Book Review: Traveling Left of Center

I recently read a collection of short stories by Nancy Christie titled Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories, through NetGalley.

I enjoyed Christie’s writing style, although many of the stories found me wondering about the characters in them, as they made remarkably bad or just plain scary decisions. Christie says her characters cannot or will not get control over their own lives, and so the outcomes of their actions are often not what they expect. One story that sticks in my mind was Alice in Wonderland, about a woman who travels through books while her real life weighs her down. Watching for Billy was another story where you worried about the main character, often yelling out in your head, NO! Don’t be that nice person! Which is of course an interesting comment on society itself…we begin the story feeling sorry for Agnes and supporting her actions, all the while telling our paranoid selves that this will not turn out well. Still Life is a dream I myself have had, usually right before the alarm clock goes off.

That’s the beauty of these stories: they feed our paranoias, our fears, but also our dreams. Many of the characters resonated with me. I liked that each story was fully fleshed out, even in so few words. Often short stories leave more questions than answers and I feel unfulfilled by them, but this was not true of Christie’s stories. There was only one where I was left thinking, “Wait a minute. How does that work?” The creepy part of the mind is definitely at work here, but in a good way. I enjoyed reading these.

The publisher would like you to know that the book itself publishes Sept 9, but that the eBook of “Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories” is currently discounted for the prepublication price of $4.99 or less until September 9th (when it will go back up to the retail price of $5.99). If you preorder, it will be automatically delivered to your eReader on the publication date (September 9th). The prepublication discount is currently active on Amazon (http://tinyurl.com/q3vqvqr) Apple iBookstore (http://tinyurl.com/q3rjbkw), Barnes & Noble (http://tinyurl.com/moozc5y), Kobo (http://tinyurl.com/nt8vyyd) and other online bookstores.

If you enjoy short stories about people who aren’t perfect, but with a creepy tinge to them, because there is no way to read this book without getting a little creeped out, then you should enjoy this collection.

Hopefully

I’m having a hard time focusing this morning. I know I have this huge to-do list that encompasses the house, the yard, school stuff, sending boychild to college stuff, and art stuff. It’s a stuff tsunami swirling around in my head. So I just sat here staring at the computer for a while, because I did a lot of stuff yesterday, but some of it was just soul-fixing stuff that needed to happen and some of it was family stuff that needed to happen (girlchild turned 17 yesterday), and my head was still whirling around last night, even though I did finally get to that magical place…I finished quilting that damn beast of a quilt…

Aug 9 14 042 small

It took 18 hours and 36 minutes. I had estimated 20 hours, so that wasn’t a bad estimate. The quilting became a pain in the butt on Friday, which is partially why I didn’t write Friday night (that and being totally exhausted from lack of sleep). The thread kept breaking over and over again and I was doing all the things you’re supposed to do (saying prayers to the Goddess of Thread, wafting burning sage throughout the house, dancing the Dance of the Strong Thread) and nothing was working. I finally gave up around midnight, because I knew I had to be up super early on Saturday morning to hike (yes! I hiked! I’ll post that later) and I was just getting frustrated.

I hiked in the morning on Saturday, and some time in the afternoon, after napping (because that’s what lack of sleep and a strenuous hike does to your body), I sat down to finish quilting…except I had to be somewhere later…

But the damn thread was still being cranky. Its’ so irritating to deal with thread sometimes. I mean, you’re already changing bobbins way too often because they’re not very big and don’t hold much thread, but then every time it breaks, you have to tie off and start over again, and it just wears on you. But at that point, I could see the end. I had gotten about 2/3 of the way around the outside edge. I was almost there.

And then I had to stop! It was OK. I went to the Visions Art Museum opening. They currently have Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry’s 30 Quilts for 30 Years, which yes, was at Houston, but is still nice to see again. That’s not why I went. I went because of Deidre Adams’ Tracings, six pieces that she made just for the exhibit, but also because I was hoping to meet her after only knowing her online via her blog and comments she made when I sent photos in for SAQA shows. So that was really nice, not only to see her work up close…this combines paper and her fabric technique of layering color and marks on the piece…but also to see her face to face. You should go read her blogposts about making these pieces if you go…interesting insights into how we sometimes have to work even if our brains aren’t ready for it (I don’t know ANYTHING about that state, right?). I also wanted to see Arline Fisch’s Hanging Garden of California, which was a treat with the artist standing in the middle dressed to match. I’m a bit annoyed that no photos are allowed at all…I can see the point when the pieces are in a book that you can buy, but I think a picture of the art with artist standing by is really cool, and we weren’t allowed to do that. I guess they might find it easier to have the same no-photo policy for all shows, but I think it would be good advertising to let people take photos at shows where publications aren’t available.

So after that, it was the girlchild’s birthday dinner, which was nice, good food and she seemed happy with her gifts (we are supporting her dream of a trip to Paris next summer…scary stuff to think of sending her off, but she’ll be 18 in a year and then off to college).

When I got home, it wasn’t that late, and yes, I was tired again, but the quilt told me that it only needed another hour or so. And it was right. And this time, it didn’t break thread a million times, so I stitched like the wind…

And finished 44 minutes later. Yes, I use an app to keep track of time. My brain isn’t capable.

