financial aid – Kathy Nida

I spend a lot of my life mediating…with students, with my kids, honestly, with my own brain. It’s not always pretty. I think of mediating as trying to see both (or many) sides and to come to some place in between where everyone is probably not happy but not completely unhappy either. I haven’t found mediation all that successful in my relationships, mostly I think because some people are incapable of seeing the other side…they’re so convinced that they’re right that they can’t see a solution that doesn’t include their rightness. That’s kinda where I’m at with the girlchild at the moment…she’s so sure she’s right and I’m not (and her dad’s not and the counselor’s not and the world’s not) that she can’t see straight. And there’s really nothing I can do about that except to keep saying the same calm and reasonable things over and over again, and occasionally tell her I still love her (even though she’s still screaming at me for the slightest things). She’ll come around. It might be 2020 before she does, but she will.

I realized today that I have been lax again with my meditation (not mediation) (too much need to get to the fabric-choosing part of the evening), and I think that is part of my problem. It helps to center me, stabilize the emotions. It’s not that I don’t feel when I’m meditating…on the contrary, I think I cried through the whole damn thing tonight, mostly because it was talking about seeing the things you needed to get rid of, the things that were troubling you most, seeing them almost as black smoke drifting around you, and then having it waft away and be replaced with an increasing sense of happiness and relaxation. I can’t quite get there, though…I see the black smoke and I get lost in it. But I’m hopeful that I will get there if I’m a good little meditator (so close to mediator) and keep practicing the visualization.

One of the things Mr. Meditation says that I like is he talks about sensing “the environment in which you’re sat.” Such a British turn of phrase…like I’ve been placed here. It’s true…this IS the environment in which I’m sat. I think at some point I’ll be able to just get up and walk away from that environment, if I choose to (and I will), but for now, I was sat here. I have no choice. There were very few seats available and this is where I was put. When it’s time to leave, I will choose to get up and go and sit myself elsewhere, or perhaps not sit at all. I’m not good at sitting still as it is. Maybe I’ll just start running and you won’t be able to catch me.

Meditation lets me be very metaphorical, philosophical, in my head but not in a bad way.

I came home to tree parts everywhere…nine trees on my property were being trimmed. Some were dangerously large or overweighted on certain branches that were over the house. Some are just in need of a serious pruning every 5-8 years or so…ah, the eucalypts and their tendency to drop crap (or themselves). Anyway, it’s a different look now…more light and air, although probably more sun as well (not so good for summer). Now I can move on to the next step of replanting the trees that were taken out for the septic and then replanting the grass area, except I’m not doing grass this time…something more native, meadowy. Nice to look at. I don’t have little kids any more, so the grass isn’t needed. I’m sure my neighbors will be glad to have me do anything in the yard. There are only so many hours in the day. When I get home from school, I have very little energy…it comes back later at night, but too late to do yardwork (in the dark). Replacing the trees is high on my list, though, because I tend to dress in front of that window and it’s a bit exposed at the moment, which I keep forgetting about (damn, now all the voyeurs will be trying to figure out what window I mean…get away!). I just want my private yard back and now I can have it.

So I mediated today. And I meditated tonight. And about 10 minutes of a Hoarders episode during cooking dinner persuaded me to clean out a huge pile of stuff and toss it into trash and recycling. I’m trying to do a little every day. Get the house under control. Maybe.

I then had to persuade Babygirl to get off the ironing board…boychild helped.

There was talking and petting. And then toe-cleaning. Very important, the toe-cleaning aspect.

I am still ironing all the non-fleshy bits and pieces that make up the main figure.

Today I did heart and veins (cool, huh?), a couple of tattoo-things on the arms, plus eyeballs and other random bits. I just have the lungs to do in the body, and then I have the hairy bits. I think there’s about 20 pieces in the 1100s at the moment, and then I’ve got most of the 1300s. It seems to be going pretty slowly. I don’t know why.

The box is getting fuller…this is the second box with pieces in it, too.

Most of what I did today was fussy little piecing. There’s a lot of mental action going on when I do this. I have to evaluate each section and the pieces within that section with how they relate to the whole piece and the coloring I’ve done so far.

It really is one of the places my brain is the calmest, the most peaceful. I’m hoping one day it hits happy again.

Content is the closest it will consider at the moment.

Here’s the fabrics in progress from the other side. It really is a large, chaotic pile.

At some point, I got tired again. Weird how that happens. I couldn’t figure the lungs out, so I quit. I think I still have 4 or 5 hours left…I have 16 hours and 18 minutes in at the moment. This alternate life I have, the other job, it’s not nothing. It’s a significant part of my life. It’s huge.

The other thing I tortured myself with tonight was trying to figure out the financial aid appeal for Cornell. I had to take out a loan to pay for the septic, but they want this complicated calculation of all my expenses and income as part of the appeal. I swear they do this shit to persuade us NOT to apply for more aid, because this is in fact a giant pain in the ass, where I have to figure out the monthly average of a wide variety of expenses, including gas and car insurance (we spend a TON on gas) and utilities. I think I prefer not to know these exact details. I have a general idea of my finances…I don’t want to know how many thousands of dollars it takes to keep the lights and the heat on.

This is what part of my calculations look like…

Holy Hell. Shoot me now. I’m not done. I promised myself I’d start, but I didn’t have to finish.

That’s kinda how I feel about everything at the moment: make a start. You don’t have to finish. You may not be able to finish. You’re going to do your best. Sometimes your best will suck and you’ll just take a deep breath and let the tears roll down your cheeks, and then you’ll try again, dammit. Just start, though. That’s all I ask. For now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tag: financial aid

The Environment in Which I’m Sat…

For Ivy…and Me