I've been knitting the wrong way this whole time.

ahmg. It's like finding out I've been adding instead of subtracting. Or turning right when I thought I was turning left. In other words, my universe has just shattered.

I've been knitting through the back loops of everything this whole time. I am thoroughly ashamed. Ashamed! :(

Hm. I was halfway through the hat already. Halfway! Probably the fasted I've knitted anything, really. Probably on account of the fact that I was so excited about making cables :P

But I didn't like how it turned out. It's a bit too slouchy already, which is perfect for me, but for stylish Italian Ahmad?? Who buys his stylish glasses expressly from stylish Lebanon? This must needs be tailored. So I frogged the bitch. Fucking Vanna's Choice. I was talking to Patty how after a while you get pickier and pickier with yarn. Maybe not exclusively cashmere or anything, but that super saver shit isn't going to cut it anymore. Vanna's Choice is joining the list.

After much hemming and hawing I signed up on Ravelry, and have been trawling its fibrous depths like a spiny lobster, absorbing patterns into my gooey crustacean innards.

Sometimes I want to skip all this youthful ambition crap and just retire to a mountainside cottage in Switzerland with a quiet, industrious Swiss husband and just knit all day with my seven cats and lumbering Newfoundland dog. 

Though most days I just dream about being Elizabeth Zimmermann.

It's like my ultimate dream to make an adult surprise jacket with long sleeves gathered at the wrists like the picture in The Opinionated Knitter.

Thick cream or mottled heather grey. Alpaca or cashmere or both. Or... sigh.

And one of those fair isle sweaters! Mmph! I've never really balked at any kind of knitting--except maybe Estonian lace :O--but the kind of intricate colour changes of fair isle kind of maybe scare me a little bit. 

I've been talking about knitting an awful lot since school has ended only because i've been trying to find things to talk about. :P Things will begin to happen on Friday. I want to make an effort to write things down coherently, since it's not a habit of mine to be especially coherent. 

I think my mind has suffered for laying fallow so long, so that hard work feels like hard work instead of the kind of mental adventure it once was when I was younger. 

I remember watching Serge at work, cleaning his brushes and putting away the sponges. It was as if every movement was calculated and considered. Everything was put back into its right place. He folded the paper towels we use to wipe down our paintbrushes into careful fourths and methodically wiped down the counters. And yet it wasn't a painstaking process. Every motion was determined and quick, executed with surety and peace of mind. I like being around Serge because he knows himself and he knows what he's doing. Maybe because he's older, he's stopped wasting time. 

Or maybe it's all the weed and the LSD. Maybe he burned out all the useless shit in his brain, leaving nothing but peace and efficiency, like watching a starving tortoise eating mash.

Those things can go.

Anyway, that's the kind of thing I want to go for this year. 

Off to the yarn shop :P

cable needle.

UGH I just got a cable needle. I've been going through all these cable beanie patterns and it's like being dipped in chocolate and gold flakes. MMMMM i'm in heaven.

That might actually be pretty unpleasant, but I'm crazy excited. 

Ahmad just asked me to make him a beanie for his DC trip.  While initially I was going to say no, I realized that Saturday would be the last time I'd probably ever see his sexy Lebanese face again, so I told him yess.

I'm thinkin' about just making him a plain old knit beanie. I do have all day tomorrow, though, and a shiny new cable needle. Hmmm. :( o the possibilities.

i'm beginning to feel my backfat.

BACKFAT. Like hairless moles furrowing together down my spine. MMMMM.

I blame the holiday food. I ate lobster twice yesterday, along with heapfuls of greasy Cantonese food. The day before that I had bacon, and also Korean bbq from Freshia.

Oh man when that stuff explodes into your mouth with grease and fat mamdfnadkfja; MMMM some more.

Hopefully I'll be making more healthful use of mum's electric grill pan thing. We tried grilling green beans and though it took a while for them to caramelize they were so sweet and lovely after they did. Maybe I ought to blanch them first. Mmm.

