A Strangely Free Day

So I was not at school yesterday because San Diego County is on fire. Nine fires, but most of them are in North County, not down here. We can occasionally see smoke plumes. They are affecting air quality a little bit down here, but nothing like the last two big firestorms in 2003 and 2007. So they closed all the county schools for safety reasons. Stands to reason, since school staff don’t always live in the same neighborhood as their school. Anyway, it’s like a free day for those of us not dealing with evacuations and fires (hope everyone we know is OK). So what did I do? I went to bed early (for me, before midnight) and tried to sleep in. Unfortunately, I have animals and they don’t agree, so I got up and dealt with their needs, made a cup of tea, and went back to bed with a book. I often dream of being able to do that, but I’d really rather train one of the animals to bring me the tea. Working on that.

Eventually I got up and fed myself, and then I cleaned floors. Seriously, it’s been driving me nuts. I haven’t had enough time to get them done. My kids are freakin’ useless lately because of the AP tests (which finished Wednesday! Yay! Now of course they will use the excuse of end-of-school projects not to help…cough cough…bullshit!), so nothing is getting done. I didn’t get home Wednesday night until almost 9 PM because of a union meeting, soccer stuff, and car stuff, so I was exhausted yesterday anyway…that’s a typical scenario, so that’s why nothing gets cleaned. I made an effort last week to sort out all the returned quilts and get stuff cleared out of the entryway. Today, I loaded up all the thrift shop bags into the car and cleaned those floors…it looks so much better. I wish I could afford a cleaning lady (although it might stress me out more knowing I had to straighten up for her)…I just can’t keep up. Yes, I’m lame. I’m constantly picking up after the teens, though…they will do it if reminded (well, one has to scream at me first because she was going to do it anyway but then I had to remind her and that just pisses her off, even though if I never reminded her, it never would actually get done), but since they’re only here half time, it just doesn’t work well.

Anyway. I didn’t do any fabric stuff Wednesday night due to exhaustion. Then I spent all day shopping with the girlchild, because she needs clothes (so do I, but I wasn’t particularly successful). At least the stores were air-conditioned, and she used up four gift cards (one only had $1.96 on it, which I was not informed of when we went INTO the store). Now I just need to get boychild suited up for prom, because, yes, he’s going, and no, not with one other person…but with a group, but I’m still pleased he’s going…the last school dance he went to was the Halloween dance in 6th grade. He didn’t like the noise. Anyway. One more thing on my list of things to do.

It was 105 degrees here too, so running around doing lots of stuff wasn’t a reality. I had quilt class last night, so I cut out pieces in someone else’s air conditioning…

And then I came home and cut more pieces out in my non-air-conditioning.

Those are actually the trimmings. I save them to make sure I didn’t drop a piece in there, because sometimes I do. This is going to take forever, I think. Actually, Earth Stories, which is bigger and has more pieces, only took 12 hours to cut out at this stage. I’m 5 hours in. It might just be another week or so.

I’ve been getting massive drawing urges. My brain is in the mood. I need it to get in the mood of drawing a specific thing for that next show, but it’s crotchety, recalcitrant. It doesn’t want to follow instructions, as has been patently evident over the last year. I’m planning on doing a life drawing session during the summer to try to keep the brain happy. It’s worried about all that empty time, which isn’t really empty, because I have 17 million things that need doing. But there’s no overwhelming school that is eating up so much of its daily time to wander. It helps. The brain needs focus, or it ruminates too much.

So I found this in my old car…

My forest adventure pass from 2006. You need one of these to hike up in the National Forest here…it has seen better days. There’s a newer one in there now…but I didn’t have one from 2006-2014. I didn’t get to hike much during those years. When soccer starts up again, it will be difficult for a while again, but she’s only got one more year. There’s already four summer tournaments scheduled. But I won’t hike as much in the summer anyway…too hot.

My mom made this while she was traveling in Australia/New Zealand…

It’s her first wool piece, I think. Someone should tell my brother that I’m inheriting this one. (Notice the magazines…Consumer Reports, AARP with Patrick Stewart on the cover…NO! Is he OLD? And Sunset…all OUR magazines are food-, quilt-, and education-related.)

So the fires are still going, although some are under control, and our local schools are going back today…which makes sense. I had to move the test for today…although I’m not sure a test on Monday is a good plan for middle-school kids who will completely forget about it over the weekend, but maybe more of them will do their study guides (ha!). I think my schedule for the next two weeks is now completely fucked, but that doesn’t really matter. In fact, none of it really matters. Any questions? They’ll learn whatever I teach them on some level. It’s not the end of the world if we don’t get through it all, because we never do.

OK, so we had one day off and it was too hot to think straight, and the plus was that I got some of the house cleaned up and all that thrift shop stuff out of here, and girlchild will leave me alone about shopping for a while, although next on her list is altering clothing, which drives me nuts, and I did a little grading and art stuff, and if I’m still feeling mopey and down, it’s because that’s what I feel most of the time. I even got more sleep than I usually would have and that’s a good thing. So I should stop pretending that this is NOT a school day (ugh, do I HAVE to go?) and remember it’s air-conditioned there and it’s only one day and then I can come home again. Not that home is a solution to the mopey and down feeling. SIGH. I need a change. I just don’t know what that change is.

Earth Stories: Tracing the Pieces

Once I have the drawing done, I number all the pieces, so I can put them back where I found them. I use a red pen because it’s easier to see with all the black lines around.

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Plus remember that I will be reading those numbers upside down, because I trace on a light table with the drawing upside down, so they are all reversed.

Then when I lay them out and iron them onto fabric, the fusible web will be on the back of the pieces.

