Rejection

I’ve been entering art exhibits since I was in my teens. Thus, I’ve been getting rejection notices for over 30 years. Sometimes they bug me, but mostly not…I understand the vagaries of jurors and making shows work together and the limitations of exhibit spaces enough to not take it personally. That said, over the years, I’ve noticed that there are some pieces of mine that never get in to ANY show. Or it takes them a long time to age into exhibition (like a fine wine or old cheese)…and these are often some of my favorite pieces.

For a long time, Earth Mother got in nowhere…

It was one of my early “bigger” pieces. I drew it on one page in the sketchbook and then realized I wanted it to be bigger, so it’s one of the first pieces I continued onto a second sketchbook page. This is from 2006 and it’s 32″ wide by 82″ high.

It has hand-embroidery on it as well as all the standard quilting I do, and it usually lives in my entryway, scaring the crap out of any of my kids’ friends or parents who stop by (whoops…I’m sure I didn’t do that on purpose). It took three years of trying before it got into a show, and it has now been in three shows.

It does have three eyeballs and three nipples per breast…not exactly normal.

It’s possible that my photography was an issue. Because it was such a long, skinny piece, it was difficult for me to photograph in my small space, so I had it redone when I finally got a real photographer. I don’t know if that helped or not, but even though it technically has aged out of most shows, it is currently in Aliso Viejo at the Soka University show. I did think for a while that it would never get in anywhere, and I really liked it, plus it took a ton of time one summer to make…it’s hard to spend that much time and energy on a piece, and invest so much of yourself into it, and then have it get in nowhere.

When I went through my exhibition records, I found a few others that have never seen an exhibit wall…some make more sense than others, but honestly, I don’t know what makes some exhibit-worthy and some not.

Soda Sux, Wine Is Better is a really old quilt…

It’s so old, it’s all hand applique. No really. That’s how I used to make my art quilts…like one a year. And it’s not even that big, only 17″ w x 22″ h. It’s from 2000. It has never been in a show. Ever. I’m saving it for my retrospective. Yes, it’s a little weird. I think I was still breastfeeding the younger kid when I drew it. I kept getting these monster headaches when I was pregnant and couldn’t take meds (I threw everything up anyway), and the doctor would tell me to just drink a soda (ironic now, when you think I was diagnosed with borderline gestational diabetes with that pregnancy)…I didn’t drink the damn soda. Honestly, I was lucky to keep water down with either pregnancy…and I’ve never been a fan of soda.

There are three or four other quilts that are just plain strange and/or in your face that I haven’t entered many places, so I don’t really worry about their getting in or not, but this one got entered a ton of places…It was different than my other stuff, but not SO different I thought. This is 3-Piece Family,

obviously a post-divorce quilt when the kids were still little. It’s from 2009 and has never been out of the house.

There are a couple of pieces from last year that have never been in shows and one from 2012, but I haven’t given up hope for them yet. This one, though…this is One of My Kind and it’s based on a dream I had after my grandmother died…

Although it took me a long time to actually draw it and make it…this sucker is BIG…and it’s from 2011…and it’s never gotten in anywhere.

There is a lot of nudity and it’s a very busy quilt, but I love this thing…

which maybe is why it never gets in…it’s the Kathy Curse or something. It has not COMPLETELY aged out of the exhibit realm, but almost. Most shows are asking for the last three years at this point, and this was October 2011…so not a lot of options left for it. I feel bad for it. It was my big summer quilt, my masterpiece for 2011, and it has some amazing stuff going on in it, but it just gets rejected over and over. I have a few more shows it can be entered in, and then it gets hung in my hallway or entryway, therefore to scare teenagers who enter here. I don’t really worry about whether it will get IN when I make it…I just got an email from a curator on one of the shows I’m in this year where I made the piece AFTER being accepted, and she made my day with her comments…so I’m doing OK. Rejection is just part of the mix when you’re an artist. Your art is so much a part of you that it can be hard to have a favorite piece rejected time after time, but if you remember that each show is one juror or a group of jurors and there are another 600 pieces that it’s up against and they all have to work together, when you make art like mine, art that challenges and is sometimes really out there, you have to accept that it won’t always get in. It’s not a reflection on you, yourself. I know my heart and soul is in my work and enough people respond well to it that I don’t have to get too down because of a rejection or two (or ten).

That said, it’s always nicer to get IN.

Making the Wrinkles…

My eyes are aging. It’s harder to see, but beyond that, the last 6 months have made my eyes LOOK older. I have all these sad wrinkles under my eyes that weren’t there before. I drew them in the Celebrating Silver quilt. I remember not having those wrinkles 6 months ago. Now they are all I see. I don’t really care about wrinkles…some people are very vain about their appearance and I’m really not. But the wrinkles disturbed me. I draw the things that disturb me. You may have noticed. I’ve had three drawings present themselves in my brain in the last three days. I took notes on the images and will maybe draw this week? What a concept. I delivered three quilts to the photographer early this afternoon…he will hopefully call tomorrow about pickup; if not, it will be Wednesday for me. I think. Maybe Tuesday? Can’t remember my schedule. But it’s a good thing.

Then I went to a meeting of one of the art groups I belong to. It took place in a dessert bar next to a gallery space where we will have a performance art/exhibit going on for two months in the fall about the border fence. Being so close to Mexico brings up ideas of crossing borders and what that looks like. I’m having issues visualizing my participation in this project, just because it’s not my normal subject matter and what I do doesn’t necessarily translate to the process they’re suggesting, but I will let me brain run with it for a while. I didn’t volunteer to be a committee leader, because I don’t have the mental energy or the time, but I will be involved somehow. Maybe I will just let someone else tell me what to do instead of having to be in charge.

A high-school friend came to dinner at my parents’ house; girlchild cooked a great meal and we had time to talk. I worked on these at the meeting and before dinner, and finally finished the first month’s squares…

It always takes longer than you think it should. I think they still need eyeball buttons, but that’s it. I did start the embellishment on the second month as well…actually, I had already done the beige background stitching on them. Anyway, there’s only one soccer game this week because the kids have finals, and I’m not even sure I am going to that game…there’s a meeting I think I have to go to…cannot be three places at once…no matter how much I try.

Grades? Well, I worked on them last night for a while and again tonight. I’m actually further ahead than I expected to be at this point, so that’s good. I also worked on the journal I need to finish for Earth Stories…it’s getting closer to done, despite Word’s attempts to mess with me via formatting and whatever crap Google Docs seems to have embedded in the original file. I know this stuff should be easier, but it’s not today.

Tomorrow, I will finish grades (which might take hours honestly), label the quilt that needs to be delivered this week, find and pack up the quilt that needs to be delivered next week, possibly pack up the quilts that need to be shipped and maybe even ship them…can’t ship the notebook with them anyway. Might as well get them out of here. There’s other paperwork I need to get through as well, and then financial aid stuff really does have to get done.

