When I Wake Up, Let Me Be*

In the past, summer vacation has always brought a sense of relief. Teachers and students get tired of each other, of the high expectations on either side. We need a break. It’s a lot of hours to be with a lot of kids, and for them, it’s a lot of demanding. I usually need to decompress for a bit after school gets out, just hang out and sleep in and don’t demand a lot of myself. But this summer is different than the last 12. This summer, I have to keep my brain and body out of the hole…that depression hole. I also have a ton of stuff to do. Hopefully those two needs will work together, but I also need to make sure I recharge myself this summer, which means not working myself into the ground just to keep myself distracted. I need to relax and rest and make art and get my head straight. And not slip back into a deeper depression.

Easier said than done. I try to tell the depressed part of my brain to leave me alone, to go the fuck away, to get out of here.

It doesn’t really work.

I checked out of my classroom today…took longer than usual because I had to lock up EVERYTHING so the summer school teachers and kids don’t get into the science materials. I’m not pleased about that, but I dealt.

Last night, I managed to sort all the fabric pieces for the big quilt…it took 2.5 hours… Here was the layout of boxes (with Kitten guarding them)…

That’s a lot of sorting…I use mostly shoeboxes, but then I never have enough, so there are some weird things in there, like an ice tray from my fridge, because there’s no water hookup for the fridge, so the box never lived in there. There’s also a silverware tray in there and some bins from a kids’ shelf. It’s so much easier to do this now on the light table, standing. I used to put them all on the floor and sit on a cushion and try to lean over all of them to put pieces in. On a quilt this size, my leg would fall asleep and I’d pull muscles in my back (holy crap, old lady talk there).

Kitten was in there, pissed because she likes to sit ON the light table and I wouldn’t let her up there.

Here are all the pieces and papers that came detached from each other. Most of them found their partner piece, but a few were left at the end…oh well. I’ll figure it out eventually.

Here they are, all sorted out, ready to be ironed together next. Not sure when that will happen. Starting soon. Eighteen boxes of pieces.

Kitten spent a lot of time sprawling about while I sorted.

So today, in between cleaning my classroom and waiting for the tech chick to show up so I could check out, I went to Home Depot, where I will be living this summer apparently, to get painting supplies. We are in fact painting a huge chunk of the house this summer, so I had wandered my garage (which is like a Hoarders episode all its own self) looking for painting supplies, realized the hallway had last been done in 2007 and everything else was older than that and mostly trashed (I have never painted the living room, which means it probably hasn’t been painted in over 16 years). Anyway, we had picked a color. OK, I lie. I picked a color. The kids each picked colors I didn’t like. Boychild went gray-white, girlchild went yellow-white, and I stuck with Fresh Popcorn. I couldn’t paint it a color if I didn’t like the name. So I refused to pick Predictable. Yes, that was a color name.

The coolest thing I got was a spackle that goes on pink and turns white as it dries.

It probably has chemicals in it that will hasten global warming. There’s nothing green about painting. It’s a shitload of chemicals and smells and fumes and yuck. I don’t enjoy painting. It’s a lot of prep and it annoys me. Always has. That’s why I do it so rarely. Plus it’s expensive. OK, it’s cheaper than buying a new house, but it’s not cheap. Boychild and I demolished the room we call the little living room, a smaller room that used to be an outdoor patio, but was built into a real room a million years ago. The ceiling was not flat and the moldings had gaps of almost 1/8 of an inch from the ceiling in some places, so I spackled the whole damn thing.

I’m a little wacko that way.

Boychild lives in this room, because that’s where his computer is. We had to recycle a bunch of stuff, toss a bunch of stuff, sort a bunch of stuff (girlchild isn’t here and I can’t just toss her stuff without her looking at it)…and then move a bunch of books out because the bookshelf is screwed into the wall and needs to come out for painting reasons. So we boxed all those books for now…

You don’t want to know how many books we have. And a bunch of the knickknacks the boychild had accumulated as well had to be boxed (soccer trophies etc.). If you thought the house was messy before, it’s turning into a disaster area now. Hopefully that will be shortlived. Ha! Yeah, I know. Now I have an excuse for the mess? Boychild was really helpful, a good worker. No complaints from him at all. He motivates me to keep going, because I really do hate this stuff and would totally give up if he weren’t there pushing me to do the next step. So that’s good.

Jake’s here too, so he managed to lie on the floor in all the most inconvenient places…

Anyway, tomorrow we wash walls and then hopefully start painting. This is the only part where we have to do the ceiling as well…as the boychild says, the rest is toxic and doesn’t need painting (ah, asbestos popcorn ceilings that I can’t afford to remove…). Then when the girlchild comes back, we’ll do the dining area and the rest of the living room, which needs some major work…that damn mirrored wall is coming DOWN bitches! Finally. After how many years? So.

All that seems like enough work for the summer, but I do have other plans for my time. I’ve had a couple of requests for smaller quilts focusing on some of the birds I draw, so I pulled a bunch of my drawings and found the birds and traced them separately. They’re mostly pretty small and simple, so I figure I can make some smaller quilt tops and maybe put them up for sale for a reasonable price. We’ll see how it goes.

I got these traced off, two from existing quilts and three from drawings that are in the queue.

Then turned around and noticed Kitten…

Um. That’s the rest of the pile of drawings. I’m too nice. I leave her there. For a while.

