol of that maybe? I think this would be a good hike for that, although I don’t know if I feel comfortable with doing that with a bunch of mostly strangers (I know a few people who will be on the hike, but not well). We’ll see. Maybe. It’s on my mind…ritual to remove sad? Not a wake, not a memorial, but something more in the dirt. Thinking about it. How to persuade the brain to release things…a gesture of release?

Meanwhile, my gestures are in the art world…releasing grief and sad and even anger through the drawings. The guns, they’re about anger and pain…not hurting myself, but trying to mitigate hurt done on me. Trying to make it hurt less by drawing hurt? I can’t really explain how my brain is working…but it is trying to work through some of these things with symbols, images of things that hurt…thorns, cuts, tears, wounds…another gesture of release? Who knows.

The Mental Health Trifecta

I was going to go to bed an hour and a half ago, but realized as I sat down at the computer to write a post that I was depressed. I mean, yeah, I’m always depressed, but I was more so than usual. I spent most of the day running around doing errands or digging holes (seriously) or grading papers or inputting grades, and it wasn’t a very satisfying day. I don’t get any jollies out of all that shit, and in the old days, I would just shake that off and assume tomorrow would bring something better, and it usually did. Not so now. Because it usually doesn’t bring something better unless I force the issue.

And yes, it means less sleep, but I’ve said before that sleep doesn’t really make me happy. Well, at the moment, nothing makes me happy, but sleep doesn’t even bring peace. Or something approaching contentment…because that’s the closest I get to happy now. Happy is way over there. I don’t even recognize it. It’s wearing a disguise.

Anyway. So I stood up, went and got a drink of cold milk (because the girlchild infected me with the first illness I’ve had in 8 months and my throat hurts), and went in to the light table. I had recopied some drawings I call the triptych, which is interesting, because there are currently only two parts, not three, and I was originally planning on making three quilts that would hang next to each other, and now I think it should just be one really wide one that’s not very high. Not a triptych at all. Whatever. Maybe I’ll just call it that anyway to confuse people. I had tried taping it together a few months ago and it was a fucking disaster…nothing would line up and I just gave up. I needed to tape it together to finish it…I couldn’t see it all any more because it was on multiple pages and I couldn’t hold it all in my head.

So I recopied it. And I taped the two sections together, starting with the easier one…

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It has fewer lines that have to meet up, so it taped together really well…and then I did the other one, the pain-in-the-ass-from-before one…

Expecting the worst. Except it worked. I think part of it was that I only enlarged it 200% this time instead of 250%. OK, I don’t know why that would make a difference, except that it takes fewer pieces to enlarge to the smaller size, so there’s less room for things to get out of alignment. That’s my current guess anyway.

I had originally drawn some connections between the two, so I redrew them on top (mostly because I couldn’t get the leaves above to behave on the copy they were on, so I cut them all off and used the other ones, so then I had to add what I had already drawn on the other page…confused? I’m not…and I’m the one who counts on this one).

So right now, I have a drawing that is about 68″ wide and 28″ high. I’m debating adding onto the left and a little on the right…and some below. Because that’s not crazy or anything. This thing has potential. I might be able to get my butt in gear and actually DO something with a purpose if I can get this to the next stage. Maybe.

I don’t have much focus at the moment. There’s no deadline that’s pressing on me. There probably should be one, but it hasn’t become urgent yet. It will.

I was drawing this disaster last night…the arm is wrong, the feet are wrong, the whole thing is a mess…

But I like y’all to see that I draw things, get this far, bang my head on the table, and move on. I may try again, but leave enough room for the feet to point the right direction or redirect the legs, and make sure the arm doesn’t look like it’s been attached after the fact…OR…make it REALLY look like it’s attached after the fact. Whatever. I was tired. And apparently coming down with sick. So there. You want to get better at drawing? Do LOTS of it. Assume about 90% will be awful. If you do better than that? You’re awesome. And then do it for lots of years, over and over again.

There. Now I don’t have to teach classes, because that’s all I would ever say…go make some art. Then make some more. Assume some of it is bad and will never see the light of day. Now make some more. Keep making it. Don’t stop. Get angry about some of it. Doubt yourself and your work. Occasionally take a deep breath and know you did good. Then do another one that sucks. There. You’re an artist.

