blatherings

I think there’s only so much redoing that you can take. I’ve been working on revising my final paper for the semester – the last thing I have to do even remotely related to school until January – and I just deleted an entire paragraph because my instructor said that the point was good but needed expansion if I wanted to keep it. So, out it went.

But, honestly, my first lace project is teaching me that I have far more patience for knitting than I do for academic work. It’s hard for me to write a paper with some care because the process is not all that fascinating for me and the end result isn’t necessarily one that I would have chosen. It was assigned. I think knitting would suck a lot of all of my projects were assigned. And the whole deadline thing kills me. Just having a time limit kind of bums me out. I’m actually a better person with deadlines, because I’m inherently abnormally lazy, but they still make me sad. Or, perhaps, they make me sad for much the same reason they improve me – because I am lazy.

But knitting is not writing a long paper about something I’ve long since ceased to care about. I have some interest in Socrates, but I don’t really delight in regurgitating the same differences between Plato and Aristophanes that I have been mulling over for weeks. This is something I know. Show me something that I don’t know.

Or maybe it is. Maybe it’s like when you get to the tail end of your project and you want to stop right before you finish. Because the last few rows always seem to be the ones that require the most motivation. Which is odd because you would think that it would be easy to rush to completion. But, the fact of the matter is, there’s always something new and shiny that catches our eyes just as we’re about to finish.

That’s life. Commitment can be really hard. But somehow it’s miraculously easier with knitting. I can spend hours of my life working rows and rows of hundreds of stitches and that’s OK. But six pages of boring academic writing on Socrates? That is not something that I can bear.

I’m not really sure what my point is here. I think it has something to do with how knitting is somehow fundamentally similar to school, but also a million times more awesome. Knitting is like that. It’s similar to everything, but yet way more awesome at the same time.

I think that, at some point, I would like to write something deep or original about knitting. I wonder if there are any realms left to explore.

I would have an interesting picture to post with this if I actually had some new, lovely knitting to post. As it stands, it’s just the lace and the two gift scarves. Maybe I’ll post the one for my mom at some point after Christmas.

That is, if I actually finish it.