This Mood

So many things achieved. I hate when my mood doesn’t reflect what I’ve gotten done…some of that is moody hormones, unfortunately, but some of it is getting bogged down by other crap that just won’t leave me alone. The little stuff is really getting to me at the moment. Need to dump that mentality. Must be getting to the end of the school year.

My two quilts are going to the photographer today…I dehaired and ironed them this morning, got up a little early to make sure I had enough time. Probably won’t finish writing this before I have to go, but that’s OK. I graded papers last night too. Girlchild and I were going to go to this art and music thing, but it was canceled for the rain (yes. we had rain. a miracle.), so she went off to dinner with friends, while I watched the series finale of Sons of Anarchy. Sheesh. Well, it’s done anyway. I think it’s hard to end a series well (Sopranos for example, not as an example of ending well). At least they got to make a decision about how to end it, instead of just not being renewed.

So I finished tracing the Wonder Under on Bathtub 2 last night…

And no, Kitten wasn’t helping. She mostly sat around on the papers I needed and then rolled around presenting her belly for petting. Then attacked. It’s nice when she comes out though.

It took almost 8 hours to trace this quilt, which is more than I would have guessed, but there are some whopping big and complicated pieces in the bathtub and water that took more than a minute or two to trace. I usually figure about 100 pieces an hour. Tracing big pieces takes longer than small.

The next step is to cut them all out and then move on to the ironing. I need to clean up the studio first though. There’s some stuff in there that’s been there so long, I don’t know what it is. Time to get it out of the way. Summer cleaning is how teachers think. We don’t Spring Clean. There’s no time. Summer is when our brains like to get rid of stuff and reorganize and move stuff around.

So that’s on the list. Even starting now, I think. I can’t iron fabrics for the next quilt without some major cleaning in here.

I’ve had some conversations about smaller quilts I can make for sale this summer. I don’t want to do all cats, but I will do some. I’m thinking of a different owl and maybe a raven…and possibly one like the cancer donation quilt I did with the hands and the heart, but simpler. So I’m finalizing all that in my head and figuring out how to fit in at least three major quilts between now and the end of September. Ha! Wow. Crazy much?

Honestly, though, I’m kind of looking forward to putting some sort of plan together for summer work on quilts. It helps school feel less crazy. It helps quiet nights at home seem less lonely. It helps with the frustration of my job. It helps temper the teenaged mutant attitudinal beast who is currently on my couch, bitching about everything I say or do (walking away, my sweet. I love you, but I’m not in the mood). I’m crying at the drop of a hat these days, stupid hormones. Fuck. Going to draw today. Seriously. They’re whirring about in my head, causing strife and stress and nausea (oh wait, those are the hormones, right?). My photographer gave me some really positive comments about the quilts I dropped off…not that I didn’t like them, but I keep having this discussion about pretty versus significant. I prefer the latter. Most people like the former. I have to find the happy place between them for the stuff that sells easily and then keep making the big stinky stuff to keep me sane. Like sanity is my strong point! Whatever.

This mood. Sheeit. Dammit brain, I finished all this stuff. Would you back off for a bit? Sigh. We can engineer bridges, put humans in space for months on end, we know how to replace a lens in an eyeball without stitches, but we can’t find an acceptable treatment for menopausal crap? This world we live in. Don’t tell me it’s equal. It’s not.

Meditative Breathing, My Ass…

OK, so I know I’m sick with something. I have a cough. I have phlegm. It’s green. When I took Sudafed, I felt better, less shaky, less dizzy, less spacy. There are some other symptoms that are cold-like or flu-like. Then I’m having chills or hot flashes almost constantly, but no fever. I even got up last night and checked my temperature AND blood sugar to make sure it wasn’t that, because I couldn’t sleep. I felt not only like I was on fire, but like I needed to get up Up UP. Like something was really wrong. I hate that. I needed to be out of bed. So I did what (some of) my ancestors would do. I got up and made a cup of tea (the rest of my ancestors would have had a beer, before they were diagnosed with diabetes). Yes, I realize caffeine and a hot drink when you’re hotflashing do not make any sense, but since the slow, controlled meditative breathing I’m supposed to do wasn’t working for shit, I went for comfort tactics, and I stayed up for an hour plus reading blogs and slowly drinking tea until I yawned again. Then I headed back to bed, where the hot flashes and the distinct feeling that something was wrong continued. More meditative breathing. A cat attacking my head (I guess I was breathing wrong). Finally fell asleep after 4 AM. Not good.

