April 30

Today was ridiculous.  I’ve never been so emotional.  I had a really rough morning, just because of annoying 18-year-old girl issues.  I just realized that I couldn’t deal with the rest of the day, and since English was my only class I decided to go home.  I’ve been feeling really in between things recently.  I went to coffee o, where I work, and I sat outside and started writing, to try to articulate to myself how I was feeling.  I wrote ten pages in my notebook, and I was sitting outside for so long that I have this huge sunburn on my arms.  One of my really good friends from work came and sat with me and we talked about how I was feeling and it really just turned everything around.  I’ve never gone from feeling so down to so happy and positive. 

            I was feeling increasingly like I was an actual crazy person, like I was really worried that I was dreaming and that one day I was just going to wake up from this.  I had a dream that I was a heroin addict living in London and I started to feel like maybe that was real and I was going to wake up from this in some London hospital and it will all have been a dream.  I was feeling like there was another reality and my head was in one and my body was in the other.  I think that my problem was that I’ve just felt so disconnected.  I feel like I’m somehow separate from everything that’s going on around me.  But this afternoon I totally came back to reality and I feel like everything is looking up.  The name of my blog is Looks Like Up, which is from a line that goes “I’ve been down so long it looks like up to me.”  It’s also the title of my favorite book.  But I felt like that I guess.  And I was worried that I was just too down.  But it all seems to have turned around, really quickly.  I worry that maybe my good feeling isn’t going to last because it came on so fast.  It feels so good to write about how you’re feeling.  It’s totally my new coping mechanism.  And talking about it all, too.  It doesn’t feel good to talk about it when you don’t want to though.  It’s too much pressure.  It’s okay not to talk about everything all the time.

Tomorrow we have the day of service, and hopefully on Thursday everything will feel like it’s back to normal.

April 29

I had a super stressful day today!  I had a world religions test, and we played this game in English about character names.  I used all of my free blocks studying for everything; so I only got to work on my project during block five.  I made three candleholders.  I only really like one of them.  I’m going to make more tomorrow.  But it’s good to have a lot anyways.

            After ceramics I got really super stressed and I think I had an anxiety attack.  My heart started beating really fast all of a sudden and I felt like I couldn’t breathe.  So I just went home after my world religions test.  It was about Judaism.  I feel like it went well, even though I was super stressed out.

            I still feel really anxious.  I feel like this should be the easiest time of the year, but I’ve just been all over the place.  I feel like I don’t have anything to look forward to, even though that doesn’t really make any sense.  I have my senior project coming out well, I’m graduating, I have the summer coming up.  But none of it really feels real at all.  I just have some sorting out to do.  I’ve been feeling really disconnected.  For about a week.  I guess I just have to pinpoint what the problem is so that I can figure it out, but that seems so daunting because all of the borders seem really blurred to me right now.  I don’t even know where to start.  It’s like the grout isn’t holding the bricks together anymore and everything’s just floating around in space and out of control. 

            I was studying for our English game during the first two blocks of the day, so I didn’t get to come in to ceramics early in the morning, so the kiln didn’t get turned on.  Hopefully it’ll get it started tomorrow, and then everything will be out before the end of the week.  There’s something to look forward to.  I loaded the kiln all by myself this time, which is kind of stressful because I’m worried that I forgot to do something I was supposed to or I did something wrong.  But I think all is well and I’m just over analyzing.  I always do that to myself.  Even if I know that everything is fine, I create little situations in my head where I’ve done something horribly wrong.

April 26

I glazed today and got the kiln totally loaded!  So on Monday I just have to turn it on and then I’m good to go.  And I’ll be able to unload it on Tuesday afternoon.  The plates and cups and the platter all made it in, but there wasn’t enough room for the two serving bowls and the teapot. 

            My six teacups and my serving dish are going to get bisqued soon, and then I’ll be able to glaze them and get the rest of the stuff into a high temp firing.

            There’s a person named Chris who has been sitting on some of the ceramics classes because he’s becoming an art teacher, and he interviewed me today about my project for a presentation that he’s doing.  I talked about how you can kind of find yourself in pottery because the way things look really relate to the way the person who made it looks, and the way they think and feel and touch.  I feel like everything is kind of a self-portrait in that way.

