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…

Rewrite the Kathy

I know how I should feel right now. I’ve written about it before…the joy, the relief of finishing a quilt, of making it through all the hours, the drudgery, the tasks. The deep breath, the sigh of relief. The empty space in your head waiting for another piece to rush in and fill it.

Fuck. I finished two quilts today. I’ve spent the last 6 months working on them (with other stuff in there too), and I feel…what do I feel? A slight release of pressure, of stress, because I made the deadlines…because they will be delivered to the photographer tomorrow and I did what I set out to do. I don’t feel joyous. I don’t feel happy. I acknowledge that it was hard work, that I achieved something, that I was successful, but for what?

I don’t know. I keep doing it because I want that feeling back, I want to feel that rush of good when I finish, when it’s done. I want that right now. I talked to the counselor about that magical step from where you are at the moment to where you want to be, when you are doing everything you are supposed to be doing, and you still can’t manage that step. She says it’s not magic, but she couldn’t produce a list of what to do next. She said to just keep doing, that eventually I would relocate that feeling…that I would allow myself to feel good.

Today? Today I do not feel like I will ever find that feeling. On good days, I persuade myself that if I just keep doing the right things that everything will be OK (fuck, I hate that phrase now, thanks to someone repeatedly lying and saying it over and over to me…bullshit it will be OK). Today was not a good day. It should have been. I was relatively efficient. I did all the things that were expected of me and more. I functioned fairly normally. Crying in the gym and on the walk from the gym to the tire place? Well, it happens…it’s not abnormal, but it’s probably abnormal that I still cry every day. Then again, it’s not abnormal for someone who is depressed to do that, and I have good reason to be depressed, so it’s not abnormal.

I’m not sure if I care whether I am behaving normally or not.

Sigh. Anyway, I spent 4 1/2 hours today sewing bindings on…

I finished Love (not) around 3 PM I think…and then moved on to the Celebrating Silver quilt.

I watched a lot of television today to get me through the sewing. At one point, the boychild came out and I said something about how it looked like I was just relaxing in front of the TV, sewing, and he said, no, he knew I wasn’t relaxing…I wasn’t. I was speed sewing…

Seriously…it was 4 1/2 hours of just poking holes…in fabric and my fingers.

Once they were done, I had to tape all the cat hair off of them…plus find the other one that now needs to be rephotographed for the book it will be in later this year.

It took about an hour to clean them up and iron them and roll them up in a clean sheet to take to the photographer tomorrow.

In between all this, I helped girlchild calculate her grade in biology and figure out what she has to get on the final to keep a decent grade in there, I picked up their dad from the airport returning from the UK for the second time in three weeks, I wrote a grocery list, I listened to the boychild giggling at whatever he was watching on the computer (it was The Daily Show the one time I looked, god forbid he actually study for finals), I went to the gym, and I replaced 4 tires on the kids’ car. Oh, and I graded all the makeup assignments that kids handed me yesterday. I still have to finish all the big projects from before break…they take forever to grade. I’m more than halfway through, but tomorrow is a giant clusterfuck, so who knows if I will get anything useful done then.

And all day, on and off, tears. I finished two quilts? Tears.

And it’s not just because of the holes in my middle finger (see the tip?) where the needle was bumping me all day…it’s sore right now.

What did you do today? I finished two major quilts. One took 48 hours and 39 minutes to complete, and the other one took 95 hours and 2 minutes. I wonder what normal people do with their hours, the hours I spend making art? I know they sleep more. They probably socialize more too. They might even spend more time staring at a television or mowing the lawn or cleaning house. I don’t envy them those. Why aren’t you happy about finishing them? Because the rest of it is empty. It doesn’t make the rest of it feel better. It doesn’t make me happy. I don’t have the magical pill to get to the happy. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck refuse to grab me by the hand and skip over the bridge to happy.

Yeah, I know it’s my job to get to the happy…and I know there’s something in me that’s stopping me from getting there. I just don’t know how to fix it. In talking about meds, the counselor admits to never having taken them herself. I have. It just pushes the emotions away, like over there. She described it as numbing the emotions. How will that help me get to happy? I’m already pretty fucking numb on a regular basis. I don’t see the point.

Anyway. I have a shitload of schoolwork to deal with in the next two days, but expect me to start something new this week. I think I will tape all the smaller drawings together and then pick one or two, plus the breast cancer one. So I should be numbering and tracing this week…knock on wood. I’m scared to death of down time. I don’t want to depend on my job for any level of satisfaction or joy. I can only hope that the art will eventually be my savior. I am so tired of feeling sad and empty. I have to believe that I will not always feel this way. I have to believe in joy and love and that feeling that used to come with finishing something like this, with finishing two in one day? I can go back through my blog and read how light-hearted I used to be, and wish I could be that person, erase the last 6 months, scrub my memories (one of the TV shows I was watching today), selectively pick who I am and how I feel. Rewrite the Kathy.

345″ of Hand Sewing…

The Celebrating Silver quilt has a binding machine-sewn on…I now have 300″ of hand-sewing to do, plus another 45″ or so on the Love (not) quilt. That’s only 345″ total. I spent about 2 1/2 hours tonight getting the quilt trimmed up to the correct size (it’s about 40″ wide by 71″ high…not a small beast) and putting the binding on. I always figure if they give you a range for the space, you should go as big as you can…my large quilts have a lot of presence on the wall and I like that about them. It’s easier to get within a range than to get a quilt to an exact size for me. The Earth Stories quilt had to be an exact size…gave me a lot of headaches. Actually, the Sightlines quilts were even worse for that, because of the spacing and all the logistics of how to hang the side pieces…

On mine, all the blood vessels had to line up. That set of quilts finally came home after 4 years. I think I’ll hang them in the hallway so I can live with them for a while…although girlchild made some comment about having friends over and having to explain her mom’s stuff. Whoops. Oh well. It’s character-building.