I hate not being able to trust my own body. There are too many meds messing around in there. Too many things that could go wrong. I know if I go to Urgent Care about the nonstop hot flashes and chills, they will just blame menopause or whatever virus I have, and maybe that’s what it is…maybe it’s all about hormones gone awry and there is nothing else that is making me feel so wacky crazy. Ask me again about intelligent design? I guess if God were a middle-aged man and he was trying to get rid of his aging, menopausal wife so he could date a younger woman, this is how he’d go about it. Make her look crazy so it would be OK to dump her for the cute young thang. Get his teeth done. Color his hair. If that’s the god you believe in, I wish you luck.

Dear doctors: it’s not a hot FLASH if it never stops. Please look up the definition of flash and get back to me.

Anyway, despite all that crazy (and it does feel like crazy, even in the broad defining daylight of morning, a morning where you have to go to school and be fully functional), I did stitch a little last night…

All I did was stitch them down. I wanted to get so much done on my day off yesterday, but I felt like crap most of the day. I did manage to go to the chiropractor, so either the headaches were the neck being out of whack or they were early stages of this weird malady I have, because they are gone.

Although I did have a heating pad on my neck while I did these. I also graded papers, but I didn’t get very far. I didn’t eat very much either. Probably not a good thing.

I had this photo on my camera of the entire fence in front of SCRAP…

Little samples spelling out the name.

And this picture of the girlchild…

I think she actually headed it, although it’s hard to tell from this photo. Soccer right now. Sigh. It’s a clusterfuck.

Anyway. The car is going in today (all the dash lights flashing along with the Check Engine light), so I have no ride home (yet…have three contenders for the job). I feel like crap. I’m still hotflashing. I’m full of green phlegm. I feel completely off. And it’s an assembly day, so school on speed. Fun stuff. Meditative breathing…my ass. Oh, I’ll DO it, but you know it won’t stop the crazy or the hot. Meds. Removable layers of clothing. I got this. I’m not happy about it, but I got it.

The Dream Police Are Inside of My Head

So this has been in my head all morning…

It’s just so wrong. This is not the best way to start a Friday.

I could show you pictures of cut-up fabric pieces…I cut out everything on the hands except the spiky bits, because I forgot my tiny little scissors. But I can do that tonight. And then iron them. Yeah. Maybe. I’m already tired and I had to get up a million hours ago to take the girlchild to a 7 AM doctor’s appointment.

And Cheap Trick is vibrating in my head. I slept like crap all week. There’s an animal that’s rummaging through the leaves outside my bedroom every night between 2 and 4 AM. I’m hoping it’s a raccoon and not a skunk, because I’ve been skunked before and then can’t sleep in my room for a few nights until my eyes stop stinging. Not in the mood for that. But it wakes me up every night. And my neighbor has been leaving (in his dump truck) at 4:48 in the morning. And I have these weird-ass dreams and the rummaging mammal and rumbling dump truck keep coming into the dreams and fucking with me and I wake up in a hot sweat, pulling blankets off, scaring the crap out of the cat, reaching for my water bottle, convinced I’ve been hiking through the desert for days. WHAT THE FUCK. Women of a certain age…we just write sleep off. Don’t tell me that my health depends on my getting 7 hours of sleep a night if you can’t fucking fix the hormonal shit that is messing with my sleep. That’s just not fair. Dammit, I’ve had periods for HOW MANY YEARS? And then I was pregnant and puked my guts out for 40 weeks straight and gave birth with no drugs and nursed them for how many months and NOW? Now you are gonna mess with me even more. Intelligent design my ass. (someone should do a search on my blog and see how many times that phrase pops up.)

Grades are due dammit. Yesterday, while my students were watching a video and taking notes, I had my headphones in one ear and was watching their videos on the computer or the three tablets I currently have collected in my room (one is my school-issued one; two are from another teacher). I’m ALMOST DONE. Except for all those kids who haven’t sent me their scripts or a YouTube link. Honestly, I guess Cheap Trick is better than some of the videos I’ve seen.

I could also show you a pile of Wonder Under pieces…I cut one of the larger quilts out last night, but didn’t start the second one. I could do that tonight too. OR I could finish grades so I don’t have to think about them after that.

AND I want to work on the non-nude Earth Mother, as someone called it. So maybe once I get home from the girlchild’s soccer game, make dinner, clean the kitchen, and start laundry, I can cut things out and draw (sounds like I’ll be falling asleep on the couch, if you ask me).

