Confusion
listen / do you want to know a secret / do you promise not to tell ~ The Beatles (and me, but I’m not telling)
There’s a lot of stuff going on chez Thrums that I don’t write about — of course. I feel relatively free to write about myself, somewhat free to write about my kids, and not at all free to write about other people I know. There are some people I never write about because their privacy is important to preserve for one reason or another, and others I mention in a glancing way because unlike me, they didn’t sign up for this public airing of thoughts business. Still, there is a lot of stuff going on in my life that isn’t getting discussed here, and it leaves me feeling strange about what I do write about, because without the unspoken stuff, what I present here seems like a sham in some way. [this reminds me of that terrible joke: So, Mrs. Kennedy, except for that one day in Dallas, how was your trip to Texas? terrible joke] So I’m finding it a little harder to make regular posts about my life, since the big middle of it is private.
Remember how I had to frog Marnie’s Moby sweater? I frogged it completely and just started over, and I’m finally back at the point I was in the first edition (I’ve decided to refer to them as editions, like books). So here I am:
Ambergris, by Ann Weaver (2nd edition)
I do note with satisfaction that the cable ropes are all done correctly in this edition; there was one error in the first version that would’ve bugged me forever, so you know, you take what comfort you can from a situation like this. I’ve already divided at the sleeves, so now I’m doing the front up to the neck, and then I’ll do the back. Then two sleeves, each with cable ropes up the center, assembly, and a turtleneck. I hope I can finish this while Marnie still has time to wear it this winter; since she lives in Chicago, the odds are pretty good.
Tonight I’m having a date with Will, which I’m really looking forward to. We’re going to a cool little independent bookstore on Prince St. (McNally Jackson) and then over to an Indian food restaurant he loves, for dosas. It’s been such a warm and dry winter, it doesn’t feel like January at all — but I’m not complaining, especially for this evening, as we tramp around that great little neighborhood. One truly wonderful thing about all three of my kids is that we share a love of words and books. It manifests itself differently in the three of them, but I do share something special with each one of them around books, and that makes me happier than you can imagine. I like to think it’s my gift to them.
* * *
Here’s the next writing prompt — a 600-word story (a narrative describing a shared experience) told from the “we” perspective. No first person pronouns allowed! My first thought was to put the couple in therapy and have them telling competing narratives about something, but I got this idea and ran with it instead. It’s a piece of fiction, again, but again it uses bits of real experience for texture. My husband and I did go to Luang Prabang, which means the details of place are true, but the rest is entirely made up:
We woke up very early that morning because we wanted to witness the monks’ morning alms ritual; since we were staying at a hotel on the other side of the Mekong River, we had to get up early enough to walk across that long scary bridge – remember, honey? – and it made us nervous because of the traffic, especially in the dark. We felt so exhausted when the alarm went off, but we both knew how much you wanted to see it so off we went.
Right – it really wasn’t the kind of thing you like to do sugar plum, you’d rather visit the markets and the food stalls, but you were such a good sport about it. We just had no idea how it was going to turn out, did we? We thought we’d go to the main street, kneel at the curb, and watch the Lao women putting little clumps of rice in each of the monks’ baskets, and then get some breakfast on the way back to our hotel – remember how much we loved the breakfast at that one place? But it didn’t turn out like that at all. And you’re usually such a quiet guy, avoiding trouble. Sure, you’ll speak up if you feel you’re getting ripped off, but you never get involved in violence. You just never do that.
So there we were, walking across that bridge, in the dark. Remember how there weren’t any lights of any kind? Not even headlights, since cars weren’t allowed on the bridge? And remember how tiny the walkway was for pedestrians, with broken boards and loose nails? And how quiet the morning was – we heard the river, the cyclists passing on the bridge, the early morning fishermen, and the birds? You were commenting on the birds just as we left the bridge and crossed onto the sidewalk. We had to stop because your long skirt got caught in the clasp of your sandal, and you were kneeling down to untangle it. We were both a little bit on edge – do you remember why, now? It’s hard to imagine why we felt so unsettled, in Luang Prabang. We’d had such a great time, and felt safer there than anywhere else we’d been in Southeast Asia. Maybe it was just the very early hour, combined with the darkness that we’re not used to, since we’re from Manhattan where it’s never dark. Maybe we were just kind of punchy from exhaustion.
Well sugar, you say “we” were punchy, but “we” weren’t really punchy – you were. Remember?
You’re right – you were singing and laughing and commenting on how beautiful the river was in the dark, and how many stars you saw. OK, “we” weren’t punchy, point taken. But we were both a little anxious in the utter darkness, that’s definitely true. And neither of us expected someone to grab you – you have to agree with that!
No, we certainly never expected something like that to happen, that’s true. Did you see him coming?
No, remember how we were both bending over – you were squatting – trying to get your skirt free? The guy just came out of nowhere, it seemed, and leaned over you, saying something we couldn’t understand.
You did overreact just a little bit honey, you have to admit. If it hadn’t been so dark we might’ve noticed that he was wearing orange robes, and had shaved his head. You didn’t have to punch the poor guy, he was just offering to help us! Granted, it was dark and you were trying to protect me, but come on. You punched a monk.
thinking about my upcoming digital sabbatical
As I promised myself, this coming Saturday I’m taking a combination internet/knitting break, and I’m anxious about it. I’m allowing myself to use my computer to write, but not to go online. We’ll see how well I do with this; in the last few days, there have been several great articles (two in the NYTimes, including this lovely piece by Pico Iyer) about people taking digital sabbaticals. There’s something to it. I feel increasingly overloaded by all the information flying in, by my distracted and fractured nonstop word and image consumption — more blogs to read, more long articles to read, more insights to consume, more inspiration to absorb, more fiction to admire, more poetry to read, more thoughts to consider (oh! Must read Fareed Zakaria’s piece on the world.…). I feel wobbly, like I need to stop and make some priorities, and do some quality curating. I need to make time to process, to incorporate. I think this post about going on an information diet might be helpful, but I haven’t yet had time to read it thoughtfully — oh, the irony. Time!! I want more time, need more time. I have too many interests, and simply can’t understand people who say they’re bored.
Last year I grew in a very specific way: I became more self-possessed. That’s a very neat word, especially for someone who has always been other-possessed, past-possessed, history-possessed. Self-possessed means I take my own counsel, I have integrity and take my time, consider myself, pick and choose with the confidence of my true self. But I’m allowing myself to be overwhelmed, and it’s definitely time to stop, to take stock, to turn away from the easy seduction of immediate gratification and instead move thoughtfully and mindfully ahead. Easy to say, hard to do. I hope Saturday’s experiment gives me a start.
On Sunday my husband and I are driving to Atlantic City for a couple of days, to get out of town and keep ourselves busy and distracted while we wait for some news. We’re going ironically, and we’re Atlantic City’s worst nightmare: we don’t drink, we don’t gamble, we intend to lie around the pool or walk on the boardwalk or chill in our room, and we plan to eat.
It’d be much more interesting to go when Nucky was there, and Chalky, but alas. That’s a tv show. We’ll have a good time together making fun of the whole thing, the gamblers, the Snookies, the plastic glam and fake glitz. I’ll be taking my laptop, and since it’ll be after Saturday, I’ll be reporting live. From Atlantic City.
“I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.” ~Robert Louis Stevenson
“I’m really good at forgetting.” ~my daughter Marnie, age 5
Curses — foiled again by my age-related failing memory. I just received four skeins of The Plucky Knitter Primo MCN (fingering) in a gorgeous red shade she calls Barn Door, and I can’t remember what sweater I was going to make with it.
1540 yards of fingering weight -- for the perfect sweater if only I could remember
I know it wasn’t a pattern I’d made before, and I think it was a cardigan. I think I actually wrote it down on a little notepad file but didn’t save it. Curses! Foiled again! Dadgummit! If you have a favorite cardigan knit with fingering, please let me know!
It’s c.o.l.d here this morning; it’s risen to 14 degrees and heading up to 29. Perhaps its because of my flu, but I just cannot get warm. I’m wearing a long-sleeved thin undershirt, a turtleneck, a cardigan, and a fleece jacket on top of it all, and I have a scarf around my neck and thick socks on my feet. I’m covered with a hand-knit blanket, and another blanket, and I’m still cold. I had a big bowl of very hot oatmeal and cups of steaming tea, and I’m still cold. I think the flu must be ramping up the chill.
On that shivery note, back under the covers for me. Don’t forget to suggest sweater patterns if you have a fave! Stay well y’all.
grrrrr. One of those days.
When I was a young mother, I did everything. I made all our clothes, I made everything we ate from scratch, I was the Brownie Troop Leader, I had my giant floor loom and a giant-er Navajo loom and my big spinning wheel in the living room, I played guitar and sang in the elementary school, I was a Maker Deluxe. In this vein, I planted a vegetable garden, a couple times, because it just fit with what I was doing in my life, for my family. Oh, I loved gardening. Except I really, really didn’t. I didn’t like the feeling of dirt under my fingernails. I didn’t like having to deal with bugs and weeds. I didn’t like one thing about it. So my first vegetable garden produced what it produced in its first blush but without the necessary care, it didn’t really last. The following year, oh, I love gardening! I planted another one. And I really hated gardening.
