Missing: Brain

Description: gray, white, pink, lots of surface area, bad attitude. Last seen: wandering the streets cluelessly, not following instructions.

I have another post I started writing this morning, but it requires brain power and I am missing significant portions of my brain tonight. They have just wandered off for a nap or a vacation or something…they muttered as they went by, so I’m not really sure what their issue is. I just know that there’s some resentment and anger, and I can’t really deal with their drama right now, so I’m just going to let them have some time to themselves and hope we can converse in a civil manner tomorrow.

I am such a tolerant brain owner.

Seriously, though, the numbness continues, but my counselor says that she has heard a real laugh out of me the last two weeks instead of just my nervous laugh (I have spent the last 7 hours trying to imagine what my nervous laugh sounds like…I cannot produce it on command and apparently have no control over my laughing). I guess that’s good. We talked about stress and how my reaction to stressful events and non-stressful events are somewhat flipped, backwards even, and I need to figure that out and switch them. But acknowledge that numbness is some version of healthy, of my brain trying to protect me or give me a rest from constant hypervigilance. It doesn’t help with the crying though. I am numb but then I cry. At the drop of a freakin’ hat. It’s so hard to be at social events sometimes because the stupidest stuff will upset me and I have to work really hard not to tear up. Not acceptable behavior…unless you’re at a funeral. Or a wedding. Neither of which do I attend with any frequency.

I drew during prep yesterday. It’s not very exciting and it’s certainly not done.

But it’s pen on paper. Blurry? Camera sucks. But drawing. Drawing good.

Girlchild had her last playoff game tonight, because they lost 0-1…

It was dark, so I’m not sure why I started taking pictures…except that she was on the field and that was kind of amazing for her coach.

And yes, it was on-and-off pouring rain. Fun stuff. She went up to head the ball and headed the other player at the same time, right above the eye…it’s all swollen and purple now. She’ll probably have a black eye. Good times.

I like to set goals for the weekends. It keeps me (sometimes) from wallowing too deeply in depressive thoughts about what I used to do on weekends and how they feel now, which is mostly like shit. I need to go to the gym and I have a hike planned, even though there’s some rain wandering around the county. It should be OK. I have a ton of grading to get done before Thursday, when the gradebook opens. I want to get a good chunk of it done this weekend, because the week is awfully full already. I want to get the big long tall drawing done…there’s not that much left to do. I want to start ironing Wonder Under onto fabrics for the Mammogram quilt. That means I need to figure out a setup to keep Babygirl off the ironing board for a few days (barbed wire? fencing around the ironing board?).

Not much. There’s a bunch of errands sprinkled in there as well, plus installing external hard drives and moving stuff around to hopefully help the computer run better. Plus some yardwork. Did I tell you two big branches came down in the storm? They missed the house luckily…last time, one spiked the roof into the bathroom ceiling. Still haven’t fixed the inside part…the outside is fixed.

Maybe I’ll even take a nap. Could happen. It would help if those pieces of the brain would come back. I kinda need their assistance.

Unacceptable…

I got an invitation to apply to a juried art competition for American women artists, art that “exemplifies the utmost in excellence in terms of composition, technique, mastery of medium and quality of design.” Then they listed “acceptable” and “not accepted” media. Um. So first of all, those aren’t antonyms really. It should be “accepted” and “not accepted” OR “acceptable” and “unacceptable.” Yes, I’m pedantic about language…but here’s the thing…acceptable means something very different here than accepted…also because what I do, fiber art, is not in the “acceptable” range. Painting is (of course), as is sculpture and drawing. Textile and fiber art are listed in the “not accepted” (unacceptable?) range.

But fiber art is almost exclusively a female art. Now they knocked photography out too, so they are obviously clinically deranged, but whatever. Also not accepted are “craft, jewelry…any work containing computer-generated elements, prints”…so basically all the art forms I have used over the years are unacceptable. My subject matter is on the fringe, and so is my medium.

I’m reading a book about art called Making Art: Form and Meaning, by Terry Barrett, and he talks about choosing your medium to fit your message. I don’t know how much I chose fabric, or whether it chose me. I don’t know when I made the decision to fully move away from screenprinting to quilt art. I know I was never a great painter…or sculptor…or photographer. I could draw though. I did all of it in school and quite a bit of it afterwards…but pen on paper and then translating that into fabric has been my preferred artistic form of communication for an awfully long time, like since 1991? OK, I probably got serious about fabric only in about 1996 or so.

