Stupid Fucking Titles

One of the things that’s been out of whack the last two days was my blood sugar. I kinda blamed it on going back to school, but it turns out it’s all hormones. My body went all girl-ballistic today after 2.5 months of nothing. I’d be OK with that, with having an explanation for the random-ass flurries of crying in parking lots and into my pillow…at least I have a good reason now…but today was not a good day for hemorrhaging. Luckily, I wore my black (OK, I have lots of black…this is not a new thing), because right about the time I was thinking, yeah, this method of staunching the flow is not necessarily working, the whole school went into lockdown. Some (as my boss put it) “bad guy” was being chased around the neighborhood by police, and there was some possible danger to our students, so we covered windows, locked doors, shoved kids under desks. Kids were convinced it was a drill. Hell, I knew better. It’s testing. No way in hell would my boss do a drill of any sort during testing. So we waited a bit, with a few freaking out and a couple showing me their true colors (please get your head out of the window before you become a target), and then they told us we could “continue to teach” with lights on etc.

Teach. During a lockdown. With middle-school kids who were supposed to be released to lunch 10 minutes ago. Are you smoking crack? I put in a movie, turned the lights down, realized I needed to deal with blood flow, and asked my co-teacher to watch my class; I think she thought it was a blood sugar issue. They released us about 30 minutes later and adjusted schedules, and I dealt with blood again. Hmn. This is not working. I still have three classes to get through. I’m in trouble wardrobe-wise. I love being a perimenopausal woman. Really, I do. It’s a challenge to not go out and kill people some days, because the sleep issues, the erratic bleeding, the hormones, the mood swings, fucking hair falling out…there is no fucking way to be a normal person when all that is going on without some serious help (mind-altering drugs, alcohol, I don’t know what else). Deep breaths. My workplace has a nurse’s office. Nurse offices have additional supplies…I brought in the heavy artillery and made it through the rest of the day, medicating myself for the cramps from hell. This is why we female teachers have very little patience with a 12-year-old who says she has cramps. Sweetie, I just lost a tenth of my blood supply and I’m still standing…what’s your problem again?

Anyway. The quilt I’m working on is so fucking relevant at the moment.

Before all that happened, during my prep, I made the mistake in my delicate frame of (weepy) mind to preview some videos about Huntington’s Disease for next week’s homework. Yeah. Watching videos of people you know will die a nasty death. Watching videos of people trying to decide whether or not to get tested. Hell, I should have just watched videos of babies been born and promptly dying in their parents’ arms or young cancer patients falling in love. Crying ensued. I’m a freakshow at the moment, a disaster area of salty proportions. Watch me lose it!

Like I said, at least now I know why. But I got home and was supposed to go to the gym, but between blood flow and cramps and general crappy feelingness, gave up the ghost on that. Sat around and read for a while, then watched those two episodes of House where Amber dies (OH MY GOD, because that’s not weepy at all) with the girlchild. It made her cry too, though, so I felt a little bit more normal. A tad.

It’s OK. I have the bike at home. Eventually the meds kicked in and I could sit on the bike for a while, plus I meditated and ate and did a little grading. I read.

Then it was ironing time, my special time with fabric, when my brain wanders off to its Not-Quite-Happy-Place (we still haven’t found happy…it’s a fucking lost cause), where my scissors and iron cheerfully dance in the summer surf. Or something.

It might be past my bedtime. Or I’m lightheaded from blood loss (certainly a possibility).

I knew I had to iron the lower body figure tonight, and those are generally a bit more time- and energy-consuming, trying to figure out what shade of flesh-colored fabric each part needs to be…I started with a run of 7, but that strangely turned into 9.

I’m not sure how. OK, I think it had something to do with not having enough of the first two fabrics, but wanting to start with something lighter than the third fabric, but not finding exactly what I wanted, so I kinda used the first two interchangeably. I can tell you the last one is something I hand-dyed myself. I call the formula FleshMud. OK, not really, but I have no idea how I got the colors in there (it’s not as black/gray in real life).

So I ironed down a bunch of pieces.

While Director Skinner observed. He’s a nice guy. He was very encouraging.

This is the chick I was ironing down…

This was in the early days of the drawing. She ended up being way more complicated than that…just like in real life! Wow. So philosophical tonight.

She started at piece 316 and went through 469, but then I had forgotten to number the face, so that was piece 1211-1247…or 1248. So 153 plus 36 (ugh, math in my head…) equals 189 pieces. Ahright. I’m up to about 6 hours in this thing. The ironing part, that is. I really need to do grades this weekend too, though, so I don’t know how much I’ll get done over the weekend. Hike. Meeting. Boychild in the house due to soccer tournament. Not a lot of free time.

But I am getting it done. There is progress. I can get my head around progress. It makes it somewhat better…it being LIFE, the practice of living. I actually find it very difficult to STOP ironing and go to bed. I just want to keep going and going until I’m done…like 1776 pieces done.

Anyway, with any luck, tomorrow will have less blood flow, no lockdowns, grading success (really unlikely), exercise, meditation, and fabric fondling. Hopefully there will be less screaming obscenities in my head as well, because I’m not finding that helpful. The section of meditation I’m doing now is about releasing bad feelings towards other people by imagining them happy. You start with yourself (this is very difficult for me, imagining my own self happy…I usually fail in the time frame they have allotted for that), then someone you see as a role model or someone important to you in some way (I have about 3 people I slot into this section), then the second person is someone you’re very close to (my kids alternate in here, based on which one seems to need it most, like today it was girlchild and her hives), then the third person is someone who don’t know very well (there are lots of these at work and on hikes), and the last person is supposed to be someone with whom you regularly have a negative reaction or negative feelings. There are two people that are obvious picks for this, but I am supposed to imagine them with happiness suffusing throughout them, and I just don’t think they deserve it. Mr. Meditation realizes that and tries to persuade me that my anger/frustration toward those people is hurting me, not them (fuck you, Mr. M…do you think I don’t KNOW that?), but I just can’t let them be happy in my mind. They don’t fucking deserve it. Anger strong. So there’s all this conflict in my head over meditation at the moment, which, shockingly, makes it hard to meditate.

