It’s sunny and beautiful outside, and a wonderland indoors. The coffee was brewing, blueberry scones were , the riotous armload of stargazer lilies filled the air with their dizzyingly thick smell, and the rough texture of made my hands crave to touch my Peasy sweater that’s starting to look like an actual sweater!

Happy Sunday, y’all -

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o happy day (o happy day)

On July 12, 2010, in FO2010, daughter, joy, knitting, lace, love it, shawl, by Lori
joy

happy! !

SUCH a wonderful, happy day for me! I finished the final little details of my old job, tied up every last loose end, left nothing undone, left on a very high note.

I finished grafting the shawl together, and it LOOKS GREAT! I was so worried that the graft would be obvious and weird, but you know the kitchener stitch is really amazing. It really looks seamless. Now I just have to weave in a couple of ends, then soak it for a bit and do the blocking.

Isn’t it great when the things that hang over you are finished? You know that glorious feeling of liberation and accomplishment and exuberance?

Yeah. I’ve got those going. After I finish the blocking, I think I’ll do the next swatch for Peasy, so I can on it on the flight later this week. To my daughter’s wedding. Two girls happily married, that’s another great relief, you know?

shawl blocking

blocking

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see? i TOLD you you should swatch!

On June 30, 2010, in knitting, sweaters, by Lori

Well, aren’t I glad I did this – I dutifully completed my (first) swatch for my beautiful new Peasy sweater.  Last night I wet blocked the swatch, and I just unpinned it, got out my measuring tape, and checked my gauge. Using a 3.5mm needle, my gauge should have been 22 st and 30 rows = 4 inches. But I got 23.5 and 31 rows = 4 inches. Here are my lessons learned:

1) because I now know from my Wowie Zowie sock lesson that what seems like a small difference can actually be a very large difference,

2) I need to go down a needle size, and

3) the fabric is going to be absolutely gorgeous, with the most lovely hand and drape ever.

Madelinetosh is not in danger of being toppled from the top of my favorite- yarn- ever list — especially not with tosh merino light in this world — but Rowan Tweed has scootched immediately to a close second. I think I’ll knit a Manu with Rowan Tweed after I finish my beautiful Peasy and an Austin Hoodie with TML. I also have enough yarn for an Inaugural sweater.

Oh dear. I think I’ve just become a sweater knitter.* Good thing I live in a place with a long cold winter. :)

With a nice long weekend coming up, I have knitting plans that include finishing Marnie’s wedding shawl and getting it blocked, doing some (you know, instead of saying I’d rather say ‘fun’) doing some fun on my Wowie Zowie socks, and maybe I’m just sayin maybe getting going on my Peasy. Last night was the first major festivity associated with leaving my job; 20 people I with came to a little party for me, and it was quite amazing. Much toasting and fete-ing and love; hugs and kisses from each one at the end. Tonight is a drinks farewell with my boss’s boss and my best friend, Thursday night is my writing group. Not much will happen until the weekend but it’s all going to be fun. When it’s good, life can be really, really good, you know?

*disclaimer and acknowledgment: knitting a swatch does not guarantee becoming a sweater knitter…there is still the ability to be in it for the long haul, the perseverance to finish all the fiddly bits, and (for some ) the ability to assemble pieces. The jury is still out on me with these parts!

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On my way to this morning, I was listening to a podcast – actually, it was just a snippet of a Studio 360 program in which people were talking about . A literature professor at NYU was talking about how, for the first time, her students were diagnosing (and dissing) literary characters. Like, “What’s wrong with Bartleby the Scrivener, he’s just depressed, someone should help him.” Like, “All Sylvia Plath ever does is whine.” Then Michael Cunningham reported that people sometimes tell him that they don’t want to read The Hours because they’re afraid it’ll bring them down, make them feel depressed. In the interview, he then said something like ‘is your hold on so fragile that it could be upended by reading a novel?’ He went on to talk about Ahab on klonopin, Virginia Woolf on lithium. A klonopin-ed Ahab might just say “ah, let that whale do his thing, I’m fine with him, let him go find a female whale.” Would Virginia Woolf have been able to write with such subtlety and clarity about the full range of human experience if she’d been flattened by lithium?

I am not against medication, that’s absolutely not my point. I take medication; luckily, I don’t have to deal with something tragic like schizophrenia, or a condition that’s treated by devastating medication. I have a garden variety condition, and medication just allows me to be normal, which means I feel happy now and then, sad now and then, angry now and then, frustrated, joyous, depressed, the whole complement of human emotions. And I’m so grateful for that! Because I want to feel all those things, they’re the electricity of being alive. Even when I’m feeling really terrible, like the emotional floor dropped and I plummeted downward, even then I’m grateful that I get to experience it. I am always relieved when I leave that bleak state, of course, but I’m glad that I am able to feel it now and then.

