Year: 2005

Stash dilemma / fear of variegation

Stash item: yarn. 225yds Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Worsted in color 37-forest (greens and blues).

If I were blind, I’d love this yarn

Photo close-up of blotchy stripes in my Clapotis. I like stash stories, so I will note that I scored this yarn as part of a $1 bag of odd balls at a thrift store in Seattle. I reached through a barricade of unsorted furniture and parts of vacuum cleaners for a bag of unidentified but potentially worthwhile yarn. I felt suitably triumphant once I realized it was not only 100% wool, it was brand name artisan yarn. Word. I love thrift scores.

The wool is very, very soft, and machine washable to boot. I understood immediately why Lorna’s Laces had a reputation. Way to go, reputations! Helping me make $1 purchase decisions.

The only catch is that I’ve never liked variegated yarn. It looks lovely in a skein or ball, but the blotchy, broken stripes that happen when it is knitted up remind me of all the knitting I hate. It looks like church sale dishcloths or acrylic slippers.

To me, there’s a reason you never see commercial clothes made from variegated yarn. Tweedy, sure. Striped, sure. Even space-dyed. But blotchy? No. Variegated colourways are one of my warning signs of knitting for knitting’s sake, of knitting things that are only cool to people who know how knitting works, of giving in to the hype.

Can Clapotis save me from variegation?

Since this yarn feels so nice, I decided to keep an open mind and try it out by finally making a Clapotis. Clapotis being another item with a glowing reputation: a scarf with dropped stitches, which uses variegation to create diagonal stripes.

I got through the set-up rows only by virtue of my determination to give this yarn a chance. Blotch city.

After dropping the first stitch to make a ladder down the middle of the fabric, I thought Clapotis might save me after all. The column of stitches left intact was short enough that the variegation looked like real stripes. Most of the stripes stretched across the entire column, without looking too broken. Cool!

But. Once I got about a foot into the scarf, the piece got large enough to start manifesting larger-scale colour patterns and it blotched up again.

Can I save Clapotis from myself?

It was a drag to lose motivation at that point. I’ve had a lot of knitting momentum since the weather became obviously autumnal a few weeks ago. If I had photos, I’d tell you about the cool scarf and hat I invented, but projects with no images are boring.

I had a little executive meeting with myself about this blotchy Clapotis. I couldn’t think of anything else I would want to make out of the yarn, so there was no point saving the yarn for later. It would be silly to try to sell one ball that had been partly knitted up, so again there was no reason to unravel the project.

Someone would probably like this scarf— strangers on the bus said they liked the colours. (Strangers on the bus love to talk about knitting. Oh man. “What are you making there?“) Maybe I should finish it.

It would be satisfying for me to get this entire unit of stash to the fledgling stage, and at that point it would probably find a home one way or another. Mainly though, it would be out of my stash closet.

Most of all, I’m committed to depleting my crafting stash. I love ambitious super-projects such as documenting just how much crafting potential was contained in my closet when I declared a moratorium on new purchases in September 2005. Even a variegated (but reputable) scarf could contribute to the super-project.

Can I save Clapotis and me from my knitter’s ego?

Someone will get this scarf for Christmas, I guess. It will be a lovely present but it seems like a generic choice. And I don’t think of myself as a knitter who gives the gift of variegated scarves. I give the gift of custom-designed complicated shit that doesn’t rely on gimmicky yarn!

Zing— maybe this needs to be an exercise in humility! That is actually more motivational that the prospect of giving this scarf to a loving home.

In summary, priorities are hilarious.

House of 100 jades

I popped awake at a productive hour this morning, and settled in to repot a bunch of plants. My favourite plant care activities are the radical rehabilitation procedures. Put all the potted plants in the shower together, for example, or prune the shit out of something.

Most of all, I love how much the plants love these treatments. I freely admit to being thrilled to see a plant go from dusty and withered to shiny and covered in buds. I don’t think you can get that kind of immediate gratification by watering a cat or whatever. (Maybe you could, if you let the cat get dusty and withered first?)