Insert crying there too. Fuck me.

Seriously Mr. M…I can imagine them dying in volcanic explosions, as firebombing victims, in horrible plane crashes, from nasty cancer that makes them vomit profusely. And you want me to imagine them happy? I can only be ironic about that and imagine them in situations that would make NORMAL people happy (like weddings or traveling to foreign countries to lie on the beach and party), knowing damn well they would be miserable. Then I smile. In a sort of evil manner. Really, I shouldn’t be allowed out.

So yeah, not so healthy.

Back to the fabric. There’s a meditation that doesn’t inspire anger.

Yeah, I also gave up on a good title tonight. They all sucked.

Fish and Seaweed

I tried to post last night, but WordPress was being cranky. I finally gave up trying. As the week drags on, my brain is more and more challenged. Tiredness kicks in harder, kids are more frustrating. They’re testing right now, the first version of Common Core, but they don’t count this year, so it’s kind of a strange place we’re in. Usually testing is a really big deal, like you don’t teach anything that might challenge their brains, so they have all their brain power for the tests (honestly, there isn’t a lot leftover for anyone after 2 hours of staring at multiple-choice questions). You don’t give homework. Usually it’s also about 3 weeks later in the year and NOT right after break (a challenge in itself). None of it applies, this year, though, so I’m trying to teach genetics when they’re spending two periods a day testing. Not necessarily the best choice. Hopefully it will schedule better next year. Hopefully they’ll be done soon.

Luckily, last night’s ironing was pretty simple. Of course, I didn’t DO very much ironing either. I was too tired. I ironed fish and seaweed…

That’s it. Can you see the seaweed? Exciting. I also ironed some blood. There is blood in this quilt, ironic, since it’s about menopause, when the blood is supposed to stop. But that’s not the only blood out there, of course. (A vision of Dexter pops into mind, probably a disturbing thing)

I stopped watching Dexter eventually. It got old. I stopped watching a lot of things in the last year. I’ve been watching X Files while picking fabrics. They all start to melt together, but basically I’ve got weird images and events and aliens on my mind. And I read a lot of fantasy/sci fi as well, so that doesn’t help. The kids are both watching all the episodes of House, so if I’m in the living room in the evening, that’s what’s on. When I was a kid, you couldn’t serial-watch all these shows like you can now. You had to wait each week (or all summer) for the next episode, and if you missed it, you missed it. We didn’t even have a VCR. We couldn’t tape anything.

I don’t know if this is better or not, being able to access so much right when you want it, but I’m sure it changes how we deal with the world. A relative made a comment about “this generation” (speaking of her own kids, who are about 7 years younger than me), that when the going gets tough, this generation bails (she spelled “bails” wrong though, resulting in hilarity in MY household, where jokes about baling cotton and hay ensued. You can’t be a bad speller here…you will not survive). Huh. I don’t think I’ve bailed. I’ve been bailed upon, but haven’t bailed myself. I don’t know what that means, and technically, her kids are a generation younger than mine. My students don’t have persistence, many of them, true, but they are in middle school. It takes time and energy to develop persistence. I do know adults my age who bail. It seems like an easy childhood makes it more difficult for some people to deal with hardship. Then again, I think some people just know how to step up and some don’t. How much of that is the generation, how much is parenting, how much is the world we live in now, the environment? I’m sure someone is writing self-help books about that.

I was reading an article about how the Brits assumed there would be all this psychological trauma during the Blitz in London, with all the bombs dropping, and the people in charge set up all these psych centers to help people deal with the psychological damage, but in the end, most Brits just went on with their days, going to bomb shelters at night, going back home in the morning. Suicide rates went down. It actually helped them feel better about themselves if they continuously survived the bombings. There was some sense of achievement, however illogical that seems. Obviously, those that died…well, they died. But their psychological health wasn’t an issue any more. Those that survived seemed to rally in a way that the government really hadn’t expected. The psych centers closed because they weren’t needed. Interesting, that.

Anyway. Yes, it’s possible I think too much. Or read too much (naw, impossible).

I didn’t iron for long. I was tired. I mentioned that. Tired. Still tired this morning.

More fabrics in the pile now…added orange (fish), green (seaweed), and red (blood).

I would have ironed more, but the next thing is one of the large figures or the guy in the boat and that requires way more brain power, time, and energy than I had last night. I try to iron all of each section before I move on, so it would have been another hour and a hundred or more pieces, and that wasn’t an option. I did grade, exercise, and meditate…all good. See, I do better with a routine. Or do I?

Part of the problem was the night before. I went to bed and had crying issues. Not sure why. Couldn’t sleep, brain goes into overdrive, unhappy. Finally slept, woke up, that mood is still there. Cried going to work, couldn’t get it to stop even in the damn parking lot. Don’t know why. I hate that. Used to be I could pin that to hormonal stuff, time of the month, and it would be really short-lived, but who knows at the moment? Body doesn’t know if it’s coming or going, thyroid meds finally kicking in? I hate not being able to figure out where a specific emotion is coming from. That’s the stuff that makes you feel crazy, out of control. If you hear something sad or feel something bad, crying makes sense, sometimes is even a relief. But just randomly? That’s just crazy talking. It’s been a salty year. So done with it. Someone says something or I hear a song or see a stupid ad for a stupid movie and I’m almost bawling (that happened last night with the girlchild in the room…I got up and walked out…don’t remember what movie…just know I won’t be going to see it).

I had to go buy some AP study guides for the girlchild, which meant venturing into an actual bookstore (because she left it until the last minute). This is just as dangerous as going into a fabric store at the moment (can’t just buy ONE), so I rewarded myself (and the boychild) by buying Saga Vol. 3 (Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples), which came out recently…

It was good. More weird alien stuff and creatures making moral decisions plus things haunting you and making you crazy. And wings and horns. Nothing bad about that. That’s the kind of crazy I can handle.