I’m glad that I’ve been able to stay on schedule with these two quilts. I know the depression has side-lined my ability to work efficiently quite a few times, and it’s certainly fucked with my feeling good when I get near the end. I just worry about having dead time, time where my brain is allowed to wander the forests of What Did I Do Wrong This Time and get caught by the iron traps of WTF. I need to have things to occupy my brain so it doesn’t wallow in negative shit. My counselor was actually trying to decide WTF today…she admitted that I have some negative thoughts, but that I am always making myself see the positive and do the right things to positively affect my mood. She doesn’t even know why it’s not working.

I know why it’s not working. Because I don’t have a normal brain. It feels harder, it falls into the muck deeper. It just doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. Maybe it’s the art…maybe it’s just me. We argued about meds again. I’m tired of that argument. I’m not persuaded. I think I’m just slow. There are reasons I’m not recovering fast…I’m not a normal girl. I don’t want to act just because I’m supposed to…I don’t want to be what everyone tells me to be, happy with being a lonely old lady, happy with the kids moving out soon, happy to be what? I don’t know. I don’t want to be sad all the time either, but I don’t want to be fake, to be perky just because people think I should be. Hypocritical. I am this messed-up person. I would be better if I understood more about what happened or if I had more answers, but I’m not allowed to have that…so I just muddle along and that’s what it is right now…muddled. I wish other people understood better how their behavior affects other people…I’m tired of being the other people.

I will say that this last art quilt is pretty fucking awesome. I’m sorry I can’t show it to you for 10 more months. It does rock. I guess depression is good for art. If that’s true, then that really sucks. I don’t want to believe that artists can only be good while suffering. That just sucks.

Photographer on Sunday…I will be done.

So at the end of the school day, I checked my phone and there are about 5 texts from both kids about the boychild popping a tire on the car and their dealing with it. They did deal…there was some bullying of lug nuts and reading of car manuals and finally calling of the AAA. Good call. That’s what I would have done. By the time I got home, they had stolen their dad’s car and left the other car in the driveway (mini-tire…they knew not to drive it far), and now all I have to do is pay for new tires. Fuck. This is not the time to have to replace 4 tires. I am going to have to start praying to the Goddess of Found Money, because I thought January was bad? February’s credit card bills may be even worse. It’s deep breaths all the time at the moment. And if one more solar company calls me and tries to explain how I can have solar for FREE (yeah right), I will kick someone’s ass. I would LOVE to have solar. Can’t afford it and y’all want me to cut all my trees down…so then in the summer, when it’s 115 degrees, what keeps my house cool? Because I ain’t got air conditioning…that’s the fucking 1 percenters with that kind of luxury. In my half-assed world, we don’t condition the air…we own the sweat.

Anyway. I’m about to kick the solar companies’ asses. I’m seriously tired of them calling here. The last one said, well can you afford your electric bills? Well, no…but I don’t have $30K, you silly cow, so what are you expecting me to do? Pole dance for it?

I think we will just turn all the electricity off for the next 6 months and see how we do.

Here’s the binding ready to go…

I should probably go to bed. Sleep has been elusive this week.

Girlchild was photobombing my quilt pictures earlier….

I can’t show you the finished quilt anyway.

She and Midnight were watching TV on her phone together…

That cat is a freak.

OK, this weekend? Lots of quilting and grading and getting shit done. I wish I had a bunch of relaxing nice stuff to do on a 3-day weekend, but my life is fucked up and I don’t. So fuck you for making me feel more like shit about that. I didn’t do anything right and that’s why I get to have a fucked-up life now. I don’t go to movies any more. Money is too tight. I don’t do a whole lot of anything but work and work out and make art and read books. I’m a hermit. Whatever. It’s OK for me to be this way right now. (I don’t really have a choice) Someday it will be different, but right now, I’m carrying too much baggage and crap around that can’t even be processed properly. I might as well lose myself in sewing and bad television and reading and working out. None of those things will really hurt me…and I can’t really deal with any more hurt right now.

This song has been the theme song for the week…

This is why I stopped listening to music while I quilt. TV I’ve already seen is less emotionally charged.

That’s All You Can Do…

Hey. So I went back to school today. It’s school. It’s the same old. It’s depressing, honestly. Seeing the people I work with, adults and kids, not depressing. The workload, the constant pile of crap, that’s depressing. The feeling you get when you realize you will be carrying this load for another 3 months before Spring Break, and then there will be more after that, and then you will have Summer Break, and then it will start all over again? That’s heavy. It’s not what I want. I want to teach kids and be their science inspiration, but I don’t want all the paperwork and the stress and the constant heavy negative crap that comes with teaching. But there’s no escaping that at the moment. There’s nothing I can do that’s different right now…I have kids going into college and I need reliable income and health insurance, and I need to focus on getting my kids a good start in life so hopefully they can do it way better than I did…hopefully they can have some semblance of happy and stable and not worry all the time about money and the septic tank and how dinner will get on the table…because that was a giant-ass disaster tonight, although it eventually came together.

