Hamlet Murdered Me…

I was thinking about artistic influences over the last three or four days…I remember being influenced by the psychedelic rock posters of the 60s and 70s (Mouse and Kelley for starters, some Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, ), but that was probably in college. I also remember being fascinated with Robert Rauschenberg, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Mary Cassatt (not quite the same as the others), and Frida Kahlo…but I think that was all more college, except for Cassatt. I remember searching for female artists…and being given Cassatt and O’Keeffe, and not a whole lot else. I also credit Dr. Suess and Richard Scarry. Seriously. I do.

And years of life-drawing classes…those were definitely a big part of my being able to draw what I draw. But what is it about my brain that makes it obsess over making art and drawing and putting together pieces that can be shown, and the brain of one of my artist friends who is content with decorating her house? We both have art degrees, but I couldn’t give a lesser shit about that stuff; the art holds me together like glue. Everything else leaves, but the art stays with me. It’s always there, sometimes lurking under the surface. It always pays attention, it never acts up, it doesn’t leave me in the lurch, doesn’t hang me out to dry, doesn’t have a midlife crisis and make me wish I lived on another planet, where humans have brains in their heads. It doesn’t make me wish I could go to sleep and wake up somewhere where everything made sense again.

It’s just mine, the art is. All fucking mine. I try to explain where my brain goes when I create. I don’t even feel like myself at the moment unless I am creating. Seriously, ironing fabric makes me feel more like Kathy than any other thing I do all day, every day. And even that is just a shadow of whomever I used to be.

I tried to do grades this evening, but either my computer or the interface between my system and the county’s grading program are just not happy with each other…I had this problem last time…it takes forever to update. I’ll have to finish at school tomorrow. There are only so many hours in the day. But grading and inputting numbers is just plain old depressing, even when you see that one kid, that one you’ve been working on for like 3 months, her grade finally pops up…she’s finally made up like 30% of her grade and she will be passing this trimester. Cry a little, happy tears, and then realize you have another 5 who are completely blowing everything off and up.

Confessions of a middle-school teacher: it’s hard to care about every kid all the time. Sometimes you have to cut your losses on some and focus your attention and energy on the kid you know will actually change their behaviors with your attention. Some kids, they’re never going to change anything…you’ve given them a 12-week window and they’re still not getting there. So I stop caring about that kid? Do I stop harassing him every day for work? Do I stop getting on his case? Of course not…I’m just not expecting much out of him.

Anyway. I graded until I started to cry. That’s sad, really, but at least I stopped there. Then I started ironing fabrics again…

Honestly, I didn’t get far. I’m tired and my head hurts and I’m in that depresso mode that doesn’t work well. It gets frustrated easily. I finished all the fleshy bits…but then I needed to make decisions about hair color, and my brain, well, it just full on creaked to a halt. Fuck. Dammit. Obviously I need to sleep on it (the problem, not my brain). I feel like I’m constantly trying to modify my mood with breathing and rethinking and exercise and reading and drawing…like I can’t just exist here on the planet…I have to work my butt off in order to exist. It’s kind of exhausting. And even more depressing.

On the way to work yesterday, I was thinking about the morning mood, which is often particularly shitty, and I thought, “Goddammit, I forgot my sketchbook. I’m tired, I’m cranky, and I don’t want to deal with grading or students or whining about a test tomorrow. I just want to take a nap and then finish my book.” Good mood to start the week.

I did finish my book, Going Bovine by Libby Bray,

About a teenager who gets mad cow disease and tries to fight it in a variety of amusing ways. It’s a good story. That said, I need to stop reading sad stuff when I’m going to be at the gym. Most of the book wasn’t sad, by the way. I will definitely read some more of her stuff.

Boychild sent me these…

He was doing an Ophelia project that required help from his sister…

It’s amazing how creative they can be. Downed eucalyptus branches from the storm, old dead roses from Christmas that I still haven’t thrown out (they made it outside), and a sign about Hamlet that is now strangely in my bathroom. I don’t think the dog was supposed to be part of it. I think he got rid of the sign for the final…it was too fucking obvious.

Speaking of not being part of it, Babygirl insists on sitting on the back of my neck tonight.

