the Village Knittiot

I live in a town where the height of marketing ingenuity seems to consist of paying someone to stand on a corner holding a sign advertising The Biggest Sale EVER! or some other life changing event of the utmost importance to consumers and patriots everywhere. Mr. Knittiot and I have not lived here very long, just shy of two years now, and the first time we saw this phenomenon we laughed and laughed, thinking it was just this isolated, humorous incident. But we were wrong. I have seen it replicated again and again. Furniture Warehouses. Bridal Shows. Mattress Sales. Computer Repairs. I find this tactic a little strange and have often wondered how effective it is. But it must be pretty good, because they continue to do it.

I am a bit of a novice about this town. I did not grow up here. I call it a town, because it is about 1/5 the size of the city that I came from (and there are those that will tell you the city I came from is rather on the anemic side of a metropolis as far as they are concerned). Even so, size is relative. It is a city, not a town.

So far as I can tell, the city sprang up around two things — a University of some renown and a thriving blue-collar manufacturing community. The University continues to feed the city on some level, but seems strangely cut off from it, like it exists in it’s own little bubble. There is this old-fashioned sense that there is the University and then there are the people who work for the people who go to the University. But over the last decade or two, the manufacturing facilities have been pulling out, leaving in their wake this dead sort of feeling. Unemployment is high. Jobs are scarce. They are trying to transition from a manufacturing town to something else. No one can agree on what that should be. Change is hard. Many seem to be resentful that there has to be change at all and are digging in their heels. But change is what is happening.

I often get the impression that there are two places you can come from here — the right side of the manufacturing floor and the wrong side. Because the town is small, those from the right side of the manufacturing floor are few and powerful. And they seem to believe that everyone else should be bending down and licking their boots clean. They also still seem to control most of the “opportunity.”

The city, from all accounts, is hemorrhaging young people. Few find reasons to stay. Few are given the opportunities they might gain elsewhere. And so they move on. I remember noticing early on how disproportionate the number of elderly people seemed to be. I mean, there are a LOT of old people here. So many of them shuffling through the grocery store and recklessly driving their cars all over the road. The light seems to be missing from their eyes.

When we visited this area a few years ago we were newly in love. The energy of this place felt so right. It felt like home. We started making plans to flee what felt like the stifling blandness of the Midwest for the East, we fell in love with this area because we were hungry for a little stark reality. I was tired of being polite. I wanted to get angry and emphatic without embarrassing everyone in the room.

I wasn’t prepared for the transition to be so difficult. I wasn’t prepared for Mr. Knittiot to lose his job and have such a hard time finding another one. I wasn’t prepared for how long it would take to find other people I liked. And how long then it would take to make them my friends. I wasn’t prepared for my job, which was supposed to be both temporary (awaiting entrance into grad school) and less soul-sucking, to become something that felt once again like a prison. I wasn’t prepared for my mother to fall and need surgery and not be able to be there for her through the whole thing. I wasn’t prepared for missing “home” as much as I did. So when Mr. Knittiot started hatching a plan that I knew would get us out of here, I latched on to it like a leech. When the plan fell apart, I expected to be devastated…

Here was the surprise. I wasn’t. I’m not.

So much has happened to me over the last two years. Not all of it was easy, but all of it has been good — good in the way that having a rotten tooth pulled is good or a ready-to-burst appendix removed. But even so, I have changed. Grown. Learned. And seen so much. I wouldn’t trade that for a hundred comfortable years in a city with which I am familiar and where I am known and loved.

One of my favorite things Mr. Knittiot and I do is read to each other in the evenings while we cook dinner. Right now we are making our way through the second Abarat book by Clive Barker. Over the course of both books I have noted that Candy’s (the main character) feelings toward Chickentown, the Minnesota town she hails from, remind me simultaneously of the way I have felt about this town and living here. And more than that, of every town I have ever lived in. She couldn’t wait to escape to the magical world of the Abarat. And yet her escape didn’t come without it’s own set of challenges. And “escaping” is never an extrication. Her life is still bound up in whatever happens with Chickentown, and she is even now discovering that despite everything, she misses it in ways she couldn’t have anticipated. We all have our Chickentowns to contend with — whether we stay or go, leave for good or temporarily escape.

