Zita the Spacegirl – Kathy Nida

Another no-posting night. I was drawing instead…

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

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

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

Whatever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s OK. I did art stuff tonight. I probably should have gone to bed earlier instead, but…I wonder which will prolong my life more? More sleep or more art? I’m voting for the latter. Trying to balance the two, but really? The art is more calming. Sleep isn’t restful. It’s full of bad dreams and nasty sad. I’d rather be playing with fabric. I started cutting out flower parts…

which is complicated by the fact that there are wool parts of flowers and cotton parts of flowers, so I’m cutting all the wool first, and then I’ll find cotton that works with it, since I have a fairly limited stash of wools and a vast stash of cottons. I made it through almost all the flowers…at least the wool parts…and there’s a squirrel and a bunny in there too.

I need to figure out the banners and all the cotton bits. There’s not a lot left…maybe tomorrow night? Except financial aid is still a mess and school stuff needs to get done too.

I stitched at soccer…

I forgot to take pictures of the girlchild playing. He played her tonight, for real. That’s good. She did well. They won. Another game Thursday. It’s kind of a routine now…two games a week, one Academic League match a week. I keep having to remind myself what day it is…do I bring my stitching to school? Do I bring my Uggs and sweatshirt to school? Will I have time to go home first? Too much thinking. My brain isn’t good at thinking any more. It’s obsessive about the bad stuff, runs over and over it, trying to make sense of it, having conversations with myself. But give it a real task? Yikes. It’s done.

I went to the gym. I meditated. I finished two books…The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon…

who is only 22 years old. This is her debut novel, the first of seven in the series. It’s called a supernatural dystopia, and definitely has sci fi overtones, whatever that means. I liked the idea and most of the book, but kept getting lost in vocabulary and this foreign race, the Rephaim, and some other race, the Emim, which sometimes didn’t make sense. Plus the setup of clairvoyant levels is supremely complicated. But it has promise…I would read another one.

The second book I finished was Zita the Spacegirl, by Ben Hatke…

Yes. This is a kids’ graphic novel. A group I’m in has a graphic novel/comics book club, and I have never been to the meetings, but thought I could try to read the books at least, and maybe someday swing one of the meetings. I had a hard time with this book…not because it’s written to a younger audience, but because I got confused by events in the story. Plus I honestly didn’t like Zita much…she’s kind of an annoying squirrel, to use a term I use on some of my students. I don’t know if this book would appeal more to a younger audience, like a late elementary age? Maybe. I do have the second book as well. I did like the giant mouse and the round monster thing, and the spider robots were cool (even though they are evil). It was kind of an eh.

Kind of like my life. Eh. Which means it’s probably time to go to sleep. The later it gets, the sadder I get. I did find another hike for the weekend, I think. I actually found two, signed up for one reluctantly, then found the other one and switched. Seems like with the three-day weekend it would be lame not to go on a long hike…so that’s what I aimed for in my planning.

Ugh. I’m hoping with more regular influxes of art activity the days won’t feel so shitty. We’ll see. I’m tired of the shitty feeling. I keep doing things to improve my mood, trying to think positively about my future. Yeah. Well. The fun thing about depression is that it makes it very hard to think positively about anything, and when past experience is slapping you upside the face, pulling your feet out of the mud long enough to even Stand the Fuck Up and Go Make Art is difficult. I can’t be that depressoid who does nothing but sleep. I can mope and iron fabric at the same time if I have to. There’s some chance of surviving this if I keep my hands buried in fiber.

Tag: Zita the Spacegirl

Vacuuming the Brain

Buried in Fiber