the Village Knittiot

Yesterday at work I handed in a really big project. It was the first time I had written anything so lengthy for them and it turned into a bit of a monster. Not because it necessarily was a monster, but because I tend to have problems with perception and otherwise harmless little bunny rabbits turn into drooling, fanged beasts that want to crush my bones and eat my spleen. I’m also a bit of a perfectionist, but more on that later.

Over the course of a couple weeks, I have been slowly and anxiously plodding along on it. Making use of my time at work, but also worrying. Worrying that it wasn’t good enough. Worrying that I was about to fall flat on my face. Worrying that I didn’t know enough about dishwashers (yes, dishwashers) to write it or that my facts were all wrong! I even brought it home over the weekend, but fear induced procrastination talked me into just avoiding it instead.

This, in turn, led me to the 11th hour, which is usually where I do my best work. However, I forgot that my best work is usually preceded by a complete and total meltdown. So, on Monday night at 8:00 I finally went sobbing into Mr. Knittiot’s office to tell him why I shouldn’t be allowed to go on writing when everything that comes out of my mouth is such shit. Furthermore if I couldn’t write to save my life, maybe it was a sham of a life anyway. My husband is very patient. I appreciated this about him. I, myself? Not so patient. Well, maybe with others, just not so much when things of me are involved. He agreed to take a look at what I had (laughing when he asked me how much I had and I said 15 very bad pages after I made it sound like I’d been sitting staring at a blank screen for two weeks) and said he would be my editor for the evening.

I continued to write. He continued to bring in the tiniest of suggestions. A sentence structure here, a punctuation there. I kept telling him to feel free to be brutal. Please, if I need to change everything, tell me! I’m sure I need to change everything. But, of course, I didn’t have time to change everything so I accepted his minor suggestions at the rate of, oh, maybe one or two a page. And I kept asking him if he was sure. I went to bed at eleven, slept fitfully for five hours imagining my bosses looking at me wondering what in the hell I had been doing for two weeks. I got up at four and finished it off. Finally at about 9:30 that morning as I was going over things one final time before handing it in, my perception shifted. I got my objectivity back, and I could see that this wasn’t so bad. It would work. Might require some changes, but in general was good enough. It was okay.

When one of the owner’s of the company (he is spearheading this project) called me into his office later in the day to go over my document, I expected he would be satisfied. I thought he would suggest changes. But no. No. Not all. He was ecstatic. He couldn’t stop saying how wonderful it was. How I had an excellent future in the company and a bright career ahead of me. He used the word “perfect” (oh, the sweet, sweet sound of that word — it is like a drug to me) and I just sat there in complete bliss. The words of my dear husband, who told me that even my crap is pretty good (which I am working very hard to believe, my love!), bouncing about my brain.

And to top it all off… Mr. Knittiot has a job interview in Philly on Thursday morning. What a week. Now, if we can just sell the house…

p.s. — don’t worry, I have not intention of selling my soul and my desire for teaching to embrace a career as a copywriter. Been down that path and the road to hell has been paved by Marketing professionals…

Cackling Thunder
This is the kind of thunder I was most afraid of as a child. I would lay there paralyzed in my bed as it started slowly with a crackling sound in the distance like a fire starting to pick up speed. It is deceptively soft at first but quickly crescendos to an intensity that involves several unpredictable bursts that feel as if they alter your heart’s rhythmic beating. I called it the cackling thunder when I was little because it reminded me of a witches laugh.

Canadian Geese
It is surprising to me how these spectacularly dim-witted, yet graceful creatures hold so many memories for me. The earliest one was a dreary overcast autumn day. Lets see, I must have been in third or fourth grade. My friend Melanie, her small brother Matthew and myself were wandering around the deserted golf course near our apartment complex. This was before they put wire fencing all around to keep out the riffraff. We came across an enormous flock of Canadian Geese resting and feeding on their way south. We slowly waded into the middle of them which made them pretty nervous. Suddenly Melanie, who had a bit of the devil in her, did something to startle them. In one giant movement the whole gaggle of them began to take off. Matthew was stunned and terrified. We watched as he ran around in circles trying to find his way out of the tangle, his hands thrown over his head fearful they would send cascades of goose poop raining down on his head. I don’t think we ever laughed so hard.