It seems obvious to say all that, but I’ve done it wrong before…I traced one whole connecting piece for the Sightlines exhibit backwards…so I can remake those fish/blood vessel quilts backwards now. I have one whole quilt that I traced backwards, and yes, there are words in it. It made sense to me to not fix them at the time.

This section of the quilt with the little people in it is about 8″ square and has about 250 pieces in it. That’s what happens when I draw pieces to size. They get insanely small.

When the numbers are circled, it’s to remind me that where the number is, is NOT where the piece is…or that the piece continues under another piece, in which case, I usually add an arrow pointing in the direction it continues. These also were just too damn small to fit written numbers into, so I had to write outside the shape. It took almost 3 hours just to number all the pieces.

This quilt has over 2000 pieces. And some of them are freakishly tiny.

I do trace the overlaps (well, underlaps really), so hopefully there are no gaps between pieces. That means I have to keep track of what’s on top and what goes underneath. And I suspect those are bone pieces above, because they are all the same color and I think the skelly in the uterus is in that picture…those are probably finger or toe bones.

It’s kind of amazing what my brain is capable of doing sometimes. It took 24 hours and 7 days to trace all the Wonder Under…kind of crazy, if you think about it. What did YOU do over Spring Break? Yeah. That’s the conversation that only happens with people who know me fairly well. The rest would think I’m crazy.

Here’s all the Wonder Under laid out on the floor.

Each piece is about a yard, maybe a little more. Then I started cutting all the pieces out…

I was really efficient with that task…it only took 12 hours. I cut them out with a little margin around, so after I iron it to fabric, there will be a clean edge when I trim those pieces. The box on the right is the trash…I hang on to that until I make sure there’s no real pieces in there. Sometimes I forget what I’m doing and throw the wrong piece in the wrong bin.

Then it took me an hour and a half to sort all the pieces into 21 bins, one for each 100 pieces. Strangely, I don’t have a picture of that…I usually do.

Anyway, next, I’ll talk about the long process of picking fabrics.

Earth Stories: Drawing It Big

The Earth Stories exhibit opened at Michigan State University Museum in Lansing, MI, on May 11, and continues through November 26. The opening reception is May 16 from 4-6 PM. It then travels to the University of Central Missouri Gallery of Art and Design, Warrensburg, Missouri, January 19 – February 28, 2015. This means I will finally be allowed to post the pictures of this quilt as of the 16th…I thought I’d spend a few posts reviewing how these two pieces came to be.

I was accepted into the exhibit in October of 2012. I wasn’t even going to enter. I got into this huge discussion with the family, intellectuals all (although I qualify as an emotional intellectual…nowadays only barely rational apparently) about what could actually SAVE the Earth. The original plan for the exhibit was to pick a group or person who had made a significant contribution to saving the Earth, to keeping our planet livable, whole, sustainable even. I kept coming back to science in general, but the thought of doing a quilt of people in labcoats with microscopes and water-testing devices seemed kinda lame.

Then I watched this video:

It was Monique’s fault. She posted it. And it clicked a switch in my brain. A huge one.

Understand that I teach life science. I teach biology to 12-year-olds. I teach human reproduction. What do we need to do to save the world? We need to stop overpopulating it. We need to make sure that the available resources are distributed fairly, but also that we don’t overwhelm them with too many people (it may be too late for that, honestly). So when I saw that there were groups that were trying to help women who actually WANTED to control the number and timing of their births, the size of their families, to keep them within the constraints of what they could afford, of what they could handle, THAT was the group I was going to put the strength of my convictions behind.

That was the International Planned Parenthood Federation. They provide voluntary birth control to women in countries where it’s not allowed or where they have financial or religious difficulty in getting the medications they need to make sure they can take care of their families. They can decide how long to wait between births, which is healthier for both mother and child, but she can also decide when to stop having children. Imagine, giving women a choice? Plus helping to conserve our natural resources? All good.

Once I was accepted into the exhibit, which is an interesting story in itself, I sort of looked at how much time I had during the school year and how much time it would take to make a 72″-square quilt, and I planned my time. My goal was to have it drawn before Spring Break, traced onto Wonder Under during Spring Break, ironed to fabric before Summer Break, and then get the whole nasty beast done over the summer.

Ah, the best-laid plans of mice and men, and overwhelmed single moms who don’t even know what kind of shit might hit their fans.

I did OK with the first part, actually…OK, well, not really. I had about 4 or 5 mis-starts to the drawing…in fact, I think I started drawing in February (Spring Break being April). I already knew what position I wanted the main figure in, but I couldn’t quite visualize parts, so I asked the girlchild (who was running a nasty fever at the time that turned into the nasty flu that messed up her system for a while) to pose…

She was thrilled. As I’m sure you can see. Yes, my carpet is that beat up.

She didn’t have the right look on her face. She’s supposed to be Earth Mother. I decided not to make her old…mothers aren’t usually super old. They’re frazzled. Plus she had live trees on her, and it’s not supposed to be alive.

A few days later, I tried again.

Serious issues with the thighs. And the mountains are lame. Plus that left hand? Both hands…way too small.

I don’t usually fuss this much over drawings, but that was the thing with this one. I needed it to say the right thing and I don’t usually care so much that the viewer is getting the message. I figure they will get SOME message and that’s all that matters. On this one, the message mattered.

So I tried again…

Much better belly/thigh area (and the pregnancy finally shows up…notice it wasn’t there before). Her face, though…too spacey. Like she’s contemplating what color nail polish might go with those shoes.