Eventually she gets bored of my staring at her and she wanders off, so I trace the rest…

I did the eyeball bird with and without the eyeball. I personally prefer the eyeball, but I can understand that most people don’t.

The next step is to number pieces and then trace onto Wonder Under. Etc. Etc.

I’m trying to take one day at a time AND plan ahead. Talk about crazy. Tomorrow is a writing workshop where I will find out if my book-writing technique is crazy stupid or just nuts. I actually wrote an entire scene in abbreviated form when I was walking the dogs with the boychild this afternoon. It took everything I had to try to pencil it down in my brain and not stop on the hike and type it into my phone. It’s OK…it came out later on the keyboard. I’m doing the whole thing in Google Docs because I want to practice using it so I can transfer all my school stuff that way. It takes some getting used to…I like parts of it and I don’t like others. Kind of a normal response to change, I think, but I’m looking forward to having access to the documents I’m using across all my devices. Anyway, I was quite pleased with how the story developed in my brain today, and I’m hoping it keeps going into something more coherent. That’s always been my issue…what’s the purpose of writing this beyond the enjoyment of writing? I actually want a product. I do. And I think I can do the drawings for it as well.

So that’s a lot of progress. I’m trying to take some satisfaction from that. Keep up the momentum. Keep me out of the hole. Avoid the crash and burn. High expectations, eh? Whatever.

*Afraid, The Neighbourhood,

The Difficult

I wonder sometimes what makes the teen years so difficult for me. I don’t seem able to communicate correctly. Honestly, I’ve spent the last two years feeling like the majority of what comes out of my mouth is just wrong, not allowed, I am misinterpreting everything, and I never say it right. There are about 15 drawings in my head coming out of that…most have tape over the mouth or the mouth is just stitched or stapled shut. I don’t know if it’s worse because I am me, and that me is depressed, or if I am alone in this, and the alone compounds the wrong feeling, or if, as the girlchild says, I am just more sensitive than most. In some conversations, the wrongness seems to swirl around in my head. I wonder what protections others have that seem to keep them whole. I feel like those are missing from my arsenal. My counselor tries to help…but what she tells me to say, the script, it angers the girlchild.

It seems I do it all wrong. I don’t think anything I’ve done in the last two years was right. Except draw…and turn those into quilts.

Is that good enough? Is the art I make good enough? Does it make up for whatever I don’t seem to be able to do right? Ask my children in 5-10 years. They may be able to answer. Maybe they will write my retrospective. My previous writer has been fired from the job for not paying attention, for falling asleep on the job, for not actually listening to what I was saying. Is it so hard to hear me?

It is just a matter of surviving these years I think. But this surviving…it is hard…harder on my own. I asked today for help. I tried to explain the things that set me off…and maybe that conversation went well…hard to say. I feel so ill-equipped for my own existence.

So. The summer: artmaking, house-fixing, room-painting, lesson-planning, sanity-finding (any chance of that?), book-reading, muscle-moving, heart-mending (not sure I believe this is possible).

Parenting is a bitch.

I cut stuff out today. I’m almost there. It’s a good thing. Progress. It’s movement…better than stagnation. I try to keep moving towards something…something healthier than what occupies my brain most of the time. Here’s where I was last night…

I did hike last night, a mere 4.5 miles; it barely felt like a walk. Fine line between what works for me and what hurts my knee. I’ll be testing it further in the next 7 days, for sure. More on that later.

Today was a giant mess of grading and managing things, but fell into this wormhole: Strong Female Protagonist…because I NEED more distractions? Naw, because it let me leave my head for a while…another troubled female trying to make sense of the world, but she can kick the shit out of robots. I bet I’d be less depressed if I could do that.

I was supposed to go to the gym, but I read instead. And I graded stuff. And then input grades. And there was the parenting thing that threw me for a loop. It doesn’t take much.

We have dinner almost every Sunday night at my parents’ house. I keep thinking it will get easier to be there on Sundays, but it is a memory of what I had that apparently I didn’t really have. Trust is an issue for me. Can you tell? I don’t even know how to draw that. Maybe when I figure that out it will get better.

I throw the ball for Calli as long as she puts it in my lap.

She makes this funny face, where part of her lip is up under her tooth. Love this dog. Love all dogs, who am I kidding? We had my parents’ dog, Katie, here this weekend…she was well-behaved but terrified of the cats (as are we all)…it was nice to have another dog here. When the girlchild goes to college, my first expense will probably have to be a dog. I don’t have one of my own and Calli will probably stay with the girlchild’s dad…we’ll see. She goes back and forth with the girlchild at the moment. My grocery bill will go down and so will the dog quotient?

Most of the year, I’m grading while she does this, but during vacations, I sew instead. And I was done grading (well, at least for a while…until all the kids who were absent dump stuff in my lap tomorrow)…so I was stitching. I managed a whopping 5 bullion stitches before I gave up. I am so far behind on this thing that it doesn’t really matter any more.

So then I came home and cut some more…

I really am almost there. And I have a plan for some smaller quilts that might go up on Etsy this summer…maybe. I want something that’s marketable. Well, as much as my stuff ever is. So watch for that. Don’t hold your breath or anything…it might be a few weeks…but I did go down into the garage and hunt around for some of the drawings that might help with that. I don’t need to remake the wheel…just re-trace something and iron it down. And see where that takes me.

