A Persistent Drive to Create

Seven hours to iron it all down. Two and a half hours to stitch it down.

It needs a good ironing, then batting, backing, and pinbasting.

It was quick and easy. But I cried a lot while stitching. Not sure why. Too much free brain space.

The back…the brain really shouldn’t be allowed out on its own. It causes trouble. Runs amok.

I didn’t get as much done as I wanted, but I got some done. I never get as much done as I want. Goals keep resetting as I get closer to them. Never be satisfied. Always you could have done more. Why didn’t you? Failure.

Sigh. A persistent drive to create. It’s an obsession. It gets me up and out of bed.

I had troubled sleep last night, partially because my brain just worries about stupid stuff and can’t drop it, especially if I’m too tired to MAKE it drop it. Also, the girlchild was up really early to go to some soccer thing (thank god she sets her own alarm and I don’t even need to get out of bed, but it still wakes me up and then I drowse until she’s gone). So there were two dreams that were interrupted in all of that. I usually dream a lot, but lately, um, for the last 4 months, to be specific, I’m not remembering any of them. That might be a blessing, who knows, but since they’re usually pretty random, it might not be. The first dream, I was at school, in class, and kids were handing in their homework…one of the more stressful times of the week, since I hate excuses, and that’s all I hear for the whole day…my dog ate it, you didn’t give it to me (one of my favorites), I didn’t know it was due today, I had to go to the hospital last night because my sister was having her baby (were you helping her?). So I was collecting homework and it was supposed to be strips of paper that kids had written some stuff on and their names (another thing they have issues doing, writing their names on their papers), and as I collected them, I realized it looked like they had done the work and someone had then cut all of it up into strips, but not so everything lined up, so someone’s name wasn’t on the same piece of paper as their sentences, and I couldn’t tell whose was whose. The kids were thrilled by this, especially those who hadn’t DONE their homework, because they thought I should just not count it, because I couldn’t tell who had handed in what. Stubborn Kathy. I sat down at one of the desks and started laying the strips out, matching them up with the pencil marks, taping them together, while the kids groaned. Dammit. Talk about obsessive.

The second dream was in a doctor’s waiting room…god knows, I’ve spent enough time in those during my life. I was sewing. I’m always sewing. I don’t know why I was there, whether it was for me or one of my kids, but the room is full, and I look up, and there’s Jim K. (from college) with his MOM (no really, he looks like he’s 12) and he’s ignoring me. They’re talking to one of the doctor’s staff, signing in or making an appointment, but even though I wave at him twice, he purposely doesn’t look at me. There’s someone else in the waiting room that I know, but in the time between dream waking and waking up enough to type the basics on my phone, I forgot who it was…someone from school, like high school or college. Why do we go back to that so often? Or is it just me? The third guy was Mike S. (from high school, names shortened to protect the innocent, because I really don’t know why my brain has picked these people out of all the people in the world that I know), but before I saw him come out of the door, I saw his mom and sister. Actually, I saw a mom and sister I thought I knew, but I couldn’t figure out why (this happens to me all the time), and the girl waved at me and I waved back, and then he came out and smiled at me and talked to me, and then his sister sat next to me, held my face towards her, and spit at me like a camel, a huge wad of goo, and for some reason, I found that hysterical and started laughing. That’s when the girlchild started squawking in the hallway (for real) about her shoes to her dad or something, I was half asleep so I only half heard any of that.

Unless the dreams are working through something for me, I’m not sure this is that helpful, brain.

What am I scared of? I wrote about being scared last night. The funny thing is, I don’t even know that most of the time there is something specific that I am scared of…I am just scared, like when you’re walking on a dark sidewalk in a not-so-great part of town and you wish you weren’t walking alone, but you’ve got to get from A to B…that kind of scared…or when you wake up in the middle of the night with your heart pounding and you have no idea why. Then there’s the standard fears: not enough money to (a) send kids to college, (b) ever retire, (c) pay the bills. There’s the fear that I will never really get over all this shit, that I will be damaged beyond full repair forever. I don’t think that’s a realistic one, but it’s hard to get past it when you don’t FEEL better. The two are linked. The fear that I will be alone forever because there is something inherently wrong with me that caused all this. That’s one I know is unreal, at my core, at least the second part, but the first part? You don’t get to control that. This whole experience (this whole experience being the last 25 years of my life) has made me think I am perhaps a difficult child…and that may doom me. So I have to get OK with just being here on the planet by myself and not blaming myself for it…because deep down, I know I wasn’t the issue either time. I picked badly, but I was not the issue. I’m afraid of screwing up at my job, I’m afraid I’ll have to be a teacher forever and I’ll start to hate it (there are parts I hate now, but that’s true of all jobs). I’m afraid I’ll get old and there will be no one to help me. Yo! Kids! Guess what? I’m afraid I will never stop crying. I’m afraid I’ll be a hoarder. I’m afraid my really old car will just die and I won’t be able to afford a new one. I’m afraid the kids will move away and rarely come back (a real fear, that one). I’m afraid of my health issues, the diabetes, the family heart issues. I’m afraid of going blind or deaf. I’m afraid my computer will die and I won’t know how to fix it…or be able to afford to fix it.

So lots of them are money-related. Those are very real fears. Many of them are about my future, which my counselor has advised me to stop thinking about, because worrying about something that hasn’t happened doesn’t stop it from happening, and I’m just wasting a lot of good mental energy on that stress and worry. That said, I should plan for some things (I have…I have retirement money, some…I have college funds put away for the kids…some. I don’t have a plan for the car. I am doing my best to deal with the health and mental issues.).

There’s this song, All Cried Out…

by Alison Moyet…I think of her as the Adele of the 80s (or Adele is the Moyet of the 2010s?). Apparently she’s released a new album this year (and she looks a LOT different).

I keep wondering when I will be all cried out, when I will run out of tears, when things will not affect me like this. My med-pro friends will say that is a sign I need to be on anti-depressants, but I don’t think the crying is a problem…it would be if I didn’t do my art and shower and leave the house and do my job and do the shopping and buy Xmas gifts. That would be an issue, but I DO all the things I’m supposed to. So yeah, I’m sad. I’m depressed. But I don’t think meds that push that sadness away are going to be the answer. I don’t know what the answer is besides time and lots of it, but I don’t think it’s meds. You don’t have to agree with me. But I’m the only one who really knows my brain and how it works, and I spend a lot of time watching it and listening to it. So I get to make the decision.

The toenail finally fell off…

Friday. During class. Yup. I bandaged that sucker up and kept dealing. It looks lovely…which reminds me. It’s that stupid Gratefulness month. I’m not a fan of the post-a-note about your thankfulness every day…it just seems trite to me, like we should try to be that way all the time, and with fighting the depression for the last year and a half, I haven’t felt very grateful for anything. It’s too hard. It feels painful to be thankful. I can’t really explain that. But I was thinking about it while stitching stuff down today, which made me cry (the stitching and the thinking, potent mixture), and then I read an article about being mindful and how being thankful is part of that paying attention part…so I tried.