Anyway, the picture I spent a lot of time staring at in that book, like for the last three days, was Frida Kahlo’s What the Water Gave Me…

an amazing painting. I think I have a bathtub drawing coming…it has to be better than George W’s version…

Yup. Our former president apparently has nothing in the water. Totally. Anyway, I think of the bathtub as this introspective place, and I think Kahlo expresses that well…that time in your head when you are floating in warm water, and you can see your toes, but all the trials and tribulations of the day are floating there in front of you (please note again the emptiness of Bush’s bathtub…a metaphor for the empty mind?). Anyway. It’s an image that has stuck with me, and then because of the title, this song has been in my head for days as well…

Sigh. The weird connections of art and emotions. And yes, Florence admits to looking at Kahlo’s painting when she wrote the song…she spoke of the ocean being “nature’s great overwhelmer.” I think kids are the great overwhelmer personally, but I don’t think Florence has had any of those yet.

The next email that came through? “Create instant happiness by injecting color into your house.” Really? Oh…so THAT’S how it works. Damn. These people have obviously never seen my house…lack of color is not the issue…and if only it were so simple to just paint a few walls and add some colorful cushions and BAM! You’re fucking happy. I mean, the wall facing my kitchen is bright red. I don’t think it’s an issue.

So I had a day. And sometimes I just pick up science journals in between classes and make the kids line up outside so I have a whole 48 seconds of silence…of breathing calmly…of preparing my head for the next onslaught. I play music. I sing to myself. Apparently today I was in Roast Mode. I don’t roast on purpose. I just state the obvious. Apparently that’s roasting. We are nearing the end of the light unit (the unit on light…not the unit that is light in content…in fact, trying to explain the difference between reflection and refraction to 7th-grade brains more interested in candy and farting…yes…farting…is remarkably difficult and not light at all). It doesn’t actually get better or easier, but talking about DNA and genetics is a bit more engaging than light…even with 400 optical illusions to show them. I think I just need a change of topic…because if one more kid tells me that the CAUSE of rainbows is ROY G. BIV? That might be the straw that breaks this camel’s back.

I got an email from the girlchild’s English teacher today (fun stuff, let me tell you), and it was RIFE with typos and grammatical errors. I refrained from marking it up and sending it back with a grade on it. Really. I did REFRAIN.

Teaching is not easy. Teaching is one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever done…not as hard as being a single/divorced parent…but close. You are parent, disciplinarian, hard-ass, therapist, content-expert, maid, actor, feeder of the mind (sometimes of the body as well)…and somehow you have to find sanity in all that. Sometimes that is very hard to do. I’m better at it now. I’m better at it while depressed. I don’t know what that means.

So it’s important that I find some balance…this school year more than any other has been about that balance…especially with the depression throwing me completely OFF balance, destroying motivation, fucking with my mood, messing with my ability to deal with the simplest things. I’ve dropped so many balls this year. I thought I would be in a better place by now, but I’m stuck in a sad swamp. I made myself exercise tonight, then finished a book…and treated myself with Mexican food. I don’t hardly ever eat out any more, but after the gym, my blood sugar was crashing, and the thought of having to come home and cook something that I really didn’t want to eat was SO depressing that I stopped at the local good Mexican food place. It was worth it. Calories? Yup. But I don’t think you can live like a monk all the time and not have the joy of guacamole in a burrito.

Then I came home and meditated and drew…I drew very very slowly, because (1) I’m really tired and (2) I’m not sure what’s coming next…I have to let my brain work it through. I know I want a wolf in there somewhere, but haven’t figured out how to fit it in…I thought originally that she (the chick at the bottom) was under water…

But maybe she’s not…maybe all that is behind her and she’s sitting on the ground. I don’t know.

It’s not like I’m portraying reality here. I’m pretty sure Kahlo didn’t worry about shit like that. And my stuff certainly has surrealistic tendencies. I can decide that’s the bottom of the ocean and wolves live down there…SEA WOLVES. Or not. Maybe there’s an aquarium behind her. Yeah. That’s it. She’s at the fucking aquarium. NAKED. Insert hysterical laughter here. I think I need to go hang out with some artists for a while…not sure where I will find them. It’s really alienating to never have other artists to talk to in person. I love book club, but I think I need art club. Then again, so many artists drive me bonkers with artspeak and pretentiousness. Sigh.

Oh who cares. I’m just drawing. Insight into the artist’s mind. Wish I could have read Frida’s blog. We could have gone out for a glass of wine and complained about how big of an ass Diego was. Could have been good.

Take a Sad Song…

So much for my plan to go to sleep earlier…my brain got in the way tonight and forced me to draw to make it better.

It was late and my brain just didn’t fucking care…it was disinterested in the whole “normal amount of sleep” theory and how sleep is supposed to protect me from all this health shit. Vicious damn cycle. Can’t sleep. Health is an issue. Can’t sleep. Depression. Depression affects health, affects sleep. Fuck it.

