happy birthday to jo spanglemonkey who turns 40 today!  welcome, jo!  you made it!  just forget about all that badyouth stuff, it’s finally all in the past.  and now life really begins….(go to it.)

i still can’t figure out just what to do with today.  i read my blogroll (if i had one) and i’m now drinking my cappa and eating oatmeal in a desperate attempt to ingest actual food again.  looked at all the flickr pictures of my peeps over there.  i have until 3, or 2:40, i guess, before i have to leave for the studio, where i will be studying some books on teaching art, i believe, and some art mags, in addition to whatever needs to be done around there, until 7.  ted intimated that he’d be skypable in another half an hour or so, and as i haven’t talked with him in so long, don’t know why when we used to chat daily, i think i’ll stick here for that possibility for awhile.

but other than that, what today?  up, out somewhere?  i’m feeling the isolation again, after this weekend particularly.  i don’t know, we’ll see.  it would be good to clean out a room, say, the study?  there’s a thought.  perhaps a thought for tomorrow, though.  we shall see.  i still don’t knnow where anything i brought back fromt he FIRST woolfcamp is!  i really should….there’s ted!

“...but, and to but, out of no are why ?”

mostly online, which i haven’t done in awhile and don’t usually like to do.  but everybody was conferring or ‘thoning or something somewhere, everywhere this weekend and i spent a good deal of time with my hand up crying “me, too, please?”  little mee up there galloped away to beat the band, but never quite managed to find the parade, always just one street over as it seemed to be.  fell asleep sunday evening and woke up around 10, thinking surely it must be 4. no?

and so tomorrow is my first real day of unemployment, or underemployment, as i still have the rec job 19 hours a week, thank god.  i’m going to try to take this phase calmly, reminding myself that there is no reason why i won’t be able to substitute, and do it enough to survive, once they finally decide to actually look at my application.  this next month i have to find about an exra grand, is all, or drain my savings by whatever amount i don’t find.  nola will put me back on some more but, of course, i’ll have to work my way back into the schedule so i can’t expect the 30 hours or so i need per week.  i go to the studio at 3 and work until 7 every day.  perhaps, no, i don’t know, i thought i’d stop by the knit shop tomorrow, but i’m sick of knitting at present.  i do need to make some rounds around town, see what’s out there in the dog days, however.  i also need to get on that certification studying thing that’s been pushed off this long.  i dont know, this is not gonna be an easy month, i guess.  but i’m hoping not to freak too much, since tomorrow is really only my first REAL day of underemployment, having funded myself the first six months as R&D of a sort…

is this thing on?

“The vacancies listed are frozen at this time. Hiring of all techers is temporarily suspended. The school district is in the process of adjusting teacher units to serve any shift in the student population. However, the district continues to welcome teacher applications. Normal hiring practices are expected to resume during the week of September 4th.”

but i gotta.  this week of fulltime with nothing set to do is wearing; mostly i knit.  i am listening to my iPod again, so i can hear books, at least.  i can’t seem to find out what is best concentrated on next, so i’m noodling around with thingies and knitting and posing.  hey, a real artist!  i’m supposing that next week, when i have only 4 hour early evening blocks in the studio, will become more focussed.  on something.  meanwhile, staying up too late listening, of course, and then don’t want to go in in the morning.  what a sludge.

i decided the other day, yesterday, i guess, that i have to stop thinking i’ve been unemployed for seven months and think instead that i’m employed as an artist at last and am simply not making enough yet to make it work.  but it will come.  no art teaching jobs on the web again.  teachers went back yesterday; classes start next week.  no word on my substituting application yet, no word on much of anything.  what to do?

today i want to investigate sculpey, and perhaps that air dry clay.  see what’s up.

i am old.

that i seem to have lost confidence?  only in an underlying way, but i ask myself what am i doing?  am i even any good at this?  what is this, anyway? an existential crisis, i suppose, and no matter.  i’m not even particularly freaked at no work, i’ve been ekeing along like this for seven months, i’ll just keep ekeing until i run out.  something’s gotta give somewhere.  but i’m wondering if i’m any good, making and good art when i do make it, etc.  a, i deluding myself? what’s that about, anyway, just because i’ve not had any feedback for, what, three days?  sigh.

slid down by the passenger door i never open, although i had looked there but apparently not well enough.  the cards had been replaced, but the $8 was welcome, as were the earrings i’d been meaning to extract from the change purse.  gotta fish those outta there….

the three-day trainings for substitute teaching don’t start until the end of august, which means it will be september at the earliest before i can begin substituting.  not that they’ve even looked at my application yet.  the application looker was on vacation last week, apparently, which is not what i was told before.  i have to wait a week or two more before i’ll hear anything, and then do one of the trainings at the end of august.

that will be a whole month without fulltime work.  i wonder how much subsisTence work i can get at nola?