I also dug some holes today…the septic tank got clogged again and we couldn’t even get showers or flush a toilet…which is a problem. You know. The leach field is being replaced on Friday, but we can’t really go without showers, toilets, and running water for that many days, so I had to pay to get it pumped again. This has been a really nasty shitty year for expenses. I keep breathing deep and deciding what job I’m getting for the summer…who will hire me for just 8 weeks? I don’t know.

I needed to save the $100 they would charge me to unearth the tops of the septic tank pumpouts…exciting stuff. So I shoveled myself…

Anyway. The plus is that my brain is in a better place after an hour of cutting up bits of paper and taping them to each other. Seems crazy if you ask me, but it’s a special mental state my brain goes into when it’s doing certain artmaking activities. It has to evaluate what it’s doing and it gets engaged with the process and the line itself and lining things up, and it really is a magical thing. Now if I could just get rid of that damn eye twitch…it’s back. I think it will leave when I finally get all the financial aid stuff out of the house. I hope. Or not. But at least I’m in a better frame of mind to go to sleep…I wish I didn’t have to keep reminding myself of the mental health trifecta. I seem to have the first two down pat…exercise and meditation…I just need to keep the third one in mind…make art, you silly woman, or you will be even unhappier.

Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve Hike

On Saturday, a beautiful day in February in San Diego, I went on what ended up being over a 10-mile hike in Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve. We started out at the western entrance near Sorrento Valley. There is a parking lot, but it had rained Thursday and a little bit on Friday, so the lot was closed (although it had opened by the time we returned). This meant having to park in a nearby residential area…by nearby, I mean almost half a mile away…this is coming down the hill to the entrance.

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You can see the start of this end of the trail, plus the trail off to Lopez Canyon, down below from the road. San Diego is full of canyons and open-space areas like this…

I’ve lived here for 25 years and still haven’t been to even half of them. It was a bright and sunny day…

This is the view of the hillsides from the parking lot. The entire preserve is surrounded by office buildings and houses, although they are fairly unobtrusive for most of the hike.

Here is a link to the website for the preserve, which includes trail maps. We hiked from the western entrance to the waterfall and then out towards the eastern entrance, where one of our members continued to her house, and then we looped back on a different trail to the parking lot.

Someone had placed rocks on the fenceposts…

These are typical California rolling hills, very dry at the moment, as we’re in yet another drought…even with last week’s rain, there is not a lot of green popping up.

You can barely see the houses on the ridge to the right.

There was some mud on the trail, but mostly it was dry. We encountered lots and lots of bikers, some in huge groups of 30, and a few runners.

There was actually water in the preserve. Here’s the official group photo, minus the organizer, whom I’m hiked with before.

It was a very fast hike…there weren’t many hills, but the organizer was also a superfast person…you can see the rest of the group way far behind us (yes, we did stop and let them catch up occasionally).

That’s why I’m sore today…speed exertion, not hilly stuff…although there was a little of it on the way to the waterfall.

This is one of the areas where we just had to stand aside to let all the bikes go past…the trail wasn’t wide enough for both of us.

When I lived in Britain for a year, this is the landscape I missed…that brown and olive green color, rolling grassy hillsides, California live oaks, the green showing where the stream lies.

The waterfall is in volcanic rock…

Not rare in San Diego…

The foam in the water was somewhat disturbing…especially when it looked like big blobs of detergent. Gotta love that after-storm effluvium.

Another group photo above the waterfall…most of us are sweaty at this point. It wasn’t hot, high 60s, low 70s, but we weren’t moving slowly. I think I said that already.

The leader took one photo of me talking while walking. Yes. I do actually talk sometimes. I had discussions about blogging, bad job situations, negative people, colleges (I tried to avoid that one), kids, being outside in nature, SEO, website traffic, and books about the Pacific Crest Trail…this group was fairly diverse.

There were shady areas on the hike…this will be a hot hike come summer, but the shady bits might make it doable.

That’s one problem with Southern California, is that there are about 4-5 months of the year when certain activities like hiking aren’t particularly easy or pleasant. I think this is when normal people go to the beach. I’m trying to get in as many hikes as possible before the heat comes…I don’t do heat well.

And there are lots of stretches of dry, hot, treelessness on this hike.

It was fine today though. We did a couple of stream crossings, some more wet than others…

I told you it was a gorgeous day, didn’t I? I took lots of deep, cleansing breaths, banishing demons from the tips of my fingertips out into the brush.

The peacefulness of these groves of sycamores and oaks was wonderful.

