Despair
despite this, I’d rather be who I am now, than to go back in time….
I don’t often feel old. I hear people say that — I feel so old, boy I’m getting old – but it’s not something I feel. I feel young, actually, and think I will probably always feel younger than my years, unless I get very sick or disabled. But two things happened in the last 24 hours that gave me that stomach-dropping jolt of feeling old.
On Amazon, I was going through one of those little exercises where you improve your recommendations by indicating things you like and dislike. Books, that one was easy. Like this one, hate that one, own this one, don’t show me more like the other one. Movies, piece of cake. More of this type, never that type. But then I hit the music selection and didn’t know a single artist who came up, no matter how many times I clicked the “refresh! get me out of here!” button. I’d never heard of them, and couldn’t even guess what kind of music they made.
I felt old.
How long has it been since I was excited about a new musician? I am riding the Adele wave, but bands? No idea. How do I find new music these days, anyway? I work alone, my social network comprises very smart women more or less (less, actually) my age, and we don’t talk about music. We talk about books or our lives. My kids and I always have too much else to talk about, to get around to music, although occasionally one will recommend something new.
I guess I’m out of that loop, now.
And then this piece in today’s NYTimes, about how face to face conversation is so….yesterday. Granted, I have an awful lot of electronic communication, but I cherish the face to face conversations I have with people I care about. (Just don’t call me on the telephone, I really hate that device.) But really? Younger people don’t like face to face conversation? I guess I’m old.
This wonderful article about Rita Hayworth didn’t make me feel old; in fact, it filled me with the exuberance of feeling that young feeling, so I prefer to close with my recommendation that you read it, and watch the video embedded near the bottom. Remember this feeling, y’all (even if you weren’t leaping over Fred Astaire)?
the joy of living, right?
good grief. two stitches forward and three rows back.
Last night I finished knitting the back of my lovely Laurayana sweater. I was watching a movie at the time and didn’t have the needles I needed to cast on one of the sleeves, as I’d planned, so I just cast on the front. Everything I needed was at hand, so I thought I’d just get it going and do the sleeve today.
- Cast on, knit knit knit. Figure out the transition to the pattern, ok, knit knit knit.
- Along the way, a few stitches tinked. OK, for some reason, a lot of stitches tinked.
- A couple times, an error noticed two rows below, stitch dropped down and repaired. Look at me!
- Oops! Was supposed to begin shaping at 3″ from the turning ridge. Noticed it at 3-1/2″, figured it would be ok anyway. Knit knit knit.
- Several rows in, suddenly noticed that the ribbing just above the turning edge is wonky; along the center design panel, on the right, it didn’t end with k2 so what came above just kind of hung there. HMMM. Ugly. Double-checked the pattern, yep, it’s a mistake in the pattern. HMMM. Ugly.
- Knit a row. Ponder. Maybe no one will notice.
- Purl a row. Ponder. Yeah, no. It’s ugly. Am I a sloppy knitter, or a careful one?
- Frog down to the turning row, slip stitches back on the needle (semi-wonkily, but fixed as I knitted the first row, turning the stitches appropriately).
- Finish that row, realize I didn’t resume the ribbing after the center panel. Tink back to the marker and knit the ribbing….get to the last 3 stitches, oops, must’ve made a mistake in my 2×2 ribbing. Yep, back at the very beginning. Tink tink tink. Re-rib.
argh.
Now I’m watching The Third Man and “knitting.” Since it’s going so badly — so ‘wonkily’ — I’m trying to decide: should I put this down and do the sleeve? Maybe that’ll be the remedy for wonkiness. Should I get out the swift and ball up my siltwash and do those swatches? Maybe that’ll be the remedy for wonkiness. I already tried a brisk walk in the lovely park, a coffee at Starbucks, and I stopped at the store for a beautiful bottle of wine, for later. None of that seems to be ridding me of my wonkiness. Just one of those days, I guess.
Do you have a remedy for times like this? I’m all ears.
Tonight the music seems so loud / I wish that we could lose this crowd / Maybe it’s better this way / We’d hurt each other with the things we want to say (I want to say SHUT UP!!)
What is it about this song?
Everyone thinks they can sing it, for one thing. For another, it’s a common choice for street musicians; I think I’ve heard it all over town, under- and above-ground, and in other cities. Today, I was crossing town and walking through Grand Central Station, and I heard it — because you can hear it from a long, long, LONG way away. A subway musician was playing Careless Whisper. A saxophone was wailing loudly, and I was filled with dread as I got closer, having to keep listening whether I wanted to or not (I didn’t). Turns out, it was a young black woman wearing a teeny black cocktail dress and very high heels, playing a sax. She’d hung a small iPod — the shuffle, I believe — on the microphone, and it seemed to be providing all the other musical parts. In other words, she was playing accompaniment to recorded music. Just her and her sax.
And boy o boy was she overly emotionally expressing herself. She was working it, squatting, waving her body around, leaning forward, leaning back, contorting her face around the mouthpiece. If it had been any other song, I might’ve just laughed (not out loud, just in my head) at the silly over the top-ness of her act. But that song. Oy. Anything but that song.
With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame. ~George Eliot
Remember this scene? It’s Forrest Gump, obviously, with Jenny. Jenny has returned to her childhood home, which was a miserable, abusive place. She stands there, looking at it, and then she picks up rocks and starts hurling them at the falling-down house. Forrest says “sometimes there just aren’t enough rocks.”
Saturday Katie and I went to Taylor, to visit my father’s grave. I haven’t been there since January 2000, and those visits 11 years ago were particularly terrible and devastating. He died 30 years ago next March, which is unbelievable to me. I was 23 years old, and 5 months pregnant with Katie when he died, so a whole new generation of life has come into the world, grown up, married, and is ready to bring another new generation of life into the world since he died.