I gave up for a while…a month actually. Then I realized Spring Break was bounding towards me, so I started again…

Ugh. Too small, arms suck. Whatever!

A few days later, though…BOOM!

There she is. There’s the start. Much bigger and the right look on her face…but I filled an entire page just with this part of her torso. I copied the bottom part and taped it to another page and then drew the bottom half…then enlarged those and taped them together.

I finally had the beginnings of this thing.

Now realize that light table is 3 feet by 4 feet, so it gives you a good idea of how big this thing gets. I started in a 14×17″ sketchbook. I think I enlarged the drawing 200-300%. Then I drew the rest of it to size (which is always a crazy tiny-piece mistake for me, and yet I do it every time).

I spent about 20 hours drawing this thing. I’d draw for a while and then step back and look at it (or stand on the piano bench and look at it, because it was the only way I could see the whole thing).

Most drawings take me a couple of hours, maybe four or five for a super-complicated one like what I’m working on now.

I had TV shows running on the laptop (the computer in the back is too slow and sound is an issue) to keep my brain occupied. Here’s me drawing the thought cloud that shows a happy world with plenty of food…

This is back at the beginning, right after I had taped all the extra paper around the enlarged figure to make it 72″ square.

It was a huge endeavor. I’ve never spent so long DRAWING a quilt, but it really did need to be forcibly pulled out of me…it took a good chunk of Spring Break to get it done. This was before all the shit hit the fan at work, so my brain was mostly OK for this type of task. I don’t know if I would have been able to do that now. It was really difficult. Maybe the art brain would prefer that level of involvement in a drawing to all the other crap I throw at it.

Next post? Numbering and tracing pieces…

The Many Hours of Quietude

There’s a fine line between quiet and quietude, between an uncomfortable silence that is sort of filled by television noises and to-do lists or a peaceful place of calm in your head. Quietude: a state of stillness, calmness, and quiet in a person or place. I’d like to achieve that. Sometimes I do, especially when making stuff. Art. Not dinner. Making dinner does not instill a state of anything, except expectation of food in the near future…assuming I don’t burn it. Depression brain is like chemo brain. I forget about stuff. I don’t hear the timer. I leave the oven on preheat. It’s a mental fugue that sometimes leaves me wondering whether my brain will ever wander fully back. Cooking requires more of my brain than is often available. Besides, I’m a lazy cook.

Perhaps I need to tempt it with more of THIS…

Girlchild made me cheesecake from scratch for Mother’s Day. It’s delicious. Delightful. Incredibly good. Really. She’s good at that cooking thing, and she likes it. Unlike me. I tolerate it. I put up with it because I like the products from freshly cooked food. I don’t like most pre-packaged stuff. So I cook under duress. I’m usually reading at the same time AND watching bad television. I’m glad she likes it. I hope that continues.

The kids also got me poles for hiking…

I’ve been borrowing dad’s old ones. These are lightweight and fold up much smaller than dad’s, AND…they’re purple. Very nice gift. They did well. I guess I was a decent mom this year, despite the brain mess. It’s nice that they listened to me.

I have a new car. My parents, dad especially, busted their butts to find me something…my car’s registration is up next week and we don’t think it will pass the smog test because of the catalytic converter. It was starting to be kind of a desperate issue, like I was going to have to start walking to school. Or not. But they did a bunch of internet stuff and phone calls and some trips to see cars, and it was delivered today. It’s still old, but has low mileage and will get me through the kids’ college years at least, and hopefully longer than that. It’s sad to be my age and not be able to afford to deal with cars and other stuff…but that’s the reality of being a divorced mom…the statistics show that we often never get our heads financially above water, even if we’re making decent money.

Anyway. It’s a bit of a relief.

I am now in the cutting-out fabric stage…

So I can get through all the saved episodes of shows on Tivo, right? I didn’t actually get much done, just an hour. I’m 3 hours in; based on the last few quilts, it’s at least an hour per 100 pieces, so it will be at least 18 hours. I suspect it will be more like 22…but maybe not, because a lot of the really tiny pieces I don’t cut out until I’m ready to iron them down, so I don’t lose them.

I need to put away all the fabrics I used and clean up the office. I’m thinking I might spend some of the upcoming 3-day weekend ironing the other quilt together. It doesn’t have a lot of pieces and I’d like to have a couple of things I’m working on at the same time. I like to feel productive. I also miss drawing. I haven’t drawn in a long time. I have a union meeting tomorrow…I often draw there.

My mood is really flat tonight. I think some of it is tired, but also I just don’t feel like feeling. The phrase “Use your words” keeps bouncing around my brain. I don’t know why. I haven’t been looking at enough art. I haven’t been reading enough blogs. I’m managing exercise and meditation and eating (damn, speaking of eating, my blood sugar is really wacky during the afternoon these days…annoying…need to remember to carry extra food tomorrow). Girlchild and I are still butting heads. Work is still a clusterfuck. It’s hot too…supposed to be 102 degrees tomorrow.

Anyway. The mood will go one way or another…improve or descend into that pit of depressoid bleck. Whichever. This flat mood is worse. I don’t know how to feel normal any more. What does it feel like to get up and not feel like the world is weighing on you, like your whole existence is a stupid mistake?

I don’t know. Make more art. Probably sleep more. Rejoice in the homemade cheesecakes of life, in the purple poles. Read a book. Take a hike.

The Person You Wanted to Be…

I’ve been watching X-Files reruns while ironing the fabric for this quilt…I’ve seen them all, so they’re a little bit familiar. The stories are generally safe; there’s not a lot of emotional triggers in them for me, so that’s good. They don’t require a lot of brain power either, plus I’ve always liked the characters. At one point, someone is impersonating Mulder (they have striated muscle that can change the shape of the face to match anyone else), and they ask Scully about the person she wanted to be when she was in high school, if she became that person. Did she have regrets?

