Sophomore Slump, Day One

Don't I Have Enough Already?

14 April 2018

I suck at glassblowing. I suck at glassblowing. I suck at glassblowing. It’s not a competition. I suck at glassblowing. I suck at glassblowing. Breathe! I suck at glassblowing. I suck at glassblowing. I should be on my bike.

I'm sitting outside of the Wheaton Arts glassblowing studio, alone in a circle of brightly-colored Adirondack chairs. It's noon, we're on our lunch break, and I'm not hungry. 

While packing my lunch this morning I told Jack that my biking self was in conflict with my glassblowing self.  "Your biking self is in conflict with all your other selves."

"Yeah." I said, washing an apple. "Today would've been a Sierra Club day anyway."

"No it wouldn't." He was right, of course. Outside the red maples were finally blooming. The sun was out. The forecast high was going to be near 80 degrees. The guys were going to do their first flat metric without me.

I almost didn't sign up for this "Next Steps" glassblowing class. All of us who took the beginner's class last fall got the invitation, and space would be limited. I hesitated long enough to know that if I missed this chance I'd be kicking myself forever. 

But why do this? What's the point? It's not as if I'm ever going to quit my day job and make a living blowing glass. It's not as if, never mind what the class is called, I'll ever be more than a beginner. One time, two times, eight times, what does it matter if months or years go by in between? I'll spend hundreds of dollars, nearly five hours in the car over two days, for twelve hours in front of a 2300-degree furnace, with eleven other people, and maybe come home with three lumpy things I can sheepishly admit I didn't make entirely myself.

Ambivalence turned into insecurity when I entered the studio. 

Of the nine gathered there, only two had been in the same beginner's class as me.  Fortunately they were two of the people I clicked with, and they even remembered me.

Everyone else seemed so confident when they gathered their little lumps of glass for punty practice. Skitch had blown a bubble. It was our job to bring him our punties, which we would affix to the bubble. He'd then break the bubble from the original pipe and use the new one to await the next punty. "Sputnik," one of the guys said.

I was wearing polarized sunglasses; I couldn't see the shadow of my rod against the molten glass in the furnace. I was gathering blind and not doing very well at it.  One of the assistants switched glasses with me and I saw what I was missing. Then Skitch called lunch break and I wandered back to my car to dig among my spare biking accessories for a pair of castoff sunglasses I'd tossed in there several years ago.

What's that saying about a bad day on the bike being better than a good day off the bike? Maybe this is like a bad day on the bike, a necessary check on my experience. I feel as if I'm riding above my speed class.

I finish eating with ten minutes to spare and wander back into the studio. 

The one thing I wanted to do well last fall was make a dozen ornaments to give to my friends. Out of twelve, maybe three were passable, and I couldn't bear to force them on anyone. And now I'm walking among a dozen perfectly-formed, oversized ornaments. Even the display is mocking me. 

Skitch divides us into three groups. I wind up in his, as I did last time. I wonder if we're the laggards or if he's parceling out us hopeless ones. 

I like it better this way. Now there are only four of us. At any one time three of us will be doing something, either working the glass, shielding and paddling, or blowing. We help each other gather glass (I can see it now with my cheap shades) and cool the pipes. 

When one of the other students drops her work onto the concrete floor I realize I'm not the only one having a bad day. Somehow Skitch rescues it. "Our house is full of floor models!" she tells me, and, in the end, her drinking glass looks pretty good.

I'm getting some confidence back as I shield and paddle. I watch three people before it's my turn.

My first gather is pretty good, but there's some debris on the glass, probably from the pipe. Skitch decides I should start over because the crud will get in the way of even heating. I take another gather and it's better than the first one. We get a bubble in it and I go in for another gather. I fumble with the marvering and when we get it back on the bench to stretch it out, my jacks aren't parallel with the glass. The blower and the paddler have done their jobs, but I've left too thin a layer of glass at the bottom, where the punty will go. 

"Take a heat," Skitch says, and he disappears to get the punty. I'm ready when he returns, or at least I think I am. "The bottom is gone," he says. It was to thin that it collapsed in the glory hole. I hadn't even noticed. I'm holding a bottomless bottle. I want to keep it but he says it'll fall apart.

He summons us all and, with chalk on the cement floor, explains what happened and why we need to keep the jacks even and how the blowing and paddling and jacking all have to work together to turn the sphere into a cylinder. "Go again," he says.

So now I'm getting all the gathering practice I need. Skitch likes what I'm bringing back. In my haste we haven't cooled the pipe very much on this gather, and when I sit down to work the glass I burn my hand on the wet rod.

"I heard that," Skitch says. I didn't hear it; I felt it though. We take a quick look. I'm okay. We do a little blocking work and I go back for another gather.

My marvering and blowing are better this time too. All is going well until I flub the jacks again. This time all it takes is Skitch to even it out while I blow. This is infuriating; last time this was the part I was good at. When I get to the bench again I have better control. The mug is small but it's much more even than the one I made in November.

We have half an hour of class time left so we practice making punties, serving them onto a bubble, and breaking the bubble from the pipe, in a continuous hand-off, making a many-puntied orb with so many holes and cracks I don't even ask if I can keep it. I have better-looking worse stuff in my collection already.

At 4:00 Skitch gathers us outside, where, at 80-something degrees, it's much cooler than in the studio. He says he's pleased with our work today. He thinks we've remembered enough after a long winter away from blowing glass. 

Tomorrow, he says, he thinks he'll have us make bottles. Cool!

He says he's trying to figure out what to do with us after tomorrow, maybe pairing us up for studio time or private lessons.

It's tempting. Maybe I could arrange a half-day of work every few weeks or something. Maybe once a month? How much would this even cost?

Maybe shut the fuck up and get back on my bike.