Google My Sanity

I spent all day teaching kids how to cut and paste on a computer. How to find things in Google Docs. How to open files and get things out of the trash (actually, I’m not sure I’ve figured that one out for Google Docs yet). I figured out how to do superscript by the end of 4th period (in Docs…I know how to do it elsewhere, but my computer and theirs are different, so there were some issues). Don’t raise your hand and tell me you can’t find the file when you damn well know you threw it in the trash. DUDE. Seriously? Ask the real question…Ms. Nida, how do I get it out of the trash? The plus with Docs is that they don’t have to remember to save anything. The plus AND minus is that they can mess with color and fonts on their answers…why do they always pick a font that is illegible? In yellow? The plus is that in Docs, I can change it all back. Google hates me at the moment though, as I am still not allowed in Classroom, so tomorrow should be interesting when they hand all these files in. What was more amusing was Google temporarily crashing this morning, as every device and app I had shut down. Yes, I had a backup plan. But it came back up quickly. It’s sad when I am using THREE devices at a time, plus poking around on the kids’ devices, in order to teach a class. Seriously, I had the Mac, my iPhone, and the Nexus tablet (school-issued). I left my iPad at home, because I don’t want it to get hurt or lost. So I have the kids watching something on my Mac through the digital projector, I’m emailing the APs on my phone, and I’m using the tablet to send documents to the kids’ Google Drives. You have to be semi-impressed (only semi-, because I wasn’t the most efficient today). It’s a major learning experience, but I’m actually kind of enjoying the change. Make them do everything. Make them prepare a report and send it to me. Make them create notes. I don’t have to be standing up at the front of the room so much any more. I can be directing it, but letting them do it all. It’s kinda cool.

I had to write about 700 words on the board as instructions unfortunately, because (1) kids don’t listen and (2) Google’s not as user-friendly as it should be. I love that the digital natives (my students) are not as tech-savvy as the media purports…they can’t handle finding a file with their own name in the title, let alone clicking on an icon after I’ve shown them the picture. On the one hand, the tech can be lots of fun and very positive to use. On the other hand, training them to do things that I do in my sleep is a pain in the ass. My goal is that they can do this by December…I can assign and demo a lab, expect them to complete it, and have them prepare the report in Docs and hand it in to me without all this crazy fuss. Are we there yet? Fuck no. But this damn science classroom is flipping onto the web. It surely is. And I’m running along after it, trying to get it under control.

Anyway. It’s a challenge to get through days like this, even though it was mostly successful…and then when I’m driving home, there’s a deep emptiness inside. I need something else that I don’t have. That hole is wearing. I keep thinking if I just keep going, making, working, cleaning, whatevering, it will eventually go away, that empty feeling. I will be OK with life as it is and find joy in moments. Sigh. Not there yet. It just seems shallow sometimes. Like I’m just on the surface of my existence…the deeper part of it is hidden, inaccessible, even lost. Not sure what to even do about all that.

Nothing I guess. Nothing for now. Keep doing. Making. Drawing. Reading. Being.

So I traced another couple hundred pieces tonight (found another 10 unnumbered pieces). I’m at the halfway mark in tracing now…which is cool. I have to really fight my brain to keep tracing though. I’m tired at the end of the day, and I went to the gym as well, so working for another 2+ hours feels difficult. I’m 5 1/2 hours in…

So I guess my 10-11 hour estimate on the tracing step was fairly accurate. This is the view of Downton Abbey on the TV while I trace…no, I had not finished watching the last season. I save stuff up for a long time sometimes.

Meanwhile, while I was tracing, both kids were texting me, one from a third of a mile down the road, the other from New York, both complaining, although the girlchild was mostly complaining about the boychild, because they were texting each other as well. Apparently the piano arrived today. You’d think he’d send me a text thanking me for sending that fucker, but NO. I get complaints about how the bars for the hanging files are too long, even with the grooves you use to shorten them. I suggest tool usage. There are no tools. I suggest finding the maintenance guy (I am always friends with the maintenance guy) or asking the RA, but no, that is not acceptable. I suggest road trips to Lowes or Home Depot, but that is also impossible. IMPOSSIBLE. Sigh. Excuse me while I drive a toolset to Ithaca. I’m slowly weaning him off me, I think. I really feel like a suite full of intelligent boys should be able to figure this out. He was obviously in a mood, though. Granted, it was after midnight. But a THANK YOU for shipping crap would have been nice.

Have I mentioned that I am not psychic? This has apparently been an issue for others. Expecting me to be so. Fuck you. I’m not psychic. I listen. I pay attention. I just can’t always know what’s in your head if you don’t say it. Stop telling me all the ways I’m doing it wrong too. I can’t possibly be doing EVERYTHING wrong.

Mega sigh. Girlchild thanked me this morning for cleaning out the clogged toilet…again. I think the plumber is on dad’s list right now. My list is a challenge. Girlchild and are going shoe-shopping later this week. I need some shoes. Plus I have back-to-school night tomorrow night, so I will deserve it. Seriously, I haven’t bought any shoes except flipflops for over two years…maybe longer. Purple leather boots it is. For the boychild. I’ll ship him those with the pliers and screwdriver that he had in his drawers at home but didn’t take to college with him because they weren’t his. But they’re IN YOUR DRAWERS, so I can’t possibly know that and use them, so you might as well have taken them with you.

MAJOR FUCKING SIGH. Seriously. I need to go dancing or camping or anything with a large group of people who will make me laugh. Like I have time for that. Or money. I was pondering the counselor’s comment about my depression being gone. I think she’s wrong. It’s better, but it’s not gone. I took 4 online quizzes, because they are accurate predictors of everything under the sun, and THEY all said I was still depressed. Someday I’ll take one of these quizzes and it will magically tell me I am no longer depressed and I will throw a party. You’re invited.