But I don’t want to go from art every day to no art at all. I know how bad that feels and I don’t want to let my mood get any worse…it was bloody awful this morning and it was just stupid stuff that set me off, got me crying in the grocery store and not just a little bit, and then I couldn’t get it under control, and there’s only so long you can stare at the Brussels sprouts with your head down so your hair blocks any view of your eyes, trying to get the tears to stop coming. I don’t get it. It’s like automatic sprinklers. Maybe it’s some sort of mental let down from finishing the quilts, from the stress of trying to get them done. Maybe it’s because the Brussels sprouts were in such bad shape. Who knows.

So I could have kept grading for another hour tonight, but I made myself stop and I started taping the smaller drawings together again…

I have 10 taped together and another 10 or so to do. Yes, that’s a lot. They’re small. It’s kind of crazy, actually, but I wasn’t capable of deciding what to do next when I copied them. I just went through about 3 or 4 of the smaller sketchbooks I’ve used over the last 4 years or so and marked the ones I liked or that I thought were good candidates. The problem is that the smaller drawings seem less serious to me, less about something, less issue-driven. Most of them happened while waiting for a movie to start or sitting in a coffee house or waiting for dinner. They didn’t have a specific purpose, no image came to mind beforehand, they are literally brain vomit. And sometimes it’s related to where I was or what I was doing before or after, but mostly they’re just random. So how do I pick one? I feel like it needs to have meaning. I don’t know why I feel that way. It seems like my life is such a crazy mess that at least my art has to mean something, to have a purpose, to have a message. And I don’t know if any of these small drawings has a good enough message. Plus they’re kind of painful to look at, because they are reminders of a life I don’t have any more. So that kind of sucks.

Sigh. I wanted to do a smaller one (or two) before starting the next big one, but maybe I just need to suck it up and go big again.

I think I’ll tape up the rest of them and then make a decision…probably not until tomorrow night or Tuesday even. I really do need to get grades done first. Damn job. Gets in the way of the art. I should do something about that (like win the lottery and become financially independent so I don’t have to go to work any more? Yeah, like that).

OK. I am really tired. Sleep. Hopefully sleep. Maybe it’s that lack of sleep thing that’s making the wrinkles…

Rewrite the Kathy

I know how I should feel right now. I’ve written about it before…the joy, the relief of finishing a quilt, of making it through all the hours, the drudgery, the tasks. The deep breath, the sigh of relief. The empty space in your head waiting for another piece to rush in and fill it.

Fuck. I finished two quilts today. I’ve spent the last 6 months working on them (with other stuff in there too), and I feel…what do I feel? A slight release of pressure, of stress, because I made the deadlines…because they will be delivered to the photographer tomorrow and I did what I set out to do. I don’t feel joyous. I don’t feel happy. I acknowledge that it was hard work, that I achieved something, that I was successful, but for what?

I don’t know. I keep doing it because I want that feeling back, I want to feel that rush of good when I finish, when it’s done. I want that right now. I talked to the counselor about that magical step from where you are at the moment to where you want to be, when you are doing everything you are supposed to be doing, and you still can’t manage that step. She says it’s not magic, but she couldn’t produce a list of what to do next. She said to just keep doing, that eventually I would relocate that feeling…that I would allow myself to feel good.

Today? Today I do not feel like I will ever find that feeling. On good days, I persuade myself that if I just keep doing the right things that everything will be OK (fuck, I hate that phrase now, thanks to someone repeatedly lying and saying it over and over to me…bullshit it will be OK). Today was not a good day. It should have been. I was relatively efficient. I did all the things that were expected of me and more. I functioned fairly normally. Crying in the gym and on the walk from the gym to the tire place? Well, it happens…it’s not abnormal, but it’s probably abnormal that I still cry every day. Then again, it’s not abnormal for someone who is depressed to do that, and I have good reason to be depressed, so it’s not abnormal.

I’m not sure if I care whether I am behaving normally or not.

Sigh. Anyway, I spent 4 1/2 hours today sewing bindings on…

I finished Love (not) around 3 PM I think…and then moved on to the Celebrating Silver quilt.

I watched a lot of television today to get me through the sewing. At one point, the boychild came out and I said something about how it looked like I was just relaxing in front of the TV, sewing, and he said, no, he knew I wasn’t relaxing…I wasn’t. I was speed sewing…

Seriously…it was 4 1/2 hours of just poking holes…in fabric and my fingers.

Once they were done, I had to tape all the cat hair off of them…plus find the other one that now needs to be rephotographed for the book it will be in later this year.

It took about an hour to clean them up and iron them and roll them up in a clean sheet to take to the photographer tomorrow.

In between all this, I helped girlchild calculate her grade in biology and figure out what she has to get on the final to keep a decent grade in there, I picked up their dad from the airport returning from the UK for the second time in three weeks, I wrote a grocery list, I listened to the boychild giggling at whatever he was watching on the computer (it was The Daily Show the one time I looked, god forbid he actually study for finals), I went to the gym, and I replaced 4 tires on the kids’ car. Oh, and I graded all the makeup assignments that kids handed me yesterday. I still have to finish all the big projects from before break…they take forever to grade. I’m more than halfway through, but tomorrow is a giant clusterfuck, so who knows if I will get anything useful done then.

And all day, on and off, tears. I finished two quilts? Tears.

And it’s not just because of the holes in my middle finger (see the tip?) where the needle was bumping me all day…it’s sore right now.

What did you do today? I finished two major quilts. One took 48 hours and 39 minutes to complete, and the other one took 95 hours and 2 minutes. I wonder what normal people do with their hours, the hours I spend making art? I know they sleep more. They probably socialize more too. They might even spend more time staring at a television or mowing the lawn or cleaning house. I don’t envy them those. Why aren’t you happy about finishing them? Because the rest of it is empty. It doesn’t make the rest of it feel better. It doesn’t make me happy. I don’t have the magical pill to get to the happy. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck refuse to grab me by the hand and skip over the bridge to happy.

Yeah, I know it’s my job to get to the happy…and I know there’s something in me that’s stopping me from getting there. I just don’t know how to fix it. In talking about meds, the counselor admits to never having taken them herself. I have. It just pushes the emotions away, like over there. She described it as numbing the emotions. How will that help me get to happy? I’m already pretty fucking numb on a regular basis. I don’t see the point.

Anyway. I have a shitload of schoolwork to deal with in the next two days, but expect me to start something new this week. I think I will tape all the smaller drawings together and then pick one or two, plus the breast cancer one. So I should be numbering and tracing this week…knock on wood. I’m scared to death of down time. I don’t want to depend on my job for any level of satisfaction or joy. I can only hope that the art will eventually be my savior. I am so tired of feeling sad and empty. I have to believe that I will not always feel this way. I have to believe in joy and love and that feeling that used to come with finishing something like this, with finishing two in one day? I can go back through my blog and read how light-hearted I used to be, and wish I could be that person, erase the last 6 months, scrub my memories (one of the TV shows I was watching today), selectively pick who I am and how I feel. Rewrite the Kathy.