Later when I was older, sometime in high school, my mom and I lived near this suburban office park that was in the midst of a natural marshy sort of area. It had many walking paths and secluded walkways that no one really ever seemed to use. I spent many of my sulky teenage years weaving through these paths brooding and smoking and dreaming of my future or bemoaning it. Throughout the spring and summer of one year in particular I watched as the Canadian Geese came, mated and raised their young goslings to maturity. Then one day toward late or middle summer I had this most amazing realization. The dad hadn’t left. There they were, this family I had often seen. Mom, dad and their five or six awkward adolescents. He stuck around and helped raise the babies and even now that they were older, still, there they were. Mom and dad together. Goslings nearly grown, making their way tenuously out of the nest, so to speak. Remarkable. I later learned that Canadian Geese typically mate for life, with recorded pairs having been through up to 42 seasons together. Stunning.

I later heard a story that when Canadian Geese are traveling together if one goes down, he is accompanied by two others who stay with him until the injured one recovers or dies. I don’t know if this is true, or a fabricated fable intended to remind us that survival of the fittest and a cold detachment aren’t the only things that get us through. But I have read about hippos and their mourning rituals, watched a polar bear mother grapple with the death of her young cub and one night driving home I came across an accident and saw a dear crouched in the center of a highway unable to move, her legs broken, and I saw right into her eyes so full of fear. If emotions are physiological or at least have a tangible element, animals feel them too. And their wisdom is just a different wisdom from ours. It isn’t necessarily anthropomorphizing to ascribe thoughts, emotions and behaviors to them. It is just acknowledging the dignity of their existence as well.

Then, of course, there was the time that my mother and I watched in slow motion horror as a Canadian Goose came in too low over the highway for its landing and was clipped by the corner of a speeding car. I have to give my mother so much credit for her willingness to indulge my tenderness toward animals, because it was often pretty tough for her too. The goose sort of hobbled off the side of the road and came to an uneasy rest on the grass. We pulled the car over and tried to approach it and this made it try to run away, which it couldn’t. So we backed immediately off feeling that we were only adding to its suffering. It had a companion with it who, I believe, would have stayed, but our fear and sorrow and meddling ways scared her off. My mother went into a nearby restaurant, some seedy bar, and used the pay phone to call everyone she could think to call while I sat at a respectful distance to the bird just keeping it company, crying a little and telling it everything was going to be okay. My mother called the bird rescue society and they told her if she could bring it in, they could hopefully treat it, rehabilitate it and release it back into the wild, but neither of us had any idea how to get the bird there. She called the police to see if they could help and she was told that an officer could come over and dispose of it, which, of course, sent my mother into a panic. No, don’t do that she said, but I’m pretty sure she knew that they would now have to send someone over to check it out since there had been a call. She imagined the policeman shooting this bird in front of me, in front of her and she started crying in the middle of the bar. The manager unable to remain oblivious to my pretty mother crying in his bar, came over and asked if he could help. He grabbed his line cook and the guy who washed dishes and a big cardboard box. The four of them striding across the lawn towards me looked like a scene from a movie. The manager and his two men quickly managed to herd the goose into the box and safely secure it in the car so we could drive it out to the rescue facilities. Ah, the kindness of strangers. As we were pulling out of the parking lot with the goose, we saw a policeman pull up and my mother and I breathed a sigh of relief. Just in time. When we got to the rescue place, they took the bird in back to examine it. We waited. Probably, we should have left. A few minutes later they came out to tell us that its back was broken. There was nothing they could do, but at least it didn’t have to suffer unduly. And then they sat there with us while we cried. I was in tenth grade, I think. The line cook was a schoolmate, but we never talked about it. I don’t know why.