I’m thankful that my toenail finally fell off and it’s not too painful. I’m thankful for my kids keeping me sane (and alternately driving me insane) and requiring me to be present on a regular basis. I’m thankful for the driven creativity that keeps me going and out of bed and away from illegal drugs and scrapbooking and compulsive online shopping and other nefarious pursuits that would not do me well at the moment. I’m grateful for all the authors out there who write books for me to lose myself in, so I don’t have to be alone with myself all the time. I’m thankful for Kitten when she’s snuggled up against my back at night in bed. She is a comfort. I’m grateful for the plumber who came today and quickly and cheaply fixed my cold-water faucet so I don’t have to shower in the kids’ bathroom again. I’m thankful for British tea, PG Tips. I’m thankful for a brain that takes the worst and tries to deal anyway, that rages against the way it is and tries to make changes, even as it sinks into depressoid mud, that rails at me and tells me it’s going to be OK, that I am strong and I will survive this, yet again, and it will not take me down. I’m thankful for warm socks, because I am cold all the time these days. I’m thankful for all the words that help me clear my brain each night…hopefully to sleep like a child, without nightmares though…the dreamless sleep of the truly untroubled innocents.

Wishful Thinking

I get to milestones and they don’t register. Or they don’t register correctly. You finished a step in making a quilt! Cool! Yup. Not feeling it. It’s almost worse getting a step done…because then I think, wow, you don’t feel any better, any different. You are still sad, depressed, slogging through the days, taking the next step and the next one, waiting for something to make a difference, to make your heart show up, to make the feelings get out of the sad realm. But they don’t. It’s just the same.

I ironed today.

Every tree needs lightning bolts.

In the long run, it doesn’t really matter that I ironed today. I also helped the boychild with his college apps; we got through the worst of it (well, he still has to write essays and ask for recommendations, so that might be the worst of it, and I have to pay for all of it, which also could be painful). I cleaned a bathroom. I grocery-shopped. I wrote a quilt statement. I did a bunch of stuff that needed doing. I worked out. I added a new bunch of exercises to my regimen, because if I’m going to be an antisocial, lonely old lady, I might as well be a strong, buff, antisocial, lonely old lady who does not have osteoporosis. None of that really mattered. I don’t know what matters.

I found the eyelid, after I had cut another one. That whole pile is pieces that I’ve found after I cut another one, or pieces I had cut out twice, or pieces that were totally the wrong color. I don’t know what to do with them. It seems mean to throw them out simply because I fucked up when I cut them out.

I’ve found that most TV shows right now rub me the wrong way. People are so shitty to each other in relationships that I can’t handle it; it makes me feel sick. So I’m watching X-Files. Mulder is kind of a jerk sometimes, but he’s well-meaning. I can handle shows from the 90s. Great. And Masterpiece Theater Mystery. That’s about it.

I didn’t start ironing until after 9, I think. I don’t know where the day went. It just went.

Once I got it all ironed together, I pulled it off the ironing sheets and rolled it up while I got the background ready to go, ironed it flat and laid it out on the floor.

I laid out the base first…the tree is easier to put down once the main section is ironed flat.

That’s most of it…missing two toenails, a fingernail, some drops of blood, a question mark, some dots over i’s, and a plug. I did get those on too, but didn’t manage a photo of that. You’ll see it again, once it’s stitched down. I’m hoping to do that tomorrow. It’s about 40″ wide x 50″ high. Something like that. She’s not happy, is she. I drew this back in June…before my life fell into a crack in the earth. I guess she knew what was coming. But she’s not crying…

I have to admit to a new emotion that’s showing up in meditation. Why do I have to admit to it? Because it’s scary. Admitting to it will hopefully make it less so. What emotion? Fear. Straight up. I’m scared of my future (or lack thereof), I’m scared of not feeling safe and comfortable…like…almost…ever. I’m just plain scared. I thought I had the future figured out. I knew shit would happen…it always does…but I thought I could handle it. I didn’t know then that everything that made me feel safe would just be gone. Without any input from me, without any chance to have a say or work on things…just gone. And I know that’s what happens when you put trust in other people, which we have to do to be in this world. OK, some people don’t…it’s true…but I don’t want to be one of those people…I’m already a bit of a hermit, and I know I could go further along that road, and I may very well wander down there for a good long time. It’s quiet, there are very few people, and I don’t have to deal with other people’s stupid shit affecting me.

But I don’t like being scared. No one does. We rush around when we’re anxious and scared and we try to control everything so we feel better, safer, and it doesn’t really work. It’s inside us and we have to work on the part inside us that reacts to things; that’s what causes the fear. It’s not the other people, the things…it’s us. So if I see scared in meditation and I feel scared in meditation (and elsewhere), I just have to face it and figure out how to make it feel safer INSIDE me. Because that’s where it lives.

Tonight’s meditation kept talking about my mental state…and I kept thinking, “like California?” A state as in a physical place with a flag and a state flower and state bird and state motto, “In nothing we trust,” and a state tree. A state of mind. A state of being. A state of matter. And then Mr. Meditation started talking about the blue sky, and that’s when I lost it…my state? The theory is that the blue sky is always there. It may be obstructed by clouds, sometimes light and feathery and easy to push through, and sometimes big and black and dark and thick…but if you just push through, you can see the blue sky. I don’t know how thick the layer of big black clouds is, but I can’t see the sky. I know it’s there, though, and that makes me sad…knowing it exists and I can’t see it, I can’t figure out how to get high enough to see the blue. It’s there though.

So yeah, that makes me cry. I’m fucking hopeless some days.

And during the 20 seconds when we’re meant to let the brain just do what it needs to do, and we sit back and observe and “note”…it’s screaming…full on screaming its head off…and I’m crying. That’s not stepping back. That’s not noting. That’s responding. That’s watching the movie and feeling it in your gut, your heart, where your heart used to be but where there’s a giant sucking hole now. That place.

Boychild sent me this link to the DSM-5 reviewed as a dystopian novel. It’s actually fairly amusing, especially when you know you’re experiencing a few of the things in there. I should just think of my life as a fucked-up dystopian novel, write it as a book, and make a couple million (someone’s debut novel just made them that amount…seriously? What am I doing wrong? Oh yeah. I’m not writing a book.).

I realized today that I had meant to ink the Earth Stories quilt, but then I forgot. Or something. My brain not being itself and all. So it’s photographed for the catalog already, but I didn’t ink it. So I was thinking…should I ink or should I not? It doesn’t ship until March or April of next year. I have time. How the fuck did I forget the inking? I don’t know. I wasn’t there. My brain, it wanders off and does things without telling me, and I don’t find out for days or weeks after. I could just leave it alone (the quilt, not my brain…my brain needs me to pay attention to it). Fuck. I don’t know. Does it matter if it’s different than the catalog? It probably won’t be hugely noticeable? I don’t know. I will have to keep thinking about it. Maybe I could think about that instead of all the angst my brain currently dwells upon.

Wishful thinking.

Hard

Today’s blog post is brought to you by R.E.M.

Every time I watch this video, listen to this song, it just kills me. Even if I’m in the best mood in the world, this song makes me cry. For some reason, I’m listening to R.E.M. today. Mood music. Maybe not the best choice…but it’s my choice.

Yeah, I know I’m getting better. It doesn’t feel better really, but I can feel shifting in something. Whatever that something is. That said, today was a throwback. I had an hour or so intermission in the evening with art and food and wine with a good friend, but it was sandwiched by Crying Act I And Crying Acts II and III. I don’t even know why. It’s not like I can pinpoint an event or a thought that warranted all those tears…they just happened.