In the years since he’s been gone, I’ve done a lot of emotional work dealing with him. He was not a good man, and certainly not a good father. To a removed degree I have compassion for him; he was born in absolute poverty and ignorance to people who truly didn’t want him, and he married a girl who hated him, who’d run away from her own bad home and dropped out of high school. And nine months later, he also had a child, me; neither of them was ready for that. He medicated all his misery with vodka, and lots of it. Oceans of vodka. He never did figure out how to deal with his own pain and rage, right up through the moment of his death, which was a very violent suicide.
When we buried him, there was icy snow on the ground, which made the grim and miserable day even more so. The cemetery in Taylor is desolate even by graveyard standards, flat and windswept with just a few stunted trees for the wind to whistle through. There were 8 of us standing around the grave, pulling our thin coats around us and clutching our stomachs. There was no preacher because of the way he died, and I was the only one of his three children present.
about as lonely as lonely can be
My plan had been to visit the grave, and I imagined I’d feel a kind of peace and triumph — ha, I’m still here, man. Instead, my feet started kicking his small headstone, over and over, and I couldn’t stop. I stood on his headstone, ground dirt into it. Kicked it some more. Kicked it, and cried, and did not feel peace or triumph.
Time passed, Katie and I left and ate some wonderful barbecue, we got a giant limeade from Sonic, we watched a dumb movie, we enjoyed each other’s company. And that was my triumph — my daughter’s loving comfort.
i talked myself into feeling better by writing this post!
I have to start with something good — my flagging spirit needs it. The body of my Wintry Mix sweater is complete, as is one sleeve! With one sleeve, assembly, and the large cowl-ish collar to do, I won’t finish before we leave Thursday night. Which brings me to the craptastic news:
Typhoon Nesat, heading straight for Hanoi
Sigh. Yep. We’re arriving in Hanoi Saturday morning, though we’re betting we’ll get stuck in Hong Kong at least one day because the currently-projected 75mph winds will cancel/delay the little trip to Hanoi. I just don’t want our trip to Sapa to get goofed up…..
Such a first-world luxury problem. I will stop complaining now.
so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, good night / I hate to go and leave this pretty sight.
I’ve become a grown-up-lady-knitter. I know, right? Me? Sure, I swatch now, I do knitting math(s), those are grown-up knitting things, big deal. But you remember how I mentioned that due to my 15-pound weight loss, my beloved dark & stormy hangs on me now? I’ve been thinking hard about Noreen’s great suggestion just to wear it as is, as a big old comfy sweater, which would also make my weight loss visible (“gosh, have you lost weight?”) Well, I think I’m going to frog the entire sweater.
sigh.
I’m trying to be all mindful about it: yes, I got all the pleasure out of knitting it. Yes, I enjoyed wearing it last year, very much. Yes, it was a beautiful birthday present to myself. Yes yes yes. Wah! Wah wah wah! Y’all.
Here’s the deal. My waist is my best physical attribute. It’s small relative to the rest, see?
me on the left, with my dear oldest friend in the middle and my son on the right.
So while I have it, while I’m young, I want to highlight it (and hide other bits!). My huge dark & stormy does the opposite — it hides me.
I’ve never frogged a giant sweater before, so I don’t know: do I need to soak the yarn (post-frogging) and let it dry, to get all the knitted-already-ness out of it? Or can I just go ahead and use it? It’s madelinetosh vintage, which is superwash.
I think I’ll give it a big kiss and a hug, pour a glass of wine, lay the sweater out and set up my ball-winder, and just frog it directly into cakes (unless the answer is that I need to soak it).
This is a good thing. This is a good thing. It’s reclaiming gorgeous yarn to refashion into something that will be flattering. This is a good thing. This is a good thing.
the downside of weight loss
Since I finished my beloved Dark & Stormy cardigan, I’ve lost 15 pounds. It was slightly too big when I finished it, and now it swallows me. Seriously. I look like I’m wearing my dad’s cardigan.
excuse everything about this photo please! the sweater was not yet blocked, that's not really a muffin top at my waist, and i'd just been awake for ~30 minutes. the eagerness of the final bind-off, you know. so this is how it fit 15 pounds ago.
So, OK. Huge on me. What would you do? Would you try to shrink it? And if so, how? Since I live in NYC, I don’t have my own washer and dryer. I have to go down to the basement and use the industrial machines, so doing fiddly stuff is a bit of a pain but I’d do it if it meant I could salvage my sweater. I’d do anything except put the 15 pounds on again. Seriously.
What would you do?
we clearly need to overthrow the Weather Czar. this is crazy.
Good grief — we’re in the midst of days and days, after days and days, looking ahead to days and days, of rain. Gray skies, cool temperatures (60 yesterday), drenching downpours, what happened! It was just very very hot, what happened here? And, of course, my beloved central Texas is going up in flames. My beloved oldest daughter is packed and ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice, and nearly had to do so. A place I’ve loved a lot, Bastrop, is mostly just gone, burned up (that fire, which is still burning, is visible from space). They haven’t had rain in months and months (and before that, just a whisper of rain), and they broke all the heat records this summer, and well, that’s just a recipe for the disaster that’s unfolding there.
yeah. terrifying.
If only I could be involved in the redistribution channels — it’s obvious, redirect all of our rain and cold weather down to the scorched, killing, devastation and destruction going on. I don’t believe this, but there’s a way it feels like the Biblical end times these days. Earthquakes and hurricanes, raging out of control fires and deadly drought, and don’t get me started on things of a politically-induced nature.
Sunday I finished my adorable little red number, my featherweight cardigan. I keep thinking I can surely get a photo tomorrow, surely tomorrow it won’t be so gray and gloomy and shadowy, but tomorrow hasn’t come yet. It’s fabulous, I couldn’t be happier with it. The color is great, cheery, powerful, the fit is wonderful, and the fact that I love wearing a cropped sweater that ends at my waist is priceless.