It took me a long time to figure out that what I love is the idea of gardening. I really love that idea. The idea of preparing the ground, planting and watching and watering, seeing the plants, the flowerings, the vegetables begin and then grow. Pulling that food out of the ground and putting it on my table. Love every bit of that idea. I just really don’t like to garden. I wish I did, but I don’t. I felt so much better when I realized this distinction, because it helped me understand this conflict and it relieved me from ever having to attempt to garden again.
Last night I had another insight, though perhaps it is more temporary. Another thing I like better as an idea is Manhattan — definitely the incredible crowds of people in Manhattan. From a distance, the crowds of people pouring through the subway stations, the hordes of people on the sidewalks, they make this city vivid and so alive. From a distance, it’s easy to see that all these people are Manhattan, really. That we all live together, in each others’ faces, in public, and we mostly do it very well. We create whatever private space we need around ourselves as we are crammed together in small spaces. From a distance — the George Washington Bridge, say — all these people on this island are exciting. All these people dashing about, creating the busyness that characterizes this city. I really like all these people from a distance.
But under any kind of stress, as I was last night, my feelings change pretty dramatically. I hate all these people! Good god, I just want to get from here to there. Nothing’s easy. The subways are often screwed up for any slight reason, and if it’s raining hard, or long, everything is just that much more difficult, including subway commutes. Since the subway is underground, obviously, and we’re on a small island, a whole lot of rain at once can bring the subways to a crawl. Once, the trains just had to stop, and we all had to leave. What this means is that (a) it’s raining very hard, (b) hundreds of people are streaming out of the subway at once, into pouring rain, so (c) getting a cab is impossible. No subway, no cab, no luck.
everything's less fun in the rain, here
Last night I went downtown, to the NYU area, for a knitting meet-up. I love and adore all my friends and various groups, but I’m the only person I know here who makes things, and now and then someone says something that makes me feel like I’m seen as weird, because of it. People will ask if I’m making something because it’s cheaper (um, no), and they’ll look at me quizzically. At a minimum, they don’t seem to get the impulse to make things. They do other things, but they don’t make things. When I was a young mother, most of my friends made things, because they were my friends from the weaver’s and spinner’s guild. So I’ve been longing for real-live in person friends here in New York who make things. This one meet-up takes place pretty far from my apartment, requiring two different trains and then a long walk, but it meets on a night that works for my schedule and I’d wanted to go several times before but then had to cancel. Last week I RSVPed for the meet-up and was determined to actually go.
And then, yesterday afternoon, it started pouring rain. Not just raining, but pouring rain. And it was windy. I thought about not going, but I decided to just suck it up and head out. The bulk of the trip is underground, and the long walk in the rain would be fine. I wore my raincoat, took my umbrella, and headed out.
Times Square -- one of the major subway stations on the west side of town
It was nothing less than miserable. By the time I got to my subway stop, which is one block from my apartment, my jeans were soaked to the knee, and my feet were soggy. The wind kept whipping my umbrella inside out. Going down the steps into the subway required tip-toeing through the lakes of rain, and the trains were very crowded. Transferring trains at Times Square nearly done the old girl in; I think everyone gets cranky when they’re trying to get around in this kind of rain, and the rain causes train delays so the crowds are worse than usual. And this time of year the city is filled with tourists, who are taking it all in and don’t know the rules of the road, so they poke along, they stop in the middle of where people are walking, they stand at the top of the stairs, blocking them, they struggle to figure out the Metro Card system, it’s not their fault but they muck up the works even more. We’re just trying to get home, it’s cold, we’re wet, it’s crowded. I finally made it to the second train, only to find out that due to debris on the track, the train I needed wasn’t running. I don’t know that subway line (or part of town) very well, so coming up with an alternative way to get there was mysterious to me, and I nearly turned around and went back home. At this point I was realizing that I don’t like people, I don’t like Manhattan, I don’t like any of it. That maybe this is one of those “gee, I like the idea of it” deals.
But I got there, and after the long walk, I entered the bar dripping wet. My hair was hanging, wet, because the wind kept inverting my umbrella. My pants were dripping, my toes were pruning, my raincoat was dripping. I found the group in the back, introduced myself, and sat down. And not one person spoke to me. They looked at me while I was introducing myself, then they turned their attention back to their knitting, and to each other, and went back to their conversations. I ordered a drink and sat there, smiling, trying to figure out what to do. I thought I’d just go back home. I felt terrible.
Finally two other women arrived and sat by me, and the proximity led them to speak to me. I ended up having a nice time with them, and may go back (but not in January, unfortunately, because the two meetings fall the same nights as my poetry group and my book club meetings). A couple hours later, the group started to disband and I headed home. The rain had slacked off, the crowds were a little less intense, and I was freezing cold because my feet and jeans had been soggy for all that time (and still were!). I got home and crashed, went straight to sleep; I’m so shy and introverted, and it’s exhausting putting myself into a new social setting with strangers.
I’m going to hold off on making a final announcement to myself about how I feel about Manhattan, and Manhattanites. Maybe I like more than just the idea of them, but I need dry feet and pants to feel it.
man. I don’t know what to do here. I want them both, I want them all, I want more time, I want more hands. Help?
I’m working like a dog and not getting much knitting time, but that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about knitting. Of course. (Note to writers: if you find yourself writing “needless to say,” then you didn’t need to say it. Cut it out.) ANYWAY, I’ve been daydreaming about sweaters. It’s cold outside. The rain today is supposed to turn to a bit of snow — nothing that will accumulate, just a bit of a mess — and I’ve got sweater-knitting fever.
I’m plowing forward on my Laurayana, up past the armhole shaping on the back and should finish that piece pretty soon. Maybe another 2″ of knitting, more or less. But Cascade 220 is workhorse-y, right? It’s great, it’s reliable, it’s warm, it’s standardized, it shows the stitches beautifully, but it’s not fancy. And I find that I’m wanting to alternate workhorse yarn knitting with fancy yarn knitting. I have my adorable Scarpetta ready to roll, since my luscious madelinetosh lace (in sumptuous fig) arrived a few days ago, but it’s a very lightweight sweater, with short sleeves, and mama’s cold. (Not really, we have the hounds of hell heat, but it’s cold outside, anyway!) I think I’ll hold off on Scarpetta until February.
Now, though, I think I’m going to pair the popular Audrey in Unst pattern with my madelinetosh pashmina, in mineral. Yes, I realize it’s another variation of green, coming on the heels of my Wintry Mix and my Vodka Gimlet, but y’all. How can I resist.
madelinetosh pashMINA people - colorway: mineral
I also have pashmina in a gorgeous brownish color, silt wash:
gorgeous, right?
I could get a lot of wear out of a sweater in that color, too. What do y’all think? Which color? I have three skeins of each, which is enough to complete the Audrey, which is supposed to be a great knit. SO: green? or brown?
I wonder if s/he wants to put this in some wedding vows, or something?
THIS search brought them to me?? Really?
So much going on, of course, including an early-morning meeting with my dear son. Now: packing, cleaning, caking a skein of yarn, copying my pattern, general futzing, trash-taking-out, dishwasher-running, trying to hold my excitement to bearable levels.
*tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink*. repeat dozens of times.
Dang it. Saturday I started and finished one sleeve for my Wintry Mix sweater — cool, so fast! I also cast on and got about an inch into my new brilliant yellow featherweight cardigan. All systems go. (And it warrants saying again: man alive is malabrigo lace soft!)
Yesterday I cast on the body of the sweater and got very far in the curved garter hem area. Not as far as I’d have liked, but I wasn’t feeling well and had to spend a good bit of time coughing and hacking and whining. And you know that’s a time-consuming business, whining. Last night I picked it up to knit a few rows when I noticed that something was way out of whack. The front and back each has 30 purls, 30 knits, and then 30 purls, and then the shaping begins by systematically expanding the knit section at the expense of the purls. There’s nothing confusing about it. But when I picked it up last night, somehow — somehow?? — one of the purl sections was wider than when I started, even though at that point it should’ve been ~half as wide.
I looked at it and looked at it, counted and recounted, and just couldn’t figure out what the hell I did, so I frogged back to the base row of the pattern, where everything is neat and clean. 30-30-30, 30-30-30. Dang it. I just hate it when that happens.
The heating oil delivery truck has been idling right outside my window for a couple hours, delivering oil into the basement I assume, and the noise and smell are making me kind of sick. I hope your Monday is off to a better start!
A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~Thomas Mann
the dreaded blank page
No one professes to love words more than I do, I’m pretty convinced about that. Not only am I paid to read and write all day long, my graduate research focused on the words we use and what that means about us psychologically, I’ve been a voracious reader since I was 3 years old and had my own library card, and I write a lot. Here, now and then, very long emails to friends, a bit of poetry, and some personal writing. Also: I say I am writing a memoir.