It was early, so I thought about trying to trim it, but I think this one might be difficult to trim…it’s not particularly straight (my fault…being lazy, stubborn, stupid, I don’t know what) and I’m debating making it not a rectangle. So I thought it would be better to make that decision when I’m fully awake (whenever that might be, because I have half a cup of tea in me and it’s most definitely morning and I actually had almost 9 hours of sleep last night for the first time in like a month, and I am nowhere near fully awake). Soon. Get the rest of the tea in me, finish this post, clear the floor, lay it out, let the brain wander in to a decision.

Shut the negative crap up. Because that voice is going ballistic in there…it’s referencing past failures, berating me for not being more careful when I ironed this together (there’s only so much I can do about my own mental state), it’s listing all the things I need to get done and yelling at me for sleeping too long, for hiking because it took up valuable time, but then also for not going to the gym this morning. So make up your fucking mind…either you want me to exercise and be healthy or you don’t. Seriously. I have to weigh every decision. I went to bed early without meditating because I was exhausted. I would have fallen asleep in meditation, so I just skipped that step and went to bed. Somewhere in my head, I know it was the right decision, but that stupid judgy part of the brain is questioning every single thing I do, every thing I say, every thing that I’ve done in the last 10 years, maybe more.

Shut the fuck up. We all have those voices. They’re just damn annoying. So I need it to get further away before I lay this thing on the floor and decide the damage. The next step. Then I can work my way through the shit on the post-it note in front of my computer, where I tried to corral all the crap that needs to happen today. I can feel inspired by seeing the art last night and the successful hike and the girlchild’s existence and even the fact that my ex and son cleaned the kitchen yesterday before I got home (apparently the girlchild had left a larger disaster than usual, which is what I had been expecting to come home to, so that was a truly wonderful surprise). I want to be invited to do a solo show at Visions, dammit. Don’t know if that will ever happen. My work is a bit more in-your-face than the work of those to whom they usually offer such opportunities. That nasty part of my brain is now telling me to make pretty landscapes. It’s telling me I’ll never get a solo show anywhere. It’s reminding me of all the rejections I’ve gotten in the last 8 months and asking me why I made art at all. Sigh. Making pretty landscapes wouldn’t work either. I need an exorcism. That part of the brain needs to wander off and get hit by a train.

Anyway. Hopefully by tonight, I’ll have it trimmed and the binding machine-stitched on so I can do the handwork. Hopefully I’ll have a bunch of things crossed off this post-it. Hopefully that negative brain piece will have duct tape wrapped tightly around its mouth. I do spend a lot of time hoping.

Book Review: Bloodlight

I recently read a NetGalley book for the purposes of review, Bloodlight: The Apocalypse of Robert Goldner, by Harambee K. Grey-Sun.

I so wanted to like this book. The cover is nice. It starts out telling the story of a boy almost 17 years old who wrestles at school and is kind of a nerd and sort of has a girlfriend, but doesn’t really fit in, and then he starts having these hallucinations and seizures. At that point, the author has asked us to understand the book not as a YA novel (which is good, because it doesn’t do well as that), but as some sort of metaphysical event, which feeds into a strange ending that reads like an X-Files episode gone bad, and not bad in that everyone dies, but bad as in Jumped the Shark bad.

On the one hand, when Grey-Sun is writing descriptions of the brain phases that the main character, Robert Goldner, goes through, his descriptions are beautiful and poetic. In fact, if he just wrote an entire book describing say how an artist views the world or a long LSD trip, he might be getting somewhere, but the story itself is beyond any sort of belief, even for someone who loves sci fi and fantasy and a wide variety of pretty out-there fiction. And the dialogue is awful. It’s so stilted, it’s hard to read it without wincing.

I wavered back and forth between a 1 and a 2 on Goodreads, and stuck with the 2, just because I was really entranced by his descriptions of the epileptic attacks, or whatever they finally were. I had to work hard to make myself finish the book. I was hoping for sense, some clarity. Sigh. No such luck.

Meditate the Fuck through It

Yup. I think that is my mantra for the new school year, which officially starts in 13 days. Don’t count team meetings and getting the room set up and prep days and professional development. Because if you count all that shit, I started yesterday. It’s a matter of looking at everything they want me to do (“they” being an amalgamate of all the people who want me to do all the things) and deciding what pieces are actually possible to do and how much of the doing I will do. And where is the line, the balance, between being a fucking awesome teacher and getting institutionalized for overwork. You take a little piece at a time. You pick one thing, maybe two, that can be different. You don’t rewrite everything. You don’t become an entirely different teacher. You do a little at a time and remember that working yourself into the ground doesn’t help anyone.

There’s been a lot of deep breathing the last two days. I’m OK. My meditation app now includes short, 2-minute refresher meditation blips…passing period is 4 minutes long, so I could meditate in between each class. You laugh, but I did that last year on way too many days. Close the door behind the last kid, gather up the journals, take a handful of deep breaths, wipe tears from eyes, open the door for the next class full of kids. It’s not the best way to live, but when you are in survival mode, that is what you do. Last year, I survived. My counselor has decided that this year, I will have a fulfilling school year. She promises me this. She calls me on my negativity. I call myself on it, but I’m not as good at it. In fact, I mostly suck at it. The parts of my brain argue with each other and there is rarely agreement. My daughter calls me on it too. I guess that’s a good thing. It’s hard to be positive when there have been so many disappointing developments, so many high expectations just completely trashed by someone else. That said, I manage it with art rejections. I’ve been rejected from a ton of shows this year. I can’t get into anything, apparently. Do I stop making art? Do I question my purpose in continuing to make art? Not really. Briefly, and then the art brain tells me to fuck off and ignore all those losers who reject my work. It will get in eventually. I won’t stop making it. I wish I had that confidence in the rest of my life, in my job, my love life, my relationships with people. Why can’t the art brain get all hot and heavy with those parts of me? Where does her attitude come from? How can it just be in part of me and not in all the parts?