Yesterday, on the way home from work, I saw the local computer repair shop had dressed someone up in a Chicken Suit and set them out on a busy street wearing a sandwich board saying “Honk if you hate pop-ups.” I still don’t get it, but it made me laugh. And it feels so good to laugh.

After getting through two repeats of the Branching Out scarf, I took a good long look at it and promptly ripped out the whole thing. It didn’t look good — I have no photographic evidence of this, but trust me it just wasn’t pretty. So clearly, I was crazy.

First, the handspun was all wrong for a lace project. It is a bit too uneven (I’m still learning…) and also I apparently haven’t mastered the oh-so-complicated (please note sarcasm) art of plying, because I am fairly certain the tightness of the ply is partly to blame for the lack of yummy softness a merino yarn ought to have.

Second, I’ve somehow lost interest in making other people’s patterns. And it isn’t even that I want to design my own patterns so that other people can make them. I just want to create my own things. My own originals. One of a kind. Unique. And it’s all her fault. Well, not entirely her fault, but she got me thinking…

Some of you may be familiar with her as “She of the knitting tarot fame.” I happened to stumble across her blog (how much do we all owe to a few luckily followed links…) right about the time that she started talking about Knitting Revolution (If you want to check it out, start with March 28th and work your way up). She asked people about it, explored what it might look like, gave us a glimpse into her ideas and her art, and touched on what knitting might be if we were all artists and there were no patterns and everything was a unique creation. And in that moment, my knitting brain expanded and I was done for.

And now that I think about it, it might have been right around that time I started to lose interest in Rogue. Ideas for some creations of my own have been swimming around in my head since I first picked up two sticks and some yarn, and I don’t know what has been holding me back. I guess I still feel like a novice — inexperienced and foolish, utterly lacking the skills one needs to create something of their very own. How very wrong I have been. If you don’t learn by doing, then how ever do you learn? How have I even gotten this far?

Of course, this is just one more piece in the whole grand puzzle of things. And since I tend to think in terms of evolution, I can see that this all started long before I taught myself to knit. Long before I learned to crochet, even. And, thankfully, it will still be in process many years from now. We are never “done.”

I think that the true nature of a knitting revolution is singularly unique for all of us, but one thing that she brought up that I come to again and again is that primary to all of this blogging, and the knit-a-longs, and the shared trials inherent in knitting the same patterns, and so on, is ultimately connection. We are longing for community and pressed for time, and somehow it culminates in this common obsession with fiber — aided, of course, by technology. What a strange and marvellous world.

So, in case you didn’t notice, I hate my job. I don’t hate everything about it. And I don’t hate it as much as I hated my last job. But it is definitely not what I was meant to be doing with my life. I need to do something about this, but lately when I try to figure out what the next step is, I am immediately overwhelmed by a plethora of options. But I think I might finally be on to something…

At various points in my life I have considered becoming a teacher. When I was in college, during my junior and senior years, all my fellow English majors abandoned me for English Education. Apparantly they wanted to do something with their degrees when they got out. (What did they mean by do something, anyway?) I was stubborn. I ended up the only one in my class to graduate with a “pure” English degree.

My plans were to go directly on to grad school, which I did for one term. Grad school was expensive and the program wasn’t what I wanted, so I quit. I got the best job I could. It was in Marketing and I was miserable. I sometimes wished that I had joined my friends in the mass exodus toward English Education.

Now, I’m in accounting. I’m still miserable. And I know without a doubt, that I am not meant for the corporate life.

