A Gesture of Release

Girlchild got me sick. I knew it yesterday, felt it lurking. This morning, I felt spacey…all day, spacey…but not really sick. Still a sore throat, headachey. I’ve had my flu shot. Think this is just a cold, but it’s holding off…maybe I’m actually fighting the damn thing. Maybe I’ll feel like shit tomorrow…maybe not? I don’t know. I debated going to the gym…for two reasons. (1) I didn’t feel great and (2) I didn’t want to infect people. In the end, I went. I needed it for my mental and physical state, and honestly, I felt better after I went. I disinfected every machine I was on (but I made sure I touched every kid who is annoying at school…OK, not really…but we did joke about it). I got to work out and read, and I came home and felt OK for about 2 hours before the spacey/sore throat stuff came back. We’ll see what tomorrow feels like. If it’s going to take me down, I want it to do it quickly, so I’m better before my weekend hike (priorities).

Girlchild had a soccer game, but she didn’t go to practice because she was sick yesterday, so she didn’t play…I did watch the sky…

It was beautiful…although apparently I should have been looking behind the bleachers…

I stitched during the game…

I think these two are almost done…I think all I have to do is stitch around the eyeballs and put the eye buttons on. Oh wait. They need feet. Damn. That’s a bunch of bullion knots. That’s time. Then there’s only one more of the Month 3 birds to finish. Then on to Month 4. Yes, I’m slow, but guaranteed I was the only person stitching palestrina knots in that stadium. It’s progress…on something. I measure my entire life a little tiny bit at a time, progress on this project and that project. I got one stitch done here. I got 30 minutes done there. It’s proof that I have things to do, to keep me going.

Some days are like that. What’s the one thing I can work on today that will let me feel like I’ve accomplished something decent? Not grades. Not dishes.

I came home to this…

There was a phone number too. It was shoved in the door handle. I too need joob and don’t know where to look. Lupe needs to be more specific.

After dinner (late), I organized all the financial aid paperwork; I’m missing three signatures from the boychild and then everything can go. Then I ironed his interviewing clothes…it’s Columbia tomorrow, he hopes the last interview. Probably true. Who knows. Then we wait. Apparently my brother and SIL are placing bets on what schools he will get into of those he’s applied to…better than the woman I hiked with who was the Queen of Negative Thinking about college apps. Whatever. He’ll get in somewhere, and that somewhere will have to be good enough at least for the first year. Am I worried? Of course. I’m mom. I worry. I’m Kathy. I worry. I will worry less in a couple of days when these damn envelopes are gone.

I meditated. That was not-so-good. I’ve spent the last 10 days trying to visualize a point of light in the center of my chest, warm and bright like the sun, which is supposed to expand and spread to fill my whole body. I suck at this. I start the spread and then black tarry stuff from my fingers and toes starts to encroach on sunny brightness and swallows it. Yesterday and today it was tears, oceans of tears, turning the sunlight into steam, covering it up, drowning it. I was trying so freakin’ hard to force the light to spread, and I finally stopped. I let it just sit at the size it could be in me right then, about the size of a cantaloupe. Interestingly, this is supposed to be an openness to creativity, which is not something with which I have a problem…so there’s just something about that meditative avenue that is causing me grief. Seriously weepy grief. Sometimes you just have to let the mind do its thing and you watch it and try to learn from it, but trying to force the change is not going to be a successful endeavor.

Then it was late and I had to choose…sleep? Or artmaking? I learned my lesson last night…I didn’t spend much time tracing, but I did spend some…

I got motivated after working on that drawing last night to finally restart the tracing on the mammogram quilt. I think I just need to have multiple projects in the works so I can pick and choose when I’m in a mood…something easy, something hard? Something that is totally engaging vs something that is more light and simple? Tracing isn’t usually easy, but it is engaging. And it helped. I was already a bit distant and numb from the gym experience (too many days of crying at the gym lately), so I guess I’m even more into that hole, but I’m not sure it’s a bad thing at the moment. It just is.