345″ of Hand Sewing…

The Celebrating Silver quilt has a binding machine-sewn on…I now have 300″ of hand-sewing to do, plus another 45″ or so on the Love (not) quilt. That’s only 345″ total. I spent about 2 1/2 hours tonight getting the quilt trimmed up to the correct size (it’s about 40″ wide by 71″ high…not a small beast) and putting the binding on. I always figure if they give you a range for the space, you should go as big as you can…my large quilts have a lot of presence on the wall and I like that about them. It’s easier to get within a range than to get a quilt to an exact size for me. The Earth Stories quilt had to be an exact size…gave me a lot of headaches. Actually, the Sightlines quilts were even worse for that, because of the spacing and all the logistics of how to hang the side pieces…

On mine, all the blood vessels had to line up. That set of quilts finally came home after 4 years. I think I’ll hang them in the hallway so I can live with them for a while…although girlchild made some comment about having friends over and having to explain her mom’s stuff. Whoops. Oh well. It’s character-building.

I’m glad that I’ve been able to stay on schedule with these two quilts. I know the depression has side-lined my ability to work efficiently quite a few times, and it’s certainly fucked with my feeling good when I get near the end. I just worry about having dead time, time where my brain is allowed to wander the forests of What Did I Do Wrong This Time and get caught by the iron traps of WTF. I need to have things to occupy my brain so it doesn’t wallow in negative shit. My counselor was actually trying to decide WTF today…she admitted that I have some negative thoughts, but that I am always making myself see the positive and do the right things to positively affect my mood. She doesn’t even know why it’s not working.

I know why it’s not working. Because I don’t have a normal brain. It feels harder, it falls into the muck deeper. It just doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. Maybe it’s the art…maybe it’s just me. We argued about meds again. I’m tired of that argument. I’m not persuaded. I think I’m just slow. There are reasons I’m not recovering fast…I’m not a normal girl. I don’t want to act just because I’m supposed to…I don’t want to be what everyone tells me to be, happy with being a lonely old lady, happy with the kids moving out soon, happy to be what? I don’t know. I don’t want to be sad all the time either, but I don’t want to be fake, to be perky just because people think I should be. Hypocritical. I am this messed-up person. I would be better if I understood more about what happened or if I had more answers, but I’m not allowed to have that…so I just muddle along and that’s what it is right now…muddled. I wish other people understood better how their behavior affects other people…I’m tired of being the other people.

I will say that this last art quilt is pretty fucking awesome. I’m sorry I can’t show it to you for 10 more months. It does rock. I guess depression is good for art. If that’s true, then that really sucks. I don’t want to believe that artists can only be good while suffering. That just sucks.

Photographer on Sunday…I will be done.

So at the end of the school day, I checked my phone and there are about 5 texts from both kids about the boychild popping a tire on the car and their dealing with it. They did deal…there was some bullying of lug nuts and reading of car manuals and finally calling of the AAA. Good call. That’s what I would have done. By the time I got home, they had stolen their dad’s car and left the other car in the driveway (mini-tire…they knew not to drive it far), and now all I have to do is pay for new tires. Fuck. This is not the time to have to replace 4 tires. I am going to have to start praying to the Goddess of Found Money, because I thought January was bad? February’s credit card bills may be even worse. It’s deep breaths all the time at the moment. And if one more solar company calls me and tries to explain how I can have solar for FREE (yeah right), I will kick someone’s ass. I would LOVE to have solar. Can’t afford it and y’all want me to cut all my trees down…so then in the summer, when it’s 115 degrees, what keeps my house cool? Because I ain’t got air conditioning…that’s the fucking 1 percenters with that kind of luxury. In my half-assed world, we don’t condition the air…we own the sweat.

Anyway. I’m about to kick the solar companies’ asses. I’m seriously tired of them calling here. The last one said, well can you afford your electric bills? Well, no…but I don’t have $30K, you silly cow, so what are you expecting me to do? Pole dance for it?

I think we will just turn all the electricity off for the next 6 months and see how we do.

Here’s the binding ready to go…

I should probably go to bed. Sleep has been elusive this week.

Girlchild was photobombing my quilt pictures earlier….

I can’t show you the finished quilt anyway.

She and Midnight were watching TV on her phone together…

That cat is a freak.

OK, this weekend? Lots of quilting and grading and getting shit done. I wish I had a bunch of relaxing nice stuff to do on a 3-day weekend, but my life is fucked up and I don’t. So fuck you for making me feel more like shit about that. I didn’t do anything right and that’s why I get to have a fucked-up life now. I don’t go to movies any more. Money is too tight. I don’t do a whole lot of anything but work and work out and make art and read books. I’m a hermit. Whatever. It’s OK for me to be this way right now. (I don’t really have a choice) Someday it will be different, but right now, I’m carrying too much baggage and crap around that can’t even be processed properly. I might as well lose myself in sewing and bad television and reading and working out. None of those things will really hurt me…and I can’t really deal with any more hurt right now.

This song has been the theme song for the week…

This is why I stopped listening to music while I quilt. TV I’ve already seen is less emotionally charged.

It Just Is…

OK, so remember that post-it from yesterday that had all the quilt stuff prioritized on it? I didn’t even write two (three?) things on it, because they were weighing on me so heavily, finishing these two quilts before Sunday, that I figured I didn’t even need to write them down. And then I got an email that has added to the priority list. It’s getting a little hairy here, but I think I have it all under control. I’m just one crazy tense mama at the moment. Seriously tense. Hate that feeling. It’s been stalking me the last two months. Won’t go, except after a hike or the gym, and even then, reluctantly. I don’t like being this person. I want to be more mellow. I don’t know how, especially with all this riding on my shoulders.

Anyway, I did manage to make it to the quilt store after school to buy binding for the Celebrating Silver quilt. It was a pain in the ass picking a color, though. I thought a gray to match her hair, but it was dead-looking. So then I tried a dark reddish brown, which worked near the base of the quilt, but was a problem higher up. So then I thought I should head for the batiks and see if I could match the brown batiks that are in the staff. Couldn’t find any that worked…nothing was dark and moody enough. So then I tried oranges and red-oranges and red-browns and reds and oranges with greens in them and then just plain old red. Even some blues. Nothing. It all sucked. I found one dark brown that was eh, so I grabbed it, feeling desperate, because here I am tossing my naked-women quilt on the ground in the store and hoping some woman with a nudity issue doesn’t come around the corner and ogle my uteri while I’m doing this. I go back to the dark browns, out of the batik section. Ugh. It all sucks. Browns are always an issue. It’s all wrong. Too many different browns in the quilt…they work together fine IN the quilt, but you can’t just pick one for the binding. Back to the grays and blacks. There we are. A dark gray. It’s not in the quilt, but it seems to ground it…not to drag too much away from the quilt itself, which is what the reds and oranges were doing. It works in some quilts, but this one is way too busy for that shock factor. Dark gray it is.

It’s such an intuitive process. I don’t think hard. I just grab and throw under the quilt and reject within seconds and move on to the next. I love that part of my brain, the part that can improvise and travel so quickly from one place to the next without a lot of introspective thought. It just does. It knows. It’s the good part of my brain.

I talked about mental illness at school today. We teach the nervous system, but it only focuses on physical problems: strokes, epilepsy, spinal-cord injuries. Why don’t we teach about mental illness? I have students who have been diagnosed bipolar, depressed, anxious. WHY THE FUCK don’t we teach this stuff? Girlchild says she got a little of it in AP biology in high school, but mostly in terms of genetic mutations. We need to teach this stuff so it’s not so confusing, so magical, so scary. I want my kids to know that this is actually somewhat normal. I heard one kid ask about bad stuff that happens to kids, can it cause XYZ? Well fuck yeah, it can! So besides the zombie unit I’m developing, I’m trying to fit mental illness into the content standards? Seriously, though…let’s teach what they really need to know.