It’s an interesting question, especially as my son gets really close to graduating high school and going off to college, but also I sit here staring at my life and wondering what the hell and how the fuck do I fix it? It’s not that easy to try to think back to high school (a million years ago) to what I wanted. It’s changed over the years, but it’s pretty simple: someone who pays attention and can travel through life with me. The ability to continue to make art. Being outside in nature. Painting my walls something besides earth tones. Life gets hard sometimes. We don’t always do it right, and when we don’t, it would be nice to know someone could handle that. My kids have had to handle it; so have my parents. I guess I have too. I’ve floundered my way through a huge load of bullshit in the last two years, both at work and in my personal life, and it could have been so much easier, except other people were involved who didn’t know how to behave.

As I sat on the stationary bike this evening, pedaling away, while playing the addictive game 2048, which my evil daughter introduced me to (dammit! I’m so close to summer that I can so easily get hooked on a silly game like this), listening to and helping the boychild vote his very first ballot (my little boy is all grown up!), I hope I did the right job with the two of them. Girlchild has way more empathy than boychild. She also cooks better. His temper is more even-handed. His handwriting sucks. Hers is much better, but she’s a total stress-monkey when it comes to school. He’s so calm, it’s scary…except he did study for AP Physics. And he was worried about colleges. And he’s worried about getting a job this summer. His social skills are not as developed as hers. I wish I had a job he could do this summer. I should make him (ha! can’t make him do much of anything) write a letter to himself about what he wants to do in his future, about the person he wants to be, about what’s in his head…like a senior-year brain dump. Then seal it up and mail it to him in 10 years.

Hell, maybe I should do that for myself. I don’t think I had any idea what I would be doing, how I would be living, how stressful being a single mom would be, how much I really wanted a semi-normal family shape (not necessarily a normal family). I didn’t know how huge the art would become in my life, how much of me it would suck up. I didn’t know I’d be sitting here at 47, trying to remake my life yet again, for the second time, and again not by choice…and honestly not really wanting to deal with that any more than I wanted to deal with my car issues, which may have been solved today by my parents. Sigh. I do feel a bit inept at the moment. OK. More than a little bit inept. Fucking useless some days. At least I know I can pick out a piece of fabric. That’s my successful moment for the day.

So I don’t think I am the person I wanted to be when I was in high school. I think I wanted to be a more-famous artist or in a more-stable, happy life. Maybe I wanted a mohawk (I could still do that). I wish I’d written it down somewhere. My college app essays mention art and children and even teaching (how strange…I didn’t get the last bit until 12 years ago), so maybe I was a bit psychic. I’m fairly sure I didn’t want one tenth of the pain and heartache. That wasn’t on the bucket list. And I’ve had enough of it.

So I get all pensive and reflective when I near the end of each stage of making these big quilts…it’s actually kind of depressing these days. I used to feel a bit of relief, a sense of achievement when I finished a big step. Tonight I finished ironing the Wonder Under pieces down to all the fabrics…here’s that damn octopus…

It did end up being that purple after all. I had to find the blue ocean fabrics I’d used for the pieces behind it, so I could make sure they’d work. There are 131 fabrics in this quilt, seen here…

It took 22 hours and 32 minutes to iron them all down. I have put almost 62 hours into this quilt already, and a top doesn’t even exist yet.

Call me crazy.

I had already started cutting them out at a meeting last month, so I kept going on that tonight. I’m sure there will be another 10-15 days of cutting pieces out in front of the telly now.

Now I need to iron that other quilt together, plus start drawing the piece for the Equality exhibit. My goal is to finish the Mammogram quilt and this one this summer, and to have the other one significantly started, like maybe even into the quilting stage before school starts up again in August. I also apparently need to do something with no nudity or violence (damn) for another possible exhibit. That might be harder. Maybe one of those other drawings I copied will work for that.

But right now, I’m sitting here with post-ironing-fabric depression. I need to get deeply into achy-hand-cutting-the-pieces mode, so I can just be a little frustrated with how long it takes and how my hand feels. And I don’t have to wonder about the PURPOSE of what I’m doing and how it doesn’t really make me feel good any more. Dammit, when will I get that back? That’s just frustrating. What the hell am I doing wrong? I know how it should feel, I tell myself how it should feel, and somewhere deep in my brain there’s this little voice, an old and tired voice that says, “Not yet. You can’t feel that yet. You’re still broken. Come back later. We’re still at lunch. Our hours are posted.” Damn smartass brain.

There is an old-lady cat currently sitting on my shoulder. I think she’s revolting against my using the WHOLE desk chair. She’d like me to move up and let her sit in the back half (half? more like three-quarters) of the chair, like usual. Demanding old bitch, she is. So yeah, I moved. I accommodate my animals. I accommodate lots of organisms.

Besides, it’s time for me to go to bed. Maybe when I wake up, I’ll know who I want to be from here on out. Meanwhile, the cat can have the whole damn chair.

Better Moments…

Happy Mothers Day to the moms…and the moms of moms…etc. This day has always been bittersweet to me, at least a little, because I never have my kids on Sunday mornings, or at least not since they were 4 or 5 years old. I don’t think I ever had the breakfast in bed or the kids doing something special in the morning. I always had a kid-free morning. Of course, most of my friends with kids are insanely jealous, because all they’ve ever wanted is that kid-free morning, no noise, no clean up after the breakfast, no crazy activities. I get it. I really do. But every Sunday morning is kid-free for me, and it gets kinda old…and TOO quiet. It’s been over 12 hours since I talked to any human in person. I talked to two on the phone briefly, my SIL and my ex, both last night. That’s my life right now. I didn’t want to go out and do stuff. I needed to grade and I did iron last night, but the quiet starts to get to me. The being alone part…the part my SIL and friends crave…it gets old.