I’m still working on this drawing. It has so much detail in it that I will be hating myself when I go to make it…because I don’t think I can enlarge it more than 200%. So those suckers on the octopus? Holy crap. They will be tiny (they are two concentric circles). Whatever. It demands to be the way it is. I didn’t draw for long, about 30 minutes. I just felt so shitty after meditation…which is probably not the way it should work, but it did. I can’t remember exactly what the issue was…something about my calm confidence (which doesn’t exist, by the way) or dealing with problems calmly (fuck no)…I just cried. It’s a good thing no one watches me meditate. It’s probably somewhat disturbing. I guess the crying was calm.

I figured out what was on the other side…

DNA. DNA is part of this, you know? DNA gives you tendencies, precursors to certain problems. Then your environment fucks with that, the people around you…they fuck with your DNA tendencies and cause nasty shit to happen. Or not. I wish I were one of the ‘or nots,’ but apparently I angered the gods before I was born and my nasty-ass karma is now fucking with my entire existence. If you believe in that shit. The combination of the two, DNA and environment, makes you who you are. Although I have to believe that my brain, my own personal will, free will? Nah. Not free. Paid for. That my will can affect some of that. When I’m feeling sane. When I’m feeling strong. I am feeling neither at the moment, sane nor strong. Mine is a particularly toxic combination, apparently. It’s one I’m really unhappy with, one I don’t want to be. I know I can mess with the environment part…the nurture part. The DNA, well, I’m stuck with that. You can’t escape your DNA. Is my brother’s DNA so different from mine? He makes better choices. I suck at it. I wonder if he is happy. I hope he is. I’m not.

I did finish the Wonder Under on the Mammo quilt…

There it is, all sorted out. Isn’t it cute? It only took up 4 bins, instead of the 13 I needed for the last one. Goals? Get this ironed onto fabric, cut out, ironed down, maybe even stitched down by Spring Break. Break is really late this year, starts April 5…so I have 6 weeks. Then I need to start drawing the next invitational quilt…can’t talk about that one yet. I guess I will start drawing it when I finish this crazy one. Then I’ll need to decide what big one will occupy me for the next few months. The mammo one won’t take long. No down time. Down time is DOOWWWNNN time. Yeah. Moody. Stupid fucking hormones. Stupid woman existence. Sigh. I don’t really hate being female…but it’s not a whole lot of fun at the moment.

Calli doesn’t seem to mind her existence…

Wish I could sleep with such sweet abandon. Maybe I should have been spayed. Or a dog.

I used my meditation skills today during one class and during tutorial. Really, my brain wanted to strangle a couple of the tutorial/detention kids who were doing their best to annoy the crap out of me. Seriously. They were doing it on purpose. They’ve learned that if they irritate their teacher enough, they will get sent out and they won’t have to work. I didn’t bite. I tortured them and made them do their work. I didn’t really torture them. I just made them stay with my evil eye. Ticket out the door is a completed piece of work. They bought it. Deep breathing though. Then came home and got drama from the girlchild. Cried in the car. Cried at home. Cry cry cry. Solves nothing. Just makes my eyes hurt. Bought nice eye drops for sore eyes. Sad. There should be a formula for Sad Eyes. Crying Eyes. Mostly no…they have allergy eyes and dry eyes and contact eyes, but not Depressoid Eyes and Fucked-Up-Life Eyes. I looked. I really did.

It isn’t really surprising that I cry as much as I do.

I wish I didn’t have to.

Two teachers today were commenting on how skinny I am at the moment, and how I growled about their saying it before. I just looked at them. They said, just say thank you. So I did. Begrudgingly. And in my head, there was the litany of the unhealthy status of my weight loss, about how it’s sickness that caused it, not healthy behaviors. Healthy behaviors are maintaining it (well, as healthy as I can be at the moment, because some of my obsessive exercising and avoiding food are not particularly healthy).

I finally ordered some external hard drives to deal with my storage issues…and then the camera wasn’t working right with the computer. Thought it was the camera, because it’s actually starting to pull apart…the two sides are not fully connected (sigh. yes, I drop it a lot, and now it’s taped together…yes, seriously)…but it turns out I think it’s the fucking hub. Dammit. Could I have more go wrong? Seriously? I just don’t have the patience for all this. I’m hoping the boychild will help me with the hard drives, move the photos maybe and set up the backup on the new ones…then maybe I will have to get a new hub as well…plus I think my computer has a memory issue. I know the boychild’s does, but I would have to buy him a new computer to fix that issue, and that’s not happening…because he’ll need a laptop for college and I can’t afford both.