Pro: The damn quilt is getting done. Ignore the Con. The cons are annoying. They need to go for a walk and get over themselves. Fuck the cons. Throw them in the Google trash, since I don’t know how to retrieve anything from there anyway.

Preparing for Hell in a Handbasket

I’m trying to stay on schedule with the new quilt. I know for a fact that at some point, the schedule will go to hell in a handbasket. Some major thing will happen that will completely suck up all my time and I will fall behind, so the better I am NOW about trying to make up time, the better off I will be later. So I traced Wonder Under for about two hours last night while helping the girlchild fill out the Common App for college…aargh…I feel like I should be able to copy all the pertinent info over from the boychild’s app, like the exact date of my divorce. I looked it up last year, and since it’s significantly different from the separation date, which is seared in my memory, I can never remember the year. It didn’t matter by then. They asked for stuff I don’t remember having to look up last year, like the address of the school in Wales I attended for a year. So the ex was on speaker phone while watching the Chargers lose (as always), girlchild was on the computer, swearing at the app, and I was tracing Wonder Under.

It kinda looked like this, except she was sitting over there. The light table is not a small thing. But I absolutely love it. It’s so incredibly convenient for what I do, so much easier than what I was doing before.

I got over 200 pieces done, so I’m now in the mid-300s. That’s good progress. If I can do that every night (questionable?), I’ll be done Friday night. Then cutting out the pieces? Maybe another three nights? Hard to say. I do actually have teacher duties and art events this week, so I might have to adjust.

I try to fill in as much of the space in between pieces as possible.

The girlchild has a much different college-choosing process than her brother. I don’t actually know what his thought process was…I just know he eventually had a list. She had a list from all the mail she got, locations she wanted, a bunch of internet searches, and other random info. Then she talked to a college counselor, and got some more names (but also got kinda pissed off, because the counselor gave her a chunk of schools she really didn’t want, like religiously affiliated schools), and then last night, she finally did this…

Yes, there are like 21 schools on those post-its, but she knows she needs to get down to about half those. Some she just needs to research a bit more, like the UC schools…I suggested she pick two, but she’s having a hard time deciding which two. She has a couple uber-reacher schools…she probably doesn’t have a chance of getting in, but she really would like to try. So we’ll see. The plus is that she’s not leaving it until the last minute, like some relative of hers who is now at college (cough cough, her brother, cough). Needless to say, the stress levels around here are somewhat charged.

To counteract those stressful thoughts, I present this…

My GISHWHES diploma…I do love their sense of humor. If you can’t read it, “In recognition of the personal sacrifices and dedication demonstrated by shocking the world with public art, kind deeds and generally being an unapologetic weirdo.” I think that’s my life philosophy. I probably need to work a bit more on the kind deeds. I think I will print this out and hang it next to my credential at school. I did not choose to hang my credential at school. It was done for me, by the way. I get kinda tired of explaining why I teach science when I have so much painting/literature experience (and really, I was never much of a painter).

We had an incredibly long staff meeting yesterday. The new school year has brought us Monday Minimum Days, presumably for collaboration with co-workers, although that hasn’t happened yet. But once a month, instead of collaborating, we start a staff meeting at 2:45 PM, the worst possible time in the world for my brain, which turns into mush between about 2 and 5 PM, and then it potentially can go on until 4:45. Shoot me now. I know how my brain works, though, so I draw. My last principal, I avoided drawing, because if your eyes were not wide open and trained upon him, you would be chastised the next day for your lack of attention, so if you consider the eyeball-straining scene from The Clockwork Orange…

That’s kinda how it felt. Anyway, this new guy seems better…so I drew. One of my co-workers requested a cat. I glared at her. She glared back and said, “I know you know how to draw them. I’ve seen you do it.” True that. But I wasn’t in the mood for just a cat…

Just so you know, because some people feel confused by this, drawing just occupies the part of my brain that otherwise causes trouble by falling asleep or spacing out. It actually allows me to concentrate BETTER on what you’re saying. I’ve always had a hard time convincing other people that I know how my brain works, but I do.

It started with a hand on fire. Anyway. I may need to draw during collaboration days as well, based on what’s been happening in my department, which has two new teachers, both female, who may shake things up a bit (not a problem, personally).

Because of the heat here, when I’m working on stuff in my office or at the light table, I am followed by the living creatures who inhabit my house. They like to lie underfoot.

This is better than where she was before, which was about where I was standing. I persuaded her to move over so I could actually use the light table.

Or under ironing boards so they can’t be moved.

Eh. I do not rule my house. Pets do.

I’ve been under some reading stress lately too, which conflicts with my ability to get art done. Apparently every single book I had on hold at the library will be coming in within the same two-week time period, even though some have been on hold for over 6 months, as I was number 723 on a list of 5,000.

I actually already finished two that came, one that was almost 800 pages. And I’m sending back the audio book, because I don’t concentrate well on those. I did not mean to get the audio version (whoops), so I re-requested it as a real book, with pages and all. I’m perfectly OK with waiting longer for that book at the moment, because I’m going to have a hard time getting through all these. Only two are book club books. And you can’t renew these, because 700 people after you have holds on them as well, so if I go over the due date, this explains my increasing fines with the library system. Pay for college? Pay my library fines? Hard decision to make.

Anyway, last but not least, here is a link to a blogpost I wrote for FIG, the women’s art group I’m in, about the installation at Art Produce opening this weekend: The Fence/La Barda exhibit…

And a picture of the flying junk-mail birds I helped install.

And now I need to go to school and try to figure out a way to deal with Google docs without using Google Classroom, because they still haven’t figured out how to fix that. Sigh. Nothing is ever easy. Yes, I could have them all SHARE their files with me, but apparently Classroom has a really easy, efficient way to do that, and I’m not allowed to have easy or efficient at the moment. So I’m winging it. Ha ha. Birds. Winging it. OK. Need more caffeine.

