Surprise
But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction — what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. ~VWoolf
I’m always a bit suspicious of photographs that show a tiny corner of something — what aren’t they showing me? Nearly anything can look great, or interesting, or desirable, if you just show a corner. I thought I’d show you the whole of my work space, instead of a tiny corner of it. Since I live in Manhattan, everything has to do double-duty, and there’s just not enough space. I don’t have an office, I have a table in the corner of the living room. To my left is the couch, behind me is our small dining table. Right over there to the left is the kitchen. So here’s where I sit to do nearly everything I do:
my workspace
On the wall are a couple of collage pieces by an artist friend, a photograph I took in Ireland, and on the top left, a woodblock print by Marnie of a whale (made December 2007), and a little print I bought on etsy. Since I took the photo this morning, you can see my French press (emptied of coffee at this point) sitting in front of my phone in its cradle, surrounded by various vitamins and hand lotions, and a little organizer for office supplies. My sewing machine and serger are pushed to the back, against the wall, which leaves me enough room for my laptop. That stack of books and papers on the right is apparently immovable; I get rid of some bits and others get added. There is a variety of paperwork, a book I’m reading to review, a book I’m reading, and another book I’m using as a reference. I suspect there are also various bills and checks in there, I’d better pay attention soon!
In the windowsill is my small Tibetan singing bowl (I have a giant one on the coffee table); resting inside are shells I picked up on Borneo, and a counting thing that belonged to my dad. Next to the bowl are two bronze horny toads (I know, horned toads, but who says it that way?!!). What’s not visible is that underneath the desk I have stashed various exercisey things — my yoga mat and blocks, a firm roller for working out sore muscles, and some yoga straps.
It’s probably smaller and tighter than you thought; I still feel that way every single day I come to my desk. I moved to NYC when I was 47, so I have a lifetime behind me of homes with plenty of room, storage space, closets, drawers, empty corners. Not here, bub. Not here. I may never adjust, and not feel so cramped, but I hope I do one of these days. For now, I daydream of Virginia Woolf’s lovely idea of a room of one’s own.
I should’ve titled this post The Unbearable Whiteness of Ballet
Last night I met my friend Temma for dinner (Indian food, so delicious) before we saw The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center. [and thank you again, Temma, for inviting me!] Let me start by describing what the performance meant to me, before I get to my primary point. When I was a little girl in the sticks of Texas, I used to watch the nutcracker on television each Christmas — Baryshnikov, as I recall. Remember how they used to put “culture” on tv, back in the old days? Anyway, I’d watch the ballet on tv and it couldn’t have been more remote from me and my life. I imagined it taking place in some other universe, not the one in which I lived, or the one to which I could even aspire. It was Fancy. Cultured, sophisticated, rich with meaning and tradition and beauty. Not my life. Not even remotely like my life. So getting to go — and to Lincoln Center, no less — was the realization of that little girl’s dream she couldn’t even dream to dream.
We were surprised there weren’t more children in attendance; Temma was looking forward to seeing little girls with ribbons in their hair, and I don’t think we saw a single girl like that. Our seats were on the 4th ring, right in the center, so we had an outstanding view of the stage and the orchestra. As a long-time flutist and piccolo player, I’ve played that music and could hear every piccolo solo, every note from the flute section. This production is the George Balanchine version of The Nutcracker, and it’s extremely traditional. The children who danced were quite good, and Temma and I kept wondering what it must be like to be the main little girl, what a thing for her. (But then, where do you go from there, when you’ve done that at age ~9, on the stage at Lincoln Center)?
The main thing that surprised me, though, was the supreme whiteness of everything. The dancers were all white — whiter than me, even — as was the audience. There may have been people of color somewhere in the audience, it’s not like I could see every single person, but if there were, there weren’t many. But what struck me and eventually made me kind of sick was that there were only really, really white people on stage. I find it hard to imagine that in all of New York there isn’t a single brown person worthy to dance in this performance.
all white, all the time
Coming immediately on the heels of the brilliant and hot performance by The Forces of Nature Dance Theater, I realize the contrast made this experience stronger than it might have been, otherwise, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.
So it was a mixed bag, for me: deep pleasure at spending that time with my dear friend, deep pleasure over the dinner, deep pleasure for getting to do this thing I’d been too poor a child to dream about — all those, great things — and deep disgust over the pure whiteness of it. Temma and I are going to see more dance performances in the future, but I’ll be more interested in modern dance and a greater mix of people, as will she.
This afternoon: Krapp’s Last Tape, with John Hurt! Another fantastic day for me. Happy Sunday, y’all.
what have YOU outgrown?