Also, on a lighter note, I do a great imitation of a honking flock of Canadian Geese getting nervous and then taking off. Someday, if we ever meet in person and I’m not feeling too shy, ask me and I promise I will do it for you. I also do a great pug impression, but that is another story and a whole other letter…

Cat Log
Our neighborhood has its fair share of cats. For most of my life I have been extremely allergic to cats — and I mean wheezing, eyes swollen shut, take me to the hospital I can’t breathe allergic — I have steeled myself against their feline charms and professed often and loudly to hate them. This, of course, serves only to make them exceedingly and wickedly fond of me. But over time, my allergies have gotten better — or at the very least I can tolerate most cats without feeling as if I am dying — and I have begun to find them as wonderfully intriguing as other people do.

My office at home overlooks the neighbors yard, and throughout the course of one spring I noticed that the local cats tend to use her yard as their main thoroughfare. Practically every time I looked up from my computer screen, there one would be. So, I started keeping a Cat Log noting which cats I saw at which times, what direction they were crossing the lawn and at what pace. Typical entries went something like this:

8/23/04 8:52 p.m. Orange and white cat crossing left, leisurely pace

8/24/04 6:37 a.m. Orange kitty (not the orange and white one) crossing left at full speed

8/25/04 3:18 p.m. Corvus can see the Professor Kitty from his office. The other kitties must be unsure of him, they are keeping their distance and pacing but not crossing

And so forth…

Chickens!
My favorite bookstore is in Minneapolis. Truthfully, The Wild Rumpus isn’t just any bookstore. It is like an amazing universe where you can become a child again just by stepping through the small front door. It is still one of my most favorite places in the world and one of the things that makes me want to live in Minneapolis on those days when I forget what it would be like to live in the Midwest so far from the ocean and general bluntness of the northeast. The place is full of books and animals — a knittiot’s playground in other words — and I lived for the feeling of being there.

One of the animals was a free roaming chicken named Dali (after the Dali Lama). I loved him and I became resolved to someday own a chicken that I would permit to wander around my house. Then they got Elvis, a fancy chicken along the lines of this:

and I decided I would actually need two chickens. Soon this dream turned into wanting a flock of chickens. This book only fanned the flames of my madness. What can I say?

Church (also, Christianity)
In my search for a father figure to fill the absent space left by my own quickly retreating one, I went through a relatively brief, meaningful and ultimately life changing foray into the Christian Church. I was, once upon a time, if you can believe it, a Sunday School Teacher to children who were at the time four and five years old, but who I hear from my mother are now getting ready to graduate from high-school. I attended an extremely conservative Christian college which my friend Melissa and I concluded we needed just so I could discover that I wasn’t a Christian and she could realize that she was a lesbian. For a time I was a theology major. I have taken Greek. I used to translate passages, write heady papers on doctrine and had major partings of ways with more than a few students and some professors who felt at best I was an atheist and at worst, a heretic. Heretic is a definition I will now heartily embrace thanks to a couple of dear friends of my husband who informed me of their game where the heretic is the one who always points out logical fallacies or otherwise uses their brain.

Cockatiel
My most favored pet is a cockatiel. I named her Madeline nearly 15 years ago and call her Maddy for short. She still lives with my mom in Minnesota. She handles change about as well as I do. Neurotic owner, neurotic pet. When distressed she plucks the feathers out of her back. This is a disturbing habit, but she has gotten a lot better over the last several years. When I call my mom, she holds the phone out to the bird so she and I can chat. She can always tell when its me on the line and she will climb down out of her cage, walk over to my mom, climb up to her shoulder and start tapping on the phone with her beak. I love my bird. Also, when I come home for a visit, she always ignores me pointedly for the first day just to make sure I know how displeased she is with me for moving out and not ever visiting.

Cooking
In my mind, cooking has always felt like magic. A friend of Mr. Knittiot said something to the effect of cooking being the oldest magic and asked why we should be surprised that we feel undernourished and ill so much of the time, when we have entrusted that magic to fast food joints and convenience solutions. I feel it is very important for people to understand that they have a philosophy of food, even if they are unaware of what it is or they have just swallowed the definitions that have been handed to them. Food, as we all have experienced is one of the most important elements of a social gathering, a family and the very life we live. Eating, cooking and consuming consciously is a spiritual pursuit and filled with magic.