It’s Like Magic…

Have faith. I just texted the girlchild about that. Have faith in yourself. Be confident. She’s worried about colleges. She’s worried about her scores, her grades, getting into a good school, not being extraordinary. Hell, most of us aren’t extraordinary. We’re not making miracles. We’re not even keeping the house clean (I speak for myself). I love that she wants to BE extraordinary, but I do think you have to be realistic sometimes. And getting into college is probably the first place where that happens. It’s gonna be a rough 8 months. I have faith in her. I know she’ll get into a good school that will give her what she needs. But my definition of a good school might be different than hers at the moment. And I long ago came to terms with my non-extraordinariness.

I started tracing Wonder Under tonight, after going to Shakespeare with the girlchild and my ex, Two Gentleman of Verona, shorter than most Shakespeare plays, but amusing. So I started late and didn’t get far, about 100 pieces in…

Again, figuring about an hour per 100 pieces, 10-11 hours on this stage. It’s really warm here, so I’m lucky I’ve got LED bulbs in the light table, so no extra heat. I’m going to need to do more than an hour a night to stay on track, especially when I look at next weekend’s craziness. I’ve been invited to a variety of social things lately, and mostly, I am just hunkering down to finish this quilt as quickly as I can. There’s a few things I’m trying to do to stay sane, hiking mostly, but there’s a funky balance between needing to be alone to make art and not wanting to be alone all the time. When I’m out with friends, my brain gets increasingly stressed and worried about the quilt and getting it done, and I can’t enjoy myself. I did OK at the play, because I realized it was probably the last time…unless we manage July or early August next year, before everyone goes off to college.

I spent some time today with a new group talking about science…I’m apparently highly underqualified. No science degree. I do have a brain in my head, though, and use it to read fairly often. So I can hold my own.

And then I spent a chunk of time on another soccer field…

The plus is that I think this is the only weekend with two games for the girlchild…so I might actually get some quilt stuff done, and then there’s the house stuff I still need to handle.

Her team tied…should have won, but a random penalty kick and a substitute goalie didn’t help…

It’s going to be a difficult season for the girls. Not sure that’s a bad thing. Is success sweeter if you have to work for it? Maybe.

I have a piece in this show opening in early October…

It’s my local SAQA group. Despite the title, there was no nudity allowed. That always makes it a bit difficult for the likes of me.

I’m hoping to be at the opening on the 10th, although not at 5. Maybe I’ll drag the girlchild along with me. She got mad at me again today and I lost it. I can’t say anything right, and when you haven’t talked to anyone else for hours upon hours, it’s really difficult to deal with teenaged irritation without getting upset. She said she was sorry, but…I guess my sad is just right there, ready to spill.

I’m too tired to write anything of substance. That’s probably OK. You can borrow some words from some of my other overly wordy posts and pretend you’re reading them here. You can just think depression blah blah blah, and art blah blah blah and make time for balance blah blah blah and tired again blah blah blah, and there we are! A post! It’s like magic.

You Can Draw, Kathryn…

So there was all this sneezing and snot at school this week, and even though I tried not to touch papers too much, one of those snotty little beasts got me sick. The thing is, I felt like crap this morning, and even came home from the girlchild’s soccer game and slept for an hour (although that could have been the less-than-stellar sleep from the whole week finally catching up to me), and although I AM sick, I am not REALLY sick. Knock on wood. Because maybe tomorrow will be way worse. I’m spacey, I’m a little achy. But I’m not really really sick. I even bought the good drugs, just in case, but haven’t needed them. Yet. So yeah. I can make meth in my backyard now. A very small amount. Breaking Bad? Not so much. Assholes on that show. I stopped watching…couldn’t deal with all the assholes.

Until maybe tomorrow I will be OK. Anyway, I canceled the hike I was going to go on tonight, because I felt like crap, and then I tried to get a bunch of stuff done, like finally entering Quilt National (donating my money to them, because I’ve only gotten in once). Then I got an email about the quilt for the local show, and there isn’t room for it any more (sigh…then why oh why did I spend time working on it at ALL, because I don’t have any time to spare at the moment. AARGH.), so I gladly folded it up (it has a binding and a sleeve now…needs a bit more quilting and some hand embroidery and it’s done, but who the fuck cares? I don’t.) and persuaded myself I could draw tonight.

You Can Draw, Kathryn.

I actually penciled a bunch of stuff in, because I didn’t want to fuck anything up at this stage…

When I’m drawing to size, it’s really better to NOT be using a lot of white-out. It’s hard to see through all those lines when it’s upside down on the light table. So the bird had some loosely drawn pencil lines and then I went in with the Sharpie and drew it final. I don’t follow the pencil lines exactly…they’re just a guideline. And I was looking at some of my old bird drawings for this one…but I had to really fight the desire to add more detail. Because it needs to be done by mid-November and there’s already a fucking shitload of detail on it.

Here’s things floating in air…

with a tree to be drawn afterwards. Something about the couple being connected by the tree. They ground it. Wish they could ground me too. Ground as in feeling attached to something…not grounded like you’re not allowed out because you fucked up.

And eventually the tree and leaves got drawn as well.

This thing has been in my head for so freakin’ long. I don’t know what my problem was. It took about 4 hours tonight to finish the drawing and number it…maybe a little longer than that. An hour was numbering…it’s at 1067 pieces…it could have been A LOT worse. Really. I was afraid of another 2000-piece quilt needing 150 hours to complete. I just don’t have that many hours free between now and mid-November…not if I’m gonna leave the house for anything else but work and soccer.

So I’m a little relieved. Still freaked out because I’m behind schedule, but it’s numbered now, so I can start tracing Wonder Under this week. Maybe 11 hours for that? I’m hoping. So I should be done by the end of the week? Maybe? This week’s a little bitchy.

I can at least get started.

I wanted it traced and cut out by mid-September. HA! OK, so that’s technically about 9 days from now. I’m thinking that’s pushing it, but at least I have a goal. Six hours to cut it out? So 17 hours of work in the next 9 days. Uh huh. With a Shakespeare play, back-to-school night, and an art opening. Uh huh. It’s possible. I don’t really need to sleep. I’m not very good at it anyway.