All philosophical questions for the middle of the night. Remember how I was going to be done quilting on Tuesday? Yeah. Well. Fuck that. I’m still quilting. I’m 15 hours in now…

So maybe 20 hours was an accurate guess. I have about 1/3 of the quilting around the outside of the image done, maybe a little less than that. I didn’t have a lot of quilting time today. School. Other stuff. So I’m doing a stipple to fill in the background…dark blue thread on dark blue fabric at night. In bad lighting. And the thread was doing really well for a good long time, and then it started breaking. Bastard.

So I gots a little frusterated in the last hour or so. There was swearing and yelling and growling and application of oily crap that keeps the thread from breaking.

This is the backing…

I have most of one long side, all of the top and about half of another long side to do…hopefully done tomorrow. Why do I even predict things like that? I already know how busy tomorrow is. Saturday is busy too. Sunday? Sunday is wide open. Next week. Sigh. I always want to have more done than I do. Always dissatisfied with my progress. High expectations and not meeting them. But it’s a good thing to have high expectations with the artmaking. I’m more realistic with the outcomes. I don’t often chastise myself for not meeting them…I just revise. Again…lessons to apply to the rest of life?

Stitching with friends tonight…still working on the never-ending Christmas stocking…

I post these pictures to prove that I’m actually doing SOMETHING…something besides endlessly stitching around and around in dark blue thread.

This quilt will be done soon. I want to get the binding either Saturday or Sunday, get it stitched on next week. Call the photographer. Move on to the next project(s). I need to build a fabric house, complete 5 birds, and get the gender equality drawing done. I think my brain will be less panicky if I can make headway on that in the next week. Plus school. And clear out all the stuff in my bedroom that belongs in the living room. If I move it out, I think I’ll be more likely to deal with it. If I work on just one positive thing achieved each day (hung a piece of art, finished one step in the next quilt, crossed one thing off the list), I think it will all feel better. This is partially why I’m doing the GISHWHES thing…it’s goofy stuff (we shot a rock album cover last night, and tonight I added the band name and album title and submitted it), but it’s fun and I am actually getting these silly tasks done. It puts my brain in a different place. I need my brain to be in a different place. I need it to stop going over and over what I did wrong, when in reality, I didn’t do anything wrong. I just wasn’t psychic. Again. There’s a drawing in there somewhere. At least one. I need to find time for that too. The drawing is part of processing the bad shit out of me. The drawing is a way to vomit it up and get it out, like a hairball. Poison in the brain. Disgusting on the carpet.

Sigh. One of the projects that needs to be done before the end of the month is a floating house, and I have all the materials (coathangers, wire, organza, tulle) and I was thinking about what the house meant and how to build and decorate it, and all of a sudden, I thought: worry dolls. I need worry dolls. Kathy York’s quilts reminded me of them. So I’m hanging worry dolls off this house, but I think I’m also going to write some of my worries down, either on tags tied to the dolls, or maybe just right on the house itself, on the bits hanging off of it. Write down the worries, have them pulled down, weighed down, by the dolls. Because that is what worry feels like, extreme financial worry, worry for sending the boychild off to college, worry about my own job, worry about finishing stuff on time, worry about the girlchild applying to college, worry about my future, worry about so many things. Maybe if I tie all that to the floating house, I won’t have to carry them around myself.

You can see why I need the meditation.

Outlined

So the plus is that all the outlining is done. The minus is that I want to finish the fucker and I have to go to school today. I think that is the core problem with my entire life (not really), that I’m always interrupting my art with that silly job thing that pays the bills (and honestly, gets me out of the house and dealing with people, which I really don’t like at the moment, because otherwise I’d be a giant hermit who only comes out for groceries once a week and snarls at everyone when she does come out…oh shit, I think I already do that).

Fucking Sigh.

Anyway, I quilted for another 3 1/2 hours yesterday, not starting until late again (maybe I should just dispose of that notion that I get any work done in the mornings at all, because I don’t) and only stopped because I knew how early I’d have to be up this lovely fucking morning (can you tell how thrilled I am by the prospect of 7 hours of professional development?). And then realized that I wasn’t tired yet, that my brain was speeding along, all excited that the quilting is almost done (Is It? Is It Really? Or do I have hours of filling in the background to go. C’mon brain. Figure it out.), so I didn’t go right to bed, which is what I should have done, because I’m “awake” now and my brain is significantly impaired by the lack of sleep I got anyway, despite stopping early.

I was quilting the upper torso, head, a giant eyeball, a dog, and a chastising thought bubble. In fact, I think I’m going to make a small quilt just of that thought bubble and call it Chastising Thought Bubble. It would also make a good band name.

I had to do a lot of careful stitching through this section…I’m over 12 hours in at this point, but remember, I guessed 20. I think that’s an overestimate at this point, but I could be wrong. That’s the heart.