Can you imagine? I teach depression and say, hey, your teacher suffers from this. This is why she has lost so much weight. This is why she cries in the classroom when you aren’t in there. This is what makes her the teacher who stands in front of you…it’s OK. You can get through this. Or you can’t. Do you know how many of my kids have been affected by mental illness, whether their own or their brother’s or their parent’s or whomever’s? And we don’t teach it. What the fuck is up with that? No wonder people can’t deal.

The binding fabric is washed and dried and ready for cutting. I needed to buy it today before the girlchild’s game, because the quilt store doesn’t stay open late tomorrow, and I was hoping to finish the quilting tonight so I could put the binding on tomorrow, and then do the hand-sewing on Saturday. I could have bought it Saturday, but then I would lose tomorrow night’s hours. Yes, I’m thinking that crazy at the moment. Can’t afford to lose hours.

I took the other quilt to the soccer game and sewed the rest of the binding and most of one sleeve on…nobody even asked me what I was doing. I love that. Two older ladies gave me an eye, so I’m glad they didn’t ask to see what I was working on (yeah, not flashing that vulva on the bleachers of the high-school stadium). I had it folded up so you could only see the back of the quilt. I don’t have a lot left to do, so that’s good. It was a tough game, so I didn’t sew particularly fast…unlike Tuesday’s game, which was incredibly boring (9-0 score). Tonight they played one of their big rivals, and they did freakin’ awesome until about 14 minutes into the second half, and then it fell apart…

Girlchild didn’t get to play much…this coach just confuses me. But when she did play, she was basically covering one of her good friends…it was getting dark, so my photos are crap…but you can see them here fighting over the ball. The high-school team is not a great fit for her, and the coach is not what we would like, but I guess it teaches her resilience in the face of adversity. They ended up losing 1-4, which just sucked, because they did so well for the first hour. Frustrating to watch…this is why I sew during games. It keeps me from getting as tense as the other parents, who end up yelling stupid things like, “Hit the back of the net!” Dude. Really? It just needs to go over the line. We also have one parent who is apparently a professional hog caller and practices her talent at the games. You think I’m kidding…I’m not.

What I really love about high-school winter soccer in Southern California is that the weather runs the gamut from requiring you to wear 4 warm layers, Ugg boots, gloves, a scarf, and a blanket one week to flip-flops and short sleeves the next week…it was 85 degrees at the beginning of the game. I did put the sweatshirt and the boots on for the second half (in January, it cools down very quickly), but it was nice otherwise to not be freezing by the end of the game. We have another week of nice temperatures here in San Diego, and then it will go back to cold (which yes, means like 50 degrees when the sun goes down…you do not need to mock me).

I think I’m still having anemia issues, because I’m still freezing all the time. Or it’s the thyroid. Whatever. They’ll get tested again in April. I do take my meds.

I was hoping to eat when I got home…had the boychild put the casserole in the oven when he got home from piano (they really are having to pull their weight at the moment…and I am so glad I don’t have to do this every day, all the time), but girlchild had some secret sisters thing for soccer that she had to do. She drew the name of someone she really doesn’t like at all, but she prides herself on being a really good secret sister, no matter what, so we hit the 99-cent store (candy is cheap!), where I was oh-so-glad to score my 2014 Baby Animals calendar (OK, it’s not THAT bad) for school…because I needed a calendar and it was on my list, but it wasn’t a supreme priority, so it was WAY DOWN the list. And I get to look at baby animals all year. Plus secret sisters wasn’t as expensive as it usually is.

Finally we got home and ate and I exercised, and then, finally, got to quilting…

I was right. I needed another 2 hours.

This thing took a little over 14 hours to quilt. I can’t post full photos until the exhibit opens in late October at Houston, but I took it to school today so I could get the binding, and for the first time ever, showed one of my quilts in person to the team…I got oohs and aahs and even a couple of dangs. Dang is good. DANG. I like the sound of that.

Anyway. I’m relieved to have the quilting done. I kept saying to myself, you need to stop. You need to go to bed early. You’re tired (I was yawning…it’s been a rough week). But in the end, artist brain won that war and bullied through all the stupid-ass thread breakages and slow quilting speed and just got it the fuck done. That’s what I needed. Then I meditated and soon I will go to sleep, yes, too late, but fuck it. I needed it to be done. Tomorrow night will not be easy either…trimming and binding does take some significant time and energy, but I feel much better about where I am on the to-do list with that step done.

Maybe all I get at this point in my life is short respites. No happy. No joy. Just relief for a short amount of time, until I turn to the lime-green post-it note of TO DO and freak out about the next big thing.

Actually, I’m hoping that the next big thing isn’t a freak out. I do have a piece I have to do by next October or November, but I’m not ready to draw it yet. I think I’ll aim for Spring Break for that one…except I want to do another big one over summer again. I’ll have to think that one through. I figure I’ll be starting a new quilt, tracing stage, by next weekend…I hope. I do have some significant stuff to do before then, and Road to California is next weekend (yay Julie for wanting to drive me up there!), so that may get pushed out a bit. I wonder if I am becoming this artistic hermit…I seem to only do the art and obsessively so. Is it all I am? All I have? I don’t know. It just is at the moment. Everything else is just stupid and lame.

Hope the Dreams Make Up for the Reality

I have 6 post-it notes on my computer keyboard at the moment. Some are college-related…financial aid stuff the boychild and I need to do as soon as I can figure out my taxes for this year. One is a list of blog and Facebook posts I need to do for an art group I’m in. Another couple are related to college funds and having to move money around. And there’s one that’s a prioritized list of all the quilt-related stuff I have to do in the next week or so. My phone is regularly buzzing me to let me know where I need to be next or what I need to do on the way home or to school. I’m organized as hell, and yet, wow…I’m not. But I am. I’ve got my brain hemmed in by all these reminders to get it all done…I’m not letting it slack. I am a really highly functioning depressoid. It’s almost MORE depressing to be that highly functioning. LOOK! You CAN get it all done and on time and finished and You Still Feel Like Shit because none of it really matters deep down. I might be happier if I climbed into bed and didn’t come out.

So there we are. How do I make some of it matter again? I don’t fucking know. I go to counseling and ask her, and she doesn’t just pull out a list and hand it to me, dammit. I need a list…go through steps 1-5 and you will see that things matter again. Step 6 is optional, but will make things matter AND help you save the world, one kitten at a time. Or! Just slog through each hour, each day, and hope that you will see some light at the end of a tunnel some day in the future. Hopefully before you die. Yup. It’s the cheery hour here.

I got an email today asking me if one of my quilts could be used in a book…wow. Cool. But I’m also waiting on a rejection notice. Neither of those things really matters.They will happen and they will not make me happy or not happy.

