Beauty Is…

in the eye…

Of whomever is awake?

When I’m depressed, I stay up late and try to distract myself or make sense of everything. It’s hard to say sometimes which I’m actually doing…distraction or making sense. Maybe they are the same thing. If I try to trick myself into going to bed and falling asleep, my brain gets all ninja on my ass and won’t even calm down for sleep…it keeps kicking the shit out of me until I finally mentally collapse at like 2 in the morning. The alarm goes off seconds later, it seems, and I get up and do it all over again.

I read someone’s description of their life in the last year and they described it as having their heart shattered. Yeah. That. That’s the word I use. And destroyed. Damaged. Dropped. Broken. So going into V-day, a day I’ve never really liked or appreciated, with that feeling kinda sucks. Big time. I was going to draw tonight…there’s actually most of a drawing, the central portion anyway, fully formed in the center of my prefrontal cortex…is that where it belongs? It totally feels like it’s sitting right there in front, waiting to spill out of my eyeballs, but…from Wikipedia (sometimes a good source): the prefrontal cortex is associated with executive function, which relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social “control” (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially unacceptable outcomes). Many authors have indicated an integral link between a person’s personality and the functions of the prefrontal cortex.

So is that where my drawings belong? Probably not. I’m storing this one there though. Maybe there’s lots of storage space in there.

These pictures are from the Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus, Ohio. I was there last May. OK. I wasn’t there. Some previous iteration of Kathy was there and she took these pictures and never got around to posting them and then her life exploded and the pictures are still there, because they survive life explosions whether you like it or not, and the pictures are still beautiful, even if the being at the Conservatory, thinking about being there is painful. So. Here they are…because interspersed about the pain there might as well be beauty. If I can stop the painful stuff and stare at the beauty, I might just get through yet another day.

Actually, I did today quite well considering. I am still sick, but really strangely…it’s in my ear canals, not my sinuses, so my balance is off and I’m still really spacey. It’s like being on mind-altering drugs mostly, and I get a little giggly. The kids think it’s funny, but honestly, it’s better than crying or being angry. I just couldn’t help myself today when kids were describing light vocabulary and were completely and totally off the mark, and all the kids in the audience would look at me confused, and I would just start laughing. So yeah. Maybe the best place to be on V-day is with a bunch of 12- and 13-year-olds, who still think that true love and your soulmate exist, and live for that one piece of chocolate or a little paper V-day card from that really special person.

Occasionally my piece-of-shit camera takes a decent photo.

Most of this is Chihuly glass, in case you don’t recognize it.

Anyway. Taking the ninja, drawing-storing brain to bed. It will have to deal. I still don’t feel well…but hopefully will feel better tomorrow. V-day and my lousy depression can kiss my ass, along with a few other things on the planet.

Vacuuming the Brain

Another no-posting night. I was drawing instead…

I’ve done drawings of the bent-over figure before…but she has an umbrella this time. These are people who are weighed down by life, I think. My people are always damaged and cracked these days. Not surprising, I guess. Drawing is a way to move stuff out of my brain…to dust out the corners, vacuum the floors. I really should draw every day (time! not enough of it!).

Once I was done drawing, there was nothing left in my head but sadness, so I took that to bed, tucked it in, and tried to get it to stay asleep for a reasonable amount of time. It likes to wake up around 4 in the morning and torture me. Sure enough, it did. I told it to shut up and rolled over, put the pillow on my head. That got me another hour or so of not-pain. That’s what these weekend mornings are now…painful. Work mornings are such a rush of having to get up for work and all that, so I can’t get bogged down in moody crap. Weekend mornings don’t have the same urgency. I’m tired, I want to sleep in, maybe lie about in bed for a while, but it’s a depressing place, so I don’t do it. Which in itself is depressing. Vicious cycle.

I get to this point in my head where I just say to myself that everything is depressing…move on. If you’re moving, maybe you’ll see something that’s not so bad. Maybe you’ll even FEEL something that’s not so bad. Standing still? Depressing. Don’t do it.

Whatever.

So yesterday I did a long, semi-painful hike (in that I am still feeling it today…it wasn’t hard, just fast), I did a lot of financial aid forms, I wrote three blogposts for groups I’m in (although I’m waiting for info on two of them to be able to finish), and I finally finished cutting out all the fabrics for Ivy’s Memorial quilt…

Wool on the left, which actually needs to be trimmed down, and cotton on the right, which will be appliqued (yes, by hand) down to the wool bits. It took just over 4 hours to pick everything out, longer than normal for me, but I think that was because of limited wool options slowing me down.

I can’t say this piece thrills me…I mean, it’s a memorial to a dead dog that we miss a lot, and maybe in the mood I’m in, memorials to dead things are not a good plan, but it is something I wanted to get to the next stage, so I did. Usually I take a photo of all the fabrics used in the quilt, but this one isn’t really one of my art quilts and I couldn’t be bothered to try to figure out what in this pile (including cat) I had actually used…

So I didn’t (I used a lot of it). And then I took all the wool bits and zipped them into one of those plastic bag things that bedding comes in when you buy it…I love those bags and never use them. I don’t use wool that much in the stuff I do, but I do want to keep it all together. I don’t want to waste a drawer in my office with it, though, and honestly, it was going to be two drawers, and I need those for cottons (which are taking over the space), because I use them so much more…so I think I will store this under my bed with the crazy-ass flesh-colored crazy-quilt fabrics. There is sometimes an issue with storing under the bed, in that you forget they are there, so that’s a problem, but when the kids move out, I am just going to turn this whole house into a scary Hoarders episode of fabric stash, so who cares?

OK. Not really. OR! If I do that, then you know I’ve gone completely off the deep end. Note to kids: good luck cleaning mom’s stuff out when she dies. I’m not making it easy for you.