Today’s surgeries mainly involved our 400 jade babies. The sprawling jade plant in the kitchen has been slowly shrivelling up with some weird rot that starts in the middle of branches, so I had accumulated a lot of twigs and cuttings in my attempts to prune the evil out of it.

It finally became clear (through a shower experiment) that the chief jade was suffering from compacted soil and water wasn’t getting to all of its roots. Time to excavate, amputate and bandage it with nice new dirt. It was a good opportunity to prune off some of the large, tangled branches and plant them in more balanced positions. I have yet to grow a houseplant that is properly pruned with unencumbered limbs, but that’s definitely a goal.

For several years (about 2001 – 2004?) I frequented the You Grow Girl forums and was really into growing exotic and rare houseplants (tropical fruits, carnivorous plants, mimosas that move when you touch them, etc.) but through all the experiments and casualties, I’ve never gotten tired of the lovely old jade plants.

Galen brought a small, bushy one into our relationship, which has become the squid-like kitchen jade. His mum gave us one of her huge, semi-trailing jades in a pot about 2 feet across, for Christmas one year. The rest of our jade farm was spawned from those two. Some of them are so excellent right now that I’m tempted to name them. One in particular would be “Teen Heart-throb.”

Growing up I never saw jades at other families’ houses, so I still have the feeling that they’re kind of special, even though you can buy a 6 inch pot for like $5 at any corner grocer. They want to live. That would be a big credit to a plant even if it didn’t have cool succulent-spoon leaves. So we’ve agreed that having 10 jade plants in every room in the house is not only acceptable, but desirable. I’m glad that Galen is into having a zillion jade plants too. By the time I’m any good at kung fu, we’ll be able to refer to our apartment as The House of Potted Jade.

All these foxy new pots of jade are giving me the houseplant itch. I need to buy lemongrass anyway, so maybe I’ll plant a stalk. And maybe some tamarind seeds. Those were the hottest seedlings I think I’ve ever seen— their first real leaves are these big fronds of pinnately compound leaflets, and they develop red, peeling bark right away. I managed to grow three I think, but they died when we went travelling. (No blame on the plant-sitter; tropical seedlings are hardly a fair thing to impose on a helpful friend. The jade did fine.)

Ranty movie moment (Kill Bill)

Galen and I watched the second part of Kill Bill last night (yes, I’m always late watching movies…), and it was kind of weird for both of us. I was prepared to dismiss it as basically an idiotic pastiche of Tarantino’s favourite pop culture, but then I watched the “making of” bit in the special features. It amounted to all of the actors verbally fellating Q.T. for half an hour about his operatic scope and his ability to write better than Shakespeare did. Yow. I hope I never get myself into a position where no one will critique me to my face.

Really, I was enjoying the movie as a vacant piece of cool-looking entertainment until about the last 15 minutes, when…

(spoiler!)

… The Bride starts explaining why she ran away and her only story was that finding out she was pregnant changed her whole personality and made her quit her job. Add that to the insistent way that her unborn baby gets referred to as a person— repeatedly, during the entire two volumes— and I got a little creeped out by Tarantino’s take on reproductive rights. But, you know, oh well, artists have statements, the whole plot was minimalist, and the guy was probably just looking for some kind of primal, female motivation for his Amazonian lead. I can deal. I’m even pro-choice about the right to enjoy misogynist entertainment.

(end spoiler)

More annoying to me is that during the “let’s fellate the director” special feature, Uma and Quentin both make points about The Bride being so empowered, and about this movie featuring empowered women empowering themselves with power. Is this seriously what passes for empowerment among movie stars? Blond babes acting out the director’s girl-on-girl fantasies by kicking the shit out of each other? Chicks who are mortal enemies because they dated the same guy? Women who wimp out because of their uteruses? A main character who gets specifically attacked in her various woman parts— shot in the tits, rendered infertile, raped, manipulated through her child?

Presumably the celebrities consider these characters empowered because they can kick ass, but every time this prowess gets mentioned in the movie it is in the form “she’s pretty good… for a girl.” Top female assassin. Deadliest woman in the world. The chicks even refer to themselves that way, while they are killing some of your deadlier male assassins. That’s dumb, and distracting in a movie made since 1970.