Fabric Meditation

I have to prepare myself mentally for picking fabric. It’s a big part of the process. I don’t color my drawings beforehand…I stare at the drawing and let it color itself in my head. I often have no idea of what it will look like until it’s ironed together. I trust my instincts, my years of practice, to put it together right, the best way. I do better when I pick fabrics in big chunks of time, hours at a time, like during Winter, Spring, or Summer breaks. It’s easier to keep all the fabrics and colors in my head if there aren’t big gaps in time between ironing sessions.

So I had planned to iron this sucker down to fabric over Spring Break. With that many pieces, almost 1800, it’s going to take over 20 hours of ironing. But it didn’t work out that way, so realistically, even with weekends (this weekend might as well burrow into a hole and die, because it’s buried already), it’s going to take me 2-3 weeks to iron all these down with school every day. Damn job. Gets in the way of my art career.

But man oh man, is it meditative. It lets me access that part of my brain that is pure art, pure alpha wave, deep and dark in my brain, where none of that stupid sad depressoid shit can venture. It kicks depression’s ass. It tells it to fuck off and find some other sucker. It is one serious bad ass.

Too bad I can’t do THAT full-time. OK, it probably wouldn’t work full-time. But it’s an interesting thought…that this state and the drawing state and the tracing state…these are places where my brain can escape all that stupid shit and just be at peace. Someone wrote to me today about that’s when I have control…when I’m in that space mentally. I can control the artistic process and nobody else can fuck with it. They can’t stop it, they can’t change it, they can’t make me do it their way or listen to their stupid lame rules. It’s mine. So no wonder I find it peaceful…calming.

One thing about Spring Break is I got very bad about meditation, the stuff on my app (Headspace) where the guy talks me through it. It’s hard to do on a plane or in a hotel room with the boychild. I just didn’t do it regularly, and I think that was part of the problem. I drew more, which does also help (another form of meditation), but I needed to focus on that process daily. So I’m back to that. Trying to be good about it.

I cleaned out most of my studio last night (by “clean out”, I mean straighten up and Swiffer…the room is still a disaster area and probably will be until both kids go to college and I have time and space to deep-clean…OR…I will succumb to hoarding tendencies and live in the glory of dust-bunny hell). Tonight I put away all the fabrics from the last quilt that were lying around, and then hung up the drawing for the current quilt…

It’s LONG. Actually, when I started ironing parts, they were down at the bottom and I got tired of leaning over to see them, so I pinned the bottom part up to about eye level.

First I sorted the first 100 pieces into piles by 10s…

It’s a very controlled process…I try to number them logically so picking fabrics can also be done logically.

I ended up thinking I needed 10 dirt fabrics in a run for the bottom section…

Yes, that’s Dana Scully…X Files, Season 3. It’s easy to watch because I’ve seen them all before and I don’t have to pay particularly close attention, but it doesn’t fuck with my emotions either. That’s a plus, because some of the other stuff I’ve been watching lately just makes me cry, and I really don’t need more of that.

I actually changed some of these browns around in the end, because some of the pieces were quite long and the fabric wasn’t big enough (stupid fat quarters) to iron the one piece down…plus I think I needed 11 in the end. That number 4 fabric (from the right)? It didn’t work. It’s gone. I added two more in its place, one lighter, one darker.

For instance, this one needed to switch fabrics for one that had a full width.

I usually buy 1/2 yards because it gives me the width I need, but not so much fabric that I will be using it up until the end of time (I have some from the early days when I used to buy yardage where I will probably NEVER run out). I like to have more variety in my stash…so I don’t buy huge pieces unless they are background or binding. Sometimes I have to buy yards if the quilt is really wide…usually that’s for the base pieces, the dirt and water. I like my quilts to be grounded…to have a base to stand on visually. In the dirt or the sand and in the water, they need to stand somewhere…so you will notice more solid sections at the bottoms of my quilts (and drawings). It’s not that I think about it while I’m doing it…it just happens. I don’t want you to think that I’m this artist who thinks every move, every line out. I don’t. It just happens.

This is not magic. I’ve been practicing art for years. Think about sports…how many years until you’re really good at it? You may have some raw, natural talent, but you still have to practice, to hone your art. I’ve been making quilts since I was 23; that’s 24 years. Holy god, I’m old.

I ended up having to pull about 10 pieces from the 100-199 bin, because they were in the dirt section and I wanted to do that all at once.

I finished all the dirt pieces…about 70 or so. The skeleton (there’s always a skeleton these days…I don’t know what that means) is the other 50 or so pieces in the 0-100 section…and they’ll be pretty easy. I usually only use 2-3 fabrics for the skelly…I don’t cut them all out separately in Wonder Under…I group them together so that all the same color of bone are lumped together and only need to be cut out once. Saves time. Plus it’s easier to iron down one big piece with a lot of little pieces drawn on it. Takes less time.

So hopefully tomorrow I’ll finish up the skeleton and move on to water or seaweed or fish. I have a meeting on Sunday, and it will be good to have stuff to cut out at that meeting. I have another quilt I need to start working on, at least get it drawn and traced before summer, so I can’t be lazy right now. I know, I never really seem like I’m being lazy, but I did sit there and read for quite a bit tonight. I also graded, though, so I don’t feel bad. I try to explain to my students how to balance the stuff you don’t feel like doing (homework, they are big whiners) with the stuff you love to do (for them, video games or Facebook or mall). I tell them I do an hour (or so) of grading BEFORE I let myself do the stuff I like to do, like draw or whatever. My job isn’t my life. I walked in this morning about 30 minutes before school started…and I hadn’t been at school since the Sunday the first weekend of break, when I went in to straighten up for the cleaning team. My room was a mess this morning, so I had the kids help me put it in order. I had a lab planned for today, and I had lists of what needed to happen…I dealt with some of it on that Sunday two weeks ago and the rest during prep today. I’m learning to be more efficient. I’m learning to spend less time and energy on the job. I still am there for my students, I hear them, I help them, I tutor them, I work for them…I stopped a saber-toothed tiger today with my rolled tongue (genetics joke)…but I come home and try to live for myself. I have to have a life outside of the job. I have to have an existence that isn’t just work and the shit that follows it.