I committed to another challenging hike in March…looking forward to it, although I’m a little nervous about it…less so now that I know it is less elevation gain than San Miguel, but I don’t kid myself…it won’t be easy. It will be worth it, though. I made a comment on the last hike about dispelling demons from the tips of my fingers as I walked, and I think maybe I need to think of a way to do that for real, like a symbol of that maybe? I think this would be a good hike for that, although I don’t know if I feel comfortable with doing that with a bunch of mostly strangers (I know a few people who will be on the hike, but not well). We’ll see. Maybe. It’s on my mind…ritual to remove sad? Not a wake, not a memorial, but something more in the dirt. Thinking about it. How to persuade the brain to release things…a gesture of release?

Meanwhile, my gestures are in the art world…releasing grief and sad and even anger through the drawings. The guns, they’re about anger and pain…not hurting myself, but trying to mitigate hurt done on me. Trying to make it hurt less by drawing hurt? I can’t really explain how my brain is working…but it is trying to work through some of these things with symbols, images of things that hurt…thorns, cuts, tears, wounds…another gesture of release? Who knows.

The Mental Health Trifecta

I was going to go to bed an hour and a half ago, but realized as I sat down at the computer to write a post that I was depressed. I mean, yeah, I’m always depressed, but I was more so than usual. I spent most of the day running around doing errands or digging holes (seriously) or grading papers or inputting grades, and it wasn’t a very satisfying day. I don’t get any jollies out of all that shit, and in the old days, I would just shake that off and assume tomorrow would bring something better, and it usually did. Not so now. Because it usually doesn’t bring something better unless I force the issue.

And yes, it means less sleep, but I’ve said before that sleep doesn’t really make me happy. Well, at the moment, nothing makes me happy, but sleep doesn’t even bring peace. Or something approaching contentment…because that’s the closest I get to happy now. Happy is way over there. I don’t even recognize it. It’s wearing a disguise.

Anyway. So I stood up, went and got a drink of cold milk (because the girlchild infected me with the first illness I’ve had in 8 months and my throat hurts), and went in to the light table. I had recopied some drawings I call the triptych, which is interesting, because there are currently only two parts, not three, and I was originally planning on making three quilts that would hang next to each other, and now I think it should just be one really wide one that’s not very high. Not a triptych at all. Whatever. Maybe I’ll just call it that anyway to confuse people. I had tried taping it together a few months ago and it was a fucking disaster…nothing would line up and I just gave up. I needed to tape it together to finish it…I couldn’t see it all any more because it was on multiple pages and I couldn’t hold it all in my head.

So I recopied it. And I taped the two sections together, starting with the easier one…

Feb 10 14 006 small

It has fewer lines that have to meet up, so it taped together really well…and then I did the other one, the pain-in-the-ass-from-before one…

Expecting the worst. Except it worked. I think part of it was that I only enlarged it 200% this time instead of 250%. OK, I don’t know why that would make a difference, except that it takes fewer pieces to enlarge to the smaller size, so there’s less room for things to get out of alignment. That’s my current guess anyway.

I had originally drawn some connections between the two, so I redrew them on top (mostly because I couldn’t get the leaves above to behave on the copy they were on, so I cut them all off and used the other ones, so then I had to add what I had already drawn on the other page…confused? I’m not…and I’m the one who counts on this one).

So right now, I have a drawing that is about 68″ wide and 28″ high. I’m debating adding onto the left and a little on the right…and some below. Because that’s not crazy or anything. This thing has potential. I might be able to get my butt in gear and actually DO something with a purpose if I can get this to the next stage. Maybe.

I don’t have much focus at the moment. There’s no deadline that’s pressing on me. There probably should be one, but it hasn’t become urgent yet. It will.

I was drawing this disaster last night…the arm is wrong, the feet are wrong, the whole thing is a mess…

But I like y’all to see that I draw things, get this far, bang my head on the table, and move on. I may try again, but leave enough room for the feet to point the right direction or redirect the legs, and make sure the arm doesn’t look like it’s been attached after the fact…OR…make it REALLY look like it’s attached after the fact. Whatever. I was tired. And apparently coming down with sick. So there. You want to get better at drawing? Do LOTS of it. Assume about 90% will be awful. If you do better than that? You’re awesome. And then do it for lots of years, over and over again.

There. Now I don’t have to teach classes, because that’s all I would ever say…go make some art. Then make some more. Assume some of it is bad and will never see the light of day. Now make some more. Keep making it. Don’t stop. Get angry about some of it. Doubt yourself and your work. Occasionally take a deep breath and know you did good. Then do another one that sucks. There. You’re an artist.