I believe in daily writing, and read The Artist’s Way back in the 80s and imagine that doing morning pages is a brilliant idea. And since I know the research about the striking power of doing regular stream-of-consciousness writing, I think it’s not just brilliant but great for you in every way, physically, emotionally, psychologically, creatively. I adore Anne Lamott’s exhortation to write shitty drafts, and think that’s so liberating. That’s right, this one is expected to be shitty! I can do that!
I want to be a writer, I think it’s the most exalted thing to do. Books saved my life as a young girl, giving me a way to imagine other possibilities than the life I was living. The Hunchback of Notre Dame gave me the idea of searching for sanctuary, even if you’re a hideous outcast. Life saving. No exaggeration. If I could write words that could give someone that kind of thing, well, I can’t even imagine that.
And now, reality:
“Tomorrow morning I’m going to do morning pages.”
I’ll just go through my Google Reader this morning and do that tomorrow.
“Just write a shitty draft of a few paragraphs and see where they go.”
I think I’ll make some tea and look at the NYTimes, I’m just not in the mood to do that right now.
And so on. And so forth. Etc, etc, etc. One of my clients has written a really incredible book, so exciting and vivid and creative, and I feel lucky to be working on it with him. I’m kind of in awe of how he came up with it. He tells me it’s a kind of job, it’s work, he doesn’t wait for ‘inspiration,’ he just works at it, keeps working on it. Another of my brilliant clients (interview with her here) says writing is misery, she does it every day. I read an interview with a writer this morning, who said the way you get better is by putting your butt in that writing chair every day and just writing. Of course I know that. And she made a little video of a song she wrote which includes the point that you just have to “push that c^*ksucking boulder up the motherf^*#king hill”. Go Nike and Just Do It.
I found a website called 750words (http://750words.com/) that presents you with a totally blank screen and your words are counted while you type, at the bottom of the screen. So of course I signed up and wrote today’s 750 words (which translates to about 3 pages). What did I write about today? This. My inability to write, and why I do this, by which I mean I don’t do this. We’ll see.
Do you stop yourself before you start, like I do? How do you make yourself do it anyway? I’m looking for ideas.
Gloom, despair and agony on me-e!
Deep dark depression, excessive misery-y!
If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all!
Gloom, despair and agony on me-e-e!
(bonus points if you know the origin of this lyric!)
What in the world is wrong with me. I imagine my knitting friends never do this, just as they always put in lifelines on lace, and always do the things they should do in their knitting……but I can’t seem to learn. I have no idea where I am on my traveling woman shawl. I didn’t make any kind of note about what row and repeat I stopped (in the middle of), and the last time I touched it was before I went to Turkey, back in May. I’m on a wrong side row, so that’s probably just purl across, and I imagine I can figure it out, but that’s precious knitting time lost! WOE IS ME. 
Seriously. Why can’t I learn this lesson. If you knew how many times this happens to me, and how each time I smack my forehead and say “from now on, I’m making notes about where I stop!” and yet here I am, you’d just shake your head and walk away. Hopeless, I seem to be.
I’m halfway through one sleeve on my gorgeous little red featherweight cardigan, and itching to start Kty’s new scarf, but decided (a) I needed a brief intermission knitting something heavier than laceweight, and (b) I ought to work a couple rows on the traveling woman shawl every day so I can just get it done. And then I go and pull something like this. I’m sure y’all never do this. If you know some neat trick (other than the obvious….”make a note, Lori!”) I’d love to hear it! I usually just open the pdf on my laptop and set it aside so I can refer to it as I knit and watch tv, so I don’t have a paper copy nearby.
I think I’ll go drown my sorrows in a gorgeous garlicky lemony anchovie-ey homemade caesar salad. And maybe a little white vino. Yeah.
why? and on top of that, why are all today’s whys about technology? I’M NO LUDDITE!
- WHY did Firefox move the refresh button to the other damn side of the bar?! I don’t buy their “we wanted to clean up the real estate” explanation. They could have as easily put it in the address bar on the left, as on the right, when they were moving it off that toolbar. This is irritating me so much, I may just abandon Firefox altogether. GOOD GRIEF.
- Twitter. I have it, my posts go out on my Twitter feed, every day I get notifications of new complete-strangers following me (why?!). I just don’t really get it. When I worked in midtown, it was fantastic for letting me know exactly where the cupcake trucks were parked at any given moment, but beyond that I just don’t get it.
- iPad. I can’t believe I’m saying that — I’m a devoted lover of all things new and technological, usually an early adopter. I have 5 computers in my tiny home, and there are 2 of us here. I have a laptop and my Droid, and I did have a Kindle but I gave it to my son. I can get a new Kindle for $139, or I can get an iPad (or something like it)….but why?! Why would I get that? I know people who have an iPhone and an iPad (and one person also has an iPod). So much redundancy! I just don’t get it. With my droid and my laptop, why do i need an iPad, besides the coolness of it?
- Why I cannot capture the green in my Saroyan. No matter how I photograph it, in what light, and do how much post-processing, it looks brown. It’s not brown, it’s green. It has streaks of gold and brown in it, but the thing is green. I just tried again, thinking that maybe, perhaps, mysteriously, it would photograph correctly now that it’s finished blocking, but no.
this is pre-blocking, but it doesn't matter. it took so much fiddling to get it to turn out at all green. this color is NOT right. WHY???
Really. Why. It’s not like it’s some extreme color, or in an extreme setting in terms of light, with one color blowing out everything else. I do not understand this one little bit.
I am finishing our taxes today, and I’m going to do some housework, laundry, all that jazz, and figure out my next knitting project. I’m thinking of making the mothed sweather (rav here, knitty here), in a very pretty espresso-brown wool (with a bit of cashmere in it). I’ve done a couple quick projects recently (saroyan, obviously, and my killer red shawl) so I think it’s time to get a bigger thing underway. Happy Saturday y’all, whatever you’re doing!
winner of today’s “truly awful writing” award:
Today’s really bad writing is courtesy of an academic. More than 30 pages into the manuscript, I still have no idea what it’s about. Here:
The social phenomenon under the prism of our observation can espouse the shape of an engraved mentality that is tributary to heredity, and at the same time be transmissible from generation to generation.
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
One may think that any writing can be improved, that an editor can surely impart sense and clarity on any writing, no matter how bad it might be. And one would be wrong.
dairse darrison and a tearis tasin losh clavette
WHAT?????? Serene Branson was the star of the Grammy’s. She had exclusive footage of what went on at the Grammys but instead decided to introduce us to her new language, complete with burtation, possibly birdation as well as a dairse darrison and a tearis tasin losh clavette behend the pet to finish it all off.
Maybe she had a stroke, thinking compassionately.
(edit: according to reports i found, she was in the throes of a complex migraine. she was examined at the scene for the possibility of a stroke, and is ok. the 2nd time i watched the video, i saw fear and something like terror in her mouth, she seemed to realize something was wrong. since she’s ok, i feel less like a shitty person for still finding it funny.)
tell me something good – wackawackawacka
One important area of research in social psychology is attributions — the explanations we come up for everything, from our own behavior to others’ behavior, to the way the world works, to who we believe and why, etc. And social psychologists have identified a bunch of really cool findings…..very cool to me, but I’ll spare you (for now). One way people try to figure out attributions has to do with identifying the cause of things — right? Pretty obvious. But it all depends on where you start, because very few things begin all at once, arising out of nothing (at least not since the Big Bang). The process can quickly deteriorate into a “he said/she said,” “but he started it/no he started” it mess. Just pick any hot spot in the world and listen for a few minutes. Israelis: The Palestinians started it! Palestinians: The Israelis started it! And from each of their perspectives, given the way they chunk the series of events, they feel perfectly justified.
But the thing is, life doesn’t work like that. Time doesn’t work like that. Everything is a continuous stream, every little thing is multiply determined, overdetermined, even. Although we all say it (“it started when….” “and I was just sitting there when….” “everything was fine until…”), none of those stories hold up to close scrutiny. Actions have long, long ripples, and sometimes they undulate through time, through generations, and you might get smacked by something you never saw coming, because it started long ago and far away. That’s just life. We’re meaning-makers, though, so we come up with a story to explain things because we need to. (and oh, here I could tell you one of the coolest research studies ever but I’ll do that another time.)
[just don't anyone say "ooh, the butterfly effect" because for some reason that irritates me. ]
What the hell does this have to do with the price of tea in China?! Well, in the wake of this disastrous pulled muscle in my shneck (shoulder + neck), since I’ve had plenty of time to sit here squinching, thinking about it, I realize that it didn’t come out of the blue. For the last couple of weeks, at least, something has been squirming around in my psyche, something is trying to work itself together, something is trying to crystallize so I can see it, and it hasn’t been even a little bit pleasant. I’ve gone in and out of waves of extremely high anxiety, where I felt like if you flicked me I’d shatter into a million pieces, everything in me was so very, very taut. And always for no reason I knew, for no explanation I could point to. So of course my poor body will have muscles that end up in spasms! They’ve been tense as all hell for a couple of weeks.