It doesn’t really matter. Time is time. It gets used up one way or another. I was looking forward to the detail of the line stitching on the face. It always brings the face to life. I don’t always use fabrics with a lot of contrast on bodies, especially the face, because I expect the line to be a major part of the image. So here’s the face before stitching…

And during stitching. I went really slow with the eyes because of the details. Even the whites of the eyes are filling up with tears.

This quilt is all about the sad. The lost. The losing. The changes. A friend of a friend posted a link to an article about menopause, a humorous article about the blood and the irritability and the facial hair and all those things that come with being a woman approaching her 50s, and her husband posted a beautiful remark, and I thought, “Wow. That’s what it should have been like. That’s what you’re missing. That’s what you didn’t have. Support. Unconditional love.” And all that’s in there too. This notion of what a woman is and should be, this crap from the 50s about the perfect housewife providing for her man in this way is still an expectation in the backs of many men’s heads, even as they say all the appropriately modern things about women being equals. I read elsewhere about “nice guy misogynists”…guys who are generally nice, but harbor these feelings deep down about women cooking and cleaning and always perky and happy and men needing things done for them after a hard day at work (think Mad Men, which I can’t watch at all). All that’s in there. Plus a broken heart and a lost something. Just plain lost.

There’s her face with the stitching. See the difference?

There isn’t actually a lot of background on this quilt…the image does a good job of filling the fabric, but today’s activities don’t leave much room for quilting, so maybe that will have to be Thursday. The schedule adjusts yet again.

There are a lot of tears on this quilt…both in fabric and real-live ones that fell while I was working on it. Drawing it, tracing it, cutting it out, ironing it to fabric…I cried. I cried when I trimmed the fabric, when I ironed it together, when I stitched it down, and when I quilted it. I will probably cry while I bind it too.

When I stopped quilting to go to sleep, my brain did not want to comply. It often just fucking ignores me, which is greatly annoying, but what are you going to do? No idea. Let me know if you figure it out. So I only had the sleeve left to stitch on the Mammogram quilt. So I did that…

Not an official picture, but it’s officially done as of August 6 at about 1:30 AM. Fuck. Not enough sleep, people. Not enough sleep.

Rethinking…

Triggers: places where I have no definitive purpose. I had to limp the car in to the car guy, stopping every 3-4 blocks to get it to stop overheating, girlchild following me, turning the engine off at every signal. She had an early appointment and was tired and cranky, so she didn’t want to go back home. She needed makeup for her senior photo today, and though I had tried getting it last month when I was in a store I visit approximately once every 13.5 months, she didn’t answer the text in time, so of course it was my fault she didn’t think of it until 9 PM last night. So she argued I could drop her at her appointment, go to the mall (aaargh, shoot me now), buy it, and come back in time to pick her up.

Sigh. I hadn’t eaten. I thought I was going back home. But I pick my arguments these days, and sometimes it’s just easier to go along with her.

So to the mall I went. And realized Walmart and Target are here, so I might as well get school supplies off my list (your friendly neighborhood public school teacher just spent $150 of her own money on your kids…one woman thanked me for my service when she asked why I was buying so many folders.). Because that’s not depressing. Half the mall stores aren’t even open until 10 though, so I’m typing this on my phone in Panera (better than Cold Stone for breakfast), where Wyatt cheerily and spacily took my order (oh my lord, you dear sweet boy…who hired you?). But I still have 25 minutes until Macys fucking opens and the muzak and early morning mall people are driving me nuts. And I just realized the kid who told me I could keep the plate that he did his cell model on must have stolen it from Panera. Ok, probably not. I don’t want to accuse someone of stealing just because it looks exactly like this plate in front of me that had over 500 calories on it that I will have to burn off later.

And you know what? The mall, by myself, is a fucking trigger. It makes me sad. It makes me depressed. Sitting around and watching mall people in the mall doing mall things, all being mall-like, I shouldn’t be there. If I go in knowing exactly what I need, like a target strike, and get the fuck back out quickly? I’m fine. Or with other people, I’m OK. Mostly. Depending on the purpose and the people. But this really fucked my mood for the day. I was doing OK yesterday. Not great. Just OK. Bearable. Not drowning in anything. Today. Today is different. Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow does not include the mall.

At comic book club, we decided we didn’t like the book…Pretty Deadly, Vol 1. The art was nice, but the story was just not present. Or coherent. Sigh.

Or should that be comic-book book club. Or comic book² club. No one knows.

I did quilt a lot yesterday. I got everything done up to the breasts. I only did about 4 hours though. I wanted at least 5, but when I got home, girlchild wanted help picking her photo outfit, which turned into “what’s my favorite color”…

(yes, that’s a snake on her head and no, that’s not what she wore for pictures, although I did double dare her), and I needed to draw something for GISHWHES, and my SIL called and I talked to my brother, because he remembers “write me a note telling me WHY,” from middle school, and then it was really late and I knew I had to get up early to deal with the car. And tomorrow is a total loss (first professional development of the year, expect nothing and you will only be surprised by whatever it is, although the over-2-hour long movie presentation planned for 1-3 PM will make me sleep…is he fucking NUTS?). And now it’s after 4 PM and I still haven’t started quilting today. FUCK.

My scheduling has deteriorated into a WTF moment. I am losing it. Deep breaths. I achieve small things each day; some days the achievements are smaller than others. They are still achievements.

