ratty blue stockings

NaNoWriMo 2007

2007-11-01T20:56:00.000-04:00

So about four years ago I started to hear little things round the internet regarding this National Novel Writing Month. It's been happening every November since 1999, and the gist of it is that people from all over the world sign up to write 50,000 words of a single discrete fiction piece between November 1st and November 30th.

If you do the math, you will notice that that is an average of 1,666 and 2/3 words per day. Every day. For a month. Now, if I write 2,000-3,000 words of fiction in a week, I consider myself productive. A 10,000-word month is pretty decent, and a 20,000-word month is something I don't even aspire to. So it was always a good thing that November, being the month of my birthday, has had a week of vacation in it every year since I found out about NaNoWriMo. If 50,000 words sounded crazy in a regular month, it was doubly crazy in a month minus a week in Paris.

This year, I thought I was OK for excuses because even though I'm not going on vacation, I do have a deadline in early December for a research-heavy feature article for the History Channel Magazine. Somehow, though, I managed to call to myself a gauzy wisp of an idea in the shower yesterday, about ten hours before the official start of NaNoWriMo, and that evening I signed up. Two hours before midnight I still didn't even know who my characters were, but I sat down at 12:01 am and started winging it.

So far today I have written almost 3,000 words. I am not the kind of person who writes 3,000 words in a day. Words trickle from me as though physically squeezed by the Gorgonic editor in my head. Today though, the editor is locked in the closet, because it doesn't matter if the words are any good. It only matters that they are words.

Misc: Google Envy

2007-10-17T19:57:00.000-04:00

So I Googled my husband yesterday, because sometimes I do simpleminded things like that to pass the time, and it turns out the Mike Hagen with the most hits these days is this guy:

http://www.strengthteam.com/home.htm

That's right: a weight-training feats-of-strength ministry. It's almost as awesome as the time Gregory Peck played him in 1957.

He is also an photographer-adventurer, at least one lawyer and an electronics company in Kansas City. And a minor character in a Star Trek novel, but that one's really him.

By contrast, the most popular Kathy Monahan after me sells real estate in Toronto.

Misc: Fun at Work (History Buff Edition)

2007-06-18T16:12:00.000-04:00

Last week someone wrote on the whiteboard in my department:

No Justice, No Peace!
Free Paris Now!

Today I came in and discovered an addendum:

(done 1945)

Knitting: It's Hortense!

2007-05-30T13:18:00.001-04:00

Finally, she makes her debut:

This is her best side:

And here is an aerial view:

The pattern didn't include horns, but she looked sufficiently like Barney the Purple Dinosaur that I needed to draw more of a distinction. I made them thus:

CO 5 st
1: knit all
2: purl all
3: ssk, k, k2tog (3 st)
4: purl all
5: ssk, slip st back on left needle, k2tog (1 st)
Break yarn and pull through loop.
Fold in half and sew to head, open side down. Shape with fingers into a crescent.

Now, to begin the three additional dragons I have contracted to make for the various associates who have fallen in love with Hortense. I'm going to be an expert before long.

Misc: Happy Anniversary!

2007-05-09T16:06:00.000-04:00

Dear Mike-

Seven years ago today was our Big Fat Geek Wedding at Disney World, and it set the tone for our "Happy," "Dopey" and "Goofy" marriage. I love you for your humor, your kindness, your blue eyes, and your toy collection. I love that you can watch Superman II as often as I can read Murder on the Orient Express, and that a typical Saturday night consists of us doing those things in adjoining rooms and not feeling weird about it. I love that you want puppies more than you want children, and I'm sure we can work out the pug vs. golden retriever question, eventually. I love that you support everything I do, and I especially love that you support my learning hapkido with particular gusto because it reminds you of Emma Peel. I adore you; I bless the day we met; and I forgive you for the snoring, I guess.

Misc: Fun on the Street

2007-05-04T23:17:00.000-04:00

So I saw a milk truck idling in front of a bodega in midtown. It had a bunch of cows painted on the side, as you might expect from a milk truck.