It was a too-easy story to say “oh, I slept wrong. That’s it.” Instead, this is a system story, and something is rippling from a cause I can’t see, or recognize it even if I do see it. My mind and body (and dreams) kind of assume I’m an idiot, and communicate with me using Dummy 101 methods. My dreams are as obvious in their symbolism as possible, and if I still don’t get it, I’ll just dream the same dream again, but this time in red! Didn’t get….ok, this time in blue! How about green! COME ON LORI, we can’t make this much simpler for you! How’s about we give you a pain in the neck.
Even though it’s causing me a good deal of physical pain right now, I actually find this among the most fascinating parts of being a human. Once I get it – smacking my forehead, oh! Obvious! – then it’s kind of fascinating just to watch and wait. I’m learning something, I just don’t know what it is yet.
Thank you one and all for the excellent suggestions (but Nancy, I couldn’t find any Blue Goo!). I tried extremely hot baths and showers, a heating pad weighted down with a big bag of rice, a klonopin, and sleeping. By the end of the evening last night, muscles in adjacent areas were going into painful spasms, including my arm muscles and my pectoral muscle on that side. THAT hurt, I’m telling you! Today it’s no longer having spasms (thank heavens, I’ll take that), but the muscles are really painful and I’m cautiously worried that it might go back into spasm. I’ve been sweating with the heating pad, and trying to stretch and relax the muscles, and moving gently, big muscle movements, etc. Maybe tomorrow it’ll be gone.
But the best part is that one of these days all these little unpleasant puzzle pieces will come together and I’ll be able to figure it out. Even if I can just get a corner put together, psyche….c’mon. Tell me something good (wacka wacka wacka….that’s actually playing right now ).
is there anything worse than babka fail? [OF COURSE THERE IS.]
Continuing in my long series of complimentary advice — you’re welcome — is this one:
Never make babka when you’re upset.
And its corollary:
Never ever make 2/3 of a recipe of babka when you’re upset.
For some reason, babka recipes make 3 loaves (these are good: one, two). Well, we’re just two little people, even though one of us (hint: not me) eats on the scale of a small family, especially where sweets are concerned. But anyway — we don’t need three babkas. So I put the list of ingredients in an Excel spreadsheet, multiplied each line by .66, and bingo: the ingredient amounts I’d need for 2 babka instead of three.
Would’ve been great, it was a smart plan, blah blah blah, but then, inside the recipe would be a statement like “using 10 T of butter” which did not represent the entire amount of butter. So I had to figure out what portion of the 3-loaf recipe 10T counted for, then try to take that portion of my butter. You can see the nightmare. I’m sure.
in case you don't know, this is chocolate babka (not the lesser cinnamon babka, cf Seinfeld). it's a very eggy, buttery bread wound up and twisted around a filling of chocolate, sugar, and cinnamon. RIGHT?
I was not having a great morning, after a bad night of sleeping/not sleeping, and my nerves were shot from too much coffee. Shaky hands, brittle mind, the whole “you shouldn’t be making babka, Lori” shebang. Which, of course, I stupidly ignored.
Hence, this advice post, in which I hope to spare you the similar anxiety and angst and absolute abject…running out of A-words here…failure. (Unless it’s not a failure, in which case I’ll post later.)
who IS the knitting god and how can I appease her? anyone?
I woke up all out of sorts this morning. You may not believe this, but it’s nearly impossible to find an image of “half a bubble out of plumb” in Google images. Of course it didn’t help that I first typed ‘half a bubble out of plump.’ Paging Dr. Freud. But that’s me this morning, half a bubble out of plump. One card short of a full deck. One egg short of a dozen. One skein short of a sweater, to turn this into a knitterly saying.
After frogging everything I’d done last night on the g^*#_&damn, motherf^*#*%&* Eve’s Rib shrug, I decided to knit a quick winner, as I posted earlier this morning. Maybe I should’ve just honored the whacked out state I’m in and decided to do something else, BUT NO.
So I cast on, and was on row 3 when I noticed further down after the pattern rows it says “if you want to avoid a seam, do a provisional caston.” OH WELL, I thought. So what, I’ll seam it. My hair’s long, it’ll be hidden anyway.
So on I knit. The cable crosses are 8 stitches, so it’s cumbersome and tight, and somewhere along the way I dropped a purl stitch. I saw it and hooked it back up there with my crochet hook, but I noticed on the return row that I’d somehow bungled it. OH WELL, I thought. It’s right next to a cable, that kind of thing won’t be noticeable.
So on I knit. I finished the cable crosses, did the return row and then two more stockinette rows and the pattern seemed to say it was time to do another cable cross. That didn’t seem right. The photo shows long sections between cable crosses. I looked at the pattern again — yep, repeat row 1, repeat row 2, cable cross. So on I knit. When I was working the return row I thought this canNOT be right. So I looked at the pattern and noticed that it said something like this:
Rows 7, 9, 11, 13 – same as row 1
Rows 8, 10, 12, 14 – same was row 2
See, I didn’t notice the whole several-rows-each thing. (cf my state today.) I’m sure this kind of thing never happens to you.
Bali Ha’i may call you … “Come away…Come away.” I wish my knitting would call me. 
The post title comes from my daughters; Katie did a series of posts in December and we were so thrilled to get such regular posts from her. In January, the series was over and unfortunately so were the regular opportunities to hear from our Katie-girl. So Marnie suggested a few series options, one of which (since Katie is a new and enthusiastic knitter) was called “Knitta, please!” Katie actually wrote a post with that title, and showed her Habitat hat, by Jared Flood (her project page on rav, but she’s well into the cables now…..new picture please, Katie!)
So I loved that title, knitta please, but had no thoughts of co-opting it until it seemed such a perfect fit with what’s on my mind. So with gratitude (and apologies) to both daughters, I’m saying Knittas, please. Insight requested.
I don’t know what’s happened to me. I have fallen off the knit wagon and cannot seem to climb on again. It’s not the oft-reported loss of “mojo” one hears about so regularly, it’s something else. It’s not a sudden dislike of the endeavor. It’s not disinterest in what I am working on. I know what all it’s not, but I don’t know what it is.
Some of it may be due to the shift in my work life. Up until last July, I worked Monday through Friday, very clear division between at-work and not-at-work. When I was at work, I was daydreaming about knitting, and when I was not at work, I was knitting. Not-at-work meant whee! I can knit! I have this couple of days and I’m going to knit knit knit! OR, I’m home for the day, I’m going to [finally] spend the evening knitting! The time not-at-work felt like a reward, like the time that was FINALLY mine to spend however I wanted before I had to go back to work so I’d better get. on. the. stick!
Now, I wake up whenever I wake up, I drink some coffee, maybe have some toast, poke around on the internet, brush my teeth, and settle into working (notice that “get out of my pajamas” was not on that list ). I sit on the couch, my corner of the couch where I used to knit all the time, with my laptop on my lap. I’ll sit there for long hours at a stretch, focused and working hard. At some vague point — either when my mind won’t do it any more, or when dinner is ready, or when I have an appointment — I’ll kind of stop working. After dinner, after the cleaning up, I don’t seem to be picking up my knitting, and on the weekends, I sometimes work (sometimes a lot), but I don’t seem to be spending every spare moment knitting.
i miss you!
I’m at the last cuff on my Dark & Stormy, I want to finish that tonight, weave in ends and do a little finishing task and get it blocking tomorrow. I don’t have buttons, and the weather is so dismal I don’t feel like wandering around the button district so I don’t know what I’ll do on that front (ha, front, get it?). I absolutely love this sweater and cannot wait to wear it. It fits very well, it’s comfortable, the color is amazing (especially in dismal old winter), and it’s my birthday sweater. What’s not to love?! And I’m very close to finishing Eve’s Rib, if you remember that one from so long ago; I could easily have two new gorgeous sweaters like *that.*
I know it’s not a race — ravelry and blogs can make it very clear how much/how fast/how whatever everyone else is knitting. I know, who cares! In the time I’ve had Dark & Stormy on the needles, other people have started and finished two sweaters. OK, maybe they knit faster, maybe they have more time available to knit, and also see the “I know, who cares!” line above. But the thing that gnaws at me is the knitting ennui** I’m experiencing, the knitting malaise**. And there are two reasons I’m so troubled by it:
- I want it back! and
- This is, after all, a knitting blog and I worry that you’ll get fed up with the very clear lack of knitting that’s going on around here. It’s just that I like you, and really like having you around.
So if you have any advice for me on this situation, I’d really love to hear it. Has it ever happened to you?
** ennui, how often does one get to use that word?
how was your weekend? i really want to know!