I was on this hike the other day and another single/divorced mom was talking about her older teens not doing laundry, and I just laughed. I trained my kids on dishes and laundry at about age 6. I was divorced and was teaching by then, and I needed them to help. I’m totally honest with them about what needs to get done and what I can handle, because one’s an adult and the other is approaching that, and they need to see that life isn’t always easy…that you have to bust your butt sometimes to get through…and that it might hurt and be hard, but you can get through. Because I think some kids never see that part and when it gets hard? They run away, they hide, and people get hurt when they can’t deal. Each year, the helping part from my kids gets bigger, and tonight it culminated in one kid on the phone with me analyzing the 1/2″ vents cut in a cooking bag while I was running tutorial at school, then another kid coming home early because she didn’t hear me say I would leave the gym early to deal with step 2 (or 3?) of dinner. Meanwhile, the first kid had read the post-it note instructions I had left for the second kid, but hadn’t panicked enough to text me yet. We are a working unit. They are adults in many ways, trying to help their mom survive work and art and life in general. They know I’m having a hard time and they try to make it easier. On the one hand, I feel incredibly bad that they have to do that…on the other, I know they will be more competent adults because of it.

God damn. I’m going to miss them when they’re gone. I’m not going to miss the fussing about getting Christmas thank-yous and college apps done, or the refusal to take the trash out until I’ve thrown things and yelled at them…I’m going to miss their care for me, their careful consideration of their broken mom and how they can help and still be the pissy teenagers they’re supposed to be. I did good with them. They will be good adults. They will know how to survive adversity and hopefully get past it. They will bitch at me about the text I sent, and then ask for a hug in the next text (yes, I text my kids while I’m in the same house…). I hope they will be happier than I am. I hope someday to be happy too, but more importantly, I hope they are happy.

I am 8 1/2 hours in to the quilting of the Celebrating Silver quilt. Technically the photos are due February 1 (I think), but I’m trying to get it done by Saturday night, so I can get it and the other quilt photographed next week. I emailed the photographer to set up a time, so now I HAVE to finish. Way to put pressure on myself. I’m juggling some other deadlines as well…I have a quilt that has to be delivered to VAM next week and it’s missing a label; my parents are doing that delivery, because I have no way of getting there within their time constraints (it takes a village). That show opens February 15, I think. I found out today that one of my older quilts, Here, will be going to Ojai to the Beatrice Wood Arts Center for an exhibit opening February 9.

It needs to be delivered a week from Sunday, but that’s to a regular meeting I would go to anyway, so that’s not a supreme hardship. I just have to FIND the damn thing. I love this quilt…it’s been in a ton of shows and has traveled all over the place. A friend was diagnosed with breast cancer and I drew this…she is still cancer-free, knock on wood. That’s 13 pieces out on exhibit and 3 in process, about to be sent on exhibit. I should be proud of all that. I should be able to take a deep breath and have that achievement fill me up with joy and success.

Those are Sion’s thorns…

Yeah, well, we know how depression deals with all those feelings. That said, meditation is focusing on this visualization technique and I am rocking that. There’s something about my ability to see quilts fully colored in my head that translates to this ability to visualize myself filling with warm light, the warm light of creative thought. It’s a good place to be…in meditation. I cry still, but it’s tempered by this calm feeling of being filled by some artistic thing…some creative thing. So many people are lacking that…lacking an ability to create, to make, to draw, to paint, to take what’s in their head and make it INTO something. I have that. I’ve had it for as long as I can remember. I have that and I am so glad that I do, because it pulls me up out of the muck. I’m still depressed, but I’m not crawling into bed and not getting out. I’m not refusing to shower. I’m not crawling into a hole and never coming out. I’m not suicidal. I could be. This experience has been bad enough, has dragged me low enough that I often think I just don’t want to be awake…I don’t want to exist, please don’t make me get up and get dressed and deal with the world. I just can’t. But the art is there, banging on my skull, saying FUCK YOU. GET UP AND MAKE ART. So I do. And I know that’s the way out of this crap…and I will eventually GET out. But I also know what it looks like to want to give up and not deal with anything. That even doing the laundry or grading papers or saying hi to someone in the morning is sometimes the hardest thing in the world for me. Sometimes I wonder how I get up, how I get in the car and drive to work, how I manage to do anything at all. Simple. Art brain. It’s saving my life. It’s making me deal. It’s taking on all the pain and crap and shit and it’s pulling me along, whether I like it or not. And when the days are really bad, really low, it puts the pen in my hand, it makes me sit down at the sewing machine, it pulls fabric out of a drawer, and it makes me be…exist…survive.

I don’t know what made that happen in my brain, but I’m grateful that it did.

One eye stitched…one eye not.

It sounds so lame to write all that out. I read a blog once about how to decide you want to be alive. I want to know how the book I’m reading ends. I want to know what quilt I will make next. I want to know if that kid I’m teaching will graduate from high school. I want to see what my own children will become. I want to see my grandchildren. I want to see the next dog I will have. I want to see the next sunset…sunrise…mountain top. That’s how you get through. That’s how you survive. That’s how you bully through depression and get to the other side. I’m not saying it’s easy and I’m not saying it works for everyone. It’s just working for me. I’m still depressed. I’m still really really sad and hurt and not happy. But…that will not be forever, even on the days when I can’t quite convince myself that it feels like forever and I see no light at the end of the tunnel, hey. I’m in these shows and I’m making art and my kids are trying to cook dinner and manage the recycling bins. So there.

Broken? Yup. Totally. Permanent? Nope. Will be cracked forever, but will figure it all out. The crone? She is there, she is in me. I’m not her yet. I’m not there yet.