I finished the second book in the Zita the Spacegirl series, Legends of Zita the Spacegirl, by Ben Hatke…

These are quick reads for adults, and really are meant for elementary-school-aged kids, maybe middle school. I actually liked this one more than the first one. The story seemed to hold together better.

There’s a robot that pretends to be Zita and the two try to save a planet. There is a third book, but I didn’t get it from the library yet. I probably will, just because now I want to know what happens (and yes, they both end on cliffhangers…if you’re like me, you can’t NOT read the next one).

We do have a 3-day weekend (thank you, Lincoln), so I have an extra day, which is good, because the to-be-graded pile is deadly, I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished much yet, and I still have a to-do list that is a mile long. It starts this morning with a trip to the gym, which is a good thing…the muscles from yesterday are complaining and the best thing for them is to make them do more. Plus it’s good for the depressed part of the brain…well, people keep saying that exercise helps with depression. Then again, there’s a lot of things that people say about how to fix depression, and sometimes I think it’s just not a fixable thing. It’s there and if you’re lucky, you’ll figure out a way to live with it or persuade it to go away. I can’t take a screwdriver to it or make a list of things that make me happy and have it just disappear.

More drawing tonight I think. Hope. It’s like vacuuming the dust bunnies out of the brain.

Watching the Mood

I couldn’t process enough to write last night. It’s interesting (to me at least) that I use the blog to process where my head (and body) went during the day. It helps me have some sort of closure about feelings and actions and progress…in my emotional life, my artistic life, and my work life. I need to see progress, moving forward, or I get more depressed…ironic that…being depressed makes me more depressed. I’m depressed about being depressed. It really is a stupid vicious cycle and the lamest stuff sets me off. I do my best to process my way out of it, but it doesn’t always work.

I don’t even know what it was about yesterday…I worked my ass off running a Jeopardy test review game yesterday. I didn’t have time to think in class, but apparently that fucked with my brain even more. Like I know today will be bad…it’s a test day, so it’s quiet (except for the dipwads who aren’t prepared and want to let everyone know that and disrupt during the test, which is why I give my little personal responsibility speech beforehand), and my brain has PLENTY of time to wander the sand dunes of depressoville. There’s not a whole lot I can do about that except realize it and try to talk myself out of it. But yesterday? Busy days are usually the OK days, the days I didn’t wallow, didn’t ruminate, didn’t do the Eeyore thing, the Marvin the Paranoid Android thing. I’ll be numb and flat, but not down and out.

At the end of school, I got a text from the boychild with this…

who had been hanging out with Calli in the back yard (Calli being the girlchild’s Golden Retriever). Um. I knew we had raccoons…I’ve heard them on the roof and in the tree outside my bedroom window…seen them in that tree too. But lying on the pavement outside the pool fence? In broad daylight? No, it had no rabies symptoms. By the time I got home, it had gone into the pool enclosure and was lying on the deck by the side of the pool (like you do in San Diego in winter), snoring. Loudly. Seriously sleeping and snoring.

This morning, it’s gone. Which I guess is a good thing, because I thought maybe it was sick and I’d get up and find a raccoon corpse in my backyard, a corpse the size of a small Golden Retriever honestly, and then I’d have to do something about it. Raccoons are beautiful creatures, really. I just don’t want it living in the backyard with the dog, I guess. Calli probably thought it was a big fat cat (she’s not very smart). Yes, we have skunks too…hopefully she’s figured out that they’re not cats.

It rained yesterday…so that raccoon was sleeping out there in the rain when I left for the girlchild’s game. There is nothing more miserable (in San Diego…not part of the Winter Vortex at all) than a winter soccer game at night in the rain: cold metal bleachers, wind, rain, everyone huddling under umbrellas and still getting wet…

The girl on the left had just arrived…that’s why she’s still relatively dry. I actually managed to stay quite dry until I had to leave early for my meeting. I had a waterproof blanket, the umbrella stuffed into my bra so I could stitch during the game, and a padded seat under my butt. Two jackets? I did OK. I did leave early though, so I did not suffer the entire game…

We haven’t had too many rainy games this season, so I shouldn’t complain.

This is the progress from Academic League and soccer…

It got too hard to do drizzle stitches in the rain, so I eventually quit on the tail of the bottom bird. Remember my original plan (hope?) of finishing 3 of these every two games? Not happening. At all. Oh well. It’s not that it’s hard; it’s just time consuming. Maybe THAT’S what I should do during the test today, instead of grading and logging in papers (no, not really…I need to get caught up on grading). The birds will get done eventually. It’s not the end of the world.

At my stitching meeting, I continued my incredibly slow progress on the girlchild’s Christmas stocking, started when I was pregnant with her in 1997. Oh yeah.

It’s a good thing she is semi-patient. She’s really not, but… The pattern is irritating in that the symbol for the mauve color is darker than the symbol for the green…but the green in real life is darker, so my visually addled brain keeps confusing the two colors on the pattern, because it thinks the darker symbol is the darker color…which is really weird when you think about it, but then also very logical. I suspect most designers don’t think about things like that: the darkness of the symbol corresponding with the darkness of the color. The mauve is a filled-in black circle and the green is a letter S, very open and light. Even making it a G instead of an S would have helped my brain, I think. So I kept losing my place (no, I don’t use highlighters).

Anyway. Did I do anything art-related? Nope. No energy. Absolutely exhausted on the drive TO stitching…finally went to bed sort of early (for me, anyway), and then was up in the night with an unhappy tummy. There’s seems to be no winning the sleep game at the moment. I really tried to get motivated on two different things, but even cutting stuff out sounded like more effort than I was capable of last night. I’m sure that’s contributing to the low mood. It’s lovely that I know all the things that are affecting me, plus and minus, but I still can’t seem to get far enough ahead of the moods to prevent them from happening. I mean, this is MY brain. I do a pretty damn good job of paying attention to all the stuff it’s saying and trying to treat it right and listen carefully and act accordingly, but it doesn’t seem to matter. When it’s in a mood, it’s in a mood…a 6-month-plus-long mood. And yes, I do often wonder if it’s still a mood or if this is just the new me. Not OK.