Down a rabbit hole. Did I mention I am trying to write an actual novel? It will probably crash and burn, but I am starting. I have an idea…a start…a burning coal. Something might come of that. Strange that a visual artist has always wanted to write a book. Where does that come from? Words v. images. A constant war in my brain.

Yup. And then there’s Babygirl. Speaking of The Difficult. There she be.

Outlast…

First of all, I stayed up too fucking late last night because I was reading a book. Yes, I am still that geek girl I was in middle school. Nothing has changed. I finished it though, and I didn’t have to hide under the covers with a flashlight to do it. And then I finished another one today. Read it in one afternoon. I’m sure there’s something really helpful y’all could say about my avoidance tendencies at the moment…wanting to hide in fictional worlds isn’t necessarily unhealthy, but it could be. Ironically, one of the books I read was about a girl who did just that. Life imitating art. Actually, my art imitates my life. Doing it backwards yet again.

Second of all, please make that goddamned mockingbird shut the fuck up. I couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to. (I think it finally stopped around 2:30 AM, because that might be when I fell asleep). Tonight? Tonight I don’t hear the bird. Probably a neighbor shot it. They’ve threatened to before (yes, that means my neighbors have guns).

Thirdly, this is what overwhelmed looks like: Me. I got a bunch of stuff done, but then my brain melted down and lost itself in fiction, because it’s nicer than real life. I ran 14 errands, cooked dinner (BOTH kids are sick and stayed home yesterday…it is a wonderful place, my house, at the moment…full of snotty kleenex and me popping Vitamin C), did all the dishes, exercised, AND input a million grades. At that point, it was after 11 PM and there was no way I was getting anything else done, and I wanted to know how the book ended. It had been a particularly frustrating teaching day and I needed a break. I worked many hours. I worked more this morning, which is why this post isn’t getting done until later…dammit.

Whatever.

Both kids made it to school today. One’s slightly better, although he sounds like crap. The other claims she’s horrible, but I haven’t seen her since this morning, so I have no evidence to support that claim. She can’t be TOO sick, because she answered texts from me. Teenaged-girl indicators of illness: if they can still text, they’re fine.

The blog title…if you can stand it for long enough, the really shitty stuff will roll under the moving car, it will disappear, it will wander off, it will resolve itself. That’s not always true, but if it’s something you can’t change, you can either leave it (if that’s an option, and there are times when that might be easiest, but doesn’t make the most sense) or you can wait it out. Outlast…remember the Survivor motto? Me neither. I had to look it up: Outwit, Outplay, Outlast. I guess that’s my new mantra. For the end of the year. For my life. For all the stupid little shit. Actually, just the two on the outsides…I don’t need to outplay. I don’t have those competitive issues. Suffice it to say, I have now outlasted (and possibly outwitted) one of the heinous parts of my life. Moving on. The next will be the last day of school. Almost there. I’ll have some issues with summer…they are already raising their ugly little heads. God forbid I finish what I NEED to finish. Oh well.

So. I was at the gym tonight and an entire drawing basically dropped into my brain. Seriously. It’s right up THERE. Now the hard part is getting it out. Sometimes my drawing ability does not match my mental ability. I show this process so you realize I don’t always just draw the whole damn thing out in one go with no edits. Here’s what I drew first.

Yick. Don’t want her to look that angry. Plus she needs to be looking down at what’s in her arms. Tilt! (As Mr. Peterson said in high school…)

Try again…

Fuck. That nose sucks. Not on a woman. Restart. Maybe if I start with the mouth?

It’s a nice mouth, but facing the wrong direction. I’ll use it for something else…try again.

Huh. Maybe. Not sure about him. It’s a start, though…much better than what I had before. He’s kinda angry though. At least I have something down on paper at this point. I’m feeling much better about that. This won’t be a huge quilt, but it will be detailed…I need to get going on it.

I made the first college payment tonight. Freaky. Scary too. I miss them so much when I don’t see them, like on days when their dad has them and I have a late meeting. I don’t want to think about their being gone all the time. I had a plan for that. I was looking forward to it in some ways. Now I dread it. Sad but true. I didn’t want to be that mom.

So the books I’ve read recently…Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice for book club later this month…really liked this one and already have the next one on order from the library…not formulaic (well, much), interesting fantasy story. Love the link to the dogs.

Then this showed up from the library…Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl…

Yes, I did just read Eleanor and Park. Coincidence. One came electronically and one in real live paper. I enjoyed this one too…it’s the one I read last night until the wee hours. Definitely YA nice falling-in-love stuff. Not sure that’s a good idea for me to read, so it makes total sense that I should move on to this one…The Geography of You and Me by Jennifer Smith…

(Just between you and me, I think it should be The Geography of Me and You…I keep thinking of it that way and getting confused about it.) This was a Netgalley book, so I’ll be reviewing it separately. I hadn’t read her stuff before though…if that matters. It seems like the majority of my summer reading list is the next book in a series I’m already reading or the next book by an author whose stuff I am constantly reading. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. There probably is something wrong with reading the YA lovey-dovey stuff…it’s not realistic at all and just throws me back into the wishful-thinking stages of middle school and high school. I don’t need to go back there with all the girly drama and inability to communicate and little boys running away from reality. So yes, the next book on my reading list is fantasy recommended by boychild. That said, he has a huge crush (OK, he would be mad if I called it that) on the women of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly (hell, so do I)…so who knows what this book will be like.