Sigh. Rough day. Babygirl is quite happy with my folded-up batting pile…

When I decide that the cat hair is too much, I do have piles of smaller batting pieces. I’m thinking she is so ecstatic about the batting that I should just make her some batting piles throughout the house. Because when part of your life is focused on how to make the life of a bitchy, old-lady cat a good thing…how do you make her last years enjoyable and make her feel loved? Well, really, that’s all you can do in this world…

Stay Gold, Ponyboy…Stay Gold

I have 12 posts in draft mode at the moment. Two of them I will never write, one because I don’t care any more and one because I care too much. Some of it is because I get an idea about something I’m working on (like that stupid journal that I have to do, which some people might really enjoy, but is giving me mental ulcers at the moment), but I’m not done with the thing or I’m not ready to write it yet…it has to develop itself more. Some need more photos or research before I can write them, and extra time is kind of short at the moment. I do write fast, and sometimes I just save up half-written posts for nights when my brain isn’t working, although that doesn’t happen often. More often than not, I get a phrase or feeling or idea midday and I write a quick draft or outline or even just a list of words or a phrase on a draft post, and hopefully that turns into that night’s post. When my brain is really in a mental slump (can you say DEPRESSION, kids? Say it WITH me! I know you CAN!), I sometimes preload a bunch of posts with pictures that I can use for nights when I can’t even pull my brain out of the gumbo…I have at least one or two of those in the wings at the moment as well. Then I get a wild hair and try to clean out the repository of drafts and post a bunch of stuff. Writing is like meds for me…it clears out all that muck that doesn’t need to be in my brain all the time. Drawing does too. Writing and drawing are therapy…I need more of the latter. I probably write enough at this point…I may even write too much.

Today was a lost day. School starts tomorrow and I’ve been trying to ignore it all day. Couldn’t ignore it completely, but I haven’t done a couple of things I always WOULD have done by now on the Sunday before we go back. Oh well. The New Kathy says Fuck That. School will start up again whether I’m totally freaking out about it or not. My biggest worry is actually being able to fall asleep at a reasonable hour, unlike last night’s sleep calamity. Was that sleep? Who knows. Does it count when you start it that late? Sure…it counted somewhere in the world, like celebrating New Year’s in 12 different time zones. I celebrated bedtime the same way…except I woke up in between each one. Dammit.

I did a lot of pre-cooking today, trying to get ready to survive the week. I’ve got multiple casseroles and crockpot items going, because the ex is going back to the UK for his mum’s funeral and I have all kid duty, all the time, and I’m really trying to be better prepared this time, especially since my head will be in a stress spin due to school and quilt deadlines and financial aid deadlines and who knows what else. I haven’t scheduled any hikes for the next two weeks because I don’t think I’ll have time. I did schedule the gym and tried to make sense of all the food stuff, because it’s so complicated…boychild will have to put this thing in the oven at that time and because the oven temperature thing is totally fucked, you have to permanently leave a thermometer in there and monitor the temperature until it’s right (can’t afford to fix that right now), and then girlchild can pop the other thing in there, and odds are I’ll be home somewhere in between all that, but the timing doesn’t work for me to do any of it. Luckily, boychild is motivated to do well by the potential arrival of food he can eat.

I went to the gym, and instead of crying at Hip Abduction, I cried at…crap, I can’t remember the name of the machine…actually, the whole gym thing was rather painful today because the muscles I used on the hike yesterday had apparently never been used in the entire 46+ years of their existence and today they had to tell me about it (which was part of why I WENT to the gym in the first place, because I could tell last night that it was going to be bad…it was going to be walking-like-an-old-lady bad). But I did read an entire book there…more about that in a later post, since it’s an official review. Yes, I was actually ASKED to review a book…probably not because it’s me, but because I put something in my profile that matched their key words for reviewers, like “reads a lot, no really, a LOT.”

I did actually quilt today, although not until nighttime, because grades and dinner at parentals and gym and cooking and kid stuff. Yeah. I wanted to do 2-3 hours and I did 1 1/2. Better than nothing. What was interesting was that when I started, I noticed a problem…

There are many problems, but this was kind of a big one. In the center, where that weird line in the fabric is? That’s a wear mark of some sort, and the fabric was trying to tear in three places. Crap.You can see the three holes here…

It’s OK. I’m a quick thinker. I thought about just patching something on top of it, but instead I made another crack and put it on top…

You can’t even tell. Plus it’s all fused AND quilted. I quilted the breasts and heart and lungs and the left arm and the entire staff…

I’ve been quilting this pretty slowly. There’s a lot of detail and I don’t want to mess it up. I’m trying to be a NEAT quilter. Crazy that.

There’s the heart and the lungs…

I can never decide what color to make the lungs. I know what color they are in real life, but that doesn’t work to set them off from the heart and the flesh, and the heart has to be red, and I’ve only recently added the yellow layer of fat on the heart, so usually the lungs are blue and there are fish in them, but this time, they were green with pink flowers. WHY? Why the fuck not?

I still need to do the right arm and the face and the cat and the owl…not a small amount of work…lots of fussy details. Then I can start on the background. I think that’s why I just reserved the upcoming weekend for finishing my stuff…for one thing, I have the kids all day Saturday, and for another, grades are due next week anyway, so if I’m not working on quilt stuff, then I’m doing grades. I also want to keep working on the cleaning I’ve been doing around the house, slowly but surely, and maybe buy those roses I was thinking about. Money’s super tight, though…the septic tank needs to be pumped and that ain’t cheap. I also got the next quilt drawing ready to go…I had to go copy some filler parts that I missed the first time around, and I got those taped down on Friday night. When this one is done, I will either start the next big one or a smaller one…I have about three of those taped up, but none of them is screaming to be done yet.

I’ve been really missing my regular drawing time…I had managed to integrate it really well into my life on a fairly regular basis, and the change in my life screwed that over. I haven’t been able to revise my practices to allow for it…I could draw at soccer games, but there are too many people hanging around for me to feel comfortable with it (I used to draw at indoor soccer and it caused some strange issues)…so maybe I will have to schedule one night a week for that. I don’t usually find that to work for me, because I do need to be in the mood for it, but maybe if I go back to the smaller drawings for a while, there will be less pressure to make something AMAZING on the first try. Maybe Friday nights need to be drawing nights from here on out…except those are notoriously low-energy nights. Sigh. Sometimes I think too hard about everything, and then I feel bad about the hermit existence as well, because I know it’s not a good existence, but I have so little time for myself as it is, and to spend it trying to be happily sociable in situations that I don’t really want to be in just seems stupid. I do miss art openings, though…not sure what’s up with that, but maybe with the holidays over, there will be more of those.

