I’m supposed to be at a writing class today. Now. But I have had a lot of other stuff to do, and I have no writing to hand in. I guess I’m skipping it this time around. And I will post this later.

It seems that every day of the week, I have several things to do: school, work, art, writing, meetings, and more. I’ve been able to squeeze in a few art tasks—a lot more than I’ve been able to since the end of my show. I took quite the break for a while. At least I’m chipping away a little bit, which is better than nothing.

Recently, I won a small grant from Artlifting. It’s enough to pay for the materials to get started on my wooden-shape paintings, which now have a working title: Grainline Studies. A grainline (in pattern making), in case you don’t know, is the direction that threads run in a woven fabric, determining how a garment hangs, moves, fits, etc. For now, that’s the only title I’ve come up with. I’d like it to represent something more that relates to the body, but I haven’t come up with anything clever yet.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve also started working on my sociology final. It’s definitely early, but I’m hand-painting a bunch of comic panels that will, of course, take a good amount of time. We are supposed to do something “creative” for the final that teaches something sociological. I chose to focus on how cults (basically) operate, like recruitment and some of the aspects of what constitutes a high-control group. The professor keeps sending us examples of students’ past finals, and they are all excellent, so I don’t know what grade I’ll get, but I tried my best, and that’s all I can do, right?

I may wind up showing this project to my ex-cult group. I meet with them once every two weeks for a couple of hours, and it’s always been super helpful. When I first left Scientology, I attended group therapy sessions IRL. It was just as helpful, if not more, because the people had been part of so many different cults. In turn, it made it crystal clear how Scientology was a dangerous group—probably the most dangerous of them all.

Most people who are in a high-control group like that do not recognize that their group is actually a cult. They think many other religious groups are cults, but not theirs, and this is very common among members, especially those just getting out.

I haven’t been keeping track of what I’ve mentioned in this blog, but I decided to change my major from sociology to art history. Did I mention that? I can’t remember. I’m already feeling much happier since switching. But this past week, I started my Italian language class. I had to switch from ASL because Arizona State University doesn’t recognize ASL as a language prerequisite, which is a bummer. I was looking forward to learning it, but it’s now on the way, way back burner.

A long time ago, I knew how to speak (bad) Italian. I went there twice, about 30 years ago. After I came back the first time, I lived in a community of Italian people and also had a short-term partner who was from Terni, which is close to Rome. He didn’t speak much English, even though he was living in the US for a few years. At first, I wouldn’t go out with him because I thought he was “lazy” for not learning English, but he lived in that Italian community I was talking about. Most of them didn’t even try to learn the language.

But now that I look at this class before me, I’m already worried it’s not going to sink in as I thought. I always had a harder time pronouncing longer words—especially ones that are close to English. I can read those words; I just can’t say them. Interrogative: not a hard word. But saying it in Italian isn’t easy. It’s like possibile. Looks easy, but the emphasis is in a weird place. Okay, that one I can say, but it took some time, and I was often laughed at, especially with words with “gli” in the middle, like egli (he). I’ve never been able to say it right. It’s pronounced “el-yee,” but the “g” is also in there, ever so faintly. The sound is not in the English language, so your tongue has to do something it’s not used to.

In other arting news, I’ve been chipping away at my next artist’s book, Miami 1975. I’ve been making all the drawings, and they’re almost done. I have two more to go, and then I have to paint each of them. I’ve just lost count of how many I have to do, and I have to decide if any of them will be originals (not printed), if any. There will be three fold-out pages, one of which will be partly collaged with fabric. Maybe I will paint them individually since the collage parts will already be original. I don’t know. I can decide later.

As for my What Matters book (the one for beginning and emerging artists): it’s still on hold. No movement on that front, but nothing I can do about it. I did decide that I liked one of the covers I put together—the one with the bullseye on it. I just changed the coloring of it slightly.