I’m also not very good at numbering. I missed the toes on the left…so they are all 362a, b, etc. through i…

I think those are the only pieces I missed, but I’m sure I will find more later.

Sometimes I wonder about my art practice, about how to explain it to someone who doesn’t know me. Like, yeah, I number all these pieces and trace them with all the overlaps and it takes HOURS and no, I’m NOT crazy, why do you ask?

Fuck me.

I am more than a little bit crazy.

And this little bit will be fun, because I need to have like 10 flesh-colored fabrics in a color run to pull this off, I think.

OK, I think I can do it in seven. Maybe. I love those hands, by the way. They are nice. A dream for me. Holding hands. Sigh.

The counselor says I am no longer officially depressed…just lonely. Huh. Not sure what the difference is. It feels the same. And it’s pretty sad to be lonely when you have someone who actually lives with you at least part of the time…although, she’s a teenager with a social life. Sigh. I’m really not doing this life thing right.

Anyway. It’s progress on this fucker. I’m glad of that, because I was starting to really hold that stress in my gut, and that’s not a good place for it to be. I just needed to get past that hump and move on.

Girlchild had a freakin’ early game in Coronado. Plus: it’s the beach, so it was cool. Minus: it was a long drive very early in the morning. Plus: we were back home fairly early.

They lost. Badly. Probably not a plus. The parents were dumbasses. Seriously. The dad next to me yells, “Get a foot on it!” and the girl’s name, and she looks at him like he’s fucking insane, because she didn’t think of that already? I don’t yell a lot…just encouraging stuff when the girlchild makes a goal. I graded papers and watched her fall.

I thought she did pretty well though…

Certainly, there was a lot of heading the ball…although the one below? I think the girlchild was not involved, but how can you NOT put that picture in?

At least the ball is in SOME of the pictures.

She hates it when I take pictures, because none of them make her look beautiful. I personally think she looks pretty amazing, but I’m her mom.

Tough little beast. As we get closer to sending her off to college, despite all the yelling she does, I’m gonna miss her.

Three soccer games in one weekend though? Huh. That’s a lot. I skipped the one where she was coaching the under-10s. Mostly because I hadn’t eaten.

Anyway. I just realized how late it is. Time is kind of difficult when I’m drawing for hours upon hours. And not talking to humans. Seriously. Last human communication? Around 4 PM, I think. That was the grocery-store checkout lady. The one who put the fruit in with the cans. She was nice, but…my fruit does not appreciate her.

Anyway. Whatever. I’m making the art, but not necessarily doing the life thing right. I’ve never been good at that. And someone fucked up my ability to deal. So there we are. Moving forward. Making the art. Because otherwise…what would I be doing? No one knows.

Note to self: Music is not helping. Stop trying to find songs that make you feel better. You suck at this late-night mood transformation. It’s just going to suck for a while. If you’re lucky, “a while” will not be forever.

Sigh. I’m just glad I’m moving on to the next stage on this quilt. I thought I was never getting there.

Art Brain Speaks…

Tired is catching up. Tired is running me down, passing me on the track. Tired just beat me to that primo parking space. Tired just cut me off on the freeway. Tired grabbed the last box of mac and cheese (actually, in my house, it’s probably couscous) before I could reach up and put my hand on it.

The problem with tired winning is that I don’t feel good about sleep the next day. It’s never enough to make me wake up and feel rested, because even when I go to bed early, I don’t sleep through. It’s interrupted by restlessness, by dreams that pop me terrified out of whatever REM sleep I might get, adrenaline pumping as my brain tries to catch up with reality after sinking itself in whatever weird dream or nightmare it was inhabiting previously. I woke one time to the sound of the cat’s scratchy tongue cleaning herself. Oh my God! What’s that NOISE? My sleep app claims I was awake twice more for significant periods of time that I don’t remember. Either I was flailing mightily in my sleep, or I’m so tired, I don’t remember the difference between awake and asleep.

So although I had a nice time at my stitching meeting and got all the binding done and talked to friends…

I meant to come home and finish the sleeve and do a little embroidery over on the “good house” side. But I ate and exercised and meditated, and realized after meditation that sleep was the next step. That I could push it and stay awake and do stuff, but my brain really was a giant ball of not-good fuzz and sleep would be the logical thing to do. Unfortunately, my brain doesn’t really give a shit about the logical. It realizes that I’ve seen the girlchild each day this week for about 20 minutes a day, and most of those 20 minutes, she’s been yelling at me (she’s stressed about school and apparently I am asking all the stupid questions…you know, like we do), and because there’s a lot going on at the beginning of school, and because I took on this additional quilt finishing, I am not where I need to be in the next major project and I’m stressing about that and telling myself that I should scale back on stuff like hikes, except I need the exercise and the outside time and I think perhaps I am spending way too many hours just with myself, and my SELF is not in a good mood because she is tired and not getting enough good minutes with anyone and that stupid fucking church song keeps popping up.

Those two bird quilts are sold, though. That’s good. I think I need to go stare at the check for a moment to remind me of that. Thanks to all of those who helped me buy groceries in the last month.

And. I feel like if I keep saying it, it will sink in. I need to make art every night to stay mentally healthy. Notice I didn’t use the word ‘sane’, because I don’t know what it means any more. Or ‘happy’. Every fucking night. Seriously. Do it. Thirty minutes. That’s it. No matter how tired you are. You will feel better in the morning.

It’s been a rough week. Not enough connections. Not enough art. Too many moments of realizing how dysfunctional my brain still is. Too many “what was I thinking?” moments. I’m sure that Alzheimers’ patients get flashes of this, or dementia patients. Moments of clarity when you think, holy crap? What the hell is my brain doing? It must be really depressing.