I quilted for almost two hours tonight…

I think I’m up to 11 or 12 hours on this thing…and I’m not done. I’ve gone almost all the way around once, and still need to go around a second time. I wanted to finish tonight, but it didn’t happen. I also didn’t get binding today, because I opted for the gym instead. Good choice. I’m still losing weight, but it’s slowed down a lot…that’s good. I don’t want it to be a superfast thing. I want it to stay off. The first 20 pounds came off really slowly, and though it was frustrating, I still think it was much healthier than the next 25 pounds. Depression is a bitch with weight…you can’t control how it messes with your ability to eat. I can eat now…I had a 3-month time period when eating was seriously problematic. I’m better now. I’d rather be eating healthily and losing slowly than the kamikaze weight loss I was doing before. I get irritated at the people who want to know HOW I did it. I don’t think you really want to know. I just stopped eating. When I ate, I couldn’t keep it down. Vomit happened. Gaacking. Did you really want to know about that? Most of the time, I couldn’t eat. Not good. Better now.

I still haven’t solved the sleep issues though. I was never a good sleeper, and now I am an incredibly shitty sleeper. It’s not good for me, but I can’t seem to beat it. Some part of me just wants to stay up all night and finish the quilting. That’s the artist brain talking. The mom/teacher brain (the responsible part) has to talk the artist brain out of crazy shit like that. But I think I will finish quilting tomorrow, so I’m actually going to go get binding fabric before I go to the girlchild’s game…I think I have time. This is my life…it is scheduled so tight that crazy things happen like I’m cooking tonight’s dinner AND tomorrow night’s dinner at the same time, and when I finish the dishes for tonight’s dinner, I’m putting tomorrow night’s dinner into the casserole dish and into the fridge. I think that’s impressive, on one hand, but supremely sad and depressing on the other. I’m SuperWoman AND SuperDepressoid. This weekend will be like that too…getting the quilts done, plus art meetings, plus grades. There’s no down time, no time for a hike, I think…I will make it to the gym, but finding 3-5 hours for a hike doesn’t seem realistic. Too bad…something about being outside seems to help. Go outside. Exercise. Read. Talk to people. I don’t like that last part. I just cry, even now, so it’s hard to just talk about everything that’s in my head. It’s not kosher to cry all the time…to just plain old lose it.

I’m still a fucking mess. When does that stop? When do I get to be a human again? Why do I have to be like this? Why can’t I just get angry and move on?

When I’m not quilting, I pile everything up on the machine…

It keeps cats and dogs off of it…I am seriously so close to done that it is painful NOT to just sit here and finish it (it would probably be another 2 hours though). I’m a little obsessive. Will I feel relieved when it’s done? Yes. It’s due soon. I need it to be done. Will I feel happy it’s done? Wow. What does that word mean again? Maybe just successful. And even then, it’s hard to feel successful about just one tiny piece of your life…that downer part of my brain starts listing all the things I’m not successful about, and it turns into a downer fest. Not good. It’s better to just take some quiet breaths and think, OK, I did that. Moving on. Do something else. Don’t get the downer brain engaged in this…it won’t turn out well. Don’t even tell it that it should be impressed…just go on to the next thing. I don’t have anyone to celebrate with. It’s empty success.

When the kids leave for college, I think I will just fill the house with dogs. Jake has been singing to me when I get home, half-howling and body-slamming me with needy German-Shepherdness.

And then Calli feeds off of that and whines and brings me a toy. Well, earlier, one of them stole a toilet paper roll…the whole thing…not just the cardboard. So that was fun. Jake will only be here through Saturday. He’s not thrilled about being here, because we tell him the food on the table is for people, not dogs, and he thinks we are crazy for saying that. Plus I won’t let him help me cook. Or eat cats. Or sleep on my bed WHILE eating cats. He does not understand when I explain appropriate dog behavior.

Calli just wants to sit in my lap. Like all the time.

She’s not a small dog. She’s a Golden Retriever. My lap is not big enough for a Golden Retriever. Petting dogs is good therapy. Cats too. They seem to absorb some of the depressed stuff. I don’t understand people who don’t have pets, especially the ones that keep saying they want one and don’t get one. Stop saying it and just do it. There is no perfect animal or perfect set up in your home. Just go to the damn shelter and get a dog or cat and give them love and food and take care of them and pet them, and have them stare into your face and bat at you when you walk by (Babygirl) and squawk a little and need you and ignore you and pee and puke all over the carpet. Because if you can’t deal with all those things, then you aren’t a decent human being. If you overthink the process so much that you can’t even ADOPT? Then how human are you? If you just keep putting it off until the situation is perfect, then you will never have that unconditional love, that furry, bad-breathed love, that cold-nose-up-your-butt love. People with pets have empathy. I’m a big fan of empathy at the moment…of being able to engage with other people’s feelings and feel for them. I don’t deal with other people’s empathy well, but I still think it’s a better place to be than in asshole mode, where it’s all your world and no one else’s.

I have too much empathy. It hurts.

Yes, my brain is in wander mode. And in pissy mode. And in overwhelmed mode. I’ve been overwhelmed for so many years that I don’t know how NOT to be. I dream of a happy place where I get all excited about what I’m almost finishing, and I wake up and hug a pet and make a nice lunch and the world is bright and full of cinnamon and sugar.

Yeah, I know. I should just go to bed and hope the dreams make up for the reality. The plus is I’m raking in the hugs at school…all the kids came back in needy-hug mode. I’m down with that…averaging 15 or so a day. Can’t complain. OK, dreams. Take me away. Make it all OK.

I Want to Be Henry Rollins…

I’m thinking I need to meditate twice a day at the moment…once in the morning in that hour before school starts, when my brain is in overdrive on what needs to get done, but it also mired in sadness at how it feels. The feels, they are much worse during the school day, during the quiet moments, in the prep hours, when there is no chaos around. Loud music chases them away for a bit, but it’s really hard to MAKE yourself grade stuff that you know needs to get done this week during the day so you don’t have to waste time on the weekend coming in when you feel like you want to crawl into a dark deep hole and never come out. But I seem to do best with this guided meditation, where he talks me through it…and I don’t know how to work that with the app I use. And it’s more TIME…time I don’t really have.

I don’t know. I keep thinking the mood should improve, that I should be getting better, but everything is so hard right now. Even simple things like sleeping and eating are hard.

So. Yeah. I did finally commit to being done with both quilts by Sunday at about 1 PM. That might be fucking crazy. I have most of the other one done…I’m just finishing up the binding on it. I have one more side and both sleeves to finish…yes, I’m sewing two sleeves on my quilts these days…they hang better with a bottom sleeve. So if I get really gutsy, I’ll take it to Thursday’s soccer game and work on it there. Yes, it has nudity, but I’m really good at folding them up so no one can see anything on a binding, since I’m sewing on the back anyway. YES. I handsew my bindings. I like how it looks. Plus I sew fast.

The other one, I finished the outline quilting tonight.

I only had a little of that left. I then started quilting the background…

Honestly, there isn’t much background on this quilt…it’s mostly covered with stuff. I did all of the little fussy bits in between the bodies and hair and animals, and then started out into the borders. I don’t expect it to take much longer, but probably won’t be able to get it done until Thursday. I thought about doing something fancy in the background, but the damn thing needs to get done, so that ain’t happening. Maybe on the next one.

