Knit Sisters

I told you all that the Jordana Paige knitting satchel was going to change my life. And how! Look what crawled up out of that bag today:

The first acid green Trekking XXL glove makes it appearance on the great stage of life!

Close-up:

That button was a stroke of genius for which I have my friend Kat to thank.

And finally, on the hand:

I am only carrying on and behaving so shamelessly triumphal about this single glove, whose mate is currently on the needles, because it turned out to be more difficult to complete than I thought.

That mitten top? The convertible piece? I knitted that sucker three times. Third one was a charm, but the first two were complete bollocks.

And why? Simple. After knitting the cuff and hand according to the pattern instructions and finding it a tad large for me, I lost faith in the pattern and decided to strike out on my own. I felt I knew better.

After two attempts, both of which resulted in a mitten top that was painfully short, I ripped it back for the second time and—now chastened and at least moderately wiser—reknitted it…according to the instructions.

You know what they say: if all else fails, read the directions!

Sometimes I just have to do things my own way, even if they are destined for disaster. I am reminded of an incident when I was a very small child—maybe three or four—involving an ice cream cone. I felt at the time that it was overly hidebound and unimaginative always to approach the ice cream cone from the top, where the ice cream sits. Why not, I thought, eat the cone first? What a brilliant innovation!

My father tried to tell me that it might not be the best idea. I felt I knew better.

I started eating from the bottom of the cone. Within a few seconds, the ice cream had melted enough to slip through the shattered ruin of the cone and land with a plop on the sidewalk. But not before I myself had become fully enrobed in chocolate ice cream.

I learned my lesson about ice cream cones, yessirree! I never did that again.

But as you can plainly see, the unquenchable spirit of stubborn refusal to see sense, the mulish conviction that the wheel must be reinvented, the obstinate compulsion to climb the mountain just because it is there…or if it is not there, to build the mountain, by God, and then climb it because it’s there now—they can’t take that away from me!

Now, back to that second glove…

Oh, and one more thing. Alex asked me to direct you here if you need a laugh. Naturally, the suggestion comes from him because, as we have learned recently from Christopher Hitchens, women aren’t funny. I was going to write something in response to the Hitchens article, but then I decided that even the minimal intellectual effort I’d need to put into dismantling his woolly-minded “argument” was…beneath me, frankly. Besides, I’m obviously far too busy cracking jokes.

So in lieu of a tedious rebuttal, I’ve decided that it would be entirely more fitting to make my point by rewriting my great-grandfather’s favorite joke:

A woman walks into the editorial offices of Vanity Fair and steps up to the magazine’s editor. “When,” she asks, “will the last misogynist, intellectually shallow, essentializing article that reduces women to nothing more than incubators on legs by means of a windy ‘Just-So’ story cloaked in sloppy, psuedo-scientific reasoning be published by the mainstream press in this country?”

The editor replies, “You should live so long!”

Life is short, and crap is long. And now, once again, back to that second glove…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 at 11:11 pm and is filed under Sock it to me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.