I have 12 hours and 12 minutes into the tracing. I’m at piece 1138, which is the hair of the larger figure. All I have left to do of her is the hair and all the crazy stuff hiding in her hair. Then I can move on to the smaller figure.
Turns out there’s actually 1852 pieces (not 1825…not dyslexic) and I missed some, as always, so there are actually MORE than that. Whatever.
I washed the batting yesterday, left it in the bathtub. The kids said something this morning about not being able to take showers. Turns out I totally forgot it was in there. They thought about telling me, decided I must be doing it on purpose (Ha! My momhood is complete! Even my crazy makes sense to them!). When I explained to them this morning that this was Menopause Brain, similar to Pregnancy Brain but possibly permanent, girlchild yelled down the hallway, “Don’t blame your stupidity on your hormones!”
And there we are. The wonder that is my household.
Seriously, I traced for about 5 1/2 hours yesterday in the long run, AND made a new dinner recipe, AND left the batting in the bathtub overnight. Which reminds me…need to go drain that fucker.
Kitten harassed me all 5+ hours by sitting ON the drawing and ON the Wonder Under…
Calli was almost underfoot, but not quite…(see how big the drawing is…)
And then Kitten stared at me balefully from the couch, where she slept because Mommy wouldn’t let her on the light table.
Meanest mommy ever. But I got a lot done…
Sometimes I want to just quit, but it’s easier to stop at the end of some section, and I crazily started the bird with 100 pieces in it at about midnight…so you know how that went.
Up too late, yet again. Thing is, I had to be up early this morning, because I’m not allowed to eat or drink anything after 9 AM. I can’t understand the logic of telling a diabetic NOT to eat, and then having her drive all over San Diego County for an MRI and a totally different place for the doctor. Hopefully I’ll have time to eat in between. I will totally be drinking an entire bottle of water, because I’m already dehydrated, and I drank two full bottles of water last night and this morning. Let’s hope they don’t need to take any blood, because they won’t get into my veins.
It’s OK…the uterus is just full of things that are benign but annoying and causing problems. I gave it permission to STOP being annoying, you know, like you give dying people permission to just Let Go? But my uterus is more stubborn than that. It’s convinced releasing eggs is what it should be doing right now, whether I like it or not. Hence stupid doctors’ appointments and procedures and tests and annoyances.
Anyway. So there will be lots of driving and dehydration and doctor’s waiting rooms today. Not fun. I’m going to trace some more before I go, though, and then pray for caffeine. I am more than halfway through the tracing…which is interesting, because we are officially halfway through summer break too, I think…although I personally start thinking of school officially on August 1, and this summer has been filled with school batting at my brain consistently, via email and text and signing up for classes, because everything is changing again. This will be the fourth website I’ve had to do for school, wait, no, I did a Google Sites one too, so that’s five. I’m not sure what was wrong with the last one, but now we get to learn a new one. Whatever. I’m sure it will be the most awesomest EVER, but if Google Classroom let us do a few more things, then I wouldn’t NEED another one. Wait. Google Classroom is number 5, so this is 6. Bloody hell. If I didn’t have to keep redoing things every time someone changed their minds about what was the coolest (and the cheapest), I might get more of my summer.
So many things achieved. I hate when my mood doesn’t reflect what I’ve gotten done…some of that is moody hormones, unfortunately, but some of it is getting bogged down by other crap that just won’t leave me alone. The little stuff is really getting to me at the moment. Need to dump that mentality. Must be getting to the end of the school year.
My two quilts are going to the photographer today…I dehaired and ironed them this morning, got up a little early to make sure I had enough time. Probably won’t finish writing this before I have to go, but that’s OK. I graded papers last night too. Girlchild and I were going to go to this art and music thing, but it was canceled for the rain (yes. we had rain. a miracle.), so she went off to dinner with friends, while I watched the series finale of Sons of Anarchy. Sheesh. Well, it’s done anyway. I think it’s hard to end a series well (Sopranos for example, not as an example of ending well). At least they got to make a decision about how to end it, instead of just not being renewed.