I think I need to go crawl into a ball shape and put a pillow over my head, and then maybe my eye will stop twitching and faeries will come and organize the hoard, plus make a reasonable schedule of all the tasks that need to be completed before August 31, and if I’m lucky, they’ll suss out my personal life as well so I can feel more human and less like everyone’s mom. EVERYONE’S mom. Yours too. Or a sad ball of snot. That’s not your mom.

So quilting…

And more…

And even more…

Not much to say, except wow. There’s a lot of quilting on this sucker.

Learning to think differently about things is not the same as positive thinking. When people tell me to be more positive, I think actually it is more useful to me to have a neutral response to things that might normally cause me to stress excessively. For example, when my credit card number was stolen, in the past, I would have freaked out and stressed and verbalized all that. Instead, I had a very neutral, calm response. Shit happens. Go through steps 1-3 and shit will go away. And I did that. And it did. So as more stressful things are popping up this week with school coming closer for me and the kids, and the thought of sending boychild off with all the stuff that goes along with that, I’m better off thinking about major stressors in a neutral way. It’s in my nature to want to be prepared, so I have a couple things in my brain for one thing that’s coming up that is causing some PTSD related to authority figures. There’s a mantra in my head from a recent stressful event…”don’t say anything until they’ve talked. don’t freak out. don’t say anything.” One friend said I wasn’t being true to my self, but I’m not sure that my self is particularly helpful in these situations. Sometimes she just needs to calm down and hear all the words…and all the NOT words, because there seems to be a lot unsaid. I spent the last few years feeling attacked for having the wrong feelings and saying the wrong things, and feeling like no one was listening to what I was saying, even though I was the only one actually communicating. But what I said was never heard. It was never considered. In multiple parts of my life, that is still the case. I feel a need to guard my self more carefully now. She needs more protection than she used to, and it’s possible that communicating what she’s thinking is not in my best interest at the moment. Maybe I just need to hold what she’s thinking carefully in my head instead of putting it out there. For now. I’d love to be able to trust someone enough to not feel that way, but I don’t.

“If we decide to think positively, that may be useful, but it is not meditation. It is just more thinking. We can as easily become a prisoner of so-called positive thinking as of negative thinking. It too can be confining, fragmented, inaccurate, illusory, self-serving, and wrong.” Jon Kabat-Zinn

To me, all that overly positive thinking, the cliches and cute little things on Pinterest and Facebook, it’s just a mask. It’s not real. It’s hard for someone like me to read them and think, oh yeah, if I just THOUGHT hard enough (because I don’t think hard?), I would be happy. It’s magic. I’m just not doing it right. No, ma’am. You’ve spent two years being told you weren’t doing it right. I was doing. I was talking. I was thinking. I was watching. There is a change that needs to happen, and it is, slowly, like a snail traversing gravel, but it’s not about cute little maxims. It’s about changing the response. Letting the big bad stuff just roll over into the swamp behind me. Pushing forward through hanging vines and snakes without letting them grab on and trigger that fear, that fight-or-flight response, that adrenaline rush caused by stress. Or even that sad wave, so different than the fear, more of a washing over your head than an electrical charge to the heart.

OK. With all that in my head, it’s probably best that I quilt for the next 10 hours before talking again.

Plans Shmans…

So much for planning to quilt, eh? Sheesh. I don’t think I even started quilting until almost midnight. Oh wait, I lie. I did 17 minutes and 51 seconds before I went to the girlchild’s soccer game. So no, I didn’t get much done. I was tired too. Maybe an hour and 15 minutes. That just sucks. It means I am on a mission today. I am going to quilt my ass off. I would take a picture right here of my ass before and after so you could see it, but I’d probably get in trouble for that. It does help that I have no car today…one needs fixing and is mostly undrivable and the other one has been bogarted by the girlchild.

Here’s some highlights of things that were quilted Sunday…electrified monitors…

Lots of octopus tentacle suckers…

This is what it looks like all piled next to the sewing machine…it’s a really LONG piece, so shoving parts under the machine to quilt in the middle is a pain in the ass.

She’s all done though. Down in the water.

I’m almost done with the water section and I’ve done the two larger things on either side of the main figure. Today I’m going to hopefully get a good chunk of the torso done. Seriously, I’ve got somewhere to be tonight, but otherwise I have no excuses. Well, I do have lots of other things I should be doing as well, but I’m blowing them off. Here I am telling you that I’m blowing them off, so no, no shelves in the living room, no hanging art in there, no starting my lesson plans, no getting that other drawing done or doing anything with the 5 birds that now need to be done or that house thing, no clearing all the living room crap out of my room, and certainly no yardwork.

I am trying to do at least one GISHWHES item a day. Yesterday involved Legos, and despite the boychild adamantly refusing to be part of anything, wow. There he is. On the floor. Aged 18 and playing with Legos. Now he didn’t try to build a lot of novel stuff like the girlchild and I were doing, but whatever.

Again, photos of these challenges will go up when I’m allowed to do that (maybe next week?). And yes, me (age 47), my daughter (17 next weekend), and son (18) were all playing with Legos for at least an hour. There is nothing wrong with that. Calli was remarkably useless. At one point, she tried to eat Hedwig (you can see the small white thing about 6″ from her nose), but then she just gave up and slept.