The art was good, by the way…the new exhibit at Visions Art Museum is recent purchases by Del Thomas, a big collector in the art quilt world, and it is definitely worth seeing. There was a good variety of quilts, some truly beautiful works of art. It’s there through January 19. You can see some of the work on Del’s blog (link above in her name). I enjoyed seeing Charlotte Bird and Cathy Denton’s works about words that start with C as well. The intermission was appreciated.

Mr. Meditation tells me today to step away from the feeling as I identify with it. I step away from some pretty fucking overwhelming sadness and fall into the hole behind me of deep dark weeping. Nice. You could have warned me, man. Seriously. What am I aware of? Did you just ask me that? I’m aware of feeling like shit right now, Mr. Meditation. I’m sure there will be a positive outcome from the meditation in the long run, but today? Not so much. Today it is just sad.

I had goals today…I wanted to get grades done (it’s the end of the Trimester), so I would have the rest of the weekend free. I had to be up at 4:40 AM to take the girlchild somewhere, and when I got home, I went back to sleep. I was going to be all gung ho and go to the gym, but when I realized they weren’t even open, I was much more cavalier about the day. It’s not like I really had to BE anywhere. No one was waiting on me to be done with my stuff and be free. So I went back to sleep and Kitten tried to head butt me awake, but I put the pillow over my head, and then Calli (the dog) was whining, but I didn’t get up until she started farting…because that’s never a good sign.

It took me about 4 hours to get through all the grades, but I did it. Then I finally packed up the two quilts that are going to Poway…which should have been shipped already, but whatever…they’re not late yet.

Dehair, label on one of them, cut a dowel and put in eyescrews, pack it all up, print labels, tape it up. Shipped it before I went to the gym. Then home and showered (the cold-water faucet is stripped…makes showers very exciting at the moment…plumber can’t come until Monday)…and off to VAM. I cried all the way there. Don’t know why. Really don’t. It just happened. I got it under control about 4 times, the last time while walking across the street to go in to the museum. Good thing…I know a lot of people in there.

Babygirl witnessed the grading…

by sitting on the gradebook. It’s either there or she sits behind my neck on the chair, like an overly heavy scarf…with claws. That’s where she is now. It explains the crick in my neck.

When I got home from food and drink, which was a pleasant experience…it was nice…I ironed for a while. I really want this thing stitched down by the end of the weekend.

I don’t know if that’s really possible, but I can try. I don’t have anything else important to do, well, except shopping and lesson planning and dealing with plumbing and pet food and kids and helping the boychild with college apps and probably saving the world if I get around to it. Did I mention housecleaning? No I did not. Someone still owes me a year of housecleaning. This would be a good time to have that. In the above picture, I’m ironing the eye and the face separate from the rest of the body. I actually lost the eyelid. It’s a big piece. Usually I lose small pieces. Who knows where it disappeared to.

Once I had all the pieces ready, I ironed the head onto the body.

This piece is holding together pretty well as a single, large ironed piece, which means I keep having to move it around on the ironing sheets…they’re not big enough for the whole quilt. I finally pulled off the whole body so I could do the top part with the tree and the hair…

Here’s the already-ironed bits (from the back).

They look a bit different. And there it is with the body ironed to the hair and the tree…

With the body hanging off the edge of the ironing board. The roots that belong on the neck are sitting to the left, waiting to be ironed on.

All I have left is everything in the tree…which is about 130 pieces…not too bad, but not getting done tonight. Too tired. I’m almost 5 hours into the ironing. At least a couple of hours to go, if you count ironing down to the background.

It was after the ironing that I hit Crying Part III. That was meditation’s fault. Sigh. Obviously there’s a reason for all of it…I’m just not allowed to know what it is right now, except if you watch this TED video…

TED Talk Ash Beckham

There is no competition for who has it harder. There is just HARD. Coming out of any closet. I guess I’m out of the depression/grief closet. Sort of…because I do close the door again sometimes when I can’t deal any more, keep hiding in the closet. It’s easier to be on here and write about it than to talk about it in person. It’s easier to draw how I feel than to talk about it. I don’t know what that means in the long run, whether it will take me longer to get through the grief than it would someone who shares more than I do in person. I can’t really do anything but what I am doing, though, so it will take as long as it takes…and while it’s taking its time, it will be hard.

My Unruly Mind

Brain fuzzy. Forgot, completely, totally, to eat breakfast this morning. Didn’t even cross my mind. Don’t know what I was thinking about instead, but I’m sure it wasn’t good. Remembered at about 10 AM, when I tripped over a step and thought, “Why am I feeling so spacey?” Oh yeah. Food. Hmn. Diabetics need to eat. I do keep food at school (and plenty of other people do as well), but I hate that feeling that I’m so disconnected from my brain sometimes that I forget the stupidest (and most essential) things.

Food wasn’t good today…lunch…yuck. I just didn’t do well until nighttime. I don’t know why. I rarely know why. My unruly mind, as Mr. Meditation calls it. I need to be kind to my unruly mind. Sigh. I just need it to show up, check in once in a while…make me believe that it’s paying attention. Someone should.

Tiring day at school…cardiovascular lab where we exercise (by dancing crazily around the room, if you’re a teacher trying to motivate 7th-graders to actually MOVE) and then determine recovery rate. It’s kind of a fun lab, although frustrating when the kids are being lazy. I always tell them that if the Old Lady (me) can do it 5 times (5 periods), then they can do it once. I turn on music and we dance. No biggie. Exhausting by the end of the day though to manage the lab and the kids AND exercise every 50 minutes.

Boychild had Academic League after school, so I stopped by to hear him answer a bunch of questions about math, dance (!), and other stuff. I’m realizing how soon he will be leaving for college…it’s scary. I wonder if he will ever call or email…he’s not the most social beast. I will miss him.

I did grade a little. Mostly I sat and stared at the computer for about an hour…I was so tired…and I realized I haven’t been reading blogs hardly at all. I don’t know why. Easier to read fiction than reality? I’m not really spending a lot of time just sitting at the computer…except to write this each night. Maybe that’s where the blog-reading time went…from passively reading other people’s stuff to writing my own crap out. Who needs NaNoWriMo? I’ve been doing it since July. I’m averaging about 1200 words a day…that means I’m up to about 135,000 words. Wow. It’s not really a novel, though…just the story of my unruly mind, my wandering intellect, my moody and emotional mental midget, trauma, disrepair, dissolution. Sigh. I wonder when I will not have to think like this any more. I wonder when I will stop having long conversations with my mind about holding it together and not losing it in the car or the gym or the grocery store…when life will seem real again. Fuzz. Fog. Mud.

With a mood like that, I needed to make art…especially after not doing it last night. Three and a half hours in. About 300 pieces ironed together. Still missing a fingernail piece and two toenails…of all things (they’re small…they’re easy to disappear). Either I’ll find them in the last box or I’ll cut new ones…and then weeks from now, I’ll find them somewhere…and be unable to throw them out, because that’s how I roll.