Summer approaches. I’m making a list, checking it twice. I have a ton of crap to do. Wish me luck.

You Don’t SOUND Fine…

I’ve never been a fan of the question “How are you?” People don’t really want to know how you are. They want to hear “I’m fine, how are you?” and then you move on to such other niceties as the weather and the kids. “Good morning,” also drives me nuts. I don’t do mornings well. I have learned how to mostly behave in these situations and parrot the appropriate words, but there are times when I wish I could just tell the truth. I had this conversation with a friend recently and it was nice to know that I’m not the only one thinking that all the time, but I wonder why we still go along with it. People don’t want the deeper relationship that means telling the truth. They don’t want to know that I slept OK, but only because I spent an hour or so last night drawing demons out on paper, and before that I had to meditate AND exercise, and that before that, right after I walked in the door, I was curled up in a ball in bed, in my flannel nest (it’s June in Southern California…I might have to give up on flannel soon, but dammit…that’s my NEST…it’s safe there), crying my eyes out because…well…teenagers. Girlchild knocked on the door at one point and said, “Mommy, are you OK?” “I’m fine.” “You don’t SOUND fine.” And yet I am. As fine as I was the day before and the day before that. Fine is some measure of average for the last X number of days. This is fine. It could be worse.

I’m back in the bathtub. (A series!) This image showed up in my head a few days ago, persistently and violently enough that I typed a description of it into my phone. I don’t remember where I was, but it was entirely inappropriate to be drawing bathtub pictures wherever I was.

It’s not quite done. I think there needs to be a rug on the floor and maybe a dog or cat, or both, curled up on it. Maybe. Back to visualizing different parts of the brain interacting with each other. Except one is asleep. Or unconscious. Don’t let Freud into my head. I won’t come out alive. I like how the water hides stuff.

I was up late last night because girlchild was at her first concert without adults…she wanted One Republic tickets for Christmas, so we bought three and she took two friends.

And I was the parent in charge of making sure kids got home…it’s late afternoon now, nope, almost evening, and she is zonked out in her bed…she’s supposed to be going to her dad’s house and I need to go to the gym (but I need my blood sugar to stabilize before I go). I will need to wake her up soon or she will never go back to sleep tonight (there’s a temptation to just let her sleep all night, eh?).

My mood is in that place, that empty place. I wonder how I get from uber-sad and down and done with the world to this flat place. It’s Flatland. There’s nothing as far as the eye can see. It’s just flat dirt, no rocks or plants, nothing in the sky to give you a heads up on where you are or whether you’re moving at all. Everything is flat and dead. Maybe I cried it all out yesterday. There’s no emotion here. It’s just empty.

Last night, I was being watched…by Kitten.

She is now coming out of my room at night to hang out in the living room with me and Midnight and sometimes Calli (they actually called her Calliope at the vet today…I had forgotten that was her name…Kitten’s name is really Holly…even more confusing). She hides from Babygirl…doesn’t like her. Barely tolerates Midnight…at least they can be in the same room together. I feel like I’m negotiating with enemy forces when dealing with the cats.

I had the chiropractor again yesterday, only two weeks after the last one…because the last one was so bad. It’s better now, but I got to be on the roller table again…

Yup, that sucker is ANCIENT, but feels delightful. It’s called the Spinalator…

which just makes me laugh.

See, I can laugh. And draw. And mostly teach and function OK, though not well…just OK. My decision-making powers are not great. I read a lot. I hibernate a lot. I don’t want to deal with things I should probably be dealing with. But I exercise and meditate and feed everyone and go to work every day. I have a to-do list and I try to do the things on it. I try to be normal. Well, normal for me.

So how am I? Huh. I don’t know today. That flat thing. I’m tired. I need to go to the gym. I need to work. I need to make art. At least I know those things. I don’t know much else. I guess that’s fine.

Earth Stories: Making a Small Statement

One of the requirements of the Earth Stories exhibit was that we were to make a small, 12×14″ piece that was sort of a poster of what the big piece was about. So how to summarize the whole issue?

Luckily, I had some part of my drawing brain back sometime in late August. I was nearly finished with the big quilt and school was starting, so I was going to panic soon. I sat down and drew this in one evening. Of course, that was after I stared at the paper with the rectangle perimeter drawn on it for about 6 days. Let’s be truthful here.

I wanted to emphasize that the birth control allowed us to decide how to feed our kids, that it gave us choices about when to have kids and how to space them.

I was still a little psycho about pieces on this tiny thing though. It has 133 pieces. Ayep. Still crazy.

Traced it onto Wonder Under in record time (50 minutes).

Cut them out (24 minutes). I really should do more small pieces)…I’d probably be less frustrated. But also probably less fulfilled. Scary balance there.

Then I started the fabric-picking…I had not put the other fabrics away, because I wanted to be choosing from the same pile of stuff…so the two quilts would speak to each other. They are related, you know. It took just over an hour and a half to choose the fabrics…

Then I trimmed the pieces in just under an hour…

And started ironing them down…

Here’s a pile of pieces ready for a background…

Then I realized I didn’t have very much of the background fabric left…to be specific, this is what I had…

So I used the same sky fabric from the big cloud, then pieced border on top of it…but as you can see, I didn’t necessarily do everything completely straight (this is why I don’t piece quilts)…

I do have a degree in fixing things that are fucked up, though, so I pulled apart and restitched a seam…

Ironing it all together and to the background took a little over 2 hours (mostly because I screwed up). Then I stitched everything down (26 minutes), sandwiched, pinbasted, and started quilting…about an hour for all of that.