I spend too much time in my head as it is.

I did manage to finish the tax board appeal yesterday, except for getting it notarized. I’m waiting on approval. I also did LOTS of really painful math (this is why I had to call the ex…financial forms confuse the fuck out of me, and I needed another brain to bounce the confusing words off of, just to try to figure out what they REALLY wanted); this was for the financial aid appeal. All I do is appeal these days. That one is done and ready to be mailed. I even graded papers for a while.

Then I ironed. This was last night. I was really tired though. I hiked in the morning, long hike, I think I’m finding my limits. I went to the opening at Visions Art Museum…more about that later.

I only ironed the bird, the hawk. I actually pulled some photos of a red-tailed hawk up on my phone and used them as a reference for picking colors…

It may be the only thing in the quilt that is colored realistically…OK, maybe the humans. Sort of the wolf.

I do this sometimes, drop an almost-real animal in there with all the fantasy stuff…in Disrupted, I was watching lots of Big Cat Diary and really loved how strong and even vicious female lions are, especially when they are protecting their young…so that’s why there’s a lioness in that quilt…she’s the ultimate protecting female.

She’s the one you want around. She’ll kick anyone’s ass. A lot of the animals in my quilts are protectors. The birds aren’t and neither are the snakes. The birds are the talkers, the storytellers, or they are a sign of something, of bad or evil or death. The snakes are just evil, bad, the sign of badness in other people. They lie, they carry poison, they are inside all of us, coiled around each of us.

Some tiny birdwing pieces…

Of course, the next crazy step is to cut all those suckers out.

It’s not a small pile of pieces. I added some different browns to help make the hawk colors.

I do try to reuse colors throughout the piece, to repeat fabrics in other places so there’s a connection between all the bits. So I used some of the browns I’d already used (there’s a lot of brown in this quilt) and then added a few more.

Today…I managed to only cry a bit. I still do that, you know. Cry every day. I think it just is the new me. Part of it was feeling very alone this morning. Part of it was feeling like I missed out on something this morning. Yes, we went out to dinner for Mother’s Day and they bought me a really awesome gift (will show tomorrow), but I bought my own flowers and got into an argument with the girlchild and didn’t feel like anything good. I guess that’s the REAL mom existence, isn’t it? My SIL said something about needing a Teflon coating as a mom, so the really bad stuff, the stuff that makes you wonder if loving your kids makes any sense at all, because they are driving you so batshit crazy that you want to run away (we’ve all been there), the Teflon can just make it bounce off. And she doesn’t even have teenagers yet.

I’m back to not being allowed to talk. It’s kinda been a theme for the last two years of my life. You will not talk. You will not use this word or that word. What you say is bad, it’s evil, it should be stopped. There will be consequences for your daring to speak. You will not like them.

It’s so tiring to feel that way all the time.

So I wasn’t going to iron tonight, because I had grades to do and I’m physically tired from yesterday’s hike…but I really thought my brain needed it. I’ve been feeling depressed (for years) for days…I guess worse than before.

First, though…I picked up the last quilts from a show that recently closed, so I finally dealt with 4 boxes, a tube, and a plastic-wrapped roll of all the quilts that have come home in the last month…

I got rid of all the boxes and other stuff and put them in my bedroom to be rolled up with the others. It’s depressing to have so many come home, sure, but then I remember that they went out there in the world and hung up in front of people…that’s why they were gone…and that’s a good thing. Hopefully it will happen again (but I actually have to ENTER something for that to happen).

I cut out the dog and the giant eyeball with the skull in it.

I’m down to the last 100 or so pieces, and they’re all part of the octopus…so I just need to decide what color he wants to be…

I was going to do it tonight…was considering that purple by the scissors (I spent some time straightening up the fabrics…the mess was driving me bonkers)…but I’m just not sure. So I will let it sit overnight and see what I think. I will be done tomorrow though…that’s good. I think.

I finished this book today, Hyperion by Dan Simmons…

I had a hard time getting into it; the first 50 pages were dense with world-building and strange vocabulary, organisms from multiple planets and lots of unknowns. Eventually, though, when he settles down into the story-telling portion of the book, I was really fascinated. The book is an outer story with 6 inner stories by major characters, explaining their reasons for going on a pilgrimage to the Time Tombs, where they expect to meet the Lord of Pain, aka the Shrike. My favorite story was that of the detective, Brawne Lamia. She was also the only major female character, so that’s an interesting coincidence. She’s a tough but interesting character. The Shrike character is pictured on the front of the book I was reading…that is so not how I pictured it. I didn’t really connect the figure on the front with the description in the book until I was near the end. I will definitely go on and read the next one, as soon as I finish all the library books that have recently appeared. It did take me a while to get through this one, about a week…which is a lot, considering it’s not so long (but the font was so freakin’ tiny!). Anyway. It was a good read.

I meant to post this video of hail on the hike in Julian…

I was standing by myself at this point, up against the rocks, but listening to the rain and the wind (and then the hail) going through these oak trees perched on the edge of the trail. It was a beautifully meditative moment. I seem to be pretty good at pulling those moments out of the hikes I’m on. I guess that’s a good thing.