I also dug some holes today…the septic tank got clogged again and we couldn’t even get showers or flush a toilet…which is a problem. You know. The leach field is being replaced on Friday, but we can’t really go without showers, toilets, and running water for that many days, so I had to pay to get it pumped again. This has been a really nasty shitty year for expenses. I keep breathing deep and deciding what job I’m getting for the summer…who will hire me for just 8 weeks? I don’t know.

I needed to save the $100 they would charge me to unearth the tops of the septic tank pumpouts…exciting stuff. So I shoveled myself…

Anyway. The plus is that my brain is in a better place after an hour of cutting up bits of paper and taping them to each other. Seems crazy if you ask me, but it’s a special mental state my brain goes into when it’s doing certain artmaking activities. It has to evaluate what it’s doing and it gets engaged with the process and the line itself and lining things up, and it really is a magical thing. Now if I could just get rid of that damn eye twitch…it’s back. I think it will leave when I finally get all the financial aid stuff out of the house. I hope. Or not. But at least I’m in a better frame of mind to go to sleep…I wish I didn’t have to keep reminding myself of the mental health trifecta. I seem to have the first two down pat…exercise and meditation…I just need to keep the third one in mind…make art, you silly woman, or you will be even unhappier.

Vacuuming the Brain

Another no-posting night. I was drawing instead…

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

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

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

Whatever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Small Baby Bird

My mind literally skittered away from meditation tonight; I couldn’t force the light to fill my body. I am supposed to start from a pinpoint of light in my chest and visualize it filling my body with warmth and light. I can’t. I just can’t. There is black tarry sludge in the edges, and it’s pushing back at the light, forcing it to shrink back into the center and sometimes just disappear. It sizzles when it touches the light, lets off a rancid smell, chemical, burns the nostrils.

Wow. That’s not like a good visual of my mood at all, is it? In fact, a drawing pretty much popped into my head fully drawn when I was meditating, which really turned into trying to fight the sludge away and continue to breathe like I’m supposed to. Sometimes it just seems so pointless to even try, but I know I feel worse when I don’t. So I just do. Again and again.

I need to try to go to sleep at a semi-reasonable hour tonight. I can feel the mood worsening this week and I know some of it is hormones, some is stress, but some is sleep. If I’m lucky, I might get an extra 30 minutes tonight. Maybe. And if I’m really lucky, I’ll have all the financial aid stuff done and packed up for mailing some time this weekend, so I won’t have to think about it any more. I’m hoping that will help. Then again, maybe it’s distracting me from the other shit.

I’m thinking about this quilt again…

One Paycheck…because my life is back to that again…looking at the available money and taking deep breaths, trying to figure out survival again. I am so tired of it…so tired of worrying about money and expenses and how to pay for stuff. I had it rephotographed because it’s going to be in a book on quilts and human rights that will be published later this year. I know that once the kids get through school and hopefully get jobs that I will be OK, because I will only have to take care of myself, and I think I can do that. I think I can keep one head above water. Three heads? When two are in college? I’m having a lot harder time visualizing that. Maybe that’s the black tarry sludge…it’s worry and depression and panic and anxiety and grief, all rolled into a burrito of shit. A creeping burrito of coming-to-get-you-in-the-middle-of-the-night. Stephen King hasn’t written the single-mom-paying-for-college book yet…now there’s a scary-ass horror story for you.

Deep breaths. I meditate at school all the time now. I kick one class out into the hallway, close the door, pick up all the science journals, adjust the planner on the screen, stare at the wall and breathe…one two three four…you can make it to the door…five six seven eight…you can do this. You can’t rhyme all of it, but you can do it. You can open the door and let them in and breathe out the crazy and the sad and the dreary depth of grief that overwhelms you sometimes as you walk around the room, trying to persuade kids to work. Feeling this one’s forehead and wondering why he got sent to school with this fever and headache, talking quietly to that one about how to change what’s happening with her stuff right now, praising this other one for doing work you’ve never seen him do, chastising that other one for a giant brain fart day. You understand those days. You have them too, and somehow you get through. You grade. You teach. You email. You do all the right things. You walk through the black tarry sludge, which sucks at your feet and threatens to stop oxygen flow to your cells, but you push through, slog through, put your shoulder to it and move on through it.

But it never ends. Never fucking ends.

