I have skin on my teeth!

We have a term, "He was saved by the skin on his teeth" meaning that someone had a close call with disaster and is OK.

I have been attention deficit with my classes. I am doing 20 things and I am fried with college. I think I've been fried for a while but didn't know it. I have been working on 2 classes through distance ed, plus one at Excelsior that I do not know if I will get to before next year at PFD time. I signed up for a drawing class this spring to help me with a project I am working on and I know the prof will advise me and I will hopefully be accused of being a real artist one day. I love drawing and painting.

In the mean time, my two classes are statistics and a science course. A few days ago it occurred to me in a dead sleep that I needed to apply for extensions on them. I just found out that I had just enough work done in each class to qualify and my deadline was yesterday afternoon. I'd done my wake-up at 2:AM the day before.

I know, the professors reading this are rolling their eyes at a lazy student. My last college newspaper for the semester has been submitted to the printer and I am ready to focus on my other academics. I may well nail my science class in the next month. I have to get one extra lesson in for stats and complete a test and before early January. I'm not worried about it as my husband is pushing me. He doesn't just push-- he likes stats and along with an excellent text book, makes it relevant to me.

Anyway, it's good to be wrapping these up if only so I can give 100% to my drawing class and editing this spring. The prof is really getting into anatomy this coming semester, which I am looking very forward to. I am thankful that my very sweet husband is indulging in my need to take a class.

I just created a really cool card for a friend that I didn't take pictures of, so I need to make another one for someone else and scan it. It's a card, but it looks like a box. I got the idea from watching an Enya song, Anywhere is. . . She opens up a box of clouds and I used time, flowers and the sky in the box. It's pretty cool. I don't know if he is just nice to me about my art or if I am actually good. I think my ideas are better than my execution!

The Sky is Not Falling

This past weekend I went to more training. Fortunately Rick Rockhill made a comment that made me wonder why I was doing this. I've been stressed out. Anything that causes the grey hairs that I am sporting isn't worth it. Screw it. I'm doing the prison ministry for God, so to hell with what anyone says to me (in the training, not Rick who was right on target!) that hurts my delicate feelings.

I did a training at the prison and I broke out in hives afterward. Smoke glass does that to me and I didn't even see it--I just knew it was there. What was I thinking? My heart was bigger than my brain. I don't feel worthy to be with the group of dedicated women who are teaching the retreat. I know so little about Christianity and it's not my denomination, it's just that I feel as shallow as a bird bath.

Friends from church, once I announced what I was doing through our priest, have offered to help me with cookies. This is pretty cool. No, it's incredible. Twenty five dozen cookies are being made by friends on my behalf for the prison. In any church you need to ask for help from the priest or pastor before anyone helps you and that's normal.

The other thing that happened. . . because the TD was in the shop, I needed my husband to cancel his and the kids' plans and get me to the next city so I was without a car. I called him the next day when I found out that I needed to go to the prison to meet with the pastors for a training. I told him several times where I was, told him that his sister was near by, maybe see her or to wait in the parking lot for me and bring something to read.

The leader who drove me to the destination is hard to describe. Are tsunamis obnoxious or do they just have a lot of energy? Well, she was in a hurry to leave after the prison training and basically I couldn't get my stuff out of her car fast enough and I didn't want to be around her when she went into, "I don't have 12 seconds to spare. hurry-hurry"mode. When I called my husband he said he would wait for me in the parking lot, then right before I went out I called him and he said that he was up the road. He told me to just unload my stuff on the steps (I'd been out over night) and I stood with a suitcase, an art supply bag and a crock pot. After ten minutes, I started to worry and realized that my car phone was in the leader's car. After 30 minutes, I was in tears because people coming out of the prison walked right past me and didn't look at me when I asked to borrow their cell phones. I started to wonder if I was invisible.

The pastors came out and they did recognize me only after I asked if they could see me. . . you know, I really started to doubt my existence. I would not have been shocked if an ambulance had arrived and taken my body out of the facility. The only other time I have been avoided like that was when I was a mime. ;)

The pastors helped me reach my husband and the leader, my husband was an hour away. It was funny when I saw my phone and he had been texting me, "Answer your phone." "Answer your damned phone! Where are you?" "Do you have your phone?" "Did you say you were at the prison?"

After a half hour of coordinating, the pastors had to be someplace. They dropped me off at a restaurant and before I called Darrin, one pastor said to me that I had every reason to be angry with him, but that it was good for me to see what released offenders go through. I felt like an idiot on the curb being ignored, but I am not the first person to feel like that and I ultimately had a place to go. Had my husband been unable to get me, I had friends able to help get me home. (This is why you memorize several friends' phone numbers.) I cannot fathom being from a village being released in Anchorage and having to stay there because there are probation officers but no friends. The pastors said that sometimes inmates get released only to not have spouses pick them up (as planned) because they are living with someone else and have been for a long time.