Oh but then my aunt made this chocolate cake with flan on top and caramel all dripping down its sides. 

i feel uncomfortably pillowed in my own fat. Ugh gross. and yet so deliciously cushioned.

i've actually always wanted to try barding a chicken. that involves wrapping the chicken breast in bacon before roasting it, since the breast is always in desperate need of some kind of juicy greasy fatness. 

of course i saw julie and julia today, and there was so much butter oh my goodness. butter, oh thou churned milk solids, thou sweet and creamy delectation. they were slathering the hens with herbed beurre. mmmmm. 

i got a 4.0 this semester, which is surprising, seeing as I struggled so hard and procrastinated so much. That I got a better grade in International Social Conflicts and Valentina didn't has got to be proof of devilry. I wrote our biggest research paper the night of, three hours before, on hasty research, and I aced the thing. :( 

I'm cowed by how hard she works, and how frustrated she gets when she doesn't get the grade she deserved, simply because English is like a second language to her. 

To me writing well is second nature, and I feel I coast on it, depend on my prose when I don't really have the kind of insight and understanding she has on any given subject. Just because she doesn't have the words to say it, she gets the worse grade. bleh.

I finished two hats today! It took me like three hours to finish Valentina's hat. I really like these seashell crochet beret patterns I came up with. I kept ripping up the one I made for Casey because I couldn't get the shaping right, but now it seems like they shape themselves. I hardly had to decrease the stitches at all near the end. 

I really want to try knitting a cabled hat. There was this cloche hat that had one thick cable braid down the side and looked so lovely and easy, I'd like to try it. Only the pattern's in a magazine in a bookstore far far away from here. And it cost like 20 bucks. For one pattern out of a dozen lousy dowdy tams and pom pom fucking beanies. Bleh.

 

fat assness

have got my rodarte dresses on hold at the local target and am happy.

got some leggings from aa in the mail, but i will have to set them aside? they fit fine once they go on, but it's the going on. my hips are so wide relative to my waist it's hard to find any pants that fit. so i just wear black leggings everyday until they fall apart :(. 

everytime i think i feel skinnier i just go to aa and i get 'moted again. 

hmm hmm. i'm going to go finish this hat some more. and plaaay dragon aaaggeee.

The Predicament

So I'm terribly ashamed of being a procrastinator. 

Like I intended to work on my paper all Tuesday. Then Tuesday became Wednesday and I was all, "I'm going knock this shit DOWN!11" but then I didn't and passed out at midnight with a half-page outline. Then I woke up at 6am and frantically worked on it, didn't finish, showed up 40 minutes late to my 8am final, and I'm sitting in the library now. Blogging.

It's a 3 page paper about Stiglitz. Stiglitz! That man like the Gabriel of Globalization, whose hymns and proclamations I've sewn into my little earth-shaped heart. But alas it was an assignment, and I don't do those.

The thing is I know I'm good at writing papers, and I'm good at bullshitting bullshit Anthro finals, so it's just more incentive for me to procrastinate. So, cushioned by this arrogance, I breeze up to the last few hours and then stress the fuck out. I don't like this. Gaahhh. I need to stop.

I need to stop blogging, holy shit. 

But my mum just gave me this $75 gift card for Target and with the new Rodarte collection coming out next week omg. I know nowhere else to shout these exaltations, except here, this little hole in a tree. I shall cover it up with mud now, and fly free. Am I rhyming? hm.

also today I am 21. it is not so much a feeling of liberation and freedom so much as it is a feeling that I am growing older, and I have all these plans, and I won't be done with them, won't be really truly an adult, until I'm like... 27. Or 28. i want to join the Peace Corps, and I want to do a masters too. And then what? :( I shall stop making plans, and just get drunked up like other 21 year olds. 

ecrasez le.

moi je ne suis pas finit avec mes devoirs, mes essaies, mais je suis finit, absolument, avec cette vie des miserables, avec cette rue d'ennuie et nul. baise it baise it baise it.

I want to crush these words and sift each phoneme through my fingers like a falling rain of powder, straight into being. I am eight kinds of done with this shit. 13 pages before tomorrow night. Not including the annotated biblio. 

I'm not cut out for this. When I'm done with this degree I'm getting out of here. I'm learning my languages as best as I can and I'm quitting. I'll join the Peace Corps, I'll fly out of this world. I'll peel off my skin and emerge some new and finally satisfied thing. Something beautiful for once. 