Soccer was interesting, in that another almost-fight happened. Fun stuff. Girchild was funny, said something about how they’re all almost 18 and this is how they’re behaving? Like a fight will help? Love that kid.

When they go to head the ball, they all close their eyes and leap into the air. The ball often misses all of them completely. Interestingly, the ball hit girlchild’s head and she headed it into the other player’s head. Yes, it all sounds very dangerous. Because it is.

This flew over.

I don’t know why I took a picture of it, but it came out better than the other 72 soccer pictures I took. Sad but true.

OK. My ass. Quilting. Because if we’re still looking at my original plan of finishing tomorrow, I have about 15 hours of quilting to do in two days. HA! Laugh all you like.

Notes on Life Drawing

One of my goals for the summer was to go to a local life-drawing class once a week. I miss the focused time with a sketchbook, plus the looseness of pencil and quick poses, just to get your hand and brain talking to each other again in that free and loose and wiggly way. I’m pretty constrained and tight when I draw…not in a bad way, because my brain is fairly loose about it, but the drawing itself is not very freeform. It’s very focused. And that’s on purpose. So life drawing is different, but useful to keeping the drawing progressing or developing or something.

I went over Spring Break and it was good, and I had done one or two Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School events last year (haven’t been able to make it to one since then), so summer seemed like a good time to try to go regularly.

Basically I suck at that. Mostly that’s because although I have a good time (in the dead silence with my pencil sharpener and only that really weird slightly mentally maybe ill or I don’t know what woman talks to me, and she’s not all there) and it relaxes me and I enjoy it, it’s not always what I want to be doing. The summer is so tight with deadlines, because the school year is a bitch when it comes to making art, and those deadlines make me NOT want to leave the house for any reason at all, especially to do something I already know how to do.

Except it’s not about knowing how to do it. It’s about keeping those two, the brain and the hand, in close contact, communicating with each other.

There is a Saturday morning class I could go to all year long if I wanted to, but if I don’t have something like a hike planned for Saturday morning, then dammit, I want to still be asleep for once…especially during the school year, when waking up gets downright painful. So I go to Thursday morning, which because it is a work day for most of the normal world, is full of old men, a few old women, and some college kids. Lots of old men. Did I mention old men? And some are very nice and even smile and say “How are you?” like they might even care, but most of them are crotchety growling old crankballs.

Things that happen at life drawing:

Once the light fell down on one of the artists, bonking him in the head. That caused a lot of frantic chattering for a while.

There’s no air-conditioning, and they have to place the fan so it doesn’t ruffle paper or overly dry watercolors or acrylics or push pastel dust across a drawing. Difficult to do.

Someone talked about playing music while we drew and one of the old guys (there are lots of them) said it would be OK if we were basket weaving or knitting, but not for figure drawing. The guy then said, what about classical music? And the old man went off on types of music and not wanting to hear all that rabble. UM. First of all, music is OK if we’re working with FIBER? I’m fairly sure there was a sexist thing going on in there, and now every time I look at that old guy (because he’s there every time, probably because his wife kicks him out of the house because she’s annoyed by him) I imagine him yarnbombed. Seriously. Just his eyes are showing and we left his hands free so he can paint or draw without any noise whatsoever but the sputterings from his constrained mouth.

There was once a long discussion of the merits of ten 2-minute poses vs five 3-minute poses.

There are lots of old men. I said this already. A few 20-something’s. A couple of old ladies. A gay man with his spiky-red-haired woman friend. I know he’s gay because he keeps pronouncing all these things about gay men and then reminding everyone around him that he IS one. If a straight man did that, he would be called a homophobe, so I guess this guy is a heterophobe? I don’t really believe that. He won’t shut up though. One woman whom I suspect of having a mental disorder. Hearing aids. There are a lot of hearing aids. I think I’m going to try Dr. AntiSketchy again soon…because it was more fun. Although trying to draw all their costuming is a pain in the ass. I’d really just rather deal with the body without all the clothing crap (as I’m sure is obvious by my own art. Fuck the clothes. They’re a pain and I’m all about what the body is doing, inside and out.).

I don’t like sitting at a table in a chair. I’m short and I can’t see over other people, plus you’re looking at the model from underneath because of the staging situation. So I sit on the counter around the edge. This disturbs most people. They feel a need to comment. It doesn’t seem to be against the rules though.

Models are always pretty young girls and one older tattooed guy. I have been doing life drawing since I was in college, that was starting almost 30 years ago, and there is always only one guy and he’s older and significantly muscled and tattooed. Honestly, I wanted to draw his tats. They were more interesting, but I needed to be closer to do that, and then you’re just drawing someone else’s drawing, and that’s just weird.

One of the older women is wearing a University of Mars T-shirt. The old men are cranky or wearing suspenders. Or sometimes both.

So I don’t know if this is something I really need to do every week. I’ve done it twice during summer and I’m running out of days I can continue to do it on Thursday. But did I mention that Dr. Sketchy events are always held in or near a bar (drinking while drawing!) and later in the day so I don’t have to get up early after staying up until the roosters crow AND, here is the most important thing, you crotchety old man: There’s fucking music. So. Unfortunately I can’t go in August or probably September even, but at least I know what my preference is. I will keep doing life drawing on and off (I really miss the class I used to do way back when I was still married…the organizer did an awesome job of getting a variety of models and it was always interesting and not silent and just more fun. That was the class that significantly upset my then-husband. He didn’t like me drawing naked people. They’re NUDE when they’re up on the platform. They’re NAKED when they step down, and they always get dressed before they step down.). I don’t need entertainment, but I do need to feel like if I’m gonna sneeze, people will bless me instead of cursing me.