Tonight…it will be better…whether that’s artmaking or sleep or just spending time with those cranky-ass beasts I gave birth to…it’s got to be better.

A Small Baby Bird

My mind literally skittered away from meditation tonight; I couldn’t force the light to fill my body. I am supposed to start from a pinpoint of light in my chest and visualize it filling my body with warmth and light. I can’t. I just can’t. There is black tarry sludge in the edges, and it’s pushing back at the light, forcing it to shrink back into the center and sometimes just disappear. It sizzles when it touches the light, lets off a rancid smell, chemical, burns the nostrils.

Wow. That’s not like a good visual of my mood at all, is it? In fact, a drawing pretty much popped into my head fully drawn when I was meditating, which really turned into trying to fight the sludge away and continue to breathe like I’m supposed to. Sometimes it just seems so pointless to even try, but I know I feel worse when I don’t. So I just do. Again and again.

I need to try to go to sleep at a semi-reasonable hour tonight. I can feel the mood worsening this week and I know some of it is hormones, some is stress, but some is sleep. If I’m lucky, I might get an extra 30 minutes tonight. Maybe. And if I’m really lucky, I’ll have all the financial aid stuff done and packed up for mailing some time this weekend, so I won’t have to think about it any more. I’m hoping that will help. Then again, maybe it’s distracting me from the other shit.

I’m thinking about this quilt again…

One Paycheck…because my life is back to that again…looking at the available money and taking deep breaths, trying to figure out survival again. I am so tired of it…so tired of worrying about money and expenses and how to pay for stuff. I had it rephotographed because it’s going to be in a book on quilts and human rights that will be published later this year. I know that once the kids get through school and hopefully get jobs that I will be OK, because I will only have to take care of myself, and I think I can do that. I think I can keep one head above water. Three heads? When two are in college? I’m having a lot harder time visualizing that. Maybe that’s the black tarry sludge…it’s worry and depression and panic and anxiety and grief, all rolled into a burrito of shit. A creeping burrito of coming-to-get-you-in-the-middle-of-the-night. Stephen King hasn’t written the single-mom-paying-for-college book yet…now there’s a scary-ass horror story for you.

Deep breaths. I meditate at school all the time now. I kick one class out into the hallway, close the door, pick up all the science journals, adjust the planner on the screen, stare at the wall and breathe…one two three four…you can make it to the door…five six seven eight…you can do this. You can’t rhyme all of it, but you can do it. You can open the door and let them in and breathe out the crazy and the sad and the dreary depth of grief that overwhelms you sometimes as you walk around the room, trying to persuade kids to work. Feeling this one’s forehead and wondering why he got sent to school with this fever and headache, talking quietly to that one about how to change what’s happening with her stuff right now, praising this other one for doing work you’ve never seen him do, chastising that other one for a giant brain fart day. You understand those days. You have them too, and somehow you get through. You grade. You teach. You email. You do all the right things. You walk through the black tarry sludge, which sucks at your feet and threatens to stop oxygen flow to your cells, but you push through, slog through, put your shoulder to it and move on through it.

But it never ends. Never fucking ends.

I needed to draw tonight, but it got too late. I had to make a test review powerpoint. I thought I had one for this test, but apparently not. And I graded because the girlchild commandeered my computer, so I watched part of Downton Abbey while doing that, and it made me cry. Dammit. I didn’t even get through the first fucking episode of this season without losing it. I’m such an emotional disaster area. Just stay away from me. It’s like nuclear waste. I feel like it just radiates off of me.

It must. You must be able to just look at me and know.

I heard this the other morning and went…NO. Why? What the hell?

Chvrches: Bela Lugosi’s Dead

And then I thought I might actually like it. And now I’ve heard it like 7 times, and I still don’t know. It’s definitely not Bauhaus. But I think I might like it.

You know, there really isn’t a conclusion to today’s post. I keep thinking someday I will get on here and yell, hooray! The depression is gone! The witch is dead! Hallelujah! Thank you all for joining me on this journey out of the hole! Whoop! Now let’s get on with what equates to normal with Kathy. Seriously, when I read old posts, I wonder who that person is? Even when she’s stressed, I don’t fucking recognize her. I don’t even know who she is. And that makes me so incredibly sad. Really sad.

Yeah. Well. I guess that’s what hope looks like, a small baby bird in my hand who is barely raising its head for water. At least it’s still alive.

No One Else Can…

The new meditation visualization is easier than the last. It starts as a pinprick of light in the center of the body that spreads to take up the whole body shape. That’s much easier than a football-shaped oval of light running up and down the center of my body. It kept getting snagged on my liver or my solar plexus, whatever that is…seriously, he keeps using that term, and I finally had to Google it. I knew it was in the middle, but that’s all I knew. Deficient education.

I spent a lot of time cooking tonight. I’m not sure why. I made barbecue sauce from scratch. It was pretty good stuff. I froze the extras for later. I made BBQ burgers with the sauce. They were really good. I made some potato things that were mostly eh. And I made a blueberry cheesecake galette that might kill people with joy. Seriously. It was fucking good. You’re jealous now because there isn’t any for you. Well, honestly, if you came over tomorrow and asked nicely, I’d give you some…I might have to wrest a serving out of the kids’ sweaty palms (I had to delineate ownership of each piece for tomorrow, so boychild wouldn’t eat all of it), but I’d give you some.