So, while I focus on my writing, something needs to change about the way I pay my bills. My thoughts have once again turned towards education. And on Monday, I have an appointment with the director of the education program at a local University. Folks, you are witnessing the beginnings of a liberation. I can already see it written out in it’s stark white perfect cursive — gleaming chalk on freshly cleaned blackboards — Ms. Knittiot.

Rogue Update: I am now well on my way into sleeve #2 — a little more than halfway, actually — andI have to tell you, I am so ready to be done with this sweater! Socks await me. Sweater designs that have been swimming in my head for the better part of a month, now, await me. There are spinning and dying projects that I want to be working on. There is a whole world of yarn out there. I am ready to be done with Rogue and it’s Lavendar Cliffs. I’m so close to being done that I feel sure I should just push on with those last 60 or so rows of sleeve number two. But maybe I need a break?

So…it’s possible that I’m crazy, but I just found out that a friend of mine is turning thirty in a few days. So I am casting on for Branching Out in some of my own handspun, and we’ll see how far I get in the next couple of days. Like I said, this could be insanity at it’s finest, but you never know. I mean, it’s not like I decided to design my own lace scarf or anything — hey, now there’s a thought…

I can tell that I have had one too many cups of green tea this morning, and I am buzzing around in my brain at a zillion miles an hour. I tend to lean towards a fairly introspective approach to the world, maybe even to a fault. But at this point in my life I have realized that there are some fundamental things about myself that I need to figure out so I can move forward towards something. And so I can feel like a whole person. So I can feel at home in my own skin.

I have this image of a tortoise all retracted in its shell, examining what’s going on at “home.” Eventually I will need to poke my head out and set my feet back down on the ground and get moving again, but I refuse to be hasty right now. I need to cultivate a bit of a tortoise pace, it would seem.

For the past couple of days I have felt like there is something that I want to say, but I’ve been struggling to find a way to write down my thoughts. Struggling, especially, to be still long enough to let them find their way out. Stillness is not a natural state for me. Perhaps that is the appeal of knitting. Knitting gives me a structure for stillness that is both practical and creative.

Tonight I once again have the delicious privilege of the entire house to myself for a whole evening. My evening will start with the 4 mile bike ride home from work. Then there is some picking up that needs to get done and some dinner to be eaten (yummy tofu and spinach curry made by Mr. Knittiot who is not only a TechnoGod, but a Culinary Master as well), but also, some quality pen and paper time is in order.

A couple things of note.

I got Knitting on the Road from my library, finally.Everything you have heard about Nancy Bush is true. I’m this close to putting Rogue aside and casting on for some socks. The patterns are wonderful, the end result beautiful, and every project is like a mini history lesson. I want to go to Stitches just so I can take Knitting Estonian Lace with her. And also because it would be a good excuse to hang out with Franklin who is just plain cool. In case you all haven’t noticed, I’ve had Franklin’s blog, Panopticon, as my “Blog of Note” for some time now. It isn’t that I haven’t thought about putting something new up there, it’s just that I’m waiting to find anything even half as interesting and well written. Still, Stitches is a significant financial expenditure, and I’m really trying to save up for Rhinebeck…

Also, I decided to toss Deadwood into our Netflix Queue after hearing much raving about it from fairly reliable sources. I give it hearty approval, mostly because I think Calamity Jane is the best thing since afternoon tea. I am nearing obsessed at this point. My only complaint — money grubbing bastards only put two episdoes on each disc!! What the hell? I suspect this is done just for the rental market. As we discovered with West Wing, buying the seasons you get 8 episodes per disc, but renting them, only 4. I supposed Block Buster must have complained that they weren’t making enough money on television DVD rentals, so they release special discs for the rental outfits. If anyone has purchased Deadwood, I would be curious to know how many episodes there are on each disc.

I’m about halfway through The Unconsoled, and I just noticed that my library says the new Ishiguro is “In Transit” to me. So, it would seem that this weekend is going to be a marathon of reading, knitting and writing — with a little bit of yard work on the side. How wonderful it feels to be me at this moment…

You all remember the Lorax, right? You know, he who speaks for the trees?