I needed to draw tonight, but it got too late. I had to make a test review powerpoint. I thought I had one for this test, but apparently not. And I graded because the girlchild commandeered my computer, so I watched part of Downton Abbey while doing that, and it made me cry. Dammit. I didn’t even get through the first fucking episode of this season without losing it. I’m such an emotional disaster area. Just stay away from me. It’s like nuclear waste. I feel like it just radiates off of me.

It must. You must be able to just look at me and know.

I heard this the other morning and went…NO. Why? What the hell?

Chvrches: Bela Lugosi’s Dead

And then I thought I might actually like it. And now I’ve heard it like 7 times, and I still don’t know. It’s definitely not Bauhaus. But I think I might like it.

You know, there really isn’t a conclusion to today’s post. I keep thinking someday I will get on here and yell, hooray! The depression is gone! The witch is dead! Hallelujah! Thank you all for joining me on this journey out of the hole! Whoop! Now let’s get on with what equates to normal with Kathy. Seriously, when I read old posts, I wonder who that person is? Even when she’s stressed, I don’t fucking recognize her. I don’t even know who she is. And that makes me so incredibly sad. Really sad.

Yeah. Well. I guess that’s what hope looks like, a small baby bird in my hand who is barely raising its head for water. At least it’s still alive.

For Ivy…and Me

My SIL really saved me from myself yesterday and last night. I think she called me about 5 times, not for long, but just to tell me one more ironic or stupid thing about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I know I was trying NOT to sound mopey and shit, but I was, and I don’t even know if she knew that…but just having her sarcastic loving self checking in with me kept me from sinking deep into the low. By the time she stopped calling (No, Really, she said, This is the last call), I was significantly tired so I managed to do a few more things and then went to bed early for me. And got a decent night’s sleep for probably the first time in a month. I know she doesn’t read my blog (she has three kids under the age of 12…I’m not sure she reads anything but text messages), so she’ll never see this. I’ll tell her thanks at some point.

There’s something about the vast expanse of weekend hours that I spend by myself that get me down. One part of me looks forward to quiet and getting to do something I want to do, and the other part of me wants to interact with people, but not total strangers and not in a difficult way. I don’t want to have to work hard at it, because I already do that every day during the work week. I want relaxing and social. Sort of. In small quantities. Maybe. Plus I’m significantly poor, so no cost. Yeah, I know. It’s not very realistic. Even an occasional movie would be nice…maybe when I get past the next Visa bill from hell.

Really, what I did yesterday was fill out financial aid forms. And I did a little fabric stuff. And I meditated.

I have completed 145 meditation sessions. Ironically, I’m having a hard time with the current series, the Creativity series…there’s something about the format of visualizing energy moving through that I can’t hold on to properly. I have no problems with creativity in itself, except for finding time for it and forcing myself to do OTHER stuff that is NOT creative. I am having a hard time relaxing at the moment in meditation…I can’t get my brain to release. It’s been too tied up in financial aid applications to relax…I’m still doing those, by the way. I finished the worst of it Saturday, the CSS Profile, which was way worse than the FAFSA by like 100 degrees. But some of the colleges have their own forms, so I did one of those tonight…and all of them need copies of my tax return, my paystubs, my W-2s, all need to be signed on each page and probably I need to provide a vial of my blood as well. Boychild interrupted my meditation because he had forgotten to turn in an essay online…and then I was talking to him about getting a job. He wanted to know why. Sigh. Ah. Money, dude. Plus hell…you just need to get a job and start being part of society. Feel free to find a job you’d like: politics, bookstore, I don’t know. Something. I will be doing these damn financial aid forms for another two weeks probably…so it seems fair that he should have to work this summer? I don’t know. I might have to work this summer too…who knows. I don’t know how anything is going to work out. Like him, I don’t know what job I could get just for the summer. Delivering pizza?

I also have completed 33 health coach sessions in the last year and a half. They’re stopping my coaching, which has been free so far…apparently losing all the weight means I no longer qualify for the free stuff. I’m OK with that. I think I got the best out of the sessions a while ago. I think there are one or two more. That’s it. I lost 45.5 pounds in that time period. I dropped one med. I upped two other meds and added new ones. Sigh. I’m healthier now despite the extra meds. I can’t help being anemic.