When I rant like this, I get self-conscious about being a feminazi. This kind of rant doesn’t seem like an activist manifesto to me. My parents and almost everyone I know understands this stuff. I was raised in this context. A lot of my life plays out in a post-feminist context, if I may toss around some jargon for a moment. Ranting like this is sort of the same as complaining about an overpriced restaurant. You don’t have to go back there yourself so there’s no further action that needs to be taken, but you might as well warn your friends in case they care about the same things.

Now with more catcalls.

About four days ago I decided to make an effort to look more hot, since that’s a pursuit I usually neglect. This basically involved buying a second pair of pants and making a point of brushing my hair.

Results: astounding. Even in the depths of my teenaged depression I was able to appreciate my body as it was, so I’m used to feeling generally happy about my looks. More interesting is the way that every day since my resolution, at least one stranger has complimented or catcalled me.

It feels a little conspicuous, like ““movie stars get their hair cut every day so no one will notice and make fun of them, like at our school”:http://www.kithfan.org/work/transcripts/four/gavpreach.html,” but I can ride it out. I like seeing cute people out and about, so it’s pretty fun to contribute my own cuteness to the neighbourhood. It makes me happy about our neighbourhood that my take on hotness can fly here.

Since I haven’t always been successful at this mission, I’d like to catalogue a few points in case I get off track again later.

  1. Spending money on my hair is always worth it.
  2. Exercising: also worth it.
  3. Clothes that fit. Give the other ones away! I’d rather wear the same awesome skirt three times a week than rotate through a selection of almost-good clothes.
  4. More than one of things. One scarf solves a problem, but two scarves is more fun. Further, both will last longer.
  5. Newer clothes look better because they aren’t worn out.

Generally, my barriers to hotness are laziness and being a cheapskate.

Live octopus tentacles, a dining opportunity

I have an ongoing love/eat relationship with cephalopods. Squids and octopuses are among my favourite wonders of nature, being so smart and alien and jet-powered. And yet, so tasty. I’ve required small pep talks a few time in restaurants when someone has ordered a delicious tentacle dish that I can’t bring myself to eat even though it is surely a triumph of human culture (barbecued squid, pasta with olipetti, common kalimari, octopus sashimi…).

The best perspective I’ve come up with to handle the awesomeness yet deliciousness of my tentacled comrades is that life isn’t fair. My ongoing meditation on cephalopods is partly to do with my fascination with hard truths. I can’t be friends with octopods because they are ruthless killers. Also, I eat them. But I want to give them my love. C’est la vie, c’est la poubelle.

So I’m really fascinated by this account of eating live octopus tentacles , still writhing on the plate and trying to kill the brave diner. (Don’t miss the movie linked in the comments.)

I snapped out of the absolute stunned trauma of having to fight with my food and attempted to regain control of the situation… Without hesitating, I bit hard on it over and over and over again while mumbling “Die! Die! Die!”

Eating live tentacles embodies almost my entire relationship with cephalopods. They fight, I desire. They are worthy opponents. I am conflicted, but must commit myself or I will barf. I’d rather be friends, but any relationship will do.

Separately, I like food that won’t come to you, but demands you play by its rules. Wasabi is like that for me: I can’t think about anything else when wasabi catches me off guard. I reckon live tentacles would be the same. There’d be no daydreaming about the office while battling a tentacle into the chili sauce.

All in all, now seems to be the time to re-examine my decision not to be a ruthless killer. I used to be OK with ruthless cruelty and domination in high school. Maybe this is yet another trait from the past that is resurfacing now that I’ve stopped taking birth control. That would be unsettling.

Leftovers (almost left behinds)

It is really easy to stop writing. I think of ideas or stories I want to write down every day, but if I don’t act on the seed within a certain window, the urge just sort of passes.

  1. My ideas are not worth writing down for posterity, or they’d be worth writing down the next day.
  2. I should write more often, if I’m going to write at all.

