L'opera, mi amore!

Dear Knit Picks,

Your products are universally lovely, I must admit, and the prices are generally unbeatable. I own quite a bit of your yarn, and none of it is in the mental list of stuff I'm getting rid of. I've given you lots of my money, though admittedly not nearly as much as some of the people in the "Flash Your Purchase" thread on Ravelry. Those people are nuts, even you have to admit this.

But I'm moving in approximately seven weeks, and I'm on a mandatory yarn diet. In fact, I'm not really allowed to buy anything right now.

So why must you be so mean to me?

I managed to stay strong and not buy yarn, even when you and Webs sent me catalogs ON THE SAME DAY.
I resisted the allure of the Interweave Press Hurt Book Sale, because I don't need to bring any more books into the house, since I'm just going to have to move them.

See how strong I'm being? You should be proud of me! You should acknowledge that I'm a good person and a wonderful knitter and I deserve rewards.

What I don't deserve are emails that say, "You know that book on your wish list? It's 40% off. And discontinued. So if you want it, you should buy it now!"

THAT'S JUST PLAIN CRUEL, OKAY?

JUST PLAIN CRUEL.

I will be over here, sobbing hopelessly into my stash.

No love (at the moment),
Me

Suddenly I've been really productive, which is good, because I'm running out of time between now and Christmas.

( A lot of knitting. )

So a couple of you suggested, in response to my last post, that I should write a book. I don't know that I'm up to book level yet, but what I'm thinking about actually doing is starting a blog. In it, I would talk about emotional honesty, and healing the damage caused by bad relationships, and building healthy ones, and knitting (and crochet and spinning and weaving). Because for some reason, the crafting and the counseling are plied together in my thoughts - maybe because I came to them together, and maybe just because I needed one to work my way into and through the other. There's just something about knitting, the act of making something real, that just is satisfying in a soul-deep way. Like meditation, with yarn. And meditation brings all sorts of people to new realizations.

I don't pretend I have all the answers, but if I can use my experience to help a few people, well, that's what it's there for. Teaching, and sharing, so we can all grow together.

The name I'm considering (thanks to finch's suggestion) is Ripping Back, which both the knitting term for undoing rows of stitches to fix an error, and what you need to do to expose yourself in a way that honesty is possible. You have to rip back the shields, and the masks, and the facade that is the "cult of okay." So this will be a blog about admitting mistakes, working to fix them, and progressing from there, both in the emotional and the knitting sense.

What do you guys think? Would you follow me elsewhere?

It's 10:49. I have a ten-minute presentation and a five-page paper due tomorrow at 1:30. I skipped my internship today so I could stay home and work on them. I haven't actually started either one. I'm struggling with a complete inability to focus, a total lack of inspiration, and I just wish the semester were over already. I hate this class, I could've taught this class better than the professor, I question virtually every decision she's made in teaching (including the books she selected), and I just have not words. The last thing I want to do is write a paper for her.

The thing that really upsets me is that we read a book, The Scalpel and the Silver Bear, for my Women as Healers class. It's written by the first female Navajo surgeon, and I really wish I could write my paper about THAT, but we have to write about the absolute shit we had to read for the second half of the semester. Also (and I've had this problem in virtually every English class I've taken) I can't find supporting documentation about what I actually want to talk about. WHY DOES SOMEONE ELSE NEED TO HAVE HAD AN OPINION FIRST? MY OPINIONS ARE AWESOME.

Hate hate hate hate this.

Welcome to the world, little one. She buries the message in every stitch. The hat is a gift, not out of kindness for the new parents but for the child, welcome and apology at the same time: Welcome to the world, sorry we screwed it up so badly. It’s a new mother who tells you about her; you complained briefly about the unseasonable cold while you fixed her camera and you thought it was small talk until she gave you the solution. You’re still not sure why you’re following her directions, but you have a fleece someone traded a few months ago, and your hands have been pretty cold.

She prefers barter to coin, as most people do out here: a jar of honey, an hour’s maintenance on her battered Airstream trailer, a new story that comes to life under her ever-moving fingers. Everywhere you look is something she’s created, or something coming into being. The walls are covered with tapestries, all stories she’s been told. A new one is being born on the small loom in the corner; it’s waiting for the right color, she says, nodding at the spinning wheel. Her hook only stops moving when she’s actively doing something else; right now, she’s pulling a pair of gloves out of a drawer. “These are yours,” she says, and hands them to you. They are fingerless, burgundy wool, and they fit your hands as if they were made for them. The palms are butter-soft leather and you know without being told that it’s genuine. There’s a hat to match, and an argyle scarf worked in burgundy and gold that reminds you of home.