So I’m ironing now. The process of coloring that picture in my head and choosing the fabrics that match those colors…it’s supremely meditative. It’s peaceful. It fights the demons away, tells them to fuck off and find another place to reside. At least for a bit.

More tomorrow.

It Is Where I Am…

So it’s officially Spring Break for me (not my kids). It came this year without the huge sense of relief and fanfare that I usually ride into break. I don’t really know why. I know the depression has allowed me (forced me really) to distance myself from my job in some ways. Not from the kids…I am more connected to them this year than I think I ever have been. That’s not to say the year hasn’t been difficult. You can’t possibly be dealing with this incredibly demanding job AND a major depression and grief and not have difficulty. But maybe I can keep my job mostly where it belongs now. Maybe.

That’s the problem with teaching. It’s too damn easy to let it BE your life, especially if you don’t have anything else. Balance has always been difficult for me.

So what did I do on my first evening of break? I cooked dinner. I exercised. I meditated. I graded papers! I know. But it needs to get done, and I’d rather get a chunk of it done now, early in break, so I don’t have to think about it the rest of the time. So a little a day until I get there.

And then I started tracing stuff…I actually started really late at night (AGAIN) and didn’t want to stop (AGAIN), so I finally had to force myself to go to sleep because I knew that there was a bunch of stuff I had to do today…I’m kind of overbooked. Whoops. No brain downtime? Probably a good thing.

Anyway, I traced for a few hours…

I’m still trying to fill in little pieces into all the weird spaces between the wiggly pieces from the bottom. I hate wasting Wonder Under…I don’t know why. It’s not particularly expensive.

Here’s an example of tracing like pieces together…I had fish on one side of the drawing and fish on the other, so I traced all the same fish parts together: fins, eyeballs, side fins, tail fins…because they will all be the same fabrics, so why cut them out in Wonder Under and then LOSE all the tiny pieces…cut them out as a lump, iron them down to fabric as a lump, and then cut them out once.

I do not even know why my brain comes up with this stuff. This is part of my artistic process, this incredibly controlled, logical, pattern-fitting piece of the process. Compared to the fabric-picking stage, which is wildly out there and in my head coloring crazily, even when I’m asleep, waking me up with the next color scheme, this is incredibly calm and soothing…like putting a puzzle together. Fabric-choosing is a much more demanding, emotional task.

Anyway, I finished tracing the bottom person and I was trying to find where I had traced next. I try to be logical and move across the drawing in sections, numbering all the same parts together, but I spent about 10 minutes looking for piece 513 and just couldn’t figure it out (because I hadn’t been TOTALLY logical). But as I was doing that, I noticed that I had forgotten to number those damn octopus tentacles…I mean it was bad enough that I missed the bottom figure’s face…her body is in the 400s and her head is in the thousands somewhere, because I missed it while numbering.

Anyway, those damn tentacles added 102 pieces; now I’m at 1764 total…

Originally I was going to embroider the smaller circles in the suckers, but I decided I wanted them to be fabric in the end. They seemed too big (ah ha ha!) for embroidery. I was going to have this satin-stitch or some sort of textural thing going on by the side of the quilt that wasn’t going to be repeated anywhere else in it, and it just seemed like a problem.

Anyway. That is not the first time an octopus has showed up in one of my quilts, by the way. So I’m about a third of the way through the tracing. Not where I wanted to be, but it is where I am. So there we are.

So I have to be super-focused today to get everything done and get to all the places I’m supposed to be. I’m hoping at the end of it to feel peaceful and inspired and maybe even content or pleased. I have to manage my days to try to manage the emotional crap too. I emailed my doctor about the weird blood-sugar incidents, because they really are illogical and supremely worrying. That may be part of my need today to be with other people as much as possible…if something goes wrong on a day I don’t have the kids around, at least someone might be around to call 911. The counselor wants me to get one of those medic-alert bracelets. SIGH. Anyway. It’s Spring Break. Cleaning, organizing, artmaking, maybe sleeping? Hiking? Who knows. Oh yeah, and a crazy short trip to visit the school where my son will probably spend the next 4 years of his life. Bet there will be some tears over that. Mine, not his.

Moving on.

More Is Better

Hey. So I’m feeling much better tonight. I think the biggest issue with the hypoglycemia is that it comes fast and I feel like crap with it, and it takes a long time for that to go away. The effects of last night’s episode continued well into the morning. I don’t think I started feeling OK again until after lunch. And I ate normally. So. But I ate normally the day before too. It’s the unpredictable nature of the crashes that is difficult. I worry about being alone and having it crash fast and not having someone around to help me. Anyway. The doc and I will have a conversation. We’ll figure it out. Hopefully.

Meanwhile, today was our team’s field trip to the Reuben H. Fleet Science Museum in Balboa Park. We saw one of the IMAX movies on the human body (probably it doesn’t help that IMAX makes me want to puke…but it was good), then we watched 140 or so students try to destroy all the exhibits inside the museum, and then let them out into the sunny gorgeous day to run around and eat and act like goofballs. It was a really well-managed field trip, thanks to one of the team teachers, and I didn’t feel anywhere near as crazy about it as I have in the past. And there’s only one day of school left until Spring Break, when I will have a little bit of freedom. I do have about 700 errands to run and another 30,000 things on my to-do list, but hopefully art will be part of it. After last night, I’m kind of trying to relax my desire to get a lot done. I think I will get done whatever I can, and I will have to be happy with that. Or at least content. Happy is still not part of my vocabulary.