MONEY. God damn. It’s tight. Deep breaths. Stop panicking. I didn’t want to be this old and still living paycheck to paycheck. I wanted my life to be different, more stable. I don’t think this level of stress is healthy for me. I don’t want to be this stressed, this worried about my future and the kids’ futures. I didn’t want to be constantly worried. But I am. I don’t see an end to that…there’s no magic that fixes the stressed-out part of my life. I just push it over THERE. Meditation helps me numb my response…is that meditation? Or depression? Hard to tell. If I’m numb, it doesn’t matter. Numb isn’t a healthy state, though. It’s supposed to be short-term, enough to get me to the hospital and into triage…enough to get me through hospice and a funeral…and then I’m supposed to feel properly again. Sheesh. Don’t want THAT. Feelings bad. Feelings make me feel bad.

I’ve been listening to the Beatles a lot lately…they are a big portion of my iPod library. This one…

I’m trying to listen to the voices in my head (yes, I sound crazy…the counselor asked me if I have conversations with myself…well, yeah. Doesn’t everyone?). But the part I keep hearing is “take a sad song and make it better.” Trying, Paul. Really. I am. I’m the sad song. I can be better.

The hardest thing to admit is that I’m not better. I want to be. I really do. But I’m not. And maybe I never will be.

Drawing It Out…

Sometimes, the mood I’m in, it requires me to draw. There’s not a whole lot else I can do. I just need to draw it out. It could take days to get it all out. Sometimes I can do it in one night. This is not one of those times. First of all, this is a big drawing. I’m now on the third page…if I enlarge it 200% (and I usually enlarge 250-300%), it will be about 35″ wide x 84″ high. That’s big. If I go bigger? Holy. It won’t be able to hang anywhere.

I was up super early to take the girlchild to the doctor; then was at school way too early as well. When it’s bad there, I turn the music on loud. Well, not too loud, because there are classrooms around me. The music helps, if I pick it right. Play the right song and the mood picks up a bit. Teaching right now is hard…the content I’m teaching, light and the EM spectrum, it’s hard for kids to get. I do my best, but it can be a slog at times…and this time of year is always tough. It doesn’t help. Plus my mood sucks. I need to work on my patience, my endurance. Meditation has really helped with that this year. I think I am a much better teacher and human because of meditation. Strange that.

So after school, after I watched my son rock it at Academic League and came home and made enchiladas from scratch (well, sort of, since I did buy a pre-roasted chicken), and then we watched Merlin together and made fun of Merlin’s ears and Arthur’s dorkiness, and then I started to fall asleep, but realized that I wouldn’t have a chance to copy the part of the drawing from before until Saturday some time if I didn’t do it tonight, so I went out and did that at 8:30 at night, after getting about 10 texts from my co-teachers about one of our kids, stuff I wish I’d known earlier…I would have dealt differently…after all that, I sat down…oh wait, first I graded because I’m trying to get caught up (story of my life), and THEN. THEN. Then I drew.

First I had copied the bottom of the drawing from the other day, so I taped it to a third page and started drawing down…

Not sure where all that is going, but she wanted legs. So now she has them. You can see the taped line right across her breasts…I have to be careful about the stuff that overlaps, because when I copy the drawings, I have to pick one to copy. At some point, I think I’m going to have to enlarge this one and add stuff at full size (which always gets me into trouble, because I put too much detail in and it’s tiny). I’m thinking that might happen this weekend. Maybe. I don’t have a hike this weekend…there isn’t one that works for me…plus I think I’m going to have to go to urgent care…yeah, it’s really urgent if I’m planning to go three days from now, but I tried to get a doctor’s appointment today, and unless I take time off work (I’m a teacher…it’s half days or whole days), I can’t get in until mid-April. Seriously. It’s hard, because I know I’m putting my kids and job ahead of my health in some way, but the thought of taking a day off work sounds more painful than going to urgent care on a weekend. The nurse I talked to today actually suggested urgent care instead of a regular appointment because of my crazy-ass schedule, and I was going to go today, but by the time I got dinner done, I just couldn’t handle it. I exercised instead. The thing is, I know what they’re going to want to do, and it will be yet another day off work and time spent and I just can’t handle it. I can’t. I know that I need to deal with it, I know I need to go to the doctor, but it would be so much easier if it would just go away. That’s true of all the hard stuff at the moment. Just go away. I can’t deal with you. There’s too much. I don’t have the outlets for stress that I used to have…now it just compounds and multiplies and reverberates inside me. I don’t have the support I had to deal with anything that might upset the apple cart. I’m afraid I will just completely lose it. This is not a good place in my head. It’s a fucked-up mess and I don’t want to spend much time in there.

So fuck it all. I drew instead. Once I had her legs in, I went back up to the previous page…

I added some water stuff and worked on her upper chest area…she has a heart now (important). Still thinking it through, deciding what will be there, what needs to be there. Sometimes I just stare at the page, willing it to draw itself. I mean, they do draw themselves.