- a desperate longing to wear capes
- my crush on David Cassidy
- a willingness to eat a bunch of donuts at once
- my childhood dream of growing up to become a paleontologist
This list was prompted by walking behind a woman who was wearing a swingy hip-length wool cape — black and white herringbone — over black riding pants and boots. I nearly laughed out loud because I thought she was wearing a very silly costume, and then I realized it’s what she chose to wear today. When I was a young slump-shouldered girl, I wanted a floor-length gray wool cape (with a hood) in the most intensely-felt way. OH how I wanted that cape. My mother refused to get one for me, saying that I’d look like an old lady. And honestly, though I say this rarely, she was right. It was Texas, first. It was the late 1960s/early 1970s (I wanted this for many years). It just wasn’t done. Over these years I’d periodically think about a cape but never got past that, just thinking about it. I even bought that Folkwear pattern once, the Kinsale Cloak, but somehow never got around to making it. Again, TEXAS.
Seeing the woman on the street just now, I realized I’ve outgrown that wish. I have no desire to own or wear a cape, period. This is jarring to me, but it’s true. Remember how fantastic Meryl Streep looked in that cape in French Lieutenant’s Woman (Lef-tenant, for any of you Brits)? She kept my cape dreams going for quite a long time, but you really need to have long quays in foggy weather to make that look work as well as she did.
So farewell, cape wishes. And David Cassidy, and boxes of donuts, and Gobi fantasies. I’ve grown up. And it’s just fine.
the skies aren’t sunny, but at least this project is!
I’m not knitting Christmas gifts, just as I didn’t last year. If my kids need or want something, as Marnie wanted a warm winter hat that could accommodate her braids, I’m thrilled to make it to order. But just making stuff in the hopes they’ll like it? A fool’s errand, I’ve decided. The lone exception is my youngest daughter Anna, who shockingly (to me) loves handknit socks. She’s a high-powered behavioral economics/stats major at a fancy college far away, where it’s hot (but dorm floors are always cold), and the only socks she owns are the ones I knit for her. This is a kid who snagged a prestigious summer internship at Standard & Poor’s, who gets all excited talking about economics, and she loves handknit socks. Ah, the lovely complexity of people.
So the only Christmas knitting I’m doing (for her, it would actually be Hanukkah knitting!) is a pair of socks for Anna. She’s still a college student, so I have to use superwash yarn that’s tough enough to withstand college machines; this is KnitPicks Stroll Tonal (golden yellow), and it’s the Kai-Mei pattern by Cookie A, which I knit once before. I’m telling you, it’s an absolute blast to knit, and how often do you end up with socks that have a right sock and a left sock?
i really ADORE this pattern
I finished the first sock in a day and a half, and I’ll cast on the second sock tonight. When I finish it, I’ll get back to my beautiful Audrey in Silt.
Happy Wednesday y’all, and if you’re in NYC, stay dry! I have to be out and about all afternoon, and am starting to hate the weather gods, who give us reliably rainy weather on Wednesdays. Come on. Shift it over a day to Tuesdays or Thursdays, at least once in a while.
Let go of the past and go for the future. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you imagined. ~[good old] Thoreau
It’s early — only two days into my big life project — so it’s really premature to make any pronouncements. But I do have these comments, in case they’re helpful to any of you trying to pursue a similar dream:
Coming up with a routine has been a great help. Since my dream is writing, my routine is organized to make that as easy to begin as possible, since it’s the beginning that’s usually so hard. Initially, I have these things in my calendar, and I’m being a little bit rigid about them: Up at 6, do my morning page writing (~15 minutes it takes). Have breakfast. Write for a minimum of one hour, but no more than 1.5 hours. Get to work (dang it).
But here’s the genius thing. Morning pages are meant to be crap. Just brain dump, freewriting, keeping the fingers moving until you hit 750 words (or whatever marker you set). It’s meant to be junk. It’s meant to be waste. What I’ve been doing these past two mornings is using the morning pages to work out what I’m going to write. Just rambly exploration, getting me going. This morning when I was writing my morning pages, it felt like something just clicked and I completely understood what it is to be a writer of fiction. I was writing about what I was going to write about, and I started talking about the characters like this: “then the kids should do this. What would happen if the father did this? What would the kids do? The options for the father are this, this, and this. If he does this, what would the kids do? Blah blah blah.” It was also neat because it shifted me more toward fiction and away from just telling my own little story, which is my tendency. It was very neat. So then I was outlining how the action would unfold, after I’d figured out what the father and everyone else would do. Then I went back and made notes – so this is a place to really showcase the mother’s cruelty in dialogue. This section is a good place to get a description of the kitchen. IT WAS FUCKING AMAZING. Like some kind of real shift from navel-gazing diarist to novelist.