So I finished tracing the Wonder Under on Bathtub 2 last night…
And no, Kitten wasn’t helping. She mostly sat around on the papers I needed and then rolled around presenting her belly for petting. Then attacked. It’s nice when she comes out though.
It took almost 8 hours to trace this quilt, which is more than I would have guessed, but there are some whopping big and complicated pieces in the bathtub and water that took more than a minute or two to trace. I usually figure about 100 pieces an hour. Tracing big pieces takes longer than small.
The next step is to cut them all out and then move on to the ironing. I need to clean up the studio first though. There’s some stuff in there that’s been there so long, I don’t know what it is. Time to get it out of the way. Summer cleaning is how teachers think. We don’t Spring Clean. There’s no time. Summer is when our brains like to get rid of stuff and reorganize and move stuff around.
So that’s on the list. Even starting now, I think. I can’t iron fabrics for the next quilt without some major cleaning in here.
I’ve had some conversations about smaller quilts I can make for sale this summer. I don’t want to do all cats, but I will do some. I’m thinking of a different owl and maybe a raven…and possibly one like the cancer donation quilt I did with the hands and the heart, but simpler. So I’m finalizing all that in my head and figuring out how to fit in at least three major quilts between now and the end of September. Ha! Wow. Crazy much?
Honestly, though, I’m kind of looking forward to putting some sort of plan together for summer work on quilts. It helps school feel less crazy. It helps quiet nights at home seem less lonely. It helps with the frustration of my job. It helps temper the teenaged mutant attitudinal beast who is currently on my couch, bitching about everything I say or do (walking away, my sweet. I love you, but I’m not in the mood). I’m crying at the drop of a hat these days, stupid hormones. Fuck. Going to draw today. Seriously. They’re whirring about in my head, causing strife and stress and nausea (oh wait, those are the hormones, right?). My photographer gave me some really positive comments about the quilts I dropped off…not that I didn’t like them, but I keep having this discussion about pretty versus significant. I prefer the latter. Most people like the former. I have to find the happy place between them for the stuff that sells easily and then keep making the big stinky stuff to keep me sane. Like sanity is my strong point! Whatever.
This mood. Sheeit. Dammit brain, I finished all this stuff. Would you back off for a bit? Sigh. We can engineer bridges, put humans in space for months on end, we know how to replace a lens in an eyeball without stitches, but we can’t find an acceptable treatment for menopausal crap? This world we live in. Don’t tell me it’s equal. It’s not.
Pouring rain. Heaven to California. Won’t be enough. Never is. But I can turn my water off for a week (to the plants…not the showers). I’m going to save water next year by sending the second kid to another state, a state with no apparent water issues…a state that makes its own water. Who thought greening the desert made any sense?
I have the end in my sights…which end? Lots of them. The end to tracing Wonder Under on this piece, which is strangely making my hand sore. I wake in the morning and it’s stiff and swollen. Probably this is more getting old or menopausal effects…because I never had issues before and I’ve traced for much more than an hour at a time. I’m up to 6 hours…
There are too many large, long, and convoluted pieces in this quilt. It makes tracing difficult…I hate wasting Wonder Under. It will make ironing difficult too.
This was the worst piece…
Crazy. Totally should have cut that up into smaller pieces. Oh well. So I’m at about 450 pieces done…didn’t do many pieces last night, even though I worked for over an hour. Of course, it probably took longer than normal because of pieces like that one above. So I need to think about the background for this one and whether or not I want to get more water or bathtub fabrics. Because that piece alone is a significant chunk of a half yard…and I don’t always have that sitting around…certainly not in water color. Whatever water color is.
I keep meaning to go to sleep earlier. I’m tired. My body protests the mornings, but some more than others. You’d think I’d be half dead this morning…stayed up later than the last few nights and it should all be catching up with me on a Friday, but I’m strangely OK. Headachy, but awake. Had headaches all week on and off. Thank you weather systems. Or students. Or financial aid. OK. So headaches could be caused by many things. They are NOT caused by donuts (don’t disabuse me of my notion please).
