Rearrange!

I. Bears for Friends

Volunteer Abby had said she wanted the first color-test strip of bears ( below, top strip)––to put up where she works with special ed students––but that print is so messy, I wouldn't let her have it.
I said I'd make another, and now I have.
I'm still adding eyes & trim (bottom strip):

I planned, took care, and managed to print cleanly (the carving lines are supposed to show)––and using only one jigsaw-cut block, it took half the time.
Not sure I like it better though...
That's okay: 

this was an exercise, not a passion project like The Escape will be (where they're trapped in the basement). Finishing that is next up.

I made the bear strip this weekend because Abby and Emily--both from the thrift store--are coming over tonight to celebrate their Virgo birthdays.

Em's aesthetic is more about death and dismemberment, but she has a five-year old, so maybe she'd like one of the strips too. (I printed three strips of each colorway.)
These friends are very different in style; I love that we all get along.

Enough with color, for now.
I'm not interested in decorative prints per se––I want to push myself to carve little stories. Black and white is perfect for that.
We'll see.

I've signed up for a couple one-night "sampler" classes (cheaper) at the expensive professional print studio, and bink & I signed up for a 5-Thursdays community ed class, Printing at Home. Looks like that's more about screen prints, but I could learn lots from that, I hope. It doesn't start till October 24.

II. Forward!

I chose "Forward"––the slogan of Wisconsin where I mostly grew up––as my word of the year, and promptly forgot about it. But many good changes have gone forward since then.

Almost immediately after quitting the thrift store in February, I saw I'd needed to leave more than I'd even thought. The constant cruelty, mostly the fallout of deprivation (- of everything), had badly ground me down.

After I left, my spirit popped back up, like it'd been...hm, trapped in the basement?
I love volunteering there though--it's my ground to touch. About once a week is manageable. Despite the terrible management and the desperate surroundings, there's a lot of joy in the place. People laugh a lot there.

BELOW: Roses hang from a fence in the parking lot, mourning the death of a young man shot there a few weeks ago

Some board member brought in a grief counselor for a staff presentation last week, after the murder in the parking lot. (Turns out it was, as we guessed, a drug-business execution. The shooter was caught.)

I rolled my eyes, "What about the last five years?"
Most of my coworkers told me they felt numb about this latest violence--the tipping point for most of them is long past. Even for me, a relative newbie to this.
My own crisis point had forced me to realize, I AM NOT THE SAVIOR, and that was what I needed to know, to carry on.

I hate the uppity-ups in the organization--they are that useless thing, "well-meaning". (I am being unfair—that’s just how I feel, it’s not a fact that being well-meaning = uselessness.)

The special-ed assistant job was perfect to get me up and out of that spirit grinder, and I'm proud of what I did in a short time at the school. I feel a pang when I think about some of the students (the boy who I took walks with, who taught me to identify cars by their logos on front), but mostly I feel relief to be gone. There was no joy in my coworkers. They never laughed.
And I am not the savior--I cannot save the kids from the institution.

I'm applying for a job at the public library today--I'd love that.
(No word from the art store yet.)
Mostly though, I'm learning about printmaking.

III. School Report

Learning is the best thing! However you do it.
I miss Marz less than I thought I would--because she's doing so well after two weeks of college! Of course I'd a billion times rather she be thriving elsewhere than hanging out in the city I live in.

BELOW: Sign in gutter by Marz's apartment, just up the hill from Lake Superior:  "No Dumping, Leads to Lake".
But, is that a shark?

I did not trust that Marz would take to college anymore than a shark to a great lake (too cold for sharks). She certainly didn't think she would.

She's said she's almost kinda angry to be proven wrong, that her ego pride is annoyed that clichés about university are proving true:
that it opens your mind, challenges your unknown biases;
that you are pushed to find out who you are and how you relate to others;
and, . . .  that it is hard. Ha!

She'd done some community college after high school, and it was soft. She's mostly home-schooled, and a she's terrific self-educator, but it's a truth that you cannot push yourself the same as an outside force can.
...And you can sometimes lose momentum and drift into a comfortable boredom. (I am prone to that, anyway.)

Maybe finding college a welcome slap awake is partly a matter of being an older returning student?  I went back to college around Marz's age myself, and it was a whole 'nother galaxy from my first time. (I got my BA  in Classics at 35, from the U here.) Rolling right on from high school might not have the same effect.

But also, teachers matter. Personality rules.
Marz disliked most of her classes the first day, so she switched her schedule, and she found a teacher who inspires her in a topic she's interested in:
Russian History.
(One of my favorite things Marz ever said was that The Brothers Karamazov "really picks up around page 700".)

LESSON: Don't like it? Rearrange!

And now I must rearrange my apartment—put away laundry and printmaking supplies before the birthday party tonight.