The accidental brilliance of this routine is that my morning pages writing has no pressure, but helps me get going. Then I stop and have breakfast, and while I’m making and eating it, despite myself I’m thinking about what I came up with, refining it, and getting more and more excited to get going. I have to force myself not to bolt my food — my other bad tendency, so this is helping me have to stay mindful and “be” eating breakfast — because I’m eager to get to the writing.
I had no idea this would work in this way. I’m great at coming up with schemes, usually overly-scheduled and rigid, and usually ineffective. That’s ok, you try something, it doesn’t work, you try something else. But this time it really opened the door.
this little guy was a real maverick.
Trey's jack-o-lantern
So there we were last night, handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, waiting for our wonderful dinner, listening to scary music, talking with a friend who came over to spend the evening with us. We munched on Katie’s roasted pumpkin seeds, Trey tended to the smoking pork, it was lovely.
The doorbell rang so Katie picked up her basket of candy and opened the door, and before she knew it a little boy walked through the door, into the living room, sat down on her couch, and started exploring his candy as if he were at home. His dad seemed kind of embarrassed and came in to retrieve his son, who didn’t really want to leave. He finally got the boy out of the house and down the sidewalk, but the boy broke free and was headed for the door again.
It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. We laughed and laughed, and wondered what was up with that kid.
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’ve had enough surprises, it’s better if I’m the one doing the surprising.” Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
I KNOW — Eileen, not Irene, but it’s in my head. Apologies if it’s in yours now. So far, at my place anyway, the hurricane is a big fat ‘meh.’ Some wind, sure, some rain, but really? Really? This is worth closing the subways, closing all the stores, evacuating thousands of people, taping up windows? There are leaves and small branches on the street in front of my apartment — see that often enough with regular storms, and frankly I often see worse — and that’s about it.
The worst part for me is having no voice, a shallow scraping non-stop cough, and goopy eyes. Yeah, that’s much worse. So no worries, loved ones who live far away and worry, it’s just a storm, and not even an interesting one.
Today I’m grateful for Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Well, grateful is one feeling I have about him. Others include envy, jealousy, awe, wonder, reader-love, and curiosity. This is a memoir about his father, really, who was a homeless alcoholic con man. His father wasn’t in his life growing up, except as a presence out there, a kind of vaguely menacing life lesson. His mother committed suicide when he was 22 — at least she didn’t leave a note blaming him, but like any suicide, it has a profound impact. He grew up to battle some of the same things his dad did, and he saw his life in parallel with his dad’s. If any of this is in your own history, I promise you’ll vibrate and cry with the way he describes things. If it’s not, you’ll read in the kind of awe people feel when they see a tragedy start to unfold and they can’t stop it. Here are some of my favorite passages:
I look at the photos, at Travis, look in his eyes as he speaks, somehow I’d learned to do that, like a tree learns to swallow barbed wire. (Travis is a homeless guy at the shelter where he works.)
“I was unable to throw myself in the ocean,” she writes, the handwriting more erratic as the painkillers seep into every cell, shutting out lights in empty rooms.
I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn’t a station you reach but just the general state of going down. Once you make it back, if you make it back, you will stand before your long-lost friends but in some essential way they will no longer know you.
Then there is a whole chapter that’s nothing more than the euphemisms and synonyms for being drunk. I keep thinking that’s it, but then the next one in the list is the most common thing ever, and it just keeps going. Tight. Tiddly. Juiced. Plotzed. Potted. Pie-eyed. Inebriated. Stoned. High. Swimming. I say off the wagon. I say gone out. I say a slip. I say in my cups. I say riding the night train. I say the drink. I say the bottle. I say the blood bank. I say drinkie-poo. I say a drink drink. A drink a drunk a drunkard. Swill. Swig. Faced. Shitfaced. Fucked up. Stupefied. Incapacitated. Seeing double. Taking the edge off I say. That’s better I say. Loaded I say. Wasted. Looped. Lit. Pages and pages of it, it’s stunning.
Nick Flynn is a poet, primarily. His father always said he was a writer, always wanted to be a writer, and Flynn actually is. This book is heavy, definitely, but not grim, despite the content. There’s a way he writes about his parents that is compassionate without being overtly so — he doesn’t ever say things like “but she did the best she could,” it’s more his emotional stance in describing their lives. It’s a remarkable book, one of those that grabs you and reminds you that there are amazing surprises to be found in the world, and this is one. I am so enormously grateful for him and this book, and for the power of words and art to transform a single experience into a universal one.
how far could you go, if you really really REALLY had to?