Totally have drawings rambling chaotically through my head. It was my monthly stitching meeting last night and they plopped a few more in there for me. It’s crazy how much stuff is piling up in there. My artist brain is rushing around, trying to record the ideas on these giant pieces of paper that she piles up in the corners, and then they all slip down and start sliding all over the place. She’s trying to keep them from getting in the way of going to school and remembering the parent meeting I have and that I have duty and it’s currently pouring rain and that I’m giving a test today and there’s that kid who can’t sign into the state testing but we think we figured out why so I have to check that today. All that’s being covered up by these giant slips of paper with intricate drawings of exploding uteri and fetuses reaching towards overloaded pregnant women and crones being pushed aside by perky-breasted skinny beasts with not a creative thought in their brains.
Yes. It’s on overload. Need to deal with that. Please don’t call Freud in on all that. I know exactly from whence it all came.
But it’s always good to just sit and stitch and talk out all your worries and amusements and giggle about stupid stuff, even though I’m old and wrinkly and decrepit and that’s not what society likes.
All I did was stitch feet.
OK. That’s not true. I stitched around eyes too. Two hours of feet though…basically.
Sometimes that’s the best kind of stitching, because it’s just kind of brainless. I can do bullion knots in my sleep now. And we talked about how to make phones do things and I’m trying to figure out how Siri can make dinner or lunch for me, because shit, I don’t have time for that, and she seems to have endless amounts of time. And then we talked about how Kathy can make money and the Other Kathy reminded me that I used to be an editor (crap, I forgot about that…no, I really did), so I’m looking at that possibility for extra work, plus they both voted for small cat quilts this summer for sale. So I need to go pull drawings with cats in them and start reinventing that wheel. Which is stressful, but not as stressful as trying to find hours in the day where I could drive to a job location and work there after being on my feet all day at school. Because my foot is killing me, despite the attempts to rest (ha!) and elevate it (double ha!) and wear an ankle brace, which a student thought was an ankle bracelet and I was on home arrest. At school. Trust me, sometimes that job totally feels like that, like now, with only six weeks to go and the hardest test of the year today and two weeks of state testing looming over us.
Big fucking sigh. I’m good. I can do this.
Thunder and pouring rain. Kids will be absent today because of that. Stupid.
Things that are good right now. Right this second. The dog is sound asleep behind my chair and is not eating the girlchild’s underwear. I am only teaching Punnett squares for about three more days and then I am done done done with the stuff that is apparently so hard we can’t do it. I had an awesome book club meeting last night and a long talk with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. I have another social meeting tonight. Grades are done. I think I have uploaded every stupid-ass document Cornell needs onto the financial aid system. The boychild is coming home in less than two weeks. It’s supposed to rain. There are leftovers in the fridge for my lunch today. Google Classroom finally updated so I can grade assignments from my iPad. I’m wearing jeans to work today (this after a long work dress code discussion at book club last night). My foot hurts but it’s not a broken bone. I already had an ankle brace in my stash. I still like Cheerios for breakfast after some 48 years of eating them. Two of my quilts are traveling with the People and Portraits exhibit, and now they will be at all four AQS Quilt Weeks in 2016.
Deep breath. See. That’s all ok.
I had book club last night. This is a group of smart geeky women, the two oldest besides me are a good 10 years younger than me, but they are accepting and funny and sarcastic and intelligent. Some of the best conversations I have some months are at these meetings, no matter what the book is (we panned the book…Mass Midnight by F. Paul Wilson…lousy dialogue, messed up the story, didn’t even make sense at one point, not pleased with how they dealt with anything, except that the vampires didn’t get all sexy or sparkly). I don’t make it to all of them, because of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but I do have a good time when I go. I had a long conversation afterwards with a friend there, and it got me home and dinnerfied late (thanks to the girlchild for making dinner), but I did manage to get off the couch and do art. I almost always manage to do that. I’m not a couch sitter really. I’m usually grading papers (did that yesterday too) or sewing or cutting stuff out or drawing if I’m on the couch. Girlchild’s new TV obsession is SVU, of all things. Kind of a mental shock for her to go from weeks of watching Friends (which almost drove me bonkers) to the Law and Order offshoots. I suggested she start with L&O and she just looked at me like I was crazy. She finished the second AP test yesterday, so she’s a little braindead.