Only here's the thing. None of the cows had udders. They were boy cows. Steers, when you think about it. Yet the truck was unmistakably carrying milk and not beef.

I wonder if someone got offended by the udders and insisted that they be painted out? I can't think of any other reason not to put cows on a milk truck.

Knitting: Dragonslayer

2007-04-30T23:01:00.000-04:00

Waaaay back in January I made this dragon from Knitty. The pattern calls her Norberta, but I made her in purple with green spines and I thought she looked more like a Hortense, so that's what I called her. Unfortunately, she turned out too loose -- so loose that her stuffing stuck out of the holes in her head. Trouble is, I'm an arch-anthropomorphizer, so I can neither destroy nor discard anything with which I have endowed a personality. And I had already named her Hortense. So she sat in the corner with no face for months, waiting for me to either come to terms with her flaws or harden my heart sufficiently to do what needed to be done.

Last weekend, I decided my heart was hard enough. Sort of. I took out Hortense, stood her up on the sofa with my yarn cutter, and explained that she had no quality of life there in the corner with no face, and it was time to undergo surgery that would make things better for both of us. I had to reassure her very emphatically that I would knit her again even better in order to make the first cut. At least she couldn't look at me reproachfully because she had no face.

So I took her apart. It was awful. There was a point of black despair when I thought I was going to end up with a bunch of two-inch scraps of yarn. My husband, seeing how het up I was, thought he would make me feel better by telling me I was a dragonslayer now. It made me cry instead. But in the end, all was well. I managed to salvage most of the yarn and now that I'm using 4s instead of 6s, I don't need as much anyway. I've got her back, belly and spines done, and now I just have to work on the legs and wings.

But it was a very eventful time.

Misc: Fun on the Subway

2007-04-20T17:49:00.000-04:00

Graffito at the 2nd Avenue F station:

-RIP-

-died waiting for train-

Reading: The Brontë Myth

2007-04-12T19:10:00.000-04:00

The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller is a lit-crit examination not of the Brontës' work, but of the carefully crafted story of their lives, starting with the biographical sketch Charlotte wrote after Emily and Anne died, and reflected by her own accounts to literary London. Charlotte's account was the one on which Elizabeth Gaskell based her Life of Charlotte Brontë, and between the two of them they created an indelible image of the poor tubercular sisters trapped in a bleak country parsonage at the mercy of their abusive father and reprobate brother and surviving as long as they did only through the purifying power of their imaginations before dying pitiably young. We learn this story along with Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in school. According to Miller it's largely nonsense.

Charlotte could hardly be blamed for bending the truth to salvage her own and her sisters' maidenly reputations by making their isolated Yorkshire upbringing an excuse for their "coarse" subject matter. Contemporary critics used "coarse" in every other sentence when discussing Ellis, Acton and Currer Bell; I was heartily sick of it before I was halfway through The Brontë Myth so I can only imagine what Charlotte thought about it at the time. The trouble with Charlotte's filter, as Miller points out, is that it obscures the work itself by presenting it as having been done almost involuntarily, an inevitable response to the sisters' mythical suffering and divorced from any craftsmanship or talent they may have possessed. Emily is especially cheated by this treatment, being presented as some sort of faucet through which her novel pours without ever touching the sides.

I've always been more a fan of Charlotte's than the rest, just because when I studied Jane Eyre in ninth grade I was powerfully influenced by the idea of two strong individuals meeting across the class divide, whereas when I studied Wuthering Heights in tenth grade I was kind of disgusted by everyone's inability to have an identity of their damn own. "I am Heathcliff." What the heck kind of thing is that to say? But my favorite part of The Brontë Myth turned out to be its revelation of the historical Emily -- that is to say, its revelation that the historical Emily is unknowable, a Rorschach blot for generations of projectionists.