So I went to my local quilt store that carries wool fabrics and got a few more bright fabrics…well, bright-ish. That’s all that was available…

That crazy fabric underneath them is the backing fabric I got for super-cheap a million years ago, and I used every inch of it up on the back of the Sightlines quilts, which have finally returned home.

And then I started going through my wool stash, trying to find all the leftover pieces from other projects I’ve done…because I don’t need huge pieces for the flowers in the background…these are from a Primitive Gatherings’ block-of-the-month that I finished…well, I finished all the blocks. I haven’t put them together…that’s usually my sticking point.

Then I found the pieces from the two Sue Spargo block-of-the-month leftovers…there were some good bright colors in there, including some orange I used for the fish in the water…

I don’t need big pieces. This is not hoarding. Seriously. This is using up my scraps. I don’t have a good wool stash. It’s OK. I don’t NEED a good wool stash. I’m not planning on this being a regular thing. I just really wanted something to show how much I cared about Ivy and how bad I felt about her dying so early. I realize that current readers may not have a clue who Ivy is.

Ivy came home with us in June 2006 as a puppy (yes, that is the boychild at age 10).

She was a Boxer mix…later we figured out that the mix must have been a whippet, because she was long and skinny and ran like the wind.

She was a good dog, like they all are, although she had issues with my parents’ dog at some point, so Missy couldn’t stay with us after Calli (my daughter’s dog) moved in. But she was sweet, and every time the phone rang at night, she would leap off the couch and go running down the hallway, sometimes barking like the world was ending.

She wasn’t very big, but sounded large. She was a good protector and was very loving. She had skin allergies that started up in 2011 and we tried some food and allergy tests…turns out she was allergic to everything under the sun, so we had her on allergy shots for a while, but she even developed an allergy to those. And then her vet died of a sudden heart attack…at age 44 or something. It was crazy. So it took us a while to get another vet in the practice up to speed on the whole allergy issue, and then she got really really sick really really fast. And then well again. And then sick again. And by the time we found out that she had liver cancer, she had stopped eating and drinking, and I had made the horrible decision to stop her pain and suffering. She was 6. It was May 2012. Yes, that long ago.

I don’t know why her death has been so hard on me…I’ve had multiple animals die, but always of old age…or they were old and the diseases finally got too much for them. Ivy was young, in the prime of her life, perfectly fine and hyper and running around excited one day, and vomiting everything up and barely able to stand the next day. It was about a month from the first serious illness to putting her down, and it was just hard for me. My daughter still talks about it; she’s still carrying around resentment over how she didn’t get to hold Ivy when she died. Long story…she was there when it happened, but…I know if she had said something, she could have held her, but that’s a whole ‘nother issue. One that can’t be changed now.

So I spent most of the summer sad about her death. When my first dog, Russia, died of old age, the kids were young, and it took me a couple of years to get another dog, mostly because of finances, and that was Ivy. We have Calli here half the time; she travels back and forth between me and my ex with the kids…so it’s not like I never have a dog here. And I don’t know that I’m home enough to justify a dog just for me…and there’s the cost.

But the real deal was that I felt I needed to memorialize her life. I did some drawings and one became a sort-of banner to Ivy. That’s what this is. And it’s wool mostly, with cotton accents, and I’m planning to embellish it a la Sue Spargo, because I enjoy doing that kind of work, sort of as a hobby, rather than like an art endeavor…and I want what I make for Ivy to have been enjoyable. Because it still makes me feel like crying to think about that month when she was so sick, to remember that day I couldn’t even get her to eat out of my hand, so I decided that was it. That she was suffering more than it was worth, and she wasn’t coming back. We didn’t get the biopsy results for another three or four days, but I was right. It was liver cancer all over the place.

So I’m making this for her. And for me.

I would be ironing on the ironing board, but Babygirl thinks it’s hers now. I had all the wool sort of spread out on the other side of the board.

When I got to the fleshy bits, I had a run of fabrics that I worked really hard to get back in 2012/2013.

And I currently have about half the quilt ironed down to mostly wool, ready to be cut out.

It’s a much different process than I use for most of my quilts…but I’m glad to have it started. Maybe tomorrow night I can get started on the flowers…I have Ivy, me, and the main landscape (hill, river, fish) all cut out. I just need to do about a million flowers and two banners and then there are bunnies and squirrels, because Ivy liked to chase animals. So expect to see more of this in the coming days. For Ivy. Yeah. And me.