I was going to include “cutting off your arm” in the post title but thought better of it. Last night I watched the movie 127 Hours, with James Franco. He’s been nominated for an Academy Award for his performance. I always think I don’t like him, but every time I watch him I really really do like him; maybe one of these days my automatic opinion will match my learned opinion. Anyway, it’s the movie that’s about that real-life guy who was climbing all by himself and his arm got crushed by a giant rock, and he eventually had to cut off his own arm to save himself and get out of there. GRIM, right? I had little to no interest in seeing it — (a) I had my automatic opinion about James Franco, and (b) I thought who wants to watch a guy cutting his own arm off, not me sister.
It was amazing. It was just amazing. I couldn’t speak when it was over, for quite a while. It’s a visually stunning movie, with wonderful editing and sound editing, but the thing is that it is really about what it’s really about. I mean, it’s not about a guy cutting his arm off (though he does). It’s really about facing yourself, facing life, facing it all, in a very real and rare existential moment. I get extremely irritated by people’s whining about “but what does it mean, it has no meaning, blah blah blah” the luxury problems of spoiled wealthy people. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t true existential moments, moments of facing the abyss of what it really all means, and what it means to be here, and that in some fundamental way it’s just you and that moment, alone. And that’s what the movie is brilliantly about, and it’s brilliant. James Franco is brilliant. The soundtrack is brilliant. Everything, I completely loved it. It’ll take a while before I can watch it again, and I hope it stands up to a second viewing. You’ll want to have your knitting with you so you can look away and concentrate on something else during some of the more difficult scenes, but you shouldn’t let them make you miss seeing the movie.
So what’s the sweater part of the post title? Two unpleasant things:
- I’m frogging my Eve’s Rib Shrug. It’s just been such a pain in my ass the whole time, and it’s not going to look the way I thought it would in the wholly misrepresentative photos (i.e., it won’t be as long as it seemed and the actual shape isn’t flattering to my (*cough cough stomach*) figure. I love the yarn too much to let it languish. So yay to making a decision but damn to all that time wasted. I’ve learned that Carol Sunday’s way of writing patterns simply doesn’t work for me, and it’s not worth it. It’s a shame, because her designs are often truly gorgeous.
- I’ve also decided with regret that I’m just not young enough to pull off the Laar sweater. There’s the ample bosom situation, but more importantly there’s the fact that I’m just too “mature” for the style. And I’m tired (see above) of putting in so much time and ending up with something I don’t like. So now I’m considering my sweater queue and yarn I already have in my stash, and as I promised myself, I’m taking my time with the decision. No more leaping without looking. My regret isn’t that I’m too old for that particular style, it’s just that it really is a beautiful little sweater and I have such lovely yarn for it. But one thing ravelry teaches us is that there’s always another sweater.
My precious oldest daughter Katie arrives in NYC this evening, and she’ll be staying with me until Wednesday. She’s on a family mission of import and urgency and probable sorrow, but it’ll be so good to have her here. I don’t get to see her….or any of my precious kids….nearly often enough. Intermingled with the moments of difficulty that bring her here will be lots of love and laughter, plenty of knitting and stash-pawing, some movie watching and card playing, probably, and lots of good food.
OH! Also, just to feed any schadenfreude out there about the high life in NYC: this morning I woke up and went to the bathroom only to find brown water dripping [again] from the ceiling, running down the pipes, dripping down the wall, splashing in the windowsill, bulging the ceiling. The guy who lives upstairs has bad plumbing and we always have to pay the very icky price. So happy waking up, Lori! Just in time for company, too. NYC, you’re such a charmer.
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?
Tulsa is better than New Yo-ork, Tulsa is better than New Yo-ork. ha!
Even though I really do get it, as a Texan (you know we think the sun rises and sets on Texas), I get awfully tired of New Yorkers’ attitudes that NY is the best at everything, and beyond the NY borders ignorance reigns supreme. The attitude is so pervasive it’s probably invisible to NYers. I think this is what they mean by the “New York state of mind.” A very small example: in an episode of Law & Order, the cops discovered a sweat shop filled with dead workers, and while looking at all the dead workers, they said “This doesn’t happen in NY, this happens in Texas.” OH YES, THEY DID.