I do sound cranky. You’re right. I kind of am.

There’s a new exhibit in Yerba Buena (I have to admit I have no freakin’ idea where that is, assuming San Francisco area) that sounds interesting…maybe…Riot Grrrls hit the scene right after I graduated from college, and I have to admit to being mostly ignorant back then, due to living in San Diego, uber-conservative town when it comes to art, but so watch this…

And then maybe you’ll want to check it out. The concept of Alien She is something I definitely felt in art classes in college. The majority of the students were female, but the curriculum and professors were heavily male. They weren’t bad professors. They were just almost all men. I had one female art professor I actually respected. At UCI, they had to be practicing artists, exhibiting out in the real world, and that made it interesting…although I suspect all art professors ARE artists, I know I had some when I wasn’t at UCI who hadn’t exhibited in over 10 years. Not really in touch with what might help us then, eh? Not that UCI prepared ANY of us for the real art world. I don’t know if going to an actual art college would have helped with that…I just know I wasn’t allowed to go to art school until I had a “real” degree (my real degree is in Comparative Literature, which might actually be more useless than an art degree). So I never did. Go to art school that is. I suspect the real art school is leaving school where they help you and provide access to all this expensive equipment and exhibit space, and then you have to do it all by yourself. That was much much harder.

I feel comfortable being an artist now. It’s not that it’s not frustrating to only be able to make art a few hours a day by foregoing sleep. It’s not that I don’t get pissed off when I get rejected from show after show. I do feel absolutely at peace though with the fact that I AM an artist and it is a more crucial part of me than any job I’ve ever had. And although openings are uncomfortable because I don’t like to EXPLAIN my work, and people always want the summary and then every detail explained (hell, it’s not that SIMPLE), it’s still nice to go and realize that people you don’t even know, have never met, who don’t know anything about you, can look at your work and enjoy it or be enlightened by it or whatever. And the shit in my head, now I can just sit down with pen and paper and make mistakes and know that eventually it will come out. I wasn’t able to do that 25 years ago. And that’s all good. Now I need to get this damn song out of my head.

That Old Lady Brain Fog

I was reminded yesterday of that weird hormonal brain fog we call pregnancy brain. You can’t remember anything, you’re an emotional disaster area, it feels like you’re walking around in a mental bowl of oatmeal and you can’t get out. OK, maybe that was just me. Apparently perimenopause does the same thing to you, similar to all the hormonal crap I teach at the end of the year to my students, explaining away puberty. Strangely, depression can pull some of the same shit on your brain, and if your depression might be partially due to hormone fluctuations because of impending menopause, hey, it’s like a giant vicious brain fog cycle that’s out to get you.

Yesterday started out wrong. I was on time, I had all my ducks in a row, and then I left the house. Went the wrong direction, eventually figured it out, went back the other way (luckily I had time), but it fucked up my equilibrium (such as it rockily is) in the morning and I spent all day trying to get it back.

For some reason, this song has been stuck in my head for like two weeks and it’s driving me bonkers because I can only remember the words that are in the title and they are constantly running through my head (ironic if you know me well)…

It’s not a bad song. It’s just depressing sounding and I’m tired of it inhabiting my head, so I’ve been trying to replace it for days. Yesterday, after the driving debacle, which was all before school started and did not bode well for my having a stellar day, I was driving up to the school parking lot and that song came on. So I’m in homeroom and it’s reverberating in my head. And I admit this to my students and sing to them (as you do) and realize…I need that fucker out of my head. Girlchild had played me this the night before…

which is a Completely Different Mood. It helped. I played it during homeroom. I danced around a bit (it’s OK…my students are very tolerant of crazy old ladies). It was better. But by the end of 4th period, that damn church song was back in there. So I played Meghan again. And it worked until after book club…when I pulled into my driveway…and that damn church song was on the radio again.

FUCK.

Yes, I’m playing Meghan right now. It’s amazing how music fucks with your head. Or at least my head…which has been all over the map for the last…I was going to say few days, but maybe it’s been longer than that. I can go from contentedly dancing to this stuff to on the floor weeping in about 3 seconds flat. I swear. It’s hard to believe you’re not going crazy when your brain flip-flops like that.

And I realized yesterday that I pulled a major brainfart over the summer. I’m amazed I was able to think myself through anything. Really, you should not let me make any major decisions, or even minor ones at the moment, and whoever gave me a credit card? Wow. Give it up. Take it away. Don’t let me be in charge of anything.