And even the vast expanse of trail and sky was soothing…

It’s even better being out front with nothing human messing with the view…

I love the sky…

The trails were a variety of straight, wide, and flat, with some rocky bits, and some narrower rocky trails near the waterfall. Usually we could walk side-by-side, and didn’t have to go single file. You had to keep your ears open for bikes coming up behind, though.

This stretch had very few bikes…

When we finished, we still had to hike the 1/2 mile up the concrete hill to our cars, but it wasn’t too bad.

The actual hike that we did in the preserve was about 9.4 miles, and we added another 0.9 on the hike to and from cars. We did it in just over 3 hours, so pretty fast (and that included a couple of stops). It was a nice day for it. If you go look at the trail maps, you can get a better idea of all the different access points to the preserve and the mileages involved. There were lots of little kids and families out for walks or rides in the space, and many mountain bikes. There’s also a historic adobe on the preserve, although we didn’t see that on this trip. Those living in the Penasquitos area have a great resource nearby in this preserve.

Vacuuming the Brain

Another no-posting night. I was drawing instead…

I’ve done drawings of the bent-over figure before…but she has an umbrella this time. These are people who are weighed down by life, I think. My people are always damaged and cracked these days. Not surprising, I guess. Drawing is a way to move stuff out of my brain…to dust out the corners, vacuum the floors. I really should draw every day (time! not enough of it!).

Once I was done drawing, there was nothing left in my head but sadness, so I took that to bed, tucked it in, and tried to get it to stay asleep for a reasonable amount of time. It likes to wake up around 4 in the morning and torture me. Sure enough, it did. I told it to shut up and rolled over, put the pillow on my head. That got me another hour or so of not-pain. That’s what these weekend mornings are now…painful. Work mornings are such a rush of having to get up for work and all that, so I can’t get bogged down in moody crap. Weekend mornings don’t have the same urgency. I’m tired, I want to sleep in, maybe lie about in bed for a while, but it’s a depressing place, so I don’t do it. Which in itself is depressing. Vicious cycle.

I get to this point in my head where I just say to myself that everything is depressing…move on. If you’re moving, maybe you’ll see something that’s not so bad. Maybe you’ll even FEEL something that’s not so bad. Standing still? Depressing. Don’t do it.

Whatever.

So yesterday I did a long, semi-painful hike (in that I am still feeling it today…it wasn’t hard, just fast), I did a lot of financial aid forms, I wrote three blogposts for groups I’m in (although I’m waiting for info on two of them to be able to finish), and I finally finished cutting out all the fabrics for Ivy’s Memorial quilt…

Wool on the left, which actually needs to be trimmed down, and cotton on the right, which will be appliqued (yes, by hand) down to the wool bits. It took just over 4 hours to pick everything out, longer than normal for me, but I think that was because of limited wool options slowing me down.

I can’t say this piece thrills me…I mean, it’s a memorial to a dead dog that we miss a lot, and maybe in the mood I’m in, memorials to dead things are not a good plan, but it is something I wanted to get to the next stage, so I did. Usually I take a photo of all the fabrics used in the quilt, but this one isn’t really one of my art quilts and I couldn’t be bothered to try to figure out what in this pile (including cat) I had actually used…

So I didn’t (I used a lot of it). And then I took all the wool bits and zipped them into one of those plastic bag things that bedding comes in when you buy it…I love those bags and never use them. I don’t use wool that much in the stuff I do, but I do want to keep it all together. I don’t want to waste a drawer in my office with it, though, and honestly, it was going to be two drawers, and I need those for cottons (which are taking over the space), because I use them so much more…so I think I will store this under my bed with the crazy-ass flesh-colored crazy-quilt fabrics. There is sometimes an issue with storing under the bed, in that you forget they are there, so that’s a problem, but when the kids move out, I am just going to turn this whole house into a scary Hoarders episode of fabric stash, so who cares?

OK. Not really. OR! If I do that, then you know I’ve gone completely off the deep end. Note to kids: good luck cleaning mom’s stuff out when she dies. I’m not making it easy for you.

I finished the second book in the Zita the Spacegirl series, Legends of Zita the Spacegirl, by Ben Hatke…

These are quick reads for adults, and really are meant for elementary-school-aged kids, maybe middle school. I actually liked this one more than the first one. The story seemed to hold together better.