Head’s in a Weird Space…

I’m sitting here at midnight on a Saturday listening to the rain pour down through the trees outside my office window. It’s been so warm the last week, and although it is still warm (and now abnormally humid for San Diego), the air has that rain feel to it. It’s nice. It feels good to my heart. Deep breaths of that rain air. Makes up for a long silent day of sitting on soccer fields and not feeling connected to anything or anyone. It’s a tournament weekend, obviously.

I really wanted to get a lot of quilting done today, but soccer was not helping with that. I realize I could send my daughter, who drives, off to these games by herself, but this is her last year in high school, the last year she’s home. Plus it always irritated me that my parents blew off most of my sports events once I was old enough to drive. Her dad has his own club team this year, and all the games are conflicting and at totally different fields, so he’s showing up for about half her games. She needs someone there. And she? She really does.

I did quilt today. I wanted to do 4 hours. I did 2.

This quilt is so detailed and complicated to quilt. I’m still down in the water section, although I’ve started one of the things that sits on the water on the left side…I still have to finish the seaweed, fish, and water on the right side. I’m still sticking to my 20-hour estimate though…

I just may not get 20 hours in total by Tuesday PM. At this point, that would mean 5 hours each day, and I just don’t think I can pull that off. We’ll see. I’m a little obsessed with this art stuff.

Still raining. So nice to hear.

I have to admit, it was a hard day today. I wrote sci fi for a while before the first game, only a thousand words or so. I’m stuck in this place where I want the science to be good, but I don’t know enough about it to make sure that it is. I will have to deal with that at some point. I kinda wish there was a plant scientist sitting right next to me sometimes. I write comments to myself (I’m using Google Docs to write), reminding me to check this scientific process or vocabulary later on. Right now, it’s probably more important that I just write.

That is what my document is called by the way: JustWrite.

Girlchild had two games today.

She also broke up a fight in this one. First time I’ve seen the girls almost come to blows, and she yelled out in this deep voice to get them to stop…I recognized that voice. It’s the one I use at school when I see a fight about to happen. Or when the kids are just getting out of hand. Deep. Guttural. They pay attention. It worked. The ref? Sigh. Take control, man.

So one of the things that started today was GISHWHES (The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen), which is a goofy image/video scavenger hunt with over 150 items. Teams of 15 people work to get the images and videos uploaded over a week’s time, and many of them require some feats of magic, honestly. I’m part of a Geek Girls Meetup group (yeah, laugh at me. I am one.) that had I think 9 members willing to play, and then we were combined with a group of college girls out of Illinois. This is the stuff that Old Kathy loved. I’m not allowed to post pictures of my items until after the event closes, but I’m saving them. I’m trying to do one a day, although there are some we will try to do as a local group maybe? I tend to pick the more artistic ones (shockingly), but there might be a duet between the girlchild and I, if I can figure out how to pull it off. She sings better than I do, but I have heart and soul. Or something.

She totally is willing to assist, but the boychild is adamantly against helping in any way, shape, or form…which is funny, because it’s totally a college-kid kind of event. Anyway. This is who I am. The wacky creative sort that can figure out what condiments mix together to make flesh colors. Not to mention, we have a lot of Legos.

Please try to figure out how many people are in this photo. I count 7 legs in the pile-up. That seems wrong.

We won one and lost one…

It rained for most of the second game. It RAINED. In San Diego in August. So fucking delightful. I put sunscreen on for the first game, because I will fry in overcast skies, but for the second game, that’s the umbrella and my stitching underneath it. Humid and warm, but wet…

I’m not actually getting much done on the birds, because she’s playing a lot of the games…lots of injuries on the team at the moment, so more opportunities to play. They played the team she used to be on in the second game, which was a little weird…

And unfortunately, that’s the game they lost (by one silly goal). If they make it to the finals tomorrow, they will probably play them again.

Because my brain is not working properly again (fuck me. When DOES it ever work properly?), I thought we’d have time to go home in between the two games and we really didn’t, so we found a weird little Starbucks with crappy Wifi nearby and ate lunch and hung out there. I wrote a little, read the worst book ever (I have to write a review later), and filled in the GISHWHES chart we made so that we could each sign up for specific tasks. By the way, if you know a friendly professional barista in the San Diego area who wants to conspire with me on an artistic activity, let me know. I’m not a professional.

After the second game, I was a good girl and went to the gym. And there are games tomorrow. And maybe tomorrow I can handle the Lego task for GISHWHES. And quilt for 5 hours. I haven’t talked to another human being since 4:42 PM. That’s the stuff that drives me bonkers. I think I already spend way too much time in my head for that shit to be healthy. In fact, the girlchild was trying to listen to an audiobook on the way back from soccer, and I was talking, and she got all irritated because she was trying to listen to the book, and I told her, “Hey. I have no one to talk to until tomorrow…19 hours or so from now.” She felt bad and talked to me on the way home. I wasn’t trying to guilt-trip her. It was reality. I really didn’t have anyone else to talk to. I needed to quilt. I also needed some human connection before I went into the cave that is my antisocial silent world. Talking to the cats and the TV doesn’t count.

