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.

Holding on…

I’m feeling lost in today’s space. Meditation is focusing on, as he puts it, becoming friendly with our emotions so we can live more peacefully. I think I’m a little TOO friendly with them sometimes, but it doesn’t seem to give me peace. Tuesdays are always difficult for me…stupid anniversaries of painful shit. I tried really hard to modulate emotion today…successful for part of the day, but the end was…the end…and I cried on the way home from school. Tired is part of it, I know. Sleep has not been great with the time change. I wake up way too early so completely tense that even with meditative breathing and pure exhaustion breathing down my neck, there’s no way I’m falling back to sleep. So that doesn’t help. Plus grades are due soon, and that’s additional stress.

I made it to the gym tonight after a meeting at school and then a bunch of paperwork and management stuff I needed to do here. The gym…I wasn’t all in my head…I don’t know where I was. It wasn’t anywhere good. I did read. Then I came home and finished the book and remembered to eat. Didn’t want to eat. Wish I could just get an injection once a day and never deal with food at all.

Before you freak out about two posts in an hour, the Houston one was half-written this morning.

The book I finished was The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey…

Yeah, more dystopia, with aliens! It was well-written, actually. I enjoyed it. It’s the first book in a series, so there will be more. I’m having a hard time keeping track of all the series I’m reading at the moment.

I should have drawn tonight or ironed fabric, but no, I graded papers. So now I’m sad. Depressed. I can say that word, can’t I? I am depressed…and not the one-day phenomenon when you got an F on your test or when you didn’t get into a show you wanted to get into, but the depressed that goes on for weeks with no end in sight. I know it’s better than it was, but…a friend today asked me about Houston, about whether I enjoyed myself. ENJOY. What does that mean? I think I got through the days there just like I get through the days here, one step at a time. I had a couple good conversations. I had one good night’s sleep. I read a lot. I saw some quilts I liked. It’s probably no different than a day here when I might read, get some sleep, and iron a quilt together. I probably get more of a sense of achievement out of putting the quilt together. But the trip was planned long before all this crap happened…so I can’t really read a lot into the experience, except to think that maybe planning trips for depressed people isn’t so helpful.

Who knows. We probably need to get out of the house occasionally, but who knows if that’s what will tip the boat, toss me into the water of real life again. Doubtful. I think it will just take time, and lots of it. Time to put pieces back together and figure out the huge knotted mess in my head that all used to make sense…what I thought about love and my future and where I’d be in five years. That’s all trash at the moment. Thinking more than 24 hours in the future is dangerous these days.

Not so for Babygirl…she’s trying to clean herself up, get herself ready to sit on my lap again. Little does she know that I’m going to bed early tonight. No really, I am. It will probably backfire on me and I’ll be awake at 3 AM for an hour or so, but at least I will have tried.

I try all the time to be normal in one way or another…not too normal, because that’s not how I roll, but normal for me. Who am I now? I don’t really know. Kathy the artist. That’s all I can hold on to today.

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.

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.

Tensity Tense Tense

The Dad taxi is picking me up in 5 hours and 20 minutes. I really should be in bed…but it’s so freakin’ early (for me) that I don’t think I can fall asleep. So I’m meditating first and then writing quickly, because it helps me leave the day and all its stupid-ass emotions behind, in here, on the screen (apparently out in the world, but I usually forget about that part). Mr. Meditation keeps talking about letting the emotions go, but I must absolutely suck at that. They’re all still here, dammit. He also says I will become more aware of others’ emotions…holy crap! I don’t need MORE of that. I’m already way too in tune with that, probably more than the person actually having the feeling, which is thoroughly annoying.