Apparently the real Emily left almost no record of her life, outside two maddeningly elliptical "diary papers" and pieces of a few letters. Her juvenilia (the tales of Gondal, invented with her sister Anne) are gone, believed destroyed by Charlotte after her death. She had no known friends, and her only documented interactions with people outside her own family depict her physically fleeing from them. I'm no particular misanthrope, but that's the kind of writer I only wish I had the courage to be.

Misc: Sick again, but now well

2007-04-11T20:51:00.000-04:00

The reason it's been awhile, for the two of you who may have noticed, is that I spent the last bit of February and almost all of March on a bad bacterial infection.

Oh, those halcyon days when I got the flu on Saturday and was back at work by Wednesday. This damn infection had me out of work for two full weeks, twelve days of which were spent with temperatures over 100. I had two five-day courses of Zithromax, which shook me by the guts, and experienced ramifications which I will spare you except to say that they fascinated my gynecologist, and your gynecologist is someone you pretty much always want to bore stupid unless you're at the same cocktail party or something. That GYN appointment, by the way, was such a surrealist satire of a Woody Allen movie I'm trying to figure out a way to turn it into an article. It might as well be good for something.

We were supposed to go to California in the middle of March, but even if I had been able to totter onto a plane, I had hosed through all my paid leave being sick, so we had to reschedule for May. I'm almost back up to speed except that I'm still sleeping ten hours a night and I haven't been able to make it back to hapkido class, in which I ironically earned an orange belt the very night before I got sick.

Misc: Siiiiick

2007-02-06T17:26:00.000-05:00

I thought I would be able to go a fourth year without getting the flu, but alas, no. I started coughing on Friday night, felt a little dowly with it all day Saturday, woke up with a stickerbush in my throat on Sunday morning and by that afternoon I had the temperature. It fluctuated between 99 and 100.4 all day yesterday -- pretty impressive considering that my normal resting temperature is 97 -- with the chills and aches and glands that felt like they were about to explode.

With all that, I was still able to engage in conversation, read anything that wasn't too demanding, and play Mystery Case Files for five hours straight (although I couldn't knit -- not sure why, but no way). During my February 2003 flu, I couldn't focus on a page, couldn't complete a sentence, and couldn't commit to any kind of narrative, which prevented most TV watching too. Fortunately the Westminster Kennel Club dog show coincided with the two days of my highest fever, and I watched the whole thing. It was perfect. I didn't have to retain any information for more than ninety seconds, nothing loud or sudden ever happened, and cute doggies!

Last night I started hacking up the component parts of the stickerbush, and my temperature started to drop. Today, it's still not normal and my throat still kills me, but I no longer have the feeling that I'd cheerfully commit suicide just to stop the pain, if only I had enough energy. I'm sure I'll be feeling that again tomorrow when I go back to work.

Misc: More Fun at Work

2007-01-26T20:48:00.000-05:00

Heard over the fire safety loudspeaker: "Due to construction workers in the building, you may notice an odor."

Misc: Fun at Work

2007-01-09T17:48:00.000-05:00

So, because I don't (yet?) make a living at the freelance writing, I have a fulltime desk-jockey job doing legal word processing for a big corporate law firm in Midtown. It's relatively painless in a McJob kind of way, but it wears down the old creativity after awhile, so I've been known to use unconventional methods to try and head-trip myself into thinking I'm doing something else. Before last fall's trip to Disney World I would listen to ride soundtracks on the subway so I could feel like I was on a ride. When I got back, I brought in my monkey-head coconut from the Polynesian Hotel luau to drink my water out of. Recently that's gotten kind of tired, so I've started listening to James Bond soundtracks on my way into the building so I can think that I might kill someone while I'm there. It's far more interesting to come into a Manhattan high-rise when you're infiltrating it than when you're just coming to edit contracts.

Reading: Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

2007-01-05T19:20:00.000-05:00

Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade looks at the years from 1920 to 1930 through the lives of four professional female writers: Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker and Edna Ferber.