Making Up a Journal…

Here’s the post I hope the curator never reads. It’s Monday, January 6 (yes, I started this that long ago…welcome to my life at the moment), and I am supposed to have done a journal for the Earth Stories quilt I finished back in August/September. It’s been a rough 6 months and said journal does not exist.

I started back in early January with trying to use Google Docs, because I figured I could load the photos into a document and then write the words around it while I was sitting at a soccer game. I wanted to use the iPad, but wasn’t sure if the app I wanted to use would be able to save locally without wifi; the phone was my backup plan (and yes, I do often at least start and occasionally write an entire post on my phone). However, Google Docs sucks because it won’t take photos of any size out if the camera…they have to be resized. That’s a lot of work. I did originally resize them for the blog, but I usually delete those when I archive photos into files…so now I’m doing double work…not so smart.

Why didn’t I start a journal when I started the quilt? Because that’s not how I work. I do have a sketchbook (or seven). I don’t journal each quilt’s progress there…I do have a typed private art journal that I write in every Friday (or at least once a week) and there’s obviously my blog, which documents everything except when the dog poops (which it would document if I could find a pattern to it), but I don’t really focus on each quilt in a logical way…it’s more, here’s the quilt I’m making and here’s all the other shit that’s going on, which is why when they said they wanted a journal for the Earth Stories quilt back in like February 2013, I was like…I can do that. I’ll just copy pages from my blog. And then life (shit…tsunami wave of shit) happened. And that’s probably more than EVER needs to go into the journal of making that quilt. Besides, it would be 400 pages long and no one would read it while standing in the exhibit and wondering what made Kathy Nida do what she did, or even how she did it, because I’m not sure anyone cares about why either. Or maybe they do. Who knows.

So I ignored the need for the journal for a goddamned good long time. I emailed the curator and made sure I didn’t have to deal with it right away. And then I let it percolate (ahem…actually, I completely ignored it because I couldn’t handle it).

I bought the journal (a portfolio, relatively cheap from Michael’s) around January 2, and I thought I was finally ready to deal with this. Of course, it meant going through old photos, cleaning out photo files to find what I needed, and that was one of the issues before. I can’t even look at some of my old photo files right now. They’re filed by date and I then go through and cut and paste them into their relevant folder, whether it’s pictures of the animals or the kids’ soccer games, or it’s a particular quilt. It’s nice to have all the quilt pictures in one place, but this quilt spans about February or March of this year until September or so, and I don’t know if I can deal with the documentation.

I HAVE to deal with them. Shit. There’s only photos from November in the quilt file. Fuck. That means they’re all uncategorized, only in by date. That means I have to go through 8-9 months’ worth of photo files, during some of the most painful parts of my life. Wow. So. Should I take a Xanax now or later? Or should I just shoot myself? It might be quicker and less painful.

Probably better to do it in small batches (the photos…not the Xanax). I managed to get them all sorted in a few days. Then I resized all of them into one folder, so if I fucked up and deleted everything, they would be easy to find. Then I started with that damn Google Docs. I fussed with that file for about two days and finally said fuck it and imported it into Word. It wouldn’t move photos the way I wanted them to move, it wouldn’t size things easily. I couldn’t get the text to wrap right.

So you’d think years of Word expertise would make this an easy job. You’d be wrong. Something that happened in the code from Google Docs came in and warped the intelligence of anything I could have done in Word. I would move and reformat a photo just to have it completely disappear when I started typing text. The page below moved all those photos all by itself…the file doesn’t look like this, but when it prints out, this is what it does.

I don’t have a great color printer at the moment. It’s about 20 years old, maybe older, and it just sucks. So I took the file to FedEx to print it out there. It’s possible that there was something hinky that happened in that interface that randomly moved photos and words, but I wasn’t about to try to fix something I couldn’t find without carefully reading code (running out of time here), so I resorted to old-school. Yes. I reprinted the pages on my black and white printer here at home, cut out the color pictures from the other copies, and cut out the words from my printouts…

And started scrapbooking. Whatever. It’s all in these little plastic pages. No one will know…or care.