So it was with a bit of smug pleasure that I just read the rankings of most literate cities in the US. And you know what? NYC isn’t in the top 10. In fact, it’s #26…..behind (wait for it) AUSTIN, and even behind Tulsa Oklahoma! No offense is intended toward anyone from Tulsa, but even I was surprised that Tulsa is more literate than NYC.
If you’re into this kind of thing, here are book recommendations for each of the top 10 cities.
Off to gloat quietly. Or maybe not so quietly. Plus, this is Wednesday, which means Union Square! In the aftermath of another snow storm! fun!!
a clever segway into prayer. and NO, I didn’t misspell segue, thank you.
I know the post title sounds like the opening line of a joke, of the “priest walks into a bar” variety, but the truth is, it kind of was a joke. Yesterday was Wednesday, which — of course — meant my weekly trip to the Union Square part of town. Union Square is often more ripe for storytelling than even the Times Square station, and that’s saying something.
There were three notable things, but by the time I got home late last night, I could only remember these two:
just like this, but inside a gloomy subway station with fluorescent lighting
As I was walking through the station, approaching me was an NYC cop riding on a tricked-out segway. If you’ve never seen one in action, let me tell you this: they don’t go very fast. I know the photo to the left has a blurry background, as if the cop is racing along, but that must be Photoshop. They just kind of putter. So here’s a cop, coming toward me putt-putt-putt, with a helmet on and a big blue and white headlight flashing on and off. (He does look kind of embarrassed.) And walking behind him – and staying at the same pace, which tells you how not-fast the segway goes – is another cop who is smirking at the segway-riding cop. OH how I wanted to take a picture of the ridiculous deliciousness of this, but by the time I got my phone out of my bag I could only have shot the backside of the walking cop. And who needs to see that.
Then, as I was nearly out of the station, I started passing people wearing red smocky aprons, the kind people wear at home depot-kinds of places. Like a sleeveless shirt that ties on the sides. Anyway, in white letters on the front of their little red smocks it said “Prayer Station.” What? A few steps later, I see the Prayer Station. It’s a little stand, like Lucy’s psychiatric help stand, but draped in red cloth. PRAYER STATION, it said, in big white letters. And all the red-smocked people were standing around, trying to hand passersby something on paper. I guess the idea is that you go up to the prayer station and they’ll pray with you. In heathen pagan NYC. I guess if ever there were a place this set-up was needed, it’d be the Union Square subway station in the NYU part of NYC. The funny thing is, even though this doesn’t fit in my belief system, I thought about stopping because I’ve got an issue going on that’s nearly killing me and I’m willing to try anything. In the end, though, I just kept walking. They were gone when I came back on my way home.
Dang, I really wish I could remember the third thing. It was so funny. All the way home I was muttering to myself, like some schizophrenic. “Cop on a segway, prayer station, and WHAT!” “Cop on a segway, prayer station, and WHAT?!”
Happy Thursday, y’all.
how was YOUR weekend? mine was thunderblizzardy.
We got that blizzard, the one that gave the mid-Atlantic seaboard a white Christmas. There’s a lot of snow, yeah; every time I looked out the window (which was constantly) the air was filled with tiny flashes — little dots, really — of snow blowing sideways, gusting around in whorls. Not the big heavy flakes, just little diamond dust. It did accumulate, that’s for sure, and I’m glad I work at home. But really, the coolest part was the booming thunder and flashes of lightning in the midst of it, last night. Oh that was neat. Thunder in a snowstorm, satisfies my heart. Living on the plains of Texas, thunderstorms are such a regular part of life and I miss them. Here are a few shots of what we got:
cool - today, anyway. much less cool tomorrow, i'm sure.
cars buried in the drifts
still, so pretty!
it even started filling the subways!
One thing I love about my city is that they organize snow days in the parks — sledding and free hot chocolate. I just love that. So stay warm, y’all! Hope your Christmases and Boxing Days were great.
what? I was gonna wha…oh yeah! That’s right. I was going over there to do that wait why am I here? Why is the refrigerator open, and why are my keys in there?
Well, my attitude is to roll with it. Don’t fight it too hard, don’t waste time griping that this is how it is now, taking it to mean that death is just around the corner. Yes, I’m getting older, and yes, things change in all kinds of ways. Yes, some things are harder (but some things are easier, too!). And sometimes things are just different, now.
My short-term memory has a very weak grip, these days; if I don’t act on something when I’m thinking about it, odds are pretty good that I’ll forget and that’s that. If the thing comes around again, I frequently don’t even know that I’d thought of it before! New world, and all that.