I’m getting a nasty crick, but she’s in a mood.

I understand that…I’m in a mood. I really did want all the fabric ironed tonight and it’s not. Fuck. Oh well. Progress is slow, but at least it’s progress. That’s the closest I get to hope these days. Oh good, you did 39 more minutes on this project. That’s 39 minutes closer to the next project. Maybe that’s the one that will make a difference, that will kick your brain out of quicksand and into happy mode, into satisfaction, into something approximating Kathy-normal, not to say real normal, but where I don’t feel completely WRONG. Because that’s how it feels now, like my skin doesn’t fit, like the eyeballs are in the wrong place, like everything feels wrong, fits wrong, sounds wrong. It’s just fucking wrong.

I go find my sketchbook and put it back in my work bag. Maybe it will save me.

So Much Wasted…

I don’t feel human when I’m numb. I woke up this morning and the numbness, it was dragging me down into a pit. That’s not good.

I go to school. I do work. I go to the chiropractor and she says oh my what’s going on with your neck and puts warming pads on me and leaves me to relax and instead I cry. That is what I do now. That is who I am now. She gives me some exercises, explains what’s happening (to my back…she doesn’t notice the crying). Asks what’s going on. Tries to suss out why it’s worse than it ever has been. Hmn. Can’t say. I come home and think about being productive. I think about what I’m doing to my back?

I can go two ways with that productive thing: (1) do some work, grading of some type or (2) start picking fabrics for a quilt.

I do neither. I have a library book due Saturday. I’m almost done with it. I sit down and read. I talk to parentals for a bit about sprinklers, but mostly I read. I didn’t actually have much time between getting home from the chiropractor and having to leave again…so it was hard to force myself to be productive.

Then it’s book club night! I liked the book a lot, and I like getting out of the house to hang out with other geeky women and talk about books and movies and whether the guy that plays Sherlock is hotter than the tenth Dr. Who. Or whatever. These are my people. I ended up talking to someone I’d talked to before briefly…turns out her current life has some similarities to mine. It was a good conversation. Plus I have more books to read. This is how geeky our group is…those of us who liked the book now vow to read everything he’s written and we get all excited about how many books he’s written. Yup. I will never be able to read all the books that I want to read. Then there’s discussion of whether the British show of this is better than the American version, and if it’s a European show, we know there will be no happy ending. Americans like happy endings. The Europeans are much more realistic. I am more Euro than US of A in character. Always have been.

I come home and exercise while talking briefly to the kids, then spend an hour plus on the phone with brother and SIL talking college and retirement and money. It’s too late to start anything artistic. I’m honestly too tired to do anything else tonight. Maybe tomorrow. There’s no rush.

I still haven’t finished the book. Too many distractions and interruptions. They’re not bad interruptions though…they’re just life. And life interruptions like that are better than wallowing in the depression pit. That pit smells bad. I don’t like hanging out there. It makes me feel bad.

Except I know I still feel empty and numb…and I feel like I didn’t accomplish anything today…and I feel like I will never feel better. And I haven’t meditated yet, so I will try to do that after I finish writing this, but will probably fall asleep doing it.

I drew at school during prep. I did a bunch of grading and I got that nasty awful feeling in the pit of my belly that tells me I should work on my mindset, so I turned the music on and started to draw. There wasn’t much time left in my prep period, so I didn’t draw for long, but it seemed to get me through the day.

I wish for so many things to be different. I didn’t want things to be like this. There are some things I can change, but so much of it is out of my control…so much is just up in the air. So much is because of my brain, which refuses to behave. Why start now? Depression takes hold, digs in. I feel like I will need to cut fingers off, sever tentacles, slice up some connecting phalanges in order to disconnect from that part of my brain, the part that is deep in hopelessness…deep in crying.

So much brain power and energy wasted on this state of mind.

So much wasted.

Maybes.

My brain is disturbingly empty tonight. I’ve been poking around the edges, looking for some insight into the emptiness, but there’s nothing. Ha. Nothing in the emptiness. Sigh. Knock knock. I don’t appear to be at home. Maybe I’m on vacation and forgot to let me know. Dammit. Stupid irresponsible brain. Never can count on it to be mature and follow through.

