The Way Things Are

You know, I'm back to mood swings...not so bad as before, and actually a little bit nice. In fact, I might be more inclined to call it "little bouts of depression interspersed in an otherwise content mood." Life feels a little calm for the moment. I like calm.

Today I worked all day at Art Awakenings. That whole situation has changed. While I am no longer a client, I am still an employee. I had zero hours the entire month of November, so I figured I was on my way out of employment. I was having a hard time handling it, anyway. The environment is actually a lot more stressful now than it used to be and a lot more stressful than it would seem.

My relationship with Sukey has changed. She's still my supervisor, but things have greatly calmed between us. I think the beginning of our professional relationship was full of unmet expectations from both sides. I was expecting things to stay the way they were. She was expecting a more stable employee. Now things are different. Now we're working together to find how we can compromise and both get what we want. This week when we talked, she offered me some hours on Friday if I was feeling up to coming in and working. That's a lot different than it used to be and, quite frankly, generally unheard of in the working world. But it was easy to say yes. I didn't have any appointments today and I've been feeling okay (most of the time).

It was busy, it was stressful and it was CRAZY. We're getting ready for the "Art Mart" on Monday--the first official art sale at our studio. I'm going to have a table to sell art, myself. There was a lot to do to get ready. Let's face it, our studio has become a mess. As one of my friends said, it looks like a place you would see on the show "Hoarders." There are empty containers every where, "just in case we can use them for something." Stuff is never put back in the same place and since we've been getting new and different art supplies, space is gone and things are piling up along the walls and in the corners. Personally, I would be embarrassed to show our studio to the public in that condition. So I did a little cleaning up. It made me feel good and it seemed to be very helpful to the other staff. I also helped one of the artists to put together some holiday decorations. We put together a string of snowflakes made by some of the clients in the residential program. They were very child-like snowflakes and part of me expected it to look tacky. IT TURNED OUT GREAT! It really made me smile to see the string of snowflakes hanging from the ceiling.

Sukey and I talked a little about work. She wants me to come up with a schedule of when I want to work, provided I feel well enough to work. We tentatively decided on Tuesdays from 11am to 3pm. For the month of January, half of that time will be spent teaching the artists how to do batik. I maintain that I'm NOT a teacher. But batik isn't that hard to teach. Sukey wants me to teach other things...I don't know if I actually will, but I'll at least think it over.