So I traced…
Only for about an hour. That’s the key. I think some people are like, well, I’m not going to get very much done, plus it’s late, and then they never get up. I regularly do about an hour a night, or try to anyway, and when I have more time (and energy, honestly), I do more. I can do almost 4 hours in a good night, but that’s rare, except on weekends and vacations. But an hour a day is 365 hours you didn’t spend on art before. An hour a day when you figure about 7 hours to trace all the Wonder Under for this quilt? That’s a week. That’s nothing. And I wasn’t always this good at it. I had to push myself to get here. I used to put it on my calendar, just like I did the blog writing. And then it became habit. And now, I have to be sick or out of town to not be making art, and even then, I’m probably drawing with the latter.
Which reminds me, driving to the book club venue last night, a drawing related to the Barton thing I showed you yesterday popped into my head. Like BING! And it’s still there, because I didn’t draw it last night. Aargh. I need a full day just of drawing I think.
So 4 1/2 hours in, I’m 400 pieces in as well. Only a couple hundred pieces to go. I’m feeling better about this piece. Progress. It helps.
Keep doing the work. Keep getting up off the couch.
OK, so I had a picture sent to me via one of those Facebook friends I’ve never met (which is fine…I’ll meet her someday, and we have quilt art in common) of this painting by an Australian woman, Del Kathryn Barton. And it’s hard to see up close, but here’s the link…and it’s the center panel my friend was pointing out to me (did my brain explode with ideas? Fuck yes, it did.).
So I went searching out on the Interwebs and found this video, where she talks about her process…
And Oh Holey Moley. You thought I had an issue with detail. There we are. Her stuff is amazing. And crazy.
It’s very hard to persuade myself to go to work right now, because (1) it’s hard and (2) I’d rather stay home and draw. Is that an option? (No, it’s not)
I was a good girl last night and graded for about 2 hours before doing art stuff. I spent about another hour prepping for the rest of this week. I only traced for about an hour. It was mostly large pieces of bathtub rim and side…
Very exciting. Actually kind of a pain in the butt to fit on the Wonder Under. I had to cut one in half. It was too big…which makes me wonder if I will have to shop for bathtub fabric this weekend. Hopefully not.
I’ve spent a little over three and a half hours tracing at this point…
It doesn’t feel that way though…I’m only at piece 280-something. Slow. But I guess I’m halfway done, or close to that. I might finish by the weekend.
I don’t feel totally into this quilt yet. Maybe it’s because of all the other stress hanging over me. Too much on my plate. Can’t keep track of all of it. Really would just rather sit here and watch more art videos and do some drawing and sleep longer.
Sounds like summer vacation? Except it never works out like that. The to-do list over the summer is even worse, because I know I have huge chunks of time to get the stuff done that I didn’t get done all year. Ugh. Even cooking sounds like hard work. I think this is stupid hormones again. I think there’s a drawing in that too. Sigh. I don’t have near enough time in the day to get done all the art stuff I want, let alone to try to fit it in amongst all the other drivel. Work, groceries, clean, yardwork, errands, manage kid stuff. SLEEP? Whatever. I need a staff. Not a wooden one…one which will do my bidding.
Wah. OK, going to work. The head is full of tiny details that want to manifest into a thousand drawings. Such is the life of a modern-day, semi-responsible artist.