Relatively Speaking.

I know I'm always talking about how my brain is dying, deteriorating, melting into the void, etc.


I'm sitting near two college students, one of whom just asked the other, "Hey, what's fornication mean?"

Face--->palm.

So I suppose maybe my brain is actually growing relative to the kids around me. I swear, this technoculture is getting out of hand. I saw two young boys in a family who each had an iPhone. Who needs a fucking iPhone when you're 9? I had fucking hot wheels, and a toy bulldozer I named Rosy. Kids these days! Weaned on this high-velocity, low content information bullshit. Where does the mind meander, yes in endless rivulets of possibility but only ankle-deep, only ever ankle-deep.

sigh.

with my palms on my eyelids i get that rainbow vision.

though i lose the clarity i gain beauty and wonder all up in my face, and your curious scent, tobacco and sweat and potatoes, the soil. your curious scent.

which is good because if i could see you now, the way you ought to be seen, i would want to walk. 

but oh, the bliss blindness brings.

how much of love is tongue-wrought and money-bought and safety-sought, how much of happiness is lost when we hold each other too close too fast. i wonder.

in the wood.

i want to crush this ominous wood and rummage through the rubble. i want to make a nest of those gnarled trees and in their solid arms i'd place this giant shapeless sadness. i'd put it to rest. i'd perch it on the obsidian face of Time by Prometheus and they both can dream on in those terrible undulating measures of pain and despair.

And I could finally walk away.


Johnnie and I were talking today about acting, and it made me miss it ever so much. I wonder if I have time in my schedule for it next year. MMmm.

I miss memo. Maybe I can see him on Friday. Every week is a busy, busy week for me. Make it stop. huummm.

one small boat on the crest of a towering wave.

Lately I seem to float through these bizarre moods, but no matter if I'm wrapped in euphoria or indifference or throbbing anger, I feel so spaced out. 

I can't seem to give a shit about anything or anybody.

I don't give a shit about the research I need to be doing, or coming to school or work on time. I don't care that I got all these obligations. I just don't care. 

 But. n'importe quoi. I need to be looking at internships and working out my schedule for next semester. I still have at least 3 semesters left. I'm thinking about taking only 4 classes next semester. This semester itself is flooring me. Saturday was my first day of real rest in a good three or four weeks. Besides hanging out with the I/ST girls I haven't seen anybody but Memo.

Or maybe I'm exaggerating. Yes, I've seen a few other people in there, but well. The meetings are but fleeting and insubstantial.

Another distinctly discomforting mood I've found myself in: crippling insecurity. There are some days I look in the mirror and just claw my face off. This morning I saw my haggard self and lay in Memo's bed just, disappointed and sad. 

Last night I went to a party with him. Maya is this real sweet lady. She teaches middle school, and this was an older crowd that came to her house. I don't often feel my age; I try to look past that kind of shit. But man. Man oh man, did I feel young. It wasn't so much the musick. I listen to Snoop Dogg and Salt n Pepa and all that mess. 

But maybe it was the slightly frumpy, decaying women in "sexy" costumes awkwardly gyrating with bud lites to Sean Paul's "Temperature". And the awkward older dudes. I mean, Memo's kind of an awkward older dude, too, but I like him.

So even this depressing prospect of going to a thirty-something crowd's halloween get-together got me all funked out before we left the house, and I put on my dead face with dread in my bones. And when we entered the place, it was practically empty. And dark. And quiet. Costumed people stood around slightly forlorn, embarrassed, and confused, as if they had just caught themselves wearing a homemade "Ceiling Fan" costume.

I mean. yeah.

So I felt pretty miserable until my second gigantic cup of cap'n coke. 

I don't really like getting drunk anymore, but I eventually came to the realization that I'd

better make the best of the situation or ruin Memo's evening, so I ended up taking a shot with 

everyone and having an okay time. 

I mostly ditched my friends and turned down other party invitations to spend the night in Memo's arms. 

And I didn't know, really, how much I liked him until this morning, when he woke up and was telling me, in the sweetest voice, about this dream he had where he was in a library with a lot of delicious fruit.

And oh, oh, my beating heart.  

i'm gone man. i'm solid gone.