There’s a robot that pretends to be Zita and the two try to save a planet. There is a third book, but I didn’t get it from the library yet. I probably will, just because now I want to know what happens (and yes, they both end on cliffhangers…if you’re like me, you can’t NOT read the next one).

We do have a 3-day weekend (thank you, Lincoln), so I have an extra day, which is good, because the to-be-graded pile is deadly, I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished much yet, and I still have a to-do list that is a mile long. It starts this morning with a trip to the gym, which is a good thing…the muscles from yesterday are complaining and the best thing for them is to make them do more. Plus it’s good for the depressed part of the brain…well, people keep saying that exercise helps with depression. Then again, there’s a lot of things that people say about how to fix depression, and sometimes I think it’s just not a fixable thing. It’s there and if you’re lucky, you’ll figure out a way to live with it or persuade it to go away. I can’t take a screwdriver to it or make a list of things that make me happy and have it just disappear.

More drawing tonight I think. Hope. It’s like vacuuming the dust bunnies out of the brain.

Dig Deep

I was going to write this last night, but couldn’t. The tired finally took over. It’s always a clue when I fall asleep in meditation.

This week has been mentally rough. I don’t really know why, but I knew Friday had the potential to be a mental clusterfuck, so I woke up and told myself that it wasn’t going to be that…that I was going to be productive, focused on a goal, and I wasn’t going to let that sad bitch inside me fuck me over. It was a test day, so the kids are super quiet, yet the unprepared ones are more demanding than ever, and it’s often just a difficult day anyway, but it leaves me too much mental space to wallow. I often get in a really bad place on test days, and they’re usually on a Friday, and then that fucks the weekend over.

But I didn’t. I made it through and I wasn’t in a shitty mood. I got lots of things logged in. I had a couple kid issues and I handled them. For once this year, after 12 years of teaching, I felt like I had it, I was in control, I could do it.

I cried in counseling, but not like the world was ending. Just trying to suss out what I’m depressed about exactly so that I can attack that and make it leave. (I typed “make it leaves”…now there’s a drawing popping into mind…I really need to make time to draw this weekend.)

And then I got home. And the toilets are still backing up, so I had called the plumber, and he told me to check something on the septic before he committed to coming out, so I did, and then called him, and he said to call the septic people, and yeah. We think it’s the leach field. Like it’s done. Like it needs replacing. Like thousands of dollars.

And I lost it. I mean, it’s understandable. I have too much on my plate, I’m financially not in a great place, and I’m depressed. It does often feel like the universe is out to get me at the moment, that everything under the sun is conspiring to fuck me over. I know notionally that is not true, that I live in an older house and it needs to be maintained, and I don’t do a great job of that due to time and money, but that sometimes things just stop working or need to be replaced, and those things cost money.

And so I tried to call my parents and they didn’t answer, which is probably a good thing, because I would have lost it. The phrase, “I can’t do this any more,” has been in my head so many times over the last 6 months, and the reality is…I DO do it. (huh huh huh…she said do-do). I do. I get up off the fucking ground and I do it. I researched home equity loans and I have my tax refund coming in (which was going to get me through the summer), and I will just have to make it work somehow.

Then the girlchild came home in tears and bounced back into crazy hyper after I fed her (she’s like a puppy sometimes, because then she falls asleep), and she said something about needing an adult and here she has me, the crazy depressoid (not her words…mine), and I said that I had called my parents and they didn’t even answer (it’s OK…I dealt)…and she sent me this…

That’s it. I need an adultier adult. Like, dammit…I’m the adult. There’s no one else here but me. I’m pretty capable though. I got the septic guy to feel sorry for me (not hard really). The drainage guy (who is the fixer guy) is coming this afternoon to see if he can figure out if it’s just the leach field or if it’s something else. I just dumped all the sand out of my hiking boots from last week’s hike so I can put them on for this week’s hike. The girlchild got herself up and out for the ACT this morning. Boychild has some scholarship stuff to do, especially now that there will be even less money and UCBerkeley sent him an application for a scholarship for low-income students. Fuck. Now I’m low income…which is funny (not really), because compared to a lot of my students, I’m not low income…although they have iPads and I have a mini that was a gift…but the boychild qualifies. He has another interview next week for the college of his choice…so I hope that goes well. Who knows, though? There are no fucking guarantees for anything, as my life has slammed down on me over and over.