Anyway. Fuck you, sad. Fuck you, tense and stressed-out. You’re downers. Go mess with somebody else’s head. For this week, I need to be SuperMom and Teacher Lady (I don’t aspire to be SuperTeacher). Oh yeah, and I need to be The Finisher for the art stuff. It would be nice if my brain would get with the program and remember all the stuff it needs to remember this week as well, but barring that, can I please just remember to put it on my calendar so my technology will remind me? I would settle for that. And the first thing I’m going to remember to do is drop that little sketchbook back into my work bag, just in case my brain tries to explode at school. I’m sure there are meds for that, but drawing seems the safer option.

So that was it, Winter Break. Three weeks, survived. It was eh. I can’t even enjoy vacations any more. That just sucks. I’m not sure what reminded me of this, but…this…

Message to the brain? Who knows.

Dear Self

Dear Self: thank you for ever so briefly getting your act together in December and copying everything for the next two units of school. I went in to school today and it was all there, ready, planned. Seriously. Like I had a brain at some point. It’s nice to know that someone is looking out for me sometimes. Am I done with the grading? Heck no. But I can teach for the next 6 weeks with very little planning. And honestly? I needed that. So it’s nice to know that my brain CAN kick in and behave at times.

So yeah, I went in to school this morning and learned a little bit about the silly tablet we’re supposed to be using and then signed up for computers for some of the upcoming assignments (because we won’t have access at all for some portion of the Spring, due to Common Core assessments), and I sort of dealt with my classroom and organizing and putting stuff where it belonged, and then I went home, because there’s a plumbing issue, and it should have been something small, but it’s not…it’s not difficult, but it’s expensive, because expensive is something I need at the moment. If we’re eating something besides ramen at the end of the month, it might be a miracle. Who knows what will die or need to be fixed next…I’m ducking at this point.

I did quilt for a little while…

Not as long as I wanted, but some. I always want the stressful things to stay away and leave my brain in peace, but they don’t. They keep me from getting the art stuff done, tying my brain up in knots. I finished the whole dirt area, the little black and white bird, and about half of the Mother. My goal is to get a ton of it done tomorrow afternoon and evening. We’ll see if that flies.

I’m about 3 hours in…I think. I had my stitching meeting this evening with friends and my kids…I worked on the binding for the Love (not Love) quilt. It’s STILL not done. I’m slow.

Julie brought a cool coloring book of flowers and leaves and birds…

There were lots of owls. I’m developing a fascination with owls lately…

It makes me want to draw…I really miss drawing. I used to draw more. Now I don’t find the time as easily. It’s a place thing, I think. When I was waiting, I would draw. Now I am waiting less. Plus I am incredibly overstressed about deadlines at the moment, and so I find myself either rushing around dealing with those or completely immobilized by too much. So I do very little or I read a lot or I clean a lot. That might be beneficial to the house, but it’s not beneficial to my brain. My brain needs to do a better job of clearing all that stress out.

Julie also gave us bird ornaments for our Christmas trees…but my ornaments are all put away in the garage until next December, so I will hang it on something else for a while and see if it notices that Christmas is over.

I think it will be quite happy being a Spring bird for a while.

Anyway. I’m going to bed early. I’m tired. I have an early hike in the morning. I want to read for a bit, even though it is still World War II, because the time travel has returned and the book is back to being interesting. And I want to have enough mental energy tomorrow to finish quilting, or at least get a lot of it done. I can worry about school and money and getting all the other crap done some other day. Saturdays should be for good stuff…not work and stress and sad. Yes sad. It’s there. It’s always there…lurking about and stalking me. Asshole.

Dear Self: Get rid of that sad guy. He’s a jerk.

Sideswiped…

I keep getting sideswiped…like 2-ton vehicles slamming past and pulling me with them, too fast, throwing me to the ground. I try to figure out the why, why now? Why today? Is it hormonal? Is there some reason for the mood change or the lack of control of the mood? Is there something that has made meditation become a weepy place again? He talks about not knowing your emotions, so looking at the frustration, the worry, the doubt, and trying to find the underlying emotion to that surface feeling. Dude. It’s sad underlying sad. It’s sad all the way down. It’s just plain sad. I don’t need help identifying the emotion. But I saw something today that hit the sad into overdrive…and it’s not something I have control over…it just is and I, as he tells me, sink my mind down into that emotion and just sit in it…just sit there, like it’s a big overstuffed beanbag chair, kind of sticking to the back of your legs and not particularly comfortable, making noise every time you move…I just sit. And it’s an ugly color too, and those stupid tiny white styrofoam balls? They’re spilling out on the carpet too, but you can’t find the hole. Apparently the emotion should move on at some point. I’m curious when that will happen. What am I sad about? When will it move on? What is the difference between grief and sadness? Tomorrow I’m supposed to have a question for meditation. One? That’s it? Will he magically answer it? There isn’t enough magic in my life.