While I wait for the yarn to arrive for my three new sweaters (me! knitting three new sweaters!), I’m spending my knitting time powering through the blanket I’m making. It’s Anne Hanson’s Totally Autumn pattern, in a rich chocolate brown Cascade 220 Heathers. This is the project that went through the trauma in Turkey of my having to pull out the needles at the Istanbul airport, so I’ve kind of recovered from that disaster and now see the end in sight. The work will come to a standstill when my sweater yarns arrive, but maybe I’ll just try to put in X number of rows per day on the blanket so it’ll eventually get done, instead of languishing.
Busy busy busy times for me — appointments this afternoon, seeing a play tonight, breakfast tomorrow with my oldest friend from Alabama, writing group tomorrow night, fly off to Chicago early Friday morning to visit Marnie, home on Monday, poetry group Tuesday night. AND I’m trying to finish the details for my trip back to Vietnam and over to Borneo, during the first two weeks of October. Which is just three weeks away. Yikes. Busy busy busy.
we all need one another. Listen to Asa.
For Sunday morning, when the news of the world is nothing but horrible, when everything seems like it’s going to hell, when someone needs to do something, please. This Asa song came on while I was hemming an ao dai I bought in Vietnam a few years ago and it brought me peace and relaxation. We don’t have to do a 360, let’s do a 180. Drop your guns and your swords. Come on.
If you do not let my people go, I will send swarms of flies on you and your officials, on your people and into your houses. The houses of the Egyptians will be full of flies, and even the ground where they are (and fly pesticide won’t work). — Exodus 8:21 (with an amendment)
Aside from fire ants, I don’t mind ants — regular old in-the-house ants. I know some people are freaked out by them, but I don’t mind them. I try to get rid of them, but I don’t mind them. Weevils? For the last year, every other bag of bread flour I’ve opened has had weevils in it. It makes me mad, a brand new bag of flour, but they don’t creep me out. I’m not crazy about cockroaches, or their gigantic Texas cousins, the water bugs, and like them to be gone immediately please. They’re so ubiquitous in Austin, living in the leaf litter, that you just have them whether you like them or not. I was in the shower once and saw one crawling on the far wall of the shower, CREEPY, and though I didn’t want to, I kind of had to turn my back for a second and when I turned back, it was gone. WHERE WAS IT????!! That was one of the fastest showers I ever took.
But flies, I really really really detest flies. In the south, there are screens over the windows so you can open them without becoming fly infested. They might dash in when you open the door (“shut the door, you’re letting flies in!” I always heard as a kid), but that was it, really. Up here, in NYC, there are no screens. Can you believe that? No screens. And since we keep the windows open whenever possible, year-round, we live with flies. Most of the time, it’s the annoying one or two, but once a year every single year, there is a fly infestation of near-biblical proportions. A plague.
Where do they come from? No idea. Yesterday I was wondering if there was something dead in the walls, a rat or something (happens in a 112-year old building in a rat-infested city), but I’d have smelled that. Nothing smells bad. There is no food left lying about, there is no obvious origin for them, but my apartment is absolutely filled with flies. Two days ago I used half a can of spray thinking that’d get them. And indeed, they started walking pretty slowly, easy enough to swat a bunch of them. The next morning I was shocked not to see dead flies everywhere, I thought surely the morning would be spent cleaning them up. But no, absolutely no dead flies. Just a lot of flies walking around, a lot flying, and a giant swarm in one room. So at the end of the day, I used an entire can of fly-specific pesticide, fumigated the living room which is closed off from the rest of the apartment, and left. Spent the night closed up in the bedroom. Expected to see dead flies this morning……..nope.
What the hell??! These flies are not only completely resistant to pesticide designed especially for flies, they’re either the fastest-breeding flies in the world, or they let their buddies in at night while I sleep. I’m feeling possessed and hopeless about it. Last year when this happened, the pesticide fumigation route worked, the first time.
Isn’t that gross?
the definition of eternity
4″ laceweight 1×1 ribbing.
I feel so shy about saying this.
For my money, William Styron wrote the very best book on depression (Darkness Visible), for people who need to know how it feels. It’s kind of unfortunate that the same word is used to describe a potentially fatal illness and how you feel when the cantaloupes are all underripe at the store, and gosh you had your mouth set for one. “I’m so depressed, I really wanted cantaloupe!” That blurring, combined with our good old-fashioned American spirit of ‘buck up!’ adds a heavy burden to what’s already the heaviest burden.
I suffer mightily from depression. It’s chronic, but luckily it’s also episodic. Although I suspect I’ve dealt with depression since I was young, the first time I experienced it to a very terrible peak, and got treatment for it, I was 26. Before I got treatment, that depression put me in my bed, in a dark room, for entire days and weeks. When I was awake, I cried. I cried when I took my daughters to school each morning, cried on the way home with my little 3-year old boy, and cried as I set him up in front of Sesame Street with a big bowl of dry Cheerios, and I went to bed. Cried in my sleep, cried when I woke up. Cried when I made my son’s lunch, and tucked him in for his nap. Cried while he played on the floor next to my bed. I was soaked to the bone in heavy, bleak, worthlessness, which was just general. General worthlessness, nothing specific I or anyone else could argue with. One insidious thing about depression is that it speaks to you in your very own voice — it’s always been like this and it always will be like this. As the medication started working and the darkness lifted — and I could see color again, which I’d been unable to do for months — I was overwhelmed by the new experience. Was this how most people felt? wow. wow. wow. I had no idea.
So when the depression was treated, and I was in a brand new and sunnier world, I thought ah! I’ll recognize the signs if it ever comes back (which it’s likely to do, once you’ve had one major episode). If I find myself crying a lot, or only wanting to crawl into bed, I’ll know. It’ll be easy to spot, it’s so terrible. Good, I’m armed.