I am also not saying that creativity requires mental illness (or alcoholism). Perhaps because my own emotional life is so complex, I do suspect that people who have to deal with emotional disturbances have a closer connection to the experience, and talk about it with greater richness. When I’m extremely happy, I just don’t have a lot of language to describe it. I say this again and again, but The Inferno is a much more interesting read than Paradiso. How many ways can you say “light, warm, love, happy”? Which is not to discount the experience of that at all! I love to feel that, too.

Part of my job involves acquiring books in positive psychology, and I have a complicated response to that field of research. On one hand, I value research and writing about what makes us strong, about what characterizes resilient people, about the very real strengths that humans often display. On the other hand, though, it slips too easily into life coaching, into “just think your way to !”, into “clean out your closets and you’ll be happy!” I just did an Amazon book search for “happy” and found 34,467 results. It wasn’t a very refined search; some books in the list were against the simple concept of ‘just be happy,’ to be sure, but the vast majority were in the “just be happy” category. There are some outstanding books that take on this whole project, such as ’s excellent book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America. She got breast cancer, and found that so many people told her she just needed to think positively and she’d be cured. Of course the flip side of that is that if you’re not cured, you must not have thought positively enough. I love this book, and love her approach to the whole magilla. She says it all with much more clarity and verve than I could say it.

I do think it’s a giant mistake, our cultural move towards believing that we should all just be happy. It’s right there from our beginnings, right: life, liberty, and the pursuit of ? Let’s all pursue , get the hell out of my way you’re seriously interfering with my . Somewhere along the way, the concept shifted from the one Aristotle developed (using reason well over the course of a full life is . Doing anything well requires virtue or excellence, and therefore living well consists of activities caused by the rational soul in accordance with virtue or excellence.) is about being thoughtful in the action of life. It doesn’t say that is creating a trouble-free life; it doesn’t say that is about refining your life so all you do is the fun stuff; it doesn’t say that simply equals living exclusively with the feeling of happy. Maybe that’s one of the problems; “happy” is a feeling, and it’s great! But does not equal living in that state all the time.

We all have to figure this out for ourselves. For me, and well-being is patchwork; some of this, some of that, more of this, a splash of red, some black to make the colors pop, and you can only really see the picture from far away.

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location, location, location

On April 30, 2010, in big picture stuff, joy, knitting, by Lori

True in real estate, true in life: is everything. Well, not exactly everything – the knitting is really everything, but is an important part, since it’s just as much about the process for me as the finished object. I knit in two places: my cozy corner of the couch, and on the subway. I enjoy knitting both places, but the couch is much better. It’s my corner of the couch, with my ginormous Land’s End bag (really, it’s big enough to hold part of a cord of wood, which was its intended use, I think) filled with yarn and projects and papers and notebooks. Periodically I go through that huge bag (as I did during my recent fearless knitting inventory), but just glancing down at it while I’m knitting makes me happy.

The side table has a drawer, and it’s full of all kinds of junk – random knitting tools like a cable needle, a pair of scissors, my iPod cable for syncing it to my laptop, my card reader for my camera, an external hard drive, stuff like that. On top of the table is a stack of magazines – FiberArts, Threads, Craft. My laptop on top of them. Enough space (but not more!) for a cup of coffee. The table is squeezed in between the couch and my sewing table, so when I sit on the couch, I’m kind of in the midst of my creative space, even though it’s just a tiny corner of a relatively small living room that’s crowded with other stuff. Ah, Manhattan.

Since I don’t have very much time to knit, it tends toward an exact routine: In the mornings, around 5am, I put on a pot of coffee, pour a bowl of cereal, and go to the couch. I open the laptop, and while I’m eating my cereal and waiting for the coffee, I open iTunes and download podcast updates and sync my iPod, and read a now-tiny set of sites: gmail, statcounter, and ravelry (I check the forums and look at my friends activity). Now the coffee is finished and so is my cereal, so I pour a mug, return to the couch, close the laptop, and knit in the deep quiet for about an hour, maybe less, depending on the hair situation. I’m usually wearing a pair of socks I knit, and I usually pull a blanket I knit over my legs. And I knit. Knitting in this hour is a very important experience; I don’t think I’m actually thinking about anything, and I’m not knitting anything that requires the strictest concentration and/or struggle. I do that knitting on the weekend. But in the mornings, I think I am in some kind of meditative state, where everything disappears, my mind and even my self sort of disappears, and I’m just kind of floating. My fingers are making their small repetitive movements with a gentle and even rhythm, the yarn is flowing between my fingers, and rows are finished. It’s always a bad moment when I happen to notice that it’s 6:00; it’s kind of like crashing into a brick wall in some way, now I have to leave this state and get busy, get ready, get going, get to , get at it, don’t stop. The pleasure is primarily in the knitting, but it’s also in the spot. My cozy spot, surrounded by my creative stuff, my little safe and textured corner of the world.

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