Cryer (not Jon)
I am a cryer. A serious cryer. If we lived in a culture where there were professional mourners, I would have my vocation. I cry at everything. I cry when I’m happy, when I’m sad, when I’m scared. Sometimes I laugh so hard I cry. When I am angry or frustrated, I cry. I hope this is one of those things that is endearing about me and not utterly annoying. When I was younger my mom told me that I “cried pretty.” I thought that was odd. I think I look ridiculous because my mouth turns down and my face gets all distorted. I think she probably meant when I am not hysterical. You know, when you just sit there and the tears slide down your face.

Here’s something else—if no one says to you, “Oh Sam (or Amy)! This is wonderful!,” you are a lot less apt to slack off or to start concentrating on the wrong thing…being wonderful, for instance, instead of telling the goddam story.

Stephen King from On Writing

As it turns out, the secret of writing is writing in secret. In the past, I have always been pretty quick to share my lovelies with my wonderful spouse or some other worthy reader. Unfortunately, this is typically the death knell for my enthusiasm. Talking about it too much leads (for me at least) to not writing enough about it in the long run. Mr. King’s (”No, please, call me Stephen,” I imagine him saying. “Mr. King is my father.” And then we laugh and have a nice conversation about writing.) practical, useful and wonderful advice to write an entire draft “with the door closed,” so to speak, has been an electrifying charge. My story is mine. All mine. All the little characters. The big ones. The events. My big secret. Who knew it was that simple?

This weekend, Mr. K, who has long wanted to create his own line of t-shirts, discovered the joys of Cafe Press. After tackling a few of his own creations, his thoughts turned to the Knittiot. So, he created a Village Knittiot store. Mostly just for me, but I would be remiss not to share the fun results. My personal favorites are the hoodie, the tote bag and the mouse pad. Though I might need to get a journal as well. Oh, who am I kidding. One of everything please.

Yesterday we traipsed off to the movie theater to see Broken Flowers, the supposedly mainstream breakthrough of (normally) un-fucking-believable and amazing indie director Jim Jarmusch. Sadly, Broken Flowers was like a watered down version of everything that is good about his direction and storytelling prowess with lots of product placement. Budget Rental, Ford Taurus, Aquafina, MSN.com, Mapquest, Calvin Klein and United States Postal Service, to name a few. It was incredibly disruptive because it was so unexpected and so antithetical to anything he has ever done before.

The movie itself had about 1/4 of the depth of say a Down By Law (my personal favorite) or a Ghost Dog (Mr. Knittiot’s Favorite — see his review of BF here). Hell, it had less impact than Coffee and Cigarettes, which was supposed to be like the movie equivalent of a collection of short stories (albeit a brilliant collection of short stories) with a common theme, filmed over more than a decade exploring like concepts from a variety of short scenarios. Unlike Broken Flowers, it was satisfying and delightful. It didn’t leave you feeling like there should have been more. It had a signature richness that I always associate with Jarmusch.

What was brilliant in Broken Flowers were the performances by the women (Frances Conroy, Sharon Stone, Tilda Swinton and Jessica Lange) who played the former loves of Don Johnston, Bill Murray’s character (who was supposed to be a modern-day Don Juan, but just seemed like a pathetic old man). The connections were obvious, the pacing sloppy and Bill Murray was just so dead (similar to his lackluster role in Rushmore and very unlike the performance in Lost in Translation). I left the theater with no idea why these women were drawn to him. Though they (the actresses) did an excellent job of portraying that there was indeed some kind of an intensity and pull between them, no matter how faded it may have become over the years, Jarmusch and Murray did a poor job of providing us with any explanation for it. The movie managed to capture us in the last five minutes, but in general, it was disappointing. Go back to your indie life, Jim, it was much better to you.

Well, that’s all for this fine Monday morning. Hope your day treats you kindly…

Morning has always been my favorite time of the day. I love the peace and quiet of being up before everyone else. I love the stillness of my mind that mirrors the stillness in the world. Normally I am not the first person out of bed in our household. It is hard to beat a man who wakes up at 4:00 a.m. or shortly thereafter. But occassionally he allows himself the luxury of sleeping in and I get the delicious silence of the house all to myself.

