I’ve already decided I’m going to hate my pottery class.
I decided that about a minute after I sat down at one of the raised tables scattered around the back of the room. Two ladies were already sitting on one side and in my attempt to be friendly, I sat adjacent to them, expecting mom to join us. She instead sat across from me at another table and when I turned my head to smile at the ladies, I found myself being stared down by one and thoroughly ignored by the other. She might as well have been hired to study the number of cracks in the ceiling panels for all the effort she put into avoiding contact of any sort.
Half hour later when the teacher finally decided to make an attempt at taking roll, the ladies snickered as both mine and my mom’s names were called and the teacher exclaimed “Oh! Related?” I was already tired of the rampant snobbery and had to physically control myself from leaning over the table and smashing their heads together as the Ignorer snorted her amusement and the Starer laughed outright. Cunts.
The class was packed. PACKED. To the fucking rafters. Which is funny since the class limit was 30 people for the combined six classes. Yeah, there are SIX GODDAMNED CLASSES in there all at once. There’s beginning through advanced hand sculpting and beginning through advanced pottery wheel. Most of the people who signed up are in the wheel classes, including mom and myself. There are 17 wheels…there are 23 wheel students. The hell? How am I supposed to complete my expected work on time when there isn’t even enough workspace for me? Had I been taking this class by myself, I would have dropped immediately. But with mom there, we’re rather stuck. She’s wayyyyyy more excited than I am at this point. I mostly just want this semester to already be over with.
Not expecting to have to do anything tonight, I went straight to school from work, only taking the opportunity to change from slacks to jeans before heading out the door. So when we were told to just start banging away at the wheel, I had no choice but to slog my nice work clothes on in there and get myself covered in sticky red clay. The worst part being that we were there for almost four hours and it wasn’t until the last 30 minutes that the teacher took a moment to SHOW US HOW TO USE THE WHEEL. Seriously. She spent the first hour fucking with roll and trying to count wheels versus wheel students…the next half hour shooing us off to the bookstore to buy our art supplies…the next two hours showing how to knead air out of clay and how to start sculpting by hand (during which time us wheel students were told we could stay with her and watch the demo or we could just grab a wheel and start throwing)…and then FINALLY…as mom and I were cleaning up our horrible messes…FINALLY the damn woman sits down and slaps a wad of clay on a wheel and in less than five minutes she had talked us through the creation of a vase.
Seriously. SERIOUSLY. If mom wasn’t in this class, I’d walk RIGHT NOW. The assignments are already confusing, the expectations are confusing, the workflow is confusing, the class structure is confusing…GAH. It’s CLAY! How can clay be so confusing?! Grrrrr…