2/25/26 - 2/27/26: I'd rather be a slime mold.
2/25/26
Thank god life isn’t static.
I’m finishing up eleven pieces in my wheel throwing class. I was able to trim the last few tonight.
There’s a red blinking light out the window, placed just so in the distance through a foggy darkness.
I’m always pretty okay if I’m lost in the art. Like running through a wild field with abandon, but that field is actually an endless ocean I’m swimming in and I’m in a trance and I have no compass.
Eating ice cream for breakfast is a perfect and beautiful activity. Add a cold potsticker from two-day old leftovers and it truly becomes the breakfast of champions.
I have figured out what the name of my future dog will be: Engelbert Humperdinck.
2/26/26
My mom’s appointment for her cancer trial in San Francisco is today. Appointment mornings are always so rushed.
If life is an ebb and flow, then I’m in an uncomfortable ebb I feel scared of and unsteady in. I’m quite sad about a particular person just kind of vanishing from my life recently. The feeling of missing them keeps swimming around in me, like I’m an aquarium of longing.
I cannot wait to keep painting checkerboard all over my wheel thrown bowl later today in class.
Someone at the hospital right now is waiting for a job interview and talking about restaurants with their friend who’s sitting next to them. They describe one of the restaurants as having a “date night kind of vibe”. This immediately gives me a puke-in-my-mouth kind of vibe. I’m just so sick of love and dating and all of that bullshit. Maybe if I say I want to be a gibbon enough I’ll wake up one day, Metamorphosis-by-Kafka style, and just be a gibbon.
I briefly went back on a dating site the other day out of morbid curiosity. I had a brief discussion with a 27 year old about Nelly Furtado and pasta, was shown a bunch of 18 year olds and dudes in their 50’s, and then I got off again. I think hitting my head against a brick wall would be a much more enjoyable experience. It just feels absolutely impossible and I give up. Saying I give up on love and relationships maybe sounds melodramatic but, alas, here we are, very much wrapped up in a give-up state of mind.
Someone in my wheel throwing class was sitting next to me sharing my tray of black underglaze. We were sitting there studiously painting and we briefly got onto the topic of attachment. They threw a quote at me: “The cup is already broken.” It’s in reference to one’s relationship to attachment and change. Do we flow down the river of change with any amount of grace, or go against its current, refusing to acknowledge the fact of impermanence?
The desire I’ve had to find a marvelous boyfriend is exhausting. A partner in crime, so to speak. When it just indescribably feels right. You get each other. Maybe I can make a life-size one out of clay. (Everything comes back to clay with me. Any topic and I’m able to turn it into a conversation about clay.) This boyfriend made of clay would just be sitting around the house, inanimate. I could sit at the table in the kitchen and have nice dinners with him. A lovely capellini with red sauce and homemade meatballs and parmesan. We could sit on the couch and watch a movie about the history of clay so that he can learn more about his origins. If nothing else, I think it would make a great performance art piece. I’ve been wanting to take ceramic sculpture classes anyway. When I had guests over how would they react? Would Mr. Life-size Clay Man even feel comfortable with house guests? Also, when tax season rolled around, would he adorn me with emotional support?
I’ve been so depressed about the concept of love and relationships lately. My solution: swimming. I’m just a frog when I’m swimming. It’s pretty refreshing to just be a frog for an hour.
56 laps later: Did that swim fix everything for me? Did it remedy everything in my life that’s awry? That’s a lot to put on just one swim, but my brain definitely wishes this were a real possibility.
I realize that if a day goes by and I don’t touch clay, everything is off. I’m tense and irritable. Do I love clay? Yes. Do I need clay? Absolutely. Am I obsessed with clay? Addicted to it? I wouldn’t say addicted. Obsessed, yes. Addiction is “compulsive seeking and use of a substance or behavior despite harmful, and often devastating, consequences to one’s health, relationships, and life.” Clay is the antithesis of harmful.
My brain latches on tightly to anything I don’t understand, and I’m finding it hard to wrap my head around all the complexity in the intersections between love, obsession, addiction, need, and want. Much like clay, I think I’m a rather salubrious force in people’s lives, and I’d hate to think I’m having an ill effect on anyone. I’ve been wondering about people who have addiction in their history and how that relates to their relationship to passion. Can the body not tell the difference between addiction and passion any longer? Does the line get too blurry? Does it feel scary? There’s so much in life that is out of one’s control, and when you add addiction to the mix, I imagine it adds extra arduous layers to everything that are difficult to live with. Add to that judgement and misunderstanding from others.
I ran out of my extremely sour strips I keep in the car. I desperately need more. As they always say: “One sour strip a day keeps the doctor away.”
I have 4 minutes left on the corn muffins.
2/27/26
A plethora of ants swarm an almost half eaten orange on the ground.
I look at things now and think “I should try to make that out of clay”. Lately it’s been bags. I see a random bag out in the world possessing the right amount of color and rumpled curvature and I think how beautiful it would be as a ceramic sculpture. What if the whole world was a bunch of ceramic sculptures? I feel as delicate as one.
I need change.