I didn't know Zelda Fitzgerald was a professional in her own time but it seems she wrote both articles and short stories that were published under her name together with Scott's and earned a reasonable chunk of change thereby. Scott himself would alternately bristle and scoff when Zelda described herself as a writer; I guess her stuff was good enough for him to put his name on but not good enough for her to derive an identity from it. Or something. Truth be told, I can't read about Zelda Fitzgerald without intense frustration, because she's so hyperfeminine that she gets my back up but her husband was such a piece of work that I can't help being on her side when sides are being picked.

Edna Ferber was the only one of the four about whom I'd never read and I left wanting more because she seems to have been the only one who "survived," in a way. She died in 1968 at the age of 82 in her own home and unmarried. The Amazon review says she suffers in comparison with her more colorful colleagues but compared to the needy, suicidal Parker and the perpetually adolescent Millay, not to mention Zelda Fitzgerald who died at 47 in a mental home -- well, the best stories don't always make the happiest lives, evidently. There's a moral in there somewhere.

Knitting: Uh Oh

2007-01-04T17:23:00.000-05:00

I can go on for months deluding myself that I merely dabble in knitting until something occurs to warn me that I will swiftly become a Knitter with a capital Kn if I don't watch out.

Yesterday on the subway I earned my Knitting Scout Obsessive's Badge when a small girl of about three got on the uptown F train with her dad. She was riding one of those little pedal-cars that turn into strollers by the addition of a long pole manipulated by the aforementioned dad; she had a tangle of blonde curls on her head and a pair of amusing sunglasses on her face; around her neck was a handknitted scarf like autumn itself spun into gossamer silk.

I looked at this picture of precious, whimsical youth, tended with loving care, and I thought: "Well, if it isn't Crystal Palace Splash in the Turning Leaves colorway. I wonder how long it took to knit?"

Misc: Erfolgtraurigkeit

2007-01-03T20:27:00.000-05:00

It's the opposite of Schadenfreude, according to the coinage of David Baddiel in the Times of London in the fall of 2005: success-sadness, the feeling described by Gore Vidal when he wrote: "Whenever a friend of mine succeeds, a little something in me dies." Consider it a gift from me to those of you for whom such a concept would be useful. Come on; I know you're out there.

I can't be the only person who has one acquaintance by whose unremitting success I can always be kept humble no matter what I accomplish. In my case it's an old college friend who I'm not going to identify even by gender, although anyone who knew me in college will immediately know who I'm talking about since this person was clearly branded in gold on the forehead from the day said person was born. The person has everything he/she has ever wished for to my knowledge: a fulfilling career in the arts without the concomitant hassle of fame; a spouse and career partner of more than a decade's mellow vintage; a young child whose rearing will never curtail the aforesaid career in the arts due to the unparalleled free childcare provided by its grandmother; homeownership in quite an expensive area of a very expensive city.

Does it turn your stomach like it turns mine? It gets worse. Due to talent, diligence, confidence and intelligence, this horrible person deserves every bit of it. It makes me want to chew off my own ears.

Misc: 2007 Goals

2007-01-02T17:23:00.000-05:00

Since my keynote 2006 accomplishments were quitting my novel, losing my cat and gaining eight unneeded pounds, my substantive goal for the coming year is the modest one of not doing anything worse.

On a separate but related note, of the seven things I either knit or attempted to knit for Christmas presents, only one turned out exactly as I had planned. I'm told that's part of the fascination of knitting, but I have my own opinion about that.

I will say for the Christmas knitting, however, that I knit about ten miles of alpaca and I'm still not sick of it. Mohair did not stand up to this test, so I think I've found my new pet fiber.

Cat: Goodbye

2006-09-08T18:31:00.000-04:00

Jamie's diabetes finally got the better of us and we had to let him go on Wednesday. It was one of those grown-up decisions where you can do the right thing and still feel like shit about it. Wednesday night was pretty lousy -- lots of wine and several episodes of Futurama figured largely. But it gets easier every day, and our friends and family have let us know we're not alone. I'll say one thing though: it's harder than ever to be an agnostic at a time like this. I always smile a little at the "paws down from the Rainbow Bridge" kind of talk, but it's an awfully comforting thought when you need it.