So I practiced that tonight after getting home from my stitching meeting (which is really just hanging out with good people and sometimes we stitch and sometimes we don’t and we try to support each other with our wacky lives and existences…which is all you can do sometimes…is support). I ate some food…I’ve been paranoid about food today. Shockingly.

Then I traced for about an hour…

It’s still going really slowly. I’m in the middle of the lowest body on the piece…

She’s got some weirdly overlapping pieces, which means I really have to think while I’m tracing about what goes on top and what goes on the bottom, since I draw the overlaps into the pieces. I’ve finished her legs and belly, and am just starting on the arms. I was getting tired, so I tried to find a decent place to stop…I’m in the 370s, over 6 hours in.

This piece really is a bit crazy. See all those empty spaces? I try to fill them in as I’m tracing smaller pieces. I try to do a decent job of fitting pieces in so I’m not wasting too much Wonder Under. I also try to trace pieces that I know will be the same fabric together so I save on cutting time…I only have to cut them out as fabric, not as Wonder Under as well. That really helps if the pieces are super small too…I often don’t cut them out until I’m ironing everything together…like I already know I won’t cut out the fish eyeballs until the very last ironing minute…which will be in June, at the rate I’m going.

The yawning, though. I had to stop. I had to make myself stop.

I got some done on the girlchild’s Xmas stocking at the stitching meeting…

this piece is really slow. But it’s meditative. I’ve had a hard time motivating myself to actually meditate for real lately. I think I need to go back to doing it earlier rather than later at night…if I’m tired, I can’t handle it. I get the feeling he’d really like me to meditate in the morning, but I find that difficult. I’m not even really awake in the morning. I feel like you should be awake to be mindful. I’m a night owl. That’s why we call it meditative PRACTICE though…you’re supposed to actually practice it. Plus practicing makes you better at things.

Anyway. At least I’ll get some more artmaking time in the next few weeks. Nothing major, nothing lifechanging. Just more. More is better. Hopefully more is better will apply to hours of sleep as well.

Sleep? Art.

To sleep? Or to art? That is the question, the perennial question. I don’t seem to be able to balance those two out appropriately…probably because I try to do other things like cook healthy meals, exercise, meditate. All those things. Really, I think my job is getting in the way of having a fulfilling life. In fact, while I’m writing this, I’m trying to come up with something to occupy the smart, quick workers in my classes who will be done with their assignment about 20 minutes into class while my less-motivated kids flail and whine and complain that I am actually expecting a product that requires brain power. I got this. I can do this.

Can I do this? I decided yesterday that I really wanted to try to get this whole damn drawing traced before Spring Break officially started, which is Friday at 3:30. I then slapped myself around some, because that would mean I can’t go to work for the next three days (tempting, certainly), which isn’t an option (my team would kill me if I wasn’t there for the field trip), so then I thought that maybe I could do it by Monday, but then I need to cut all those pieces out (THAT’S why I’ve been saving all those episodes of InsertCrappyTVShowNameHere) and try picking fabrics, and now it looks like I will be in upstate New York for at least three days or more during Spring Break and it’s looking pretty grim in terms of getting the ironing done.

Oh well. I still cleared my evening (meaning I ignored all the grading I brought home and anything else like yardwork or cleaning or whatever) because hell, I barely saw my kids yesterday (but I did run errands) and I basically didn’t talk to anyone at all after about 5:30 PM, and this is what it’s going to be like when they go to college. Every day. Depressing.

I lied. My brother and SIL called me (yes, I am that pitiful that they call me and check up on me, mostly because they bought this talking Mr. T thing at Archie McPhee that said things like “quit your jibber jabber” and “pity the fool” and they just can’t NOT share that with me) and talked to me about snow and Ivy League schools and my brother’s and my grades in high school and college (apparently I had better grades than him in high school because I applied myself better…a lot of good THAT did me, right?).

Anyway. More pictures of my favorite fusible, Wonder Under. I’ve been using Wonder Under to make quilts since um since (holy crap, I had to go look up my list of quilts to figure out when I started doing that) since January 2001, my first fused quilt (besides the one where I learned how to do it in the first place) was When Laundry Attacks…

clearly a feminist portrayal of the burden of motherhood. Seriously old-school Kathy. Love her hair though…best use of Australian aboriginal fabrics ever.

This is the picture I use for all my avatar thingies, whatever they’re called, when I have to put my photo somewhere and I can get away with not using a REAL photo of me. But look how few pieces there are in that face! Holy crap, I’ve gotten complicated. She doesn’t even have EARS! I just realized that. Weird.

Anyway, so Wonder Under and I have been best buddies for a good long time, weathering the years of paper that released without warning all the time to the years of paper that refused to release. I think they’ve finally gotten the recipe back to normal. I buy it by the bolt.

So I’m up to three yards for this quilt (it will go much higher than that)…

I’m in the water section now, so lots of pointy wavy bits. Then tonight, assuming I trace tonight, I think I will finally be tracing one of the three humans in this quilt. Well, one is barely human. Presumably he was human at some point.

I traced for almost 3 hours last night…with my tea and everything spread out over the couches…

What were YOU doing last night? Probably something way more useful or productive or sociable. Not me! I am none of those things. OK, maybe I could argue productive in terms of producing art, but sometimes I wonder to what purpose. Not last night, though. The purpose? Distracting me from my actual existence, ironically by tracing a quilt that is about my angst about my actual existence. I know. But it makes me feel better. And at least they will have a lot to write about when they write my biography.