Yeah. So I didn’t do well with the sleep thing last night, so it makes sense that I’m writing this past one in the morning. I’m not at all tired, wide awake really, wired. I suspect it’s the artmaking doing that. I didn’t get to it until late, but then I couldn’t stop…I did the 100 pieces of skelly…

dead bodies hidden in the ground. Then moved on to a few other things I buried underground in this piece…

This quilt has symbolism all over the freakin’ place. It’s like my depression got a home in fabric. It will be oh so fun to explain. The boychild quite liked this part…

He’s been writing college essays for the last two days and hopefully his mother’s art was not the subject of a huge number of them…he won’t let me read any of them. I spent about 2 hours with him going through and paying for all the tests to be sent to the various colleges, and then going through and sending all of the application fees. He has 5 more to finish, 4 before Wednesday and 1 later next week. Then we’re done…until the acceptances go out, no stress, and I still have to do the FAFSA and we need to try to hunt down some scholarships. It’s all very terrifying, especially when I look at how much money I charged to credit cards today for all the fees. Yikes. Anyway. We’re mostly done until next year, when we have to do it again with the girlchild.

I went to school in the morning to grade the last of the science journals…

I had to do it. I had put it off already for two days…but it was as depressing as I thought it would be. There are parts of my job that I enjoy, but the hard work parts of it just make the rest of my life seem so much worse…so I sat there for a minute, staring out at the empty room (they’re waxing floors on Thursday, so everything is up or out), and cried. Then I turned up the music real loud and graded and wondered what magic miracle was expected of me to get some of these kids to give a shit about their classwork, based on what I was seeing. I probably shouldn’t have done that class last…they are a bit challenging. But getting pressure from higher-ups that makes you feel like any F is a failure on YOUR part, and then going through simple assignments like this? Makes you want to quit teaching and go work for the Republican party. Yes. It’s that bad. It would be easier. I think.

Anyway…politics aside, I’m pushing through the grading best I can, because grades are due the week we go back to school. It depresses me to grade at the moment, so I try to do it in small amounts, spread out over many days.

I’ve been falling down on some of my jobs for an art group I’m in, so I tried to get my act back in gear today. I just need a routine. If it feels hard, I just put it off at the moment. I can’t handle anything hard. I say that, but I’m ironing a million tiny pieces down. Hard is relative.

I’m geocaching later this week, and I didn’t know what to bring to put into them, but remembered I had been given an Shrinky Dink oven and supplies many years back, so I pulled them out and started drawing…

Then colored them in and put them in the oven…

Which is powered by a 60-watt lightbulb…

They came out teensy weensy…

But I think that’s OK. The flame head folded over on itself a little and didn’t fully flatten. I’ll make some more tomorrow.

The boychild is interested in geocaching, so we might do that on his birthday. He’s turning 18 on Thursday, which is more than a little terrifying. Not as terrifying as paying for college, but close. His Christmas present included hiking boots (his request), so I’ve been trying to get them broken in.

We spent a few hours this evening picking up the kids’ dad from the airport; he’s been in Britain for 2 weeks visiting family, especially his mom. Part of my Christmas present came back with him. One thing that always amused me about British TV and books from when I was younger was how important tea was to their culture, but I didn’t really understand it until I lived there. It’s where I got addicted (and I still drink British tea with milk, thus confusing the majority of Americans, including all my students)…this mug was a gift from my ex-SIL and family, and entirely appropriate to my life at the moment…

Tea does solve many problems, simply by making you sit down and drink it properly. Sometimes a cup of tea perfectly brewed and at exactly the right temperature can bring an immense amount of calm to my troubled brain.

So I washed and folded all the red fabrics I bought yesterday (yes, some were NOT red)…

The one on the left was going to be the binding, but it lost out to one of the other ones, which I was lucky to have bought a yard of anyway, because that’s all that was left on the bolt and I had this niggling feeling that it was a better choice than the one above. I’ll try to get the binding on sometime soon so you can see it…but right now, I’m still on a roll with ironing…

I was going to stop after the bird, but the woman was calling to me…above, she is still in pieces…

Apparently she called quite loudly, because I got all of her ironed except for the head.

Which maybe is why I’m still up (but finally getting tired) at holy crap in the morning. Plus the girlchild is coming back from Pasadena, where she’s been working on one of the floats for the Rose Parade. I wouldn’t be a good mom if I didn’t wait up. Actually, if I’d thought I could have gone to sleep earlier, I would have.

Earlier today, Babygirl was helping me use the mouse.

Right before I took this picture, she actually was sleeping with her head on my mouse hand. Ugh.

Then Midnight was standing watch for a while too…

Actually, she spent most of her time sleeping.

Jake went home today, so the cats seem to feel more free to move around. Jake chases them, stalks them. Calli could care less.

Anyway. I’m hoping to iron more tomorrow…it’s taking me about an hour per 100 pieces, so there are about 8 1/2 hours to go. That’s a lot. Hmn. That might be unrealistic, when I look at what else is going on tomorrow. The ironing did distract me for a long time from the sadness that is lurking around and gut-punching me on a regular basis. Meditation made me think about something I had said or done that was positive, and I remembered making an effort to tell these two girls who are in one of my roughest classes that they were rocking science right now (they really are…and the other positive thing I had come up with just made me cry more, so I picked the girls)…they’re both kind of different and went into teen-girl glow mode when I said it. I was just thinking about trying to encourage girls to be more into science through high school when I said it, plus I wanted them to know I appreciated how hard they worked. I don’t get any happy glow out of it, though. I’m supposed to…for making them feel good. But that’s part of my job. Sigh. I think my emotional machine is out of order. It doesn’t react right. And I’m getting this vision of the Wicked Witch on her bike (broom? Wizard of Oz?) cackling that I will PAY, my pretty, I will pay. That I have been wicked somehow and I will pay.

I should probably iron a lot more tomorrow instead of spending close personal time with that part of my brain. It needs a vacation or something. And the sad? It can go fuck itself. I’m tired of it. If it’s going to be sad, be sad about something that’s real, that’s true, not something that was apparently bullshit and a lie. Oh if only it were so easy to direct the mind to be sad about the right things and to drop the wrong things. The creative mind…it kinda does what it wants. We can try to direct it all we like…it will decide how to be.