As I walked into my office this morning and set my coffee cup on my desk (which I had managed to get by myself without spilling it all down the front of me or even burning my hand) I heard a familiar sound. Rhythmic honking. Call and response. Canadian Geese. When I lived in Minnesota, there was an abundance of Canadian Geese. Everywhere you went, it seemed, you were dodging the evidence of their infestation. They were quite a nuisance. Their little greenish-black poop logs covered every surface. The geese were also mean and fierce in their protection of the little tiny goslings they produce in abundance. Many people hated them, but not me. I thought they were beautiful. They were graceful and strong, albeit a little on the not-so-bright side. Plus, they hiss and flap their wings and stick their tounges out at you when they are trying to be threatening and that is just supremely funny (and also, admittedly, a little scary).

Here, I only hear them and get a glimpse of their retreating v’s. They don’t stick around pooping on lawns and holding up traffic. And when I see them it means that summer is really close to its end. I have never been particularly fond of summer, so I am not one to typically mourn its passing. It is often hot — oppressively so — which can make it just as difficult to do things as the winter weather does. But the longer days are heavenly and the chance to walk out the door without boots and heavy coats is important.

Still, I am always calmly pleased that fall is on its way. It is the seasonal equivalent of an early morning. Quiet and still. It makes me feel very aware of being alive. This is a good thing. And, of course, I love it for the same reasons everyone else does. It is beautiful.

I feel a little in-between right now. No nibbles on the house. Only one viewing. No job offers for Mr. Knittiot. I didn’t expect it to happen overnight. Oh, who am I kidding, I did too. Anyway, I am learning how to live in flux. It could all change tomorrow. It could take until six months from now. It’s hard to plan anything and this forces me back to momentary living. Something the Universe clearly wants me to get comfortable with.

I have begun to feel the need to rearrange furniture. Since we are (hopefully) moving soon, it doesn’t seem to be the best idea. So I am tinkering a bit with the furniture of my blog instead. I am in the process of rearranging links. My blog perusal habits have changed lately thanks to a job that keeps me extrememly busy during the day and a much limited time for link hopping in the evening. I apologize, because I do truly miss being a regular reader. I think changing, not to mention eliminating, links is always scary because you don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. It is impossible to know who is actually reading your blog and doing away with the link of a faithful reader can hurt. So this is my small plea — please, please, please do not be hurt. You will notice that even the Yarn Harlot was a casualty of my need to get a little more sparse and reflective of my true current reading habits. It’s just honesty, not cruelty.

Also, Franklin, since the Blog of Note has remained faithful to you for so long, I have retired it and given you your very own spot cause you are still that good — case in point, The Midwest Stitches Diaries.

There is a new category called “Lately Inspired By” and it features the two that keep, well, inspiring me lately. Do the things is by Amber Dorko Stopper, of Knitting Tarot fame. Her ideas about the craft and art of knitting and fiber are second only to her ideas and philosophies about art and creativity in general. She is fucking amazing. Plus, she knitted (or is it knit?) a zombie “Bub” doll and you just have to love a girl who painstakingly knits a zombie doll (and secretly hopes George Romero will notice). Furthermore, her ongoing Sims saga about the Tudors is more than a little entertaining. And her continuing reflections on “The Pottery Barn Culture” are brilliant. Okay, enough gushing. The second is the Jabberwock a journalist and writer out of New Delhi who writes excellent book reviews, talks about the biz — and lately his forays into freelancing — and opens up the exciting world of Indian cinema and the mysterious universe of cricket (I know, I know, I’m such an American, but I still don’t understand it. Someday, I fully intend to and then I’ll have to get cable so I can actually watch the game.) He also loves Kazuo Ishiguro and I found him thanks to a brilliant review of The Unconsoled. I don’t find many people who have read or care to discuss it, so that was thrilling in and of itself.

Backpack
I don’t often carry a purse. I opt instead to lug my utilitarian backpack with me wherever I go. It is hard to fit several notebooks, books, pens and various other implements that I might need at any given moment into a purse, while a backpack easily houses two notebooks, several pens, knitting implements, sometimes my laptop and so forth.

