Knitting, reading, gaming

Those are the three themes of this weekend. Job's birthday was yesterday, so we bought terribly unhealthy food, rented videogames and movies, and gave each other permission to generally slack off. This will last for this weekend, and then we will feel sick to our stomachs and guilty for a week at least. But it's worth it. Now that we're both in school, we need to unwind periodically. Okay, so we've only been in school for three and a half weeks.

So we have a system: while Job plays, I knit; while I play, he builds his P-38 Lightning model; sometimes we both play, sometimes we eat, very rarely do we get any kind of exercise unless it is in the form of searching the dishwasher for a plate or digging through the piles on the floor for a disc, or in my case, a stitch holder.

I'm knitting three projects at once right now:

1. Ceris Morgan's Short Row Rib scarf from MagKnits (in creamy white "Inca Gold"). Pattern at: http://www.magknits.com/warm05/patterns/rib.htm
2. Shirley Paden's Cabled Shrug from Interweave Knits Fall '05 (my little brother got me a subscription for Christmas! Yay!)
3. Still finishing the Big Sack Sweater from Stitch'n'Bitch. Just have side seams left to sew and then block, but it's daunting because I'm afraid it will look horrible when I finally put it on... my blocking skills are nearly nil (I'm a poet and I don't even know it!)

I'm also reading five theory articles for Tuesday (three Foucaults and two Deleuze & Guattaris... sounds like a chic coffee shop, no? Maybe somewhere Felicity would work?)

I'm also in the middle of watching Broken Flowers, which is lovely but I feel guilty sitting still for two hours when I have all that reading to do. Two Foucaults today and then I'll knit the movie. Feel bad for Job, he has to work until 9:30 tonight. But tomorrow we're going out for dinner and then meeting some friends from school/work at the bar afterwards. The birthday thing.

Will post pics of WIPs soon, although maybe not the sack sweater if it ends up more sack than sweater.

Here's a picture of Daco, Job's family's dog (in Edmonton). He likes to snuggle between people in bed. Such a cutie.

Funny bird incident

Next to our building is an assisted living home for seniors. They have a large front lawn with two huge trees. On most days, about fifty crows sit in these two trees and squawk at anyone who walks by. If a car drives up the side road, all of the crows on the tree nearest the road fly, all at once, to the other tree. When the car has passed, they fly back. Or some of them fly back; I have no way of knowing if it is the same group. Today is hazy and it looks like it will rain, although it was sunny when I woke up. We had almost thirty-five straight days of rain before this. They thought we would set a record, but it stopped. It’s strange that records are set and broken for long periods of weather, as though long periods of rain or heat require months, maybe years of training. Maybe keeping a record of it makes us feel as though we’re in control of it. We can measure it; keep tabs; try to predict it using patterns previously established.

This hazy afternoon I happened to look out the window, and more crows than I have ever seen in one place were standing, not in the trees but on that front lawn. They walked with their noses to the grass, combing the area like police looking for signs of a struggle, or a recently dead body in a shallow grave. A car drove by one side of the lawn, and the crows jumped up, squawking, and hovered in the air, but they didn’t move, just flapped until the car passed and then settled back down, as though someone had lifted the corner of a blanket to look for something underneath, and then let it fall. What were they looking for? Materials to build nests? Worms that will be flushed out when it rains? I checked back twenty minutes later and they were gone. Only green grass where just a few minutes before the lawn had been black with feathers and poking beaks.

Monday Guilt

So my plan didn't quite happen yesterday. Surprised anyone? Right.

I did finish the Williams article. Yay me. I then watched TV for three hours until it was time to go to the movie. Then I got home, bickered with Job a bit, had some tea and went to bed. Planned to wake up at 8:00am, read the Jameson article, and go to school.

So where are we now? 12:16pm. I've read four pages (out of 22) of the Jameson article. I slept until about 9:30, drank coffee, ate pizza and worked on another NYT crossword (gotta keep up with the calendar!) until 11:00, tried to read the Jameson but was really trying to work out a four-letter word for "1914 Belgian battlefront". Fredric Jameson, while I'm sure he's a Marxist genius, is not a friend of mine. At least not today.

The movie we went to see was Fun with Dick and Jane, which was much MUCH better than I thought it would be. I actually laughed out loud a couple of times. Of course the stinky, jittery druggie next to me made it a little less funny -- he almost kicked my drink onto the floor about 3 times --

I liked the association of the Alec Baldwin character with George W. Bush... the "now look at this shot" quote was great, and I didn't feel bashed over the head with the comparison. Maybe that's because I'm Canadian and we don't get bashed over the head with Bush everyday... but who am I kidding? All the TV I watch is American -- except Rick Mercer and Corner Gas -- Yay Canadian TV!

