The Ceramics teacher gave me my last display piece back and took three more for the display case. One of them is kind of crummy in my opinion, but he said it was nice....

Maybe I already mentioned this, but I made a goat shaped teapot last week; she's coming along nicely and is all cleaned up and ready to bisque fire. Made several other pieces today, including another fish (this one is anatomically correct this time) and....hmmm, I don't know what else. I just didn't really have the touch today, felt enthusiastic but not creative enough, and I could hardly throw a good pot to save my life. Oh yeah, I made a small colander, because I don't always need the great big ones.

Our next assignment is to make a sculptural, non-representational piece that incorporates another material after it is fired. I had this idea to make a nice vase type thing and then break it or slice it up while it was in the leather hard stage, and make holes in each piece, and wire it back together, and glaze it, and then......and here is the problem. Then what? Because see, any glaze will make a piece stick to the bottom of the kiln in the glaze touches the kiln floor. Wire will melt, so it would have to be taken apart again before it could be fired, but then the glaze is an issue because of the glaze melting the pieces to one another and to.......oh......wait...... They could melt back together? hmmmm.

I have been working through a lot of the trauma, abuse, etc issues and wanted to make pots that expressed that kind of thing, that's why I was going to break it. If it would melt back together enough to stay in one piece, even barely......oh my, that sounds risky. Thinking......

And I was going to make a lot of small, cute, defenseless looking little round extruded pots and violate and ruin and distort them in various ways, but the extruder and I didn't get along today.

And.....maybe I just wasn't mentally gathered enough to do a good job today. Who knows.

I read Innocence Destroyed a study of childhood sexual abuse, as well as The Unsayable, The Hidden Language of Trauma, which apparently is about Lacanian psychotherapy, and then I looked at The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook and honestly, aside from making me aware of how much worse it could have been, these things didn't help much. The Last book does have an interesting section on nutrition and how the foods we eat can affect anxiety, and that actually was worthwhile. Sigh......I need to give up the coffee..... :-( and eat more B vitamins.

I guess that the reason these books are unsatisfying is that they are not giving me the answers to the questions I have, which is primarily whether or not there is any hope for me.