Urges that have passed in the last few days:

  • Telling you about Antony and the Johnsons playing in a cathedral in Vancouver. Especially about how overwhelming and fantastic it was after about the fourth song, when the sound man finally turned up the volume just enough to resonate in the architecture. And about the comfort of seeing a genderqueer sensation sing in a church, along with a varied crowd of freaks and families and plainer sorts. I really like it when things don’t have to be burdened by being a radical act.
  • Writing out the caffeinated explanation I came up with for why I laugh so much. I don’t think of myself as a giggly person, but somebody probably does. Once the caffeine wore off, this train of thought seemed highly drug-induced: self-absorbed and overly sincere. The jist of it was that I laugh at the paradox of everything being absurd, yet perfect. Am I in my ninth grade mystical phase all over again? I did not know caffeine held this potential for unselfconscious declaration. Maybe it’s a better vision quest drug than I initially thought.

Penguin romance will not be silenced

The original French version of March of the Penguins puts words in the penguins’ mouths, for an anthropomorphic romance. At first I agreed with the producers that such a sentimental approach would never fly in North America, but then I took my gramma to see it in the theatre.

The whole crowd was old people and little kids: two groups who tend to talk through movies.

I think the French version could be reconstructed from the voices that the little girl next to me improvised to her mother.

(baby voice) ‘Oh, I’m so happy to see my daddy. Hello daddy!’

(deep voice) ‘Hello son! I missed you so much!’

And my favourite,

(mom voice) ‘Here, eat this. (barfing noises)’

Seitan, alchemy, the pantry

i am eating homemade seitan! i was resigned to creating an inedible learning experience on my first try (or two), but the results of this first attempt are just fine. a little denser than the packaged stuff i usually buy, but tasty. best of all, a $5 bag of vital wheat gluten looks like it will produce at least 12 packages worth (street value $36).

(for the uninitiated: seitan is a chewy vegetarian protein source, made by boiling a dough made from wheat gluten. also known as wheat cutlets, and the usual ingredient in mock chicken dishes. these are my seitan recipes.)

i don’t yet understand the correlation between pre-boiling consistency and final product. the transformation from wheat flour to fake meat is a weird one. i thought my dough would fall apart during boiling for sure, but it came out huge and puffy and dense. how can something be puffy and dense? meat replacement is alchemy. next time i won’t knead it so much.

this reminds me of canning, in that i have a giant and very heartening stash of seitan in the fridge now. galen wisely asked if seitan could be frozen. at that point, it would become a full-fledged member of the long-term food stores, which is always a satisfying occasion.

the pantry seems so noble, despite being basically a glorification of material gain. maybe the nobility comes from crediting outside sources (the bounty, the harvest, the earth, the fields!) for the treasure. or from the alchemy of turning cheap raw materials into valuable stores using a laborious ritual. (and such a ritual! complete with charts of numbers, specialized glassware, rules that can be bent and rules that can’t.)

Convergence of unlikely killers

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about being violent and hitting people, because of learning kung fu. The validity of using force in self-defense is so obvious to everyone in the world except me that I haven’t been able to have a discussion about this with anybody, really.

“I can’t see how I could justify hitting someone in the face.”

“Well, if they were going to hurt you otherwise, it just makes sense.”

“But— “

The End.

After eating too many Penguin caffeinated mints yesterday, I finally figured out why I was so hung up on this. I’m happy about this for two reasons!

  1. Problem solved. I am suddenly really grounded about hitting people in the face. This feels much more stable and honest than my previous inner turmoil. (More below.)
  2. I think my caffeine-induced revelation counts as a junior Vision Quest, which I’ve been wanting to add to my problem solving repertoire for awhile.

Why I couldn’t just hit people, already

I think my hang up was that most rationalizations of self-defense would require me to either believe in the law of the jungle (eat or be eaten, man!), or some kind of means vs. end justification, both of which options run directly into the hardest part of my hard-ass ethical instincts (the part that says “TRY HARDER”).