It didn’t help that my school department had a clusterfuck brewing yesterday. I went and kicked it around a bit. Some people need to be brought down to Earth occasionally. I don’t like being the one who has to do that. Honestly, I just want to teach my kids, who are pretty good this year, and meet with my team, and ignore the rest of it. I don’t want to have to smooth feathers or manage discord or knit together a team that has never worked properly. I want my old co-teacher back, not that the new one is bad. She’s just new and I have to figure our relationship out and that’s hard and takes a long time and I don’t have the energy. That’s probably true across the board. I don’t have the energy to go out there and remake shit so that I can function in this new existence. The one where the kids go to college and I don’t see them for months on end. Or in the girlchild’s case at the moment, barely seeing her because she has a social life and only lives here half-time. Apparently I’m not invited to ice skating tonight…which is OK. I get it. No seriously. I didn’t expect to go ice skating with high-school kids. I did hope for a quiet dinner with the girlchild and some bad TV time on the couch. But she will be home late. Like she should be. And some part of my brain, the part that is semi-OK and wants to make art and doesn’t give a shit about people much…it’s looking forward to a few hours of quiet contemplation with Game of Thrones on and a pen in my hand, trying to get past the LEGS, those damn legs are done and now I need to draw the next section while persuading myself NOT to add too much detail.

The art brain has communicated its demands. I need to listen to it. I’m not sure how normal people function, those that don’t have this separate part of their brain that seems to live apart from the rest of us. To be off doing its own thing and then come in and say, “HEY! I’m taking over tonight. Y’all need to get out of the kitchen, go to your rooms, don’t come out and bug me. This is MY space for right now.” And the rest of my brain is like, “But wait a minute. Don’t I live here too? Don’t I get a say in this?” And art brain is like, “Fuck you. Just get out. You had your time and you messed up. I’m in charge now. I’ll bring you a cup of tea later. But I need you out of here right now. No complaining, just go. And take all that grading with you. I don’t wanna see that. I don’t even wanna know it exists. I’ve got stuff to do.” The rest of the brain shuffles out of there, picks up the school bag, looks sadly back at art brain and then moves down the dark hallway into her room and shuts the door as art brain turns up the music and starts making something with curry.

Yeah. OK. I sense a ton of progress in the next three days. Yes, there’s three soccer games, a hike, a discussion thing that I might not go to, and a Shakespeare play. But I think my art brain needs some time and will demand it. As well it should.

Double Fuck No

Note to self: trying to meditate while your daughter is texting you at 10:30 at night is somewhat counterproductive. Especially when you want to pay attention to the texts, because you haven’t talked to anyone for 6 1/2 hours at that point and there’s another probably 10 hours before you WILL talk to someone that is not short, furry, and coughing up a furball. I actually had text conversations with BOTH kids last night, as boychild needed me to find things in his room (gaack) to shove in the box I’m shipping to him. I think all I will be doing all year is shipping boxes places. Mostly to New York.

Before I wax on about shipping (because that was part of the unplanned activities for last night), I did finally finish two more birds…the second of the eyeball birds…

And the second HeyBird…

Both are currently spoken for…if that changes, you will see it here. I need to put labels on them tonight and find sticks (OK, dowels, but it’s more fun to think of me wandering the yard looking for an appropriate stick, isn’t it?).

So did I get the binding on that house quilt from the previous night? Fuck no. Did I do any drawing? Double fuck no. Am I running around putting fires out? Hell yes. I really love the beginning of the school year. It’s always like this. (I really hate it). Thank god for leftovers in the fridge, because I can’t handle food on top of all this crap.

Anyway, I managed to come home from school, which included two unknown parent meetings, unknown because I did not check my box in the mailroom after I had my prep on Friday, and instead of emailing me meeting times, the translator put pieces of paper in my box. So analog. So none of us knew about the meetings. So that was fun. So then I carried the incredibly awkwardly sized (it’s almost as tall as I am) box of digital piano, which only weighed 36.8 pounds (I was guessing much more) to the car and then to UPS, where they helped me weigh the bastard and ship its ass to Ithaca, where it can live for 4 years at least and then will hopefully be someone else’s problem, not mine. Then I came home and was a very good girl and went to the gym (mostly just so I could read my book, which is good, but depressing, and maybe a little rambly, kinda like me, honestly), then made dinner (cooking it mostly on preheat, which is a problem if you don’t like burnt food) and started packing the second of the boychild’s boxes, which contains such essentials as soccer shoes, Oreos, an alarm clock, a can of salsa, and the manual to his piano. I was texting him at the time, and he had me spend probably 45 minutes in his room looking for a piano music book and a still-elusive hand-sized piece of black microfiber cloth. I know not what for. Or for that matter, where the fucketh. All his laundry is now folded and put away or piled on his bed, though. And his trash is all picked up. So that’s a plus.

I knew I had two more quilts to ship this week, so I was debating whether to do that or sew bindings, and I thought I should at least look up the shipping date on one and email the chick in charge on the other, because I didn’t get the shipping instructions.

Holey Whoops, Batman. It was supposed to be there Monday. Well, first of all, my bad, because they did email us an updated date and I totally spaced out and didn’t change my calendar reminder. It had popped up, but was still telling me mid-September. But second of all, who the fuck picks the MONDAY of a 3-day weekend for their due date? And curators should be sending reminders. Yes, I know we’re adults, but I feel like curators are better off communicating MORE rather than less (and yes, I’ve been a curator, so I’m not being a bitch about this, and yes, I know they don’t get paid, but they do get the experience on their resume, and that’s worth something).

Anyway, I had already pulled the quilt. I just hadn’t ironed, dehaired, and packed it up. So guess what I did? Yup.

So I’m going to UPS this morning. I was going this afternoon, but it is suddenly a tad more urgent…and expensive. Stupid brain. It really doesn’t play nice. So I feel really lame and stupid about that. But it’s done. And I handled it.