I can get binding fabric tomorrow after the boychild’s Academic League (if I don’t go to the gym), or I can wait until Saturday. Tough call. Thursday MIGHT be an option…hard to say. I’m juggling pointy rocks like crazy. When they fall, they will stab me in the eyeball (hence need for meditation).

By the way, when you’re depressed, you probably shouldn’t read books about kids with terminal cancer…even when they’re really good. I just finished (in about 48 hours, maybe less), The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.

It’s a compelling book. Yes, it made me cry. Not shocking. I purposely finished it tonight at home, so I wouldn’t be finishing it at the gym and weeping inconsolably there. That’s not good gym etiquette.

So this was in my comments to be approved this morning…

certainly like your web site but you need to test the spelling
on quite a few of your posts. Several of them are rife with
spelling issues and I in finding it very troublesome to inform the
truth however I will definitely come again again.

I am highly amused. My spam filter didn’t catch it. Personally, I think my spam folder should kill any comment with a spelling issue in it, but that’s because I was in a mood this morning. I love that they used the word ‘rife,’ but then had a serious grammar issue in the last half of that sentence. Spammers are interesting creatures.

OK. I’m really trying to do this thing where I go to bed at a semi-reasonable hour. Tomorrow is no less busy than today was. Tomorrow is rife with busy. And my daughter informed me (and her dad on the phone) that not getting enough sleep at night will kill you. Nice. We’re dying anyway, sweetie…and not getting enough sleep is the least of my worries at the moment.

Brain depressed. Will read about some person’s sketchbook before I go to sleep…Danny Gregory’s An Illustrated Life…

If I read about other people’s artful existences, it might make me feel better about my own. Which reminds me, this…

Henry Rollins is so serious. I wonder if he ever smiles. I love this story of his…I wish I could have been in my favorite band when I was younger. I’m a visual artist, and that’s definitely where my talent lies, but I’d really like to be either a book author or a rock star. Or Henry. Yup. That’s it. I want to be Henry Rollins…

That’s All You Can Do…

Hey. So I went back to school today. It’s school. It’s the same old. It’s depressing, honestly. Seeing the people I work with, adults and kids, not depressing. The workload, the constant pile of crap, that’s depressing. The feeling you get when you realize you will be carrying this load for another 3 months before Spring Break, and then there will be more after that, and then you will have Summer Break, and then it will start all over again? That’s heavy. It’s not what I want. I want to teach kids and be their science inspiration, but I don’t want all the paperwork and the stress and the constant heavy negative crap that comes with teaching. But there’s no escaping that at the moment. There’s nothing I can do that’s different right now…I have kids going into college and I need reliable income and health insurance, and I need to focus on getting my kids a good start in life so hopefully they can do it way better than I did…hopefully they can have some semblance of happy and stable and not worry all the time about money and the septic tank and how dinner will get on the table…because that was a giant-ass disaster tonight, although it eventually came together.

I was on this hike the other day and another single/divorced mom was talking about her older teens not doing laundry, and I just laughed. I trained my kids on dishes and laundry at about age 6. I was divorced and was teaching by then, and I needed them to help. I’m totally honest with them about what needs to get done and what I can handle, because one’s an adult and the other is approaching that, and they need to see that life isn’t always easy…that you have to bust your butt sometimes to get through…and that it might hurt and be hard, but you can get through. Because I think some kids never see that part and when it gets hard? They run away, they hide, and people get hurt when they can’t deal. Each year, the helping part from my kids gets bigger, and tonight it culminated in one kid on the phone with me analyzing the 1/2″ vents cut in a cooking bag while I was running tutorial at school, then another kid coming home early because she didn’t hear me say I would leave the gym early to deal with step 2 (or 3?) of dinner. Meanwhile, the first kid had read the post-it note instructions I had left for the second kid, but hadn’t panicked enough to text me yet. We are a working unit. They are adults in many ways, trying to help their mom survive work and art and life in general. They know I’m having a hard time and they try to make it easier. On the one hand, I feel incredibly bad that they have to do that…on the other, I know they will be more competent adults because of it.

God damn. I’m going to miss them when they’re gone. I’m not going to miss the fussing about getting Christmas thank-yous and college apps done, or the refusal to take the trash out until I’ve thrown things and yelled at them…I’m going to miss their care for me, their careful consideration of their broken mom and how they can help and still be the pissy teenagers they’re supposed to be. I did good with them. They will be good adults. They will know how to survive adversity and hopefully get past it. They will bitch at me about the text I sent, and then ask for a hug in the next text (yes, I text my kids while I’m in the same house…). I hope they will be happier than I am. I hope someday to be happy too, but more importantly, I hope they are happy.

I am 8 1/2 hours in to the quilting of the Celebrating Silver quilt. Technically the photos are due February 1 (I think), but I’m trying to get it done by Saturday night, so I can get it and the other quilt photographed next week. I emailed the photographer to set up a time, so now I HAVE to finish. Way to put pressure on myself. I’m juggling some other deadlines as well…I have a quilt that has to be delivered to VAM next week and it’s missing a label; my parents are doing that delivery, because I have no way of getting there within their time constraints (it takes a village). That show opens February 15, I think. I found out today that one of my older quilts, Here, will be going to Ojai to the Beatrice Wood Arts Center for an exhibit opening February 9.

It needs to be delivered a week from Sunday, but that’s to a regular meeting I would go to anyway, so that’s not a supreme hardship. I just have to FIND the damn thing. I love this quilt…it’s been in a ton of shows and has traveled all over the place. A friend was diagnosed with breast cancer and I drew this…she is still cancer-free, knock on wood. That’s 13 pieces out on exhibit and 3 in process, about to be sent on exhibit. I should be proud of all that. I should be able to take a deep breath and have that achievement fill me up with joy and success.

Those are Sion’s thorns…

Yeah, well, we know how depression deals with all those feelings. That said, meditation is focusing on this visualization technique and I am rocking that. There’s something about my ability to see quilts fully colored in my head that translates to this ability to visualize myself filling with warm light, the warm light of creative thought. It’s a good place to be…in meditation. I cry still, but it’s tempered by this calm feeling of being filled by some artistic thing…some creative thing. So many people are lacking that…lacking an ability to create, to make, to draw, to paint, to take what’s in their head and make it INTO something. I have that. I’ve had it for as long as I can remember. I have that and I am so glad that I do, because it pulls me up out of the muck. I’m still depressed, but I’m not crawling into bed and not getting out. I’m not refusing to shower. I’m not crawling into a hole and never coming out. I’m not suicidal. I could be. This experience has been bad enough, has dragged me low enough that I often think I just don’t want to be awake…I don’t want to exist, please don’t make me get up and get dressed and deal with the world. I just can’t. But the art is there, banging on my skull, saying FUCK YOU. GET UP AND MAKE ART. So I do. And I know that’s the way out of this crap…and I will eventually GET out. But I also know what it looks like to want to give up and not deal with anything. That even doing the laundry or grading papers or saying hi to someone in the morning is sometimes the hardest thing in the world for me. Sometimes I wonder how I get up, how I get in the car and drive to work, how I manage to do anything at all. Simple. Art brain. It’s saving my life. It’s making me deal. It’s taking on all the pain and crap and shit and it’s pulling me along, whether I like it or not. And when the days are really bad, really low, it puts the pen in my hand, it makes me sit down at the sewing machine, it pulls fabric out of a drawer, and it makes me be…exist…survive.