At first I tried to go with the dog-eat-dog strategy, on the grounds that life is not fair. Man, do I love to get down with the unfairness of life. (It’s the core of atheism for me, and why I love it so much. I’m not the apple of god’s eye? Hot.)

But. Despite my addiction to Hard Truth, being allowed to punch somebody back seemed like a cop out. Does someone else’s violence really give an excuse to me, a separate person who believes in being peaceful?

Relationships are magic.

And there you go. An attacker, and a defender. Two separate people… who are having a relationship. It takes two to fight. If I’m being attacked, I’m already in the fight, and that relationship already has hitting in it.

For some reason, this relationship perspective makes a huge difference to me. I think I can defend without adding any violence. (Sure, I could escalate with really disproportionate defense, like explosions. But also I could do something appropriate.)

This really jives with one of the things I like about wing chun— it is focused on ending the fight, rather than having an extended battle or taking revenge. The point is just to bring the relationship back to a non-violent state. If either person can run away at any point, it’s done. I can live with that.

Post script

A separate hard truth that has been popping up lately is that I can’t get friendly with octopods, even though they are so interesting, because they are ruthless killers. I am intrigued by my potential to be a tough bitch. What would happen if I got to the point where I could take an octopus? (This is silly.)

I just got knitting spam.


Better
Together: Buy Creative Knitting 1 Year Subscription – 6 Issues (US Only) with Knit N’ Style – 7 Issues (US Only)Today! Better Together qw1yrusplustq

I feel conflicted. I think I consider spam a sort of status symbol for an industry. That’s terrible! (But cheers to knitting!)

inspirational, celebrational…

galen and i rented the best of the muppet show and disc one of season one, then went back the next day for disc two. there is so much muppet show in our house now— children’s dvds are only $1 to rent for a week!

when i was little, i thought the muppet show was for adults because it was so violent and unfunny and confusing, and not remotely educational. now i watch it and it’s obviously made with little children in mind— half the skits are pre-verbal and make heavy use of colourful blobs.

but it is really weird. it’s about a bad variety show. that’s a rather complex angle for a tv show— celebrating weirdness without making it cool at all, just loving these bad performers with monobrows, and never letting them finish their acts or get applause. i remember finding the lack of closure really dissatisfying as a child. someone would start singing and just fall off stage and it was over. fozzie never got to upshow the hecklers. it was frustrating to watch!

i thought this would just be silly tv to watch after work or during dinner, but i’m finding it deeply satisfying. affirming, even! it’s such a complete vision of love and bad art and diversity (and puppets).

predictably, my favourite parts now are the parts i found most confusing when i was young: gonzo and sam the eagle.

gonzo is at max power in the first season. i never really understood that he was a performance artist, not just a chicken fetishist. “and now our resident artist, gonzo the great, will eat a rubber tire to the music of the flight of the bumblebee.” (booing ensues.)

sam the eagle is practically the president of the US right now. it’s comforting for a weirdo such as myself to see moral righteousness coming out of a grumpy blue bird instead of a man in a suit.

but i think my absolute favourite moment is seeing sam the eagle in a chorus line of male muppets in the opening credits of later seasons, singing “it’s time to put on make-up”.

Dork Parade

All today:

One of the guys at kung fu brought out his kung fu magazines to show people, leading to a discussion of the best places to buy these in town. I’m not that kind of kung fu student yet, but I’m sort of looking forward to it.

While I was out, my Squid Overlords shirt got me into a conversation about whether it’s possible to respect cephalopods for their intelligence without forgetting that they are ruthless killers. (That’s most of the attraction for me. My busmate was unconvinced.)

When I got home, I found Galen barricaded into the office with a friend, 3 guitars and 25 pedals, three hours into a giant wank jam. Mark showed me where he had written JH on his wah pedal in glow paint in high school. I thought he’d bought it second hand from someone (Jeremiah Henderson, for example), but he had just wanted Jimi Hendrix’s initials on his pedal, and for them to glow in the black lit practice space he was using at the time.