My weekend was so quiet, I couldn’t even tell you what happened. A little bread baking, a (too) little bit of knitting, three long telephone conversations with two daughters, sushi Friday night with the other daughter, wonderful chicken parmigiana last night, and …. um …. more snow. Here, then, are a couple of pictures that represent my weekend pretty well:
just enough snow to make the trees so lovely
and here's a bit of Riverside Park, my NYC love
Shots taken with my phone, which I’m still trying to learn how to use. But the pictures capture a kind of empty quiet that represents my weekend very well.
I do remember that I saw two amazing movies this weekend, and that they shared a theme. True Grit (yee-ha!) and Winter’s Bone. In both movies, a very tough young girl is on a quest related to a dead father. I’m sure you’ve heard about True Grit, and what’s not to love? Coen Brothers [love], Jeff Bridges [love], filmed in Austin and Blanco TX [love, for me anyway]. I had to keep wrapping my mind around the fact that the landscape was pure Texas, but they kept saying they were in Arkansas and the Choctaw Territory. If you know all three places, you’d know in an instant that something was wrong, that’s not how Arkansas and Choctaw Territory look, like, at all. But who cares. The only quibble I had about it was that the Texas Ranger (Matt Damon) was written as a silly character, not quite effete but a bit too dandy. Real Texas Rangers are tough, man.
But you may not have heard about Winter’s Bone, and I’m here to tell you that you should definitely see it if you can. I had to keep reminding myself that they were using actors, and not filming life as it was actually happening in Ozark poverty. If you’ve ever known people like this, and I have known them very well, you’ll be stunned at how right on it is. Crushing poverty and ignorance has a very particular flavor, a particular way of holding a face, holding the shoulders, expressing a thought, wearing the hair, living, and all the actors just hit their marks — even the young children. I know that hair and wardrobe go a long way to helping make a character real, but it’s the smaller things that make these people so real. It’s a hard, hard movie — don’t think for a second that it’s not, you have to be ready for it — but it’s haunting and visceral and very real.
So? How was your weekend?
Paging Alfred Hitchcock, paging Alfred Hitchcock.
Across the street from my apartment, on the 2nd floor of the building, something’s going on. From my couch, I can see the bedroom window. It’s a fancy one. It is more like a glass door, it swings open like that. There are no cross-panes, it’s just a full door-sized window. The owners open it when the weather is nice; they have one of those tiny little balconies sticking off the front of the building, just deep enough for a few potted plants.
For the last several days, the overhead light has been on 24 hours/day, and for the last 3 days, that window/door has been standing wide open. Last night I was up from 1-3am and there it was. Lights blazing, door/window wide open, despite the snow.
Now, the door/window has been closed but the curtain is still pulled aside and the overhead light is still on. I haven’t seen a person once; it’s not like I see them very often — it requires a coincidence of timing, I just happen to glance over as they just happen to be there. But it does happen often enough that I would’ve seen them by now.
So! Just enough ambiguity to leave me uncertain what to do.
Tomorrow: lots of knitting. Hope to finish knitting D&S, in fact. Fingers crossed.
still feeling off – strange and weird and headache-hungover. just wanted to say hi…
If you don’t suffer from headaches, you are so lucky. And even if you do, but you don’t get migraine headaches, you’re still so lucky. I’m not going to go on and on about this, but migraines suck. Thank heavens for sumatriptan, which does at least help – and often stops mine. So today I have the leftovers, the hangover, the “wait….something’s wrong….oh don’t move my head, that’s right…wha happened…”
Yesterday I was going to bake – bialys, or makowiec, or pletzel, or panettone, or chocolate babka. After going back and forth, I decided to make bialys. Diced the onion, mixed it with olive oil and poppy seeds, got the yeast activating, noticed my bread flour had weevils so I bought a new bag, in the meantime my new DROID was delivered and while holding it, I realized I couldn’t see. Aura, disaster, dread, oh no. A whole day lost, too bad for me.
So today I’m walking around very gingerly, I have bialys doing their final pre-bake rise, and the day is half over. And I really had so much I needed and wanted to get done this weekend, too. Oh well. But here’s what I did get done:
- bialys, obviously (more on that later)
- set up the phone well enough to use it
- watched I Love You Phillip Morris and enjoyed the hell out of it
Lame, I can tell my mind is in a fog. This might not be a good time to knit; I’d probably end up having to frog every stitch. Guess I’ll count this as something of a lost weekend, in a lost holiday season. At least I’ll have some yummy bread to eat.
you helped me so much once, let’s go for broke – 3 more questions!
I promise I’ll return to knitting content soon, but first I have a couple more questions since you were really so helpful about my phone question. I’ve just 
about decided to get a Droid X, which isn’t the newest, hottest thing out there (that would be the Nexus, thank you for the link, Kty!), but it seems to be highly-rated and well-liked. The whole thing with iPhone coming to Verizon is irritating the hell out of me (“rumors are circulating…” “…in December…” “…next January…” “…surely in February…” “…by summer 2011…”)
Really, the only reason I was even considering an iPhone was that it would replace my iPod, and let me have just one device. I wasn’t sure that Droids would sync with iTunes – silly me for not investigating! A quick search this morning showed me that there’s a free program that does that. And since I work at home now, I use my iPod substantially less often, anyway.
So here are my questions for you:
- What apps do you use most often?
- Do you listen to music on your phone (and if so, how is it?)?
- What’s your FAVORITE Christmas cookie that you make or have access to the recipe (and would you share it with me?)?
gyro sensor?! WHAT???
This post has so many origins it’s hard to know even how to begin it! I guess I’ll start here:
A long time ago — when was that….hmm…..late 80s and early 90s — I was a Quaker. I attended an amazing meeting in Alexandria, VA, and truly looked forward to the weekly meetings, even though it meant a bit of a schlep from Fredericksburg, VA. It was a meeting for silent worship, which meant we all sat in what we called “gathered silence” and if someone felt led to say something, they’d stand up and say it, then sit down. In an hour, it was fairly typical that 4-6 people would have something to say. By the end of the meeting, it was entirely common to see that there had been some kind of theme holding everything together, even though that hadn’t been evident as people spoke.
So this morning as I was having my coffee and scanning through my Google Reader, the sites I opened to read fully all came together in a theme. (Gee, the more I write this, the less sure I am about any of this.) My ultimate point is to ask you a question: iPhone or Android? What do you have, and would you get it again if you could?
I’ve been reading a lot about the different options and feel kind of dizzy, and increasingly unable to make a decision. Then, this morning, I read this:
The world’s first smartphone with a dual-core procesor – a 1 GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 – also features a 4-inch WVGA screen, 8 GB of memory (expandable up to 32 GB via microSD memory cards), a 1,500 mAh battery, a 8-megapixel rear camera with 1080p recording capabilities and a 1.3-megapixel front camera for video calls.
It also has an accelerometer, a gyro sensor, and a micro-USB port. It supports HDMI mirroring, which lets you expand content on external displays to full HD quality. The phone can connect wirelessly to DLNA-compatible devices, such as home network devices and HD TV sets.
And not one damned bit of it made sense. A phone with an accelerometer and a gyro sensor??? Do I need that?
It reminds me of late 1984/early 1985, when I had a scary feeling — oh no, I’d better get one of those computer things and figure out how to get on that internet thing or I’m going to be left behind. I was 24 years old and computers were giant and so expensive we had to take out a loan (I think the computer cost more than our car), and the “internet” was just a mess. I’ve always been an early adopter and obviously I’m pretty deeply embedded online (unusually so for my demographic, according to Pew). So I’m feeling bad, and old, and left behind, in my inability to make sense of these options and just pick a damned phone.
What do you have? What do you like and dislike about it?
how was YOUR weekend? i want to know!
Monday morning, time to do a quick recap that summarizes my weekend. Of course it’s impossible to do that, really, since a weekend comprises at least 48 hours (depending on when you start counting), but still, there’s a way to capture the essence of it, anyway. This past weekend was mainly about trying to get into the moving stream of holiday spirit. I bought a live wreath, I walked around the neighborhood, I went to a holiday concert. I wish it had worked. Of course there was also a lot of knitting and eating and baking and stuff, but I’ll get to that later. For now, here’s a sense of my weekend:
how we buy Christmas trees in Manhattan
buying trees in Manhattan
trees decorated on the Columbia campus
nutcracker on 110th st.
So that’s a little 3-block tour of my neighborhood – it’s pretty, and festive, and certainly holiday-rich. The median up Broadway is decorated, too….blue and white lights in the closest block, for all the Hanukkah celebrators, maybe?
So how was your weekend?
how was your weekend? i mean it: HOW WAS YOUR WEEKEND?
Well, my weekend was really strange; I started it Saturday morning in Phnom Penh, flew to Hong Kong, left Hong Kong at 5pm and at 8pm Saturday night I was back in NYC but in the middle I flew 16 hours. So Saturday is a wash of eternal flight weirdness surrounded by shrieking kids and airport shenanigans, and I honestly don’t know what happened yesterday. I was just in a fog, woke up at 3am and fell asleep at 10pm and in between? I knit a lot on my sweater and had to frog every damned row.