Example above. It worked fine. I didn’t write a lot because I didn’t think people would want to read a lot. I included a cover page of my inspiration for the piece and my resume in the back. I finally mailed it off earlier this week. You can see below the stupid shit that printer was doing…

“I to see”? Whatever. So it’s done. I don’t know if anyone will ever look at it, let alone read it, but there it is. When the exhibit opens, I’ll do some posts here about the quilt too, so don’t feel bad if you don’t make it to the opening.

The next journaling experience? For Celebrating Silver, they want one or two 12×12″ pages of the process or story or hell, I don’t know what. I don’t own 12×12 pages. I will have to make some paper between now and then apparently. I think I have until mid-April on that one, so obviously I should ignore the need for that to get done until…um…about April 14. I’m sure some people’s journals are really interesting and give great insight into the artistic process. I don’t think that’s the case with mine. I don’t know if I want to spend more time writing about the inspiration before I make a quilt, making the drawing, and then making the piece. I do write about it here, but I think a journal with nothing in it but a big fat QR code is probably not what they want.

Anyway. I suck at journaling the way they want. Here’s my journal. Right here. You’re reading it.

Emotional Sine Wave

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

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

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

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

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

I worked on the third bird of Month 2…

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

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

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

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

As is Untied…

Both normally hang in my house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Need Better Shoes…

If I’m going to hang out at art openings, I will need better shoes. I may need a personality transplant as well, one that smiles and chats at the appropriate times. I also need to be much less judgmental, both of the art and the art wannabes; the fake is strong here.

That said, I did force myself to be among the living…

and had a reasonably intelligent conversation with, of all people, another middle-school teacher who volunteers for the group that was raising money at this function. The group is 1:1 Movement, which is working on educating kids about sustainability and conservation. One of the things they do is give a plastic recyclable bag to each kid in a classroom and ask them to collect everything they would normally throw away for a whole week, and then they come back and look at what’s in the bag. The woman I talked to started saying all these things my students say about losing stuff, papers they got the day before, the pencil they brought to school…I hear you sister. They will come out to our school and talk to the kids…gonna see whether I can pull this off.

It wasn’t what I expected when I went…but I wasn’t really paying attention properly. They invited local artists to paint the recyclable bags they give the kids…

And then they auctioned them off to the highest bidder…

The money went to buy more bags for kids.

I don’t have any money to spare at the moment. So I bid on nothing. I did start to walk out (way too many people that I didn’t know), and then stopped. I bought a jar of wine (drinks came in jars, which meant I spilt), and then went and sat down in sort of the center of things, OK, not the center, but there were still lots of people around me…

And I did actually talk to about three whole people, one about my shitty camera (he had the same one and the same problem with the stupid lens covering…piece of shit!), one about the project itself (she was obviously an extrovert), and one about tamales. I know. I’m not an expert, but I did know where they were (observant tendencies).

Mostly I just sat and listened to other people do artspeak and anti-artspeak and wow, I’m old here, aren’t I? And I don’t have a lot of tolerance for people. Sigh. So I people-watched and checked out shoes and clothes and who was walking around with whom and what they looked at and didn’t look at. But I stayed for at least 45 minutes. And I’m glad I had the conversation with the other teacher, because I will look into bringing them on my campus. I think it would do my students good to think more about what they waste…it frustrates me no end. Breaking pencils so they can throw lead at other students, picking up 5 pieces of white paper instead of 1 because they think they’re entitled to do so (I buy my own paper about half the year), losing assignments they picked up the day before, never having a pencil or lead.

Anyway. I did it. I went. It was OK.

I went to Road to California in the morning and afternoon with Julie and my mom…I will have to find time to write that post. It’s long and complicated.

The morning looked like this…

Actually, it was much prettier than that, but the camera is not being my friend.

I stitched in the car on the way up and back. I always expect to get so much done, but even with about 3 hours in the car, I only finished two of the blocks and got a bit into the third…and the first of the two I finished was really almost done.

I have done a lot of Pekinese stitch in the last few days. The bottom two are done (I could embellish them a lot more, but would never finish at that rate). The top right one will get finished in the car tomorrow (yet another drive for art-related activities).

And then when I got home, I needed to decide how to spend my evening. I needed to find something that would help my mood, rather than make it worse. I’ve had a bunch of drawings wandering my head for weeks, so I sat down and drew…

It’s not done. Yes, it’s a bit disturbing. It will get more so, once I add another page to the left. Such is my brain.