Moving on. I still have to be a mom tomorrow, but this time with no celebration, no card, no cheesecake (she did make cheesecake…definitely good stuff). It’s harder, but you know it will all turn out OK in the long run. I probably have a lot more crying to do, but hopefully that will get balanced out with better moments. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.

Something about Me…

Damn wolf is done. Worried about it all day, along with other crap. Hate that. It was a day. Things that threw me in the past? I just rolled over them. Or under them. Hard to tell. Who the fuck cares about some of this stuff…petty people with their silly control issues. Better to walk away.

I dragged the boychild out to get something to water the wild animals who frequent my pool area. This confuses my SIL, who was raised by someone who grew up on a farm. She thinks I’m nuts. Quotes Darwinism. Well, yeah, but…these are babies. So if they’re too dumb to find my manmade pond, THEN they’re too dumb to live.

Anyway. That was my tiny good deed for the day. I probably only have a tiny one.

I did buy plants for the entryway too…that’s been bugging me for a while. So I’ll plant those tomorrow or Sunday, make the entry a happier place…it makes me feel better to come home to flowers there. The simple things. Now I will have to remember to water them too. Sometimes I forget and my ex waters them when he comes to pick up the kids. I have been known to return the favor at his house. Strange symbiosis there.

I ironed tonight finally…that wolf. Thought about it all day, stared at the fabrics for about 10 minutes. I knew what the flesh fabrics looked like and what would be below it and what was above it, and I also knew I didn’t want it to overshadow the figure in front of it, so it needed to slightly fade behind it. So it couldn’t be all the wild crazy colors I auditioned in my head.

So she’s gray…

I know. Boring. But necessary. Sometimes it has to be boring.

I ironed the snake and the iPhone as well. I’m in the 1500s now, getting nearer to the end.

I stopped when I realized (a) it was late and I have a long hike tomorrow and (b) I would have to choose fabrics for the bird next. Same deal as the wolf…probably needs to not be too flashy. I think of it as a hawk, although it’s probably not correct…

Why? Because I rarely draw from reality. I just draw. Beak’s wrong. But I’m thinking browns of a red-tailed hawk. Something like that. That’s tomorrow night. You have to understand that the hawk has about 80 pieces in it, so it’s not something you start at midnight when you have to be up early the next morning.

As it is, I’m already up too late.

I’m always up too late.

I added some yellows today. I already had the greens.

I like my snakes to be green and yellow. I’m not sure why. I’m not even sure that’s a proper snake color. Never mind, of course it is. It’s totally the snake from the story of Adam and Eve.

Snakes end up in my quilts a lot. They’re kind of evil, but not. Amazing creatures, snakes. Martha Sielman asked me about some of the symbols that end up in my quilts when she interviewed me for the People and Portraits book. It’s hard for me to define why I use certain things over and over, like the snakes. I know the cats and dogs, they’re a sign of the animals I have around me, of the unconditional love they have for you. They are my protectors. Sometimes they are almost like angels, the ones who are dead and watch over you. I don’t remember what I said about snakes though. The snake in this quilt isn’t particularly good…it’s threaded through her abdominal area. That seems like an issue. I think that’s the feeling I get in my gut lately, well, over the last year, when I think about what I’ve been dealing with. It makes me clench my abdominal muscles involuntarily. I’ve written about that feeling before.

Anyway. Three more major things to iron down on the quilt: a bird, a giant eyeball, and an octopus (well, three tentacles anyway). Then I can start the 20+ hours of cutting stuff out. I’m at 20 hours for picking fabrics so far too. There’s something magical about that 20-hour mark. It means, This is a quilt of import. It has lots of pieces. It must be good.

Whatever. It’s a significant piece to me. I understand that it might not feel the same to others.

Earth Stories opens Sunday. I can start writing about that quilt soon…I’ve actually started but not finished the first post. Maybe tomorrow night. I’m so glad to have that quilt out of the house.

OK, need to find that sleepy place again. Must sleep so I can go beat the crap out of my physical self in an attempt to get my mental self under control on a long hike. One of my friends said to me today about the depression, “We need to DO something about that.” Made me laugh. Like we could just go to the store and buy a cure. My counselor would ask me if I would actually BUY the cure, or would I stay depressed? I don’t believe in insta-cures for things like this. I think it’s a process and it takes time. If you don’t take the time to work through it, if you just move on and start partying and trying to be a different person, like one person I know right now, I think you end up in the same place…or a worse one. I don’t want to do that. I want to be better…not pretend-better, but really better. So no, I guess I wouldn’t buy the cure. I guess that tells you something about me.

I Think I Did It Wrong

Yesterday. I think I did it wrong. I tried to do it right. I went to the gym. I did not engage the girlchild in any squawkiness until I knew she could handle it (basically waited until she was asking me for a favor…ha!). I even got done with the gym early and went to FINALLY buy my new camera. Decided that I was never going to find exactly what I wanted and it wasn’t really that crucial, but the Canon has gotten to the point that it randomly refuses to open the lens unless I eject the battery (I think I did that about 20 times on the last hike) and I didn’t want to do that again. I knew my price range (gift card and birthday money…I actually didn’t spend it all!). I knew I wanted rechargeable batteries. I knew I wanted real zoom for part of it, not optical all the way. I also knew that I’m hard on cameras and it will only last a couple of years, so stop freaking worrying so hard about this little tiny decision that will NOT be the end of the world!

Anyway. So I did that. And then I tried to deal with my normal evening plan and fell asleep in meditation, even though it was early. So my brain had this argument about whether I needed to go to sleep, because I was really tired, but my blood sugar has also been off the last couple of days, and I have a long hike tomorrow, and I don’t want that heavy-leg feeling, which might be hormones and might be physical rest. I wanted to FEEL rested. But then balance that with my mind. Either my body’s rested or my mind is. There doesn’t seem to be a happy medium (or even a content medium).