I’m not sure why I had a sudden urge to cook good stuff, but I did it. Maybe it was to make up for the largely useless day at school, where very few people listened or changed their behavior based on my directions. I love days like that. Those are the days when teachers wonder what it must be like to work with adults. Having spent the first 13 years of my work life working with adults, I can tell them it’s not a whole lot different…except that you have more control over your own stuff and politicians don’t expect you to work miracles with rocks. Or teenagers. Because sometimes they’re hard to tell apart.

There was definitely some frustration involved. So the cooking helped. And the girlchild cleaned up the kitchen. It almost looks normal. We had a discussion the other day about available hours in the day and why I don’t care as much about cleaning as I do about fabric. I explained to her my theory that in a household, whether you are married, dating, or roommating, that if there is something that really truly bugs you about how things look or are being done, then you should do them yourself…it’s not OK to force your ideas of cleanliness or household importance on other people. It’s about the only good thing I got out of marriage counseling a million years ago…and since I’m the only adult here, that’s how we roll. She’s welcome to mop or sweep any time she likes…and when her friend came over on Sunday, because we were the only household in East County that wasn’t watching the Super Bowl, well then she cleaned what she thought she needed to clean. It was different than what I would have done in some ways, but I was grateful for any help…because honestly, I don’t usually get any help.

Things I’ve learned from the girlchild: how to use fresh garlic and ginger, how to embrace weird-ass ingredient combinations, how to use every dish you own for only one meal. She’s an amazing cook. I don’t know where she gets it from. I am a much better cook now because of her. It’s her fault that blueberry thing got made…and all the calories that were in it? Probably also her fault.

There are only so many hours in the day. I choose to do the things that make me more at peace. If I watch a Hoarders episode, my priorities might change…but only briefly.

I’m not sure where the rest of the evening went. I did have detention and tutorial after school, so I was home late…and I did meditate and exercise and talk to my health coach for the last time and work on more of these crazy financial aid forms and help dry dishes and help pick out boys soccer photos for the school newspaper and butt heads with the boychild about the next college interview (sigh. if you want to go there, and this is your first choice, then stop bitching and set up the interview. or don’t. just don’t give ME shit about it. I did not design this world. I am no happier living in it than you are.). It’s his third college interview…good sign. I hope. But I didn’t do art stuff, and that is starting to wear on me…nothing in two days. Need a fix. Tomorrow is staff meeting, soccer game, and gym. It will be a miracle if anything else happens. No photos even today. Barely even got to read my book. Feel disconnected from my own head at the moment. I can stitch during the game at least. Have to remember to take it all with me. Car full of supplies so I can survive a game. Boots, sweatshirt(s), gloves, stitching, blanket, chair. Tea.

The awesome hike I was going to do on Sunday got canceled…the trail is closed. I picked another hike. I’m not as excited about it, but it will be semi-challenging…although I’ve done it before. I was looking forward to the other one. Sigh. I rarely look forward to anything any more. Sad but true.

OK. I need to do that sleep thing…even though it doesn’t work right. Too much of that stupid sad brain talking back to me. Actually, it doesn’t even do that. It mutters in a corner and when I say, “What? What did you say? Repeat that?”, it replies in a surly fashion, “nothing. I said nothing. Shut up. Go away,” like I’m just going to stop paying attention to it. I mad dog it a little, giving it the eye, getting up close and personal with it, and it gets nervous, fidgets, uncomfortable, tosses some now-painful memory out at me, a picture, a scene from the past and I seize up with it, with the view of what the artist-formerly-known-as-happy looked like (this one was from Oregon), and it takes the opportunity to duck out under my arm, slipping past me, and I feel it slide gently past into another space, out of reach. Damn brain. You talk too damn much. Heal thyself. No one else can.

Seesaw World…

Still freezing tonight. Must be fighting something off. I actually managed a social evening, although I was meant to socialize with 11 other people (and did for about an hour), but then ended up talking the rest of the time to the one other person I talked to LAST time I was at book club. The plus is…I like the books…and these are my people. Sort of. Counselor dings me for always remembering that I don’t fit in. Yeah well. I’m old. I don’t know where all the old people hang out, but it’s not where I am…actually, I am middle-aged. The old people are retired and they all show up, and the young people all show up, and all the people my age are on vacation? Who knows. The discussion wandered through books, cleaning, Myers Briggs, food, childhood, and god knows where else. For two and a half hours, I was mostly at peace. Good thing.

I was a giant stress monkey before that, though, because the financial aid stuff is due sooner than I thought, despite W-2s JUST showing up on Saturday. So I finished my taxes tonight. In January. Earliest ever. Tomorrow I will try to track down the vast quantities of data the other schools need in order to give the boychild an education. Meanwhile, he has another interview…someone should do his laundry so he has something to wear to that.

It was eyeball dissection day today…

It was pretty easy. Sometimes I think I could do some of this stuff in my sleep. I think I’ve walked almost 2000 kids through eyeball dissection at this point. I need to do the dishes tomorrow. Exciting stuff.

Boychild had Academic League and knew some amazing stuff…

He’s on the left. They beat the rival team by 10 points, but it was a tense match (funny to say that for Academic League, but it WAS!). Two of his answers were Walt Whitman and women, but I don’t remember the questions. One had something to do with the State of the Union speech, which I didn’t watch and he apparently memorized. Make me feel stupid, boy.

Girlchild had soccer last night…but he wouldn’t play her. I spent a lot of time watching the sky…

The sunset was gorgeous…

but I watched her get angrier and angrier.

Don’t blame her. There are girls who mess up continually who are playing. It’s frustrating for her and for us.

I think her dad is just going to stop coming.

I will still be there. There are nice sunsets at the away games (which always face into the sun)…

I stitch…I did this…

Finished the bottom one, and started Month 3…just barely got started on the background stitching.