I went to the girlchild’s soccer game and stitched through the whole thing…

Well, except when I was trying to take about 40 blurry pictures of her because it was dark and I hadn’t quite admitted to myself yet that it was too dark to be trying to photograph anything. Did I mention my camera is currently taped together? Yeah. So I took a lot of blurry photos…

I have no idea what is going on in this photo…

And in between I stitched…

Like the only picture I got of her that wasn’t significantly blurry was because she was almost standing still. I don’t know why I work so hard at this. I got amused later when one of the parents, whom I’ve known for YEARS, told me he thought I was British…like I’d lost my accent years ago. Say what? Dude. I’m born and bred Californian…OK, by some mistake of weird geography (my dad was stationed in Alaska in the Army and I was born on an Army base there), I was not actually BORN in California, but I might as well have been. Both my parents are from California as well. I have been amused by this all night. I’m a secret agent Brit masquerading as a typical Californian artistic freak. OK, not so typical. Whatever. I embrace my British roots (well, I do have some of those…but Scottish).

They won the game. We knew they would. I’m really REALLY looking forward to the next game on Friday, because they’re predicting lots of rain and lightning storms. Yes, I will still stitch. I have that cool setup where I put the plastic-covered blanket over me and the umbrella sits in my bra (seriously, it props quite well in there), and I stitch under the umbrella. Yes, it’s a little crazy. I don’t think we’ll get past Friday’s game…we’ve played this team before and we usually lose…although we tied them a couple of weeks ago. Who knows.

I got home and didn’t have time for the gym, so I just made my dinner and ate and read a little and exercised, and then the ex called because his car broke down and he needed me to pick him up, so I did that, and then made tomorrow night’s dinner for the kids, so I can go to book club, and then I meditated and then it was time for bed. Or writing, then bed. Not very exciting. Then again, most of my nights aren’t very exciting. What’s new?

So no art. No deep thinking. Nothing really. Just empty. Seriously vacant. Wanted to draw. Wanted to pick fabrics for the Mammo quilt. Realized I didn’t have a background fabric picked out. I have a bunch of hand-dyed backgrounds I could use (probably too busy), or I have the dark purple I originally picked out for the Celebrating Silver quilt, but then rejected. I think I decided that was my best choice. And a little-old-lady cat with dandruffy skin just jumped on my lap, even though I told her it wouldn’t last long.

I finished reading this tonight, David Sedaris’ Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls…

I’m still not sure what the title means, but how could you NOT read a book with that title? It’s a bunch of essays. Some were quite interesting, some funny, some I just didn’t care about. I’m not really an essay reader…maybe because I actually read essays as part of my job…although Sedaris writes better than 99% of my students (I have had a few very funny and articulate students).

Really, the best thing for me is to take the empty brain to bed and do a restart tomorrow. Maybe after book club, I’ll be motivated to pick fabrics. Maybe I’ll feel like installing the absolutely adorable (really, they are…they are so tiny and cute) external hard drives I got to try to ameliorate the computer issues I’m having (running out of space). Maybe I’ll make dessert and eat it. Maybe I’ll make it to the gym (OK, not tomorrow night, for sure). Maybe my brain will check back in from whatever vacation it’s on at the moment and let me know something helpful, something pertinent to my healing.

Or not.

Searching for Better Than This…

When my head gets all tied in knots, I have this stash of partially written or barely started posts in draft form on here, and that’s what I put on the blog. It’s like fill-in-the-blank posts, posting-lite, don’t have to think too hard about posting…like the Road to California post…I had all the pictures resized and stuck in the post. I just had to go through and add all the names and links. I can do that without hardly thinking about it…and yet it takes up mental space and time. So I don’t have to deal too much with the goo in my head that wants me to feel bad. Avoidance. Book reviews? Same thing. I have about 8 other posts that are started in draft form, just sitting there, waiting. The Chihuly glass one? Started with photos, but then words took over.

This weekend? Not so much fun. Just keeping my head above water. Trying not to think too hard about feeling bad, about feeling sad. Trying not to remember how I used to feel, because that Kathy does not live here any more. She has moved out. She is never coming back. She can’t get in past the hoard (imagining when they try to get in the front door and all the crap that’s been hoarded is blocking it, and you can only squeeze in).

