Brain Wanders Off…News at 11…

Interesting day. Bad anniversary. The word anniversary seems like it’s supposed to be good. There should be a different word for bad anniversaries…like anniversaries of someone’s death or planes crashing into buildings or bombs going off. We shouldn’t use the same word that we apply to getting married or hired or being born. It should be like a maliversary or a downerversary or a shitversary. Better, huh?

Yeah, whatever. It’s all about distraction for me at the moment. The whole summer, a distraction attempt. I fail.

I stitched a lot of things down today while listening to Pandora. Pandora and I have a troubled relationship. Sometimes she rocks my world and I get up and dance around my office, out into the hallway, where if my kids look up from computers or phones, they see mama gyrating, pumping fists, in the hallway, yelling out (scary huh?) But so often, she’s lost in this young girl YOLO mentality or romantic shit that I don’t believe in anymore. Maybe I never did. Pandora, when you get like that, I don’t want to hang out with you any more.

That’s wrong. I did. I’m not sure I will again.

So I stitched for almost 4 hours today…and I almost finished.

I probably have an hour left, maybe two at the most.

View of sewing machine and yard while filling yet another bobbin…

It was hard to force myself to keep going. It’s really hard to do this part. But then it got late and I just wanted to finish, but I have to be up early again tomorrow, so I stopped.

Seriously, though. I could just stay up all night. Why not? I have no life. I can just stitch for 24 hours straight and then go to bed. Whatever.

Who’s gonna care?

I got on a roll at some point. But then I had to stop and deal with girlchild’s wisdom teeth. Apparently she is too wise and they have to come out…

There they are. What sucks is that we can’t get her in for the surgery until the week I start school. And boychild leaves (aargh). I am not going to be a good or happy person that week. I am going to be a mess. Naw. My counselor says not to assume anything. I am actually really good at that now. I just don’t think I will be or do anything. I just show up and go from there. I go with the flow and if I don’t like it, I step right out of the flow and watch everyone continuing on. And I crawl back into my hole and hang out there for a while. Hermit is the antiflow.

Yeah. I didn’t say it was the healthiest thing in the world to do. It just is what I do at the moment. I set a goal every day and I try to reach it. Most days I don’t, but that’s because I have high expectations for myself. I guess that means I should be regularly disappointed in myself, but I don’t think that way. I think, Oh Hey, you tried. You’ll finish up tomorrow. It’s OK. Because none of it is life or death.

So yeah. My goal to finish stitching down today didn’t happen, but I got close, so I’m OK.

The back…

And more of the front…I just have the head and the thinking bubble with the yelling face. That’s it. Then I can sandwich and pinbaste it as well. I don’t know if I’ll get to that tomorrow, just because of what’s already on the plate for that, but definitely Friday. So that’s good. It’s progress. I won’t think about the show I didn’t get into. I really don’t care. I don’t. I will keep entering. Eventually I will get in. That’s how you know the maliversaries are going badly…because I’ve progressed past the constant crying (not that it’s stopped) into not feeling at all. I’m not sure which is worse. They both worry me.

Go read another book. Anaesthesia for my brain. Side effects? No engagement with reality. You know, you can’t see the cat in this picture…

But you can see the yelling face. I love that face. I mean, I don’t love it because I know what it means, what it represents, but it’s so well done. The angle is perfect. The teeth. Midnight agrees. But she wishes I would stop making the desk vibrate. She doesn’t like it.

So the carpet went in today…part of why I had so much stitching time. I was trapped in my office.

I couldn’t distract myself by moving stuff. Until later. Padding going down…

They were quick. They asked permission to play music (conflicted with mine, man). It was funny…they played the same stuff the girlchild listens to, except they were way older than her.

Speaking of girlchild…she experiences new carpet in a different way.

We moved a bunch of the big stuff back in the house, but girlchild wants to try a different furniture layout, which probably means getting rid of some furniture. Might not be a bad thing. It’s just a storage issue with some of it. I have a lot of thread and other supplies in the living room that probably don’t need to live there. Or they can live there in a different way. We agreed to try her way out…

This is not it. Grandpa has moldings to put in tomorrow, so nothing can go anywhere really at the moment. I have a couple of places to patch. We need to make some decisions about bookcases and the TV and other stuff. Honestly, I felt like I had already made more decisions this summer than I could handle, so I just gave up. Maybe I will have more of a brain tomorrow. Maybe not. It certainly seems to have wandered off. Unfortunate.

Lost Cause

I sat down this morning to write a blogpost and even resized the one single picture I had and then realized the mood I was in and decided, no, no, no. Do not write now. Live the day, try to change that shitty mood that dragged you up out of deep blank sleep, or at least dreams that you don’t remember, change it and then write.

So I set out to change it. (BTW, WordPress, WTF? Way to completely change everything. I am weirded out. Totally new interface. Radically different.)