I realize photo-wise this and the next stage are remarkably boring. Miles and miles of Wonder Under…although hey! I bought a new bolt of WU yesterday and it feels really different. You have to realize I’ve been using Wonder Under to make quilts since 1999. Or maybe 2001. Had to go look at the quilt list…I did start making art quilts in 1999, but I wasn’t a Wonder Under user until 2001. Most of my earliest quilts, I cut out the fabric and just lay it down on the background and pinned the fuck out of it. Stabbed myself a million times too, which is pretty damn stupid. But that’s how Joan Colvin showed me how to do it (and that’s how she did it too, and her quilts are beautiful).
Anyway, so here’s the miles…
I’m on the 4th yard, but had to start a 5th one because one of the pieces was too big to fit on the 4th piece…so probably around 5 yards of pieces. I was trying to keep the detail to a minimum (ha!) so I would be able to finish it in time, so there are some honking big pieces. I think, “oh cool, I’m gonna use up some of my stash!” but I know that it really doesn’t. I rarely run out of a fabric…I might get down to the tiny pieces that can really only be used for little things, but if you think about how much fabric I have (well, you probably don’t think about that, but I do), it’s really just a drop in the bucket. Kathy York was making a stashbuster quilt here, and made some comment about how it barely used any of her stash up, and it was only one color, and it was a huge quilt, and I’m like…YEAH! But we have to use it to justify buying more, right? York buys fabric for specific projects, too, so she is a much better person than I am. I buy fabric because I need it in my palette. I really do think of the stash as this huge palette from which to paint my quilts. And you always need more colors.
Anyway, my special fabric psychosis aside, there are some stash-busting pieces in this drawing, where I’ll need huge chunks of gray or white, and then blue, and some foxy red, which doesn’t mean a red that makes you look foxy, but a red that’s the color of a fox.
I traced about 200 pieces last night before I stopped. I really wanted to just keep going, but that would have been close to an allnighter, I think, another 2 1/2 hours and it was already midnight. I do still have to get healthy and teach and function like a semi-normal human being. Apparently.
And then the NEXT step will be cutting all those pieces out, which is another batch of boring pictures. The fabric-choosing…now there’s the pictures y’all will enjoy, because you get to see my stash and what I’m currently watching on Netflix. Always exciting.
But the thing is, even though the pictures are boring, this is sometimes one of my favorite parts of making the quilt. Tracing all those pieces out, standing at my light table, it’s really meditative. I have the TV on and I’m half-listening and maybe a quarter-watching, and I’m looking for each piece (sometimes it takes me a while to find them if I didn’t number particularly logically), and then I’m evaluating each piece for whether it needs an overlap to go under the pieces next to it, and then I’m looking to see if it continues underneath to another section at all, and it’s this place in my brain that’s like a big soft pillow. All the other shit just wanders off, looking for a bar where it can start a fight, and my brain just settles down, takes a deep breath, and does its work. Analyzing, drawing, going on to the next piece. And the next one. And the next one. And really nothing gets in the way of that, except when the tea gets cold (take break to walk to the microwave…should take regular breaks anyway), or when I need to pee (see breaks), or when the show ends and I have to pick the next one or fastforward through commercials. It’s peaceful. It’s relaxing. It’s a weird-ass form of meditation. The Wonder Under Meditation.
I always feel so much better after tracing. Fabric-choosing is kind of the same way. They use a part of my brain that pushes everything else out, which is why I lose track of time when I’m doing it. When I finally thought to look at the task-measuring app I was using last night, I had been working for over 2 hours. Just working. Just tracing. No way I could do that with grading without getting all antsy and irritated. Even quilting irritates me (mostly because thread is breaking or because it’s so much more physical).
Anyway, I had another idea for a bathtub drawing (a series!)…I think I’ve done two drawings so far, but only one really deserves to be a quilt, and now I have a third one in my head, and it’s really not pretty, but whatever…
This was the first one, and she’s still headless…
I actually like it now that I’m looking at it, but I would finish it much differently now than when I first drew it. Which is fine, because I’d enlarge it and THEN add the head. Only the top head. The bottom head is supposed to be gone. These are of course inspired by Kahlo’s bathtub painting…which I know I posted on here, but now cannot find. What the Water Gave Me, 1938…
And then the one I really want to do…
It’s next on the list…some day. But now there’s another one. In my head. And you aren’t going to like it. But it needs to get out.