Anyway. I’m tense. Tensity tense tense. Hate traveling. I have books, food, sketchbook…I spent about an hour this afternoon trying to organize the last three months’ worth of Sue Spargo’s crazy birds, because it was all just a giant mess…I hadn’t been keeping up (shockingly) and I needed to get it under control because I find it really relaxing to stitch on the plane…plus the high-school soccer season is coming up, and I can’t grade at night in the stands (but apparently I can embroider…don’t question it). So I prepped the last three months and organized all the patterns and embellishing threads and found all the wool bits and pieces and cut out about 50 1/4″ circles of wool (with a hole punch…I’m not totally insane…just mostly so). I’m ready! OK, I’m so not ready. But I have stitching!

Once that was done and I’d ferried the girlchild here, there, and everywhere…ferrying her these days means I sit in the passenger seat and try not to squeal too loudly when she brakes later than I think she should…she doesn’t have her license YET…and pulled the dinner out of the crockpot (rejected by boychild for containing THIGHS, which reminds me of the THIGH GAP, which holy crap! I did not even know existed until today and am now thoroughly horrified, yet again, by the world I live in)…I had a choice…I could grade papers (thumbs down) or cut out the last bits of the Love quilt (thumbs up). So I did that and finally finished, after almost 6 hours. Started September 19, then blew it off until October 17…then finished up this week. Then I spent 20 minutes sorting them…

(there are only 505 of them…this one is kind of an easy quilt for me), so when I get back from Houston, I can start ironing them together. Three and a half weeks to Thanksgiving Break, and I would like this at least ready for stitching down, if not ready for quilting. I can hope. Let’s not think about grades being due or the end of the trimester or any of that other silly work stuff that just bogs me down. Or the boychild’s soccer tournament, which might mean driving to the OC at 5 AM later this month. Shoot me now.

Yesterday I was trying to clean out my photo files, sort at least the month of October into the appropriate files for various quilts, kid stuff, etc…but got completely bogged down and sideswiped by October pictures from LAST year that still weren’t handled. Fucking balls. I can’t even handle photos. So many things to avoid or to tread carefully around…because I’m so damn in tune with my freakin’ emotions, I guess. But I can’t let them go.

Anyway. I tried. I will try again later…looking only for the 2013 photos maybe. Perhaps in 2020 I will be able to handle previous years or months. Fragility sucks.

Finally, after a million years of dealing with an ancient beast, we got new teacher computers at school…

It’s so pretty. But we can’t use it yet, because it doesn’t work with our daily broadcast. Of course. Oh well. I’ve never trusted my school computer enough to store stuff on it anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.

Stupid tenseness. Is tensity a word? TENSION. Duh. Brain is completely melting down at this point. Might have something to do with the purring clawbeast on my lap. Or the lateness of the hour. Or the TENSION.

Deep breaths (all day it’s been deep breaths). Girlchild was almost having a nervous breakdown. Someone thought it would be a good idea for her to be Treasurer of Key Club and organization is not her strong point, but I think we got it under control…and then Girl. Teen. Drama. Yikes. Major shit going down. I may have to call someone’s mother. I leave all that in the trusty hands of my exhusband (who looked terrified as I explained the situation). I’m sure he will handle things just fine…plus she might text me 700 times. Oh well. It’s nice to know I’m needed.

Emotional life is pushed out of the way by stress, tense belly, gut. I hear it…yelling in the distance…but it will stay away. It knows I’m on the edge and need a break. I’m hoping to maybe even enjoy the quilt show. What a concept. Enjoyment. Walking around and looking at quilts and fabric and not having to be at school on Halloween or the day after, when the average blood sugar level of a middle-school student hits dangerous levels. I’m OK with not being there. Although I’m a little antsy about starting the ironing on this quilt. I think it’s going to look good…but it will make me sad too. Sigh. What’s new.

OK. Wish me luck. Short sleep. Planes. People. Not my strong points.

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.