Although it waxed and waned over time, pulled me into its dark and nasty little hole now and then, I didn’t have another major episode until I was 42, in the middle of graduate school, January 2000. I never saw it coming, because it wasn’t like that! I was always so pissed off and angry, and overwhelmingly agitated. I was furious at the sun, and thought I just can’t keep going through this sun in my eyes for the rest of my life, goddamn sun. Stupid people in the cars, hate hate hate! Hell no I’m not depressed shut the fuck up and get the hell out of my way. But I was, and profoundly. Luckily, a friend picked up something in my voice and was worried and drove me to get help, and stayed with me until I was safely in someone’s care. I was floored by the diagnosis of major clinical depression. Treatment helped and it retreated. This time I wasn’t so cocky, thinking I could spot it a mile away if it ever came back (which it was more sure to do, now that I’d had it twice). Still, two types, I could be on guard. Just want to sleep and cry, or always overwhelmingly mad and agitated. Easy enough.
Unfortunately, there’s at least one more face of it (do I have to experience them all, depression gods?) that’s different still. It’s the one that just takes away the words. Takes away the thoughts. Takes away the pleasure. Bleaches me, my mind, and the world. Sure, I’ll cry too easily, but it’s the blankness that defines this version. Blank. Silence. Disinterest, though that really isn’t the right word because it implies that interest might be hanging around…but it’s not. It’s too blank for that. At least this one doesn’t hurt so much.
People faced with a depressed person feel helpless, and probably have good intentions when they offer a quick and easy list of recommended activities [this is the "buck up" model]: Get out! Take a walk! Go to lunch with a friend! Wander around the museum! UGH, all those exclamation points, no. It’s hard just to sit and face it when your loved one is so clearly suffering, and honestly there’s nothing to do other than trying to ensure that they’re getting professional help. I know and understand this, because I’ve been on the other side of it too, watching people I love suffer so terribly.
My research in graduate school was all about pronouns and linguistic profiles. I developed a linguistic profile of suicidality, after analyzing a college student’s diary in the two years leading up to her suicide. The language of depressed people is dominated by the first-person pronoun. I, I, I, I. Occasionally my (rarely me, curiously). Extremely rarely you. It’s maddening to try to hold up your relationship with a depressed person because of this terrible rumination on their suffering, it’s as if all they/I can see is the suffering. The I who is suffering.
What’s so funny, here at this advanced age of our culture and civilization, is that there is STILL a stigma surrounding emotional illnesses. I could not reveal my depression when I was in graduate school (in a psychology program!!); I was advised by the one faculty member who knew about it not to tell anyone, at all. There are lots of books, awareness programs, and people like me who’ll occasionally speak up and say how difficult it is, but here we still are.
So here I sit, in the silence. This is the first thing I’ve been able to write, and I’m not sure why I’m writing it, what I want. Maybe I want you to know about depression, maybe I want to tell you all these little researchey pieces that (when I’m not depressed) I find so fascinating, such a window into something. I know I’m not writing this to elicit your comments, but I’ve decided to keep comments open because I always get so annoyed when someone writes a post like this and closes comments. I know that I am dearly loved, I know that this will pass, I know all those things. Maybe I just want to normalize it, to let you know that I’m sick, that’s all, and I’ll get well soon.
Beauty itself soon fades, and when a woman has beauty and nothing else, well, it’s like putting all the goods in the shop window, isn’t it? And the moment she loses her good looks–poor creature! what is she? Just a mere bit of faded finery to be thrown aside. ~henry arthur jones
This always makes me cry, and breaks my heart:
Theoretically, conceptually, as long as I’m in the dark and do not have my glasses on, I think I’m ok-looking. I think I ought to be ok-looking, I look kind of normal. I guess I look like any 52-year old woman who gave birth to 3 kids and had major abdominal surgery, cut from hip bone to hip bone. But then again, I have no idea what that looks like, because you sure don’t see that image anywhere.
These things infuriate me to the point of blurred vision and high blood pressure-induced headaches:
- thin mannequins at Lane Bryant, and huge photos in the store of skinny models
- wrinkle cream commercials that feature 25-year olds (or younger)
When I used to teach social psych, I always showed the video “Killing Us Softly” and the results were the same, semester after semester. When it was over, the men in the class were unmoved, and the women sat in silence, with big eyes and hands over their mouths. Women in print ads are usually just shown in pieces and parts – legs, mouths, stomachs, hands, feet, not whole – or they’re shown in submissive or victimized positions. I don’t need to go off on gender stuff here, media stuff, we all know it, and you’re the choir I don’t need to preach to. But it hurts me that knowing it doesn’t stop its power. It hurts me.
not to worry but i’ll be quiet for a bit
Another book that meant a lot to me was Little Women. My bitchy grandmother (the other bitchy grandmother) gave me a hardback copy when I was in 2nd grade, I think, and I still have it. It’s falling apart and the pages are brown. I remember crying every time I read it, when Beth died. (no!!) My daughter Marnie’s name came from a misunderstanding of the mother’s name in Little Women (it’s Marmee in the book, but my father-in-law’s mother wanted to use it for her grandmother name and she got it wrong, so she was always called Marnie, but it was a mistake).
ANYWAY. Remember how the little women are always reading (or being exhorted to read, by their mother) Pilgrim’s Progress? I’ve never read it, but somehow I know of the Slough of Despond and sisters, I’m in it. I’m in it up to my waist. Just personal stuff going on, not for public blog consumption, and no one’s dying or anything so in the scheme of things it’s surmountable, but the Slough is sucking me down.
I’ll probably be quiet for a few days — sure I’ll be back.
***
p.s. #1 If, like me, you never said Slough of Despond out loud because you didn’t know how to pronounce it, it’s slough like through — slew.
p.s.#2 And many thanks to Jess for commenting on my political post to let me know that the Republicans have decided to remove the word “forcible” from their definition of rape. Yay, thank heavens for that small favor. Kristen Schaal said on The Daily Show Wednesday night, “You’d be surprised how many drugged, underaged or mentally handicapped young women have been gaming the system. Sorry, ladies the free abortion ride is over.” Guess she’ll get to eat her sadly funny words.
why? why? why? was it hubris? that’s the usual suspect with greek gods…
I have made an executive decision. The goddess of knitting is Ariadne. She’s the one who gave Theseus a ball of yarn so he could find his way out of the minotaur’s labyrinth. Remember her? That girl?