Afterwards, I once again forgot that tiny-ass binding is a pain in the ass to stitch down, so I did it anyway (I will never learn)…

Binding it took a couple of hours. I started this on August 24, finished on September 12 (and that’s only because I took a long time on the binding). It took 9 hours and 19 minutes. Holy crap. That was easy. It is difficult for me, though, to get enough meaning and depth into a small piece to make me feel satisfied with it. I think this one is successful, as are the other two small ones I did last summer, but it’s not a size I enjoy. I may work on that this summer. There’s something to be said for finishing something in one day. Maybe I’ll set a goal.

Next post? I finally reveal both pieces and talk about the exhibitions and the catalog.

This Is Where Things Are Right Now.

It’s been a rough few days, physically and emotionally. I’ve been running microscope labs for three days and then went right into frog dissections. These take lots of time, energy, class management, cleanup, and dealing with squealing teens, which I just don’t have the patience for right now. I suspect MOST teachers are running low on patience at the moment. There’s nothing abnormal about that. But Tuesday night at the gym, after spending over an hour with the boychild and his dad, trying to navigate through college and immunization crap, I hadn’t apparently eaten enough and my blood sugar crashed at the gym. Badly. I didn’t have my tester, but I did have glucose tabs with me. Here’s a sign of how your brain doesn’t work when your blood sugar crashes: I kept exercising. I know. Silly. It was OK in the end, though…although I felt like crap for the rest of the evening…that’s also unfortunately normal. So I didn’t have the energy to stand and iron…I cut pieces out instead. Silence abounded. Sadness followed.

It’s OK, the next day, right?

Fuck that.

My cutting view: TV, messy house, pajamas on, single glass of wine. I get my hour in, then I go to sleep. The sleep of the exhausted. That’s what low blood sugar does. Fucks with me.

And I keep getting emails from places that annoy me…like Good Housekeeping, why? I don’t think that a new everyday hairstyle or a pop of color in my bathroom is going to change my mood…although the bathroom is on my list for the summer. And House Beautiful? What the fuck? I’m not into that stuff, reading about it, it’s just depressing and reminds me of how lame I am at the moment. Comedy shows? Not my thing. Delete delete delete. Comedy shows are full of mean people being mean to people. Fuck them. Take me off your fucking list, unsubscribe over and over again. Just leave me the fuck alone. Comedy isn’t funny.

Deep breath. Normally I would take a weekend or a short vacation right after school got out and clear my head. That’s not happening this year. No money. Nowhere to go. No one to go with. One kid will apparently be in Palm Springs (or Palm Sprongs, which is what I’m calling it now), which is fine, or it WOULD have been fine if someone had actually talked to me about it instead of assuming that because I have no life that there doesn’t need to be communication. I feel like I need an artists’ retreat or a self-reflective place with lots of meditation time, but I think that would also be a mistake right now. I don’t have enough emotional support to do that. Maybe what I need is to be in my own space, cleaning and rearranging and painting my own life so I can move on past this mopey shit. Damn mopey shit has tentacles that don’t let go. Release me, you fuckwads. Let me be someone else, someone who is not this sad person. I’m tired of her. She’s not fun to be around and she just makes me feel worse.

Funny that the me is still me. Can’t get away from me. Me me me me…fuck me.

So yesterday, I knew it would be rough…first day of frog dissections, plus I had a 2-hour science meeting right after school and then I had to sit through a 2-hour teenaged driving course (required by the school so the girlchild can drive on campus next year without her brother around, who already sat through this). For those of you who remember Red Asphalt…I just saw Red Asphalt V. Sigh. And three other videos that I show my students every year about driving and drinking and texting and all that crap. So I packed food (I learned from the day before…this is my new existence. Eat or pass out.) and I drew during each meeting, because otherwise I would have fallen asleep…

Post-it note with ballpoint pen: not my favorite materials, but I left the sketchbook in the car.

Then I drew during Red Asphalt…

She’s remarkably calm-looking, considering what I was there to see and listen to. Surprisingly, girlchild got mad at me for reading on my phone during the presentation, said it was rude, but had no issues with my DRAWING during the sheriffs’ talking. Not rude to draw.

So Tuesday night, this is what it looked like after I cut pieces out…

And this is after Wednesday night…

Can you tell the difference? Sigh. It’s no wonder I’m depressed. It’s fucking neverending. I mean, I can look at those two photos and see that I got something done…but it’s taking for-freakin-ever. I’m at 11 hours and 38 minutes. There is no way I’m finishing in a couple of hours or so.

Same with this post. I need to go to school. Who knows when I’ll finish.

From meditation, the title. This is where things are right now. Live in the moment. In the moment, I am tired, frustrated, dejected, sad, depressed, overwhelmed, disheartened, anxious, stressed, barefoot, drinking tea, reminding myself I need to iron the boychild’s clothes for the awards ceremony. Mr. Meditation talks about opening a space where we can envision change, even if change is not happening right now (I imagined a mountain meadow with peaks and trees all around, because he said to open the space). Lifting oneself out of the depressed space. Can’t do that. Fuck you. But now I’m sitting in a meadow with all that other shit towering around me. I don’t know if that’s better. It’s easier to hide in the trees than out in the open.

