Utter Exhaustion

This is how I felt all day.  Yesterday I woke up at 7:30 a.m. and didn't get any sleep until 5:30 a.m. this morning.  And even then, I only slept for three hours to go to work study at 9.  I was working on one of my Malleable Object projects in which I am creating tiles that will be arranged on a wall to resemble an Italian majolica plate that I saw.  I have a kiln signed out for Thursday and I need to finish glazing all 61 pieces.  I glazed about 40% last night.

Some people seem to be able to hold it together when they have little sleep.  I know some students here who love pulling all-nighters to get work done.  I, however, am not like these people.  Maybe I was able to stay up later the first two years of college but now I go to sleep at 11 and wake up 7:30 almost everyday.  I'm on a sleep schedule.  Staying awake for 22 hours, then sleeping for three, and working for another 9 or 10 hours destroys me.  I barely have my eyes open now as I type these words. 

I get really emotional when I'm exhausted like this.  I made an urn for myself for one of my classes.  It's made out of beautiful white glassy porcelain with inlaid turquoise slip patterns around the surface.  I also made delicate wings as the handle to the lid.  The urn is very smooth oval with no foot on the bottom so I am making a base of realistic intertwined clay branches that will support the weight of the urn.  I fired the urn last night on three stilts to keep it off of the bottom of the kiln since I had not made the base yet but we were going to apply decals during class today so it had to be glazed.  I opened the kiln this morning and I was devastated.  The urn was too thin at the bottom and at such a high temperature, the porcelain warped and melded into the stilts I made and completely bound itself to them.  The urn warped so much that it even trapped and welded the lid in place which was really startling since it was too small of a lid before I even fired it.  Well I just stood there, urn in my hands and cried.  I'm already so stressed out as it is to get all of my work finished in time and this was just the icing on the cake.  I hesitantly showed my teacher Matt Towers and I did my best to hold back my tears as he looked at my piece.  He was wonderful.  He said that he would rather see me take big risks like this and fail then to play it safe.  He has had many many failures but he learned something from each one, and I have learn a lot from this collapse.  Still, it broke my heart.  After spring break I'll be making a larger, better, and more awesome urn then my other one ever dreamed of. 

P.S.  I was so tired today that I took at ten minute cat nap on the toilet...I swear it wasn't intentional.