So I guess my weekend’s best picture will be one from Phnom Penh, since that was the best part of my weekend! How about yours?
my last look at my wonderful hotel room in Phnom Penh
To play along, just put a link in the linky thing below, to a post on your blog showing a photo that represents your weekend or even just a post about your weekend. I’m easy. So how was your weekend?
so i says to her, i says baby? we’ve got to have us a spirichal c’nnection.
So last Thursday I had to take the bus up to Harlem, to renew my driver’s license at the DMV. It was rainy and gross, but hey, I had some knitting to keep me busy. (That’s a knitter for you…..lemons out of lemonade, man.)
When I was standing by the door getting ready to leave the bus, these two ancient black guys were standing next to me engaged in a raspy-voiced and loud conversation. They were so old I could hear their bones turning to dust. But this part of their conversation grabbed my attention:
“So I says to her, baby, we’ve got to have a spirichal connection. Otherwise, we lie down, and then what? We get up and eat, we watch tv or listen to music, we take a walk, we talk, and then we lie down again. Then what?”
WHAT ELSE IS THERE?????? What am I missing that those 2 old guys know about?? Seriously. I’ve been wracking my brain for nearly a week now.
And I saw this on a card – it’s funny because it’s true.
Can you see that bottom line, in blue? The one that says “That’s also the bad news.”? yeah. I’m decidedly mixed about my invisibility, as a 52-year old woman. Maybe if I get that spirichal c’nnection thing figured out it’ll help.
she really pisses me off. sure, she’s “interesting” and “fascinating” and beautiful, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD she’s a pain in my ass.
You know the kind I’m talking about – at first you were just crazy about her. She’s so beautiful, interesting (we’ll come back to that one), endlessly fascinating, she adds a lot to your life, you imagine being friends for a long long time.
But then you start to realize that interesting should have quotes around it. She’s “interesting.” She’s beautiful, yeah, and she certainly does add a lot to your life, but the “interesting” and fascinating bits now make you suspect you won’t be friends for a long long time. Consultants call this the PITA factor (pain in the ass), and sometimes add a hidden PITA fee when offering a price quote to a known PITA client. Still, you can’t say this friend is boring. No, you could never say that, that’s for sure. You might say a lot of other things, but boring she’s not. Now and then you throw your hands up and say “that’s it, we’re done. I’ve had it this time.” But you go back…..at least for a while.
That has been the story of my relationship with my Eve Shrugged. At first? Smitten. Totally, totally smitten. Over the moon, endlessly fascinated. And then I hit the wall, not once, not twice, not even thrice (ha, thrice) but many more times than that. Knit frog knit frog knit frog knit frog. Repeat. But finally I got it, thanks to the help of many of you. I made it to the point of adding the sleeve stitches, where you then transition from Eve’s Ribs to Adam’s Ribs, and something went wrong. Knit frog knit frog knit frog knit frog. Repeat. This is why I haven’t been mentioning this project – it’s been in the Bad, Bad Knit Time-Out chair in the corner.
Last night I pulled out my ratty old cursed ball of this yarn and just worked the Adam’s Ribs repeats a few times, and it went fine. No problems at all. I knew the problem must be my haste, so I frogged it all one more time and started anew. Put stitch markers everywhere. Stopped and counted each tiny segment. As the French would say: et voila!
here's the transition point, from Eve's Ribs (on the bottom) to Adam's Ribs
good to go now. for a while.
famous last words.
Anyway. I’m feeling a little more hopeful about the old gal right now, and expect not to have any problems until I hit the next change, which will be (I think) adding the sleeve bells, after the sleeves and body are finished. I think Carol Sunday is a wonderful designer; her patterns are distinctively hers, typically feminine, and quite beautiful. But the way she writes patterns does not connect (like, at all) with the way I think, so they’re very frustrating to me. She’s not a bad designer or pattern writer, and I’m not a bad knitter or pattern reader, we just don’t think the same way so it’s 2 steps forward and 3 steps back for me. Other knitters sail right through.
I haven’t decided whether to take this project or the green tweed ribbon scarf project with me to Rhinebeck (Rhinebeck!!). If you’re going to Rhinebeck, I’ll be wearing my Peasy.
PLEASE PLEASE HELP ME. I am lost, wandering in a dark wood, O Virgil, and need your guidance.
Imagine you just heard the heaviest sigh in the whole wide world. Then repeat. I’ve been doing that for hours now. Although it was niggling at me the whole time I’ve been working on my Eve’s Rib project, you know denial is a powerful thing. “Just keep going, it’s going to come together and look right.” I’d study the pattern, study my work, study the samples on rav, and embrace denial.
But last night, an intrepid raveler wrote me and said she thought I was doing something incorrectly with the pattern. And my carefully-held-together little world came crumbling down. She’s right, of course, but for the life of me I can’t figure it out. Carol Sunday’s patterns are always really beautiful, and for me, they’re always unnecessarily complicated in the way they’re written. (1) Easy for me to be critical, where are any patterns I’ve written! (they don’t exist) and (2) it seems to be just something about my way of understanding, because other people seem to do just fine with them.
SO…..I throw myself upon the mercy and kind assistance of the knitters among you. First, my incorrect work – pay attention to the broken ribs and pattern of YOs:
one skein down, and only this far....
And now, here’s how those ribs and YOs are supposed to look:
a photo of the sample
See? More like cables. Mine are cable interruptus. Here is the pattern, written out and charted:
the pattern written out
the pattern charted
I’ve been going by the written out instructions, but thought the chart might be useful. So when the written instructions say ‘Repeat rows 1-7 beginning on opposite side” I’ve taken that to mean that after I knit rows 1-7, I then go back to row 1 and do it backwards – i.e., “yo p2 k1 k2tog….etc”. So that’s exactly what I’ve done, and the result is the photo of my shrug.
Which means that “exactly what I’ve done” is exactly wrong. Do you have any ideas? Where o where have I gone astray? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
you say heebies, i say spilkes. let’s just call the whole damned thing off please.
Linda Richman had spilkes too. In her ganecktegazoid.
I’ve got plenty to do – I mean, plenty. It’s not all work that I’m excited about, but whatever. Grading stats, editing a chapter in a historical novel about Yugoslavian war crimes, programming a survey, writing a couple of surveys, blech. I need to do them all, and just cannot sit still. I have monkey mind. Jitters in my spirit. A whole lotta blech. SPILKES.
One of the great things about living in Manhattan is that there is a great abundance of Jewishness all around. Plus, around here, it’s not really that rare to hear yiddish words and phrases used so casually, as if it’s assumed you know what they mean.
So many great words start with f: Feh! Facocta (with lots of alternate spellings), farbissinah (same with the alternate spellings). If you want to add some Yiddish to your own vocabulary, here are a bunch of links: (1), (2), (3), (4), and (5). Today I’m reporting on the word spilkes, which means something like ants in the pants. I’m full of spilkes today. I cannot focus, can’t sit still, feel all heebie-jeebie.
I think I’ll make a little pot of mint tea, sit still and quiet for a bit, and then knit a little while. Those things are soothing and might send the spilkes packing.
.
a photo I took is in a glossy magazine!! If you can read Hebrew, tell me what the magazine is called please…
So one of my photos has been published in a glossy magazine! How bizarre. No, it’s not Vogue, or some knitting magazine, or something about food. Or Riverside Park (my favorite subject after my kids). I don’t know what the magazine is about, actually. I don’t know the name of it, even though I’m holding it in my hands. I just know it’s a real magazine, it’s very glossy, and it seems to be about travel. I got a big envelope from Tel Aviv, and this was inside:
the magazine - read from back to front! That's how I do it anyway!
The cover photo kind of freaked me out, and I was wondering what the hell, man. What the hell is THIS about? Why am I getting this magazine? Who do I know in Tel Aviv anyway?
So I opened it and started thumbing through, with an extremely vague memory of someone asking if they could publish one of my photos in some magazine. Was this it? The whole dang thing is in Hebrew, so I just looked at the pictures. And here’s what I found:
I took the picture in Zagreb, at the market - and there's my name above it, almost the only English word on the page
the page, for context - see how tiny my photo is?
Isn’t that wild??
.
getting old isn’t for sissies. that’s .. .wait, what was I saying?
When I was a very little girl, I read a lot of serial novels about girls doing exciting things. Cherry Ames, Student Nurse. Loved her. The Boxcar Children, always fun to see what they were up to. And like many little girls I loved Nancy Drew. Nancy and her chums Bess and George, and her boyfriend Ned – ever so much more interesting than dumb Barbie and her boyfriend Ken, and her cousin Scooter. Oh, you didn’t know she had a cousin named Scooter? Yeah, isn’t that dumb? But Nancy, the titian-haired girl detective, always falling into mysteries. I envied her that. I wondered why she couldn’t seem to turn a corner without getting involved in the mysterious, while that NEVER happened to me. Ever. I thought maybe it was because her father Carson was a lawyer. He always had these cases that were tricky, and like all lawyer fathers do, he’d ask his daughter for advice or help. Dang. Why didn’t my dad become a lawyer.