And then today at Academic League, I did this…

Finished the background stitching on the blue ones and one of the purple ones (Month 4). I end up getting about 5 hours a week of stitching in at kid events. I can’t grade in the crappy light of soccer games. I guess I could have graded at Academic League, but I didn’t feel like it. Sigh. That will come back to haunt me at some point.

I really need to get some focus. I started tracing Wonder Under for the mammogram quilt, or whatever it is, lumpy breast…

I did NOT get very far. Like I said, I didn’t feel right last night. I feel off again tonight, but not like last night. Obviously I’m doing financial aid tomorrow night or Friday night, whenever I can find the time. Lots of numbers to locate and input. Stress.

Trying to think about things I can do that will be good for me, like book club, but won’t take so much time. I thought about joining another book club, but I don’t have time to go to another meeting right now. Same with life drawing. Number of hours in the day is a finite number. I don’t have any. What was interesting about last night is that I went to bed about an hour and a half earlier than I have been for weeks, but I couldn’t fall asleep, and then I woke up for a significant stretch of time in the middle of the night and right before alarm time, so I got about the same amount of sleep as I have been every night (nowhere near enough). Have I trained my body to only allow itself 5 hours a night? Or is there something else going on?

Stop thinking so hard. Go to bed. Sleep…sigh…maybe it’s just not something you get to have enough of for a while. Maybe it’s like ice cream…it does affect my mood, though. Not enough sleep and I get more sad, more depressed. No balance. Seesaw world.

The Getting Up and Pretending

I’m not sure where my head is still…I forgot even more stuff today, left one ingredient out of dinner (the kids noticed, but survived), couldn’t find photos that I had already removed from the relevant email and resized, left my brain in a dusty corner somewhere. I feel so freakin’ inefficient and lame because I can’t seem to focus properly…only half my brain is engaged in life. The other half is somewhere else. Hopefully it’s in Tahiti or the Caribbean, having a grand old time, instead of what I imagine from all the TV shows, where we hope it’s on vacation but it’s really locked up in a damp cell with duct tape (students, that’s d-u-c-t, not quack like a duck) over its mouth, bloody nose from getting hit too hard, double vision.

Yes, the imagination runs in overdrive on a regular basis. I tried to remember stuff. I shipped my journal and bought boxes for the quilt, which needs to get there next week some time. I should have packed it up tonight, but I didn’t have the mental energy…which is too bad, because I think the other four nights this week will be much worse than tonight. Oh well. I need to iron it and dehair it as well. Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow night (cough cough, after tutorial, soccer game, and gym). Whatever. The show doesn’t open until May. It will get where it needs to go on time. Ish. I focus so hard on deadlines sometimes that I think it makes me a little insane. Juggling like crazy right now.

I graded papers tonight because I am now way behind. I rarely grade at home these days…it’s just not a priority. I try to do it at school, but sitting in the classroom during prep is depressing. So I avoid it. I have enough depressoid going on…I don’t need to make more. On the other hand, I do need to catch up. So I’m trying to balance those things out.

I exercised and meditated like a good girl…exercise is just an excuse to be able to read really, and that is never bad. And meditation…it centers me, makes me be more conscious of my inner state, which is often not good, but I’m much better at controlling it this year. My students I think are benefiting from my conscious understanding of when I am losing it, and taking control of that. Breathe. Think. Don’t react. Wish I’d known about it sooner…I think it would have made my life different and better years ago.

Then I came in to try to figure out the fabrics for the Ivy Memorial quilt, which has nothing to do with any art show or entry or deadline at all. I didn’t think there were that many pieces in it, but that is because I am a space cadet and forgot all the detailed tiny bits I put into it because I am freakin’ insane. It has 312 pieces in it, which is a lot when you consider its size…which is about 19″ high x 38″ wide…wow, that’s a lot bigger than I thought it was…and that’s without a border.

I laid out the first 100 pieces, which are all freezer paper, cut with a border if they’re meant to be wool, so I can cut out the wool on the line, or cut on the line if they’re meant to be cotton, because I will turn the edges under to applique them. Only a tiny bit confusing…

Most of it is supposed to be wool, with a few cotton accents around, and I planned it to be mostly bright colors. Last year or the year before, I was searching for a run of flesh tones for the main figure, but I never really worked out the rest of it. I have a decent stash of greens and a few browns etc., but none of the brights I was envisaging for the flowers. I have red. That’s about it.

I did manage to iron the hills and river behind the main figure…I had enough greens for that…this is what I’ve used so far for the hillside…

And the river is done. But before I decide about the rest of them, I need to find the stash of leftover pieces from the two Sue Spargo quilts…there were brightly colored pieces in there that were big enough for flowers, which is mostly what I need them for. I think they’re hiding out in the living room in one of the boxes from my last cleanup. I never throw those offcuts away, those funny-shaped pieces left over from cutting out birds or flowers. Yes, I think that makes me a hoarder in some ways, but I think if I just keep watching a Hoarders episode every month or so, I will be motivated enough to keep the packrat tendencies down to a minimum. Besides, in this situation, I think it’s exactly what I need…little pieces of bright colors. I may track those down tomorrow night.

After I pack the box. Yeah, I know. I don’t think I’ll be doing either of those things tomorrow night, but who knows.

I could just do another drawing of a sad woman with a weapon…because that’s not disturbing at all. I try to explain that I get all my supremely sad and angry and disturbing thoughts out in my drawings, so I don’t need to follow through with them. Expressions of anger, sadness, grief, depression, even suicide. I don’t need to DO any of that, don’t want to…but do need to acknowledge the thoughts that ramble through the brain. It would be stupid not to address those thoughts, the ones that inhabit your brain in the early hours of morning and want to color your dreams. Naw. Bugger off. I saw you, I said I saw you, now go away.