So trying to explain this to the guy at Apple who called my house confused last night about someone using a computer I’d bought and then…well, let’s just say that I hope he has an older woman in his life (mom?) who is going through the same shit, because otherwise he is going to just think I’m fucking nuts. I know the boychild does. The girlchild…she just tells me everything is OK and I’m NOT stupid and No, I can’t have her ADD meds.

Book club was last night. Book club is ostensibly where we talk about the book we were supposed to read last month (I read it! John Scalzi’s Red Shirts…amusing, especially if you’ve been watching Star Trek at the same time), but mostly add more books and movies and events to our to-do lists. Scalzi will be at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego doing a book signing on Monday night (I can’t go), and apparently Kevin Hearne is funny on Facebook, and David Bowie is in a movie about Tesla, so I don’t have to read the biography (I did actually already give up and return it to the library)…I can just watch Bowie. I actually think I will just review the Oatmeal bio on Tesla and leave it at that.

As far as music goes, I wish I had a newer car where I could just program some stuff in there for when my brain is in the nasty place, so I can quickly get back on the bouncy dancing track and off the prostrate-on-the-floor track. The brain? I don’t even know what to do about that. I thought it was getting better, but it’s not. Maybe it never will.

I was reading articles about menopause and the brain and they suggest stupidass shit like “reduce stress.” Oh. OK. Will get right on that. I do try to do some art every day. They also suggested “organized relaxation.” That term cracks me up. I’m gonna call that meditation. Says it reduces hot flashes and night sweats (huh. weird. those are better now. maybe not so crazy). Then they want you to sleep more…ironic, because sleep is a major issue.

I didn’t get much done when I got home from book club…sewing bindings and sleeves and labels. That’s about it. Taking my depressed, foggy brain to bed and telling it that everything will be better some day. Then waking up at 4 AM for the third night in a row, this time convinced that the high-school back-to-school night will be the same night as my own school’s, overlapping in a way that means I don’t eat (I have done this before). It’s not, by the way. The easiest way to deal with stupid shit like that is to Google it. If only I’d thought to do that at 4 AM. I might have gotten more sleep. I hear Valerian herbal tea is good for deeper and longer sleep, especially when dealing with menopausal symptoms. I’m gonna go buy me some of that shit. Maybe they’ll have something for Menopause Brain Fog as well (or Depression Brain Fog. Or both. Who can tell the difference?). Meanwhile, thanks to Meghan Trainor for a song that tries to pull my brain out of its fuzzy funk. You’d think I would forget that I was depressed…I forget everything else.

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.

All That I Know Is I’m Breathing…*

Another maliversary approaches. I feel my brain retracting even…pulling away from whatever hurts it, trying to protect itself, curling up in a ball like a roly poly. I keep throwing things at it to fix it…a hike…damn knee really hurt in the last mile, so I sent a message to the doctor…basically along the lines of NO. I’m not willing to stop hiking. Because being outside is a good thing. I can breathe out there. I don’t have to be in a room with myself and all that evil depression poison gas just rolling around the room. I can breathe outside. I can look for miles and see the sun set and the bugs fly and the branches reach out and grab me and I trip over a rock. And that is REAL. And I can almost find Kathy in there. Because it’s hard for me to find her. I’ve been looking for a year, and maybe that’s what makes me cry. Because she’s lost and I can’t get her on a regular basis. I put my hand out and she tries to grab it and it just slips out and I lose her again. Over and over again. Every week or so, she’s gone again. Sometimes I find her in my sketchbook. I find her when I’m writing these days. Seriously. The same brain that draws also writes a book.

I wrote almost 2000 words tonight in less than 45 minutes. What the fuck IS that? I don’t even know where it comes from. I can’t manage it. I just sit and it vomits itself out of my head into Google Docs. At this rate, I might have a whole book ready for editing by Christmas. A book. Was I planning on writing a book? When did that happen? I’m writing a sci fi book. Weird shit.

So Tuesday before the hike, I trimmed four quilts and cut out the bindings and sleeves. Then I came home after the hike and managed to trim and cut out bindings and sleeves for the other six quilts.

Yowza. Now that’s a binding (it’s actually in the quilt…in his feather tips). HEY. I like my fabric.