Frogs are done. I even did the dishes already (science labs=dishes). Tomorrow we start sex ed. I don’t know that it will put me in a better mood. When you read all that futuristic and dystopian fiction, there’s always pills or medical conversion chambers or genetic engineering that makes sure that people don’t feel bad or sad…OR…they kill all of us mutants and don’t let us reproduce and make more deep reflective thinkers like us. Society doesn’t want to deal with the likes of us. Even though we make amazing art, visual, verbal, musical, dance…they don’t want to admit that the brain falls so deep for so long. This is where things are right now. Tomorrow maybe I will have a donut and they will be somewhere else.

Ironing a Mammogram

I had a goal this weekend to start ironing the Mammogram quilt together. It doesn’t have many pieces, less than 400, although it’s not a small quilt. I am still cutting pieces out for the big monster of a quilt I’ll be finishing this summer (which isn’t actually that BIG, it just has a lot of pieces). I like to have a variety of things to work on over the summer, so if I get tired of any one stage of a quilt, I can take a break and work on another one that’s in a different stage, because usually all the deadlines are in the fall, not the summer, so I have some leeway with what I work on. Last summer, I had one ironed together, another one in the fabric-trimming stage, one that needed tracing, and two smaller ones that I started, no wait…three smaller ones that I started and finished over the summer (if you count Labor Day weekend). So it worked out OK. Well, at least THAT part of summer worked out OK.

So right now I have one small top ironed, ready to be stitched down. I have this larger one that is getting ironed down now. I have the big one in pieces, and as soon as I can get my head somewhat cleared (um. cough cough. when might that be?), I can draw the other one that’s due in November and start tracing it. It’s OK. I seem to eventually be able to draw what I need to…when I really need to. I have faith in my brain’s ability to kick butt when it’s required. Someone told me this weekend that I handle high-stress situations well, that I can be counted on in those situations. Huh. Funny. It never FEELS that way. I always feel like I’m falling apart, that I’m barely holding it together. I guess I fake it well.

The problem with that quilt, the one I need to draw, is that I had a clear vision of it back in September when I was first asked to be part of the exhibit, and ironically, that view was more positive in outlook than the view I have now. So I keep trying to get back to that positive view, because that is a view of hope, and I’d rather be there than in the negative place I’m in now about gender equality. But maybe that negative view is more realistic? I have a post-in-progress that I’ve been writing on and off for about a month about feminism and gender equality as they exist (or not) right now…not in the 50s or the 60s or whenever, but right this minute, while I’m trying to raise a son and daughter to be aware (they are, trust me). But like the drawing, the post is not fully gelling, so I’m just giving it space and time to develop. I’ll probably work some of it out in drawings that will never grow up to be big quilts, which is fine. It’s not a waste of time; sometimes they do go on to be quilts, and if not, it was an hour or so that I needed in order to process what was in my head. That’s never a bad thing.

I had a ton of grading to deal with yesterday, plus my eyesight is getting worse again, so I had to get eyes checked…they were lots worse, unfortunately, because the cost of new glasses was not in my summer expense budget (and now it is). So I didn’t get started on ironing the Mammogram quilt together until about 10:45 at night (yes, when you were all going to bed), and then my brother and SIL called about a teacher/tech issue that I hopefully gave them multiple ways to solve…so I was trying to iron AND help them (how to get a large video file to a teacher at 11 PM on the night before it’s due). So I didn’t get very far…

It’s a start. I’m already missing an eyelid. And yes, that figure fades into the belly, but that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want it to bounce out at you. And when I stitch around it, it will be more visible. I only got 49 pieces ironed down. Oh wait, 48, because of the missing eyelid (it will either show up in another bin or I will cut a new one. It’s not crucial).

For those who haven’t been around for a whole year, I’ve had a few mammograms over the years that show this dense area that sometimes makes the radiologists nervous, so I’ve had to have retakes on the scans a few times. Last July, it was a major retake with multiple mammograms and other scans and then he wanted to see me in 6 months, just to be sure…that was back in January, where they did all the panicky stuff again, which makes you feel like you just want to cut the offending appendage off and hand it to them…here, just go at it. Give it back to me when you’re done. Of course, you go along with it, because that cancer word is scary as hell, and I did finally get cleared…again. But now I’m back to my yearly schedule, so I get to do it again. Anyway, last year, when it was a big issue, I drew the issue. Because that’s what I do. I draw what bugs me, what worries me, what makes me sad.

I think the fish are like protective spirits of some sort. They show up a lot. Birds aren’t really protective. Harbingers of doom and all. Anyway. The breast is still here, and so is the funny shadowy area that freaks them out every other year or so (some years, it’s not an issue at all). So maybe I’ll draw one every year and have a mammogram series. Or not.

Hopefully it won’t take all week to finish this (although this week is a bitch, so it could). I thought about trying to finish it for IQF, but I don’t really see it hanging there…amongst the pretty landscapes and technically amazing traditional patterns and the occasional quilt from a nice photo. I will have a piece in the SAQA Celebrating Silver exhibit that is challenging enough for most viewers, so I don’t know that I need to try to enter IQF…besides, I just checked and the entries are due in two days and I haven’t mailed it yet, so there’s the deciding factor right there. I love it when my forgetful brain handles decisions like this by just filing them in the back cupboard, so I don’t have to even consider it. I only remembered the exhibit at all because people were talking about it being the 40th anniversary.