Half Asleep with Its Tongue Hanging out

How to distract a grieving mind? Just give it stuff it likes…the gym, a good book, some fabric, time with kids, a task so close to being finished, tracing Wonder Under. Then try to bring it back and focus it on itself? Not happening. I wonder how healthy it is to constantly be trying to distract my mind from its work, its pulling apart the grief like a stuffed dog toy, going after the fluffy insides to spread them all over the carpet. Everyone’s had a dog like that, right? It’s Christmas, you give the dog a new toy, and an hour later, it’s all over the floor and they look perturbed…and they’ve probably swallowed the squeaky mechanism.

Pulling the grief apart is taking much longer. Sometimes I have to distract the mind from its task just so I don’t feel like I’m sinking under. Sometimes you just have to get stuff done…I am a highly functional depressoid, apparently. I have a couple of books I’m reading about loss and being and stuff like that, but my brain gets so tied up in them, and one of them, while I’m reading it, I just cry. So I can only take it in small amounts. I still need escape…art, music, movies (not many of those lately), books, the gym.

The meditation app is talking about feelings, about labeling them like yesterday with a type, but also deciding how we are dealing with that particular feeling. It’s easy for me to pick the feeling…I really only have one or variations on it: sadness. I guess there’s loss and grief, a variation, and sometimes misery and often tension is there, but that’s a much more physical feeling. When he says to check in with the physical body, from the head to the toe, my gut automatically tenses up multiple times, not something under my control, some psychological thing. The counselor asked me to name it once, name the feeling, and I called it loss. And as soon as my gut tenses up in that physical check-in, here comes the sad, sweeping over me, through my chest, my eyes, that’s when I start to cry. Sometimes it’s sobbing and sometimes like today, it’s more like a convulsive uncontrollable thing, and maybe only a few tears make it out. I cried at the gym today. Can’t remember why. Some thought, some song on the iPod, some random-ass thing as I beat myself up…physically and emotionally.

He asks about the feelings: do I want to prolong them? I don’t think I do. I don’t know. Maybe it’s too hard to let go of being sad. I know I’m trying to, but the girlchild says there are things I should be doing, things that are hurting me that I could get rid of or avoid, and I don’t. I don’t think I am trying to prolong anything…I am just having a hard time letting go. When I am ready, I will. I don’t know when that will be. I’m aware of it, at least. Do I hold on to feelings? I don’t think I’m allowed to…I often have to cut off a feeling so I can get things under control wherever I am or wherever I’m going. I can’t sob at the gym. When I get to work, I have to wipe my face and get out of the car and go to my classroom. I don’t cry all night. Am I resisting the emotion? I don’t think I resist them. I think I let them be. I don’t think I could resist them. I am beyond the days when I could push emotions down into a box and squash them down there until they explode outwards. That’s not really me. I’m not sure I’m letting the emotions go when I sit with them like he wants me to. I think I let it go in the moment, like releasing one balloon, because in reality, there are 50 trillion balloons and releasing one isn’t a problem…there are still 49 trillion and blobbity blobbity left. So even though I’ve let the balloon go, the emotion is still there, looming above me.

It was a physically painful day. Being a woman…sometimes it just hurts physically and emotionally, and you have to wait for it to be done and move on. It makes the days sometimes more difficult simply because the body is going to do what it needs to do, and you will just have to wait on it, be with it, deal with it…like childbirth…you relinquish control to the process and just do the work…and at the end, if you’re lucky, you will push that baby out…but it’s not something you ultimately have control over…which includes the child once it’s out. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. Today…even standing and sitting were painful. Deep breaths.

Today things were just painful. So it was easy to distance myself from emotion and physical pain. I did what I needed to do. I’m good at that. I can be relied upon for that.

You can hear how distant I am, can’t you? Everything that is so painful is over there…way over there…by the river. I’m standing up on the hill looking down on it. The river is sparkling in the morning sun, and there is a breeze, and everything is washed clean by the rain. It’s not exactly pretty or enjoyable…but it has promise. At least for now.

I finished the Wonder Under on the Celebrating Silver quilt. Eleven hours and seventeen minutes.