Maybe someday when we have gotten past the pain and worry and we only remember the happiness we had with Jamie, we'll be ready to get another cat. Because writers have to have cats. It's one of the rules, duh.

Cat: No Holiday For You!

2006-07-12T18:17:00.000-04:00

Jamie has given us a terrible week starting with getting very, very sick on Monday afternoon, July 3rd. On Tuesday morning we took him to the vet (the expensive emergency vet because it was a holiday, natch) and he has been there ever since. By Saturday he was even worse and we were starting to talk about putting him down, but the vets worked a miracle and now it looks like we can bring him home tomorrow.

He's just a little guy but our home has been awfully empty without him. I got him in January of 1995 when he was four months old, and even though we moved in with Mike less than two years later and have been a family of three for almost a decade, Jamie still kind of thinks that he and I are the couple and Mike just lives with us. They get along great -- they've even started watching television together, which tickles me when I go into the living room and they're both engrossed in Star Wars -- but there's no doubt that Jamie is my cat.

He's a cuddlesome sort and can go on about asking for a lap, but he's still got quite a bit of devil in him. You have to be careful about walking past him, because he can wake from a sound sleep in an instant and whap you on the ankle. He's also opened a vein on me more than once: it starts with the whap, and then he evidently feels that while he's got me there he might as well feel that sweet human flesh between his teeth. His regular vet has labeled him "cage aggressive" for that behavior, which I've tried to explain to Jamie is a terrible blow to his reputation.

In November of 2003 he was diagnosed with diabetes. It was the first time I'd had to deal seriously with the question of his mortality, and it was quite a blow; I've known Jamie longer than I've known most people in my life, after all. We had to learn to give him shots twice a day, which was more traumatic for us than for him. He got very old in the summer of 2004, with neuropathy in his legs that made him stagger, and we were worried for awhile. Changing his insulin did wonders though, and he got young again, without too much trouble until just this past week.

"Acute gastroenteritis" they called it, and just when they brought it under control his diabetes kicked in from lack of food and he became ketoacidotic. I went to visit him and he didn't seem to care; he just sat and suffered with half closed eyes and laboring breath. But aggressive drug therapy and excellent supportive care managed to save him; he started eating on Monday and they've been weaning him off the drugs ever since. Now when I visit he sits in my lap and purrs, just like at home, and shoves his little head into my belly so he can smell me and not the disinfectant.

I'll be getting my bonus on Friday. It's a record bonus this year, and it will just about cover the vet bill (Jamie always helps me spend my bonus; last year it was food allergies). I think I'm going to spend some extra money some goodies for the vets, too. They gave me such a blessing by saving my friend for me; it's the least I can do.

Misc: How Not to Write a Novel

2006-06-16T19:16:00.000-04:00

Because the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I've started working on my novel again. From the beginning, of course; grave-robbing the old dead novel would make far too much sense. Actually, while I'm still calling it The Amateurs and it's still a caper story with overtones of magical realism about two professional jewel thieves trying to leave the business, everything else about it is so different that there is nothing left from which to rob. And that's OK.

I've been working very sporadically on the new outline for several weeks, and I finally started the first-draft composition on Monday. I'm up to about two thousand words, which is practically none, but I can't think too hard about how many I still have left to write (78,000!) or I'll stop cold and start doing useful things with my spare time, like keeping my apartment clean or learning carpentry, and that would never do.

In any case, I probably won't allude to it very much here. I found the running word count on How Not To Write A Novel to be a failsafe ambition-killer -- like dieting, it made me focus totally on results to the detriment of any healthy or effective process. I learned from it though, and the most important thing I learned is that I am so bogged down by fear of failure that I have to put myself through some amazingly gymnastic head-trips in order to get anything done. Also like dieting, now that I think about it.