-
- this one kept me up one night
-
- and this one – remember it well!
-
- i LOVED this book!
Well, for anyone else who has had that same woeful experience as a child, let me tell you that your chance will come. My life is now constantly full of mysteries. “Where did this paper tape come from, I have two rolls in the medicine cabinet! I didn’t buy them?” “No, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them before.” OR “Didn’t we just have a whole bag of chips? What happened to them, I didn’t eat them.” “Neither did I, I have no idea what happened to them. I remember buying them.” And the mystery that keeps repeating itself: “Where are my glasses? I just had them.” And its cousin, “Where are my keys, have you seen them?” And the always popular “Now why did I come into this room?”
Paging Nancy Drew.
.
if only all problems were this small.
Well, knitting friends, I’ve gone back and forth, like this:
I’m pretty sick of stockinette and want to start a new project.
Don’t do that- you’ll never finish these sweaters!
But I really want to cast-on with the Cascade Eco Duo.
If you just focus and spend your time with the sweaters, they’ll be done and you know you are going to love them.
I know, but….
Forget it. Just stick with your sweaters. Stick with it.
Yeah. Just when I think I’ve decided something, the other voice starts making a lot of sense. So there I sat with the last point, sticking with my sweaters.
And then I decided, screw it. I’m casting on. Laura mentioned a hat with snowflakes, and I think that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll knit the background with the luscious hazelnut Cascade Eco Duo, and the snowflakes with the vanilla Eco Duo. As Laura said, the snowflakes should really pop against that beautiful brown.
And then, if I have enough yarn left, I think I’ll knit these mitts – I’ll use the vanilla as the background, since I’ll have much more of it left, and the owls with the brown, assuming I have some left.
Also, one kind of embarrassing confession: when the current batch of his homemade pickles is gone, we (which really means I) will have eaten 30 pounds of pickles this summer. Yikes. When you put it that way, I am a piggie!
.
i don’t know what to do. really. please help me solve my knitting problem. AND DON’T LAUGH.
Colossus of Rhodes
I guess I fall on the process side of the process/product divide (here’s an aside for any reader who isn’t a knitter: we are process knitters if it’s really the process we enjoy [and some of us are even pre-process knitters], otherwise we’re just after the end result). Of course I also adore the products, and love having my handmade work as part of my daily life. I guess I’m like the Colossus of Rhodes, straddling the harbor – one foot firmly planted in the process, the other firmly adoring the product.
ANYWAY. Geez, I get off track so easily. When I started composing the post in my head, I thought I’d open with the first lines of The Odyssey, about asking the muse to sing. I must be in some Classics/Ancient Greek head today.
ANYWAY. Good grief. OK, to my point. I am languishing in stockinette wasteland. (oh yeah – this is why I brought up process knitting. I do love the process, but I’m going really bored with stockinette! sorry for rambling…) I’m nearly finished with Peasy‘s 2nd sleeve, and have been randomly working body rows when the round-and-round-and-round of the sleeve starts to be too hypnotic. Yay! An alternating purl row! Variety! (sidebar note: I once had a knitting blog called I Hate the Purl Row but decided that was a little too harsh.)
ANYWAY. So if I’m tired of Peasy, I can work on …… my Mondo Cable cardigan. Also at the sleeves, and also all stockinette. OK, so that’s wearing a little thin and boring? How about my subway knitting……oh yeah. Stockinette hat, knit in the round.
So one project is sock yarn, and not all that soft and lovely a sock yarn either. One project is madelinetosh merino, o so soft and lovely. And the other is Rowan Felted Tweed – scratchy and rustic. I can focus on the yarns to experience some variety, but I think I’m coming down with a case of startitis. I suspect I’ve been infected by
don't you want to rub them against your cheek? 70% baby alpaca, 30% merino
Cascade Eco Duo. Two skeins – hazelnut and vanilla. Only 197 yards each, aran weight. Oh y’all….they’re so soft it’s like lying down in a field of puppies. Or bunnies. And having fairies kiss your cheeks, while dusting your nose with marshmallows.
SEE?! See how they’ve hypnotized me! The problem is that I need to make something with them, and now….but do I use them both, in some stripey scheme? Or make something precious with one of them – there’s the 198 Yards of Heaven shawl (dang, I have 197 ). But I don’t want to just pick something, anything, just because it’ll work with the yarn.
aaaaaargh!!!!!!!! The paralysis of a perfect yarn. All advice and recommendations welcomed.
.
britney spears is providing ‘mental support’ to mel gibson? really??
I was comparing smartphones on CNet, and some ad on the page led me to the LA News Monitor, or so the masthead says. I draw your attention to 2 items I added a red mark to:
First, the big red check. REALLY? Webs just happens to be advertising here? Or is it some evil background web marketing deal, where my IP address/ computer “knows” that I visit Webs now and then (OK, a lot), so their ad was inserted just for me? (If it was really smart, it’d know that I don’t need no stinking ad.)
But this is the part that left me shaking my head, and going back to the masthead repeatedly to be sure it wasn’t The Onion. See the 2 lines I highlighted in red? “Britney Spears is providing mental support to Mel Gibson”????????
Hello, pot? This is the kettle calling. Or, if you prefer, I could say something about the blind leading the blind. I still think it’s some kind of prank by The Onion. Granted, I quit keeping up with Britney’s and Mel’s doings many many years ago, but still. This can’t be real, right?
.
dancing in the dark.
My sweet older daughter Katie got married in June 2008 (easiest anniversary ever to remember: 06/07/08). Hers was a much more traditional wedding than Marnie’s, complete with puffy white dress, groomsmen in tuxedos, rosebud corsages, and all that happy jazz. She hired a professional photographer, who caught this very enigmatic shot that I rediscovered yesterday while wandering through her online photo album:
me dancing with my son
Several things to note, before turning attention to the odd glance:
1- That’s my daughter Katie, dancing with her husband Trey, in the right side of the photo
2 – That’s Marnie visible in the back, in the green maid-of-honor dress
3 – Yes, that’s right, I’m wearing the same dress at Katie’s wedding as I wore at Marnie’s. First, both girls crazily decided to have OUTDOOR weddings in the HOT SUMMER, so something extremely cool was called for. And second, I bought it specifically to wear to Katie’s wedding, and when Marnie’s came up I decided to call it my “dress I wear to my daughters’ weddings.” I’ll have to keep it safely aside to wear in the future when my youngest girl gets married, which will probably be several years, since she’s a sophomore in college.
It’s a very long story with my beloved son – lots of very long stories with him, to be more accurate – so I know everything that lives behind that glance, behind my close hold on him. I store the photo here so I don’t forget about it again.
.
So I’ve been out all day, wandering in the soggy rain — which left me soggy, pants wet to my knees, feet pruney from being in wet sandals all day, sandals that held water and also turned my feet black from the leather(?) uppers. Yes, I’m a real charmer right now.
Since I had a couple of hours to kill between appointments AND since I knew it was going to be so rainy, I didn’t want to take Peasy with me. A smaller, less complicated project was in order, so I took my 2nd Wowie Zowie sock. And I just solved a mystery associated with the first sock.
The yarn in the 2nd ball is dramatically lighter-weight, much less stiff, than the yarn in the 1st ball! The ball bands indicated that they were identical in every way, down to the dye lot. Exactly identical. Every way. But when I was knitting that first sock, the yarn just felt so thick and tough, and the sock was like heavy cardboard. It did soften up a lot after I blocked it, but it’s still substantially heavier than the 2nd ball of yarn.
Perhaps that’s why I ran out of yarn so quickly! Perhaps it was just mismarked, and it’s whatever weight is heavier than 4-ply fingering. I don’t know – but I do know that the yarns are not the same.
I feel redeemed, somehow! I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, before. The 2nd sock has a very different hand, much softer, more pliable. The colors are so strong, any differences won’t be very visible because they’re drowned out by ALL! THAT! COLOR!
Off to knit for a couple of hours, happy me!
.
why can’t i do this math?!
I just feel the need to say this – this subject must be threatening to my identity or something – but I’m very good at statistics. I can do a discriminant function analysis, structural equation modeling, whatever. But knitting math just makes my head hurt. Since I’ve written about this before, and you left such generous comments, I do know that I’m not alone; for some of us, the whole enterprise is just counterintuitive. I knit a swatch and have too many stitches per inch….do I use a smaller needle or a larger one? Even though I have already been through this, I still don’t know.
So after redoing my Peasy swatch in the wrong direction, I redid it last night in the right direction. The pattern gauge is 22 st and 30 rows = 4 inches. Going up a needle size, I get 21.5 st and 30 rows = 4 inches. Pretty dang good!
