take a deep breath

It's starting off to be an intense week.

school starts tomorrow and my list of things to do is insanely big. everything from xeroxing my syllabus for my "material worlds" class (and goddamn if it isn't like, 300 pages. ok, maybe not, but the damn thing is thick and my students will freak out), actual classes (Tuesday and Friday), getting together the "Object Agents: Contemporary Sculpture and the Social Life of Objects" lecture series I'm curating this spring, the first in the lecture series tomorrow where I have to stand up in front of a large lecture hall audience and introduce my idea for the series, an art opening this Wednesday at Mills College, and a Friday lecture at the Crocker Museum in Sacramento (that i have to drive 2 1/2 hours away right after my Friday class to make). Then on Saturday i'm doing a youth workshop at the Crocker where we make things similar to my "Grey Market" piece.

All this pales in comparison to finding out this afternoon that a dear friend of mine died yesterday in a tragic accident. i'm in shock and grief and it's been so hard to process. today was really hard and a mix of feeling distracted, distraught, and oddly calm. if anything, it sometimes helps to put things into perspective. All the deadlines and personal matters I was worrying about today went by the wayside and I had to just put it all aside to deal with the loss of my friend. And I'm thankful for the time I set aside, because it makes me feel human as opposed to a machine, which is what i've been feeling lately as i charge through deadlines, projects, and to-do lists. Fuck all that. Sometimes you just have to really really really feel.

Tomorrow is another day. I'll finish some things up. But it also feels like my perspective has been shuffled. Maybe that's a good thing. I spent more time than I have in a long time talking on the phone to friends and just trying to process what happened. Just feeling, really. It's so hard to come to terms with something like this when it happens. Like the cosmos has been robbed of potential, the possibility that could have been if the person were able to have seen their future through.

god, this sucks.