Reading: My Family and Other Animals

2006-05-01T19:04:00.000-04:00

I have loved Gerald Durrell's work since someone gave me a copy of A Zoo In My Luggage for airplane reading in my very early youth; to me, Lawrence Durrell is merely Gerald's older and less funny brother, a viewpoint which would no doubt pain them both. These days, A Zoo In My Luggage makes me a little uncomfortable, being about a white man who goes to Africa and surrounds himself with Cameroonian servants who call him "Masa," but I still read it for the animals, which are classic to the point of being immortal.

In the introduction to My Family and Other Animals, Durrell writes "This is the story of a five-year sojourn that I and my family made on the Greek island of Corfu. It was originally intended to be a mildly nostalgic account of the natural history of the island, but I made a grave mistake by introducing my family into the book in the first few pages. Having got themselves on paper, they then proceeded to establish themselves and invite various friends to share the chapters."

They are also what makes the book laugh-out-loud-till-your-nose-runs-and-people-on-the-subway-look-at-you-strange funny. The passages on Corfu's animal and plant life are indeed beautiful, almost poetic, but the crazy people in and surrounding the Durrell family are the kinds of characters who could only have been invented -- it astonishes me that they actually existed outside someone's fevered imagination. Larry, obsessed with books; Leslie, obsessed with guns; Margo, obsessed with herself; Gerry, obsessed with animals; and towering above them all (only in the metaphorical sense, as she was apparently about four feet ten), their indomitably eccentric Mother: passively but surely focusing all their individual oddities into a grand, tidelike surge of family strangeness.

My favorite thing about Durrell's style in MFaOA (also its sequels Birds, Beasts and Relatives and Fauna and Family) is that, while the book is written in the first person, he never quotes himself. Everyone else "talks," but Gerry merely tells us what he said. The effect is one of a slightly drunk raconteur telling the story of his childhood long, long afterward.

Misc: John Williams and the New York Philharmonic

2006-04-27T12:15:00.000-04:00

Last night I thought I would humor my husband by going with him to Lincoln Center, to watch John Williams conduct the New York Philharmonic in a program of his own and Bernard Herrmann's film music, with guest speakers Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. I was pretty tired and the place was packed to the rafters, which was where we were sitting, and I'm not so big a movie fan of late so I didn't know if I would have a very good time. I was quite wrong and how glad I am.

The first half of the program was Williams conducting Herrmann's music and Martin Scorsese talking about it, which was just sufficient degrees of separation that it was more informative than entertaining. Scorsese was reading pretty evidently from a prepared script, which was perfectly fine and very educational, but once or twice I wondered if he'd glanced at it at all before he came out or if that was his first gander. The music was great, of course -- there was a wonderful Psycho montage with accompanying film -- and Williams is obviously an enthusiast. It's just that it was a little academic: an homage, but not a particularly emotional one. Scorsese loosened up a little talking about his own Taxi Driver, which was Herrmann's last score, but all in all the most interesting thing I learned before the intermission was that Martin Scorsese is not a tall man. At all.

But the second half, with Steven Spielberg, was magic, my God. John Williams conducting his own film music that he wrote for that guy right there in what is surely one of the most prolific collaborations in the history of the medium, was something almost otherworldly. Spielberg came out, acknowledged the earthshattering applause that must follow him wherever he goes, and when we all shut up, began "Movies are made from flashes of light," and I immediately got chills that I haven't lost yet. He loves movies, and hearing him talk about them is like a master class. He talked a lot about process and creative decision-making, which seems very active, but the thing that struck me most was a sense not of creating a story but of finding the story and giving it the space to tell itself.

The best part of the program was the last fifteen minutes of E.T., with accompanying film. The movie's so good that I managed to forget for long stretches that the orchestra was there, until I glanced away from the screen and realized "Oh! You guys!" What's funny is that everyone in the audience was there because they'd seen the movie over and over again, but we still all totally lost our shit when E.T. made the bikes fly. What must it be like to be Steven Spielberg and experience that from an audience? Twenty years later.

Star Wars wasn't on the program, but Williams gave it as one of the encores. It was the last one -- people were just about throwing their underwear at him before he finally put out -- but it paid off, is what I'm saying. Nothing like it.