I went to a movie last night. I used to go to the movies almost every Saturday night. I loved going to the movies. I don’t love it so much by myself. I did it, though, because I felt like I was being punished for being alone, that I didn’t feel like I could do the things I love because of that. I’m becoming a hermit. OK, I was kind of hermit-like before, but I’m getting worse. It’s because it’s honestly too hard to be with people. I often feel more lonely in groups than I do at home alone with my sketchbook and my fabric and a cat or two. It’s sad. I wish it weren’t true. But it is. Right now. And realistically, the movies cost money and money is really tight at the moment.

So I picked a movie I had wanted to see when I first saw the trailers ages ago (there were others, but they weren’t at convenient times), and I drove out there to the theater and I cried through almost the whole movie and all the way home. I saw Her.

It was good…although it had some slow bits and the ending was…eh. Thing is, when I see people with technology now, out to dinner, hanging out in groups, everyone is doing that…talking to themselves, to their OS instead of a human…so it’s creepy, but not that far off of reality. Shades of that book…crap…Wake, by Robert Sawyer, where the WWW becomes conscious and starts talking to a teenage girl…because I know that’s who I would choose to talk to if I were the web (not). Anyway. Here’s why I’m on Goodreads…so I can look shit like that up, books I read before that I can’t remember the name of because my brain is like mush.

I suspect it’s really that so much of my brain is otherwise occupied that stuff like that just slips through.

So that was really successful, guys! I joined a couple of movie-going groups on MeetUp…maybe it will be a better experience. Of course, I can only go like one night a week, and most of their movies are not on that night. Sigh. But it’s better than this. It’s got to be. Something has to be. I keep searching for Better Than This…it’s an island in the Atlantic and there are no boats that go there. I might have to swim.

All the hikes I wanted to go on this weekend were too many hours for a two-day weekend…I had too much I needed to get done, so I got up this morning and hiked Cowles Mountain instead. It’s a quickie, but still is a good workout. San Diego has two mountains that get the shit hiked out of them by every weekend-walker and lame-ass wannabe hiker in the whole town: Cowles and Iron Mountains. The annoying part is the number of people…and the number of people who don’t know trail rules (yes, I’m a hiking elitist, sorry, get the fuck over if you are hiking that slow please)…and the number of dumb bimbos and assholes who are hiking up the side of the mountain, not following the trails, destroying it for future generations. Yes, I yelled at two girls. I apologize. Wait. No I don’t. They were being stupid. Ladies, if there’s a fence, it’s there for a reason. Where are the vicious rattlesnakes when you need them? Avoiding Cowles, for sure. I should carry one in my pack for times like this, just hurl it at the dumbshits who can’t walk on a trail without damaging sensitive habitat. Yes, they went over a fence right next to a sensitive habitat sign. I don’t feel bad about yelling at them.

That said, I did it fast (the hike) and proved I am much more fit than I was 7 months ago, when I would have to stop to rest. I didn’t rest at all, and I ran the downhill, passing two of my former students. HA! That was funny. And their mom. YOUR MOM. Sorry. Middle-school brain took over. I did pass your mom though. She’s looking good. You should be proud of her.

I didn’t do much in the way of art, because I was doing a lot of work-related shit. Which sucks. Always. I did a whole 16 minutes of cutting out Wonder Under…

The thing is, there isn’t much more to do on this one…then I’ll be on to the next step of picking out fabrics. But to what purpose? Hell. I still don’t know. Still don’t feel it. Maybe that’s why I didn’t push it. I knew I’d be done and have to go on to the next step and I wasn’t in the mood. It’s depressing to finish a step right now. I hate that. It used to be fun, sometimes even exhilarating. Now it’s just fucked up.

Then I cleaned photos off my phone. My computer is actually getting full. I have too much music and too many photos. I need to do something about that, like soon. I meant to do it over Xmas and freakin’ ignored it. It’s too much for my brain to handle, like the broken sprinkler lines. I just can’t take it on. I have to though.

The girlchild got reading glasses.