            My project is about self-portraiture, and also about the juxtaposition of a simple piece of porcelain dinnerware with the kind of nonsensical blind contour drawing.  It’s almost funny, if you think about it, because porcelain is classically really carefully and methodically decorated, with little details that are really intentionally placed, and the blind contours are just the opposite of that.  They just go where they want to go and do what they want to do.  And as the artist you don’t really have much control over them, even though you’re creating them.  I think they’re so expressive and they really capture the emotion of the creator.  If you’re sleepy a blind contour looks different than it would if you were angry.  So I’ve tried to find ways to immortalize them, like embroidering and glazing.  I just like to let them be what they are.  And classically, the design on a plate would reflect the surface of the plate, but I just let the drawing be what they are and let them be unconfined by the structure of the piece.  If a drawing needs to slip into the inside of a cup to be finished, then I just let it and I don’t try to rescale it.  I just slap it on there and let it do it’s own thing. Self-portraiture is really about process and seeing yourself for what you are, and not trying to change anything so that it fits.

Glazing and kiln loading

April 25

Today I glazed my cups, and I trimmed my serving dish.  It was perfectly dry for trimming.  I had a lot of homework to finish up so that’s all I was able to get done.  It took a while to finish blind contouring the cups.

            I’m feeling really good about my project still.  Tomorrow I’m going to finish clear glazing everything and maybe I’ll be able to get the kiln loaded, so we can just set it off on Monday morning.

            I did a blind contour of Mark on one of my cups.  So now I’ve got nine for the set.  Maybe I’ll give them away as little gifts and just keep four or six of them.  I think they’d make good presents.  People are always really psyched about getting homemade ceramic things.  I think because it’s one of the crafts that you really wouldn’t be able to do just at home, because you need a kiln and all that.  And you can actually use them so that’s another plus.

            My world religions class is really intense but I really like it.  We’re starting to learn about Christianity.

            I had an in class essay in English today, which was stressful, but I’m glad it’s over with.  It’s not getting graded or anything, so that’s good, although I think I did alright on it.  I always have so much anticipatory anxiety about those but then it turns out to be okay.  I feel like that’s true about a lot of things.  The anticipatory anxiety is always worse than the actual thing.

            We’re getting the front of our house redone, and there have been builders and painters there for months, and they finally finished painting on the inside of the house, and we got to put everything back together.  All of the furniture from the bedrooms was all piled up in the living room and now it’s all back in order.  Being displaced like that really causes more of an issue that you’d think.  It’s really nice now that everything is going back to normal.  They’re still painting the outside of the house.  It’s red now.  It used to really look like the Brady house, and now it looks like a cool barn situation.  It’s funny how when something gets changed like that you can hardly remember what it looked like before.  The new thing just totally replaces the old thing in your head.  Maybe that’s just me though.  Hopefully not, I’m already kind of concerned about how terrible my short-term memory is.

April 24

I got my cups out of the bisque kiln this morning.  They look nice.  They’re not a perfect set, although I’m sure once they’re out of the glaze kiln they’ll look pretty nice together.  I made ten cups, because the first four that I made didn’t match enough, so I made six more.  Then when they all came out of the kiln they all had pretty much the same dimensions.  So now I have six extra.  I think I can just use them as a set of ten, maybe.  I’ll pick my four favorites to go on the table setting, and then when my project is over they can just be their own set.  Actually, two of them are substantially bigger than the rest, so I can have a set of eight and a separate set of two. 

            The serving dish that I threw yesterday wasn’t ready to trim yet today, so I flipped it upside down and put a little bit of plastic over it.  Hopefully it’ll be good to go tomorrow.  I trimmed the two teacups that I made yesterday, and there are five that look good and one of them is too big.  I’m sure it’ll be easy to pick the best four of those. 

            I didn’t actually get to glaze anything with clear today.  I spent all three of my free blocks working on the blind contour drawings.  I drew them on all ten cups, and the platter, which also came out of the bisque today.  Then I underglazed the platter and five of the cups.  Tomorrow I’ll finish underglazing the cups, and then I need to wax them all.  Then I’ll clear glaze the rest of the work that’s ready, and hopefully I’ll be able to start loading the kiln.  Otherwise I’ll just spend Friday loading it.  It takes way more time than you’d think to load the kiln.  Everything has fit right, and you need to really economize space.  You can pack things in there pretty tight because nothing moves around in the electric kiln.

            It’s cool the way the kiln works; you put a little cone (it’s called a kiln sitter) in this little space, and it sits on tow little prongs and it holds up a third little prong, and when it gets hot enough, the cone melts and the third little prong falls and it shuts the kiln off.  Different cones melt at different temperatures.  Lots of fun.