Looks to be about 5-6 yards of Wonder Under…I started October 13, finished October 28. I didn’t work on it October 24 or 25, but I worked on it every other day. The shortest amount was 24 minutes in a day; the longest was an hour and 16 minutes. I get to do art for about an hour a day, on average, during the school year. Sad but true. Next I get to cut them all out…that should take less time, but not by a lot.

I like that there is progress, that I am creating, making things from nothing.

I’m a little over 5 hours into cutting out the fabrics for the Love quilt…I’m almost done with that. It’s got fewer pieces…and it’s smaller too. I think I’m going to try to iron it together before I cut Wonder Under on the other piece…I’m just looking at due dates and trying to be logical. I know, me? Logical? What the fuck for? I am pretty organized, though…that’s how I get done as much as I do. Plus writing makes me accountable to myself for getting stuff done. If I didn’t write it here, I wouldn’t feel as much pressure to get it done. The second bit of pressure comes from not feeling so useless in my life…if I can get some art done, get a bit done every night or most nights, and I can see progress over time with that, then I feel better about my own existence…it’s not a purpose…or maybe it is? I don’t know. It gets me off the couch. It gets me away from the computer, which isn’t really a source of happiness for me at the moment. I can look back at all this trauma and think, well, at least you made a shitload of art, eh?

Anyway. The girlchild sent me this…

and this…

they took the dogs on a hike and Calli’s tongue tried to take over the world. That’s kind of how I want to leave this rambling post…half asleep with its tongue hanging out.

Something the Darkness Couldn’t Take

Hi. Do you see me? I’m that person crawling into a hole. Do you see me? I’m crawling into the hole and pulling all the dirt in after me? Can you see me? I’m crawling and pulling it after me.

I’ve been hearing this in my head all evening. I don’t know why. It’s just repeating. Like a whisper. Do you see me?

Sometimes the stupidest things hurt me right now, things I would have found funny or even cute before the tidal wave hit, they hurt…and not a little…the hurt I feel in my gut when I meditate, the hurt that feels like aliens climbing out, or is it zombies climbing in? Doesn’t matter. Either way, it’s pain, pain caused by others…but it’s also my reaction. I can’t disconnect…I can’t harness enough anger to disconnect. The anger is there, but so often I direct it at myself, even though I know I shouldn’t, that the fault is not there. Girlchild rails at me, speaks of vengeance, tries to understand how 9-plus years of connections are harder to break, to escape, to destroy…well, for me they are. She is so angry too…and I didn’t do that. I understand her anger. I would be angry too if I were her. She is my Mama Bear at the moment, because I can’t be. She’s protective, standing out in front of me, fists half-cocked, ready to go at someone on my behalf.

I made it through the gym. I don’t even remember working out. I was only half there. My muscles were there. Enough of my brain was there to go through the workout, and not in a half-ass manner…full throttle. And that part of my brain got me home and dealt with prepping for school and prepping dinner for the slow cooker and dealing with kids and getting in the car and going to pick up my passenger and driving all the way to Oceanside and holding my own in conversations and then driving back. It fractured in between, at the meeting, but I kept cutting out little bits of fabric and kept it under control.

But by the time I finished meditation, which was all about labeling feelings, and I realized that my brain was screaming at me, “FEELING! UNPLEASANT! FEELING! UNPLEASANT!” (the choices for labeling your feelings were ‘pleasant,’ ‘unpleasant,’ and ‘neutral’), I was already grabbing the sketchbook, even before meditation officially ended. He told me to open my eyes and have a stretch, and I stretched right over and picked up the book and opened to the first blank page (I say that so many times a day at school, I can’t tell you, in answer to “what page?”) and took the pen and it was moving across that blank expanse of white toothy beautiful page before I could even wipe all the tears from my face and neck and down onto my chest, where they fall when they reach the end.

When I reach the end.