Ahhh habiiiiiibbiiii I am done and gone and gone and done with all this thinking and thinking.

I don't know where I stand on this earth any longer. I feel like the inside of my brain is decaying. I feel like my body is dissolving into the ether. 

I want to say I used to be awake. I want to say I used to stand firm and touch the ground with eager hands. I wanted to say I drank in words like thirsty men, sucked the marrow from every last book, ate the glue from the binding just to taste the stories leaking there.

but i'm not. and i don't know where I'm going. sigh.

Oh Des Choix

Alors. Things have become so heartbreakingly normal, around here.

My only consolation is listening to KCRW in the mornings when I am late for another class. 

Sometimes, if I am lucky, the music shakes up a sweet, effervescent bubbling just below my lungs

and I float, mes amis. I float.

Have recently resolved not to buy any makeup until I've used up all my old ones. !

I went to MAC to buy a substantial number of items, and after that it's been hard to bat off 

the temptation to buy more.

It is, after all, MAC. Thank goodness the only thing I have from NARS is the 

Laguna/Orgasm stuff or I may just be in debt.

I have a lot of dreams, unwarranted, mind, about the other one. I normally never dream about 

boys I'm dating or who I like.

Granted I dream a lot about Memo, too. But the conversations, the feelings, the overwhelming 

sense of reality, never approaches the kinds of dreams I have about the other.

These feelings, though I fight, are so consumptive I break into pieces when he comes near me. 

I just want to be happy with one person, someone who is, enfin, right for me. 

That boy is not right for me. But oh! Should he lay his head across my lap once more 

I shall faint.

rest

we shall be given to restlessness and hard labour, and so prevail over lesser things, and step out stronger than by the way we came. sleep is for the weak, and procrastination only the slow gestation of marvellous things, like baby whales or well-written essays.

oh mr. sandman.

i feel terrible. i have only slept a handful of hours la nuit dernier. after the first hour, i had a nightmare, un vrai couchemar.

i dreamed i had been grazed by a bullet or shot in the top of my head. I had the feeling of utter heaviness and blackness. I could feel terrible difficulty and numbness in trying to turn myself over. Was I, thought I in that slow and sluggish manner, was I dead?

Was I dying?

I gasped upon waking, and the feeling of intense burning and wetness on my crown remained for a good many minutes. I lay there, awake, feeling this wetness even as I touched my own head and found it dry. It hurt, tender and burning, for so many minutes. The darkness in my room was like the darkness of some other place. There was a weight in my bones like my flesh had been packed with muddy coffee grounds. I felt like I was floating, and sick, weightless and yet sinking.

Was I really awake? My head still feels kind of weird and tingly.

I remember thinking, as I always do after these many, many nightmares, that I don't ever want to go back to sleep again. I wanted to call Memo. I wanted to be held. I wanted to know that I was alive and awake.

jesus i'm so tired. and so sick.

sinking slowly

Did yesterday happen? 

I need to stop smoking and drinking. It's making me rust. I am my worst person on these substances. It makes me lonely and depressed afterward.

Or at least it exacerbates my loneliness and depression. I didn't want to be at that kickback in the first place, and there I woke up. 

I didn't. Have. Any. Fun. I'm very... angry? Or sad, or something. I want to see someone, talk to someone, that isn't Memo, that isn't Catherine. I'm tired of everybody. I'm sick of people's faces. Their judging, their apathy. I'm fucking tired. I want to leave, without coming back. I'm done, goddammit. 

conundrum

sexisasmallpartofmyrelationshipsexisasmallpartofmyrelationship

sexisasmallpartofmyrelationshipsexisasmallpartofmyrelationship

sexisasmallpartofmyrelationshipsexisasmallpartofmyrelationship

sexisasmallpartofmyrelationshipsexisasmallpartofmyrelationship

sexisasmallpartofmyrelationshipsexisasmallpartofmyrelationship

sexisasmallpartofmyrelationshipsexisasmallpartofmyrelationship

the singing man in the deaf parade--

I sometimes feel like a raving lunatic, or an eccentric scientist or mad prophet, especially when I am trying to explain something wonderful to a host of friends who could not be moved to care or understand.