But drawing is another form of meditation, one I hope to rediscover someday soon…really. It’s been long enough.
I hear the wind blowing. It’s blowing quite heavily at the moment. I considered sweeping leaves up in the driveway this afternoon, because trash pickup is tomorrow and I never finished from last time (weeks ago). Ran out of room in the green recycling bin. But then I thought, what’s the point? I had seen the wind advisory. I knew I’d have a million more leaves by the morning. Better to wait and do it later this week. I don’t like to waste energy on things that need to be done more than once in a short period of time. I don’t have much time.
I don’t know how to feel about today. I don’t know how to feel about most days. Those questions “How are you?” or “How’s [insert name of current project] coming along?” or “How was the hike?”…I don’t know how to answer those. The hike was good, because I was outside and the rocks were really cool, but the last two miles kicked my mental butt, and yet I kept moving, but I’m debating that 14-miler I signed up for, because I’m not sure I can hike that far. Is that what you wanted to hear? Or did you just want to hear “Fine. It was fine.” I can’t answer the “How are you?” at all. I don’t have the words. I could draw it, but we’d be here for a while and you’d be frustrated by my answer. The projects? They’re moving along. There’s nothing I really want to talk about in depth about any of them at the moment. I’m just progressing, moving forward, continuing the process. I don’t know.
NaNoWriMo, for example: I totally forgot to write yesterday. I wrote for a short period while waiting for something, I don’t even remember when, but I only did like 400 words. I’ve haven’t done that few words a day all month. But I was busy yesterday and I got into art-brain mode and I just plain forgot. So this morning, I wrote 2500+ to make up for it. I have a little over 4000 words to go to hit 50,000. And I figured out how to kill off one of the characters. While I was watching David Attenborough’s show Life in the Undergrowth (fascinating, by the way, and kinda creepy), he talked about how ants use formic acid to attack plants and predators, and I had a lightning bolt hit my brain. It’s gonna be SO COOL. OK. I know. This book, it’s just plain weird how it’s inhabited this part of my brain. It’s writing itself. It really is. By Thursday, I will have hit 50,000 words this month, which I think means the book will be at 75,000 words. And I’m in the rising climax part of the book or whatever it is when all the good stuff happens that makes your heart race. I know the book itself won’t be done on Thursday. My goal is the end of the year. Then edit its ass. Then start the next one by next November.
Meanwhile, a car had a brake issue, so it went to the mechanic, my body went to the doctor and we tried to diagnose all my frailties (elbow brace, toenail collection, weird exercises with soup cans and hammers, more blood, changing meds. Holy moly.). I picked up my quilt and the photos. Warned him there was another one coming in December. Heard the story of his dog and cats.
The hardest part…parts…it’s been parts…about this vacation have been my mood swings (down, down, down) and the girlchild’s moods. So moods. The theme for Thanksgiving this year is MOODS. And none of them particularly good. I say everything wrong. I do everything wrong. I get irritated by having to stand in line at the post office to sign for a shirt she ordered (my name on the package, so I have to sign for it, plus she’s not 18), and then she’s out to lunch and at a friend’s for hours, so she doesn’t clean, and because we’re down to one car, she’s texting me to hurry up while I’m in Target trying to do all my errands in one place (I failed at that, by the way). Big Fucking Sigh. This is not fun. I have been on the verge of tears (or just outright crying, let’s be honest) more times in the last few days than in the last month. OK. That might be a lie. It’s been an emotional month. Blame hormones. Blame my thyroid. Blame the fucking moon. I mean, how could they ever have looked at the moon and NOT seen that it was a sphere? I just don’t understand. It so obviously has the sun reflecting off of it in crescent stage. It’s such a beautifully awesome thing. And yet it’s obviously fucking with me.