So here’s how it goes in my new associational way of being in the world:
I’m working and realize that my face is feeling tight because the air is so dry. Oh yeah! I was going to put some moisturizer on my face! Walk to the bathroom, as I’m putting it on I remember oh yeah! I was going to refill the humidifier in the living room because the air is so dry….walk to the living room and get the tank, walk to the kitchen to fill it oh yeah! I was going to empty the dishwasher, empty the dishwasher as I put away the mugs I remember oh yeah! I was going to make some mint tea, go to the cabinet to get tea and see oatmeal oh yeah! I was going to have oatmeal for breakfast…..
My life is a series of ‘oh yeah!s’ now. I experience this in a delightful way, a never-ending series of eyebrow-raising, gasp-inducing insights. Ah! Oooh! Oh! Luckily, I always remember that I’d much rather be knitting. If only these manuscripts would edit themselves…..
want to know how i know fall has really arrived? dust on the radiators being burned off…..if you live in NYC you know what i mean.
One reason fall is so exciting is that it engages all the senses in a new way. (Especially true if you live in the north.) The colors on the trees are so vivid; the crunchiness of the leaves underfoot is so delicious; the crispness of the air tingles on the skin and in the nose. If you live in a rural area, I imagine you smell smoke in the air…….and if you live in NYC, you smell that very particular smell that means the heat has been turned on.
It’s the smell of the summer’s accumulation of dust burning on the radiators, I guess? When I came into the kitchen to make my coffee this morning, I felt like a dog because I paused, cocked my head and made a quick sniff, looked side to side, and sniffed again. Yep, that’s it. The heat is on. Which means the heat is on from now until next April or May, whether we like it, need it, or not.
My building was built at the turn of the last century – 1901 I think? Maybe 1905, I can’t remember now. I believe we have a boiler in the basement that heats oil — I see and hear the big oil truck parked at the curb now and then. I don’t know how the decision is made about when to turn on/off the heat, but it’s a binary thing, and we have zero control over it. The only way I can regulate the temperature in my apartment is to open the windows. So during the winter, the heat is blasting in my apartment and the windows are open, but that does not mix to produce comfort. Instead, I’m simultaneously very hot and very cold.
As I get older and mark transitions between things, the transitions feel a little different than they used to — more notable. Ah, it’s fall again. Another fall, one more fall, a finite number of them still to come. Of course there has always been a finite number of them to come, but when you’re a kid that’s not what you think about at the transition! (Correction: that’s not what most kids think about at the transitions, unless they’re dark little kids who read too much Camus, like me.)
Still, even though I know I’ll be cursing the radiators and the boiler and the incessant hounds-of-hell heat before too long, at this first moment I note the smell with a bit of delight. Fall is here. The light hasn’t done that cool shift thing that it does, but the radiators are on. Seasons turn.
my NY age is 28? REALLY? (said the 51-year old woman)
No one ever believes me when I say I’m 51. I know, that’s true for nearly everyone, whatever their age. But it’s one reason I don’t mind being 51 – the buggy-eyed response, the NO WAY, the “your kids are how old?” I think if people had no reaction at all when I gave my age, I might not like being 51 quite as much.
I started college when I was 36, graduate school when I was 40, and I finished my PhD when I was 45. What this means is that I spent the bulk of my middle years among people who were considerably younger than me. I thought we were the same, and it usually took a reflective surface to remind me that they probably didn’t. Still, I think it’s one situational reason I’m kind of young for my age, whatever the hell that means.
But I wasn’t prepared for this:
My New York age is “28″
This New York age puts you-generally speaking-into the young category. That’s what you were hoping for, right? Run and tell your friends. Then get drunk (as usual). Then sleep it off. Then pop an Adderall. Then come back and consider experimenting with a more mature type of New York life (just once in a while). Have you ever been to the Village Vanguard or the Living Theatre? Eaten at Elaine’s? Taken a date to Michael Feinstein? Before you laugh, check ‘em out and see what old-school NYC experiences you can add to the new.
What’s your New York age? Take the Time Out New York quiz and find out!
And I answered each question absolutely honestly. Which means I said I don’t even remember the last time I was out until 4am. For example. I get my caffeine from coffee (not cocaine). And still, at the end, I’m a 28-year old NYer.
Who knits a whole lot. They didn’t ask me about that one.
.
i thought Tom Wolfe made it up!