What decided it was that damn wolf. I don’t know what color to make the wolf. Usually when I have a problem picking colors, I put that piece of the quilt in my head and let my brain work on it all day (or days). It’s not really conscious work…it’s just up there, like a little neuro-reminder, and occasionally I’ll see snippets of trying to solve the problem, coloring here or there, and then all of a sudden…BOOM! There’s the solution.

Mar 12 14 001 wolf crop

There are parts of my brain I love. Not all of it, for sure. Seriously? I’m being artistically bamboozled by a section with like 20 pieces in it that might MIGHT need 5 or 6 colors of fabric in it. My brain is like, gray wolf? Brown wolf? Red wolf? Can’t be a black wolf. Won’t work with the background. Dark gray? Light gray? Can’t see light gray against the arm color. Pink wolf?

Fuck. Maybe that’s it. The wolf is like a freaky color because it’s obviously a major issue for me.

Sigh. So I did that last night. Tucked the wolf drawing up in there and told my brain to go at it. Went to bed early. Woke up this morning and I still don’t know! Oh well. I have all day.

But the morning has been hard. I have a stressful meeting today that might NOT be stressful, but until I know what it IS, it’s stressful. Hate that. Thank you, brain, for your PTSD crap. I’m getting significantly behind in grading again. Suck. I wanted to be done with the fabric ironing. Not. Despite saving one baby possum this week, I found his sister in the pool this morning, along with some other baby rodent that I don’t recognize. DEAD BABIES. Fuck. Way to go. I’m going to Home Depot this afternoon, I think, to go get something to put out there for water so they don’t have to drown on my account. I can’t handle any more dead babies at the moment. Because if I put a pond out there and they STILL drown in the pool, well that’s Darwinism and I can handle that? Whatever.

I am trying to get back on track. My brain is really in wander mode and I have all this stuff I’m responsible for (shocking, I am an adult) and I’ve slacked off on some of it because I’m finding it hard to care about it, or really it’s just that it’s overwhelming to care about it. My SIL said I needed to simplify. Huh. OK. I should stop hiking so much maybe. Except that’s sanity in its own way. I know she wants me to clean out my house. I’m trying. I have two major issues on my plate right now…it’s my goal to get them taken care of this weekend, so they stop weighing on me. I’m going to work on them tonight and tomorrow and Sunday, and they will be done so I can cross them (violently with a big black Sharpie and a Fuck You yelled at the top of my lungs, because that’s what they deserve) off the list.

Then I can maybe be less of a blithering sobbing idiot for a while. Maybe. It’s good to have goals.

Little Pieces

I’m 18 hours and 23 minutes into ironing fabric for this quilt…this quilt that does not yet have an exhibit to call home, and is probably destined to be like a couple of the other quilts I’ve made, where no one wants them in a show. Oh well. I like them to be in shows, but honestly, that’s not why I make them.

I’ve made it into the 1400s, but not very far, about 20 pieces in. So I’ve got about another 350 pieces to go. It doesn’t sound like much, but I’m in the fussy little piece section now…

See all those little pieces? There’s like two tiny pieces ironed onto one little piece of THIS gray and two tiny pieces ironed onto one little piece of THAT gray. It’s a little piece bonanza. So it takes more time. Or maybe it’s just that this thing takes X time and X seems to be a larger number than normal. It’s still not taking as long as the Earth Stories piece. But it seems like no matter how much ironing I do each night, I still have about 4 more hours to do…I find that strange. Like time is stretching out and the fabric is breeding or the Wonder Under is undergoing mitosis.

Or I’m thinking too hard.

At least there will be no shortage of things to work on this summer (besides my sanity, a clean house, and a better yard). I have a lot of stuff in progress and a whole new quilt I have to make by November that only barely exists in a sketch in my brain.

I’m not worried. My summer is pretty empty. Well, except for soccer and working and all the other shit that will rain down upon me that I don’t even know about yet.

You know, like it does. All the little things. That’s what’s overwhelming me at the moment is all the little detailed crap that I’m supposed to be handling and getting done every day, and which is really NOT getting done because I keep doing healthy things like meditating and exercising and making dinner and then I do other things like making art, because if I didn’t do that, I don’t know who I would be. I’ve really thrown the balance up in the air this year, and I don’t know how successful it’s been. I think I need some distance from it to decide.

Here’s what it looked like last night when I was picking fabrics for the face-in-a-cloud section, which is only like 8″ square…

Each fabric had no more than 4 pieces on it…and some only had one. I’m running out of room on the ironing board.

See the face in a cloud in the top right? That’s what I was ironing.

I also ironed the headphones and cords…basically all I have left is the wolf, the iPhone, the snake, the bird, the dog, and the giant skull eyeball. It doesn’t seem like much when you realize how much I HAVE done, but it requires some mental attention. I quit last night right before the wolf, because I was too tired to think WOLF. I had done over an hour of ironing, which seems to be the right amount for working every night at the moment. In my old life, I would work on it every other night, but for longer usually. I actually didn’t usually get ironing of big projects done during the school year at all. So I guess that’s changed.

Everything’s changed.

I was going to write all this last night, but WordPress was having issues, so I went to bed (a little early!) instead. I should try to do that more often, but then I’d get even less done. It would be nice if I could get some sense of life fulfillment from my job…and you’d think as a teacher, I would, but it’s so much hard work and paper pushing that it’s hard to see the good stuff until you’re 6 months past it.

