I took that Blog 365 button off of my blogroll. Who was I kidding? When it comes right down to it, I blog when I have a minute, when I feel inspired, when I want to, which seems to just fly right in the face of a blogging regiment that requires, nay, demands daily compliance. I read and write something everyday, but that something may not be a blog post and I need to make my peace with that.
But enough angst about my lack of writing. What's going on with my knitting?
Truthfully, not a whole lot. I'm looking at my knitting basket right now. It contains my Silkroad Aran Tweed (that's a mouthful) vest, which I'm trying to make a cardigan with the knitting of sleeves (limited amount of yarn--this will be a nail-biter). One layer below is a pair of socks--2 socks, knit at the same time, on the same needle--in Louet Gems. Final layer? A couple of skeins of Galway that were supposed to have been long ago transformed into the fronts of a jacket I'm planning in linen stitch. I have about 4" of the left front.
And then there's the other basket, the long, shallow one that lives under the coffee table. It's full of projects in little ziploc baggies and I don't even want to look in it to see what's actually in there. Flanking that basket are two smaller baskets (part of a set) which hold spinning supplies. SPINNING supplies because I have (thank you sweetheart!) a beautiful new (to me) Lendrum wheel (remember, I showed it to you a while back?) and I really want to do some spinning too.
And my stash. Well, Steve was a sweetheart (as always--I don't deserve him) and photographed the stash I've marked for deletion. I need to price it all and tell the world. It needs to be gone from my home in short order because I just don't want to move it.
Last night I was in a chat room as a participant in an online conference. The keynote was an anthropologist* who had noted (among other interesting things) that the community he had observed underwent a transformation when the technology of writing (we don't really think about paper and pen as technology, but they are). The need for an accurate census listing necessitated the need for actual, discrete names where relationships had named villagers before. And their living spaces were transformed from scattered huts into neat rows.
One of the other participants wondered whether the introduction of the web instead of the introduction of writing would have made a different sort of difference. I immediately fired back the observation that the web is based on writing; writing presupposes the web. The web, for all of its visual and audio offerings, is really a writing-based enterprise. In that moment I was struck with this sense of how truly different we are from less-developed (or differently developed) cultures, and how much our culture shapes the way we think about the world.
What does this have to do with my little stash/time inequality? I realized that these are really silly problems to be complaining about, aren't they? I'm whining about an abundance of fun, productive, creative work. I have too much inspiration around me, too many resources to work with, too much to be and do, and too many opportunities to explore and examine. I think that these things are good and valuable because my culture says that they are so, but to another culture, my complaints about my stash may just mark me as, well, insane.
That's about as brutal as I want to be today, I think.
*The anthropologist is Michael Wesch, composer of a great YouTube commentary on our digital culture called The Machine is Us/ing Us. The presentation that we watched for our conference was called Human Futures for Technology and Education (left column, 4 down).
by Maryanne Wolf
by Richard Restak M.D.
by Henry Jenkins
by Ann Marie Fleming
by Asne Seierstad
by Emma Campbell Webster (this one was actually a graduation gift)
by Elie Wiesel