Which is funny, because it was the boychild we thought needed glasses and turns out his vision is almost perfect. She describes her vision as “buzzy.” We said, “vibrating? blurry? fuzzy?” She said, “No, buzzy.” The child has her mother’s way with words. Oh well.

There was this…

Now, it’s one thing to put all those words on the back of your car (to remind you? because it’s not reminding others…driving along, OH SHIT…I’ve blown number 8. Dammit.); it’s another to spell one of them wrong. Sigh.

Jake helping the girlchild make her bed…

I am still learning to take panorama photos on my phone…I inevitably do it wrong three times before I do it right.

That’s Penasquitos last weekend. NOT a panorama.

And here it is again…done almost right this time…

Pretty, huh?

And here was the top of Cowles’ Mountain this morning…

San Diego does have the weather, doesn’t it? OK, summer will suck. I’m a little worried about summer. I won’t be able to hike like this. I don’t do heat well. Maybe I will borrow my ex’s kayak a lot. Maybe I will swim more. I don’t like swimming though.

I finished this book…A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore…

which is a good thing because book club is Wednesday. I liked it. I liked his turn of phrase. I like his weirdo stories. It’s the second of his books that I’ve read. It’s a little wacky, a little out there, but amusing and not dreary. Probably that was a good choice for the weekend, because it was a bit dreary…except for the hiking bit.

I watched this, a Tate Gallery video on nudity in art through the ages…

What’s funny is that to actually link to this video, I had to persuade YouTube that I didn’t need Safety Mode on my videos. They thought it was unsafe…I guess you shouldn’t watch it at work (I thought it was pretty benign myself). I like their shorts…educate the public about art. God knows we aren’t doing it in school any more.

This week? This week is the girlchild’s team finally making it to the CIF playoffs…two games this week guaranteed unless a volcano swallows us up (could happen), a book club meeting, and I think I signed up for two hikes next weekend, just because I think one will get canceled due to rain (she’s a real water wimp, the leader is). I set some goals on the art stuff for this week…I have two drawings I’d like to get done…one is in the sketchbook and one has been copied full size, but needs more. I want to finish the Wonder Under on the Mammogram quilt and start ironing it to fabric. I’d like to get all the wool cut out for Ivy’s quilt too, but I suspect I just shoved more into a busy week than can actually realistically get done. All that is better than thinking about the muck my brain wants to wallow in, though, so hopefully it will keep me distracted. If not, I may be back here again, clearing out photos and writing filler posts that don’t let my brain think too hard about reality. My other goal is to try to go to bed earlier…those super late nights aren’t helping. Maybe just 10 minutes earlier each night until I get back to something in the realm of sanity? Or not. It’s got to be better than this.

Book Review: Above

A few weeks ago, I read Isla Morley’s new book Above, to be released March 4.

Above is a fictional account of a survivalist kidnapping that unexpectedly turns into a dystopian novel. In fact, it feels like two novels, with the kidnapping of 16-year-old Blythe and installing her in a nuclear bomb silo underground as the first part, as she comes to adjust to her existence…and then the second novel, when she escapes. I don’t want to say much more because of spoilers, but it was not what I expected…which was refreshing…and jarring…shades of “be careful what you wish for…”.

Anyway, the important part is the writing…was it well-written? Yes, I would recommend the book, because it was certainly a book that was difficult to put down, albeit a bit slow in reading and jumpy in years in the middle of the book, but I would add that the last part of the book seemed weak in comparison. I love the idea of the last part of the book, love that it was unexpected and strange and messed with your head, but I thought the actual writing of that section fell a little flat. It seemed rushed, flat, compared to the rest…and maybe that is the difference between focusing on a significantly inner life for years and then being out in the world in the second part…but it just seemed like it was cut short or it lacked the depth of the first section.

All in all, though, worth a read, just to consider the possibilities.

Dissolving Problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vacuuming the Brain

Another no-posting night. I was drawing instead…

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

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

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

Whatever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buried in Fiber

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

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

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

I stitched at soccer…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emotional Sine Wave

I have another post I have mostly written, but I don’t feel like finishing it tonight. Maybe tomorrow morning.