But the cat is done. Hi Kitten…

I managed the torso and upper arms…

Next is the head and the crazy heart tree above it…

Still got 200 pieces to go, but I’m past the halfway mark. I might actually get this ironed down to the background this weekend (grades due…aargh)…stitching down next week maybe? It could happen…like if I don’t look at the calendar and all the stupid meetings and crap I need to go to. OK. Some of it’s not stupid. Some of it is actually social, or at least as social as I get these days…like three people I know really really well who won’t freak out on me. I can do that. Or complete and total strangers that I can tell nothing to. I can do that. I can make art. I can do that.

Fucking slog.

I like this song. I don’t like the video. Or I do. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just too old for it.

And then I watch it again and it reminds me of those old paintings of groups of philosophers and scholars…like this one…

School of Athens by Raphael. OK…is that a weird comparison? Artist brain. I don’t know why they’re linked up there, but they are.

And this video…yeah…totally (except not flowers)…

Tattoos in a New Light

I would do that. Reminds me…followup mammogram number three for this year is coming up. May my breasts survive the experience. When she starts to tear up…I do that a lot…and I don’t even have cancer. But that’s how close everything is to the surface. I’m not sure I could get a tattoo that someone else had drawn. And if I were to do one of my own, I would just keep adding details until it turned into a 70-hour extravaganza. Not sure that’s a good use of time or money. Will think good thoughts though. My followup is unlikely to be a problem…he’s just being overly cautious. Deep breaths. Don’t think about bad stuff. Don’t think about the future (you don’t have one at the moment…it’s just more of the same). Don’t think? That’s harder.

I’m in that fuzzy place…not the good fuzzy, but the blurry fuzzy, the muffled mess that seems like a psychiatric hospital, the crazy ward, the mental ward, the strait-jacket and smells-like-disinfectant ward. Not a good thing. Need a remedy for that.

A Slow and Sloppy Process

I didn’t think I would have the energy (mental or physical) to make art tonight, but my post-meditation mood was so dim and dreary that I knew I just had to push through that and do it. It’s the same stubborn streak that had me running cross country with multiple stress fractures in high school. Some people might call it driven, some might call it just plain stupid. I don’t know what it is, but I know I feel better with some art under my belt every night, so I just need to do it…just like I need to exercise, meditate, and apparently eat food (I’m not keen on the last one, but my body seems to require it).

So at 10 PM, I got my butt off the couch, wiped my face…multiple times, because I couldn’t stop crying for a while there post-meditation…and turned on the iron. Part of why I was apprehensive about starting so late is that the next section was hands…fingers…complicated little buggers…

But I decided to iron the arms off to the side and then put them on top of the legs, which worked pretty damn well. An hour later, I had both arms down about halfway up the biceps…

I’m about 200 pieces in, about 2 1/2 hours done. I like how it looks. More tomorrow.

While the pieces are laid out, I have to protect them from a cat lying on them, so I use the bins with sorted pieces to cover up all the other pieces…

Progress. Deep sigh. It really does feel better to do that. I need to write that down somewhere so I can remember. It seems like a duh moment, but some days, I really have a hard time remembering to do the things that make me feel better, push the misery off my shoulders and into the trash. Not that it will stay there, but it’s the thought that counts.

Midnight has been guarding my stuff…

Not really. She threw up on the Wonder Under and she leaves dirt everywhere…need to change her flea meds. I did clean up the light table, though, figuring I won’t be tracing Wonder Under for a while…need to finish these two quilts before the next one is due. Deadlines first, I guess…although there are two or three drawings from the last three months that are clamoring to be quilts. We’ll see…after December, when I get these two done.

I didn’t get much stitching done on the trip to Houston…I was more into reading, I guess.

But I did get some done…the backgrounds for the orange birds and getting the green birds sewn down…now they just need all their parts. I have another post to write about the vendors and shopping at IQF and some other stuff…like the apparent milk shortage in Houston.

Today, I had my students study these…

Sheep hearts (reasons why science teachers need cutting boards, hot water, gloves, and big knives). MMM MMM Good. Not really. Lots of squealing and some stupid behavior. It gets them ready for the eyeballs, which are way more gross and gooey and squirty. Two more labs this week…exhausting, lots of cleaning up after students. They will survive. I might too. Who knows?

I finished a couple of books on the trip…Elizabeth George’s new book Just One Evil Act…

This was a bit weird…it had some issues…but I love me some Elizabeth George, so I enjoyed it. Barbara Havers is such a messed-up character and Lynley is such a good guy (well, he can be a mess too, honestly)…definitely worth reading.

And then I read Michael Scott’s 4th book in the series about Nicholas Flamel, The Necromancer…

still loving this series. I need to wait a while to read the next one, though, because two more real live books (as opposed to the electronic ones) just showed up at the library, and they’ll be due in a few weeks. Plus one is for a book club (yes, I’m trying to do that again…we’ll see if I survive)…so I’ll have to finish it sooner rather than later.

I also finally finished this book, Broken Open, by Elizabeth Lesser, which made me cry every time I read it (hence the length of time it took me to finish it)…

Every time I read it, tears. Not sure why. There didn’t seem to be any one thing that did it, and sometimes I just found her incredibly irritating, plus I’m not really a God person and he kept showing up there. It was recommended by a friend who had read it and benefited from it. She wasn’t wrong.

I have quotes from the book…”For a while I just went off the edge of the world.”

“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kiss the ground.” Rumi (this is my excuse for making art every day and blowing off the grading…I shouldn’t say that…I graded for an hour and a half tonight, so I’m not blowing off ANYTHING. But making more time for art is never a bad thing.)

“Our culture favors the fast-food model of mourning–get over it quick and get back to work; affix the bandage of ‘closure’ and move on. I am not a big fan of ‘closure.’ It sounds so abrupt, so tidy, so final. I prefer old-fashioned words like mourning, lamentation, and grief. They suggest a slow and sloppy process–one that involves emotional upheaval, interrupted activity, and dark nights of the soul.” I don’t have closure. Apparently closure should have taken me a whopping 51 minutes or so…well fuck that shit. I don’t even know that closure makes sense…I think our emotional existence is a constantly changing landscape and you don’t get to close off one part of it and lock it away, and if people are doing that, I don’t actually think that’s healthy. We need to process through it, wade through the shit and mud and have it cling to your shoes and clothes for a while until you can get it all cleaned off, and even then, it will rise up and slap you around every once in a while. It’s possible that my existence is somewhat messy in general, though…so I’ve had to learn to deal with that. Where do the drawings come from? Well…there…not locked up…but vomiting all over the paper. I wanted to draw tonight, but didn’t have time, speaking of vomiting over the paper.

“Our tears, and the calm hands of grief that follow, are not signs of some tragic and evil reality…Grief is the proof of our love, a demonstration of how deeply we have allowed another to touch us.” I’ve said this before, that my grief is a sign of how deeply I was committed…and I shouldn’t feel like that was wrong…I should keep my eyes on working through the shit, but I’m not wrong for the level of grief I’m experiencing…it’s related to the level of emotion I hold (held?) inside me. There’s nothing wrong with that. Without that depth of emotion, I probably wouldn’t be the artist that I am.

“Grief is often confused with depression or self-pity. While one can certainly go into a woeful tailspin during the grieving process, in the long term, grief is not the same as depression. If we gloss over our grief, we might become depressed. Unfelt feelings and unexpressed grief have a way of dulling life. It is as if with every grief we do not feel, we stuff another handful of our vitality underground, until we are numb or sick or embittered.” Yeah. That. I might feel dulled at the moment, but I’m really not…I’m feeling all of it.