“Thank you,” you say, and she smiles at you.

“Come back any time,” she tells you, and, letting the door click shut behind you, you realize that she means it.

Also because I don't have an angry feminist icon, for some reason.

Tonight I'm taking a break from the brain-intensive beer gloves and casting on the Gryffindor Argyle State University scarf, now that I've found a proper gold yarn. It's double-knitting and colorwork, two things I've not done before, plus it's a pattern I thought was cool, so I'm kind of excited by it.

This evening's Women as Healers class involved talking about the mpreg story I wrote my paper on. The story in question is a "in the near future" feminist science fiction piece in which there exists the technology to remove a woman's uterus, place it in an artificial pouch, and connect it to someone else via a conduit implanted in the navel. It's a semi-surrogacy situation, without the legal messiness, because the uterus and eggs don't belong to the host and obviously aren't actually inside her. The sidebar has marketing materials, newspaper articles, and excerpts from a scholarly paper all using a rhetoric of pregnancy as a messy, dirty burden that the "busy professional woman" can escape from by having a poor woman of color someone else to do the work for her. In fact, the host who is interviewed is a woman (from El Salvador, I believe) who wanted more children but had to be sterilized in order to keep her green card, and so this is the closest she can get to actual pregnancy. The "main" part of the story is a man, a scientist, who takes his wife's uterus in order to have a son after the illness and death of their daughter. The wife, incidentally, isn't interested in having another child, and I got the impression that she gave up her uterus because she was tired of arguing with him about it, but Howard convinces himself that there will be a Magical Point at which she will become interested in the baby and then all will be well.

Most of our discussion was focused on the reversal of gender roles, and the way that Howard (and his privilege) processes pregnancy and others' reactions to it, using simultaneously the Mansplanation "I, a man have experienced this thing, so now it is valid" approach (did you know that morning sickness was not something in our heads, ladies? it's REAL! because Man Howard has experienced it!) and the rhetoric of "I am special! because I are a PIONEER! and if you discriminate against me it must be because I am a MAN HAVING A BABY and that makes YOU uncomfortable!" Also I understand racial oppression because my ancestors are Irish. (Yes, Howard seriously reminds me of Privilege Denying Dude. Google it, it will make your morning.)

Speaking of Privilege Denying Dude, I have a particular classmate (Poli Sci major, Women's Studies Minor) who is gay and Asian, and acts like no one in the world could possibly be more oppressed/stereotyped/racialized than him. He's loudmouthed in a particularly obnoxious way, and several members of the class (including me) get into arguments with him virtually every week because of it. Tonight's Privilege Demonstration was regarding Man Howard's attitude toward parental leave (which he turned into an argument about how it was DISCRIMINATION, REALLY, and if he were adopting a child and he got discriminated against, he would throw a fit. Which, I actually had to turn to a human being in real life, face-to-face discourse, and say, "It's not about you. Stop making it about you."

One of my classmates, a fellow knitter who's usually a little more aware than this, opined that she didn't understand why Dorothy (the wife) and Rosa (the sidebar host) were getting so much sympathy, because they both CHOSE to do these things. (Obviously she's never been in a relationship where it was easier to give in than to argue, even if you really didn't want to do something, because your partner was so gung-ho about it they weren't hearing you when you said no.) The professor pointed out that criticizing Rosa was operating from a position of white privilege, because framing her decision to be sterilized to keep her green card as a choice was problematic. (She did concede the point after I re-emphasized that Rosa wanted more children but chose sterilization rather than deportation; obviously returning to her home country was something she desperately didn't want.) So Privilege Denying Classmate stands up for her against the professor, saying that Knitting Classmate can't be experiencing privilege because she's a lesbian, and her oppressed state as a lesbian basically outranks her privileged state as a white person. I could not possibly be making this up. And then, not ten minutes later, he gets into an argument with another classmate about how she shouldn't treat intersectional oppression like a hierarchy. Because it's only valid when he does it, obviously.

He wasn't in class last week. It was so nice and quiet and civilized.

On the other hand, tag-team jumping him for being wrong is kind of fun.

At least I hope not, because I certainly don't have one. Except that I'm going to talk about knitting, because what else do I talk about ever.