Today was a numb day. I went to the gym. I managed grocery shopping (sort of a miracle these days…I forgot my reusable bags…again…the world will die because of all the plastic they gave me today). I went to one of my art group meetings (I forgot the quilt I was supposed to deliver for a new show, so I went back for that…didn’t get too far, luckily, and then I forgot the checkbook to pay my dues). Numb apparently equals forgetful.

It really does. I am so forgetful now…hence all the post-its and the calendar reminders…otherwise I’d forget my brain. Some days I don’t even know what day it is. I don’t know what month it is…I wrote a check earlier and dated it October 2013. What the hell? It’s like I’ve had some sort of stroke. My brain doesn’t like to remember stuff at the moment, so it chooses to tune out of everything. Hello, brain…feel free to join us here any time. I don’t think it’s going to get better without your involvement. Really. I know it sucks and all, but this is what we’ve got.

I finished a book, M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans…

It was a gift from my UK family. It’s her first book, about a lighthouse operator in the early 1900s in Australia. It was good; I enjoyed it, even though it was tinged with sadness.

I worked on the third bird of Month 2…

Thought I had finished it, but turns out I was supposed to sew in the moon as well…so I started that but didn’t finish. I sewed in the car on the way up and during the meeting; it was dark on the way back down. I’ll finish it at Tuesday’s soccer game and then start on Month 3’s embellishments. Very exciting stuff. The stitching itself is relaxing. I manage to stop grinding my teeth when I’m stitching mostly. The rest of the time, grind away. I have to consciously make myself stop holding my jaw like the world is ending around me.

Still too many things on the to-do list. Started my taxes because the W-2 finally showed up and I need that for the financial aid, finished the journal for Earth Stories and got it ready to ship, along with a bunch of other stuff I have to mail. Made a new to-do list. Boychild had one college interview today, so I ironed his clothes for him. He commented that men’s button-down shirts are not made for men with long hair. Never thought of that. He has another interview next weekend. I guess it’s good that he made it past the first pass…or maybe they interview everyone. Who knows. It’s all new for him, having to talk to strangers about himself, trying to sell himself, trying not to get annoyed by stupid questions…or at least not to SHOW irritation. I feel for him, but am excited by his having to deal, to manage, to grow up. He’s a good kid…man.

Came home and girlchild had made dinner, which is always nice. She hurricaned the kitchen (yes, that is a verb now) as well, but I needed to catch up on dishwashing anyway, so it was motivation to do so. All these tasks take away from artmaking time, of course. It was pretty late before I started my lesson planning for this week…well, I did most of it last year. I’m not deviating much…can’t handle that on top of everything else. I signed up for two more hikes. I need more outside time…more physical in nature time. More open space with fresh air and sweat and exertion and letting the toxic shit in my head float away into the sky while I stomp along a dirt path.

Two of my quilts are in a California Fibers exhibit at Soka University in Aliso Viejo through May 8…the opening is this Thursday from 5:30-7:45. The weird time is because there is a performance at the university right after that, so this takes advantage of that. I won’t be able to make it up there, unfortunately, but it apparently is a really nice show (that is only open Monday-Friday). I’m hoping to go up during Spring Break, I think. We’ll see. Earth Mother is there…

As is Untied…

Both normally hang in my house.

Then next week, I have one quilt in another California Fibers show in Ojai, California, at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts…Here is hanging there…

ha ha ha. Here is hanging There. That’s funny. OK, not really. It will be there through March 30. There’s word that there may be an artist’s panel with some of us on March 30. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it to that, but other artists will be there.

There are three California Fibers’ shows opening in January and February…this was a great group to join to get into shows. All three have been juried, so you still have to have good work that people want, but instead of pulling from 700 people for a show with 40 pieces, they’re pulling from a group of 30. California Fibers is a juried group and the membership call is coming up in April. If you live in Southern California, are willing to commit to 4 meetings a year in Oceanside, and work in anything that qualifies as fibers, you might consider it. Check out the website and contact the membership person.

The other art group I’m a member of is doing a 2-month exhibit in September/October about the border fence. I’m in a subcommittee (I didn’t commit to leading anything…see notes about forgetfulness above) that will be doing some sort of cross-border quilt/fabric construction. This group works completely differently than the other group…but they both are trying to be actively in exhibits and marketing themselves. It’s good, because I feel like my local SAQA group has become less active, even though we had a decent show last month that will be traveling to Georgia in March. We used to meet more down here in San Diego, and now there seem to be very few meetings down here.

