a chaotic year

Hey y'all, check on your friends in academia.  They're probably not OK.  

This academic year has been so chaotic that when it finally ended (or at least, we had graduation) I felt weirdly unresolved.  Part of that is that I'm still having to do school stuff and even drive there several days this week, but it's also because it's just been impossible to process all the weirdness in real time.  

I process most of my days on the commute.  Sometimes through music or a good podcast, but sometimes I talk to myself out loud.  When there's more to digest, I take care of that in my sketchbook by logging some events and documenting the happenings for future reference.  This year has been a Lego type year, though.  Each strange and unprecedented event was followed by another and they just kept stacking up to build this very tall, very unstable tower.  I feel as if I've just been dodging missiles one right after another with no time to really reflect on the events.  Since that's one of the goals of this blog, I figured I owed it to myself to sit down and really recall and reflect a little.  One way I do that is through images.  I open my camera roll and thumb my way back to August before slowly scrolling through the academic year.

Dude.  It's crazy how much has happened.  So much has changed.  And then I get distracted by all the funny photos and crazy events that are documented on my phone and I forget that I started out trying to process the weirdness.  

Like, remember when I had to do surgery on one of the welding machines and we treated it like a real operating room situation?  Remember when Elena hated me on the first day of classes and then we became school besties?  Remember when MG and I had a snowball fight while delivering sculptures for an exhibit?  So many good memories.  See how easily I get distracted?

Anyway, we'll look at some photos together.  Let's start with a few things that just happened to me...

I got to be a part of Wim Roefs' memorial exhibit.  I was proud to be grouped with so many cool artists.  

I won an award from the SCAEA.  It was a big surprise and I was really honored.

I had a solo exhibit of my drawings and that was pretty cool.

I (we) got to visit Emily at her school and hang out with her.

Oh dude, there was a whole hurricane situation with school canceled for a week.  We lost power, had a bunch of trees down and I did a jigsaw puzzle obsessively on the dining room table.

Freakin' Walter joined the family.  What a chaotic mess he is.

Violet ran in state XC and did great.  She had a great year despite constant hip pain.  Today she had an MRI for that hip pain.  Still not out of the woods on that.

Blue went off to his first year of college.  The cool thing is that the college is the same one I work for.  It's been really cool seeing him several times each week.  

Then we have all the student related things in my camera roll.  This was really the thing that saved the academic year - the students.  There's some sort of tide that rolls in and out with student groups and this year, the tide was high.  So many great students who provided me with so much entertainment and joy.

This was our Charlie Brown Thanksgiving feast.  We had toast and popcorn, just like in the Thanksgiving special.  

Shine tormented me with cats and weird music all semester.

Babushkas!

Halloween costume fun with Payton and Mac!

Art hiking with the cool kids.

Ali got her masters degree.  I'm so proud of her.  I love her.

I took the cool kids to a jewelry workshop with Katie Poterala and they made very cool things.

Freakin' MG.  What a blessing to us all.  I got to spend 4 years with her talking about all the controversial religious things and helping her really understand what she needed to be making and why.  It was all so much fun.  Well, except the fact that she holds the record for the number of urgent care visits.  Everything else was great.

MG also made me another award and I was just as honored to receive it as I was the other one.  This seriously meant so much to me and I haven't fully processed that yet.  

The spring Art Gala was so much fun.  This group is the coolest.

We had a whole year of ninjas of kindness missions.  We made people uncomfortable and made them feel loved.  A win.

I got to teach all these people to weld and this was just one of three classes of Sculpture 1 this year.  I LOVE seeing people realize sculpture is amazing.  This was a fun group.

I'm not even sure what this was but it made me super happy to find it on my phone.  I think it was a film camera shot on exam day?  

So yeah, some really negative and irritating things happened throughout the year.  It was annoying and unnerving on many occasions but these students and their antics made all of it worth it for me.  If you want to know about the bad things, maybe take me out for a drink and I'll tell you.  The tea is hot and I'm all about spilling it in the right environment.  But today, let's just think about these happy times instead of dealing with the negativity.