It bothers me that I knew how I looked standing on that curb while I was standing on it, but didn't want people to think that I had been "one of them" and was then a released inmate. The pastors confirmed what I suspected that people were thinking. Why did I not want people to think that? Who cares? For several years I have wondered over the situation of people who have not even voting rights and how disenfranchised they are and I have mentioned it to lawmakers, but they never paid much attention to me on it. I have tried to present them in a good light, but I still felt furious at my husband for leaving me stranded. I am not better than they are, yet I was thinking pretty damned well of myself.

I worked what happened in to the speech I am giving about opening the door to God and letting God take His time. I have even painted a picture of myself standing at that curb in gouache to illustrate Matt. 6:26 "Look at the birds in the sky. They don't plant or harvest or gather food into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. You are more valuable than they are, aren't you?"

I am weird about Christianity. I doubt it constantly. I don't "know" it like CS Lewis seemed to know it. I do "know" that there is a God who created us and loves us, and I "know" this because Descartes said that just being able to imagine a being who created us is proof. I have a picture here of me and a few of my kids lighting candles. That night I must have lit 7 or 8 for different people and things. I like lighting candles because the represent so much-- the candle wax is us melting to God's will which is the heat from the flame, and the wick is our passion burning.

Yesterday I signed up for a drawing class. I only got a C in it last spring and I think that having no other classes I can put more in to it. I'd like to be able to speak through my art without needing to explain it. I would like for any one to look at my work and say the same things.

I got a message that my radio show is going to happen. The two interviews that I did are going on the air in several weeks. I of course have ten shows that I want to do next. I thought that my supervisor-mentor-friend just didn't like my voice, but instead he really was waiting. So exciting!

I will be off until possibly Sunday night,probably Monday. I have much to do.

Art Class, Editing

The effort it takes for me to go to art class is amazing. I love drawing almost more than I love anything else. I go in and it is almost meditative. Except for one person. She is always saying something "sassy"-- but she's not funny. She makes cutting remarks to me and she irritates the hell out of me.

Yesterday in class, my teacher asked me to discuss my latest drawing. I said, "I need to take a thirty seconds to share a story about this." The teacher was being stupid and tried to be funny by yawning at me and looking at her watch. I told her that I needed to share my story so she wouldn't cut me off. The classmate turned to me as I tried to focus and said, "She is teasing you." I ignored her and moved away from her.

The classmate is always making some remark though. She doesn't seem to get on anyone else's nerves as far as I can tell, but I doubt that anyone can tell how much she annoys me. When she makes her remarks to me she subtly pushes her chest out which is a sign of aggression. She is always saying things to sound "smart" and seems to like to stand near me during critiques. When I told a friend about this, he asked if I am doing well in the class and if she has kids. Yes on both-- he said, "There is your problem. She's singling you out. She's grating on you and she knows it. You are good, you have kids, she is seeing you as someone to work."

As I listened to her talk while we were doing our class assignment (that is so fucking annoying while people talk from across the room to each other about something inane) I realized her sense of entitlement. Our lone guy was telling her how he was with his brother at some restaurant and got a free meal because they didn't cook his burger. As he told his story, I thought, "She is going to say that she gets things for free."

As it turned out, she said, "I get things free all the time. I'm sensitive and they have to make things special for me." I wanted to say that surely she doesn't accept food free from restaurants where they make their living preparing food for people, but I don't like to talk to her so I said nothing. As she conversed, everything was, "I get that too!" "That happens to me, too!" Only it supposedly happened more often and worse to her, whatever was being spoken about.

I suppose that there will always be people that I do not like. I kept thinking of my ex's wife during a court battle that lasted for three years and how I never let on that she was getting to me.

For my assignment-- I had to do perspective. I drew my church for the assignment. I don’t go to church very often. The night before last I wanted to quit my art classes and slide through, not really putting any more effort into the classes—they cost money and time and I am short on both. My husband said that Art is necessary, that it allows us to express ourselves and to relate to our environment and that other people can relate to this. He had me get that picture and I was amazed by what he read from it. I sketched him prostrating to the Theotokos (the Mother of God) while Boom-Boom lit a candle to St. Basil, and a mother who looks a lot like me with several children around her and hanging off of her and she was standing near a side wall with six icons looking on. He pointed out to me that the man was engaged in honoring Mary, that Boom-Boom was meditating to St. Basil and the mother figure was dazed and not really there, but the saints seemed to be looking at her. He said it spoke volumes on my mental state about church, not to mention how pretty the church is. I need to learn to draw with light but this may turn into something fantastic that I will enter in an art show later this year.

I may be up for editing my college newspaper next year. That was exciting news. I have two stories coming out in the next edition. I spoke to a "real life reporter" who comes in from the local paper to run ideas with us and I told him about my other class in writing that is driving me batshiat crazy. I told him that I wanted to swear off adjectives and he told me to not use adjectives but to use quotes from people and let those color my articles.

The newspaper adviser got his Ph.D. in technical writing and has advised me to go into it. It pays well so I may take a class in that.