It’s funny…I have this tiny little wool stash, only about 20 different colors and some small pieces of some others…so it makes it really hard for me to pick what I want. I like having a huge palette from which to choose. This is the biggest section of stash…crazy quilt fabrics on the left side, browns, yellows, whites, purples, blues, and grays on the right side (actually it’s taking over the left side too…I recently consolidated the CQ stash over as far as it would go). And below the shelves you can see is a drawer of green and one of black.

Then to the left of that are the blues (3 drawers) and greens (3 drawers), with a drawer of grays and one of browns…

There’s other stuff stacked on top, pieces large enough for backings and backgrounds, plus a hefty Kaffe Fassett collection and all the William Morris-type fabrics ever printed…there’s a bizarre combination for you.

Behind me is one drawer of brown, one of orange, and one of red (spilling out all over)…I have another black drawer back there somewhere too.

Then under the sewing machine desk are two drawers of brown, two of pink/flesh, and then a ton of flesh colors that won’t fit in there. The top pink drawer is broken…the plastic is so old and one of the fatter cats kept sleeping on it until she broke it. I keep meaning to try to replace it. I’ve been really good over the last two years about not buying backing fabric, about using up what I have.

Since I will never be able to afford to move out of this house, I’m thinking when the kids move that I will just knock down all the walls and make a huge studio. I’m sure that won’t hurt the resale value.

So yeah. I did some art stuff, not a lot. I worked. I don’t feel happy. I don’t feel completely buried by sadness…just heavy with it. Always so heavy. I work so hard at pushing that away, at getting up and out of it. I wish it would just go. But I think I would need to walk out the door and get on a plane to some foreign country and start completely over for that to really work…plus they’d need to wipe my brain (tempting, oh so tempting). But then who would make my art? So I stick with my dorky kids who argue with me like teenagers do, and the goofy dog who lay on my lap while I was grading, and the three cats who vie for my attention. Every day I feel like I’m just going through the motions of a living person, trying to act like a real live human so no one notices that I am actually an alien from another planet, infiltrating their world, trying to fit in. At least there is art and there are animals and snotty teenagers and books and sometimes even decent movies or television (although tonight was not a good night for that). Without those things, I don’t know that it would be worth it…the getting up and pretending. I do miss, horribly, going to the movies regularly. Sigh. Oh well. Life sucks and then you die (I said that in high school with no understanding of what it meant…now that I better understand what it means, I deeply hope it’s not true).

“‘That’s the thing about pain,’ Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. ‘It demands to be felt.'” John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

Finishing Parts, Not Wholes

OK, I think I really suck at writing to-do lists, because once again, I can’t actually cross something off because I only got part of it done. I got part of lots of things done today. That seems to be what I’m good at…finishing parts and not wholes? Makes sense. I usually only finish about 6 quilts a year, so I spend most of my days making parts (or wishing I could make parts), rather than finishing. I only get to finish 6 days a year, and because I finished two on one day this year, I will be spending even fewer days finishing.

So I should stop worrying about the finishing. Maybe. It’s the process, not the product.

But the product is what we see.

I finished (ha!) taping all the smaller drawings together. The smallest is about 10″ square; the larger ones are about 18×22, with a bunch in between those two.

Here’s the funny part. There are 21 of them. Because HOW LONG WILL THAT TAKE ME? Seriously, what the hell kind of drugs was I on when I thought picking 21 drawings made any fucking sense at all? I guess at least I have a choice. Or many choices. Or so many choices that I will be unable to make a choice.

Sigh.

I’m not sure any of them, including the big one, are really speaking to me at the moment. I’ll try again tomorrow night.

Before I even started taping them, I worked on the journal for Earth Stories. It’s almost done. I’ll be writing that post soon, because if it could go wrong, well hell yes, it did. I am the Queen of Adaptation. I make things work. I did that at school today too…made it work. It’s my thing at the moment. Spend less time after hours dealing with school, but more intense when I am actually there. It was intense today. I went above and beyond. Where the fuck are my stickers? I want my stickers. I should get stickers.

One of the other teachers, who I don’t think has ever graced my room, came in to tell me how he was asking his homeroom who inspired them, and he said that all the kids said mama and papa, all around the room, and then one of my dorky boys, my annoying, will-never-shut-up, could do way better than he has been boys, he said me. Sigh.

No, he’s not an orphan. And his parents are nice, supportive people. And I get in his face. So why do we keep teaching, when everyone tells us the job is awful, the hours suck, the pay is miserable, the stress levels are horrendous?

Yeah. That. And the dorky hugs. And the moment when I make them realize that they are animals. It’s so obvious to the rest of us that humans are animals…but kids need it explained, they need to be shown, they’ve never thought of themselves that way. I guess I’ve seen/felt too many people ACT like animals to ever question it. Every time I make them think or question or say OOOHHH. There we are.

Anyway. So I have 21 drawings and at least one student who likes me and I only have two things fully crossed off the lime-green post-it note from hell.

I did go to copy stuff today, and I almost recopied this other drawing that’s sort of the huge triptych from hell (apparently the phrase of the day is FROM HELL), but then I thought, no, it’s OK.

It’s really fucking not OK. Stupid copiers don’t copy correctly…they’re not accurate, so if you’re trying to tape something big together, it won’t match up. I think I might wait a month or so and give up the big bucks on this one and have it copied at the printers to size, rather than try to do it myself on 11×17″ pieces of paper that I then try to match up and tape together.