Knitting: Splash accent scarf

2006-04-18T14:08:00.000-04:00

So I finished the skinny accent scarf in Crystal Palace Splash. It looks like I cruelly lopped a really long tail off of a really short Muppet, but I don't care.

Thus:

It took me three tries, embarrassingly. The first one, knit lengthwise, I had to rip up because it was too short. The second one, also knit lengthwise, I had to rip up because in the middle of casting off I dorkily got distracted and began straight knitting again, and I couldn't figure out how to save it because I can't see the stitches in eyelash yarn. The third one worked, because it would take some stupid that even I haven't seen in years to screw up the "cast on 4 and knit till the yarn's gone" technique.

Here it is on a model, before the model stopped cooperating:

You can tell from the ears that he's not quite diggin' it.

Reading: To the Lighthouse

2006-04-14T12:04:00.000-04:00

I've discovered that reading Virginia Woolf puts me in kind of an irritable mood. So far I've only read Flush, A Room of One's Own and now To the Lighthouse, but they all feature cultural bondage in one form or another, particularly the bondage of love. After awhile I begin to feel as though the mere presence of other beings in the world imposes an unbearable pressure on me, and it gets worse and worse as I go along until eventually I have to take the cat off my lap and put him in another room.

I'm not sure what Woolf felt so damn bound about, in the matter of love at least, since her husband was by all accounts supportive to the point of self-effacement. Maybe it was just that she was nuts -- the mental illness that led to her suicide was manic-depression, I believe. Personally, if I'd been asked, I would have chosen a wildly successful marriage and taken my chances on mediocrity in everything else (which is fortunate because that's pretty much how it's worked out for me so far).

I was about to continue "so it makes even less sense that I'd be affected that way," but on thinking about it I realize that I'm exactly wrong about that. If you love happily, your actions are influenced by the people you love down to the very last nuance, whether they set out to influence you or not -- even more so, I believe, than if you're unhappy. I can see why someone like Virginia Woolf would feel bound by that.

Knitting: Veroniguel bootees

2006-04-10T14:55:00.000-04:00

I have made a pair of bootees out of Kid Merino with a Splash embellishment for the impending baby of my dear friends Veronica and Miguel. I haven't checked with Guinness on this, but I'm pretty sure I've managed to make the cutest bootees of all time.

Thus:

It's kind of hard for me to make things that come in twos because, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person with this problem, I make one of them and it's interesting and fun and a challenge to see if I can make it come out, but then the second one is a huge damn chore. These took me two weeks, which is ridiculous, and the only reason I finished them at all is that the baby is due, like, any second and will undoubtedly have two feet, unless Veronica and Miguel have extraterrestrial DNA that they're not telling me about, so there was no way to avoid it any longer.

Anyway, Splash is my new favorite novelty yarn. I'm making a skinny accent scarf out of it next.

Here I Yam

2006-04-05T12:04:00.000-04:00

I couldn't keep posting at How Not To Write A Novel when I stopped writing a novel, because there's really not much more to say about it after that, but one has to have someplace to discuss one's interests, doesn't one, and I only know two people in real life who I can talk to about reading and only one and one-half people who I can talk to about knitting, and in any case I'm not too crazy about real-life people, let's be honest, living in New York as I do and riding the subway with hundreds of them every single day of my life, and out of a couple of hundred people there's always one who hasn't showered that morning and another one who farts.

Where was I? Oh, right.

So from the ashes of How Not To Write A Novel rises ratty blue stockings, a title I chose because it conflates my current interest in knitting with my perennial interest in reading. I've always liked the designation "blue stocking" because I was born to be an old maid librarian who keeps twenty cats, but added "ratty" because I'm a married library school dropout with only one cat, so I'm clearly not very good at it.

Reading: To The Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
Knitting: Kid Merino baby bootees (sage green)
Cat: Cranky, because it's winter again out of fricking nowhere and he hates being cold.