Well, I think he might hate me. And if he doesn’t, he should.

My job, in case anyone was wondering, is the devil. I swear to god, it is like stepping back in time to the 1950s. And not just the sexism either, mind you. Or the racism. But also the technology. The racism and sexism I can address head on, and have done and will continue to do should the need arise (although, pretty much everyone has stopped talking to me about anything other than the weather and things directly related to my job). But the technology? I am at a loss.

Like most companies, everyone here has a computer and email. Since email is one of the easiest forms of communication, you would imagine that everyone would use it, right? Wrong. Nobody uses it. And I mean nobody. When I ask them to email me something because it is important and I don’t want to forget it, I get actual whining and complaining and resistance.

One particularly awful, self-entitled, priss (who thinks that having a job is beneath her, but has to have one because her famous surgeon husband divorced her and took his money with him after discovering she’d had an affair with their gardener — yes, I know, how cliche can you get) once complained to a manager that she wasn’t able to notify me about something because I only use email and so she couldn’t call me. This was considered a valid complaint, and I actually had to explain to people that just because I like email and use it doesn’t meant that I don’t know how to or won’t use the phone.

So, when information needs to be circulated to the members of our office, the dimwitted, techno-phobe, incompetant “office manager” (who seems hell bent on giving all her work to me because I “know computers”) types up a memo, prints it out, and passes it around with a list of people in the office attached to it. We are supposed to “note & pass,” which means I have to take time out of my already busy day to read some stupid information about a company bowling league, or daffodils that will be for sale, or the passing away of some former employee’s grandmother’s cousin’s dog, then put a check mark next to my name and pass it on to the next person on the list. What the hell? Because email would be soooo much more difficult than that.

But that stuff, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg. The real vileness is an ancient database system called TOM. Total Office Management. *snort* Talk about your misnomers. Anyway, this “system” (and I use the term loosely) will, on occassion, give me completely different results when running the exact same report. Run the report one day, get certain results. Run the exact same report the next day — completely different results.

When I do manage to get the reports to print correctly, part of my job requires me to take the information I managed to scrape out of the “database” (and I also use that term loosely) and put it all into Excel — BY HAND. You know why? Because the piece of crap won’t dump it’s information into a digital format. So if I want to be able to use the 100+ pages of information, I have to print the report and hand type the relevant info into an acceptable format using Excel. And because Baboons “run” (note sarcasm) the company, they are incapable of receiving digital reports via email. So I then have to print up copies of 5 different reports for about 12 different people.

All of this results in a considerable amount of wasted paper. I am wracked by guilt and I have nightmares that trees are making books out of my skin. Clearly I need a new job. My “boss” (I use that term even more loosely because he is a raging moron) once assured me that “all our paper is recycled,” but he is lying. I’ve asked others and I know the truth.

Knitting is a haven. I come home at the end of a long day and I want to hug my yarn. It is so simple and calming and I can just let it all go. I have finished the hood on Rogue, and the sleeves are progressing. Well, the sleeve is progressing — I am only on sleeve one. No more pictures until she is finished…

I hear a lot of talk these days about “being in the moment.” About living *now*. About mindfulness. I hear admonishments from others to live conciously — in the present. Some of this talk is sincere and born out of a desire for something deeper, something more than Walmart and McDonald’s and SUVs. Some of it is glib psychobabble. But glib or sincere, living in the present moment of my life is something I would very much like to do.

On days when I am feeling particularly delusional, I will tell you that I am a person who lives in the now, or at least someone who strives towards that kind of conscious living. But a lot of the time, that is a complete lie. On days when I am feeling brutally honest, I will admit to you that I live the vast majority of my life about 127 miles into the future. I am seldom paying attention to where I am right now, and am forever thinking of where I will be tomorrow — or where I won’t be. My monkey brain spits out a constant litany of thoughts that tell me I will surely be happy if I can only get over there. Then I get there and there becomes here and it starts all over again.