I figured any woman who is clever enough to come up with a use for a skein of yarn AND who is handy and familiar with labyrinthine things must be our patron woman. And I have clearly pissed her off somehow. I’m trying to find a corner clear enough to do a burnt offering, though I have no livestock to give (pa rum-pa-pum-pum). Maybe I’ll put some yarn scraps in a bowl and set fire to them.
Or maybe I’ll just use my Dark & Stormy Cardigan. Yeah, that one. That gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous sweater. That somehow grew — like the Grinch’s heart — 3 sizes. After careful blocking, it became the cardigan for a giant. And I’m no giant, even though I’m pretty dang tall. (ok, it’s not 3 sizes too big, but it’s at least one size too big.)
The yarn I used, madelinetosh vintage, is superwash. I don’t know how much success I’ll have tossing it in the dryer, but I’m ready to give that a try. My hair is already thinning with age, so I don’t want to pull it out. With my family history, I’d better not take up drinking to soothe my spirits. So all I can think of are (1) burnt offerings, and (2) a hot dryer. Which means going to the coin-operated dryer in the basement, paying for a whole hour (the minimum), and hoping no one comes in to do laundry while I’m trying to shrink my sweater.
p.s. and yes, for those who might ask, I knitted a swatch, I washed it, I blocked it, I let it dry, I kind of whipped it around in the air a little to try to stretch it out, and it didn’t grow.
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?
too much to do! too much to do! stress monster, aaargh!
That would be me, today and for the rest of this week — Wendy Whiner. Whiney McWhinerson. I have too much work to do, (a), and something’s gone jiggy with me, (b). My muscles are all vibratey and jittery, my head’s kind of wonky (-er than usual), and as my kids used to say when they were little, I have daddy-rhea. I’ll let you figure out that one.
So in keeping with the old adage, since I don’t have anything nice to say, I won’t say anything at all. But in the celluloid words of the recent governor of California, I’ll be back. Just as soon as I get this work done……..
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.
MAN! How do I get myself into these problems?! I’m almost 52, maybe it’s time to learn how to pronounce the most difficult 2-letter word in my repertoire: NO.
I know, you me and everyone else. If there were a wish-granting fairy, I’d ask her for more time, and if I got a second wish I’d ask for more money. That’s the pecking order, for sure. Early next month I’ll turn 52, so that’s one aspect of the time issue; how is it going by so quickly?! And as it gets closer to the end (whenever that is) it just goes faster and faster. Such a boring topic of conversation, I know, but it’s definitely on my mind. There’s a more mundane, less existential version of the issue, too. I have too many things to do each day, too many things I have to do (as we all do), and too many things I want to do (as the lucky[?] among us feel). If only I had a spare several hours a day that weren’t on anyone else’s calendar. Man, wouldn’t that be heavenly?
So here I sit with a dilemma, and I have no one to blame but myself. I have a very small writing group, and we meet monthly. It’s just me, Susan, and Marian, and I really enjoy their company, and enjoy their writing and their feedback on mine. They’re substantive, beautiful women, and they’re close to my age (I’m oldest, by a couple of years). (And sidebar note, here: I’ve never had friends who were my age! Like, ever. When I was very young, I got along much better with people who were substantially older than I was. Then when I started college at 36, my friends were half my age. Grad school, same deal. How do people find friends their own age?!)
Anyway. I love Susan and Marian, they’re the kind of women I really value. We don’t get together outside our writing group, mainly because we’re all busy. So I’d say I love them, they’re my friends, but they’re not my best friends, not to sound 14 years old or anything. Susan may be moving to the west coast, which will be the disbanding of our group. So when we last met, I wore my Peasy and they both went on and on about it. And by the time we were leaving our writing session, they both asked if I’d knit them scarves, they’d pay.
Lace Ribbon Scarf, in Rowan Felted Tweed; I'd never have thought the yarn would work with the pattern, but another raveler used it and it looks great!
Here’s where I have no one to blame but myself. I should have just said no. I made a half-assed invisible attempt at saying no, when I said no I don’t sell my knitting, I could never make enough to compensate the time spent. I guess I could still say no, but now I feel like I’ve agreed. Susan loved the Peasy yarn and wanted a Lace Ribbon scarf, and Marian loves this Tiger Eyes lace scarf (I’ll use this curious creek fibers meru, held double).
I need/want to be doing holiday knitting! I don’t have much time to knit (since I can’t knit and edit manuscripts at the same time…..WHY don’t I have 4 arms?!). They aren’t friends with whom I exchange gifts, so it’s not like they can just count as Christmas gifts. And I’ll ask them to pay me for the yarn, but I couldn’t possibly charge enough to equal the time it’ll take, so why bother?
Luckily, I have the coming weekend’s road trip to/from Rhinebeck, and a couple of weeks later I have the long flights to/from Austin, to see my Katie girl. I can knock out a lot of knitting with those two trips.
And now, to the nicely large stack of manuscripts waiting for me! Lots of work this week, yay…..
i have been my own worst enemy on this project, and we nearly came to blows. read what a little perseverence’ll do for ya.
ICK and YUCK. As lovely as Saturday’s weather was, today’s is that awful. It’s cold, gray, and drizzly, but not in a let’s-get-together-in-trench-coats-in-Casablanca kind of way. Just in that ick kind of way. The kind that makes the annual GYN trip just that much more pleasant. Yeah.
Here’s the transitional thing that straddles the awful-to-wonderful divide: my shrug. OK, so you would not believe the hell I’ve been through with this thing. First there was the whole oops I did it wrong debacle, resulting in frogging a whole skein’s worth of knitting. OK. Figured it out, cast on, got to the 2nd repeat (where we last left our cheerless heroine) and I made some kind of mistake. Shoulda just looked closely to figure out where I goofed, but I was getting a global sense of despair with this one so I just frogged.