Tomorrow? More of the same. Head is in a weird space. It may never come out.

Yarnbombing the World and Other Fiber Stories

I spent a lot of time with fiber today…

I went up to Oceanside and Vista to see some quilt-related stuff, and that led to yarn bombing stuff…

Like this yarnbombed payphone that is actually an iPhone…

Pretty well done, actually…Wait. Actually it’s NOT an iPhone. It’s not even a payphone. It’s an empty space where a payphone used to be. Actually.

This is in front of the Oceanside Library, if you want to see it…

And the other cool stuff that was there…like sweaters for hamsters hanging out to dry.

Lots of yarn was used up in this endeavor…

As well as all those bits and pieces that you started knitting and crocheting and don’t know what to do with them?

Now you know.

Plus. If it has eyeballs…

Then odds are I’m going to take a picture of it…

But since this is the entrance to the library, you know the kids are gonna love it too…

Or be totally creeped out by it and refuse to go in.

Cool feet. And eyeball.

I used to knit AND crochet. Regular Renaissance woman, I am. Now I stick to being a modern woman. Except minus the pointy bra and the Mother’s Little Helper in the cupboard for afternoons post-child.

And yet I don’t yarnbomb. I’m kind of a fan of trees. But also of the absurd. I think it would be cool to yarnbomb a single tree about 20 miles from any access point, like way out in the mountains. But someone’s probably already done that.

So we went to the Rancho Buena Vista Adobe for some quilts that were there…

It had been a while since I’d been there, so I probably have a picture of this mosaic from a million years ago…

And no, it’s not like I needed inspiration to persuade myself that lots of pieces is better than not very many.

I really like that sun. And I liked her…

especially her face up close…

A level of peace I find hard to come by. Plus…waterspots. And this sign…

Too many words for drunk people.

From there, we headed to the Oceanside Museum of Art, where one of the traveling portions of Quilt National opened this last week. No photos allowed, but what’s funny is that I don’t remember some of the quilts. I must have gone through that exhibit 17 times over the three days we were there, and I didn’t remember some of them. There are some wonderful pieces up there, though, totally worth the $8. I would pay $8 just to see Susan Lenz’ graveyard rubbings and Paula Kovarik’s round piece again. Oh yeah, and Brooke Atherton’s journal/map piece. Drop dead gorgeous. So that was nice.

And afterwards, we had Thai food…I don’t know that I’ve ever had Thai, because…well, let’s just say it wasn’t a choice I made…to me, Asian food is all very similar, plus this spice or that one, minus this grass or that one. Then again, the only food I really can’t handle is fish…well, and chocolate, but that’s not usually the main dish.

Van Gogh was checking the time…

I love these Van-Gogh-esque trees (so much drawing inspiration…like I need MORE of that).

Even the tulips on the utility box…well, one of them anyway…

The other one was very bad and didn’t deserve tulips.

I didn’t start quilting until late…I know I have to finish this one up quickly, because I’ve got lots more to do before school starts…and this one is a big bad beastie of a quilt…this is the back…

Luckily, the thread isn’t breaking very often and it’s quilting well, but there are just a LOT of pieces and fiddly bits, so it takes time.

I made it through all the dirt parts, I think…Calli was incredibly helpful, of course.

This is where I gave up…I realized how early I have to get up in the morning for the soccer tournament, and my car overheated today, so I was down in the driveway at almost midnight putting coolant in the radiator, and I still don’t trust it to drive to UCSD tomorrow morning, so we’ll take the kids’ car, but it needs gas. Sigh.

I wanted to get like 5 hours of quilting in today (probably somewhat unrealistic). I managed two.

Eighteen (at least) to go. Realistically? I could finish quilting her by Tuesday maybe. I could do sooner, but only if girlchild doesn’t make it to the finals on Sunday. And I’m probably not supposed to hope for that. There’s no time between games tomorrow, but I have most of the afternoon…although I need to go to the gym and I’m blowing off any possibility of a social life to make quilts. Now there’s a decision for you. So I could realistically get maybe 3 or 4 hours in tomorrow. Sunday, maybe the same, depending on the final and grocery shopping. Monday could be the last bit. If I buckled down and worked my butt off. So I’m sticking with my Tuesday estimate. Of course, I’ll probably have to go back to the fabric store for binding again. Maybe that should just be my Tuesday thang. Buying binding fabric. Whether you need it or not.

Then I have all the materials for the house thing I need to do, plus now I need to do some birds for that as well, plus potentially three more birds. And the gender equality drawing needs to get done and numbered and traced. Plus I might need to actually think about and prepare for school. Nope. Fuck that. I will figure that balance thing out if it kills me. I did OK with balance last year in terms of art v. schoolwork. I just need to make sure I take care of myself too, and that was difficult last year. I have permission from my counselor at the moment to cry as needed, to do what I want, and to take care of myself for the next two weeks without dealing with school. It’s not a very realistic thing, that, but it’s nice to keep it in the back of my mind for when I’m feeling a bit crazy about going back and losing the boychild and coping with my existing life. I’m so incredibly busy, but so incredibly alone in that incredible busy-ness. Not good.

Working on this quilt though? Good. It’s powerful. Of course, that means it won’t get in anywhere, but whatever. It will still kick ass.