Which brings me to the title of the post. Girlchild’s soccer team yells this out as one of their cheers during games…Dig Deep! It’s amusing to me, because I don’t think most of those girls really have to (or choose to) dig deep for anything, even the physical demands of the game. You can see a few giving their absolute all, but most of them don’t. And some of their personal lives may require them to dig deep emotionally…we can’t ever know, but when I got up this morning after a longer than usual night’s sleep, after yesterday’s slump, I heard them yelling in my head…Dig Deep. Yeah. I am. You know I am. Every day.

Watching the Mood

I couldn’t process enough to write last night. It’s interesting (to me at least) that I use the blog to process where my head (and body) went during the day. It helps me have some sort of closure about feelings and actions and progress…in my emotional life, my artistic life, and my work life. I need to see progress, moving forward, or I get more depressed…ironic that…being depressed makes me more depressed. I’m depressed about being depressed. It really is a stupid vicious cycle and the lamest stuff sets me off. I do my best to process my way out of it, but it doesn’t always work.

I don’t even know what it was about yesterday…I worked my ass off running a Jeopardy test review game yesterday. I didn’t have time to think in class, but apparently that fucked with my brain even more. Like I know today will be bad…it’s a test day, so it’s quiet (except for the dipwads who aren’t prepared and want to let everyone know that and disrupt during the test, which is why I give my little personal responsibility speech beforehand), and my brain has PLENTY of time to wander the sand dunes of depressoville. There’s not a whole lot I can do about that except realize it and try to talk myself out of it. But yesterday? Busy days are usually the OK days, the days I didn’t wallow, didn’t ruminate, didn’t do the Eeyore thing, the Marvin the Paranoid Android thing. I’ll be numb and flat, but not down and out.

At the end of school, I got a text from the boychild with this…

who had been hanging out with Calli in the back yard (Calli being the girlchild’s Golden Retriever). Um. I knew we had raccoons…I’ve heard them on the roof and in the tree outside my bedroom window…seen them in that tree too. But lying on the pavement outside the pool fence? In broad daylight? No, it had no rabies symptoms. By the time I got home, it had gone into the pool enclosure and was lying on the deck by the side of the pool (like you do in San Diego in winter), snoring. Loudly. Seriously sleeping and snoring.

This morning, it’s gone. Which I guess is a good thing, because I thought maybe it was sick and I’d get up and find a raccoon corpse in my backyard, a corpse the size of a small Golden Retriever honestly, and then I’d have to do something about it. Raccoons are beautiful creatures, really. I just don’t want it living in the backyard with the dog, I guess. Calli probably thought it was a big fat cat (she’s not very smart). Yes, we have skunks too…hopefully she’s figured out that they’re not cats.

It rained yesterday…so that raccoon was sleeping out there in the rain when I left for the girlchild’s game. There is nothing more miserable (in San Diego…not part of the Winter Vortex at all) than a winter soccer game at night in the rain: cold metal bleachers, wind, rain, everyone huddling under umbrellas and still getting wet…

The girl on the left had just arrived…that’s why she’s still relatively dry. I actually managed to stay quite dry until I had to leave early for my meeting. I had a waterproof blanket, the umbrella stuffed into my bra so I could stitch during the game, and a padded seat under my butt. Two jackets? I did OK. I did leave early though, so I did not suffer the entire game…

We haven’t had too many rainy games this season, so I shouldn’t complain.

This is the progress from Academic League and soccer…

It got too hard to do drizzle stitches in the rain, so I eventually quit on the tail of the bottom bird. Remember my original plan (hope?) of finishing 3 of these every two games? Not happening. At all. Oh well. It’s not that it’s hard; it’s just time consuming. Maybe THAT’S what I should do during the test today, instead of grading and logging in papers (no, not really…I need to get caught up on grading). The birds will get done eventually. It’s not the end of the world.

At my stitching meeting, I continued my incredibly slow progress on the girlchild’s Christmas stocking, started when I was pregnant with her in 1997. Oh yeah.

It’s a good thing she is semi-patient. She’s really not, but… The pattern is irritating in that the symbol for the mauve color is darker than the symbol for the green…but the green in real life is darker, so my visually addled brain keeps confusing the two colors on the pattern, because it thinks the darker symbol is the darker color…which is really weird when you think about it, but then also very logical. I suspect most designers don’t think about things like that: the darkness of the symbol corresponding with the darkness of the color. The mauve is a filled-in black circle and the green is a letter S, very open and light. Even making it a G instead of an S would have helped my brain, I think. So I kept losing my place (no, I don’t use highlighters).