If this is my life, if art is my focus, if art is the thing I have right now, then I might as well make it a regular thing. I’ve been looking at life-drawing classes as well, although then I need to balance exercise and hiking and art, because they all seem to want to happen at the same time. But if I can do it once a month, that doesn’t seem like a bad thing. I miss life drawing. Yes, I miss sitting on an uncomfortable wooden bench for hours staring at a naked person and trying to make my drawing look like what’s in front of me. Sounds crazy. It’s a different head space though…not a bad one.

Anyway, I didn’t get to start on even thinking about real artmaking until about 10:30 tonight…and then it was a decision of What Next? I could draw, I could clean off the light table and set it up for tracing the next quilt, I could stitch down the smaller quilt that’s hanging in my office. I decided to finish cutting out all the pieces for the Ivy Memorial Quilt…

They’re freezer paper, not Wonder Under…yes, new and different. The quilt is mostly wool fabrics (or will be, since it currently doesn’t exist) with cotton fabric accents, and then there will be embroidery like you see on the bird blocks I’ve been doing. It’s not something I really expect to exhibit…I just want to hang it in the house, like above a doorway, so it’s wide but not high. Ivy died in May 2012 of liver cancer at the age of 6. For some reason, it was significantly more difficult to deal with her death, probably because of her young age and it happened really quickly. I guess I don’t deal well with unexpected bad stuff. Anyway, now that all the pieces are trimmed, I could start picking wool fabrics and ironing freezer paper to them…maybe tomorrow night.

I wonder if these numb forgetful days are an aftershock to the highly emotional days. I think I’m on some sort of emotional sine wave, up and down on some regular rhythm, somehow controlled by hormones or amount of sleep or exercise or something else I don’t understand (or a combination of all of those). It’s super super low and then I hit numbness…I don’t ever really get to the high point, though. It’s just less painful than some other days. Maybe the numb days are when I get enough of some combination of sleep and exercise and interaction with humans who give a shit. It’s hard to say. I have people say to me all the time, Hey, I read your blog, and then I’m like, well then you know I’m not having any fun with all this. I don’t know what to say to that. Well, then you know I’m a giant pile of depression and awful. Well, then, I guess you know that I was crying yesterday, I’ll be crying today, and tomorrow? On the menu is crying. I guess that’s OK. You won’t have particularly high expectations of me then, will you. You’ll know I can make good art but I can’t remember anything and I’m likely to dissolve into a pile of saltwater if you bring up anything that I find troubling…like really anything. Sigh.

Who the hell is googling my age, by the way? I’m 46, people. I’ll be 47 in a couple of months. I don’t know why it’s relevant. Feel free to just ask.

OK, taking the sine wave to bed…maybe I’m still on the way up…

Past the Deadlines…(sort of)

I practiced meditation at school again today. In class. While teaching. Well, supervising independent work today. We do that. I also practiced a feminist rant…OK, I didn’t practice it…I just did it. Sometimes I think the kids need to see that…plus the kid saying that men were better at everything than women were kinda got my goat. It’s OK…I kinda did it as a gospel moment; I think I even hallelujahed. The girls appreciated it and some of the boys did too (although most were probably frightened). I don’t just teach science, people…

I taught. I breathed deep (actually not so deep…it’s either the allergies I technically don’t have or something pretending to be sick). I went to the emergency union meeting and took notes. I went to the girlchild’s soccer game where the asshole coach (oops, did I say that out loud) wouldn’t play her (long story…it’s finals week and she chose academics over soccer). I went to the gym and read an entire book (it was a graphic novel…they are a quick read). I prepped tomorrow night’s dinner, which now has to stretch to feed 7 instead of 3 (one of which is a hungry teenaged boy). I cleaned a bit, because apparently now there is a sleepover at my house tomorrow night (I wonder if they will mind my tracing Wonder Under on the giant-ass light table while they watch bad TV and gossip late into the night…yeah, I know. I will probably have to give up my Friday night plans).