I started watching The Following, because I had Tivo’d a few episodes from January…and I realized I had no idea what was going on…so I logged onto the girlchild’s Netflix account and found the rest…realized I had watched the first episode last year some time, but no more. Not sure why. Probably had too much other stuff I was watching…stuff I can’t even watch now because it reminds me of the person formerly known as Kathy, and I can’t deal with her and all her shit. Kevin Bacon’s got some angst going on there. Impressive.

So I kept drawing…

I don’t really know where it’s going, but I know it’s about menopause and all the shit running up to that phase of your life, and it’s about depression and all that shit, and it’s about what my life is doing, was doing. I don’t even know what else. Girlchild gave me shit for saying I would be alone forever…but it’s so hard to look at the future and see any hope right now. That’s really the depression, how it works…you just CAN’T suck it up and make the happy. There’s nothing in the head that allows it. The head is full of dark and damp and tears and sad and grief and anger and hopelessness. You look at yourself in the mirror and you don’t see yourself. You see someone who is sad and strange and alienated and alienating. I go on these hikes and connect with so few people. I feel like I’m in this vehicle that is glassed off from reality. Probably I’m not even here. I’m only virtual.

And then I go to work and some people have seen my work at the Visions Art Museum and they tell me how cool it is and that feels OK…it feels like, OK, you’re not doing everything wrong (although school and parenting feel wrong at the moment too, like I can do nothing right…girlchild in tears tonight and that’s probably my fault)…maybe the art is the only thing I can do right at the moment. I feel like a hollow vessel. I make the art but I don’t feel the art. I think everything I feel is in the drawings, like I actually cry sometimes while I’m drawing…but I don’t see the work and feel anything. Feeling is shut down, protected by the brain, which thinks I should maybe crawl into a hole for about 5 years and then come out and see if the nuclear winter is over.

In the YA novels, that never turns out well, though. Life. Piteous cry. Sucks. And then you die.

Dissolving Problems

Apparently Mr. Meditation is stalking me and listening in on my conversations. We are supposed to be visualizing being filled with light and then dropping a problem or question into that light and watching it dissolve. Last week, getting the light to fill me up was difficult; I seem to have managed it for this week, and then I drop this problem of depression into the light…it’s like an oil slick, black and globular, dense, spreading, trying to take over the light. Sometimes it succeeds and I have to start over, sweeping the black away and trying to refill the body with light and trying again to dissolve its greasy self into the golden light. Sometimes I manage to break it up into smaller and smaller black blobs, but they never go away; they just float around like errant black tadpoles. I guess that’s all a very realistic interpretation of how I am dealing with the depression…I try to break it up, destroy it, and it either grows and grows and takes over everything else, or it breaks up into smaller bits that still color my daily existence. There’s no escaping it.

So Mr. Meditation tonight is talking about how we deal with difficult things in life, and he says that people generally try to move quickly past challenges in life, to get through them as easily as possible, that we like security in our lives, we like things to be definite. He suggests instead that we sit with difficulties. Allow them to dissolve. Watch them dissolve, even if it’s slow and tedious and sometimes unsuccessful. He says we need difficult situations in life to practice, little challenges to be embraced instead of running away, so that we will be able to deal with whatever life throws at us. Ironic that. I’ve had enough of those. I need those around me to deal with their difficulties so they don’t make MY life more difficult. Dude. I think I’ve had enough difficult. Cut me a break for a while, eh? Bring on the security, maybe some peace, some joy, and don’t tell me I just have to make my own joy. If it were as simple as buying the ingredients and mixing them together correctly, don’t you think I would have done that already? Yes. I drew again tonight. I didn’t have much time in the end…

Grading sucked up some time and there was another soccer game, plus exercise (in the end, I did not make it to the gym). I worked on one piece of it, the drawing. Not much. Girlchild got to play some soccer tonight…

It’s been a rough season for her. She’s freaking out about the back surgery, understandably, getting cold feet. It’s hard to be the mom right now, to be the always-responsible one. There’s a lot of grabbing and pushing going on here, with no ball in sight.

They won. This picture looks like the Hokey Pokey (put your left foot in, put your left foot out…)

What can I say. It’s late. I’m not sleeping well. I was cranky today. One kid asked me if I’d taken my pill today. WTF? Sometimes teaching middle school is really difficult, challenging, in your face. I did do a color chromatography lab today, and the coolest part is when the ink (which I have them make in class) starts to move and spread the colors up the filter paper…they actually OOOH and AAAAH. It’s very cool. That’s when I know I’ve got them. Now if only I could persuade them to do their homework. I have been stitching anywhere that I sit down for any period of time…last night at the quilt meeting I got all of this done except for about an inch of the wing before they turned the lights out for the presentation…

Damn! But I finished it at the girlchild’s game, so that’s all of Month 3 from 2013 completed…

And I started Month 4. Yes. I’m behind. Welcome to my world.