Working on the Beer Gloves, and having some problems with the sizing, so I went poking around until I found someone else who had already resized them and I'm starting the second cuff with her adjustments in mind. If I like how it turns out, I'll rip out the first cuff and redo it; if I don't, I'll figure something else out. Knitting! It is a giant game of trying to figure it out as I go. I'm not thrilled with the way the pattern is written, and I'm thinking about writing it out in the way that I wish it were written. But I am lazy, so I might just make notes directly in the book. We shall see. If nothing else, the chart for the palm is driving me insane and I'm not sure I like how it looks finished (based on pictures I've seen), so I may get rid of that section anyway, or alter it a little. (crankyoldman, are you in love with the textured palm?)

Did some thrifting today, but didn't really find anything cool. Took a stack of books and miscellaneous stuff down to Bookman's and picked up the first and third book in Holly Black's faerie trilogy; I really liked the second, Tithe. Normally I don't read out of order but apparently the first one is mostly unrelated? (At least nepenthe told me so. If this is not true I blame her. XD)

We also went to two different yarn stores looking for the yarn for my boss's scarf; The Fiber Factory had Cascade 220 in a gold that I liked (California Poppy), but they only had one skein of burgundy, so we went up to Tempe Yarn & Fiber. They ALSO only had one skein of burgundy! So I ended up getting that skein and then trekking back to TFF to pick up the other. They're different dye lots, but Fred at TYF assured me that Cascade's dye lots were very consistent, and they look the same to me. So it's all good. I also picked up a darning egg, so I can darn finch's favorite socks, so he will no longer be heartbroken.

Afterwards, we went to a very nice coffee shop for some quality NaNo write-in time for finch and some quality homework-and-yarn-balling time for me. This week on Women and Crime: more reasons for me to hate the justice system! This time, it's inadequate health care, and how mandatory drug sentencing hurts children. I'm normally not into the Think of the Children!!! arguments, but when you have a non-violent first-time offender serving fifteen years for smuggling drugs for somebody else, and she has a toddler when she goes to jail? The person who's going to be suffering the most will be that totally innocent child, who cannot possibly understand why her mommy won't be coming home again.

As I certainly can't do anything about the inadequacies of the justice system tonight, I'm going back to knitting. The Beer Gloves, I can help.

I finished the first Ribbed Sock and I'm now going back and forth debating whether to immediately cast on the second, or finish the damned Seafoam Shawl. After I finished the sock, I got three more rows done on the shawl. I really just need to be working on a project that doesn't feel like the most tedious thing ever. My Knitpicks order should be here tomorrow! So I can get started on that. Except that they'll probably leave the box at the office and I won't be home until after the office closes, so I'll actually have to wait until Thursday. THURSDAY CANNOT BE HERE SOON ENOUGH.

I'm in a weird mental state right now; I'm writing a paper for my Women as Healers class, and I'm still in the transition stage between reading the source material I'm going to talk about and the beginning of the actual writing process. This apparently means that I'm profoundly dissatisfied with every sentence I produce, because I've written this paragraph three times and it still feels awkward. Like I shouldn't be talking about a paper I haven't started? I'm not sure. But the paper is (going to be) about the medicalization of childbirth through the lens of a nurse-midwife's memoir and a science fiction short story about mpreg. (My degree requires reading the weirdest things!) Pregnancy is a very gendered thing, even when it's not.

Thinking about this story makes me wish I had enough time to re-read Ethan of Athos and add in commentary about pregnancy in the Vorkosiverse. Maybe I will do that on the train tomorrow; I'm pretty sure I have it on my ereader (which I cleverly failed to bring to work with me). Science fiction and pregnancy! A fascinating topic.

Poking around, I just found an article on Junior, and now I'm thinking about writing my paper about mpreg. I love this class.

If I have learned anything from listening to knitting podcasts, it should have been that when you try to knit for a non-crafter it becomes a much more massive undertaking than it should have any right to be. Non-crafters don't understand how difficult things are, so they don't realize when they're asking for something irritating or impossible.

I mentioned previously that someone essentially offered to buy the Seafoam Shawl as soon as I was finished with it. At the time, it was about kerchief size. Now, understand, the pattern for this project came out of a book called One-Skein Wonders. I expected it to take one skein. Granted, I figured out that the yarn was a bit bulkier than the pattern called for, and so it was knitting up denser (and thus making less fabric). I ended up buying a 24" cable needle (because it was the longest needle in that size that JoAnn's had). So, fine, I used 3 skeins on it, knitted until it was longer than my cable needle, fit comfortably over my shoulders. It was a small shawl, but undeniably a shawl. Also I was bored with it. So I bound off, as I mentioned, and took it back to the prospective owner on Friday.