I’d like to decide to be asleep now.

I Could Totally Do That

Brain is all over the map. My students’ gave me gifts today, those of the hugging variety. Cheap but appreciated. It is the thought that counts. I was reading someone else’s post about their depression and how it affects their ability to do things they know they should be doing, and then I was thinking about the gifts other teachers at school had given me and how I couldn’t even wrap my head around that task (I’ve never been able to deal with more this time of year), and I’m having issues even dealing with gifts for my own children, and for some reason, the whole mess made me really sad…which would have been fine, but it was lunch at school and crying at school is never a good thing. I felt completely inadequate and lame and nonfunctional and sad and useless, and even writing about it, taking simple notes to remind me of how I felt for when I wrote this post later…those little notes made it a bigger issue. Brought to tears by kindness? Or the reminder that I am broken? Or do I just accept my inability and move on?

Depression is such a fucked-up mess. Thinking about it makes you more depressed, because there is no magic pill or word that makes it all go away. When you’re totally sick of being depressed, you are still depressed. In fact, it may make it worse. It’s worse when you know you’re doing everything you’re supposed to be doing and it still doesn’t feel better. It’s still a slog through cold mud. Someone today told me I looked great (ironic, that), and I said thank you. Because that’s what you say. And that is one positive from all this shit. I’m healthy. I’m the only non-sick person on my team at school at the moment. I haven’t been sick in the last 6 months, at least with the normal viruses etc. I’m just sick in the head. I just don’t sleep. I just don’t eat well. I just don’t give a shit. Except I do. I get up. I shower. I work. I try. I make art. I read. I work out. I try to do all the things that normal people do…the non-depressed people. The kind of person I used to be. I guess I did that for enough years that I can fake it now. Look! This is what a normal person does during Christmas! She shops! She wraps! She cooks!

Fuck that. I have three weeks off of school. I can make sure I exercise regularly. I can try to drag the monsters out on some hikes or go on some on my own. I can clean the damn house, because it’s driving me nuts. I can try to be OK…whatever that means.

I can’t be happy. I can’t be non-depressed. Those aren’t really antonyms. Happy is not the opposite of depressed. I am sad. I can’t be happy and sad, can I? Maybe…I read that you can be happy your child is going to college, but sad as well. I get that. I understand that. I don’t think there’s something that will make me happy at the moment at the same depth as my sadness, though, so sad it is. Depressed, though…depressed is a whole ‘nother island, further out to sea. There’s no getting off that island until the non-depressed boat shows up to pick you up, and he’s notoriously bad about finding the island. So here I sit.

Girlchild had a soccer game today. She did not play. I don’t like her coach. He’s kind of an idiot. Hopefully he doesn’t read my blog (it seems unlikely, unless he is a closet quilt artist). She’s having some mood-related issues because of his lameness. I’m doing a lot of huggy mommy stuff to try to make up for his shit. I graded during the game and stitched as well…

That’s a whole lot of little blue dots.

Plus she misses her dad. So I didn’t exercise tonight (ran out of time…cuddled teenaged kid instead of exercising…not as many calories burned, but good karma is better anyway I think) and I ate like shit today (not her fault). I did meditate…there was discussion of cause and effect. How does it feel to give someone something? Ironic that, considering the season and my issues above with gifts…I’m having this issue with gifts I gave that were handmade, some of which meant (mean?) quite a lot to me, and now I wish I hadn’t given them away…because I don’t believe they will be treated with respect. It’s interesting the kinds of gifts we give to loved ones…some give mostly handmade, some give all material things, devices, objects that don’t have personal meaning. I wonder if that is a gender thing or if there is some type of person that would be better for the handmade type…one who was more thoughtful. Don’t get me wrong…gadgets can be very useful…but there is a level of intimacy with a gift made specially for someone, about thinking about the person as you made the gift, that I think makes it worth more. And if that is never reciprocated, that level of feeling inserted in the gift creation, maybe that is always a mismatch? I don’t know.

I don’t have much time for things like that…for making those types of gifts any more. I used to.

Speaking of tech, here are the two tablets I’m using now…

The iPad Mini (left) has been around for almost a year and gets lots of use, mostly for reading, but all types of reading. The one on the right is the new Nexus tablet from our school district (it’s not mine to keep), which I’m supposed to use for school-related stuff. Apparently I will be able to track everything my students are doing in class on this thing and send feedback right away. I’m imagining a classroom where everyone is staring down at a device, silently tapping away, including the teacher. That has got to be so far away from reality. Here’s reality…kids doing Snapchat and Instagram in class with their phones and talking instead of getting work done, while another kid shows his table a YouTube music video that is incredibly inappropriate. Some mom complains and the teacher gets reprimanded. One thing we definitely need (besides a case for the damn Nexus so we don’t drop it and break it and have to pay for it, part of what we had to sign off on to get the damn thing) is a better agreement for parents to sign, one that actually protects teachers from stupid kid behaviors. It’s a whole different world to navigate. So I am supposed to spend part of break getting used to the beast on the right. It is not like the beast on the left. Wish me luck.

I told you I was wrapping…just very slowly and inefficiently, that’s for sure. My brain is not fully engaged (hello, can you say depression?).

Still haven’t opened the curtains from summer sun. Didn’t even notice until I saw this picture.

And meditation took place with cat on lap.

Also not particularly efficient.