I ate dinner super late. I picked TV that I should not be watching in the mood I’m in. As always, I don’t know what governs the moods. Is it being tired? Is it work frustration? Is it a chemical imbalance in my brain? Who the fuck knows.

At the soccer game, I almost finished this guy…

It was dark, though, and I was trying to do Pekinese stitch on top of the blue things and largely failing (I got one done), so I stopped. Some schools have crappy stadium lights.

I am definitely beyond trying to predict how many games it takes to finish any of these. I will have time in cars on Saturday and Sunday, though. I could potentially finish quite a lot. Maybe. It doesn’t really matter. They just are fun to do…the embroidery stitches are interesting. Sometimes even relaxing (minorly).

The book I finished is the graphic-novel adaptation of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children…

(real book on the left, graphic adaptation on the right)

I read the book last year and really liked it. The graphic novel was eh. The art didn’t move me. I felt like the story was chopped up by the pictures. I had a better imagination while just reading the words (there are a few photographs in the original book).

Like I said in my review on GoodReads, I need a graphic adaptation (or a movie, for that point) to ADD to the fiction, and they rarely do. Mostly they just mess with the images I had in my head.

I do have a plan for tomorrow night’s artmaking. Actually, I will need to do some more of the crossing-off the post-it-note crap. I crossed off two things today (woo hoo!). I know. It’s amazing. So maybe I can cross a few more off tomorrow. And I do have another quilt top in here that I could work on. In fact, I think there’s another QUILT in here that has been pinbasted for like 3 years. I obviously care a lot about it. So there’s no shortage of stuff to be done. It just feels better to start something new sometimes…to have that sense of excitement (pretty toned down in the current Kathy state) about new. Different. Moving on.

So I numbered the big quilt…

It’s about 350 pieces. That’s tiny. I mean, the quilt itself is good-sized…it just doesn’t have a lot of pieces.

By the way, I got my evaluation back from Road to California…shockingly, the uterus quilt did NOT win an award (I am so shocked…I’m still minorly amazed that it even got in), but the comments were interesting…they said it could use more quilting (I know KPM did not say that…), which is par for the course when you put an art quilt in a semi-traditional show (Road embraces art quilts…but there are still traditional judges), but they did say the imagery was interesting and the storytelling was effective. Nice to know. I guess. It’s been so long since a quilt of mine has been judged like that…they always say not enough quilting. Whatever.

Anyway. I’ll be up there on Saturday to see the ones that DID win awards and have enough quilting. People, if I wanted to quilt the body parts, I would, but then they wouldn’t pop out so much.

Then I thought I should probably pick one of the smaller ones too, and I had a real hard time with that, because nothing was really reaching out and grabbing me, so I just picked the smallest one, which is also breast-related (I’m on a roll), but is only about 10″ square…

It has 150 pieces or so in it. I don’t know when I’ll get back to working on these…it kind of depends on what I end up doing tomorrow night…what I feel like doing. I kinda feel like going with my mood, with whatever makes me feel better, more at peace, is totally the way to go with my art at the moment. I’ve spent the last 6 months really getting through some have-to’s as far as my art is concerned. I had what I originally thought was four pieces that had to be done by deadlines (actually 6, if I count the two small ones), and so it’s been All Deadlines, All the Time for an awfully long time… maybe I should give myself a break for a while. I’m thinking I can work on whatever I want until Spring Break (which is late this year, mid-April), and by then, I should have a drawing for the next invitational quilt that has to be done in November and another big piece for the summer…not as crazy as the Earth Stories one, but one that is impactful and strong and meaningful and will celebrate me, the artist, next summer. I feel like I’m going to need some of that Me Celebration by then. Maybe. Who knows. It will probably still be painful and emotional and full of sturm und drang, but it will be mine.

Wow. That sounded almost hopeful and maybe even a bit I am woman, hear me roar. So much better than the godawful mood I was in earlier. It’s silly that something as mundane as numbering two drawings can be mood-altering…at least minorly. I really should just quit my job and make art full time. (ha. like that’s an option) I should probably finish crossing things off the post-it note list before I abandon all deadlines, though. Yeah. Gotta be a little bit responsible.