After waiting for her for 45 minutes, she says to me, "Oh, it's lovely, I definitely want it when it's done." I look at her, I look at the shawl. No needles in sight, ends all neatly woven in, very obviously (to me, at least), a finished object.

"It's done," I told her.

She wants it bigger.

So I ended up having to buy a longer cable needle, and because finch loves me, he bought me a 40" #9 Addi Turbo. Addi cable needles are widely accepted as the finest needles on the market. They have the most flexible cable, the smoothest joins, the highest quality needles. Plus, the coating on the Turbos make them the most friction-free needles available - which means they're really damned fast.

( Technical babbling about knitting )

I'm sure you're all bored by now.

Just as a reminder, I'm still taking commissions. They don't even need to be remotely geeky; I'm making some fantastic fingerless gloves for crankyoldman, who is totally my favorite person in the world today. (Sorry, finch. She bought me yarn.)

If you would like to become my favorite person in the world, plus score yourself some lovely handmade items for totally keeping for yourself gift-giving purposes, follow that link above, drop me a note, proceed to party.

Someone asked if they could provide me with materials, and the answer is yes! In that case, it would be 1.5 times the cost of materials. (If you can't remember how much you paid for the yarn, I can hunt it up and tell you what the going price is. If it's discontinued, we'll find something similar for pricing purposes.) (If you got it discontinued at Big Lots for $1/skein, we'll talk. I might use the words "fair market value.")

I'm excited because I'm about to do the last row and bind off the Seafoam Shawl. This was a stashbuster project that resulted from buying some of that aforementioned discounted-at-Big-Lots yarn, a Lion Brand mohair/novelty blend that is pretty to look at and kind of a pain to work with. I understand why they discontinued it. However, it was my first opportunity to work with mohair, so I snapped it up. (I admit that I bought it before I'd been knitting for very long and I also didn't know any better. Live and learn, produce a shawl, move on.) So later on this week, I get to find out whether the woman who wanted to buy it was actually serious about it. (I hope so; otherwise I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it.) With this project, I learned some things about breaking the rules of the pattern and ignoring gauge - the pattern called for a worsted weight, and I used a bulky, plus my number of stitches per inch were half again as many as the pattern called for. I went with it anyway because first, a shawl isn't a fitted object; and second, I liked the results I was getting. The original Seafoam Shawl is an open, lacy pattern, and what I produced was a warm, dense fabric that drapes beautifully. I may be repeating myself. Anyway.

I'm also making good progress on my ribbed sock. The yarn is a fingering-weight superwash wool, and it's not spun terribly evenly. It's not difficult to work with, exactly, but the more tightly spun sections are a little more uncomfortable to slide over my finger. I like the fluffy sections more. It's even enough that you can't really tell by looking at it and finch will love it anyway.

I should be working on my icon scarf, but I'm not.

I'm ready to start some new projects!

Well, I don't promise anything actually clever. I had a post in mind until I got to talking about ereaders with my co-worker, and then the time just flew.

I went to a grad school fair with finch today, and we toted home a million tons of useful information, approximately 4,000 pens, and a bunch of random stuff (including a spine, a brain, and a syringe). Grad school swag = FTW. Unsurprisingly, the med schools had the best swag. Not that we're looking at med schools, either of us, but I'm not going to turn down fancy pens or a cleaning cloth for my glasses.

Now begins the delightful process of figuring out what the best fit for us is.

We require a school in a reasonable part of the country (i.e., nowhere with a lot of snow; please keep in mind that I've lived most of my life in Arizona, so for me "a lot" is "more than none") that has a decent program for both of us. I'm looking at counseling or social work, leaning toward the former; he's looking at... something probably nonprofit. He hasn't quite worked it out yet. I've managed to escape deciding what it is I want to be when I grow up thus far, and I sort of feel like grad school is the point where I actually have to make that decision.

After we'd walked around the fair, he went back to get a squishy brain (because how do you turn that down) and noticed that gals at two adjoining tables were both knitting. He dragged me over and we had a fantastic time talking about knitting and showing off our projects on Ravelry (one of them had an iPad). I also taught her how to search Ravelry for patterns and techniques, and encouraged her to try cabling. It was fantastic.

And then finch and I ended up in a side room talking about law school with a woman who looked like she stepped out of a Japanese fashion magazine. She had the most amazing brocade suitcoat; I wanted to hit her over the head and steal her clothes except that she was tiny so they would never have fit me. I should have stolen them and sent them to crankyoldman.

All in all, it was a very productive day. Unfortunately, my own university was largely unrepresented at the fair, because they're having an ASU-only grad school fair TOMORROW, when neither of us can make it. Fail.