Anyway. Back to entering art shows. Because that’s where my stuff belongs.

No Fit…

I’ve never been good at fitting in. I have a lot of different interests and that seems like it should make it easier, but it doesn’t always. I suspect part of it is my fault…I see all the differences, as well as the similarities, and the differences feel like they push me away. I’m not even sure I want to fit in most of the time…maybe it’s that I want to feel accepted even when I don’t fit well. Maybe I will never fit well. That’s not true. There have been times when my core existence was a good fit, or at least I thought it was, and it made it easier to feel like I fit in elsewhere. Or that it mattered less. Right now, I can’t even find my core…I’m floating around in this weird mental space that doesn’t feel right, I don’t feel right, and maybe that’s the issue. It’s not that I don’t fit in with any particular group. I can handle that. I’m OK with that. It’s that I don’t feel like I fit in with myself.

It’s hard to explain. It’s like wearing a shoe that’s not quite comfortable. There’s a rock in there. You pull the shoe off, readjust the sock, find the rock, put the shoe back on, walk for a while. Nope. Still doesn’t feel right. It’s just uncomfortable. It’s wrong. You stomp your feet a bit to try to make them conform to the shoe or vice versa. No luck. No fit.

I have conversations with my counselor pretty regularly about how this feels and what to do about it. It’s part of what feeds the depression, feeling out of place, unsettled, like I don’t know who I am. I do the stuff she suggests, sometimes I’m already doing it, because I do know how to make a life. I’ve had to remake my life before. I remember. It wasn’t this bad last time though. This time, it’s like going from a scorched landscape…like the hike we did on Saturday, where the fire was a year ago…where baby plants are just now popping up, and here we are stepping on them, feeling bad about it. A fire goes through, it can take 10 years or more to get back to something approximating normal. So maybe I am the fire-scorched landscape, and it hasn’t even been a year, and I have baby plants, but they’re not strong enough, big enough, and they’re getting stepped on. I’m betting those hillsides don’t feel normal yet. They certainly don’t look it.

So why do I hike? Being outside in nature helps with the depression. Being outside doing something physical, sometimes even challenging, it helps. (Saturday was a challenge, between elevation and my knee acting up…not a good thing…it was a challenge. Not a significant challenge, like the previous week, which hopefully I’ll post later today, but still…) Forcing myself to be with people for at least part of the days when I would normally be alone, in dead silence, it’s probably a good thing. I do OK when the people are around most days…it isn’t until I’m on my own, driving home or wherever, that I have an issue. Out of the group, into the pit.

I’m working on all of this. I’m aware of it. I’m trying to find my trail through all of it. There are marked trails, but I’m not good at following those…I’m out bushwhacking my own trail. It may take me a while. It most definitely will take me a while.

So this weekend, I tried a few social events. I did OK. I haven’t found a balance between trying to be with people and getting my introverted and artistic needs met. I have to sacrifice one to the other, it seems, and that’s not ideal. It’s not what I want. But it is what it is right now. I went to a work thing. I went hiking. Then I went camping with people from work (well, one people from work, because the others bailed). In the moment, it was fine. I did OK. I like hiking. I like camping. The crap feelings I have on either side are what I need to work through. And I am.

So after I hiked about 10 miles off of Sunrise Highway, I drove out to William Heise County Park near Julian, where a friend from work and a bunch of her family and friends were camping. Here was my setup…

We had four campsites all clustered together under the oaks, with a nice wide area in the middle for the ten kids to race around and throw things at each other (you know, like kids do…).

We hung out and chatted and ate and sat by the campfire…

It was nice. I was tired, but it was OK. I even walked around and took pictures of flowers…

These are the oaks that were above my tent…

Here was my breakfast (very exciting…I did not challenge myself on the cooking. I bought a burrito for dinner and heated it up on the fire).

I read. I drew. I made tea (shocking, for those who know me). It was nice. This drawing has been in my head in pieces for months. It’s not done.

I’m not even sure I like it, but if it’s in my head, it needs to get out.

This one I did Sunday morning while drinking tea…

It’s also not done. I like it better than the other one, but I’m not sure it needs to become a quilt. Maybe.

Sometimes I just draw and I don’t worry about the purpose of the drawing or the final product. It is enough to draw. I haven’t been drawing much lately. You need time to draw, and my time has been limited. That is one of the issues of doing all the hiking and social stuff…it takes away from my art time, from the actual space I need in my head to draw. I hate that. It’s a nasty balance. I don’t seem to be able to work it out right. I was better at it before, but that was a different me. She’s gone. This other me is a lot more needy.

I only camped for about 22 hours (yes, I counted). I had stuff I had to do yesterday, including groceries and getting the boychild a tux for prom. Yes, he’s going…with a group of friends, which is the best way to go anyway. So we stood around in a tux rental place yesterday and tried to get him to make decisions (amusing!). And I was uber-tired yesterday night after very little sleep two nights running, so I fell asleep while trying to grade tests (I am so far behind…) and finally gave up and went to sleep. No amount of caffeine was going to help. I slept over 9 hours last night, almost straight through, so that tells you how exhausted I was. Good thing I had today off. Today? Gotta be efficient. This week? Gotta be on top of my game. Whether or not I fit is irrelevant this week. I just have to get through.