Bad Dreams
I still remember vividly the bad dreams I had as an extremely young child. One from when I was about three years old involved a giant estate sale inside a castle, which was actually a fire station near my house on the outside. A skeleton in a trench coat and fidora cackled from a balcony and swung down on a rope. It was very frightening. I remember looking through bins of silverware. There was another one from when I was about five in which our apartment building was on fire, but my mother insisted on cleaning the house before we left the building, which was odd, because she was a terrible cleaner. In a way it made sense because her timing has always struck me as the best example of insane logic - she always has reasons, they are just very odd.

Bear, Pooh (also: Best Friend; Bears, Literary; Bears, Stuffed )
Pooh Bear, in addition to being a childhood literary hero, is what I often call my best friend. Her name is actually Hiroe, and my world is an infinitely better place because more than a dozen years ago she decided to travel halfway around the globe and go to school in the Midwestern United States. Christopher Robin — which for much of my life I was convinced would have been my name had I been a boy, though my mother is not that literary and not that fond of non-biblical names, so I probably would have been named something like Isaac or Ezekial — anyway, Pooh is no good without Christopher Robin, and vice versa. Thus, Pooh Bear.

Book Meme
A long, long, long time ago, Lee Ann taged me with a book meme, and though I am not fond of the meme, I accepted because her entry was lovely and interesting. This will not be lovely or interesting, but most certainly wandery in its attempt to answer some of the questions. Oh and possibly incoherent and most certainly incomplete…

1.) How many books are in your house?
Not enough. Also, lots. The last time Mr. Knittiot and I moved we talked about entering all of our books into a database of sorts, cataloging them by genre, with title, author, ISBN, publisher and various other bits of information (Obsessive? Anal? Us? Why do you ask?). But after giving it some thought, we felt that might be a bit much and, frankly, I just wanted my books out of boxes and on my shelves so I could breathe again. Had we done the whole cataloging thing, I could tell you an exact number, but as we haven’t, I’m gonna go with lots. Here’s a picture of some of our book shelves and a few boxes of books that are still packed:

2. What was the last book you bought?
As a gal on a tight budget thanks to unemployment of spouse and the generally brilliant econmic “plan” of the Bush regime, I am going to modify this to say, “What was the last book you got out of the library?” (which is where most of my books are obtained these days).

The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman. This book is often lumped in with new-agey self-help psycho-babble books of the 80s (kind of a forerunner to the genre really), but I found it to have more substance and quite a lot of useful information. Sometimes the messages we need are obvious and sometimes you have to dig a little. This book manages to walk a fine line between the obvious and the hidden. I emerged at the end with a renewed zeal for putting together some of the less than desirable elements of my life. The writing is plain (and therefore accessible) and tinged with a 60s sort of optimism that those of us on the other side of the 80s may have a hard time feeling. But ultimately, we have a desire to be happy and this book talks a lot about how to find it in lasting doses and as a way of life.

3.)What was the last book you read?
Well, I just finished a very fun comic book collection called Bone. I also recently read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver which immersed me so thoroughly in Africa that I haven’t yet emerged and I think may account for my present difficulty in getting into the Canadian landscape of The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, which I am making my way through at the moment. I also am slowly looking through Stephen King’s book On Writing, which has some surprisingly useful nuggets as well as an interesting glimpse into his life. It was recommended by several friends who are writers and I sort of put in on the back burner with no real intention of reading it until Mr. Knittiot brought it home from the library. Someone at work mentioned that he thought Stephen King was a hack. I think that is an unfair statement. He’s a genre writer who has never pretended to be anything else. And as such, he has some interesting things to say about the craft.

4.) Name 5 books that you often reread or that mean a lot to you…
There is no way I can pare this list down to five. So I’ll just do what I can and accept the fact that there will be things that I have forgotten to add or mention.