For some reason, when I’m going through piles of emotional shit, I save quotes. I have notes on the phone and the iPad of quotes from books I’ve been reading. I have quotes taped to my office door from the post-divorce reading frenzy. They seem to help me focus. I don’t know why.

Toenail revisited: I managed to half rip my big toenail off on Friday night…it wouldn’t come all the way off though (yes, I tried), so I had to bandage it back down and let the ooze and blood restick the nail to my toe…goddamn, I wish it would just fall off. Sigh. What a pain. Sometimes I dream of a cleaver and my toe. Not good.

The most useful and exciting thing I’ve done in the last week? I managed to successfully pair my old bluetooth earpiece and the new phone. This was not as easy as you would think it would be, and required many bizarre maneuvers and clicking on and off in a particular order. But I was successful! I know. Simple pleasures. It took me a long time to get it done.

So. Mood all over the map today. Whatever. At least I was aware of all its wanderings…and I managed them. There’s nothing wrong with crying. It’s all getting me somewhere…Montana? Not happy yet. Mr. Meditation wants me to be happy. Content. Double sigh. I think Mr. Meditation has a simpler life than I do.

Make art. Save lives.

Reviewing IQF Houston 2013

Yes, I took pictures. I’m never very logical about it. Sometimes I take pictures because the piece speaks to me…sometimes it’s because I want to complain about it. I try to stay away from the latter, but there are a couple in here. I don’t take a whole lot of traditional quilt photos, mostly because I find them boring. I suspect there are traditional quilters who walk right past the art quilts in the same way. So this is Kathy’s highly selective (I take fewer photos when I’m tired!) reconstruction of maybe 1/32nd of the International Quilt Festival at Houston, 2013, remembering that she had already seen West Coast Wonders and the Dinner @8 exhibit in Long Beach, and somehow she missed the placemats completely…I SAW them…I just didn’t have the mental energy to photograph any of them. My bad. But since most of you don’t come here for my quilt-show reporting, I’m not going to worry too much about my lame-ass reporting style.

Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry (sweetie, it’s too many names…I get why you’re keeping all of them, I really do, but please…maybe just calling yourself Caryl would be good) has created a series of thirty 30-inch-square pieces that celebrate her thirty years of quiltmaking, referencing her past work, themes, etc., and using her fabric collections to complete them.

So. Here’s what I think. First of all, the more power to her. She has a strong body of work that is well-liked by many, the exhibit already has 8 venues it’s traveling to, and she definitely has the technical ability to be showcased like this. I liked being able to look closely at her insane stitching…

(Electric Ellipses #2)

Especially in the more cellular-looking pieces and the two beach sand pieces.

(Casting a Long Shadow #2)

That said…why redo ideas from the last 30 years? I don’t get it? I know it might be hard to put a retrospective together if a lot of your work has sold, and I do get what you’re saying about the exhibit being pulled together by all of them being the same size, but…eh. Make New Work. Put some old work in the show. I don’t understand. It was popular, though, so apparently I am in the minority. I want to see new work, though. You have a new life…how will that change your art?

Bodil Gardner had at least 4 pieces in Houston…with two in the SAQA: People and Portraits exhibit with mine. I’ve always liked her work…it’s quirky and graphic and slightly off, but Martha Sielman mentioned something in the People and Portraits Walk and Talk that I’d never really thought about…her work is inordinately cheery. There’s never a sad moment. It’s just nice and joyful and chaotic and happy (unlike my own work).

This is Santa Lucia and that is one BIG and happy spiral-eared dog. Maybe I need to channel some Bodil. Maybe she’d let me come stay with her for a while. One of the pieces in the People and Portraits exhibit had a large central female figure, like her pieces (and mine) often do, and there was a coffee cup balanced on her shoulder, like I often do. Sielman said that Gardner says it refers to how women often share a cup of coffee (or tea) together as part of their socializing, and that if she were doing men, she would probably do a beer stein instead.

Another featured artist in People and Portraits is Sonia Bardella, whose faces have a particular quality to them.

This is Venice’s Carnival, which takes place near where she lives.

The best part is the detail she puts into the clothing in contrast to the skillfully painted faces.

Dianne Firth made four elements pieces for an exhibit, with Wind currently showing with the traveling Quilt National exhibit. This is Fire…

Which, like Wind, is much more stunning and vibrant in person…and was based on the volcanic eruptions in Iceland in 2010.

Betty Busby curated an exhibit of quilts called A Walk in the Wild, a SAQA exhibit of artists from New Mexico. Below is Busby’s piece, Desert Fox.

All the pieces were similar sizes…this is Where Earth and Sky Meet by Susan Szajer.

Her work deserved a detail shot…there are even tiny beads in there…

This one…Eight Ravens by Judith Roderick…was one of my favorite quilts in the show.

Her silk-painting technique adds a lot of interest and depth to her pieces, which have that graphic quality that I love, coming out of the printmaking world.

And the subject matter of the ravens is also a favorite. This piece glowed in person.

There were two dinosaur pieces by Shannon Conley that I liked…S Is for #4 is below…

Coelophysus bauri is the dino depicted in both quilts, apparently was thought to be a cannibal until recently. In the quilt above, Conley shows him in his Triassic-era habitat, with S Is for #3 below showing him in modern-day New Mexico.

Conley is a scientist who put real teeth on that first quilt…hopefully not valuable fossils (naw, they’re polymer clay). Here’s a link to her posts about these quilts.

Kathy York is one of my favorite brightly colored artists…you’ll notice I photographed lots of bright-colored quilts (a dream? hope? wish?). I posted York’s video of populating this quilt, Park Place, a while ago…

You can see it here on her blog post where she writes about making this quilt…

This is Stella in Yellow by Joanell Connolly.

Stella is the dog in the raincoat, rescued from the animal shelter. I love the contrast and the pattern, with the pitiful-looking dog off to the side.

Both Stella and this one were part of a pet exhibit, It’s Raining Cats and Dogs, bringing awareness to saving animal lives. This is One Cat, Two Cat by Laura Bisagna.

Bisagna had been feeding a stray gray cat, and every day it would come out and eat, then go behind the house, and seemingly come out and eat again…until she realized there were two gray cats.

This piece was deceptively simple-looking until you studied it up close. This is Winter by Laurie Weiner.

The piece is whole-cloth, hand-dyed, and trapunto, but the quilting is what drew me to it…

Intense pattern and texture makes up this piece. I saw a lot of this close, patterned quilting and I’m always attracted to it, which is amusing, because I so don’t quilt like that…but it’s true that type of quilting would not lend itself to the images I create…so I am happy to admire it in other people’s work (and call them insane behind their backs…while they say the same about me and my 2000-piece quilts).

The sky drew me to this piece…In the Bleak Midwinter by Ruth Powers.

Being a Southern Californian, we rarely see winter landscapes such as these.

I always like to show Tanya Brown what pieces hers are hanging with…so there’s Under the Gingko Tree…

featuring her painted whole-cloth work and crazy tiny stitching…

As well as her boy actually standing still…a minor miracle in itself.

This one drew me to it with all the crazy detail…It’s a Crazy Life by Gail Thomas.

