The other night I decided to get started on the first Year of Lace shawl...seeing as the second package is due to arrive in a month or so, I thought I should at least start the first one so that I can get used to knitting with what is equivalent to silk thread, on tiny needles, in the dark. "In the dark" because the livingroom doesn't have a lot of direct light, and the yarn is brick orange-red, and the contrast isn't great. Not a huge bother, because it's the hands that need to get used to the feel of things, rather than the eyes needing to see all that much, save for the pattern on paper, and I had enough light for that.

I was knitting away on the tiny needles with the very fine silk yarn, thinking, "Oh, this is going so well! I will be able to get through the first chart in no time!" No time being the one hour that ER was on, a stupid show that I watch when Hub goes to the pub on Thursday nights. I actually wanted to write something after I finished the knitting, and thought I'd have lots of time for that, even including the fact that I'd have to get up at 5:00a.m. to go to work the next day.

I looked down to what I'd knit, and stretched it out a bit to see the pattern, and what do I see? A gaping, massive hole. When I pulled the yarn a little more to get a view on this abomination, I realized that there was no possible way that I'd be able to sort of fix it a little bit by drawing another thread through here or here or here or....nope, now the hole is bigger, and considering that the piece of lace that I'd knit was only five cm square, the problem was growing. Hmph. Now normally I'm a fixer rather than a frogger, but I saw no choice and pulled the lace off the needles and took it all apart to re-knit it. Near the end there was a bit of a knot, and forgetting that silk is impossible to break, I tried to break the yarn. Why did I not get up to get my scissors? Because it was late and I was tired and I'd had a long day and because in truth, I am totally lazy. I tried to break the yarn, but all I did was break the skin on the side of my right index finger. It didn't really hurt, but it reminded me of this time last year, when I had the same break in the skin on that finger, and that turned into Frankenfinger and resulted in a three-day hospital stay, and that, that was way more upsetting than ripping out a few rows of lace knitting.

The run-on sentence up there is mildly upsetting also.

In other updates, I'm going to start an MA in the fall, through Athabasca University. I am not really an MA sort of a person, but I'm looking to push my brain through some gymnastics and will try to do a degree with a Cultural Studies sort of a bent. Part of the final application was an English test, and while I did fine on the editing/grammar section, I was totally blown apart by the section where I had to answer questions about a particular piece of writing. Firstly, the piece used too many words. I am myself a wordy sort of person (according to the director of the funeral home that took care of Dad's arrangements. When they saw my obituary, they called it "wordy". Hmph.) but I try to actually get around to the story or the opinion rather than tossing in a bunch of $10 words to fill in the 10,000 word quota. It seemed to me while I was reading this bit about adult education and how it fails to reach all the adults because it's just not being done right, and you can't convince the people who make decisions about how it's being done that it's being done wrongly, because they think they're right, but they're not, and really, I'm going to whine some more about them...that I was getting lost in all the words, rather than finding the point about the fellow's thesis. Highly annoying.

Then I realized that if I found this one short excerpt from a paper to be annoying, how on earth was I going to get through a whole two years worth of coursework and analysis and breakdown and deconstruction of every idea?

With aplomb, I figure. I am not party to the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" sort of school. If they let you in, then you should point out the errors of their ways, is more my mantra. In speaking to a friend who is in that social/cultural course of study already, she just nodded and smiled, and said well, you have your point of view, but there's nothing that needs to be changed, just things that need to be discussed. My problem with the discussion is that it never goes anywhere, it just sits in a circle and holds hands and acknowledges that there are problems, but that's it. It victimizes itself (much like the little passage I had to analyze) and says there's nothing to be done really, but at least we know the problem.

Oh no, no, no. Knowing the problem is a good start, but once the problem is known, then we start in on solutions. We look for a light at the end of the tunnel. We don't just sit there and sing together and feel the kinship, we get out and fix things and at least feel as though we're making some headway, even if we end up butting our heads on the wall and having to back up and start again.

A scientist in social scientist clothing? So far, even without the first bit of coursework, it's an ill fit.