Tracing Motivation…

So why can’t I wear pajamas to school today? Oh yeah, it’s not pajama day. It might be wear-your-sports-jersey day, but that’s not usually a day I celebrate, like I didn’t wear my SDSU gear last week (um, because I didn’t go there for one thing, but also because not so into the big sports events). If it’s crazy hair day or hat day, though, I’m there. I always forget (until someone reminds me) how bad the week before Spring Break is in middle school…especially when it’s so late in the year like this year. Why we tie a break to a religious holiday, I will never understand. It makes a lot more sense to figure out how many weeks there are in the second half of the year, look at when testing is supposed to happen, and put the break in a place where it will support the students (and honestly, the teachers) most. Then again, and I hate to say this, I suspect my students would do better without all those long breaks where they forget to behave like a student, where they go through their backpacks and throw out everything, where they completely forget whatever topic we were learning about before. Get rid of Spring Break! Wait. Don’t do that. I need that break.

So yesterday? Wow. Ouch. Supreme frustration. I was doing deep breathing exercises most of the day. I thought about bringing my book today so that when that period that everyone has that refuses to do any work because they’re too focused on anything BUT work, when they start going off like they did yesterday, I can just settle down in my chair and read a few chapters until they get back on task. And I’m not teaching something easy at the moment…it’s mitosis…cell division. It seems easy, but it boggles their minds that something like this is happening ALL the time in their bodies. Even though it boggles them, though, they’re not willing to think about it, consider the details, let alone show me they get it with that fun thing we call an assessment.

So I came home supremely frustrated…and down because nothing I did worked. When the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed, there is often nothing a teacher can do on days like that. I can change it up, engage with a video, tell goofy stories, have high expectations (I hate that one…), I could probably throw cupcakes into the air…oh no, wait, THAT they would get their attention. Food. Rewards. Money would probably work. So that’s what I carried home from work. After 14 after-school errands. Tired. Blood sugar off again. And there were two things I wanted to work on before I had to make dinner, but the girlchild needed my computer (and both the things I wanted to work on, you guessed it, on my computer). So I tried that dinner-making thing.

Wow. It really wasn’t my day. I had some weird ingredient and the instructions to open the container were in Spanish, so that was OK. I could figure that out, although it was the strangest thing I had opened and the instructions didn’t really work, but then the ingredient wasn’t in a form I expected. In fact, it was mostly unusable. I’m sure I was doing it wrong, but I had another similar option in the freezer that I knew would work, so I used that instead. Then two ingredients were just not in the cupboard. Strange. These are staples, things I always have, unless someone used them all up and didn’t tell me. Yup. She denied it though. Anyway, for a variety of reasons, dinner took forever to make and was kind of a lot of work for what it was. Tasted good, but I can’t handle that many minutes on a school night. We ate late.

So after meditation and exercise (at which point, my blood sugar was careening towards the other crazy extreme, making absolutely no sense biologically), I was really tired. In fact, I think I fell asleep in meditation. I don’t remember all the parts I was supposed to do. But I was still carrying around that crazy irritation, that bugged feeling from working a job that is often thankless and more often completely crazy and sometimes seemingly pointless (please, lord, do not let any child ask me today why they need to learn about mitosis, because I’m not sure I can give a coherent answer that doesn’t harken back to my mom’s constant “Because I said so.”).

That’s not a good thing. I can’t carry that to sleep. I’ll wake up with it still draped around my shoulders, still dragging me down. It will feed off the core depression and make it hard for me to even walk across the classroom, let alone find a way to encourage them to learn this weird process that helps explain all the crap that happens in genetics. Plus I can’t be in that mood space. It’s just too hard.

So I stood up, drank some water, looked at the clock, tried to balance my sleep needs and my artistic needs in my mind, and started tracing…

Yup. It’s crazy that I’m doing that at midnight. Totally and completely nuts. But I’m glad I did, because it let me fall asleep and I didn’t wake up in an awful place. It’s not a great place I’m in, because (1) I am tired and (2) I still have to teach mitosis today (trust me, I did totally consider blowing it off and showing baby animals videos), plus there’s a staff meeting about using Google docs (holey moley, shoot me now), but if I play music really loud during my prep (oh wait, I think I have to be making field trip group lists during prep…another hellish task). Dammit.

Deep breaths.

Hey, here’s some fish I traced!

You don’t want to know how small those fishy eyeballs are. I know. I really do try to keep my brain out of the muck. Some days it’s really hard, though.

I’ve done about 3 hours of tracing…and I’ve traced about 206 pieces…so it’s going really slowly. That could be because I’m doing it really late at night and I’m tired, or it could be really complicated pieces. Or both. Usually I figure 100 pieces/hour, so it would be about 17 hours to trace this whole thing. At the rate I’m going on this one, it will probably be closer to 23 hours. I really need to rethink the artmaking plan for Spring Break. It’s going to be less purposeful than I had hoped. My fault. I was not focused enough (here is where half the people who read my blog, the ones who read it for the art-related stuff, start gagging and sending me messages that I am the most focused art person they know and they wish they could do as much work as I do and I should just shut the fuck up and rejoice that I am making as much as I am…it’s all relative, though, isn’t it?).

I’m hard on myself. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t get any art made. I don’t always understand why making the art is so necessary to my existence, but it is, and as long as I can keep that in the front of my mind, I know that I can get out of bed and shower and get dressed and go to work at a job that is the most difficult (and yet sometimes the most rewarding) job I’ve ever had. And for now, that’s what I need to do. So I need that focus. I need to have the goals in place and they need to be something I’m working towards every day. Without that, I don’t know how I would do anything else.

Now I need to get out of the pajamas.

Zooming In…

It’s interesting to wake up the morning after the hike and try to figure out what the hell you did the day before to cause the specific, different muscle pain that you have today. For instance, why does my right quad hurt so much more than the left? Maybe because that’s the leg I used to pull myself up onto rocks when we were scrambling up the canyon toward the waterfalls?

Then there’s Poison Oak Paranoia: every slightly itchy feeling since Saturday, I’m checking for the rash. I’m convinced it will show up (and it can take up to 5 days to show up, which is scary). At some point, I’ll get around to posting about that hike, but I have to resize the photos and I was in two long meetings yesterday, so I ran out of time.