Decided I’d better just try to figure out the stitch pattern before casting on again, so I cast on for 3 pattern repeats plus the edge stitches, and knit through three repeats. GENIUS!! IT WORKED!!! I must have just made an easy mistake the last time, I’m on it. Cast on again – 324 stitches, by the way, screwed up the first row. Frogged. Cast on agai…oh no, too short a tail, by ~5 stitches. Cast on again, got to the end of the row and still had ~30 stitches on the needle. Frogged. Cast on aga….too short a tail, by ~12 stitches (and p.s., how did THAT happen, because I kept the starting point the same as it had been the previous time, when I’d cast on way too many!!!).
Tried again, maybe 2 or 3 more times. It almost became funny. Almost. Maybe later it’ll be like, hysterical. I started thinking it was a sign; my friend Preeti used to see signs in everything, maybe I was just being dense about it. Maybe the universe was screaming at me “RUN AWAY LORI” and I was just sitting there like a dolt, trying again and again. After a couple more times, I finally gave up for the night.
I decided to try one. more. time. And if it didn’t work this time, I was going to cry uncle and decide that me and Carol Sunday, we’re one of those sad couples, the ones who love each other but it’s never going to work, and it’s no one’s fault. I cast on, put a stitch marker down every 10 stitches. Counted again. Counted by the 10s. Counted individually. Counted three more times, just to be sure.
Row 1, WHEW. Row 2, stopped after each 16-stitch repeat and checked obsessively. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16, ok. Next. I knew if I could just get past the first couple of rows, I’d be in like Flinn. AND I AM!
that baby hugs the curve just beautifully!
and look at that dimensionality!
it's right! it's right! it's right!
I know I said I wouldn’t blast you with more photos and stories about this project until I finished the collar and was working on the body, but you can appreciate the sense of triumph I have at persevering to this point. MAN. The good news is that it’s pretty fast knitting, and I know the pattern by heart (and it’s really very simple, despite me).
curse you, TinyMCE plug-in!! i damn thee to hell…
grr….I installed a plug-in that has caused me all kinds of hell, even though I deleted it. I can’t tag posts now, and I have to go through all this external folderol to upload a photo because the built-in photo uploader no longer works. (STAY AWAY from TinyMCE if you use WordPress, that’s all I’m saying!)
So I’m going to reinstall the latest version of wordpress, change templates, delete this one and try to reinstall it. Many of my modifications will be lost, if not all of them, and things may go wonky in the interim.
edit: OK, so obviously I installed a different template, which means photos on old posts may be slightly too large for the column. I’ll play around in the CSS later, but for now, sorry for any wonkiness. Also, this one seems to load slowly. And the kicker? Didn’t help. 
If this doesn’t destroy your mind and crush your spirit, I don’t know what will. A sentence from a manuscript I am editing:
When we exited the building we found Dracula standing by a prairie schooner with a team of six horses hooked up to it, when he saw us Dracula said, “It’s about time, I have been waiting out here for an hour.”
Continue Reading–7 words totally
If this doesn’t destroy your mind and crush your spirit, I don’t know what will. A sentence from a manuscript I am editing:
When we exited the building we found Dracula standing by a prairie schooner with a team of six horses hooked up to it, when he saw us Dracula said, “It’s about time, I have been waiting out here for an hour.”
It’s not all fun and games, you know. This thing just goes ON and ON and ON.
the movie Conspiracy is excellent, but i can’t watch those things any longer. i’m too old.
When I taught social psychology, I was always most eager to make students think carefully about the dark side of social influence. The Milgram studies, undertaken in the aftermath of The Third Reich, which showed that people would — despite their obvious misery and discomfort — administer a probably fatal shock to someone in another room, because they were told to (note: there wasn’t an actual person in the other room). My students said “oh, that was the 1950s, it wouldn’t happen now.” The Zimbardo prison study, which was shut down much sooner than anticipated because the students randomly assigned as prison guards became sadistic, and those randomly assigned as prisoners became profoundly withdrawn, depressed. My students said,”oh, that was the 1970s, it wouldn’t happen now.” “Not me, I wouldn’t have gone along.” “Not me, I wouldn’t have become sadistic.” “Not me.”
In a way, this gets at the essence of social psychology; especially in our western culture, we like to believe that we ourselves, our minds, our choices, are responsible for what we do and believe. Me, I decide. We become uncomfortable when told that the situation is leading us to behave in a particular way; we resist believing that something outside us influences us without our ‘knowledge’.
I think it’s extremely important to recognize that it’s not just those people back then, those people in that country, those people in that culture, those people. Them. We are them. (Of course people are also capable of rising above the situation, of acting from a thoughtful place; I’m not making an “always” claim here.)
Because this is important to me, I have been drawn to thinking about the horrors of the Holocaust. I tend to read about it if I hear of a good analysis, or fictional work. I tend to watch the movies – fiction or nonfiction. I was so moved by Everything Is Illuminated, the book and the movie.
So I watched a movie last night that was recommended by Tammy, a ravelry friend and regular commenter on my blog — Conspiracy, which is about the meeting outside Berlin in which the “final solution” was laid out and set in motion. Tammy mentioned it because Colin Firth is in the movie, and I’d just written about another of his movies, A Single Man. I looked up Conspiracy and saw that Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh, and Stanley Tucci were in it – I love all three of them! It wasn’t available for instant streaming, so I moved it to the top of my regular queue, and I watched it last night.
The actors were wonderful, without exception. I wondered how they dealt with the roles they were playing – Tucci especially, who did a truly incredible job playing Eichmann. I felt a cold shiver all through my body and in my stomach when he came on the screen. Eichmann. The cinematography was beautiful, the direction subtle, the performances very strong. I have to see more movies with Colin Firth, and soon!