Anyway. Did I do anything art-related? Nope. No energy. Absolutely exhausted on the drive TO stitching…finally went to bed sort of early (for me, anyway), and then was up in the night with an unhappy tummy. There’s seems to be no winning the sleep game at the moment. I really tried to get motivated on two different things, but even cutting stuff out sounded like more effort than I was capable of last night. I’m sure that’s contributing to the low mood. It’s lovely that I know all the things that are affecting me, plus and minus, but I still can’t seem to get far enough ahead of the moods to prevent them from happening. I mean, this is MY brain. I do a pretty damn good job of paying attention to all the stuff it’s saying and trying to treat it right and listen carefully and act accordingly, but it doesn’t seem to matter. When it’s in a mood, it’s in a mood…a 6-month-plus-long mood. And yes, I do often wonder if it’s still a mood or if this is just the new me. Not OK.

Tonight…it will be better…whether that’s artmaking or sleep or just spending time with those cranky-ass beasts I gave birth to…it’s got to be better.

A Small Baby Bird

My mind literally skittered away from meditation tonight; I couldn’t force the light to fill my body. I am supposed to start from a pinpoint of light in my chest and visualize it filling my body with warmth and light. I can’t. I just can’t. There is black tarry sludge in the edges, and it’s pushing back at the light, forcing it to shrink back into the center and sometimes just disappear. It sizzles when it touches the light, lets off a rancid smell, chemical, burns the nostrils.

Wow. That’s not like a good visual of my mood at all, is it? In fact, a drawing pretty much popped into my head fully drawn when I was meditating, which really turned into trying to fight the sludge away and continue to breathe like I’m supposed to. Sometimes it just seems so pointless to even try, but I know I feel worse when I don’t. So I just do. Again and again.

I need to try to go to sleep at a semi-reasonable hour tonight. I can feel the mood worsening this week and I know some of it is hormones, some is stress, but some is sleep. If I’m lucky, I might get an extra 30 minutes tonight. Maybe. And if I’m really lucky, I’ll have all the financial aid stuff done and packed up for mailing some time this weekend, so I won’t have to think about it any more. I’m hoping that will help. Then again, maybe it’s distracting me from the other shit.

I’m thinking about this quilt again…

One Paycheck…because my life is back to that again…looking at the available money and taking deep breaths, trying to figure out survival again. I am so tired of it…so tired of worrying about money and expenses and how to pay for stuff. I had it rephotographed because it’s going to be in a book on quilts and human rights that will be published later this year. I know that once the kids get through school and hopefully get jobs that I will be OK, because I will only have to take care of myself, and I think I can do that. I think I can keep one head above water. Three heads? When two are in college? I’m having a lot harder time visualizing that. Maybe that’s the black tarry sludge…it’s worry and depression and panic and anxiety and grief, all rolled into a burrito of shit. A creeping burrito of coming-to-get-you-in-the-middle-of-the-night. Stephen King hasn’t written the single-mom-paying-for-college book yet…now there’s a scary-ass horror story for you.

Deep breaths. I meditate at school all the time now. I kick one class out into the hallway, close the door, pick up all the science journals, adjust the planner on the screen, stare at the wall and breathe…one two three four…you can make it to the door…five six seven eight…you can do this. You can’t rhyme all of it, but you can do it. You can open the door and let them in and breathe out the crazy and the sad and the dreary depth of grief that overwhelms you sometimes as you walk around the room, trying to persuade kids to work. Feeling this one’s forehead and wondering why he got sent to school with this fever and headache, talking quietly to that one about how to change what’s happening with her stuff right now, praising this other one for doing work you’ve never seen him do, chastising that other one for a giant brain fart day. You understand those days. You have them too, and somehow you get through. You grade. You teach. You email. You do all the right things. You walk through the black tarry sludge, which sucks at your feet and threatens to stop oxygen flow to your cells, but you push through, slog through, put your shoulder to it and move on through it.

But it never ends. Never fucking ends.

I needed to draw tonight, but it got too late. I had to make a test review powerpoint. I thought I had one for this test, but apparently not. And I graded because the girlchild commandeered my computer, so I watched part of Downton Abbey while doing that, and it made me cry. Dammit. I didn’t even get through the first fucking episode of this season without losing it. I’m such an emotional disaster area. Just stay away from me. It’s like nuclear waste. I feel like it just radiates off of me.