Am I the only person who didn’t know this? The origin of the phrase “bonfire of the vanities?” WOW I just learned something so interesting. I’m watching a PBS series (Empires: The Medici, Godfathers of the Renaissance); it’s a period I’ve always been fascinated by. I got kind of fixated on Michelangelo as a young girl and read everything I could get my hands on about him. Collected giant art books of his paintings. Etc. It’s truly an amazing period – Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Dante for heaven’s sake, Galileo (for a different kind of heaven’s sake). What an amazing time and place to live.
Savonarola - executed in 1498. Good riddance.
But when Lorenzo (“The Magnificent”) Medici died, this crazy monk Savonarola took over. He’d foreseen damnation and downfall from the indulgent and decadent lifestyle the Medicis brought to Florence, so at Lorenzo’s death Savonarola took over. He had the gay people burned to death. Prostitutes were savagely beaten. And one night, in 1497, he created an enormous bonfire and everyone had to bring their jewels, their make-up, their paintings (Botticelli threw his on the flames), everything Savonarola deemed decadent. It was such a big thing, it was called the bonfire of the vanities.
I had no idea – I thought it was just the cool title of a Tom Wolfe book (and title of a really terrible movie).
If you have Netflix, you can watch the series on streaming – it’s a great program, highly recommended. (And good if you want to get some knitting done at the same time!)
in which the world turns in mysterious ways.
OK: So I was born in a very small town in Texas (Graham, population 7,477 when I was born). I later went to high school in a slightly larger town in Texas, Wichita Falls. Outside of Texas, no one has heard of these places. (I just learned that Bud McFarlane, Reagan’s National Security Advisor, is from Graham. Not that that’s anything to brag about.) So that’s the background.
I’ve been talking with one of my authors who lives in Australia. One thing led to another, and …. get this. He grew up in Graham. He graduated from high school in Wichita Falls. And we share an uncle. His uncle is my great-uncle, so I don’t get the whole cousin structure, but maybe we’re 2nd cousins once removed?
I stood with my mouth open, reading his email on my Blackberry this morning on the subway platform. We knew the same people. We’ve been in the same living room – Jim Vernon’s living room, right across the street from my grandfather’s house. In Graham Texas. My author got a scholarship to Stanford, and off he went – B.A. from Stanford, PhD from U Minnesota, then off to Australia for a professorship. But he and I both know that living room on the corner of Colorado Street in Graham Texas, because it belonged to our shared uncle.
This has left me shaking my head today at the wonder and mystery of life.
Also, I’ve arranged to trade my madelinetosh jodhpur for a skein of the same yarn, but in a blue-green called cousteau:
madelinetosh eyre light - cousteau colorway
I’ll mail mine to her, and she’ll mail hers to me, tomorrow. I liked the jodphur well enough, but think I can do more with the cousteau. Pretty, right?
you know what they say about women.
I saw this come up in someone’s twitter feed today – Roger Ebert, maybe? I can’t remember. Anyway, there’s a site called Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet [hey!!], and it’s a collection of international proverbs about women. You really get a sense of a culture’s take on women by looking at their proverbs, I must say, for example:
She who offers a half-cooked meal is better than she who offers her buttocks.
— Rwanda [not quite sure I get this one, but I think they really like food?]
The thicker the veil, the less it’s worth lifting.
— Turkish [a universal truth in some ways, certainly not just about women, although it's not true at all about Truth]
A woman’s beauty makes fish sink and wild geese fall from the sky.
— Chinese [the Chinese are now my favorites, unless I've totally misunderstood the meaning]
Every woman is beautiful in the dark, from a distance, and under an umbrella.
— Japanese [hey! that's a jerk thing to say!]
A woman who knows Latin will never find a husband nor come to a good end.
— all over Europe [oh, you wacky Europeans]
I personally like proverbs that I’ve learned from women – especially old women – and more especially, from old Texas women like my grandmother, who taught me “Don’t worry about the blind mule, honey, just load up the wagon.” Or one from my grandfather Big Daddy, about some female relative: “She’d talk your right arm off and whisper in the hole.”
I love those colorful old proverbs. Personally, I try to work in the one about the blind mule at every opportunity. Do you have a favorite?
hard yarns and fun places to go
I had a wonderful weekend – got a lot done on the wedding dress (but not too much, since Marnie is coming for a fitting at the beginning of May), had some great food, got outside a bit, and did a bit of knitting on my blanket:
love the pattern
I do love the pattern – Totally Autumn, by Anne Hanson – it’s great fun to knit, and the scrunchy dimensionality of it is fun to touch. The yarn, though, not as much. I’m using Cascade 220 for the first time, and finding it a bit hard. Ravelry lists it as the most popular yarn, and I got it on a great sale at Webs, but it’s not soft, and the hand is a bit heavy at this point. We’ll see how it goes; it’ll be just fine for what it is, but I’m not sure I’d use this yarn for anything that needed to go against my skin.
we had joy we had fun, we had blanket in the sun
And in other news, I may just be taking an exciting trip in September. I’m not sure yet, there are some impending changes in my life that make it a little uncertain, but if I do go, here’s the masthead for that blog:
I really did love Vietnam, so much, and I’ve heard that Laos is amazing. I hope I hope I hope I hope I hope……….
what does your music list say about you? Mine? I love disco.