And Sunday night, I started cutting out Wonder Under for the Mammogram quilt. I didn’t get very far…

This is going to be a troublesome piece. There aren’t very many pieces, but many of them are bigger than I usually do, so they will need big honking pieces of fabric…and since I usually only buy 1/2 yards, that might be a problem. I do have lots of flesh fabrics though, so maybe I’ll just go all out crazy on this one and pick really wild fabrics for the body, like 30 of them. Maybe. Or not. I have a while to decide…I have quilt class on Thursday, hopefully, and will be cutting these out and the wool pieces for Ivy’s memorial quilt. But if I keep drawing every night, then that will slow me down. The drawing really does help me process some of the ugly tarry crap in my head…anger and stress and sadness and those repulsive black thoughts that try to take over your brain in the middle of the night (during which I am always apparently awake, even though I told myself I needed to go to sleep early tonight…early wakeup tomorrow for girlchild)…if I can just draw them out, literally, on paper with black ink…then maybe they will haunt me less. Maybe I will be able to keep some of them from slipping back in to the unconscious and continuing to fuck with my barely stable equilibrium. It’s hard to say.

I’ve been reading The Dresden Files by by Jim Butcher…I have a 3-book volume of Storm Front, Fool Moon, and Grave Peril, and I’ve made it through the first two…

They’re pretty good…formulaic, but interesting light reads in the urban fantasy realm. Apparently I have 12 books to go. The proof that they’re light fiction is that the publisher pushed a bunch of them into omnibuses instead of letting each book stand tall on its own. I don’t know if I’ll get through all of them. What’s interesting is that I ordered the 3-book omnibus from the library back in June or July, and it only showed up in the last few weeks. Now that I know that the word omnibus does not mean a really big bus, I’m going to use it all the time. So I guess this is either the only of these omnibuses in the system, or it’s really popular. It’s similar to the Iron Druid series, in that the male protagonist is sort of obsessed with breasts and how women dress, and there’s lots of weird magic and creatures and potions and getting your shit together and ending up naked on the side of a road with big purple bruises a lot. Seriously. But like I said, a light read. I’m sure I’ll move on to serious fiction soon.

Actually, I need to read the book club selection by next Wednesday, and it’s still not here from the library. I might have to suck it up and buy it…which would mean finding the money for that. Sad but true, a single book purchase is an issue.

My SIL, whom I love very much, sent me a V-day card with the F word in it (actually, it was just the letter F as a stand-in for the F word, which I type here all the time) and gift cards to go buy a little black dress. Hmn. Where does she think I will wear such a thing? On the hiking path? It’s sweet. I might actually buy something useful with it. It could happen.

The girlchild was doing a project today on Magnum Opus, and she was thinking of art and painters, and suggested a shirt like a Jackson Pollack painting. Mom to the rescue. I actually OWN a dress that I painted about 10 years ago to resemble a Pollack painting…I went to Halloween post-divorce as a JP painting. Yup. I did. There is no other household IN THE WORLD where that same conversation happened. She said, “what about a shirt like Pollack?” and I said, “come here, my pretty…it’s been done.” And what did she do? Did she take it with her to wear to school, as her mother would have? No. She did not. She said it was shapeless. Sigh. I was impressed. So were my son and ex. Girlchild? Not impressed. Oh well. I tried.

The Place You Go…

I’m sitting here (Sunday night) waiting for the laundry to finish so I can put the girlchild’s soccer stuff in the dryer for tomorrow morning. I’m actually kind of wide awake…must have been that 26-minute nap I took this afternoon when I realized I couldn’t keep my eyes open. That’s the problem with hike days…they do kick my ass and I get very little else done, which is why I can’t do them every weekend. I can’t lose a day every weekend.

This is a 3-day weekend, though, so I still have tomorrow (Monday, yes I started this on Sunday night) to play catch up. I had a rough day yesterday. I actually cried on the hike…usually I don’t, but strangely, being in a group that large was isolating for someone like me. I’m not an extrovert at all. I need space, both mental and physical. I felt like some alien creature. It was so loud and raucous and overwhelming…I had to strike out on my own and physically super-challenge my body so my mind wouldn’t freak out. I have an event coming up with a lot more people than that…and I’m worried about my ability to deal. It’s strange…I spend all day with tons of people, but I don’t feel so out of place with my students…they are safe. I can handle interactions with them. Interactions with large groups of strangers? Fuck that. I’d rather stay home. I will be that crazy cat lady who never leaves the house if I’m not careful. The hike was redeemed slightly by the last 30 minutes spent talking to one other person. I can handle interactions like that, but you have to have something in common or at least something you can talk about.