Gail’s own beautiful, long white hair was used to quilt this piece as she recovered from health issues…

Her painting on the fabric is very colorful and detailed.

This piece drew my eye because of parts of it…overall, I wasn’t sure I liked it, but I liked the faces. This is You Are Here by Victoria Findlay Wolfe…

The people are from digital photos manipulated in Photoshop and printed on fabric.

It’s an interesting use of a traditional pattern with modern tones to it…I’m not sure I like the whole thing (the silver lamé really bugs me), but I liked those parts.

This quilt had lots of funky details in it…and I kinda like how it’s just all globbed together…

And the use of pattern in the fabrics is really interesting too…

This is Japanese Calendar by Fumi Kido. The Japanese do often have a certain feel to their quilts…

I’m not sure what that’s about…because they often use American patterns, and it STILL feels Japanese to me. This one has a different appeal to me, though…very stylized but with those details.

I do hail from an applique background…and this one was beautifully done. This is Four Loons and Friends by Patricia Sellinger.

The symmetry and design in this quilt are stunning…and she embellished the birds with beads as well.

This is an original design.

I liked this one because of the flame-like blobs wandering across the design. This is May Your Burdens Be Light by Kazuko Covington. This is an original design using New York Beauty blocks, made after the tsunami that destroyed her hometown.

Those blobs now look like tsunami waves…

This one won best of show…Chihuly’s Gondola by Melissa Sobotka. That’s $10,000, people. It’s a beautiful quilt, but it is from a photograph of Chihuly’s installation in Texas from a few years back.

So tell me this…is there a difference in the art applied between Sobotka’s copy of another artist’s work (is this a Sobotka or a Chihuly?) and the Jane Sassaman (original design) below? I think yes…but I wasn’t a juror in this show (and probably never will be invited to be one either). I think Chihuly deserves a healthy percentage of the prize.

This is Jane Sassaman’s Illinois Album, also an award winner, but in my eyes, a much more deserving one.

You decide.

Another Bodil Gardner happy piece, this is I Arise from Dreams…

Sheila Frampton-Cooper had two of her graphic, colorful pieces in the show…this is Lair of the Amethyst Deva…

I see legs…Sheila’s another tight, detailed quilter, which suits her big, bold, abstract work.

Nearby was another somewhat controversial piece…yes, it’s abstract; yes, it’s colorful, even pretty…Roses in the Window by Carol Morrissey. On the surface, an original design from a photograph she took…but how did she get all those circles? Is it the same place my mom gets her circles? Where is her hand in this quilt?

Does what equipment we use to create a piece make it more art or less art? You’ll notice I have no pictures of quilts with digitized photos where the artist has printed it out full size and just stitched over it. I need to see the artist’s hand in the work…I need to see what they’ve changed or made their own. Feel free to BE a photographer (there was a great photography show at IQF), but if you’re going to put it on fabric, make sure there is a purpose to that. Why fabric? Why not just print a photograph on paper and frame it and be done with it? It’s something to think about…

Another Kathy York…this is You Are What You Eat…

Speaking of having your hand in your artwork, York made the batik flowers herself.

This piece…I still need this one explained. The graphic nature explains why I like it, but there is some weird stuff going on in this quilt. This is Alice’s Kitchen (obviously Alice in Wonderland) by Miki Murakami…I love that this is so NOT typically Japanese.

All she says is that this is how she imagined a kitchen in Alice’s story, even though there wasn’t one. I think I want to talk to this woman.

Sue Bleiweiss makes wonderfully graphic and deceptively simple pieces. This is Tutti Frutti City.

This one intrigued me…it was just plain weird, yet cool. This is The Birders by Suzanne Marshall, an original design inspired by a 1565 manuscript…ahhh…there’s why it’s weird.

I’ve taken pictures of her work before…liking the weird medieval qualities to her work…

Just look at that unhappy face.

This one caught my eye because I couldn’t (at first) figure out what it was…I thought maybe it was leaky tubes of paint. Silly me…it’s just Oregon Buoys by Jane Haworth.

I like my idea better…but I guess it caught my eye. Chaos and color.

Another Frampton-Cooper piece, this is Venus in the Garden, named by her sister, who saw Venus Flytraps (I see an angry parrot…that wouldn’t be a nice name though).

This one had a stunning use of color…this is Antelope Canyon by Kimberly Lacy.

And another winner, Tuning Fork #11 by Heather Pregger.

It’s a very graphic piece…she does lots of pieces like this, though. I wonder about that. I guess it’s a different challenge to work abstractly with the same shapes than to do what I do. (It would drive me bonkers though!)

OK, so there were all these cow quilts…something to do with a book. I liked this one because?

Come on. Guess. OK. It’s a cow skelly. How can you not love a cow skelly? Actually, I was walking past this part of the exhibit when someone pointed to the earrings on the cow and said, “Honestly, some of these quilts you cannot use as a QUILT!” Oh my. No ma’am, you can’t (she wasn’t old…younger by far than I am). So. There you have it. It’s a MooSkellyNotQuilt. Actually, it’s Dia de los MOOertos by Patricia Ward.

This one…it’s cute. It’s tiny. It’s beautifully made. It’s a prize winner. This is Masanobu Miyama’s Wind, a picture of the artist’s dog.

The statement talks about an original microfused applique technique. I do not know what this is, although micro means small and those pieces are freakin’ small (I should know).

This one caught my eye because of the fabrics…in the US, we are so into our cotton and occasionally a silk or two…this piece, The Berlin Bear by Marjan van der Heijden, was made completely with leftovers…

That were stitched together sort of haphazardly, but in a beautiful way…

Truly amazing use of fabric.

This Japanese landscape is so Japanese because of the taupe, but the imagery is so American…I wonder what the Japanese countryside actually looks like and why this appeals to them. This piece is A Place to Long For, by Aiko Yokoyama.

The fabric and design is beautiful…I just wonder why it’s so appealing.

So that’s my take on IQF 2013…there were probably quilts I didn’t photograph just because I was tired or in a mood (I was in a mood a lot), so don’t take it badly if yours isn’t here…mine is just one set of slightly jaded, tired, and miserable eyes among 60,000 viewers. I do know that I will miss IQF coming to Long Beach, California, because it was cheap and easy to get to, and I don’t think I’ll be going to Houston again for a good, long while, but I did enjoy some of the quilts quite a bit. I’ll talk more about the experience in general at another time. I do provide artist’s links when I can easily find them and confirm that they belong to the artist. If your work is here and you have a link you’d like me to use, please let me know.

Don’t Think Too Hard…

Some days it’s like I’m watching myself from a distance moving through life. I shake my head, thinking, she should be more careful, she should slow down, she’s not thinking about what she’s doing…as I watch myself walk here, move there, drive over here, go to the gym, buy groceries. Nothing of import. Nothing that has meaning…just the chores. Today was one of those days. I got up at 2:45 AM San Diego time, although it’s possible my brain was on Texas time…hard to say. Then rode two planes, ate some food in between, read a long book and started another, slept a little…and I was home.

Home didn’t feel good…well, it did and it didn’t. It’s my bed. My stuff is here. My fabric is here. I can make a cup of tea without having to hunt down ingredients. Those are all good things. I came home, though, to a pile of laundry, a bunch of dirty dishes, cat vomit (fun stuff), an empty fridge, an empty life.