It must. You must be able to just look at me and know.

I heard this the other morning and went…NO. Why? What the hell?

Chvrches: Bela Lugosi’s Dead

And then I thought I might actually like it. And now I’ve heard it like 7 times, and I still don’t know. It’s definitely not Bauhaus. But I think I might like it.

You know, there really isn’t a conclusion to today’s post. I keep thinking someday I will get on here and yell, hooray! The depression is gone! The witch is dead! Hallelujah! Thank you all for joining me on this journey out of the hole! Whoop! Now let’s get on with what equates to normal with Kathy. Seriously, when I read old posts, I wonder who that person is? Even when she’s stressed, I don’t fucking recognize her. I don’t even know who she is. And that makes me so incredibly sad. Really sad.

Yeah. Well. I guess that’s what hope looks like, a small baby bird in my hand who is barely raising its head for water. At least it’s still alive.

Buried in Fiber

It’s OK. I did art stuff tonight. I probably should have gone to bed earlier instead, but…I wonder which will prolong my life more? More sleep or more art? I’m voting for the latter. Trying to balance the two, but really? The art is more calming. Sleep isn’t restful. It’s full of bad dreams and nasty sad. I’d rather be playing with fabric. I started cutting out flower parts…

which is complicated by the fact that there are wool parts of flowers and cotton parts of flowers, so I’m cutting all the wool first, and then I’ll find cotton that works with it, since I have a fairly limited stash of wools and a vast stash of cottons. I made it through almost all the flowers…at least the wool parts…and there’s a squirrel and a bunny in there too.

I need to figure out the banners and all the cotton bits. There’s not a lot left…maybe tomorrow night? Except financial aid is still a mess and school stuff needs to get done too.

I stitched at soccer…

I forgot to take pictures of the girlchild playing. He played her tonight, for real. That’s good. She did well. They won. Another game Thursday. It’s kind of a routine now…two games a week, one Academic League match a week. I keep having to remind myself what day it is…do I bring my stitching to school? Do I bring my Uggs and sweatshirt to school? Will I have time to go home first? Too much thinking. My brain isn’t good at thinking any more. It’s obsessive about the bad stuff, runs over and over it, trying to make sense of it, having conversations with myself. But give it a real task? Yikes. It’s done.

I went to the gym. I meditated. I finished two books…The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon…

who is only 22 years old. This is her debut novel, the first of seven in the series. It’s called a supernatural dystopia, and definitely has sci fi overtones, whatever that means. I liked the idea and most of the book, but kept getting lost in vocabulary and this foreign race, the Rephaim, and some other race, the Emim, which sometimes didn’t make sense. Plus the setup of clairvoyant levels is supremely complicated. But it has promise…I would read another one.

The second book I finished was Zita the Spacegirl, by Ben Hatke…

Yes. This is a kids’ graphic novel. A group I’m in has a graphic novel/comics book club, and I have never been to the meetings, but thought I could try to read the books at least, and maybe someday swing one of the meetings. I had a hard time with this book…not because it’s written to a younger audience, but because I got confused by events in the story. Plus I honestly didn’t like Zita much…she’s kind of an annoying squirrel, to use a term I use on some of my students. I don’t know if this book would appeal more to a younger audience, like a late elementary age? Maybe. I do have the second book as well. I did like the giant mouse and the round monster thing, and the spider robots were cool (even though they are evil). It was kind of an eh.

Kind of like my life. Eh. Which means it’s probably time to go to sleep. The later it gets, the sadder I get. I did find another hike for the weekend, I think. I actually found two, signed up for one reluctantly, then found the other one and switched. Seems like with the three-day weekend it would be lame not to go on a long hike…so that’s what I aimed for in my planning.

Ugh. I’m hoping with more regular influxes of art activity the days won’t feel so shitty. We’ll see. I’m tired of the shitty feeling. I keep doing things to improve my mood, trying to think positively about my future. Yeah. Well. The fun thing about depression is that it makes it very hard to think positively about anything, and when past experience is slapping you upside the face, pulling your feet out of the mud long enough to even Stand the Fuck Up and Go Make Art is difficult. I can’t be that depressoid who does nothing but sleep. I can mope and iron fabric at the same time if I have to. There’s some chance of surviving this if I keep my hands buried in fiber.