Erg. Huh. Really. No. I really can’t. I’m in a week that should have been easier than last week but is proving not to be. Maybe it’s all the chemistry labs we’re doing (I have 120 pounds of baking soda in my car right now). Maybe it’s the roller coaster stuff on top of the chemistry, or trying to plan a light unit when I literally have no time in the day to find the brainpower to do so. It’s hard to say. I do know, and can say, that I am back in that overwhelmed place. I get out of it for a day or two, feel like I have a handle on things, and then it all blows up.
Solution? Exercise regularly. Remember to eat and take meds. Sleep. I slept all the way through last night, which is how I know I’m exhausted already even though it’s only Wednesday. And last, but certainly not least, make the art. That’s how I close the day. Hopefully for an hour…last night, it was 48 minutes. I started late. I was making seating charts for today’s 8th-grade seat switches, plus trying to figure out the revise of the wave unit. The other teacher is a week ahead of me, so he’s telling me what to change on the fly and I’m doing it. Best I can. I think I still need to punch holes in the table of contents for the new unit when I get to school, and put papers out. Didn’t have time yesterday. They moved my physical therapy appointment so that fucked all the timing up. Plus I had to go buy materials for 7th-grade demos because Amazon fucked that delivery up. At some point, I made it home, and the Man was cooking dinner, singing, and dancing (because he’d had time to relax, have a beer, watch some videos) and I was so exhausted.
Anyway. I started ironing flesh on Monday night…
I wanted bright. And bright it is. Overly pink. Usually I try to pull all the flesh pieces in one go and iron them all at once, but I have flesh in boxes 300-500 and 700-1300. So I pulled a goodly chunk (up to the neck) and ironed those, and then last night, did the arms and head. Lots of her body has metal instead of flesh, so it didn’t take as long as it normally would with a figure that large.
That was Monday’s pile…and then this is Tuesday’s pile…
Definitely bigger, even though I only added those 7 flesh fabrics. I still need to do all the stuff that’s on and around the flesh…some of which is here…
Those are hair, teeth, arteries, metal bits, embedded phones, the little creatures she’s holding, pubic hair, etc. I didn’t pull them all out of the bins because there wasn’t room. Besides, in the 1300 box, there were only 2 pieces that were flesh. The rest is all electronic or whatever. There’s also two extra arms that I need to deal with…I’m not sure how. I think they should be different colors. At first, I thought they would be flesh-colored, just a different shade of it to stand out, and I may still do that. Like where would you get spare arms in the future? Dead bodies? Or would we synthesize them (probably 3D print them, yeah?), and if so, wouldn’t we make them different colors? That would be much more fun. So that’s rolling around in my brain for tonight or the next night.
This is a fun quilt to design and make. It’s hard, because I have some dark angry stuff I want to deal with too…cop killings and beatings and political bullshit and trans rights because I just finished a book and I’m just irritable about all of that. But I know it’s also OK to make a quilt that isn’t about all that. I also know that some people never get to stop thinking and worrying about that shit and that sucks. It’s Black History Month, if you haven’t been paying attention. The Man and I finished watching Kindred (in small chunks…it’s hard to watch), and now I’m reading it, and wondering how this amazing author (Octavia Butler) grew up in my childhood neighborhood and I never knew about her until I was an adult. That all the books they gave us to read were all male white authors, our mostly female white teachers handing those to us. I had more variety in college, because I took classes about more diverse literature, feminist and queer and people of color were writing too, no duh, why didn’t we see any of it when we were younger? When it would have made a bigger difference? So many of those kids I went to school with didn’t read a thing after they left high school. The 1619 Project is next. Take advantage of the offerings this month–book lists and movies and documentaries–and open up your mind. Add to the to-read and to-watch lists. Make time for that.
OK. Now I need to go to a meeting I forgot about (didn’t click the YES button on the calendar invite…I think whatever device I was on was having issues), get my classroom ready for the day, clear one lab and prep another, plus 17 thousand other things I haven’t remembered yet (hopefully they’re all written down somewhere), plus deal with an email that just popped up confirming my eye appointment (what? I don’t have an eye appointment), then union meeting after school where I have to sit too close to people (I have issues with that; like being on the edges), and then cook dinner. Guess my state of mind after all that!. Yeah. I suspect I’ll be curled up mentally into a tiny ball. And then making art.
Kathy Nida 