I also didn't get to knit very much, just a little during Grey's Anatomy last night, but then I miss stuff like the track marks on the 11-year-old girl/boy's wrist... luckily Job was there to remark frustratedly, "Did you see that?" knowing that I had not, in fact, seen that. What would I do without him? Anyway, I will put off posting a picture because I have not knit as much of "lace and cables" as I'd like to... the pattern will be much cooler when there is more of it. I'm actually thinking of branching out into design and making a cardigan/sweater thingy with this pattern. I don't know about sleeves and shaping and stuff, though. Scary. The picture I'm posting instead (because there has to be something to break up my rambling text) is of Job's nephew. I'm posting this because Job's sister is due on January 20th and I can't wait for pictures of the next one! Jacob is about 2 years old now.... this is an old picture, but he's still a cutie!

Okay. That's enough stalling for now. Back to Jameson for one hour and then I gotta go to class. Tonight I will post about the wonders of Canadian poet A. M. Klein, unless the class was boring, in which case I will complain about how boring A. M. Klein is.

End-of-weekend Guilt

I should be reading:

from Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams
and
from The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson

but they're so boring!

So that's why I have Sunday guilt. Tomorrow is Monday and I go back to class and I run out of weekend days full of perfectly good reading time. But weekends are also excellent crossword time (just finished two NYT Sunday crosswords from my new desk calendar, the Pomegranate NYT sunday crossword one... gotta catch up with the date) and reading time (still trying to read books I want to read while I'm in school... when will I learn?). So Williams and Jameson are still sitting there, thirty pages of cultural materialism just calling to me, but I prefer Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy so too bad. By the way, this picture is not of me doing a crossword. I don't think I would ever have "ismske" as part of any answer. It's a screenshot from Lost.

Slightly incoherent rambling style of this post is due to two cups of coffee and onset of panic at the realization that half my day is over and my studying has not begun.

Or I could knit...
I got a 365 days of knitting perpetual calendar (no weekdays) for Christmas, and yesterday's was "lace and cables", a combo of a really cool Y-shaped lace pattern and 3x3 cable. I tinked and frogged the stupid thing 3 times yesterday before giving up. It was 11:30 at night and I couldn't get past row 5 of the pattern without losing a stitch (and thereby offsetting the whole pattern by one stitch) or repeating part of the pattern and getting lost. I was watching TV at the time, so I probably looked at the wrong YO and continued from a part of the row that I'd already done. Argh! I love knitting but I was in the mood last night for mindless knitting that I could give only 20% of my attention to and give the other 80% (that makes 100, right?) to season 1 of Battlestar Galactica (Job, my dbf, got me hooked). However, "lace and cables" is not a 20% pattern, at least not the first time I try it. So I'd like to give it an hour or so today and see if I can get something. If it works, I'll post a pic of my swatch. I'm making swatches of each day in the calendar, and then I'll make a funky blanket or something out of them. Right now I'm labelling each swatch with a piece of notecard, but I don't know if I'll keep doing that.

Okay! Enough stalling! I have a plan.
Finish Williams, then knit for an hour, then start Jameson, then go to movie with Job. (We got movie money for Christmas from his lovely aunt Holly. After all, the theory reading isn't due until Tuesday, and my Monday classes don't start until 2:30pm... delay delay delay!

A great quote

***Update***

I misquoted! And the whole point of the post was a quote!

Boys don't make passes at female smartasses.

is the correct quote.
Thankyou jamaal and sorry Letty!
-M

***

I just saw a fantastic quote and had to share/preserve it...

"Boys don't make passes and female smartasses." -- Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Not that I've actually found that to be true, I just thought it was cute.

the Balance

The title of this blog is from a poem by Emily Dickinson. Here is the full poem:

I prayed, at first, a little Girl,
Because they told me to --
But stopped, when qualified to guess
How prayer would feel -- to me --

If I believed God looked around,
Each time my Childish eye
Fixed full, and steady, on his own
In Childish honesty --

And told him what I'd like, today,
And parts of his far plan
That baffled me --
The mingled side
Of his Divinity --

And often since, in Danger,
I count the force 'twould be
To have a God so strong as that
To hold my life for me

Till I could take the Balance
That tips so frequent, now,
It takes me all the while to poise --
And then -- it doesn't stay --

She wrote this circa 1862. This is not to say that this blog is about God or religion or even poetry. This poem is just a marker of a significant time for me; it was the first poem I memorized, it was the first poem I can really, honestly say that I GOT, and it was the inspiration for my first and only 'A+' essay in English 310, a year-long honours seminar. It made me understand why Emily Dickinson is such a big deal, and convinced me that maybe I can do this literature thing. At least I can read and say interesting things about it, if not write any myself.

So this blog will be about my life, which means

1. my work towards an undergrad degree in Honours English
2. knitting
3. reading
4. occasionally trying to write (more sporadic ideas that go nowhere than fully formed work)

I hope you read and enjoy!