That’s actually quite crazy, because I didn’t start until after 10 PM. I was talking on the hike about having to reset my clock for school soon. I really can’t be doing these late nights. But I am having a hard time with that sleep thing. It’s 1:30 AM now and I am wide awake (I’m editing now and it’s after 2 AM). I know I need to be up at a reasonable hour tomorrow (it’s not tomorrow any more…it’s today), but I can’t get a handle on that part of my brain. It’s in major rebellion mode. It yells, “Fuck you!” on a regular basis. OK. Whatever. I had to be up early this morning, so I took a nap at some point, around 5 PM. Maybe 30 minutes. Then I got up and did stuff.

So I trimmed and picked bindings until after midnight.

This one, this fabric, wasn’t in the quilt again. The darker blacks weren’t dark enough when it came to bindings. They were fussy or too linear. So I picked that weird cellular one again. It worked well…

This one, I tried the orange, but it was too much, so I went for the blue.

That’s the bird from the Mammogram quilt.

Then this one. I wanted the darkest purple, which is actually the background fabric for the Mammogram quilt, but I couldn’t find my stash of it. I looked everywhere…for over half an hour. Finally I gave up and found a variegated batik that I think will work. The patterned one is for the sleeve. It wasn’t quite right for the binding.

Purple is really fussy. It goes wrong really quickly. Is it some sort of irony that purple is one of my favorite colors? Nope. That’s like the core of me…I’m purple at the core.

This one obviously needed black…but which one?

I have tons of this black fabric…it is in most of the eyeballs in my quilts for some reason…the hint of not-black, not-white. I have over a yard of it and the average quilt uses a square inch of this fabric. I will be 70 years old and still be using this fabric.

I hope I’m still making art at 70. Please let me still be making art then.

This one also wanted that purple that I couldn’t find, so I finally settled for the other purple…which honestly, was probably the better choice.

You’ll know when I actually get it on there.

For quilts this small, I do a super-skinny binding, maybe 1/4″. Of course, to get an approximate 1/4″ binding, I cut 1 7/8″. Fold in half, because it’s easier to sew a binding like that anyway, and sew a scant 1/4″. A really SCANT 1/4″.

I did a lot of moving furniture and books and honestly a knick-knack culling this morning after my fillings. I think there’s a Home Depot or maybe even a Lowe’s trip in my future. With boychild. Because I think he will be in charge of something. Shelves and TV installation. I think we will put it on the wall on an arm thing rather than use a big honking piece of furniture. But that is MORE decision-making. Have I told you about my troubles with the decisionmaking thing? Yup. It’s an issue.

Then I started sewing bindings on right around when the plumber showed up. I had multiple problems and he handled all of them cheaply and efficiently. He’s my new best friend. Well, at least when it comes to plumbing. He’s cheap and quick and honest. Can’t beat that. Plus he can’t do math, so he trusts MINE. Is he NUTS? OK, there’s an app for that. (plumber math)

I got the first three done while he was here…

It’s not like they’re huge, but I have to sew the bindings and the sleeves by machine and then pin everything down for hand-stitching…on average, these were taking about 15 minutes at this stage.

I got numbers 4 and 5 done before I needed to cook dinner…and then I did 6 after I did dinner, exercise bike, AND meditation. Gotta be impressed…

I hate sewing bindings on. I do like how the orange looks on number 5.

The bigger ones were taking 20-22 minutes at this stage. Here’s 7 and 8…

Yup. There’s two more. But it was after midnight at that point, and I wanted to write this blog. So I sat at the computer and got distracted by the damn storywriting. So I didn’t start this post until after 1 AM. Kinda crazy if you ask me. But I only wrote for about 45 minutes…and I wrote a LOT. Where is my brain? I really don’t know. It’s writing a book.

Part of this stage was pinning them all down.

These are almost done. I have life drawing in the morning. Remember how I was going to go every week during summer? Yeah. I know. I’ve made it once. Tomorrow will be twice. I’ll try again a few times before school starts. So these are for my stitching meeting in the afternoon. I honestly don’t know how long it will take to hand-stitch one. That’s why I’ve been so crazy-anal about keeping track of the time for each quilt. I want to make sure I’m charging a reasonable price and NOT screwing myself over. What that means is that the smallest ones are at about 2 hours total work without the handsewing…and the larger ones are over 5 hours.

My plan is to finish all 10. Then photograph them and put them on this site with prices and sizes. Then the people who have expressed an interest will have a chance to purchase based on where they are in line. Then whatever’s left…I’ll put them up here and on Etsy if I have to. If there’s one that sells and someone else wants one like it (because reproducing the exact fabrics might be difficult), then I would do those as a commission, which is basically that you know the price ahead of time and you agree to pay it, because I’m not making any more of these unless there’s a guaranteed purchaser. No offense, but these don’t rock my boat.