My women’s art group is doing a show with Mexican female artists in September/October about the border, more of a conceptual collaborative piece than everyone contributing a single piece of art, so it requires meetings and brainstorming and working with people who work very differently than I do. I realize my experience of the border by being a teacher of students who regularly cross it is very different than others. I’m not entirely sure what I feel about it except that it seems to break up families and make it more difficult for certain groups of people, especially those who really don’t need more trouble in their lives. I read a book a few years ago about four Hispanic girls and the Dream Act and how this arbitrary line that we draw affected their lives. Anyway, you will probably see more about this project in the future, but know that right now, I am envisioning floating 3D fabric houses in the air above our real-live fence. And how that will go together. I think it’s good to force the art brain to work out of its comfort zone, out of what it’s used to doing.

Girlchild survived her weekend camp and came back invigorated and excited (she is so much more of an extrovert than I am). She had to tell everyone who her role model was as one of their team-building/introduction exercises, and she told me she chose me, and I said, “because you want to be a depressed, crazy old woman in your future?” and she said, no, because she wanted to be strong like me. Sigh. And I don’t feel strong at all most days. It’s like dragging myself along through the mud most days, but I guess she’s right. I just wish I didn’t HAVE to be so strong. It would be OK to have less to deal with and get through and to not have to feel like I’m always surviving things. I’d be OK with that. I guess I should tell her, some day, when it doesn’t make me burst into tears, that a huge part of my strength comes from having her and her brother around, that if they hadn’t been here this year, if they’d been off at college or even if they’d been around but not supportive (which believe it or not, they have been), then I don’t know where I’d be right now…maybe still in bed and under the covers. Maybe worse. Sigh.

I graded a little, but I didn’t let it take over my day. Then I traced some more…

Honestly, this seems to be taking forever and I don’t know why. Complicated pieces? Tired brain? Hard to say. Lots of little skeleton pieces…hey, I must be tracing dirt again! Dirt, then water. Skeletons, then bodies. Then birds, always the birds…and cats. Actually, I think this one has a dog instead of a cat. I don’t remember drawing a cat. The drawing is so big and took so long to do that I don’t remember, and when I’m tracing it, it’s upside down on the light table, so I can’t see all of it. I literally only see the little section that I’m tracing.

Kinda how I’m living life at the moment…just the little section I can handle each day. The night before I usually think about the little section I will handle the following day, but I try not to think further ahead than that unless I have to. It’s too hard. It feels too empty.

Brain. You really need to rewire yourself. Being smart and reflective and all inside-looking and crap? It ain’t helping you at the moment. Look out. See the whole drawing, not just the piece you’re on.

Nope. That’s what gets me in trouble right now. Trying to see the whole picture. I zoom out, the brain freaks out, and I zoom back in, quickly erasing whatever set it off. I don’t know whether that’s the healthiest thing to do or not…it’s just what I’m doing to survive right now.

Diverging from the Fairy Tales

I’m finding that certain parts of my artmaking process are more meditative, more peaceful-making than others. I’m not sure why, but I think it has to do with how much brain power the task takes up…the more, the better. Drawing, tracing Wonder Under, and choosing fabrics use up big chunks of brain real estate, so they work really well to dispel wandering depressive thoughts. Cutting pieces out? Not so much. I’ve spent my artmaking time all week cutting pieces out, and it hasn’t really helped much…a little, but not much. Tonight, though, I started tracing the big drawing on Wonder Under, and there it was…a peaceful (semi-, as much as it ever is) brain. Sigh. Wow. It’s such a better place…because before that, not so much peace.

I did OK this morning and into the middle of the afternoon with an awesome yet physically challenging hike (more on that in another post), but my blood sugar was being cranky today…it was too high after hiking, for no apparent reason, and in trying to control it, I don’t know what happened, but it crashed worse than it has even in the last month or so…and it’s a real mood changer. I know the symptoms, but I often get the symptoms when my blood sugar is normal, so coming back from the grocery store, I was fairly sure it had dropped again…and yes, I had eaten…and yes, it was bloody low by the time I got home, like bad. Not call 911 bad, but certainly minor-freak-out bad.

Dammit. It freaked me out (it always does, especially when I’m on my own, even knowing there’s help a phone call away). I drank my milk and finished unloading groceries (because that’s what you do when your blood sugar is crashing, right? No. That’s what you do when you’re trying to keep your mind off the crash…and no, it’s not really effective because you still feel like shit). And after 15 minutes, it was OK again. But I have no freakin’ idea what is regulating it right now. It’s all over the freakin’ map. It makes no logical sense if you look at what and when I eat and when I exercise. My doctor’s running some tests in a week and a half, and we can look at meds, but her initial answer was to make sure my diet was appropriate, which was more than a little annoying, because I haven’t changed a damn thing about my diet, and the blood sugar is totally off. Now that I’m totally watching everything and counting everything and keeping track multiple times a day, it’s even worse. And it’s inconsistent about it too. So that’s something out of whack.

So it’s probably a good thing I traced some stuff…

I actually didn’t get very far, because these pieces were really complicated to trace, lots of funny complicated shapes. But at least I got a start on it. I was supposed to grade papers today, and I napped instead. And read my book. And meditated.

I cannot bring myself to care about the grading.

My car, she is old. She is 12 years old this year…and she rolled into 190,000+ miles without my noticing at first.

Sigh. And the check engine light went off, but I think that’s because the bulb died. I don’t know how much longer she will keep driving. Problem.

I took this picture at our school assembly on Friday…

We had these BMX bike guys come out and do stunts…

One of the better assemblies we have had…only a little proselytizing about no drugs and staying in school.

It’s not that I disagree with those things for my students; it’s just that I don’t think it works to get them to repeat it back during an assembly like this. They don’t hear it. It doesn’t sink in. But the bike-riders were cool.