This week we got some disappointing news. Or more accurately, we received more disappointing bits in a long string of disappointing news. But the final piece came on Thursday, and it seems the other proverbial shoe has now dropped. We are not waiting anymore. There is no there, only here. And this moment is asking me what I am going to do with it. I chose to cry for awhile, be angry a little, or rather a lot, actually. And I can do that with that moment, but each succesive moment I encounter asks the same question. What are you going to do with me?

I think I may be getting tired of living where I’m not.

I finished the hood on Rogue. I bound off the top and it was beautiful. The back, however proved to be trickier than I was prepared for and you know that sickening feeling when several stitches get away from you in an area that is more complicated than merely picking up a few dropped stitches? I labored for hours trying to get it back, but in the end, it had only gotten worse and looked like this:

The guts of unravelled knitting is a disheartening sight. Ultimately, I had to rip back 17 rows of work, which I did last night. It looks fine now and I have nearly made up for all my undoing. I imagine I will finish the hood this weekend and get a good start on the sleeves.

A few years ago, I had a tarot reading done. I’m not usually quick to do things like that — natural suspicion and cynicism I suppose — but this woman coupled a down-to-earth pragmatism with her natural intuition. She had the feel of a counselor — managing to combine the best in Jungian recogntion of the resonance of myth with a very practical approach to the cards. It was by far the best reading I’ve ever had. Part way through she asked me how old I was. I told her that I was 28. Her eyes lit up and she started to tell me all about the Return of Saturn.

The Return of Saturn, it turns out, is a fairly life changing and often turmoil filled time, which takes place in your late twenties (roughly between the ages of 28 and 30). It is a time for considering yourself, your life, what you do, how you approach things, and so much more. It is the time where you make changes and, if you are smart, the time you reach out towards that life you want to be living and shed all the extraneous garbage. All the astrologers caution that if you don’t learn the lessons of Saturn now, you’re going to have a difficult time of it the next time it rolls around (which is roughly every 30 years).

And you know, for me it has been a turmoil filled and exciting point in my life. I’ve made some amazing changes over the last couple of years. I moved away from the city I had lived in for most of my life. I got married. I started to reevaluate what I wanted to do with myself and my life, my career, my relationships. And now, facing the aftermath of Saturn’s return, I know that I’m still not where I want to be yet. There are still so many missing pieces.

This morning I had a panicked thought — what if I missed it? What if Saturn is gone now and there is no way to change things? Which is, of course, a very silly thought. It is never to late to change things — Saturn or not. And besides, I’m not sure Saturn is through with me. It kind of breezed in, shook things up in all the right ways, and I’m still sifting through the debris. It’s a rather large job and I feel somehow like I’ve gotten lost in the mess. But I imagine I shall emerge at some point, shovel in hand, feeling rather victorious and all the better for it. I just wish it could be today…

Technology is something I like, but usually only when it is working well, and usually only when I don’t have to think about it too much. When I do have to think about it, I want it to be marveling at some new wonder of this digital world we live in. I certainly don’t want it to be because I have a problem. Nevertheless, I have reconciled myself to the fact that problems will arise, and deal with them I must. So…

As it turns out, getting your own personal domain is not all smooth sailing. And the previously promised automatic redirection isn’t so much automatic or redirecting. As a matter of fact, at the moment it is nothing more than an error message (as you may have discovered). I don’t know if this will change or not, but I suspect it won’t. We are working through some poopiness with the new domain hosting, so please bear with us. I will send out an email to those blogs I know link to the Village with updated URL info. And for those of you with bookmarks that haven’t been able to find me, my sincerest apologies and I’m glad you managed to find us despite the mess!

Welcome to our new home!

Yes, the Village Knittiot now officially has it’s very own home on the web. PJ’s Attic has been kind enough to give us a little virtual corner to crawl around in these past several months. But … our fiber stash got a little too large so we decided it was time to look for a place of our own. So, what do you think? Roomy, no? And look at all this light!