It was a relief to come home after the hike and space out for hours, grade some papers, hang with my kids, cut out some Wonder Under. I appreciate the physical exertion and being out in nature, but hanging out in groups isn’t making me happy. Then again, nothing much is making me happy.

So in the middle of this post, the rant came through and became its own post, and then I went to the gym to try to leave some of my irritation and anger there instead of carrying it around. I’m debating calling the doctor (hemorrhage!), I need to find eye doctor paperwork for the kids, I haven’t prepped for tomorrow, I need to go to school to check for lab supplies, but I can’t get out of my driveway, because they are in fact digging holes in my front yard so my toilets might work properly someday. I’m wondering if I will ever stop grinding my teeth, if my eyelid will ever stop twitching, if I will ever sleep properly again.

The part I was having issues with was people making assumptions about other people based on how they behave or look or are labeled. I’m constantly amazed by how different people are than what they project…my leach-field guy looks like a redneck, talks like a redneck, and then starts talking to me about the Lord of the Rings trilogy and how many times he’s read it and whether Smaug is the coolest dragon around or what. The guy is 64 and you’d never think to look at him that he could have slogged through that series (god knows I haven’t been able to after multiple tries). You cannot make assumptions about people. You have to talk to them and listen to them and turn on the part of your brain that pays attention to someone besides your arrogant self, and only then can you make any decisions about people, and you still have to leave open the possibility that you are completely wrong. Maybe I know that from teaching middle school for so many years. Maybe I’m just that kind of tolerant person. I don’t know. I just know that it’s not OK to hurt other people. And sometimes people think your emotions are hurting them, but it is really their response to your emotions that’s the issue. I had the girlchild full on screaming at me this morning and I realized that she was having the same issue…her emotional reaction to what I had said was hers and hers alone. I was not the cause of the screaming. She was. Granted she’s a teenager and doesn’t modulate her responses well…she’s not Asperger’s, but teens often have this idea that they are the only people on the planet (shocking!) and it can manifest in similar ways. “My way is the only way.” Boychild and I often have discussions about her inability to realize there are other people in the world who might not have the same priorities as she does. In this case, I let her stomp off and slam a door, and then she came back and it was eventually all OK. I wonder what it will be like when they are both gone and I no longer have to tiptoe around those kinds of emotional outbursts. I wonder if her roommates will survive! I wonder if having the girlchild as his sister has helped the boychild navigate emotions any better…god knows they are full on in his face on a regular basis. His sister screams. His mom cries.

Wondering about my own sanity. Wondering after reading someone else’s blog if there is actually always a way out of depression, or if it just becomes something you live with for the rest of your life. After this weekend, I don’t see a way out, I don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, I don’t feel like it will ever change. It does not help that my hormones are going ballistic. I could really live without that additional mess in my head…hence the thought to call the doctor…more because of the physical symptoms than the mental…the physical symptoms set off all the alarms on the stupid online symptom checkers. But I already know what they will say, what they will want to do. They’ll use the words ‘abnormal’ and ‘dysfunctional’…ironic because those can apply to my physical symptoms and my mental symptoms. OK, not fully dysfunctional, because I do manage to function fairly normally…I’m just patently aware of how nonfunctional my functioning is.

Anyway. I find the solution to all this angst, short-term as it might be, is that silly thing called art. My brain wandered about a bit, trying to figure out what it felt like doing, until that urge to draw came a banging at the brain door…so I pulled this one out from before, in December sometime (was it really that long ago?)…

I had copied it and taped it to another page, so I found that and started drawing downwards…

Shades of the Celebrating Silver quilt…I still need to put yet another page on the bottom…

because she needs more room. She wants the rest of her body. She told me. She demanded it. I listened. And I need to figure out what else is happening here…maybe more of those crazy birds. Who knows. Draw, Kathy. It gives you some peace. Draw the assholes out. Draw the arrogant jerks out. Draw the emotional reactions and put them on paper. Make someone see what’s in your head. Make someone feel what’s in your head. Make.

I made it to my quilt guild tonight, for the first time in 12 months, I think. Mary Pal was speaking and she and I had seen each other Saturday night at the Coast to Coast opening. I think we might be sisters from another mother…we are in the same shows, feeling some of the same artistic angst. I hope for her sake that she is not feeling the rest of my angst. It was nice to hear her talk, to feel her deep hug again, to feel a connection to a fellow artist who plumbs the depths of her artistic self to make work in the middle of the night, by the skin of her teeth, in the early morning light. To feel a connection that deep to someone you barely know…simply because of the place you go when you work.