But I did copy this drawing, because it needs to continue on another page…

And I’m glad I did, because I realized how good it was, but I still need to figure out what’s on the sides. I purposely drew it on the horizontal, so I would have room at the sides. I don’t know when I think I will have time to draw, though. I will be at Road this weekend, plus a California Fibers’ meeting and an art opening, so no free time. And I’m totally exhausted tonight. Really couldn’t manage that sleep thing last night. Think I will collapse tonight, probably very soon. I exercised, but I won’t meditate…there’s no point. I will just fall asleep.

I finished reading the last in the Flamel series by Michael Scott, The Enchantress…

It made me cry. I wasn’t expecting it. I committed myself to this story for 6 books and it was compelling and interesting. There is tons of mythology and history and fantasy embedded into the series; I think the Morrigan and I need to have a drawing session. Maybe I will invite Billy the Kid…he seems like an interesting guy.

Anyway. I’m sad to have the series end, but he did good. Oh hey, there’s one where I finally finished the whole.

OK, this is seriously tired. Taking it to bed.

Lime-Green Demands

I’m up to eight post-it notes on the keyboard and the desk in front of the computer now. They are all lime green and demand my attention. I wonder if they were a different color would they feel quite so urgent? I’ll find out soon…the next color in the pad is purple, and I’m not that far away from it.

This morning at 7:40 AM, I was drawn over to the light table where all those little drawings are…I have about 10 more to tape together and I actually picked up the top page and the scissors and grabbed the tape and then NO! Bad Kathy! Bad! You have to leave for school in 20 minutes, you haven’t eaten breakfast or found your shoes or prepped your lunch, you still have about 8 kids whose grades are nonexistent (minor issue, really…grades aren’t officially due until 2 PM or so and I could probably beg an extra two hours if I needed to), and your school bag isn’t packed. You may NOT engage in art activities this morning!

But…but…I didn’t get to yesterday because of grades…

You got to sew a label on and dehair a quilt to be delivered to an exhibit. That is a privilege (crap, I can’t spell that word without looking it up). The fact that you spent probably 8 hours on grading and grades and waiting on a grading website that behaved like a recalcitrant 2-year-old is completely irrelevant. You can make art tonight. After school. And the gym. And whatever other tasks you come up with before then (there is still more grading…it’s just not going on the progress report).

I did prep a quilt for a show last night…

Mom’s picking it up tomorrow and delivering it because I don’t have time.

I had some help.

OK, no, she didn’t help me.

There’s nothing like a day (a holiday, no less) full of grading papers and inputting grades and calculating the number of Fs because you know that is all someone will care about…they won’t care about the kid who went from a 28% F to a 56% F. I care about that kid. Next time, he’ll be passing. It was painful and depressing. The only interesting part is that I watched about 7 episodes of The Black List in the last two days and I finally have figured out the plot (I don’t watch closely when I’m grading) and the James Spader character is a truly devious and wonderful person. I mean, not wonderful in like I want to hang out with him, because of the devious lying bit, but fun to watch his facial expressions and how he messes with people. But mostly it was a shitty day.

It was somewhat tempered by, strangely, dinner out with the family, which included my ex-husband…

He felt bad about something to do with his birthday dinner…girlchild likes eclectic restaurants and was upset that he didn’t want to go to one before he went back to the UK last time, so I got invited…

A fire pit instead of a dinner table. It was actually a relatively decent evening, good food, interesting place, no one was too pissy (well, there’s the girlchild, but I think my purpose in life right now is to give her something safe to be angry at), and everyone still had their eyebrows at the end of it.

I did a crappy drawing at the table, but I’m out of practice. If I work on it some more, I might photograph it.

The good news is that I had three quilts photographed, two new ones for 2014 and one older one that needed updated photos for a book it will be in this year. Of course, I can only show details on the Celebrating Silver quilt, which will be in Houston in October this year…

It’s called Awakening the Crone, and you’ve seen its birthing over the last few months.

It’s 40″ wide and 70 1/2″ high…

Not a small beast. I’d like to say it’s a relief to have it done, and in some ways it is, because the photos are due February 1 and I’m actually early! But it’s also a letdown from the intensity of working on it and all the details…that’s hard to deal with right now. Being fully engaged in a project like that distracts you from all the crap that surrounds you otherwise. Duh.

I actually finished the other quilt first…literally, it was finished at 3:00 PM on Saturday and the Crone was finished around 10:30 PM the same day. This is Love (not).

It’s 43″ wide x 56″ high…so not too small and not too big.

It’s had a few variations on that name over the last 8 months…Is It Love? Love (not Love)…but this one stuck.

It was originally a drawing in a small sketchbook for a show that I thought an art group I am in was going to do in February, but the situation changed, and because I need so much lead time to make quilts, I was already well into finishing it when they came out with revised guidelines that were way smaller than anything I have that’s relevant.

Oh well. Some day I’ll be able to write the statement without crying. Well, I think technically, I’ll have to do that later this week, but hopefully I’ll be better off by then. OR…I’ll just cry. Whatever. Yes, those are real anatomical hearts hanging from that tree.

Tonight I forced myself to deal with the damn journal for Earth Stories…I’ll be writing about that hellish process (really, it was just hellish because I’m lame) later this week. But I rewarded myself with some art time…

I taped together another handful of smaller drawings. I’m feeling better about them now…not sure why…maybe this bunch was more interesting. A couple of them need paper taped on so I can finish the side of something or add the tips of the leaves. The one on the bottom there with the yellow post-it-note needs a half a person added on each side plus some lights and maybe a bar. I wrote all that on the note.

Anyway, the lime green post-it note with my overall to-do list only got one thing crossed off tonight, mostly because I didn’t go to a high level of detail on the list…it just says to ship the journal. I should have divided it up into steps: finish the pages, print the pages, assemble the journal, ship the journal, email the doc to the curator. Then I could have crossed off the first one (big whoop!). Actually, that is a big time-consuming whoop, so I am feeling a tad less stressed…only a tad, though.