And yes, AFTER all that I meditated. Damn straight I did. And then I sat down and sewed the bindings on the eyeball bird. I need to finish the sleeve tonight and put labels on those two for Thursday’s delivery. So maybe TONIGHT, after book club (bwa ha ha, like I do anything constructive after book club), I will sew bindings on the big quilt and draw. It could happen. The fact that I’m not sleeping well at all, that I keep waking up like a loud noise knocked me out of a deep sleep, with adrenaline pumping so hard I can’t go back to sleep…that’s not going to hinder my progress on those tasks, is it?

Don’t fuck with me people…I gots stuff to do. No more last-minute crap. I need to get it done.

You Wanna Elaborate on That?

I didn’t do well last night. I was fine as long as I was ensconsed in my book, lost in someone else’s reality. As soon as my brain was allowed its own space, it sank like a stone. It’s strange, because I’ve spent most of the week in a daze, just floating above any major issues, cushioned by school’s chaos and busyness, unable to really feel anything. Apparently a few hours at the gym and the girlchild being gone were enough to throw me off. Not a good sign.

But I’m better, I think. That word better is troubled though, because it can just mean you are not as bad as you were, or it can mean everything is all good, you are cured, healed, in remission, I don’t know. I know I’m not that, and after last night, even what little progress I occasionally feel on the Better Continuum seems kind of fake.

I’ve read 350 pages of my book in 36 hours. You can tell I’m trying to hide from something. Yeah, it’s a pretty good book, but it’s not THAT good. I just wanted to curl up on the couch though, wishing it were cold enough for a big blanket and a steaming mug of tea (OK, y’all know I was drinking the tea anyway), reading until my eyes fell sticky closed and that peaceful dreamless sleep took over.

Huh. No dreamless sleep lately either. Just tortured crap that I can’t really remember when I wake up, but feels bad and stressful and dangerous and did I mention bad?

Sigh. And then I walk through the house and think about all the things that need to get done and how I’m not getting them done and I just feel like climbing back in a hole. It’s quiet in there. I don’t care about the mess in my room in there. I don’t care about all the other crap I’m supposed to care about. Well, I care about my kids and my art, although sometimes even that is back over there and I can’t get to it.

It’s a 3-day weekend coming up. It’s full of stuff I need to do, including a major installation, but I’m hoping to find my brain some space, some time, to get closer to better. Last night felt bad and I still feel bad today. Tired is part of it and hormones probably are too (who can tell? My body does what it wants, when it wants to.), but maybe more sleep and exercise, plus some drawing will help. I’ve been really good this week about not bringing much work home (it helped to have girlchild and a teacher’s aide do a lot of the grading and organizing this week). I’ve done art every night, although sometimes very little.

Last night, I put the binding on one of the 3 remaining birds…

It wasn’t that late, but it had been a long day with a full day of teaching, using Chromebooks (which went really well, actually), and then the gym, where I was obviously tired, and then cooking dinner. I was hoping to do all three of the bindings, but realized how tired I was with the first one and went to sleep instead. Well, I went to bed. Sleep is something else. It came eventually.

So I will try to finish the other two tonight, or if the girlchild is needy and wants me in the living room, which she has been this week, then I will try to get that damn drawing done. My brain is really fighting that. It’s so hard to conceive of gender equality at the moment. Things you want that don’t exist? The bigger problem is that I want it to be a positive quilt, because it really is something that I would like to aim for. The entire show is about equality…imagine trying to draw something about racial or LGBT equality when you were being subjected to inequality on a regular basis. If you were in a good state of mind, a positive frame, you could imagine this and have an easy time of producing a piece that showed all your dreams of the future, of equal rights and access etc. But if you aren’t in that place, if you’re feeling dragged down by your existence, then it is that much harder to visualize a better way, a positive outcome. I know what it should be. I’m just not sure I have evidence of its existence.

It may not matter. Didn’t I say I needed to be done with the drawing by the end of the weekend? Yup.

I’m hiking this weekend. I might go to the sci-fi writers meeting, although my brain currently thinks I need the time at home. I’m finishing three bird quilts and delivering and installing two bird quilts and a floating house. I’m getting my photos from the photographer on the two most recent quilts. I will finish that damn drawing. I will pack stuff up for the boychild for shipping next week. I will read my book. I will go to the gym. Girlchild wants to walk the dog around a lake. I will write. I will draw. Notice I wrote it last. Maybe I should draw some bad nasty stuff and then try the other one.

The title is a quote from Agent Doggett on X-Files, so you have to imagine his voice, sarcasm and all. I think I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what’s in my brain, what’s causing it to sink like it did last night, to hide in fluff like it’s been doing all week. I’m trying to find the brain I had before, or at least pieces of it, the pieces that were happy. It’s actually impossible to get it to stop thinking…trust me, I’ve tried. I’ve yelled at it. I’ve ignored it. None of that works in the long term. I can’t box up all the stuff that hurts or that I don’t like and lock it away somewhere. It breaks out of the box, comes hunting me down, more pissed off than before. I’m really better off grappling with it whenever it shows up, relieved at least that it’s not as omnipresent as it was say a year ago. But hopeful that in another year it will be even less apparent.

With that, apparently I have to go to school. I don’t quite have the energy, but I usually find it between here and there. Sometimes.

Figuring out How to Make the Feels

It’s highly possible the girlchild and I are related. I often come home from work and my brain is fried. I have no ability to get anything done. I sit and read, whether blogs or book, and I can’t move off the couch or the chair. Inertia. I’m tired. My job can be exhausting. Tonight, I come home and read, because I have 5 books that were on library hold and all came in at the same time and will all be due in 3 weeks. I love this STRESS to get the reading done. I start with the 800-page book. It’s long. Read it first.