Art can be amazing that way.

Make the Head Fit…

I drew…

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It’s not done. I don’t know where it’s going. I had to make the head fit. That was fun. Or weird. Or something. I drew for like an hour or so…like right when I came home…well, after I talked to my philosophical drainage guy, the guy who is charging me more than my car is worth to redo my leach field and quotes Khalil Gibran while I’m signing papers. Exciting stuff. He gave me marital advice. Whoops! Too late. I don’t think that’s on the menu any more.

I drew because my head was in a bad place…had been for a couple of days. Hormones are out of whack…I mean, they’re really out of whack. Love being a woman of this age, perimenopause hitting me upside the head. Body doesn’t know what it’s doing. Fucks with the mind while it’s at it…and the moods. It’s annoying. No way to control it if you can’t take estrogen. You just have to ride it through.

So I drew and made dinner, and then I traced Wonder Under for over an hour…

Because I could. I mean, I could also grade, but there’s only so much suckiness a day can hold before it can hold no more. And I had reached my limit. The problem is that I don’t have moments of joy at the moment…I just have more or less of the suck. So I have to do things to make it more on the high side of the sucky wave instead of the low side. Artmaking. It’s what’s for dinner. I traced through about piece 240…so about 100 pieces to go. I need more Wonder Under (errands…hate errands). I need to stop being sick, even though it’s really low-level sickness…it’s messing with my head.

I put feet on them…

The two on the left are almost done…they need outlining around the eyeballs. Not sure what the one on the right needs. A life? Oh no…that’s me.

I don’t really know what it means…

But you should watch it anyway.

Yeah, it’s long, but you know what? Most of the good stuff is longer rather than shorter.

Art opening at VAM tomorrow…I will be there. Hopefully I’ll be well enough to hike on Sunday. I’m sure there’s other things I have to do. I’m trying not to think of them.

Beauty Is…

in the eye…

Of whomever is awake?

When I’m depressed, I stay up late and try to distract myself or make sense of everything. It’s hard to say sometimes which I’m actually doing…distraction or making sense. Maybe they are the same thing. If I try to trick myself into going to bed and falling asleep, my brain gets all ninja on my ass and won’t even calm down for sleep…it keeps kicking the shit out of me until I finally mentally collapse at like 2 in the morning. The alarm goes off seconds later, it seems, and I get up and do it all over again.

I read someone’s description of their life in the last year and they described it as having their heart shattered. Yeah. That. That’s the word I use. And destroyed. Damaged. Dropped. Broken. So going into V-day, a day I’ve never really liked or appreciated, with that feeling kinda sucks. Big time. I was going to draw tonight…there’s actually most of a drawing, the central portion anyway, fully formed in the center of my prefrontal cortex…is that where it belongs? It totally feels like it’s sitting right there in front, waiting to spill out of my eyeballs, but…from Wikipedia (sometimes a good source): the prefrontal cortex is associated with executive function, which relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social “control” (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially unacceptable outcomes). Many authors have indicated an integral link between a person’s personality and the functions of the prefrontal cortex.

So is that where my drawings belong? Probably not. I’m storing this one there though. Maybe there’s lots of storage space in there.

These pictures are from the Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus, Ohio. I was there last May. OK. I wasn’t there. Some previous iteration of Kathy was there and she took these pictures and never got around to posting them and then her life exploded and the pictures are still there, because they survive life explosions whether you like it or not, and the pictures are still beautiful, even if the being at the Conservatory, thinking about being there is painful. So. Here they are…because interspersed about the pain there might as well be beauty. If I can stop the painful stuff and stare at the beauty, I might just get through yet another day.

Actually, I did today quite well considering. I am still sick, but really strangely…it’s in my ear canals, not my sinuses, so my balance is off and I’m still really spacey. It’s like being on mind-altering drugs mostly, and I get a little giggly. The kids think it’s funny, but honestly, it’s better than crying or being angry. I just couldn’t help myself today when kids were describing light vocabulary and were completely and totally off the mark, and all the kids in the audience would look at me confused, and I would just start laughing. So yeah. Maybe the best place to be on V-day is with a bunch of 12- and 13-year-olds, who still think that true love and your soulmate exist, and live for that one piece of chocolate or a little paper V-day card from that really special person.

Occasionally my piece-of-shit camera takes a decent photo.

Most of this is Chihuly glass, in case you don’t recognize it.

Anyway. Taking the ninja, drawing-storing brain to bed. It will have to deal. I still don’t feel well…but hopefully will feel better tomorrow. V-day and my lousy depression can kiss my ass, along with a few other things on the planet.

A Gesture of Release

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

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

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

I stitched during the game…

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

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

I came home to this…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mental Health Trifecta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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