Sad is still tracking me. It hits when I least expect it, at the gas station, in the pet store, on the way to the photographer’s. The counselor says I don’t know how to get away from it. That I’ve been sad for so long that I don’t know how not to be. Same with the depressed…like they’re somehow separate? Well, yeah. It’s my shadow. I don’t think there’s a magic trick to shaking it, despite people saying things like “well, you just have to decide to be happy.” Oh. OK. Well. Then. Happy it is. And then my brain does some Marvin the Paranoid Android move and there’s no getting there. Because I don’t believe in magic? I don’t know. I think it’s just a slow process and I will eventually realize that I’m there and it might even surprise me. I could use a surprise like that (unlike the surprise of having to change my Apple password 5 times in the last 24 hours because someone hacked into my account, but changed the credit card number and THEN charged stuff on it? Aren’t they supposed to use my card number?). Whatever.

Art this week: moving on to the next projects. Maybe it will persuade my brain to move on as well.

Making the Wrinkles…

My eyes are aging. It’s harder to see, but beyond that, the last 6 months have made my eyes LOOK older. I have all these sad wrinkles under my eyes that weren’t there before. I drew them in the Celebrating Silver quilt. I remember not having those wrinkles 6 months ago. Now they are all I see. I don’t really care about wrinkles…some people are very vain about their appearance and I’m really not. But the wrinkles disturbed me. I draw the things that disturb me. You may have noticed. I’ve had three drawings present themselves in my brain in the last three days. I took notes on the images and will maybe draw this week? What a concept. I delivered three quilts to the photographer early this afternoon…he will hopefully call tomorrow about pickup; if not, it will be Wednesday for me. I think. Maybe Tuesday? Can’t remember my schedule. But it’s a good thing.

Then I went to a meeting of one of the art groups I belong to. It took place in a dessert bar next to a gallery space where we will have a performance art/exhibit going on for two months in the fall about the border fence. Being so close to Mexico brings up ideas of crossing borders and what that looks like. I’m having issues visualizing my participation in this project, just because it’s not my normal subject matter and what I do doesn’t necessarily translate to the process they’re suggesting, but I will let me brain run with it for a while. I didn’t volunteer to be a committee leader, because I don’t have the mental energy or the time, but I will be involved somehow. Maybe I will just let someone else tell me what to do instead of having to be in charge.

A high-school friend came to dinner at my parents’ house; girlchild cooked a great meal and we had time to talk. I worked on these at the meeting and before dinner, and finally finished the first month’s squares…

It always takes longer than you think it should. I think they still need eyeball buttons, but that’s it. I did start the embellishment on the second month as well…actually, I had already done the beige background stitching on them. Anyway, there’s only one soccer game this week because the kids have finals, and I’m not even sure I am going to that game…there’s a meeting I think I have to go to…cannot be three places at once…no matter how much I try.

Grades? Well, I worked on them last night for a while and again tonight. I’m actually further ahead than I expected to be at this point, so that’s good. I also worked on the journal I need to finish for Earth Stories…it’s getting closer to done, despite Word’s attempts to mess with me via formatting and whatever crap Google Docs seems to have embedded in the original file. I know this stuff should be easier, but it’s not today.

Tomorrow, I will finish grades (which might take hours honestly), label the quilt that needs to be delivered this week, find and pack up the quilt that needs to be delivered next week, possibly pack up the quilts that need to be shipped and maybe even ship them…can’t ship the notebook with them anyway. Might as well get them out of here. There’s other paperwork I need to get through as well, and then financial aid stuff really does have to get done.

But I don’t want to go from art every day to no art at all. I know how bad that feels and I don’t want to let my mood get any worse…it was bloody awful this morning and it was just stupid stuff that set me off, got me crying in the grocery store and not just a little bit, and then I couldn’t get it under control, and there’s only so long you can stare at the Brussels sprouts with your head down so your hair blocks any view of your eyes, trying to get the tears to stop coming. I don’t get it. It’s like automatic sprinklers. Maybe it’s some sort of mental let down from finishing the quilts, from the stress of trying to get them done. Maybe it’s because the Brussels sprouts were in such bad shape. Who knows.

So I could have kept grading for another hour tonight, but I made myself stop and I started taping the smaller drawings together again…

I have 10 taped together and another 10 or so to do. Yes, that’s a lot. They’re small. It’s kind of crazy, actually, but I wasn’t capable of deciding what to do next when I copied them. I just went through about 3 or 4 of the smaller sketchbooks I’ve used over the last 4 years or so and marked the ones I liked or that I thought were good candidates. The problem is that the smaller drawings seem less serious to me, less about something, less issue-driven. Most of them happened while waiting for a movie to start or sitting in a coffee house or waiting for dinner. They didn’t have a specific purpose, no image came to mind beforehand, they are literally brain vomit. And sometimes it’s related to where I was or what I was doing before or after, but mostly they’re just random. So how do I pick one? I feel like it needs to have meaning. I don’t know why I feel that way. It seems like my life is such a crazy mess that at least my art has to mean something, to have a purpose, to have a message. And I don’t know if any of these small drawings has a good enough message. Plus they’re kind of painful to look at, because they are reminders of a life I don’t have any more. So that kind of sucks.

Sigh. I wanted to do a smaller one (or two) before starting the next big one, but maybe I just need to suck it up and go big again.

I think I’ll tape up the rest of them and then make a decision…probably not until tomorrow night or Tuesday even. I really do need to get grades done first. Damn job. Gets in the way of the art. I should do something about that (like win the lottery and become financially independent so I don’t have to go to work any more? Yeah, like that).

OK. I am really tired. Sleep. Hopefully sleep. Maybe it’s that lack of sleep thing that’s making the wrinkles…