I don’t know what made that happen in my brain, but I’m grateful that it did.

One eye stitched…one eye not.

It sounds so lame to write all that out. I read a blog once about how to decide you want to be alive. I want to know how the book I’m reading ends. I want to know what quilt I will make next. I want to know if that kid I’m teaching will graduate from high school. I want to see what my own children will become. I want to see my grandchildren. I want to see the next dog I will have. I want to see the next sunset…sunrise…mountain top. That’s how you get through. That’s how you survive. That’s how you bully through depression and get to the other side. I’m not saying it’s easy and I’m not saying it works for everyone. It’s just working for me. I’m still depressed. I’m still really really sad and hurt and not happy. But…that will not be forever, even on the days when I can’t quite convince myself that it feels like forever and I see no light at the end of the tunnel, hey. I’m in these shows and I’m making art and my kids are trying to cook dinner and manage the recycling bins. So there.

Broken? Yup. Totally. Permanent? Nope. Will be cracked forever, but will figure it all out. The crone? She is there, she is in me. I’m not her yet. I’m not there yet.

Sigh. Rough day. Babygirl is quite happy with my folded-up batting pile…

When I decide that the cat hair is too much, I do have piles of smaller batting pieces. I’m thinking she is so ecstatic about the batting that I should just make her some batting piles throughout the house. Because when part of your life is focused on how to make the life of a bitchy, old-lady cat a good thing…how do you make her last years enjoyable and make her feel loved? Well, really, that’s all you can do in this world…

Stay Gold, Ponyboy…Stay Gold

I have 12 posts in draft mode at the moment. Two of them I will never write, one because I don’t care any more and one because I care too much. Some of it is because I get an idea about something I’m working on (like that stupid journal that I have to do, which some people might really enjoy, but is giving me mental ulcers at the moment), but I’m not done with the thing or I’m not ready to write it yet…it has to develop itself more. Some need more photos or research before I can write them, and extra time is kind of short at the moment. I do write fast, and sometimes I just save up half-written posts for nights when my brain isn’t working, although that doesn’t happen often. More often than not, I get a phrase or feeling or idea midday and I write a quick draft or outline or even just a list of words or a phrase on a draft post, and hopefully that turns into that night’s post. When my brain is really in a mental slump (can you say DEPRESSION, kids? Say it WITH me! I know you CAN!), I sometimes preload a bunch of posts with pictures that I can use for nights when I can’t even pull my brain out of the gumbo…I have at least one or two of those in the wings at the moment as well. Then I get a wild hair and try to clean out the repository of drafts and post a bunch of stuff. Writing is like meds for me…it clears out all that muck that doesn’t need to be in my brain all the time. Drawing does too. Writing and drawing are therapy…I need more of the latter. I probably write enough at this point…I may even write too much.

Today was a lost day. School starts tomorrow and I’ve been trying to ignore it all day. Couldn’t ignore it completely, but I haven’t done a couple of things I always WOULD have done by now on the Sunday before we go back. Oh well. The New Kathy says Fuck That. School will start up again whether I’m totally freaking out about it or not. My biggest worry is actually being able to fall asleep at a reasonable hour, unlike last night’s sleep calamity. Was that sleep? Who knows. Does it count when you start it that late? Sure…it counted somewhere in the world, like celebrating New Year’s in 12 different time zones. I celebrated bedtime the same way…except I woke up in between each one. Dammit.

I did a lot of pre-cooking today, trying to get ready to survive the week. I’ve got multiple casseroles and crockpot items going, because the ex is going back to the UK for his mum’s funeral and I have all kid duty, all the time, and I’m really trying to be better prepared this time, especially since my head will be in a stress spin due to school and quilt deadlines and financial aid deadlines and who knows what else. I haven’t scheduled any hikes for the next two weeks because I don’t think I’ll have time. I did schedule the gym and tried to make sense of all the food stuff, because it’s so complicated…boychild will have to put this thing in the oven at that time and because the oven temperature thing is totally fucked, you have to permanently leave a thermometer in there and monitor the temperature until it’s right (can’t afford to fix that right now), and then girlchild can pop the other thing in there, and odds are I’ll be home somewhere in between all that, but the timing doesn’t work for me to do any of it. Luckily, boychild is motivated to do well by the potential arrival of food he can eat.

I went to the gym, and instead of crying at Hip Abduction, I cried at…crap, I can’t remember the name of the machine…actually, the whole gym thing was rather painful today because the muscles I used on the hike yesterday had apparently never been used in the entire 46+ years of their existence and today they had to tell me about it (which was part of why I WENT to the gym in the first place, because I could tell last night that it was going to be bad…it was going to be walking-like-an-old-lady bad). But I did read an entire book there…more about that in a later post, since it’s an official review. Yes, I was actually ASKED to review a book…probably not because it’s me, but because I put something in my profile that matched their key words for reviewers, like “reads a lot, no really, a LOT.”

I did actually quilt today, although not until nighttime, because grades and dinner at parentals and gym and cooking and kid stuff. Yeah. I wanted to do 2-3 hours and I did 1 1/2. Better than nothing. What was interesting was that when I started, I noticed a problem…

There are many problems, but this was kind of a big one. In the center, where that weird line in the fabric is? That’s a wear mark of some sort, and the fabric was trying to tear in three places. Crap.You can see the three holes here…

It’s OK. I’m a quick thinker. I thought about just patching something on top of it, but instead I made another crack and put it on top…

You can’t even tell. Plus it’s all fused AND quilted. I quilted the breasts and heart and lungs and the left arm and the entire staff…

I’ve been quilting this pretty slowly. There’s a lot of detail and I don’t want to mess it up. I’m trying to be a NEAT quilter. Crazy that.

There’s the heart and the lungs…

I can never decide what color to make the lungs. I know what color they are in real life, but that doesn’t work to set them off from the heart and the flesh, and the heart has to be red, and I’ve only recently added the yellow layer of fat on the heart, so usually the lungs are blue and there are fish in them, but this time, they were green with pink flowers. WHY? Why the fuck not?

I still need to do the right arm and the face and the cat and the owl…not a small amount of work…lots of fussy details. Then I can start on the background. I think that’s why I just reserved the upcoming weekend for finishing my stuff…for one thing, I have the kids all day Saturday, and for another, grades are due next week anyway, so if I’m not working on quilt stuff, then I’m doing grades. I also want to keep working on the cleaning I’ve been doing around the house, slowly but surely, and maybe buy those roses I was thinking about. Money’s super tight, though…the septic tank needs to be pumped and that ain’t cheap. I also got the next quilt drawing ready to go…I had to go copy some filler parts that I missed the first time around, and I got those taped down on Friday night. When this one is done, I will either start the next big one or a smaller one…I have about three of those taped up, but none of them is screaming to be done yet.