But I find that as I get older, it’s harder and harder to bear these things. It’s harder and harder for me to listen or watch as a people are described and treated as ‘vermin.’ As inhuman. Not human. Less than human. I never found it easy to bear, but I could bear it because I wanted to think, understand, remember. Now I’m not so sure I can bear it. I cried throughout the movie. I was so nauseous I thought I’d be sick. Often I couldn’t even look at the screen. Almost the entire movie was set around a long table, with the parties to the meeting simply talking – no actions were performed, nothing actually implemented, just talking. And I couldn’t watch.
It’s a very powerful movie, I highly recommend it. I didn’t know anything about that meeting, I didn’t know this part of history at all. When I was a little younger, I could’ve watched it more easily.
Now, I need a lot of knitting and contemplation to get myself back in order. Hello, Peasy.
.
in the bleakness of night, i go to extremes. don’t you?
If you ever find yourself awake in the middle of the night – I mean, waking up in the middle of the night after being asleep – this experience is probably familiar to you. Thoughts can seem entirely profound: life is to be lived! I never truly understood that – life is to be lived! And then, in the light of day, the profundity just isn’t there. Well, yeah, life is to be lived. And thoughts can seem entirely bleak and hopeless, too. Problems so huge, woes unresolvable, pressures unbearable – but when the day comes around, they really don’t seem so awful. I finally learned to say that to myself when I’m lost in the dark: even though it feels hopeless, you know it’s going to seem much better tomorrow, during the day, even if that really doesn’t seem possible right now. It doesn’t stop the paralyzing thoughts, but it does help me make it through to the morning without totally freaking out. I have had the experience of profundity gone banal, but much more often, it’s the bleakness of problems that haunts my middle-night waking, and it’s a very strange state. I lie there in a kind of suspended way, with thoughts swirling all around me, like electric chaos. My eyes are open, but I don’t feel anchored in any way.
Why is that! What is it about the middle of the night that can drive thoughts to the extremes like that? I don’t think it’s just the quiet, or the dark; I have gone into my office during the day, closed the door, and lowered the blinds so it’s pretty dark, and find that my thoughts just get clearer. I think the push to extremity must come from something within us, something about the contrast from the sleeping state. Maybe something FROM the sleeping state. I don’t know – do you have any ideas about this?
this is my brain on distraction crack
Not the corpus callosum, the crack-like division between the two brain hemispheres. Not crack cocaine and what it does to your brain. No, the ‘brain crack’ of the post’s title is a phrase my daughter the artist uses to describe the way a creative person might get so involved in figuring out everything involved with a new project and never start, preferring instead to continue planning, tweaking, thinking. That process is kind of like brain crack, it’s fun, nothing is at risk, it’s a way of doing “work” without having to face the blank canvas, or the blank page, or the raw materials, and enduring that difficult process and the potential for risk and failure. “Don’t get stuck on brain crack, mom.” Because that’s what I do. (And here I’m not talking about the actual prep work, the swatching (though that could be done in a brain crack-like way), the material testing, the sample creation, etc.)
I’ll just answer these emails that are coming in, and after that I’ll get going. I’ll just organize my knitting bag and then I’ll get going. Oh wait, I should really read this book about design before I get going, it’ll probably save me a lot of trial and error. Oh wait, let me just clean the kitchen first. I’ll just run through my Google Reader real quick and then I’ll get started. I’m sure this is very common; I’ve read all sorts of pieces by writers who describe this kind of process they wade through when they’re having trouble writing. It doesn’t feel good to do this, there’s a kind of building desperation, you know you’re stalling and the thing is waiting, waiting, getting further away rather than closer.
During the week, I get up at 5am and spend about an hour (more or less, depending on the daily situation with my hair and how tragic it looks) sitting on the couch, drinking two cups of coffee, reading my Google Reader, and knitting. Some days I don’t knit, but usually I do. I leave the house absolutely no later than 6:30, and shoot for 6:15 as an average. I relish this quiet hour all to myself, and if I don’t get it I feel cattywampus all day. The street is usually very quiet, and I don’t listen to anything, no music, no podcast. It’s precious and necessary and I love it. I have aspirations of other things to do with that hour, and I continually plan to do them but the morning comes and I think well, this morning I’ll just do my usual. What I’d like to do instead:
yoga and meditation
writing
actual work on creative projects
walk in Riverside Park
explore my neighborhood and take photographs
I really want to do these things! I really do. Obviously, I couldn’t do them all each morning, and my silly tendency would be to regulate them in some kind of rigid fashion: yoga M and W; walk on Th and Sat; write on T; etc. What stops me, as silly as this sounds, is Google Reader. I subscribe to 435 blogs. I have them categorized in ways that let me skip to specific ones (knitters, NYC, food, art, photography, entertainment, fabric, design, creative multi, etc). If I’m in a real time bind, I always just read the knitters and the fabric (which means people who work in some way with fabric, sewing or quilting or dying or weaving), and try to fit in the creative multi – the people who knit AND sew AND do photography. I tell myself that one important purpose of looking at all the blogs is inspiration, and that does happen! There are some amazingly creative people out there who not only do good work, they write about it in inspirational ways and take amazing photographs. Of course, inspiration is a two-edged sword, because it can also make me feel like I’ll never be that good at anything.
I daydream of a balanced life, where I do yoga and walk, and have time to write, and have plenty of time to make things, whatever they are. Where I am careful about my food, and eat with the seasons, healthy and yummy all together. In this fantasy, I’m also calm and content because of the balance, and those two – the calm and the balance – feed each other. And me. Those weekends where I take a little adventure somewhere, Queens or Chinatown or somewhere, and where I take a little walk in the park, and I actually do some housework and also knit, I am much happier in a strange way than I am at the end of those weekends where I have just knitted on the couch for the whole weekend and watched good movies. It’s that balance thing, obviously. Of course, I don’t live in fantasy land, I live in a life that is mostly taken up by my job, family I enjoy talking with on the telephone, unpleasant tasks to do like laundry and cleaning up after dinner, etc., and then the obvious need for sleep. Not much time is left. Still, I do have that hour five days a week, from 5 to 6.