I just finished a long run of music that made me so happy, and I realized it was a mishmash of genres, probably a lot like yours. Right?
three times a lady – the commodores
crazy train – ozzy osbourne
jesus just left chicago – zz top
let’s get it on – marvin gaye
the world at large – modest mouse
seems like old times (from annie hall) – diane keaton
sugar daddy (soundtrack to hedwig & the angry inch) – john cameron mitchell
wilkommon (sountrack to cabaret) – alan cumming
blue grass breakdown – bill monroe
keep living – jean grae
ode to billy joe – bobby gentry
believe – cher
yellow dog blues – geoff muldaur & the texas sheiks
cello suite V in c minor – rostropovich
hablame – gipsy kings
light & day – polyphonic spree
souvenirs – john prine
liquid dance – a r rahman
sing – annie lennox
bang bang – sara schiralli
boogie shoes – k c and the sunshine band
One of my friends from graduate school did a lot of research on personality and what we know about others from their “behavioral residue” – i.e., how their rooms or offices look, their amazon wishlists, their iPod music lists, etc. So you see a photo of someone’s dorm room and you have a really good sense of them, right? He’s not very neat, he has travel posters on his walls, CDs scattered on his desk, a black leather jacket hung on the chair, and a dead plant. Based on nothing more than that information, it turns out that your description of his personality would be a very good match to a description offered by his friends, by people who know him quite well.
Of course we all know this and operate on it in the world. When you go to someone’s house for the first time, don’t you look at their bookshelves? Their music collection? You probably do it to find points of connection, but you’re also looking for more information about them. You scroll through a friend’s iPod for the same reasons.
What does my recent list of music say about me? If I’d jotted down more, you’d have thought “wow, she really loves disco.”
gee, I guess I’m really a sock knitter!
I am a social psychologist; most people think ‘psychologist’ means therapist, but clinical psychology is only one subdiscipline. There are cognitive psychologists, who do research to understand the way we think (and other stuff), developmental psychologists, who do research to understand….um…. human development across the lifespan, industrial/organizational psychologists who apply psychology to work, health psychologists who study mind-body stuff and health communication etc. Social psychologists do research on all kinds of things, but the bottom line is that humans are social animals, and our behavior is affected by that fact, whether we like it or not. Social psychologists have done some really fascinating studies – some quite controversial, like Zimbardo’s prison studies at Stanford in the 1970s, and Milgram’s obedience studies at Yale in the 1950s.
One very interesting line of research concerns how we understand and learn who we are. We observe ourselves! We don’t realize we know something, or like something, or do something, until we notice that we do it a lot. This is primarily a knitting blog, believe it or not, so let me put this all together: Apparently I’m a sock knitter! I didn’t know that, and if asked to describe myself as a knitter, I don’t think I’d ever say that I’m a sock knitter. (Note, I could also say that I’m a cowl knitter and that would be true…. maybe it’s that I’m an accessory knitter.)
I just noticed that all the posts showing on this page feature socks. And if I look at my ravelry project page – the sock edition – I see 9 pairs of socks.
Hi. My name is Lori and I’m a sock knitter. What do you know about yourself from observing?
yoko ono is following me!
It means absolutely nothing, but it sure made me laugh. I got this in my email :
To answer the obvious questions:
- YES – that says that Yoko Ono is now following my tweets.
- YES, it’s the real Yoko Ono. I saw an interview with her and she gave her twitter name so of course I decided to follow her. It’s Yoko! I love her! I follow a few famous people – authors, mostly – and of course I follow them and they don’t follow me. But Yoko followed me back, how bizarre!
I guess I’d better step up the quality of my tweets. Which means doing any tweeting at all. I just don’t get it, as I’ve said before! What would I tweet? “should i have another cup of coffee?” “getting ready to send another email” “i just read a terrible manuscript” “think I’ll knit for a while” PLEASE. I have a twitter account just so I know where the cupcake truck is, and which neighborhood the waffle truck is visiting on a given day.
Still – I’ll probably never again get an email saying that Yoko Ono is following me.
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