Well, it’s not totally empty. I make art. I have my kids (I did not see them today…I only saw my exhusband…twice…weird). The cats were glad to see me (lovely to feel needed). But there is too much of the stuff that feels like drudgery and not enough of the stuff that makes my heart soar…mostly because I don’t know how to do that any more. The quilt show…it was OK. I wasn’t comfortable being there. I wasn’t interested in a lot of what WAS there. I had some good moments, but…I wasn’t in the right mindframe to enjoy myself. I don’t know how to shake the grief long enough to enjoy myself. I get to a point where it feels like I’m trying to climb out of my own skin. The closest I get to anything resembling enjoyment is at the gym or when I’m doing art stuff, but even that today was an issue. And that’s not enjoyment…it’s not a rush or a soaring feeling…it’s just like taking a deep breath at the top of the stairs, getting some air.

My emotions are very distant today…a combination of travel and tired and overwhelmed, I think. Mr. Meditation says to be less critical of my feelings…don’t identify with them. It’s not MY feeling or I FEEL LIKE, but just labeling it. That? That is sad. That over there? That’s angry. I recognize those. Even using the words ‘pleasant’ or ‘unpleasant’ is not meant to be judgmental of the feeling…just a label. I couldn’t get my brain to label anything during meditation tonight. And is SAD unpleasant? I guess so. I don’t like being sad, so I guess that’s unpleasant. Anger is definitely unpleasant. Sad just seems like it’s there. It has a purpose, it seems, as long as you don’t wallow in it forever. I’m sure some people think I am wallowing. I’m not. I’m just not capable of jumping up and yelling Happy! right now. And fuck you for thinking I should be able to do that right now.

I’m thinking way too hard about this. When I feel like that, bogged down in the thinking, I go to the gym, I draw, I read. I did two of those today.

Then I had a choice after the grocery shopping (because shopping on a Saturday night doesn’t make me feel like a total loser…OK, it does, and it’s even worse when you run into your exhusband there, who is buying stuff to feed at least one of your kids…). I could work on school stuff or I could work on art stuff.

I bet you know which one I chose…the one where there is some hope of mental rest, of peace…maybe…some days. I cleaned up a little in the office to make room, putting away fabrics etc…and then I started ironing…

I’m missing two toenails…they will probably show up eventually.

Most missing parts do. I had to cut one missing rug piece because it went above and over another piece…so of course, I found the missing piece AFTER I had done that…it was in the next box by accident (I sort them into boxes by 100s before ironing).

This really is a rather simple quilt after the last beast…

I have about an hour 40 minutes in, and there’s about 150 pieces ironed down. A couple more nights like that, and I’ll have it done. That would be nice. The colors are a bit more subdued than normal…at least so far. Interesting. I never really get to see how the colors work together until I get to this stage, since I don’t really have a color pattern…I just sort of color it in my head and hold fabrics next to one another to see if they’ll work.

I knew I would be grading at two soccer games tomorrow, so that helped me make the decision to blow off work for yet another day. I’ll be grading at games for about 5 hours tomorrow…that seems plenty. I should be allowed to do stuff besides work and clean and cook.

I do have pictures from Houston and will get to them eventually. I didn’t take a ton of pictures, though…not inspired, I guess.

I hope some day there is some feeling besides all this sad and blah. It’s wearing on me. I want to be able to just go out somewhere and laugh and enjoy myself, but I can’t get there. The sad is always looming over me, poking me in case I forget about it. Sounds like there will be more drawing this week…let this muggy emotional mess solidify into a drawing and vomit it out on the page. Then I’ll feel better maybe…as long as I don’t think too hard.

Deep Breaths

I don’t even know if I can put a coherent post together tonight. Long conversation helped my mind settle…realizing that when I make art, whether it’s the drawing, tracing, cutting, ironing, or sewing, that one of the reasons I feel peace then is that I am in the moment right then…I’m not worried about the future or diving into the past and hurt and regrets…I am just right there, right then…and that is the closest to normal (Kathy normal, not your normal) that I have been in months.

So it makes sense that I should do more of it, right?

Things I took away from the quilt festival today:

Quilters help well. They like to gather forces together and fix things that need it. Case in Point: Libby Lehman suffered a stroke some months ago and paying for her treatment has been an issue. You can read updates here on her Caring Bridge Libby Lehman site. I like to think of most quilters as people who share information (and fabric and thread), but they do also seem to take care…whether it’s taking care of their own, or homeless animals, or what’s for dinner.

The Japanese: does the Japanese countryside look like that? I’ll have to post that picture later…but much of their work seems so Americanized that it makes me wonder what Japan is really like. I think I will have to go back there some day (last time I was there was when I was 9 months old…don’t remember much).

I apparently have a crazy brain, but not in a bad way (more than one person told me this after either hearing me talk or seeing my quilts). I do not consider this a problem. I tried to have mom record my little talk, but technology beat her and we have no video. We should have practiced more. Apparently the app is not intuitive. Enough.

Waiting at the end of every aisle. Mom is like an errant bug, illogically traveling based on some unseen pheromones that drag her here and there. I stand in one place, waiting for her, and people keep wanting me to move around and get out of their way. I am like a post, an immovable column. I lose her multiple times. She is not following directions.

My view of Houston from the gym…

My view of the Convention Center from the gym…

My view of life from the gym? Cannot contain in photo.

Fabric…the only thing I bought…or was gonna buy, until mom jumped in…

All hand dyed stuff by Frieda Anderson and Laura Wasilowski.
The iron set up by the window (for the view)…

And messing with sewing on the floor (a logical place to sew, if you ask me)…

Writing this post…

Home tomorrow. Hope to bring back some of the wisdom and peace that came from tonight’s conversation, but know my brain will do what it does…even when I try to remind it what’s best, it does not always listen. But I will get there eventually. Deep breaths.

It’s Not Easy

First of all, I’ve been awake since 3:30 AM, so anything I write should be suspect. Second of all, I’m in Houston, Texas, home of the International Quilt Festival, where approximately 60,000 people (yes, mostly women) will attend the quilt and vendor show.

Why the hell am I here? I have two quilts in one of the special exhibits, so I came for that. I’ll be doing a Walk and Talk of the show (I will only be talking about mine) tomorrow at 11AM (tomorrow is Friday, in case that’s confusing, because honestly, I don’t what time it is at the moment).

Mom came with me…she will try to record me tomorrow, but we haven’t persuaded her phone to DO such things yet, so I don’t hold out great hopes. I did much better this time…I actually talked to people at the SAQA Meet and Greet (be impressed…I think it’s because I am seriously sleep-deprived).

I woke up this morning thinking, “Normal dreams?” I’m having dreams of a normal life, perhaps even MY normal life…like not sad and stressed and walking in a fog (I have now typed ‘dog,’ ‘fig,’ and ‘fof’), but like normal-feeling. Maybe that’s why waking up is so difficult. Reality doesn’t feel normal. Reality feels bad.

Everything is tainted by associations with the past nine…twenty-two (??) years. I can’t go anywhere or do anything without feeling it resonate with something that now hurts. Airports, airplanes, sitting on a plane, sitting by the gates. Bloody hell, some peace please??? Can I just have something that’s just mine and not attached to all this crap?