I finished reading Wally Lamb’s We Are Water…

I love his writing, and this book was no exception. The only issue was that the story was fairly predictable. I knew where it was going, I just didn’t know how he would get there, and it’s in how he writes and reveals the details that his stories are so great to read. The book is about a woman whose life is full of some fairly dank and nasty secrets, and how they affect her family over time. She also happens to be an artist, which might have made it more interesting to me as well. I wonder how my being an artist has affected the kids and the rest of my life. Is it part of the problem? Who knows. It’s told through multiple perspectives, which mesh very well. It’s interesting that they are only family perspectives…one woman marrying into the family shows up in everyone’s story but has no story of her own.

We have a week of school left until Spring Break. It’s possible I might have to take the boychild to New York to look at a college…or not. Hard to say. Girlchild is still recovering well; in fact, she’s at a camp this weekend for Key Club. So I think she’s doing fine…which is a relief after last week at this time. It’s amazing how fast the young bounce back.

Maybe that is the core problem with my depression…my brain doesn’t have the resilience it used to have. I hate to think of the brain slowing down like the body obviously has…on the one hand, I’m hiking all over and doing crazy things like boulder scrambling and rope climbing, but I also feel it the next day (and the next day), and it’s clear to me when my body is done, is tired. It doesn’t bounce back quickly. But I don’t know about my brain…it is just as creative as ever, if not more so, but it will not drop this depression…it will not move past it and get on with it, even though intellectually I’ve gone through it all and I realize what the deal is, but I just can’t get on. The core part of feeling is so mired in this bad place where I’m not worth anything and I can’t be happy…and that part feels so horrible that I get lost in it. It’s like those swampy horrible monster-filled places in the stories we read, where the heroine has to tromp through to the other side, usually to a dark and nasty castle where something important is hidden or being kept, and the heroine has to rescue it and get it out, away from whatever evil ruler or magic being that is in the castle, and of course, they always succeed, right? Except I’m still in the swamp and I’m lost. So I guess that’s where my story diverges from the fairy tales.

I’m not the princess, not worth saving. I’m not even the scruffy servant who has some secret magical power. Or I’m not a good enough heroine, or whatever’s in the castle isn’t motivating enough? Or I didn’t bring my sidekick or my group of intensely supportive friends or my weapon of magic or whatever. Do fairy tales only work on the young? Hard to say. At least I have over 1600 pieces of Wonder Under to trace in the next few weeks to try to keep that old brain occupied. Maybe it will figure out it’s own fairy-tale ending in that time period.

It Will Have to Do…

I had a plan for the artmaking this month. Spring Break is coming up. Usually, by now, I’d be counting the days and ranting and raving about how I need to be on vacation. This year, Spring Break is late even. But I don’t know how many days it is. I’m not even keeping track. It’s not that this year is easier than any other year; it’s really not. We took on some things this year that made it more difficult, trying to keep on top of kids and their work, really pushing for passing grades, TRIED to take on computers in the classroom, but that disappeared last week (long stupid story). Plus my brain makes it difficult for me to focus a lot on school this year. I’ve figured out how to push it over there in the corner and ignore its existence a lot better. I think. Maybe. Either meditation or depression has helped me to balance my work life better. I’m hoping it’s the former more than the latter. I don’t want to have to be depressed to put work in its rightful place…just enough attention to do it well, but not at workaholic level.

So I wanted to have all the Wonder Under traced on that new big drawing by now (insert hysterical laughter here, because that’s probably 20 hours of tracing), and to be cutting out Wonder Under, so I could do all the fabric ironing over break, but in reality, that’s not going to happen. I haven’t even started tracing. I’ve had other stuff to deal with. And it’s not that important that I finish it “on time,” because there is no “on time” for this one. There’s no deadline for anything I’m working on, which is alternately a relief and really depressing. Last year had three major pieces that had to be made by a deadline for a specific show, and I guess that was a good thing in some ways, providing me with a focus that I couldn’t wander away from. Right now? I don’t have that. So on the one hand, I can make what I want without some wacky theme hanging over me, but on the other hand, who knows if it will get in anywhere? I have about 4 pieces from the last two years that are getting in NOWHERE. Sigh.

It’s OK. I know intellectually that is a temporary thing, that there is no explaining the whims of jurors, any more than you can explain what colleges the boychild got into and didn’t get into (still waiting to hear on two more, but I think he did OK). It just is what it is; you take a deep breath, and you move on. You pick up the next thing and start working on it.

So I did…

Still doing this, but I didn’t fall asleep while doing it tonight. I guess that’s good. I’m 4 hours in and still have most of the fleshy pieces to cut out. But it’s getting there. Worst case scenario, I’ll get this one ironed down and start on the stitching over break. I’m going to schedule some hikes in there too, plus I have an art exhibit to go see up in the OC, and I’m going to do some life-drawing classes during the school days. I can pretend to be retired…practice for a million years from now when I might be able to afford to retire (ha!).

I managed to make it to the gym, eat dinner, meditate, read my book, AND do the art stuff. Of course, that’s because the house is empty and I have no one to talk to except furry beasts, and I’m blowing off work. So. There’s that. I don’t know that it’s the healthiest existence. It’s certainly lonely.

I also had to do a journal entry thing for the Celebrating Silver exhibit. I had found the scrapbook paper at my ex’s house Tuesday night. I wrote up the pages yesterday and got it all put together tonight.

It’s not super-exciting, but it will do. And since it has to arrive by April 1, it will have to do.

Over Spring Break, I also need to draw my gender equality thing (the only real deadline I have this year), and then there’s an exhibit my women’s art group is working on about the border between the US and Mexico; we’re meeting about that this weekend. I think I will have very little weekend free outside of the hike and the art meetings. There’s more next weekend. I guess I know how to keep myself busy. Now if I could only figure out the happiness part. I guess that comes with time.

And art. And nature. It’s kinda like sleep when you’re female and my age…if you really want it, it’s elusive. It comes when you least expect it, when you’re holding scissors in your hand.