We had a discussion of saggy boobs today, especially what happens to the body post-pregnancy…singing the boobs-hanging-low song (like you do), remembering a conversation with a friend about the pregnancy stretchmarks (wherever they inhabit your body) being a mark of what you had survived, a mark of the relationship that created the child that caused the marks themselves. Stretchmarks existed as a sign of the good in the relationship, medals for wounds inflicted in war. It brings to mind how we appreciate the aging and used body…the work those parts did. I found all those thoughts depressing as well. I need to go for a walk or something (probably not right now…it’s a bit late).

White Lies by Max Frost…

Heard this song this morning on the way to work. Not sure why it stuck, but it did. Up early. More soccer. More grading. More tiny blue circles (I’m fairly sure I left some on the bleachers at the high school). Hopefully she will play tomorrow. Hopefully I will get a bit up and out of this funk. Funk makes it sound like a good thing, like the music. It makes it sound like all I have to do is get out of the chair and come in and dance. I wish it were that easy, because I could totally do that.

Don’t Stop Believin’

It’s possible I should be meditating more than once a day at the moment…two or three times in a 24-hour period might be necessary. It’s really just end-of-the-year stress coupled with student mayhem and big-project chaos and stupid petty administrative crap that we shouldn’t have to deal with at all.

My desk at school at the moment…

At one point this morning, I had 5 iPods, a Nexus tablet, and a flash drive connected to 2 computers and a flash drive on a third computer, with three types of connectors in play. It’s possible my brain almost exploded with technological dealings. Sometimes I wish I could just walk out of the classroom and into a local park, sit down on a bench, and start to draw. But you don’t. You find somewhere in yourself that has some wicked large burst of teacher power and you bully through. I only had three unsolvable tech problems today, and I think one was because I don’t read Arabic…yet. I have 9 kids who had the balls to NOT turn in the assignment (out of 165, suck my…excuse me), and 4 of them were absent. The other 5…I promised them a parent phone call on Christmas Eve if they didn’t produce something by tomorrow. I am nothing if not evil.

That said, my desk is STILL a mess and I have a ton of crap to deal with tomorrow…but I WILL deal, dammit, and whatever doesn’t get done tomorrow will get done eventually. I put myself in a much better place schoolwise this year than last year going into Winter Break. I managed the bullshit, best I could, and the petty crap that sets me off will be out of my hair by 3:30 tomorrow afternoon.

It started pouring rain while I was on duty this afternoon, so I entertained myself by yelling out car color and type so the kids would know if their parent was there to pick them up. Boychild had his piano recital today…I need to upload that video so his dad (and maybe his British grandma) can see it. I managed to bring food to that and then I came home and made tonight’s dinner and then tomorrow night’s dinner (soccer game). I also wrapped a bunch of presents, mostly the stuff that needs to go to Seattle. If I’m really good, I can stop at UPS in the morning on the way to pick up donuts for the winning class of the month on the way to school. I might even be able to BREATHE somewhere in there. Seriously.

Then I noticed three presents under the tree…for Mommy. From my kids. OK, it’s the girlchild who calls me that. Boychild calls me Mother. Sweet, I know. I’m trying to get all the Christmas stuff done. Some of it just isn’t going to happen this year. Or it will happen differently. I just can’t get my head around it.

I meditated. I exercised. I did not make any art. Sometimes this holiday stuff takes precedence. I knew if I didn’t wrap the Seattle gifts tonight that I might not get them mailed until Monday…so I did it. I should have done it weeks ago. There’s no point in kicking oneself over the should-have’s though. My whole life might be about the should-have’s…or not. Maybe I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing…except I’m not really a fan of fate ruling my life, any more than I subscribe to a deity being in charge, so there we are. Life just is. And we move on.

A significant lack of sleep is not helping at the moment.

I’d like to say that tomorrow night will be better, but there are three soccer games in the next 48 hours. I know, crazy, huh? And I realized that I didn’t plan a Saturday dinner, because I forgot I would have the kids that night. I never plan a Saturday night dinner, not even now, when it’s just me…it’s just leftovers or chicken and Brussels sprouts. Or the occasional dinner out (that would be twice in the last 6 months). Sad but true. I can’t really afford to do anything nice…we are considering doing Unsilent Night again, and last year that was followed by dinner out. We’ll see. I don’t know what we will have energy for by then.

I really want to go draw right now or cut out fabric, but I’ve had two nights with less than 5 hours of sleep and I need to fix that tonight…or at least do better. I need my wits about me tomorrow…some of them. Then I can settle in to making art for hours each day and going to the gym regularly again and trying to eat right and drawing when I want to and reading more and cleaning the damn house before I go totally bonkers with the mess. And dealing with the 17 million errands that have been piling up. And sleep? Maybe? Some more sleep would be good. And at least one hike a week…three weeks off? I should be able to do that, right?

Maybe I will feel more peaceful then. Less like mosquitoes are buzzing me. Goodreads says I read 76 books so far in 2013, almost 30,000 pages. They call it a year in review, so I wonder why they don’t publish it and the stats on like January 1? It would make more sense. I could easily finish another 4 books before the New Year. I will probably finish one in the next 48 hours (it’s short). All the library books I had on hold are being delivered this week, it seems. I actually feel pressure to read more to catch up. Weird, I know. I love reading, love losing myself in someone else’s world for a while. Love reading other people’s stories. So much better than my own right now.

OK, I managed to upload the videos (which really only family care about) of the boychild’s recital…here’s the first one…

Yup. He made mistakes. All four of the teenaged players admitted to not practicing near enough. And that’s why they’re not famous.

And here’s the four of them doing that holiday favorite Don’t Stop Believin‘. No really…

Don’t ask. Someday I will remember to record video by holding the phone sideways. I don’t know when I will remember that. I did actually remember in the middle of the second video. Whoops.

My mood has wandered off. It’s tired of hanging out with me. There are pros and cons to that.