I realized how much irritation I was carrying yesterday at work, but then I remembered that we don’t have much of the school year left, and this is normal. The kids want to be on vacation already. There’s all these end-of-year pressures of awards, grades, cleaning up, preparing for next year…I have a boss who sends messages demanding meetings at certain times without ever thinking that we might already have things on our calendar. I seriously get emails that say “See me during Period 2.” or “Meet here at 3:45.” and you’re thinking, wow. Dude. I already have a parent meeting during Period 2, thanks for asking, and at 3:45, I’m doing this presentation thing. And there’s often no information telling you the purpose of the meeting, so then you’re left wondering if this is a bitchslap event or just a check-in. A decent boss emails you and says, hey, we need to talk about X, here are the times I have available. I realize you’re busy doing your job; when would be convenient for you?

I guess that is too much to hope for. I just take a deep breath these days, do a little weird dance in the hallways to make the kids laugh, or randomly yell “Dress Code!” into the hallway (that’s actually really fun to do…I’m not even dress coding anyone, but they’re so paranoid it will be THEM that they all jump). OK, yes, it’s time for vacation. Someone on last week’s hike (which is still in a picture file and not in a blog post) said they were surprised I wasn’t in a tower surrounded by a bunch of guns. Well, isn’t THAT a nice image to put alongside my teacher image.

Now you know why I exercise so much and make so much art. Otherwise I’d go even more nuts than I already am. I’m leaving the guns alone though. I do better with pen and paper. And honestly? The kids aren’t the problem…they may drive me bonkers on a regular basis with their shenanigans and laziness and moody crap and drama, but it’s the adults that cause the real trauma. I know the kids aren’t old enough to control their shit. I wish the adults remembered that they are.

Saving One Possum

I’m too tired to post tonight. Got started on everything too late. Busy day. Saved a baby possum. Will write this up in the morning. Am typing this now to remind myself to write the rest in the morning. Right now, a pillow calls my name.

Sleep is a troubled thing at the moment…it really only works for me when it’s like the sleep of the dead. There are so many times when I go to sleep after 1 AM and then STILL wake up around 4 or 5, wide awake. This is not good for me…I know it…but it seems to continue.

Yesterday. Sigh. I didn’t manage it well, and yet there were things about it that clued me in to what makes me feel better…like, apparently, saving baby animals. Doesn’t everyone feel better after saving a baby animal? Yesterday morning, I looked out and saw something swimming in the pool…

Yes, it looks like a drowned ~~rat~~ possum. Because it is.

Yes, I know they bite and carry disease (hell, so do humans), but I’ve never had an issue with them. I did find its sibling in the pool last week, though, and it was not a good thing. So I left it out there for a little while to see if mom was around somewhere. And then I went out and dried it off, because it was shivering and not moving. And then I put it up in the bushes, so it was away from the pool and hidden from the hawks who hang out here. And I waited some more. And my mom hormones kicked in (are they hormones?) and I went out and it hadn’t moved in 20 minutes and it was still shivering.

Dammit. I need to go to school and Project Wildlife doesn’t open until 9.

So he (she?) went to school with me. In a cat carrier. See? He looks much better dry.

I fed him apple and gave him water and eventually he recovered enough to poop all over the towel and bare his teeth at us when we would check up on him. Yes, I think possums are adorable (I know, I’m weird). I don’t have issues with rats or snakes either, but spiders? Yeek. I’m fascinated by them, but inordinately creeped out as well.

Around 8th period, my two kids showed up (because I texted them and told them they had to) and took him to Project Wildlife, where hopefully they will get him ready for release back into the wild. They come to my pool to drink and fall in. I used to have a fountain that helped a little with that, but the fountain doesn’t work any more…and you can’t leave standing water out with West Nile and the mosquitoes around here. Anyway. It was my good deed for the day, and the interesting thing is that it made me feel better.

So maybe I need to fit some volunteer work in this summer (except some will die or need to be euthanized and then I will be sad, OR I will bring a huge number of homeless animals home with me.). Things to consider. I know if I start fostering animals, my SIL will come slap me with wet noodles…she already thinks I have animal hoarder tendencies (I’m down to 3.5 animals…not bad!).

I did finally make it to the gym and meditated and all that. And then started ironing late again. I really wasn’t very focused last night. I was tired and unmotivated. I know it’s OK to be both of those things, but it just seems like such a waste of time sometimes. I need to be productive or I feel more awful than normal. I know some of that is being a workaholic, but I think being productive holds the depression off a bit as well…counteracts the hormones that are zigzagging through my system. At the end of the day, if I can say, “I accomplished THIS,” and THIS is not just eating three meals and not killing anyone, then I’m doing OK. I need to be doing OK.

Anyway. I didn’t iron much, that’s for sure. I quit the night before because I had to make a decision about her hair: gray or white. She’s definitely menopausal, aging, so what direction do I go with that? I finally decided on white with black, mostly because I think of this quilt as directly autobiographical, and I’m going white, not gray. Plus I liked the idea of the two lighter fabrics having words and computer code in them…it’s supremely relevant.

If I ever have to explain this quilt at an exhibit, I will probably lose it. Or someone else will have to read the statement while I stand there crying. Good stuff! Or more likely at the moment, it won’t get in anywhere.

Another shot of the in-process fabrics. I tried to straighten them up last night because they were getting out of control.

I finished the lungs too. I think I’m officially done with the main figure and moving into all the crap floating around her now.

I have a parent meeting this morning, so I need to leave…but here’s another pitiful picture of the possum…

Yeah, there was no way I could just leave him out there like that. I saved ONE baby yesterday. That was my accomplishment.