When girlchild gets home, she’s upset. There’s drama, there’s sad, there’s hormones, there’s just a whole lot of stress and worry and shit. She’s worried about her future, her college choices, her soccer team, what she will wear the first day of school (in contrast, I have no idea what I’m wearing to school tomorrow). I’m working really hard at ignoring the big future things, about not worrying about her leaving, but I’m sure she knows I worry about it. That said, I want her to go. I want her to go and have a college experience without living at home, to be far away and functional all by herself. To know we love her and will jump on the first plane if necessary, but meanwhile, she needs to handle her own laundry.

And we’re a year away from her leaving. It’s just amplified by the boychild being gone. She misses him already (it’ll be a week in about 5 hours). I do too, but not like she does. It’s different between brother and sister. I don’t remember missing my brother, but I was the one at college, and college is noisy and messy and busy and inhabits your entire brain.

So instead of all the things I thought I would do tonight, I hung out with the girlchild. We cobbled together some lame-ass meal after seriously considering Menchies for frozen yogurt (it’s almost a healthy dinner). It wasn’t the greatest, but it was food. It reminds me that we should have better plans once her school starts, because there are some nights when neither of us want to cook. Before, the boychild’s presence would kind of force the issue, unless I was totally dead, and that was usually Friday, and then I would just order pizza. Now, with just the two of us, she’ll tell me she’s not hungry, and so I’ll just forage. I think we need to spend one Sunday a month cooking and freezing meals for those nights, or we’re going to be in serious trouble. If we’re smart, we’ll start this Sunday. I don’t know if we’re smart (I already know I’m working on an installation on Sunday).

Anyway. The plus is her moods seem less volcanic. The minus is they are swimming in salt water. Luckily, my brain is still holding me well above the water line…mostly. I can’t say I feel normal, because I feel…I don’t know how to explain it…distant. Distracted. Emotions are mostly held far away. I don’t know what that means. It just is at the moment. It just is. I honestly am not feeling most of the time, or the feels are so far away, they don’t really affect me. Strange.

I spent about 4 hours with her, talking, hanging out, reading, because she needed it…and then she went to bed and I started quilting the last bird, the second owl…

It’s quite a bit different from the other owl in coloring…

Background and owl color. I trimmed all 3 bird quilts that will be bound…maybe tomorrow night I will get the bindings on. I also need to make some decisions about the floating house and how to hang the other two bird quilts, and then DRAW DRAW DRAW. No more fucking excuses. I really could have sat in the living room with the girlchild and comforted her as I did anyway, and I could have been drawing. Except my brain said no. I’m not sure why. There’s some mental space I need to be in, and I can’t be there at the moment. Unfortunate. I expect to be done by the end of the long weekend. I do.

Expectations? Modify. Every day. Deep breaths. Modify again.

Girlchild does not want to leave her pets behind when she goes to college. She was feeling mopey today and subjected Calli to full body hug…

Calli put up with it for about 20 minutes. That’s all the doggy love she’s got, apparently. Although that’s a little closer than I get to the dog on a regular basis.

It’s a rough week. Lots of adjustments at school. Parent meetings are already starting. Trying to keep on top of things, to use my staff (girlchild and student aide) appropriately. To put art in every day. To take care of myself. To take care of my mind. To be myself.

The path to happy? I don’t know. I follow this path and get distracted and end up on another path, one that doubles back or ends at a cliff, and I pick my way back, or I just end up bushwhacking across the hillside, stickers in my socks, scratches on my calves. I don’t really think, this one thing, it’s what will make me happy. All those things are now troubled choices. I think what made me happy before? I won’t trust it for a good long while. Thanks for that. That’s not my construct. It’s what others do…they damage the normal neural pathways and we have to route around. You think, “This SHOULD make me happy, but due to all the heinous shit I associate with it, it no longer works.” How else will we get there? Sometimes that’s the hardest part, is figuring out how to make the feels. One step. One day. One.

On a Tuesday Night…

In which another thousand words of a sci fi novel randomly pop out of my head into Google Docs…where they righteously belong. For no apparent reason. After hiking 6 miles. Really, I shouldn’t be capable of much after a night hike, but apparently those words needed out. I don’t actually read what I’ve written, unless I’ve forgotten something, but even then, I usually just tag it with a comment to be fixed later, because I’m over 35 pages at this point and trying to find that one paragraph where I explained whatever it is I explained (probably something to do with government takeovers) is pretty much impossible.

There is a cat ballet going on in my house at the moment, as the most likely petter of cats has left for college. Yes, boychild was home the most and would search out cats and scratch their heads and pet them and sometimes comb one or two of them. Without him here, they are constantly gathering around whatever space I inhabit and I will turn around and try to shepherd one into the space and one out (none of them like each other, some actually hate each other). Last night, while letting one out of the laundry room (home of food and litter trays), Babygirl came kamikazing out of the boychild’s room, front legs cycling like a windmill, caterwauling at Kitten like she was a foreign invader. Made me scream. Little pyscho. Aren’t you the oldest one? Kitty equivalent of 80 years old? Feisty old bitch. It’s the only excitement I get at night.

So I hiked last night after school. It was nice, but it will be my tutorial day in a few weeks, so I probably won’t be able to do it again. It was hard enough to find the energy for a Tuesday night…I suspect Thursdays will be considerably worse. When I showed up for the hike, I was told I looked like I was moving slowly (I was…it was after school…I was tired), but my body eventually figured it out and got moving. The group I hike with mostly looks normal…until cameras come out, and then the weird happens…

See? Normal…for zombies. Well, we started out normal.

We did Cowles Mountain to Pyles Peak from Barker Way, leaving at 6 PM and coming back in the dark.

Yeah, it was hot yesterday, probably in the high 80s when we started, but it wasn’t too bad…do you see the little tiny thundercloud in the back of that picture?

It got bigger.

I kept trying to get the color that was really showing, but my camera wasn’t quite up to the task.

The sunset reflects off the clouds to the east. This one is from the top of Pyles Peak.