See. This is how my mind works. It’s on a crazy train.
I guess the good thing is that I worked. I finished tracing all the Wonder Under, despite almost needing to walk out of the living room twice due to girlchild’s intolerance for ANYTHING or ANYONE. (I do live here. I do. I have rights. Inalienable rights.)
It took almost 10 hours to trace this beast. Only 768 pieces, so you know the pile of men really did slow me down. It should have been 8 hours. Julie says I should copy the pile and color code the bodies. She may be right, but I feel like it’s time I don’t have. On the other hand, then I’ll waste the time trying to figure out what piece goes with what body. GAARHHH. Cannot Decide.
I also traced two more birds that were on order…
I’m hoping to finish them by the end of the year as well. By the way, there are three birds that have not sold. I should put them in their own post. I’ll try to do that tomorrow.
And then I sat down and started cutting Wonder Under out.
I only did it for an hour, because it was getting late. And some of it is releasing from the paper, which is always annoying. And I need to buy background fabric or decide if what I have in house will work, because inevitably, I will be ready to iron on Thursday and nothing will be open. Must Plan Ahead. And I have to clean house and straighten up my studio so I can tear it apart again, and now I have a window screen AND a screen door with issues, and for every one thing I solve or resolve, two more pop up in its place.
And dammit. I’m still depressed. That’s the only thing to call this blob in my head that keeps raining on my parade. That keeps dragging me into the mud. That keeps eating at my peace of mind. That won’t shut the fuck up and leave me alone.
Knowing that this is not how you want to be? It doesn’t really help make it stop. This war quilt I’m doing, women at war: it’s women at war with their own bodies, with failing uteri and thyroid glands, with fluctuating hormones and clogged ducts and irritated tendons and pus-filled pores; at war with their children and their parents, with people trying to push them into holes, into slots, into places they think you should fit, telling you what to do, how you’re doing it wrong, constantly getting at you; at war with men, the misguided, the nice-guy misogynists (so many of those), the crazies, the assholes, the arrogant, the self-centered, the clueless; at war with society, which is trying to control my parts, my mind, my place in the world. Nature vs nurture. There’s outliers and I guess I’m way the fuck out there. Like in outer space outlier. I’ve never wanted to be easily categorized or explained, but that makes it harder…to just be, honestly. Sometimes it just makes it harder to exist. I’m here because I want to be. I’m here because that’s where I belong. I never meant to be here by myself though. And it’s hard. It’s hard to deal with the girlchild’s drama without any support. I often just want to crawl into bed and never ever come out. Just put the pillow over my head and ignore all of it. Never fucking come out.
I don’t know how many times I have to scream “This is not where I want to be!” before someone hears me.
That’s why I keep these guys around, the furry ones, even though all they did today was sleep, bat at me with claws out, and vomit. I swear I cleaned up more vomit today than I did anything else. It’s just not right.
So this looks like a picture of the girlchild messing with her hair, but look closely.
What is that in the back, in the corner of the couch?
I do not know how to explain the dog.
Then this evening, the scary bitchy cat ventured out again, and this is the closest I’ve ever seen her to any living thing that was not human without her trying to kill it.
It’s not even that cold tonight.
But I had both of them for a while…
It’s hard to cut out Wonder Under with her on your lap, but again…she’s old and I feel sorry for her, so I tolerate a lot. Besides, she didn’t vomit today, so she’s on my good side.
Tomorrow I finish cutting out Wonder Under and hopefully start ironing to fabric. Dammit. That means I need a background. Aargh.