OK, tired, exhausted. Really. That is the second time I’ve drawn a gun. It is the third time I’ve drawn tsunami waves. It’s not done.

Past the Deadlines…(sort of)

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

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

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

At the soccer game, I almost finished this guy…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I numbered the big quilt…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finishing Parts, Not Wholes

OK, I think I really suck at writing to-do lists, because once again, I can’t actually cross something off because I only got part of it done. I got part of lots of things done today. That seems to be what I’m good at…finishing parts and not wholes? Makes sense. I usually only finish about 6 quilts a year, so I spend most of my days making parts (or wishing I could make parts), rather than finishing. I only get to finish 6 days a year, and because I finished two on one day this year, I will be spending even fewer days finishing.

So I should stop worrying about the finishing. Maybe. It’s the process, not the product.

But the product is what we see.

I finished (ha!) taping all the smaller drawings together. The smallest is about 10″ square; the larger ones are about 18×22, with a bunch in between those two.

Here’s the funny part. There are 21 of them. Because HOW LONG WILL THAT TAKE ME? Seriously, what the hell kind of drugs was I on when I thought picking 21 drawings made any fucking sense at all? I guess at least I have a choice. Or many choices. Or so many choices that I will be unable to make a choice.

Sigh.

I’m not sure any of them, including the big one, are really speaking to me at the moment. I’ll try again tomorrow night.

Before I even started taping them, I worked on the journal for Earth Stories. It’s almost done. I’ll be writing that post soon, because if it could go wrong, well hell yes, it did. I am the Queen of Adaptation. I make things work. I did that at school today too…made it work. It’s my thing at the moment. Spend less time after hours dealing with school, but more intense when I am actually there. It was intense today. I went above and beyond. Where the fuck are my stickers? I want my stickers. I should get stickers.

One of the other teachers, who I don’t think has ever graced my room, came in to tell me how he was asking his homeroom who inspired them, and he said that all the kids said mama and papa, all around the room, and then one of my dorky boys, my annoying, will-never-shut-up, could do way better than he has been boys, he said me. Sigh.

No, he’s not an orphan. And his parents are nice, supportive people. And I get in his face. So why do we keep teaching, when everyone tells us the job is awful, the hours suck, the pay is miserable, the stress levels are horrendous?

Yeah. That. And the dorky hugs. And the moment when I make them realize that they are animals. It’s so obvious to the rest of us that humans are animals…but kids need it explained, they need to be shown, they’ve never thought of themselves that way. I guess I’ve seen/felt too many people ACT like animals to ever question it. Every time I make them think or question or say OOOHHH. There we are.

Anyway. So I have 21 drawings and at least one student who likes me and I only have two things fully crossed off the lime-green post-it note from hell.

I did go to copy stuff today, and I almost recopied this other drawing that’s sort of the huge triptych from hell (apparently the phrase of the day is FROM HELL), but then I thought, no, it’s OK.

It’s really fucking not OK. Stupid copiers don’t copy correctly…they’re not accurate, so if you’re trying to tape something big together, it won’t match up. I think I might wait a month or so and give up the big bucks on this one and have it copied at the printers to size, rather than try to do it myself on 11×17″ pieces of paper that I then try to match up and tape together.

But I did copy this drawing, because it needs to continue on another page…

And I’m glad I did, because I realized how good it was, but I still need to figure out what’s on the sides. I purposely drew it on the horizontal, so I would have room at the sides. I don’t know when I think I will have time to draw, though. I will be at Road this weekend, plus a California Fibers’ meeting and an art opening, so no free time. And I’m totally exhausted tonight. Really couldn’t manage that sleep thing last night. Think I will collapse tonight, probably very soon. I exercised, but I won’t meditate…there’s no point. I will just fall asleep.

I finished reading the last in the Flamel series by Michael Scott, The Enchantress…

It made me cry. I wasn’t expecting it. I committed myself to this story for 6 books and it was compelling and interesting. There is tons of mythology and history and fantasy embedded into the series; I think the Morrigan and I need to have a drawing session. Maybe I will invite Billy the Kid…he seems like an interesting guy.

Anyway. I’m sad to have the series end, but he did good. Oh hey, there’s one where I finally finished the whole.

OK, this is seriously tired. Taking it to bed.