Of course, this means our address has changed, so for those of you with bookmarks, please feel free to update them with the new one — www.villageknittiot.com — although, the old one will continue to redirect you here.

Random Rogueishness

Neck detail completed, and shoulders seemed together, I am well on my way into the hood. I couldn’t resist trying it on to see how it was fitting…

One of my usual gripes is the seeming lack of time to do, see, read, and experience all the things that I want to in the time I have been allotted in this life. I am sure that this persistent time pressure I feel is only exacerbated by the fact that I have a job I dislike and find uninspiring, and yet am required to be at 8.5 hours 5 days each week. On my less than Zen-like days, where perspective is in short supply, this feels like a complete waste of my time.

Of course, as I am being constantly reminded, it’s the journey that is the thing. So I am working at appreciating where I am right now and getting what I can out of each day — even if I have to pry it out with the metaphysical equivalent of scary dental tools. There is no wasted time unless I waste the time. Right?

So, this time-pressured, results-oriented, perfectionist, type-A personality gal that runs one half of my life (and you do recognize this is only one half of my personality, right?) doesn’t usually allow herself the luxury of rereading books, even the really great ones that she likes to rave and rave and rave about. Because usually she is racing us onto other books because there are so many of them and, really, we only have so many years left of reading and that’s what? 30 books a year? Maybe 40? Yes, 40 if I push myself. And what if I have a bad year and there are only like 10 or 12 books that year? Not likely. But really, there are so many and someday I’m going to be dead and then what? So certainly there isn’t time for things like rereading good books.

Clearly there is a flaw in her logic, but like the good tour guide she is, she doesn’t have time to see that flaw because there is a schedule and looking at flaws isn’t on the schedule, see? So let’s just move along.

Isn’t she annoying?

So I’m rebelling. Ms. Goody-two-shoes doesn’t get to run the show all the time. I’m rereading a book.

I first read it a couple of years ago, and it was one of those books that was sometimes so frustrating that I wanted to throw it against the wall or bury it in the garden under some lovely yellow mums. But it was my choice for a book discussion group, and I was damn well going to finish it. When I was done, I felt gratified in the way that running a marathon feels gratifying. You are drained and replenished and amazed with yourself and exhausted all at the same time. That book was called The Unconsoled, and it was written by Kazuo Ishiguro.

It was the first book he had written after The Remains of the Day, and the critics hated it. I didn’t know that until after I was done reading it, but suffice it to say, it was not a well received book. I think they are nuts, but I also think they were not expecting this from him, and it completely fucked with their ability to read the book. They thought they had him figured out and nothing pisses critics off more than being told their assumptions are wrong. But they were. This is not to say the book wasn’t frustrating, which is not to say the book wasn’t brilliant, because it was all of the above. I think it is one of those books that people read, and even if they want to set it down and never pick it up again they don’t, and upon finishing, they close the cover announce they hated it and then open it up immediately and need to read it again.

Rereading it (oh, the luxury!), has been far less frustrating and I am finding my ability to step into its dream-like quality as easy as walking to the mailbox at the end of my block. I am not fighting the narration this time or trying to make it fit into some concept that is more akin to the way my mind thinks it should work. I am letting myself flow with the story, and it is fascinating. Yesterday at lunch, I couldn’t knit because I had to read.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this book since I read it two (or was it three now?) years ago. And just last month he released a new book, which I requested from my local library and am patiently waiting for, called Never Let Me Go. I read an excellent article on Ishiguro over at the Guardian, in which he touches briefly on the popularity of Remains of the Day and this realization he had that much of his audience, which grew considerably with that book, weren’t probably going to like the books he knew he wanted to write in the future. He was right. And oh how glad I am of that.

Even type-A girl couldn’t argue with me that it wasn’t worth rereading The Unconsoled, and I think she’s accepted that fact that there is going to be a whole lot more re-reading going on in the future.