And the song the post title comes from…one of my favorite bands…
So. I’m officially on vacation. I traced Wonder Under Friday night for a little while, but I was exhausted and went to bed early, because I had a long hike early Saturday morning. I get up earlier for hikes than I do for school. It’s a little crazy. But it was a good hike (post later) and we went out to eat afterwards, which I almost never do, because you lose the whole day. But I could afford to lose the whole day because I have a whole week of them off. Anyway. It was good. And I came home and tried to function, but the body and brain were old and tired. Eventually, after the second or third cup of tea and some reading of the book club selection that I had to be done with by today (there’s nothing like leaving it until the last minute), I got up and started tracing Wonder Under again…
The fun part (wait, put “fun” in quotes) about tracing this section is that it’s a pile of bodies that are all overlapping, and although I might have tried to be logical about numbering them in the first place, that logic has now left the building, and I am often staring at the pile, trying to find the next piece in number order. Piece 225 took like 10 minutes to find. I don’t know what I was thinking. So the almost-200 pieces in the pile took forever to trace. But I wasn’t going to give up. I wanted it done, so that when I came back to tracing today, it would be straightforward and relatively easy.
The thing is, that pile is gonna kick my ass when I have to pick fabrics out, because overlapping and random behind spaces and I don’t even know what parts go with what body in half of it. Yeah. Way to fuck with yourself, Kathryn. I guess I like a good challenge.
So I’m 4 hours into the tracing and only at piece 287 or so. Like I said, it was a bitch. I have about 5 hours left, I’m guessing, and I’d like to be done today. No really. I would. That might not be realistic though because I still have to go grocery shopping and to book club and to dinner at my parents’ house. Hmn. Are there 5 hours LEFT after all that? So much for vacations, right? That’s why you’re supposed to GO somewhere, so you can relax and stop doing all that other stuff. Then again, I don’t really do anything else right…why start with doing vacations right? It’s a stay-at-home vacation because I can’t afford anything else. I would have loved to have taken the girlchild to NYC, met the boychild there, hung out, got an AirBnB apartment, checked out the city. It would have been cool. It would have been $1500 I don’t have right now. Especially with college apps coming up again.
So we’re here in lovely San Diego, soccer tournament, practices, a couple of hikes, dinner with the close family on Tday. And lots of artmaking. So my plan is to have all the Wonder Under ironed to fabric in a week. Because then school starts back up again and that 3-week stretch notoriously kicks my butt. And then I have vacation again, but only about a week and a half before this next quilt has to be done. So yeah. I need to work hard. Like usual. Like what the fuck is new about that? This is my life. It’s a continuous hard-work endeavor. I’m not always entirely sure what I get out of that. People tell me the art is cool, amazing, etc., but then I just make more of it. I don’t know if there’s a reason for it, except that I’m incredibly unhappy when I don’t make it. And there’s enough of that feeling in my life…I don’t need to make more of it. There must be a better balance though.
I did take time out to finish the book for book club. It must have been cold last night because (1) I was wearing polar fleece in the house (lots of windows behind the light table) and (2) the bitchy old-lady cat was in the living room, curled up tight next to me.
Which was fine. Notice the pile of dirty clothes on the floor? Girlchild has some cleaning to do. I’m tired of the slob factor. That’s one goal for this vacation…get the mess under control, at least enough to get me through December.
I wanted to show you where I normally write…
Yup. The computer. The computer desk is a mess. The chair has been scratched all to hell by bitchy cat, who often is sitting on the chair (you can see the top of her head in the picture). Right now, she’s not, but that’s because morning winter sun is over THERE on the table, so she’s curled up over there. Thank god. I can actually sit properly. I’m over 42,000 words on the novel, and I will easily hit 50,000 by Thanksgiving. I’m hoping to keep the momentum going and get to the end, whatever that is, by the end of the year or earlier. I’ve already decided no sequel. So I’m writing it that way. I guess I always knew I would. I do have another book started in my head though. Different story, different characters, different location. Still sci-fi though. Not sure what’s up with that.
Here’s Luana Rubin’s review of the two SAQA exhibits at Houston this year…she mentions my piece.
Someday I’ll meet her in person and tell her how to pronounce my name. Or maybe you could do that for me.
Kathy Nida 