My problem is that I can’t figure out what that 1/2 a stitch difference is going to mean. In the gracious spirit of Amy Herzog’s Fit to Flatter series, last night I decided to just suck it up and take my real measurements, disregarding what the actual numbers were and just looking carefully at the relationships between them. Then I compared them to the Peasy pattern to see what size I really need to knit. Well, I’m exactly on the large. Exactly.
So does this 1/2 stitch difference mean the sweater will be ever-so-slightly larger or ever-so-slightly smaller? If it’s larger, that’s wonderful! I sit here and try to puzzle my through it and just get a headache.
note to self: you can do structural equation modeling! you are not stupid!
.
i’ve never HAD time to kill! i don’t know what to do with it.
greek yogurt with greek honey - luscious
It’s so strange, going from having too little (time) to having an abundance. From having too much (stress) to having almost none. I don’t quite know what to do with myself.
I know what I want to do with myself! I want to arrange a life of balance, that’s the big picture. I want to do yoga regularly, to strengthen my very bad back; I want to walk regularly, to be outdoors and to benefit my heart; I want to lose a bit of weight and eat well; I want to write; I want to line up enough work so I don’t feel frantic about it; I want to make things; I want to stay connected to people; I want to keep my house clean and neat. Balance.
If I’m not careful, though, I piddle away time without doing anything at all. I sit with my laptop, just checking this site one more time and oh yeah let me look at that one and oh wait I need to respond to this and after I look at that I’m shutting it down and getting busy and then it’s time for dinner. That’s what happened yesterday.
I tend toward Prussian organization, which then collapses and I’m back to wasting. In other words, I get way too anal about it, like this: On Mondays from 8:30 to 8:45 do this. From 8:45 to 9:45 do that. Tuesdays and Thursday from 7:15 to 8:45 do that. Every Wednesday afternoon from 3:00 to 4:15 do that. Rigid, strict, entirely structured. And all it takes, when you’re set up like that, is one fail and then the whole thing can wash down the drain. (Of course it needn’t, but if you’re a person with these tendencies, that’s what happens.)
So I think instead, well, how about if I just say “3 mornings a week I’ll spend an hour doing yoga” etc. But what I do in reality is this: well, right now I’ll just finish my coffee and poking around the internet, then I’ll get up and straighten up the living room – I’ll do yoga tomorrow.
Maybe, instead, I need to deconstruct the beginning – do what alcoholics have to do when they’re trying to learn how to stay clean. Break up the routine that supports the addiction. Right now, I get up and make a little pot of coffee — 2 mugs’ worth — and then I slowly drink my coffee and feel justified in poking around the internet. Just while I drink my coffee, you know? That’s all. Then I’ll get busy. But I take a long time with it! I may take 2 hours drinking those 2 mugs of coffee. A little sip, poke poke poke. Sip poke poke poke. Sip poke poke poke. It’s really really hard to break up that very slow start to my day. Every night I think, as I drift off to sleep, “in the morning, don’t open the computer, just take your coffee to the table and write by hand for 20 minutes. Just do that.” But then I don’t, because I’m tired. Or whatever.
My life has been entirely structured, forever. Babies’ nursing schedules, naptimes, picking up kids from school/snack/homework/dinner/baths/tucking in. My own college and grad school schedules. Work work work work work work, always at jobs that are intense and draining and never the kind that nourishes me in any way.
So now, here I am, for the first time in my 51 years of life, with time. I can’t squander it. Do you have any advice for me? How do you manage your time?
help me swatchers, help help me swatchers
There are some things we all know we should do – flossing our teeth at least twice a day, weight-bearing exercise as we age – and swatching, if we knit. I confess that I have never swatched, and I know I should but I don’t quite get it.
I understand the need to make a swatch if I’m making a garment that needs to fit in a particular way. Scarves don’t have to be swatched, I get that. Sweaters do. Yep, I get it. I know how to change needles to get stitch gauge but I don’t know what to do if my row gauge is off, even if the stitch gauge is right. Basically I just kind of do a bit of ostrich-dealing, pretend I don’t know anything about row gauge, and sally forth. It hasn’t been a problem, since I’ve frogged every sweater I started.
This time, though, I want to really make a sweater. Finish it, block it, take it to the end and end up with something I love to wear. So I know I need to learn more about swatching. When I’ve got spilkes, or when I’m not going to get to use a new yarn for a while and I’m just dying to do more than touch it, I’ll cast on 20-30 stitches and just knit a few rows in stockinette, to try to get it out of my system. Hardly swatching, but still, it’s a little fun.
I couldn't leave that Rowan Felted Tweed alone....
But there’s another thing about swatching I really don’t understand. I’ll read people’s posts describing swatching all the new yarn they get. Or they’ll say things like “my binders full of swatches were taking over the library!” and I just don’t know what that means. Even if I pretend I know what it’s like to design a sweater, I can imagine making very specific swatches to figure out the yarn and needle combination to get drape; the yarn and needle combination for different weights of yarn if I want to provide alternatives; and the gauge issues for pattern knitting. I get that. Is there some other use for swatching that I just don’t understand? Swatchers? (and I’m serious: how do you change needle sizes to hit row gauge, when the stitch gauge is right?!)
i gave notice at work, and guess what happened….
So. On Monday I gave notice at my job, and I didn’t know what to expect. I knew they would be surprised – and they were – but beyond that I just didn’t know. I was prepared for everything except what happened.
They cried. They really did. My boss cried when I told her, and came into my office the next day, sat down, and did it again. Colleagues said the most incredible things, things that were hard to take in. Inside, I imagine myself as just slinking around the perimeter, and not registering with people. I imagined that I’d just quietly slip out the door and no one would even know I left for a while. But that’s not what happened, and it has blown me back off my feet. It’s hard to take in, hearing people tell me what they think of me, what I mean to them. (Remember when you were about 12 years old, and you’d get mad at your mom for something and imagine that you died, and everyone was at your funeral, and they were all so sad, they’d all be so sorry then? This has been something like that, but without the death part!)
They immediately started listing freelance work they want me to do, so they can keep me around and also to help me, which is kind. My authors have wailed, and sent me the most amazing letters that I will absolutely cherish.
I think this is true for most people, and we just don’t realize it. We make an impression, we have an impact on people, people in our lives feel all kinds of things that they don’t ever say, because they think they don’t need to, or they’re shy, or they’ll just tell you tomorrow. I think you’re a very lucky person if something happens while you’re alive and you get the chance to hear it – especially if it’s all at once. So maybe the other side of that is that we should actually tell people these good things we feel about them.
One thing nearly every person said in their little lists referred to my sense of humor. Well, I am a dramatic person, I do have a quick and dry sense of humor, and my reactions can be large and hilarious. For example (you can see that I like you, I’m willing to be ugly in front of you), someone snapped this shot at a birthday party they gave me. I was responding to something someone said. Oh the humiliation….
silly, dramatic me
So anyway, I’ve been silent because I’ve been silenced by all this. Plus I’ve been insanely busy. I did finish the wedding dress and today I bought beautiful little Italian mother-of-pearl buttons from Tender Buttons, which is such a cool store. Only in New York, man. We have a button district, yes we do. In the morning I’ll take it to the cleaners for a good pressing, then get it off to my girl, the bride-to-be.
I promise knitting content will return soon. I’m dying to return to knitting…
i sell my photos, therefore i am a photographer.
Hi. My name is Lori and I am a photographer. I sell photographs on a stock photo site – fotolia. This is a link to the gallery of my photographs.
I haven’t uploaded any new photos in a couple of years; the ones that are in my current gallery were taken before I knew very much about taking pictures. I’d delete some of them now. There’s nothing spectacular about them, but what’s so confusing to me is that 91 people have paid for this image:
It’s a fine picture of red leaves, but (1) photos of red leaves are a dime a dozen and extremely easy to find, (2) for free. I don’t know why 91 people paid for this.
I use stockphoto sites when I’m trying to find images to use on jackets of the books I am publishing, so maybe it’s just people like me, people doing their work and needing a quick and simple resource.
Anyway, I guess this makes me a photographer. After my excessive rumination below, I guess this nagging issue is taken care of.
a housekeeping question you may not be able to answer
Olly olly oxen free
Just as I got ready to open this new post, I realized the flaw in my thought process. I have gathered that a couple of my friends are not being able to leave comments here, and that’s a problem for me because I love to hear from you!
So my thought was to create this post and ask you to let me know if you are unable to leave a comment. DUR. How can you leave a comment and let me know you can’t leave a comment. Silly me. But you can send me a note on rav (I’m LoriNY), or you can send me an email to thrums.ny at the gmail business. You know what I mean. I want to get your notes, if you are inclined to leave them! You always make me happy. Well, most of you. I’m not happy with the ones who want me to try their viagra.
If you’re having trouble, and take the extra step to let me know, please let me know what happens, why you can’t, so I can try to figure it out. I just checked all the backroom settings and everything looks ok. The weird ways of the online world, I’m telling you.