Be Angry and Sin Not

Things that got done today:

Voting. We voted! I actually teared up in the voting booth as I filled in the bubble for President Obama. He has a 70% chance of winning according to The New York Times survey of the electoral college. Still, a few tears might help that along, right? Now can I stop paying attention to the polls so that my blood pressure can get back down from the stage one hypertensive to the pre-hypertensive range? I'm just trying to avoid a stroke here. That's my only goal for this election season now.

We ordered a remote camera to put in our cubicle at the studio. Over $140 worth of our tools have been stolen recently. The thief is very clearly someone who has been caught repeatedly stealing from the studio and has not been asked to leave (!) because the studio director is a fucking milquetoast-variety idiot. So now our stuff is missing. My first thought, of course, as a brown girl from the valley, was to throw myself into revenge and start making his life a living hell. (Pour oil on his bisque wear. Stop the kiln in the middle of his firings or reprogram it to overfire and ruin all his work. That kind of thing. I'm perfectly capable of it.)  But my second thought was that I don't want to be that kind of person anymore--and I don't have to be. But I also don't have to stay and put up with whatever garbage comes my way.

What would you do, if someone stole from you?

Here's what we did:

We put in notice that we will soon be leaving the studio. One of the students, when she heard I was leaving, threw her arms around me and said, "You can't go! Please don't go." Most people are disappointed and think the situation sucks. Which it does, yeah. But that acknowledgment doesn't get my stuff back and it doesn't make me feel better about having to deal with a thief.
 
We also visited another studio as a possible replacement. It's further down in the valley than we are, has a lot of natural light and a flaky studio director and greatly reduced hours. But there are only five members and we'd be moving into a small (but adequate for our purposes) studio. For a time anyway.

We priced wheels and kilns with the idea of setting up a home studio. Dave throws on a Lockerbie motorized kick-wheel. They're nice. They're not as portable as the electric wheels, but whatever. We're also, since we don't have the ability to fire an electric kiln at home, considering a propane-fueled raku kiln. We could potentially bisque work in it, and both of us have a relatively large amount of experience with raku firing.

So that was our day.

I also, when going through stressful times like this, start to look around for omens and such that will tell me how the situation is going to play itself out. Here's one whose meaning so far largely eludes me:

This evening, Dave and I came home to a black widow spider building her web in our doorway, close to the ground. At first I thought she was just trying to get in under the door, but as we watched her, she connected her web to the door and spun it outward, beginning to form the characteristically chaotic black widow-style web. Dave caught her in an old, chipped, salt-fired pottery bowl that we use to prop the door open sometimes, and put her out in the driveway. I was almost sad to have to do it. Interrupt her, I mean; I absolutely love spiders, even dangerous ones.

In dreams, spiders are a representation of female energy and sexuality. Feminine power, in other words. In this dream that is my waking life, it may very well have the same meaning. Sometimes spiders represent stories, the stories we need to hear or the stories we need to tell. Maybe that's a more accurate interpretation.

It's a strong omen, sure, but another possibility is that it wasn't actually meant for me.