Later tonight we’re going to see the music video Bex’s brother made for a Monsieur Guy track— hopefully there can be some film geekery before the night is through. All I need to make this day complete is to listen to folk rock on the living room floor, and practice drawing typographic grids or something. And for my comic books to arrive in the mail. And I guess I should knit something using a technique I have to look up in a book. This might not happen after all. But it’s good to have goals.

Granny’s destiny: to live until the invention of shredders.

On Monday I helped my granny with her semi-annual paperwork confusion chores. The goal is just to replace outdated investment statements with the latest round and file it all away, but it is about the most spectacular display of granny management I’m ever required to produce. It’s guaranteed hilarity, paranoia, and a clear view to the inner workings of gran, twice a year.

I need to catalog a few things about the 2nd quarter 2005 edition.

Papers

(Unexpectedly produced by granny, from a Girl Guide Cookie caselot box1, handles tied together with old blue yarn, for me to shred2.)

  • Gas bills from 1995 on, from companies that no longer exist3
  • Eaton’s4 account statements from the nineties
  • A notebook with handwritten household bookkeeping from 1978 – 19855
  • Monthly credit card statements from 1998 – 2000, pinned to receipts with dress pins6
  • Blank airmiles card offers
  • Half a page of grampa’s income tax assessment from 1997
  • Such quantities of bank statements that we had to stop because the poor household-rated shredder started to smoke.

Appendix

1 Depression-era reuse of household waste. Noble, yet absurd. See also: wrapping leftover food in the inner bags of cereal or cracker packages, storing legal documents in marketing folders that came in junk mail.

2 Granny has technology at her house, but I have to make it go. You probably guessed. I like calling her house and getting myself on the answering machine.

3 Granny is a world champion worrier. Leaves no stone unturned.

4 Granny is patriotic. We had a small conversation about the demise of Eaton’s. I actually got a little sad, thinking about the role of the T. Eaton Company in The Hockey Sweater.

5 Granny’s house is one of those breeding spots for history. No matter how many times we empty her deep freeze, there are always packages marked “Blueberries ’86” or “Quince ’91.” I wonder where the rest of these notebooks are hiding.

6 More determined cross-purposing of household objects. Also, comprehensive lack of normal stationery supplies. Only giant scissors, only giant paper clips, etc.

Memo to self

Pints at 4pm on a Thursday: more often.

Especially in the sunshine. (For once, I have been really taking advantage of the weather this summer. Having a tan makes my future wrinkle locations more obvious. Welcome, baby eye crinkles.)

Wing Chun for cowards

At Kung Fu class tonight I was forced to conclude that I really am a pacifist. Or at least a coward. Even if someone were trying to rape me or murder my baby or perpetrate some other excusable motivation for self-defense bordering on vengence, I can’t imagine actually hurting anyone on purpose.

Skipping all ethical discussions for the moment, this makes studying a martial art really weird. As you’d expect, none of the instructors gives the impression of violence, just power, and the focus of the classes is always on defense and response, rather than attacks or abuse. And it’s all fascinating and efficient and really cool, and has lots of side benefits for mind and body.

But it’s still absurd to me, even in this responsible context, to learn how to elbow somebody repeatedly in the face and then knock them out with a blow to the back of the neck. Wing Chun is all about overkill; this kind of exercise comes up a lot.

I think I’m happy that I don’t actually want to punch anyone in the face, ever. My concern is only with how to stay motivated to kick hard and train my muscles to respond to any opportunity to break an attacker’s elbow. Because I do want to get good at this, for some reason. I’d rather learn Kung Fu than soccer or distance running or whatever.

Actually, I have a second concern, too: to stop laughing awkwardly whenever I realize what we’re about to learn, and stop needing to give my partners little pats to reassure myself that we’re cool. The “I’m not actually trying to hurt you” disclaimer is supposed to be covered when we bow to each other at the start, and I’d like to get into that “we have an understanding” mindset. But I can’t settle on an understanding. Everything we do in class sets off major cognitive dissonance in my mind: “Why would I ever even pretend to do this to someone?” vs. “This is so awesome!”

My bow/disclaimer needs to include something about how I’m about to enter a strange altered state induced by my rich inner life.