I’ve been really missing my regular drawing time…I had managed to integrate it really well into my life on a fairly regular basis, and the change in my life screwed that over. I haven’t been able to revise my practices to allow for it…I could draw at soccer games, but there are too many people hanging around for me to feel comfortable with it (I used to draw at indoor soccer and it caused some strange issues)…so maybe I will have to schedule one night a week for that. I don’t usually find that to work for me, because I do need to be in the mood for it, but maybe if I go back to the smaller drawings for a while, there will be less pressure to make something AMAZING on the first try. Maybe Friday nights need to be drawing nights from here on out…except those are notoriously low-energy nights. Sigh. Sometimes I think too hard about everything, and then I feel bad about the hermit existence as well, because I know it’s not a good existence, but I have so little time for myself as it is, and to spend it trying to be happily sociable in situations that I don’t really want to be in just seems stupid. I do miss art openings, though…not sure what’s up with that, but maybe with the holidays over, there will be more of those.

Anyway. Fuck you, sad. Fuck you, tense and stressed-out. You’re downers. Go mess with somebody else’s head. For this week, I need to be SuperMom and Teacher Lady (I don’t aspire to be SuperTeacher). Oh yeah, and I need to be The Finisher for the art stuff. It would be nice if my brain would get with the program and remember all the stuff it needs to remember this week as well, but barring that, can I please just remember to put it on my calendar so my technology will remind me? I would settle for that. And the first thing I’m going to remember to do is drop that little sketchbook back into my work bag, just in case my brain tries to explode at school. I’m sure there are meds for that, but drawing seems the safer option.

So that was it, Winter Break. Three weeks, survived. It was eh. I can’t even enjoy vacations any more. That just sucks. I’m not sure what reminded me of this, but…this…

Message to the brain? Who knows.

Draw More. Make Art. Be Content. Find Happy.

From my first post of 2013: A year ago, I wrote my 2013 resolutions: Draw more. Make art. Catch up. Sleep some. Clean up. Throw out. Use up. Be content. Find happy. 2013.

Wow. Nothing’s changed except the year. Well, and me. Sigh. It’s good that I have the same goals, even though my life is a fucked-up mess and so is my brain and everything in between. It sucks that I didn’t really achieve any of those in 2013, but I do still have them in mind. I sleep less now. I am less content, less happy. I make more art. Not sure what to say about that. Haven’t figured it all out yet. Maybe I never will.

This song kicked my ass today…

That’s the problem with quilting. I need to have something on to occupy my mind, and it used to always be music, but music just fucks with my emotions now, and there’s no way to tell Pandora to lay off the sad stuff. It doesn’t know what will set me off, stuff from high school or last year. I don’t even know until I hear it and have that bad reaction. I finally gave up and turned the TV on, which is distracting in another way…but at least I wasn’t crying and trying to move a needle up and down at 500 miles an hour around my fingers at the same time. It’s really better that way. I think.

Fuck, I don’t know.

I hiked this morning, early. The mountain (San Miguel Mountain) tried to kick my ass too, but I’m way more fucking stubborn that that. I’ll post about the hike later, once I get all the photos dealt with, but I did it. And it was good. And I’m feeling it now…some serious muscle pain for tomorrow morning. Oh well. It’s a good thing. My counselor wanted me to promise that I would admit to being an artist at the next hike, during all that stupid introductory conversation stuff that happens, instead of always answering the question of “what do you do?” with “I’m a science teacher.” She says that’s not who I really am. Yeah, but who I really am is a really long explanation and uses more words than I want to right now. Anyway, this was not a talking, chatting hike. This was a kick-your-ass hike with very little talking, so I failed at my task (not the hiking, but the admittance of being an artist). Oh well. She says I am isolating myself. Damn straight I am. I’m trying not to, but honestly, people kind of drive me bonkers at the moment. I just want to crawl into a hole most days, even now. Depression is a fucked-up monster. People suck. I can’t deal.

I managed to quilt some today, about 3 1/2 hours’ worth. It’s also not easy, but I got through the rest of the Mother and all of the Maiden, plus up the Crone to the breasts, and one of the birds. I wanted to be further, but it is what it is. I need to deal with school tomorrow, but I’m hoping for two or three more hours of quilting. I am trying to pretend school isn’t starting. It’s not working.

All I’m doing right now is outlining things. I have to decide what to outline and what to leave alone. I don’t think too hard about it. I just stitch and it tells me what wants outlining. I missed part of the milk ducts below…that’s why the pin is in there…to remind me to fix that.

I managed grocery shopping too, but hell…there is something so depressing about grocery shopping on Saturday night by yourself. It makes me want to just eat desserts. Not healthy. But at least I don’t have to deal with it tomorrow.

I ate Brussels sprouts instead of desserts. I don’t really like food any more. Girlchild was upset because her dad didn’t want to go somewhere interesting for his birthday dinner. I tried to explain to her that her dad likes his routine, not change. I think I will just take her out for mine. She and I can go somewhere interesting. Maybe I will be able to afford dinner out by March.

Meditation: I’ve made it a third of the way through a year of meditating. I finished the Discovery series and now they are moving into 40 days of Creativity. I probably don’t really need any help with that. I’m pretty damn good at it. It might be the only thing I’m good at. He talked about visualization and the connection to creativity. The first thing he says is, “Imagine the body is transparent.” Wow. He’s channeling my art. He says too much thinking and tension restricts your creativity. No shit. That’s why I can’t draw right now. Too much stress. I’m going to schedule some of this stuff out tomorrow, the stuff that HAS to get done in the next three weeks, because the next three weeks is a little ugly fugly. Then maybe I can fit some freewheeling creativity into my life.

It was 7 PM and I was feeling low. I was dealing with some lame-ass dinner and finishing a book (more about that later), and was just not feeling happy about life. Girlchild texted two words: “love you.” That’s it. Some day in the future, I will be able to explain to my kids how they held me (pulled me) up this year without even really trying, how their mom wanted to give up on everything about 400 million times, and they wouldn’t let me. I didn’t think all this shit had really affected the boychild, but he said something yesterday that made me realize that he HAD been affected and he would basically beat the crap out of people for me. Nice to know. They got my back.

We just recycled almost all of the college crap the boychild has received over the last three years…it was two huge piles of brochures and cards (and that doesn’t even count the hundreds of emails). It’s a whole new world. One of the things he asked for for Christmas was The Color Purple…I’ve been watching the movie tonight and it still makes me cry after how many years? Awesome story.

This is the rambling post for the week. My brain is kind of a mess.

I finished All Clear today…

It’s the second of two books, starting with Blackout, by Connie Willis. Honestly, I don’t think you can read the first and NOT read the second, because they are the same story…and I think she should have edited better. I am not a history fan, and there was way too much history and worry going on. There were about 500 pages in each book that were engrossing and good…and really good, honestly. The book club I’m in is only apparently reading the first book. It will be interesting to see if most people read both, because it’s about 1200 pages total, but you can’t read one without the other. That said, the story was good, even with my dislike of history, especially war history. There were too many words. This could have been one fucking amazing book with a good editor.

So there we are…life, reading, and a fucked-up mood. Nothing new.