Pretty much anything by Roald Dahl (especially The BFG and Danny the Champion of the World)
The horrifically dated Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, because they can send me instantly into fits of laughter like nothing else
Any and all of the Winnie-the-Pooh books
Emily Dickinson’s poetry and T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
Beyond the Writer’s Workshop by Carol Bly

As for other fiction, I’ve enjoyed many of Margaret Atwood’s writings (especially The Robber Bride and Handmaid’s Tale), John Irving wrote three good books and several really mediocre ones and I sort of can’t forgive him for what he did to Cider House Rules when he turned it into one of the shittiest movies I have ever seen in my life and for which I have also never forgiven Toby McGuire and Charlize Theron and therefore hate them with a passion. Am I the only person in this country who is sick of watching Toby McGuire cry? I think I am. I have loved everything I have ever read by Murakami. I like Banana Yoshimoto. And Shusaku Endo is just utterly amazing (I am incredibly fond of Japanese literature). I stuck with Dickens through David Copperfield and I’m so glad that I did. Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn was my favorite of his writings so far. Anne Ursu wrote a book called Spilling Clarence that I thought was just remarkable. Seriously, there are just too many and I am leaving out way too much, but if I don’t stop here, this post will get ungodly long.

Oh, and I love, love, love anything by Annie Dillard (especially Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

5.) Who will you pass this on to?
Nobody.

Bowling
My grandfather loved to bowl, and I loved my grandfather. Before he died (I was only 5 at the time) he used to take me with him to the Aqua Bowl where he would hang out with his old cronies. The only thing I remember is sitting in a boothe in the little cafeteria and him teaching me how to blow the wrapper off the end of a straw. Up until that point it was a complete mystery to me how people did that. Who knew that all you need to do was tear the end off the wrapper? Ah, the mysteries of the Universe revealed.

I am one of those people who, for all of my childhood and beyond, have been genuinely happiest when my nose is in a book. I remember when I was in college how I couldn’t wait until I was done so I would have more time to read. (Ha!) I was constantly exposed to new materials that I would only get a taste of but could never fully delve into. My list of things to read grew faster than I could keep up with. And I foolishly thought that outside of college I would find the reading time I craved. And I didn’t fully realize at the time what a powerful thing it was to read and discuss in a community — even if that community was nothing more than a class full of people who I had decided only half cared.

I’ve noticed when I talk to people now about books and reading that most people get this sort of hushed awe about it. They usually tell me about how important books are and how they know someone who reads a lot and how that person is really smart. What usually follows is an admission that they don’t read much. This is almost always said with a bit of embarrassment. I’ve let them sit in that embarassment and walked away with my smug attachment to the library, the bookstore, the great mothers and fathers of literature, etc.

As I go through life and deal with my own illusions about myself and “the way things are” I have to admit that I have always held very close to my heart a sense of satisfaction and, embarassingly enough, a personal superiority around my love for books and reading and words and language and writing. When I was younger and “troubled” I received little encouragement in the academic arena, but even I knew that testing out at a 10th grade reading level in 3rd grade was a big deal. It was something that I was good at and liked so I clung to it. Almost as an identity. Okay, maybe not almost, rather most assuredly. I liked books. I could write a little. That was who I was. It made me smart and wonderful.

After college, I had less time for reading, as I’m sure you can imagine. And as the pressures of “adult life” mounted, my time for reading got more and more crowded out. At first I noticed my vocabularly lacked a little lustre. Then I had no time to care about that either. I realized for the first time how much mindfulness reading requires. And how it means being able to set aside all the noise and clutter in your mind to immerse yourself in another world. That has become harder to do. I started reading more non-fiction. But I missed stories.

I am always grateful when the opportunities to dash your own self-importance start to present themselves, because it helps clear out a little of that clutter. So lately, in the light of my struggle to make time for reading and my even greater paralysis around writing, I am thinking a lot about my senior class in Biological Psychology where I read one simple article that talked about how they think it is possible that only 20%-40% of brains are really wired to be “great” readers. How the processing of words and language might just be a fluke of biology and genetics. And how that forced me to imagine that, like so many things, there is an element of luck involved in the things we are “good” at (or in my mind, the things that make us good) and it may have very little to do with us. It’s hard to feel arrogant about luck-of-the-draw physiology.

Lately I am reading a lot again. Fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, comic books, blogs, textbooks. And it feels good. My brain feels happy. I am learning to shut down the noise of my mind and live in the moment where I am scanning words across a page and letting them sink in. And I’m learning to read them with a little bit more of the being comfortable in my own skin. I’m putting the eternal “Why?” and “How?” behind everything and hoping to let the smug superiority, born out of an internal terror and insecurity of “never good enough!” just slide off.