Sometimes when I am at the library, I feel thus. Or standing in front of a clothes display. Yarn shops, or the word "yarn" also evokes this high and lonely feeling. The intoxicating and unique mixture of several chords and a drumbeat, coagulated into a perfect jelly of song, provokes me into speaking tongues. 

And lo, the image of me traipsing out with invisible vapours in wonder and awe amongst the more solid and sane statues of my confused and pitying friends, how it comes.

Ours is a high and lonely destiny.

I'm going to write something down, and you read it and you say if it makes you feel kind of funny, the way it made me feel.

"And when I have become as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at earth's eastern rim) and once more tread the great dance."

- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

No, it probably won't. You'll need to have heard the rest of it all, have learned the whole of it. You'll have to have been briefed in that wondrous lexicon. I have been drinking steadily of the Chronicles of Narnia, one every day for the past few days. If I had not been working yesterday and been busy with the boyfriend before that, I would have finished the last two books already, but I've been slow.

I picked up The Voyage of the Dawn Treader this morning and just finished it this evening, after making beef curry for the boys in the family. The homely stew felt leaden in my mouth, as I read about boy kings and girl queens and talking mice and sailors supping on dazzling liquid light.

like clearing the fox den.

I am excited by neatness. On trips to Ikea, I am filled with a kind of intense joy to see things compartmentalised into sweet, stylish, and Swedish boxes and bookshelves, into underbed storage units. Like Kit and Nita fighting Entropy in the Young Wizards series, it is like watching the Devil get suckerpunched. Fuck you, Mess! In your place, pants! Serves you right, Errant Towel! Etcetera, etcetera.

But those of you who intimately know me will know that I am a notoriously messy person. It is not so much that I like mess or that I am incapable of cleaning, but my mind does not exist on quite the same plane as my body. I am always elsewhere. While I may be blogging on my bed in front of my Mac now, in Garden Grove, in the slightly chilly Southern California night, I am in Nazi-occupied France with the likes of Eli Roth and Brad Pitt. I do not notice the dust on my desk, nor the dirt on my sheets in the way angels in graveyards do not mind the lichen on their faces. They are not there to care.

But I admit sometimes it gets to be maddening, and the sight of the mess in my room throws in me into a mad kind of frenzy. I feel like there are ants all over my back. A rush of blood hits me square between the shoulders, right up into my head, and I clean everything out. I wipe clean the mirrors, dust the drawers. I organise my lingerie drawer into types of lace and colour. I throw out the trash and lo, I have made my peace.

It is the same with this blog, I guess. I come here when my mind goes crazy, when I have all the languages I have learned and all the songs I have sung all crash together like a cacophonous disaster in my skull. And all the long words tumble out like sequinned gymnasts, and all the big thoughts like marching elephants bespangled and proud. All the sad sentences and the small thoughts, the ponderous loon songs of self-abasement, like tiny clown-cars tooting round the ring. And the vain ideas, the lady shimmering bare-back on the white horse, why they come around too, all naked legs in the spotlight, all bejewelled breasts.

And it gets a little bit better. It makes the maddening crowd, the lions and tigers, the bears, it makes them all right. They do not so much snarl as snicker.

I get so many bad dreams I don't know what to do. I don't want to go to sleep, mother. Five more minutes. Five more minutes.

Listening to my brother's croaking song, for he feels like he can sing.

Have been filled with prose and prose and prose, ladies and gentlemen. Prose and prose and prose.

I am more restless by the day. Siiiigh.

Went last night to a Dodgers game with Memo and his friends. It was interesting, I was more amused by the people than I was by the game. I felt all yesterday as if I was in some strange dream. It feels gloomy and balmy by turns. The air is silvery gold, and my bones feel filled with mud.

It is 12:30, and I should be at his house at 3. I need to do laundry yet, and some knitting. 

I feel so curious! I feel like I'm dreaming, even now. 

My financial aid has come in, so I am a few hundred dollars less poor. I pick up my pay check this week, lads and ladies, and I am so glad of it. Money, money, money. A golden balm to blind the eyes.

Have been reading a lot. Finished two books in the last two days. Grazing through the Chronicles of Narnia like a hungry sheep.