I can’t say that I was entirely successful, but since my counselor saw me today (to make up for missing last week) and told me multiple times that I was feeling all the normal feels and nothing was crazy talk, except the part where I call myself a loser, but that’s crazy talk from a year ago that I can’t seem to shake, and we talked about the two parts of my brain and how sometimes one part wins over the other, but the other, more practical and mature part of my brain is still there, talking away, shaking its head at the stupid drama, saying “I’m not crazy. I’m just tormented at the moment.” Odds are I’ll get over it. Someday. That’s the shitty part. The Someday Part.

There are other shitty parts, but believe it or not, I don’t write everything I’m feeling on here. Some of it just gets cried out in the car on the drive between here and there. The worst of it, you never see it. Think about that. I really wanted to be in a different place by now, but you can want things all you like, and you can even be one of those perky people who think that if you just WANT it HARD enough and SMILE a LOT, then it will be YOURS. (Fuck You, by the way)

Those people have not lived my existence. They are not negotiating golf clubs with a teenager at 11:30 PM. They are not determining if an axle boot needs fixing. They are not trying to decide how much weight the deck can hold. And they are certainly not trying to decide whether it’s possible to just stay asleep, deeply asleep, blindly and blankly not dreaming, for at least another year or two, until it doesn’t hurt to wake up. Because it still does. And I can’t even describe to you how much that sucks. How much I want it to stop. And there’s no magic that makes it stop. Just like there’s no magic to stop the tears that are falling down your cheeks as you drive up to your destination.

Thanks, by the way, to my chiropractor for the second emergency appointment in two months. Am I stressed? I guess. I don’t know. Was I crying in your parking lot? Damn straight I was.

I often wonder if people know I’ve been crying. Yet again. Because that hasn’t stopped. That’s the new me. Crying Kathy. Woo!

Anyway. So I set out to make the day at least…well…um…insert adjective here. Not unhappy. Not depressing (impossible at the moment).

I finished stitching down the Mammogram quilt…

And then I sandwiched it and pinbasted it.

Which meant I had to clean a floor first, and that floor promptly became dirty again, but that’s OK. It’s gonna be worse tomorrow. It was a temporary clean. I wanted that done before the carpet guys came, in case I finished stitching the Menopause quilt down before Wednesday, because I’m expecting to get a lot of stitching done on Wednesday, since I’ll be trapped in my office pretty much. I’m OK with that. I need more of that…because then I can’t see the chaos in the rest of the house.

I can’t tell you how much I need that chaos gone. It’s transmuted into my head. I think it’s making everything worse.

Once that was done, I started in on the ten bird quilts…pinbasting all of them.

They didn’t take long…

Five minutes for the smaller ones…

They all have the same backing fabric, an old cotton from before I was really sewing quilts, but when I made fabric frames. I wasn’t sure if it was cotton or poly cotton, so I burned it in the sink.

It was really old cotton. I really don’t need to be buying more fabric right now…

Although I’m a bit concerned about bindings. The dark quilts are easy, if I have enough of the dark fabric left. Although that one could do a green or orange binding and be OK.

And this one could do black…maybe.

But I need to quilt them all first.

That could take a while.

But they’re all ready now.

The longest it took to pinbaste one quilt was 12 minutes.

The day was still shitty after all that. I’m in the middle of writing a post about art and why I do it and how it doesn’t do magical things like solve all my problems and make me leap out of bed in the morning and sing joyous songs during the day. So art helps, but it doesn’t really make everything OK. It’s there. It saves me in many ways, but it doesn’t make everything pretty and nice-smelling. I think people who are not artists and really want to be think it’s so cool that it must solve everything and make everything fucking awesome and they really wish they could be an artist like me, but they don’t realize that it’s not something you choose to do…it chooses you. And it doesn’t make it good. It just makes it. And. I don’t know. It’s not magic. I keep saying that. I want there to be magic. I really do. I’m Scully though, not Mulder. I wish I were Mulder.

Girlchild has been fussy lately and keeps wanting me to sit with her while she watches television, like while dinner was in the oven tonight (she did cook)…so I can’t quilt during that time and today was so bad I had thought of drawing about 17 times, so I grabbed this drawing and finished it up…

This is good. It needs to be a quilt. Not anytime soon of course. Really I should have been drawing the other one, but apparently I can only work on that one while sitting in a wine bar waiting for teenagers to get out of concerts. Or something. I wasn’t going to draw a penis while sitting next to my daughter on the couch. I knew what kind of commentary that would produce.

After dinner, I started stitching the Menopause quilt down…that’s not its real name, just its inspiration.

Cracked skull and all…I’m about halfway up into the water…this is gonna take a while.

Which is probably OK. I sorta persuaded Pandora that it should be playing young angry-man rock instead of that mopey shit that makes me cry. Of course, when X-Files makes you cry, you know you’re a mess. So there’s been a lot of Linkin Park and Nirvana. So that might tell you a bit about where my head is at the moment.

And this song…was the last mopey song Pandora played before I fucked with it and explained my current mood…

Beck’s Lost Cause…”There’s a place where you are going…” Hopefully that place is into a deep sleep with an easy wakeup call.

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