Skip Town, Part Deux

Got to make this quick so I'll do it in bullet points:

• Leaving tomorrow for a week with Mom in sunny California.
• Finished the eyelash yarn corkscrew scarf and started a soy silk clapotis shawl.
• Finished articles about Melvil Dewey and the Great Bone Wars for the History Channel Magazine, and I am so damn sick of them that I hope I never hear about decimal classification or dinosaur fossils again.
• No novelizing.

So that's it! See you in a week. Unless you're Mom, in which case I'll see you tomorrow.

Wait Too Long To Take Up A Hobby

So I've made a hat and a pair of fingerless gloves, so far, and I've just cast on a corkscrew scarf in glittery eyelash yarn (kind of a beast to work because you can't see the stitches, but quite forgiving because...well, you can't see the stitches). And I've discovered something interesting. My microcassette recorder has a voice-recognition feature that turns it on when it hears sound and off after a moment or two of silence. Which means I can dictate while I'm knitting (*BUMP bump BAAAAAA*).

This may sound like I'm making a big deal out of nothing, but it's actually a discovery of some importance. The problem I have with first-draft composition, as I mentioned once before, is that concentrating solely on it causes me so much anxiety that I second-guess it as I go along, thereby adversely affecting the speed of the process, the quality of the work and any lingering enjoyment I might have of the whole affair.

I used to dictate while I walked in the park, which was ideal. Exercise, fresh air and perceived forward motion -- exactly what a neurotic needs most. But that's not always practical in the wintertime, especially on pitch-dark weeknights, which is when I have to write now that I work days. So any activity that will distract the internal censor while the lizard brain gets to work in peace is a great help. It's not quite a perfect solution because I'm not a particularly good knitter yet, so I have to send part of the lizard brain along to give the internal censor a hand with it occasionally, and the dictation slows down. But time and practice should address this.

Momentous discovery notwithstanding, I haven't done very much in the last two weeks, and whenever I don't work for a few days, I'm convinced that I'll never work again. But I transcribed my knitting dictation last night, as well as putting in an hour with the two articles I have due next week, so I feel that I can face you all again.

Word count: 19,593 (+2,111)

Take Up a Hobby

A bunch of us at my job have gotten together for a "Biggest Loser" contest. Each person kicks in $100 and on May 5, the one who lost the highest percentage of body weight gets the pot, which is up to $2,000. To complicate things, the firm's charity committee is donating $5 per pound lost to Oxfam. Long story short, since health and vanity are obviously not strong enough incentives for me to lose that last thirty pounds, I now have greed and philanthropy to shore them up.

This is one of the reasons I've taken up knitting. I figured I needed something besides eating to do with my hands in my leisure hours. The other reason I took up knitting is because of my friend Wiz Knitter (N.B. Daaaaamn yooooou). I'm sure she didn't go out of her way to indoctrinate me or anything, but what she did do was introduce me to the concept of the online knitting community, and from then it was merely a matter of time.

Because knitters? Are crazy people. Intense, compulsive, possessed of a majestic illogic. Here is a knitter who lusted after a particular fiber for months, finally procured it from a foreign land and then put it in her yarn stash where it stayed for a year before she figured out what to do with it. This is the site for the Knitting Olympics, where contestants begin a project the moment the Torino flame is lit and have to finish it before the flame goes out. Finally, this. Clearly any activity undertaken by such sumptuously eccentric people is one it would behoove me to investigate.

So I'm going to be making this. It's my first attempt at knitting in the round, so I foresee drama. But one must move beyond scarves at some point, mustn't one? Of course one must.

Word count: 17,472 (+8,020, but mostly second draft so it's not quite as impressive as it sounds. Sorry!)