Blogs are interesting creatures. They seem to require a carefully weighted balance between divulging the intimate details of your life without getting “too personal.” I find that I am not always keen on sharing the details of everyday life, but sometimes it becomes (or at least feels) necessary. So how do you maintain that space between the mundane and the extraordinary with at least a modicum of anonymity before a mostly silent audience that could be 10 people or 100 on any given day? And how do you write without the “audience” in mind? I’m not sure you can — at least not all the time.

The last several weeks have been a mad dash. I have been to more cities on the Eastern seaboard in the past month than in the entire two years since we moved here. In the end one city captured our heart and that was Philadelphia. This past week, one of these went up in front of our house.

You know how it is when you want something very badly and you don’t dare say it out loud for fear of the intensity of your own hopes and wishes and dreams? How saying it out loud sort of makes it real and final and you can never put it back into that quiet place of longing in your heart? How when you finally say, this is what I want, that it makes it really real and nearly impossible to continue to exist as you are? This is how I feel about moving. This is how I feel about being in a real city again.

When we moved here, this town was intended to be a springboard for other things. It was a temporary move with affordable housing and a chance to start over again. It was 5 hours from anywhere so we could take our time and figure out where and what next. It was the place that got us moving. And in ways it has turned out to be those things, but I will admit we got a little sidetracked. We bought a house. We lost a little bit of our intensity. I tried to believe I was happier here than I was. I tried to feel more optimistic than I could.

What was going to be a one or two year stay turned into a potential for 5 years when we bought the house. I’d always wanted a house, and here we could actually afford one. I think we were eager to solidify our commitment to each other with an action. A home was a strong symbol. When I finally managed to find myself in the arms of this wonderful human being, I felt home. Still, my heart wilted silently when I thought of being here that long. So I didn’t. I just continued to put one foot in front of the other every day and figured that life was what it is and it didn’t promise to be anything spectacular, in every arena, did it? And that made me angry, because what was life for if it wasn’t going to be spectacular! Why did I want something spectacular but was continually served up nothing more than a huge plate full of disappointment?

Then there was the unexpected unemployment for Mr. Knittiot and the impossible and defeating task of finding a job here when there are no jobs. And much, much more than that. Things that I am not ready or even able to go into right now. I’ve been through my fair share of dark periods in life, but this past seven months has been one of the most soul-wrenching of them all. I started seeing a counselor at the University to deal with what I thought was a little anxiety, but turned out to be a bigger can of worms than I had anticipated. This past week my counselor asked me if I felt I could see a light at the end of the tunnel now. And I said, “Not exactly, but I’m starting to feel that I’m in the tunnel and it’s okay.”

Despite the fact that we have our house on the market and Mr. Knittiot in the frenzy of a job search that has already yielded more opportunities in the last two weeks than we saw in six months here, it does still feel like we are in the tunnel. I want out of this place with a fierce desperation, but there are so many little details that all need to fall in place in just the right way for this to all come together. And I don’t want to be so focused on “escaping” that I am not able to live here right now. I live so much in the past and the future and it never occurs to me to enjoy this moment and appreciate it for what it is worth until much later.

I’m also starting to see that the plate full of disappointment that I often seem to be eating from is one that I am serving myself. This isn’t to paint over every detail of my life with a brilliant purple crayon and pretend that there aren’t a few piles of garbage sitting around, it is just to say that everyone has compost heaps lying around at various stages of decomposition and sometimes the stinking rotted garbage phase is just where something is at, but this is the stuff of a rich and nourishing soil later on. And besides, look at those beautiful roses and zinneas and bean plants and cabbages growing over here. Wow. That’s the stuff that comes from composting your garbage and as Voltaire reminds us, all that is left for us in the end is to tend our gardens.

It is all about perspective. It is all about what I am willing to see and learn and do. It is all in the approach. And mostly, it is about being a human being, which I am reminded again and again and again is all about taking responsibility for the levels of apparant spectacularness you see each day in your own life. Glorious. Truly glorious world.