I thought I was going to finish tracing Wonder Under tonight, but no. My brain had a different plan. I did try grading earlier, but I could tell my brain was fighting it…fighting the mundane, the work, the drag-you-down-further-into-the-fucking-muck feeling I was getting, the one I’ve been fighting all week, since last Monday. It gets worse and then better but never very good.

B. B for be? B for broken. B for bamboozled. B for bad. B for breaking. B for bastard. B for bearing…bearing it. I was thinking The Scarlett Letter…or a branding.

I’ve always put symbols in my work…the symbols are changing. Some of them.

So I am a bit more at peace, now that I’ve drawn. It’s not a happy peace. Just a distancing peace. That’s what labeling the feelings is supposed to do…to help me distance myself from the emotion and not wallow in it or make it worse, but maybe, at some point, to just let it wash over me while I be, and then maybe I won’t have to be that emotion any more. I’m not very good at the distance. Or maybe I am…because if I really wasn’t very good at it, I would be crying all the time, no matter where I was, and I do seem to hold it together for hours at a time when necessary.

At the meeting, I saw this out the window…

I think everyone else was socializing and eating and being friendly and I was staring out a window at a foggy grey sky and watching this beautiful bird and trying to just Be in the moment even though I wasn’t connecting to the moment at all.

Birds are often in my work. I need to draw more types of birds. I usually just make them up.

I’ve told you that both kids worry about me because of my braindeadness…my uncharacteristic mindlessness at times, my loss of memory, my inattention to detail.

Girlchild pointed out that I didn’t need to buy more ground mustard, that I must have just bought some in the last few weeks. I didn’t remember. She thinks we will never use it up…so now I have to come up with all-mustard recipes from now until we use it up. Just to prove her wrong. I really only have two recipes that use ground mustard, and neither in large quantities. We’re fucked. I’m going to die and have ground mustard left over.

Speaking of dying, I finished World War Z today…

It was OK…a little on the dry side. A little truncated. Not really a story, per se, but an interesting take on a story. I guess I could watch the movie now, if I wanted to. Do I want to? I don’t know. I’m currently immersed in all the PBS Mystery shows I have archived on Tivo. I’ve been watching Wallander and Endeavour…I like Endeavour better. He is more caring, less of an asshole. Wallander cares, but he’s an asshole. I don’t need more assholes right now.

I wrote this down from Endeavour tonight: “You go home and put your music on, and with every note, you remember that’s something that the darkness couldn’t take from you.” DI Fred Thursday

Yeah. That. That’s why I draw. That’s why I make art. That’s why I get out of bed in the morning. That’s why I don’t just give up. That’s why I’m writing every day. Almost every day. Because of that.

At the meeting (yes, I realize my brain is jumping all over the place, hence the multiple mustards), I cut out pieces for the Love quilt. I need a plan. I can get it cut out this week, and when I get back from Houston, I can start ironing it. If I can get it ironed and maybe even stitched down (that might take more mental energy than I have at the moment), then maybe I can quilt it over Thanksgiving. Maybe. Then at the same time, I can be cutting out the Wonder Under for the Celebrating Silver quilt, aiming to pick fabrics for it either over Thanksgiving or the first few weeks of December. Either way, it’s a plan. I need plans at the moment, even if I keep fucking them up.

So I cut out lots…

because it kept my brain from wandering off into the mists…

Someone please do something about the cat that is trying to be a scarf around my neck. Please. It’s literally perched up there between the back of my head and the back of the chair and trying to hold on. The stuff in the bag is all the scraps. I save them until the quilt is ironed down, because occasionally I toss a piece in there instead of into the bin. The way my brain’s working, though, I’ll probably forget I have them and I’ll just recut another piece. Or I’ll toss all the good pieces in the trash by accident.

Whatever. It’s progress. Movement anyway. No one knows in what direction. Taking my headache to bed right now. Hopefully it will let me sleep. Unless it’s an asshole. Don’t need more assholes.