For a while, I’m taking a blog reading break. I hope you will still read mine even if I am on a temporary hiatus and [very painfully] not reading yours, though I understand if you unsubscribe. Blogging is a community thing – we get to know each other, we comment on each other’s posts, we follow the parts of our lives that we share. I find myself wondering how Jocelyn‘s class is going, what’s going on with Kty, over in Paris, etc. We are real to each other in a funny and kind of unreal way, so I feel bad turning away from reading all the posts I enjoy. But I’ve realized that I’m reading about others’ lives at the expense of living my own. You wouldn’t want to do that for yourself, either. I will continue to write on this blog for my own pleasure and documentation, and hope you stick with me. I’ve just got to get off this brain crack and get busy.
a mishmash of thoughts, plus a picture of monkey socks
A random mishmash o’ stuff today:
* It’s been a hell of a week – 12.5 hour workdays, which were nowhere near enough. By the end of each day, I was still too far behind, how does that work?
* I saw a friend I usually see once a week, and the evening I was on my way to see her, I thought ‘man, it feels so long since I saw her!’ It took me the whole trip to realize that I hadn’t seen her in 2 weeks, and that’s because last week I was on vacation. In Honduras. Last week feels like forever ago. And not real.
* Until this moment: for my vacation, I took the electric kettle, a huge coffee mug, a plastic cone for making one cup of coffee at a time, and a stack of filters (plus a bag of fresh-ground really good coffee). So every morning on vacation, my routine was to make a cup of coffee and drink it on the porch and knit. So this morning, I just made my coffee and poured a cup into that particular mug. The vacation feels real, I remember it. And I wish I were there.
Two sides of me:
* The not-so-nice side – I always get really mad on the subway when an adult with small(ish) children expects other adults to give up their seats so the kids can sit. What??! Kids have all the energy! They haven’t just worked a terrible job all day, they’re not stressed out, their backs don’t hurt! I’m sorry, if you’re 4 or 5 years old and there’s enough space for you to very safely stand and hold onto a pole, I am going to keep my seat. Bite me, adult giving me a dirty look.
* The nicer side – I have a friend who had a major stroke last year and who is currently in the darkest place of suicidal depression. She’s very brave but she doesn’t know that (or anything good) right now. So yesterday I wrote her an email that included this: “The bravery of us poor little frail people in this world, going forward as if we know what we’re doing, going forward as if it’s all somehow guaranteed (until something happens and we’re reminded that it’s not……but we go back to our old habits of thinking it’s all guaranteed). It makes me feel quite tender toward humanity whenever I think about this. Here we all are, with all our troubles, with the pain and trouble that we all bear in one form or another, with our small joys and our fragile hopes and plans. Here we all are, tiny little specks in an unimaginable infinite, on a tiny little planet whirling around a tiny little sun in just one little galaxy, here we all are, doing our best. GREAT. Now I’m starting to cry. I think we are all amazing, and that includes you. And I guess, then, that it must include me.” See? I can be kind towards people. Just don’t ask me to give up my seat to a 4-year old.
Finished the monkeys – will block them and get them in the mail to Katie first thing Monday morning:
one's a little smaller than the other - i'd bet the smaller one is more tightly-knit and therefore the one i knit here in Manhattan. looser = vacation.
blocking the monkeys to make them closer in size to each other; actual color is closer to the photo above this one, which came out weirdly golden.
I have a 3-month plan: I am putting all my ducks in a row, getting everything lined up to quit my job in 3 months. Period. I’ll teach, as much as I can; I’ll do writing and statistical consulting, as much as I can; I’ll try to do developmental work and rewriting on manuscripts for publishers, as much as I can; and I’ll make things and sell them, as much as I can. I’ll pare down my expenses, as much as I can. I cannot persist in this job that sucks the living life out of me. I’ll be 52 in November, and I say uncle. I want to have a life that’s not just bearable and happy on the weekend, you know?
This week, 3 people at work quit. Two of the editors in my group are going on interviews and will leave the second they get another job. Granted, I don’t know everyone on my floor, but everyone I do know is looking for another job. No exception. My boss even told me that she suspects our brand new assistant is already looking for another job. My company is based in the U.K., and there, it really is an enormous honor to work for this company. People stay with the company their entire lives – so very proud to work for this company. And I get it – it’s an amazing amazing and old company! It published the very first book. BUT (1) it doesn’t hold the same cachet here, (2) the Madison Ave experience is 100% different than the experience on that lovely lane in that beautiful town in the U.K., and (3) publishing is under such pressure now due to the economy and the transitional moment between books and online presentation of [free] content, we’re all turning into diamonds from the pressure.
Anyway. Lots to get done this weekend! No easy traveling knitting right now, as my knitting time is turned entirely to the wedding shawl. I’d hate to carry that in the subway – snowy white cobweb-weight wool, complicated Estonian lace patterns. My only other knitting alternative right now is the lettuce-green Ishbel, which is also a bit hard to do on the subway. So this weekend I’ll get back to the shawl, and I just have so much other stuff to do towards my eventual release to freedom. I feel myself getting lighter, just thinking about it.
in which I can hardly put two words together
Same as last week. Work (and life) are kicking my butt, man. Nothing new on the knitting front, and not much else to speak of. How boring. I bought some fabric to cover some new throw pillows for our living room couch, from Bolt44. We have hardwood floors, and an oriental rug in front of the dark brown leather couch. The rug has dark blue, some tan, a lot of brick(ish) reddish color. Here’s the print for the pillows, then:
So I’ll do that next weekend, something handy-dandy to look forward to, assuming I make it through this hellish week.
I want these pants, from this store:
soft cotton ticking fabric, soft elastic waistband, lightly rolled bottoms. heaven and red!
OK, I’m doing nobody any good here. My brain she is fried – off to have tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. Fancy!
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.