It was nice and cool by the end of the hike. And dark. Yes, dark. But in the beginning, you could see all the clouds and marine layer in the distance to the west…this is from the top of Cowles.

This is facing north from Cowles, looking out toward Pyles Peak, which always looks a million miles away from here.

And from Pyles, here’s Cowles Mountain. At this point, we’re halfway through and it looks like a million miles to get back. It’s not really. It’s only 1.5 miles to the peak and then another 1.5 down. At 8 PM. On a work day. Before you’ve eaten dinner. Yeah. A little crazy.

As the sun set, we had popsicles! It felt really good to have icy sugar with the heat.

It’s hard to capture the look of the hills. I love looking at them, but I can never get a good picture of what I love looking AT. The graying out of the different layers of hills in the distance. Totally opposite of what they taught us in painting class.

There was wildlife. This scorpion is maybe 2-3 inches long.

I decided this was a gopher snake because it’s skinny and has a pointy tail.

Lovely. Spider creepout.

When I got home, I was feeling tired (OK, physically exhausted but mentally alert), but I really want to make a point of art every night. It makes me feel better. I’m still falling into these nightly downspaces, especially on the nights when the girlchild is not here. Plus I have deadlines. I want to be making progress. I need to be able to show that something is getting done. That there’s a purpose to everything. That it’s not just Go To Work. Go Home. Watch TV. Like some people.

I had decided in order to reduce the price on the two quilts that will be in the Art Produce show, which is being installed this weekend (some pressure to get done, eh?), I wasn’t going to bind the edges. In the olden days, I used to participate in a weekly or monthly challenge (don’t actually remember) that was one word? Maybe two? And you’d make a small quilt for it. I have about 7 or 8 of them. I’ll try to find them maybe. They were fun to experiment with, but I didn’t want to spend the time binding them, so I remembered a technique that I think Ellen Anne Eddy taught us using cording to help satin stitch an edge. Now I’m sure I could do the same thing without the cording, but for some reason, the cord seemed to make it work better.

Unfortunately, I think it took 20 minutes last night to FIND the cording.

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Once I did, I finished the two edges…it was kind of amazing that I had thread to match the lighter one.

OK, maybe not so amazing. I do have a lot of thread. Now I just have to figure out how I want to hang them. Keep it simple.

I was really tired when I finished all that, but I think it was better going to bed with something completed, something that I’d accomplished…yes, besides teaching all day and hiking 6 miles. I didn’t say any of it made any sense. I do spend a lot of hours not talking to anyone though and it wears on me. Girlchild is still coming to school each day with me, so that helps, but that ends this week. Then I go back to talking to myself. I already know how those conversations will go. Anyway. My goals for the week are to get the other three birds and the house done and get that damn drawing done. Holy moley. That needs to happen.

Apparently I will also be writing more sci fi…it’s crowding into my brain even now, waiting for the end of the day when it can all spill out. I guess that’s a good thing.

All Over My Head…

My art goals during the school year are constantly challenged by work, kids, general life stuff falling all over my head. I succumb for a while to work demands and come home and work, and then the art brain pitches a fit and lets the art take over for a while. During the first few weeks of school, general exhaustion also plays a part as the brain and body adjust to a more demanding existence. It’s usually about the time back-to-school night occurs when you realize how slammed you’ve been and you start to fight back for some modicum of balance, whatever that means. More sleep. More art.

I have so many deadlines, though, that I have the art brain front and center. So when I was finally done with errands yesterday, I realized I had two quilts going to the photographer in 24 hours that needed inking, ironing, and dehairing. So I started with the Mammogram quilt…

A little bit of cross-hatching is a good thing. Jake was underfoot, waiting for his dad to come back (yes, the ex is back from Ithaca with a list of things the boychild wants)…

The smaller one took about half an hour. The larger one, the one nicknamed Menopause, it took more like an hour plus…

I took some detail shots before I took it to the photographer. I’ll have photos back on Sunday.

There’s a bunch of detail in this quilt. It’s kind of crazy.

I ran the total hours on both quilts…Mammogram came in at a little over 41 hours and Menopause at a whopping 144 hours. Funny, they’re not that different in size…but definitely in detail and number of pieces.

I guess my biggest worry now is that I’ll enter it in shows and I won’t get in, like with a couple of my earlier very-complex quilts. It’s a scary thing to put so much of yourself in a piece, so much time and effort and blood, sweat, and tears, and have it be rarely seen. I joke about how I’m saving those special pieces for my retrospective, but…

Sometimes I wonder if they are just too much for the average show I enter. So many entries this year and nothing gets accepted. It wears thin.

Then I started quilting the 14th bird, the second version of HeyBird…

It was a bitch last night and a bitch tonight. Thread breaking a million times. Frustation.

Girlchild made a million blueberry muffins last night. I wanted to take them to school, but she claimed some quality control issue…bigger than normal tunnels due to the less-acidic content of the batter (we didn’t have buttermilk, so she used half and half…yes these are fully freakin’ decadent. And tasty. You wish you lived here.). I don’t know if I believe her, but I don’t care, because I live here so I get to eat all the blueberry muffins I want (nom nom nom a la Cookie Monster).

I finished quilting Hey tonight, although I’m exhausted again. It seems never-ending, this feeling that my eyes need to close and stay that way.

One more bird to quilt. Then 3 bindings and 2 edges sewn.

People keep asking about my mood, if I’m OK, whether from the boychild leaving or depression in general, I’m not sure. I’m not really sure how to answer that. I seem to have shoved all emotion deep down and am just floating above on a cloud of Have-Tos and hot tea. I guess that’s good for now. I’ve had moments each day of Holy Fuck, and tears follow, usually out of control, but I seem to be holding it off for now. I don’t trust it to be permanent and I’m not even sure it’s healthy. I think it’s more of survival mode. I’m good at that survival thing. It keeps happening so I get lots of practice.

More tomorrow…although I don’t expect much happening in the way of art. There is a hike instead. That fucking balance again.