Then again, not much DOES rock my boat. But I need to start quilting the other two. My goal is to get Mammogram AND Menopause (not its real name) quilted by August 2 (major soccer tournament that weekend). I might be a little crazy. I think I can do it though. I need to do the bindings for two more of these small ones, so maybe an hour tomorrow. Then I can start quilting Mammogram, which I expect to take about 7 hours or so. Then another 20 hours or so for Menopause. Then I can get the bindings started and contact my photographer, while I start tracing the gender equality quilt (yes, that means I need to finish the damn drawing. Yes. I know that.).

I had a name for one of the quilts that will come after gender equality, but I’ve lost it. Dammit. It’s in the lyrics of something I was listening to tonight. (doesn’t help)

But I wrote 2000 words of the book. I’m not possessed when I write. I’m not here, certainly. I just fucking write. It’s all there in my head. Spilling out. How do I explain that to anyone? I just don’t know.

I can’t tell you how often I feel like I am an alien species.

The title of the blogpost came from Ingrid Michaelson’s Keep Breathing…

I’m trying. I can do the breathing thing. Meditation helps, I guess. But it’s kind of amazing how little my brain is involved with drawing and writing. It’s not conscious. It just IS.

Stupid Fucking Titles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I ironed down a bunch of pieces.

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

This is the chick I was ironing down…

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

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

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

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

Insert crying there too. Fuck me.

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

So yeah, not so healthy.

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

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

Poking the Finger

Wow. So that was low blood sugar. Not sure why, but I think that’s what happened the other night as well, both after exercising. Sigh. It’s so exhausting and scary to have blood sugar drop like that, especially when the kids were already in bed, so I had no one to check in with. I had graded tests with the girlchild helping me, and I wanted to get something art-related done, but I had exercised in between 7th and 8th period’s tests, and I was sitting there finishing the grading, trying to figure out why I was so dizzy. I was too shattered last night after the blood sugar dropped to do much of anything. It’s OK…I took care of it and it went back up to normal. But my bigger question is WHY…why now? What’s different? Who knows. I will log it and will bring it up with the doctor next time. I’ve had the diabetes under control really well for about 12 years now…I didn’t do anything different. And this was lower than I’ve ever had, unless I wasn’t eating or I was sick.

Oh wait. The Google says it could be hormones fluctuating with impending menopause. Wow. Really? So I could be dealing with this crazy for another year or so? Seriously? Sigh. Deep breaths. When the physical body is this out of control, it’s really hard to keep the mental body on an even keel.

Then this morning, I’m down on myself because I haven’t gotten any art stuff done in DAYS due to grades and being tired and fixing computers and grades and tired. There seems to be a pattern there. And yes, there’s no point in berating myself about what I didn’t get done. I just get more depressed when I feel like everything I do is just work and slog and clean and work and then do it all again. The art is what gets me out of bed and in a better mood. It’s necessary.

Yesterday was also girlchild’s pre-surgery appointment…she’s having two screws put into bones in her lower back next week. It was the first time we’ve seen a clear scan of the bones in her back and it was kind of a shock to see the two fractures…hell, no wonder she’s been in pain. So she’s going to have to spend at least one night in the hospital (which probably means I have to spend the night as well, which is fine). My work brain is trying to plan out in time in case I have to be out for more than three days (the worst-case scenario is that she’s out of school for 2 weeks, but we’re hoping for less than a week). Unfortunately, my parents are out of the country, so me and my ex will have to juggle work and the girlchild best we can. She’s convinced she will need no help; I’m on the more cautious side (let’s see…how can I move a bed into the prep room at school?). I warned my students…but there’s always chaos when teachers are out for more than a day. Plus I’m teaching DNA and non-science guest teachers are notoriously non-science-educated, so it’s got to be easy, yet engage the kids and give something that keeps them on task. Not an easy job. I can’t show movies for a week.

Suffice it to say that I have art on the menu tonight. I also need to go to the gym, though, so I’m going to have to hope the low blood sugar doesn’t hit again. Seriously, both times it’s been after I ate a healthy meal and exercised. Everything’s out of whack. Sigh. Back to poking the finger three times a day. My doctor gave me permission to stop a few years back because my blood sugar was so controlled. Guess my body is telling me something else. Got the message, bastard. Whatever. One more thing.

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.