So here’s the science teacher brain at work. One of my coworker’s daughters pointed out these bugs while we were setting up my tent (it required two people…it was a bizarre shape…kinda buglike, actually). There were some on the ground near the tent, and then she found them on the tree. These are the adults, I think, with the wings…

Then these are the larva, no wings, look kinda like bees with the stripes.

There were husks of the larva on the tree, attached to it, so like a cocoon, but not. The legs are still there. Like they stick to the tree for a while.

Then as I was taking the tent down, I saw this one, probably newly emerged, because the wings aren’t entirely unfurled, and it still had a really pink, new-looking body.

And this one, also on the tent, looked full grown.

We were concerned that these were the gold-spotted oak borers that have attacked many of the trees up in the Cuyamacas, including in this park, but those are much smaller, and the larva are worms, not crawly beetle things. So I don’t know what they are. But it was interesting seeing all the stages around (most of them on my tent).

Anyway. Today? Not trying to fit. Just trying to cope. But see, I’m back with my kids in my house doing the stuff I need to do as a mom and teacher. So that’s not where I have the problems. I have issues when it’s just me on my own…and that’s going to get worse over the next two years as the kids go off to college, so that’s my goal…figure out my head before they both leave. Have a comfortable space where I feel like I fit, even if it’s just me by myself, and be OK with that. Be able to go out and do this more social stuff and come home and feel content, not empty and lost. It sucks to be in my late 40s and trying to figure all this stuff out yet again, but there’s nothing I can do about that except try to do a better job from here on out. Find my fit.

Out of the Pit, into the Cave

Depression is an interesting beast. It’s so prevalent in our world, has been for years, just read some Romantic poetry or wallow in Russian literature for a while, and you’ll realize how not-alone you are in this feeling that never seems to go away. I’ve seen it described as a rain cloud that follows you around, the big black dog, a pit, a hole, a cave. We come up with these personifications, these illustrations, to try to make it something we can look at, distance ourselves from, maybe even fix. My meditation guy wants me to look at my whole brain that way. Like I’m a private detective, leaning up against that lamppost in the dark, lighting the cigarette and watching the brain (hey…shouldn’t smoke!). Watch what the brain does, make notes in a little book, process it, spit out a report at the end. This is what happened, this is where it went, dry and dissected, no emotions.

I wish my depression was the big black dog. I know how to deal with dogs. It started out as a pit, a hole. It’s been that before. Prior to my divorce, back in 2000 or so, it was a giant hole, and once I had dragged myself out of it, with no help from my husband at the time, he tossed me back in. But I got out…probably because I had spent a couple of years trying to deal with my brain and what it was doing, and I had enough tools to build a ladder out of there fairly quickly. I had some control over the situation.

Not so this time. This time I didn’t even see the pit before I got tossed in. I thought it was way behind me, filled in, totally safe ground to walk on, and I blithely continued on, carrying my little beachball of work stress and hormonal disruptions…which yes, caused a minor depression, but it was completely treatable. I just didn’t know I needed to deal with it. I think it would have eventually worked itself out with the right supports (which I wasn’t getting). But then a giant maw of a deep dark hole opened up and I just tumbled all the way down. And I can look back now and see how deep I went, how bad it was (sometimes still is).

They tell you that once you’ve experienced one depressive event that you are more prone to them later on. Great. Appreciate it. Didn’t ask for this. Mine are event-based. This isn’t just random shit being shot out of a cannon, like some people’s depression, which I can see would be much harder to deal with, because you can’t pinpoint the cause. It just is. It’s that brain chemistry out of whack. No, this is because of what other people have done, and in each case, it is out of my control. I am just the one dealing with the aftermath. It seems unfair, but I know that life is not set out to be fair…there is no arbitrator of fairness and karma setting out punishments and rewards. You may believe otherwise…feel free…but I don’t.

So once I’m in the pit, the deep hole, I have to find my way out. Sometimes it’s medications, which didn’t work this time, it’s always counseling, it’s always a time of deep reflection and artmaking for me, which makes me somewhat lucky, in that I can actually create while down in the pit. I know plenty who can’t, who are hogtied by the depression to a point of not being able to even pick up a pencil. I guess I’m glad that when my brain goes into that hole, she takes her sketchbook and her pens with her. I guess that is a learned defense against the depression.

And it really is me, the private dick, still leaning up against the lamppost, checking my watch, adjusting my hat against the misty rain, waiting for the brain to show herself again, logging her activity.

I guess the plus is that she’s moved out of the hole. Well, she moved into a cave recently, I guess…I don’t know why the visualization changed, but it did. It seems easier…she can just walk in and out of the cave, no need to build a ladder or scramble up the sides of a muddy pit. She hunches over, my brain, and she brings a bowl out into the light, gathers some leaves or berries (I’ve been eating a lot of berries lately), she blinks, squints up at the sky, sees me and drops her chin, acknowledging my presence, and then shuffles back into the cave. Brings tears to my eyes. There she is. She was out. She tried. She’s going back in for a while, because it was too much.

Some day I’ll talk about the current quilt and its title. Because it is the hardest part of this depression. I know what was in my head as I drew it, and…it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever had to deal with in my own head. Yes, only one. Sad but true.

I’d better find a way to do something restorative tonight, beyond exercise and meditation. Because…ouch. Bad place.

Earth Stories: Tracing the Pieces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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