I sat there on the plane as mom talked to some other quilter, and I hurt. I read, I stitched, I tried to sleep, and the hurt tied my guts in knots until I couldn’t sleep. Or eat. I turned the music up louder and worked on my stitching callous.

Sigh.

I’m better now. A lot of the quilt show doesn’t interest me…there are lots of quilts that just don’t even touch me (and I’m not being very open-minded at the moment…it needs to seriously catch my eye for me to even get closer). We’ve only made it through half the quilts (saw mine!) and skimmed a portion of the vendors.

One woman told me I should exhibit in Europe because they’re not prudes like the Americans (not her exact words). Another woman told me never to lose my unique style (I don’t think I could do that if I tried). I met some people I already knew and some I’d never met but had known for a while.

I need to go to sleep (mom was down for the count an hour ago). We’re getting up to go to the gym in the morning before the show opens (so virtuous). It’s not easy being here, but it’s not easy being anywhere at the moment, so I might as well be uncomfortable here. It’s not fun, but it’s a change, and change can’t be bad at the moment.

Paying Attention…

I’m supposed to pay attention to, label my feelings, pay attention to my movements…going from stopped to moving, from seated to standing. I think too hard about the latter…wait, am I moving now? Am I stopped? When does movement start? Trying. Not breathing right this morning. Irritated. Stressed. Too much to do before I leave for Houston. Work raises its ugly head and demands more attention. Fuck you…you have too much of my life already, you bastard. I’m ignoring you. Hard to do with the sound of hundreds of middle-schoolers outside my door.

I started typing this in the morning, before school. I was trying to get everything set up and my brain was vibrating, it was working so hard to push emotion down and out and away. So I stopped. I typed. I cried. I cried with kids right outside the door. Better than inside, right? It’s OK. It’s under control most of the time. Or is that OK? Would less control be better? I don’t know. I have to function. I have to do my job, pay the bills, take care of my kids.

Tension. Nausea. Tweaked one part of my back. Bloated, tired. Wanted to stay home and read my book. Still want to do that. (got to read at the gym and during dinner…having dinner by yourself? Or having dinner with the characters of your book? Sad either way, but at least I semi-enjoy one version.)

Here’s the core problem to paying attention to your feelings: mine get overwhelming pretty quickly, and that’s not OK at work. I try to draw from positive interactions at work, especially with kids, but they seem more heavily weighted in the morning hours, and then I try to check in with my team at lunch for their collective strength and with my science coteacher between classes, in the space between our doors, but some days I just can’t get enough mental and emotional space from all that crap that swirls around in my head, making soup out of my control and logic and planning. Mr. Meditation doesn’t probably deal with what I deal with…he looks too damn calm. Give him my life for a week or so and see if he changes his tune. I spent all day breathing and paying attention to how I felt (you are about to duct tape a student to a chair…how does that make you FEEL?). Not really. But maybe it worked, I don’t know.

He says, “Experience overtakes the intellectual understanding of your feelings,” like that’s a good thing. OK. I guess it is. It’s just not good in the context of work or the gym or the grocery store or wherever I’m standing that isn’t in my room, a closet, in my car, in a big field in the middle of nowhere (can I be transported there now?). I am very good at experiencing my feelings. I am also good at understanding them. That unfortunately does not help them leave me alone for a while. Or even control them enough to feel like I’m in control.

Speaking of control, tomorrow’s dinner is already prepped and in the fridge for the slow-cooker tomorrow (I’m getting the hang of this. Praise my efficiency, dammit). My sub plans for the two days I’m gone were done this morning. I did extra laundry today for the trip. I’m not packed, but that’s OK…I’m doing that tomorrow night. I have food for the trip. I’ll be running on very little sleep (hey, what’s new?). Expect me to fall into a closet and cry at some point. I have books on the iPad and in real life (just in case), I have a couple of sketchbooks (have to make a decision about those), and I spent time tonight prepping the last two months’ of Sue Spargo’s birds to take with me…

I needed to iron and cut things out…

and sew a few things down with the machine. Tomorrow night I will put the bags together for stitching on the plane. I’m hoping we aren’t in terminals for long…if we are, it’s because we missed a flight. I’m prepared if we do. I have food, books, and stitching…materials for drawing. I hate being bored. Headphones for music. I will need music.

I’d like to say I’m excited, but mostly I’m nervous and apprehensive. I don’t travel well. I have to talk about two quilts, and I don’t really have anything logical to say about one of them, although girlchild approved my rambling explanation from last night. I’m worried about being around people. I know, that’s lame. I’m hoping to hold it together without my routines of exercise, meditation, reading, and drawing in a safe place. There are no safe places in a hotel or on a plane. I have my gym clothes. I have my meditation app. I have headphones.

I had to grade tests tonight, so I didn’t get any time for real art, but I did interact with fabric. During school, I needed to do a cover page for the new unit…

So I even got to draw at school. And color! You wonder why I draw what I draw…or maybe you don’t. I wonder if I were an English or Math teacher, what would I draw instead of body parts? Or was I fated to be a science teacher? Who knows.

I had 17 ideas today for drawing uterine-related stuff, women and their periods, women and menopause, women and their uteri, the pain, the blood, the mess, the annoyance, as you age, having to deal with the vagaries of the female body deciding to ignore routine and just mess with you on a regular basis. Cramps so bad it hurts to stand, it hurts to sit…and yet, there you are, doing both, in front of 35 kids who have no idea what you’re feeling or experiencing. This is your teacher…she is basically hemorrhaging AND suffering from depression. And you think YOU have it bad? Really? Deep breaths. It’s like my inner emotional world is being wrought upon the physical body. I can draw that.

I need to draw more of that…you know, because it will be so accepted in the art or art-quilt worlds. Yeah. Whatever. I obviously don’t pay much attention to acceptance in either. I just do what’s in my head and rail at the world when it causes issues.

I’m going to Houston for the opening of the Art Quilt Portfolio: People and Portraits exhibit that SAQA is sponsoring to go along with Martha Sielman’s book published this year. I was one of 21 featured artists in the book (if I’m smart, I will find my copy and take it with me for signatures). They are exhibiting two quilts from each artist. I got to choose which two out of the book (oh my…what were they thinking, letting me choose?). I chose Fully Medicated and I Was Not Wearing a Life Jacket. I’ll post them later this week (although they are on my Current Shows page). My mom will be there too…be nice to her. It must have been hard to raise me to be the crazy-ass artist that I am today. I’m sure it was hard.

When I get back from Houston, it’s race race race to the end of the school trimester and getting two quilts done and the stupid fucking holiday season (hate the holidays) and the high-school soccer season and family stuff and maybe some free time. And maybe some mental space, who knows. Probably some pain and hurt as well. That seems to come with the holidays, whether I like it or not. Lots of have-to’s and shoulds and not a lot of enjoying the moment. I will have to work on that. More exhibits to enter, some to get into, some to reject me (I can handle that…it’s disappointing, but it’s a rejection that I’m used to and can deal with). If I had my choice right this second, I’d be working on a quilt right now, instead of trying to persuade my brain it’s bedtime.

I don’t often have a choice, though. Paying attention. Sigh. I really wish someone had been paying attention. That’s part of my test, now. You need to pay attention. If you can’t? Fuck off. You’re not worth it.