I’m having that weird thing happen again, when I’ve been doing too much graphic design. I was just knitting something, and did something I didn’t mean to do. I had that half thought/half reaction of pressing Ctrl+Z. This would, of course, undo the last thing I did.
Except I’m knitting, and neither the yarn nor myself are equipped with an undo function.
Kittenwar.com is a site where you choose between two pictures of kittens. There’s a list of the winningest kittens, and the losingest kittens. I haven’t looked at losingest yet, I bet they’re mangy.
Last night my dream was much more weird than the night before. In this dream, I had stopped at a convenience store on my way to work, where I ran into Holly. We chatted and she told eye-rolling stories about Signs Now. The owner of the store was a letcherous-looking old man who kept trying to get into the conversation Holly and I were having. Holly left, and I was perusing the doughnuts when the owner came over and told me that he was going to kill my family if I didn’t perform a certain favor. I didn’t see what choice I had, but then realized that this guy probably didn’t know where my family lived, and if I went to the police, my family could be protected. I ran out of the store and into the parking lot where there happened to be a police car. I ran up to it and told the officer. He smiled a charming smile and handed me four quarters. He said “Go stand over there in that line, and we’ll get right to you.”
I queued, and spent several hours in line. The line thinned out as people started giving up and going home. Finally, I was left with just one other person. I asked him what the quarters were for, and he said to buy (something; I don’t remember) and then he left. I wasn’t sure what to do, because if I left, the police wouldn’t help my family, but if I stayed, the fam could be hurt in the meantime.
I left. I went to the safest place I could think of, which was an apartment several of my friends had. (These were friends I had in college: Jeff Oleshki, Jeremy Koch, and John Bowser.) I figured I’d be safe where there were big angry male friends who could fend off a crazed convenience store owner. They seemed indifferent to my story, which made me angry, and their attempts to calm me by offering me a turn with the PlayStation didn’t help.
That, my friends, is where I woke up.
I saw the new Star Wars movie tonight. I have to say, it didn’t suck. The first one sucked large large large amounts of antimatter. The second wasn’t much better. This third one is the best of the newbies. Now, I love the fourth, fifth, and sixth in the series – there’s a certain excited feeling I get when I watch them, a triumph.
Maybe it’s that this one aligns to the old school ones. I don’t know. What I do know is that I always find myself acting a little different when I leave movies I really like. For instance, after seeing the first X-Men movie with Abbie and Dave, I couldn’t stop chattering about what our superpowers might be (it turns out mine is the ability to turn into a 13-year-old boy by merely donning a hoodie and baseball hat). I did cartwheels out to the car.
Tonight, I raced home like the fate of the empire rested on the shoulders of me and my Taurus. Silly, yes. Dangerous? Not really. I live in a vacuum. Anyway, I have that super-jazzed feeling of just watching a really good action movie, and I’m a happy camper. It was worth the $6.
I had my first reoccurring dream of adulthood last night. That is to say, I’ve now had the dream more than once.
I was in Chicago, but not a neighborhood I knew, and a group of friends from AmeriCorps and I were doing something superheroish, and we were all captured by Ali Issa and a band of villains. He took us below ground to a large cavern with a dirt floor. We were scheming a way to escape, and I discovered a hidden passage that went straight up. We engaged the villains in witticisms to distract them, and I made a run for the passage along the wall. My hands were bound, but I somehow managed to wiggle myself upwards, like up a chimney but sideways, away from the villains. I knew they’d follow me, so there was both a sense of fleeing and a sense of dark-small space. The upwards slant turned downwards, and I rolled down it hitting a plywood flap that flipped up, depositing me on a bright orange seat of a ferris wheel. “Huh, this secret passage ends up at Chicago’s oldest ferris wheel,” I thought. “Now I know of TWO cities with secret passages.”
(To clarify, this was definitely not Navy Pier, and I don’t know of any other secret passages in other cities. That was only factual in the dream.)
I ran down the street, which looked a lot like Wrigleyville, and ducked into an apartment building because I saw villains tumble out of the ferris wheel. They spotted me, and I ran zig-zag until I found another building to hide in. I was able to get into the building because there was a party. I went into the stairwell, and down the stair, and noticed my friend Noah sitting on a chair in the middle of the landing, getting a haircut. The person giving the haircut had taken scissors and cut most of his hair close, leaving a mohawk. He had shaved close around the base of the mohawk but was having trouble getting the clippers to cut. I asked if I could try, and started buzzing close to Noah’s head. I was doing a good job, but stopped paying attention and buzzed off part of the top of the mohawk. I was trying to figure out how to fix it when I woke up.
I’ve definitely dreamt about being a superhero, the secret passage and the ferris wheel, and running from villains down the streets of Chicago, but never have I given a haircut in a dream.
I have just been offered a graduate assistantship in the chemistry library at the U of Illinois. Woot! I’ve been stressing about this for months now, even though a lot of GAs aren’t even up for grabs yet. Getting hired as a GA was the last thing on my list of stuff I HAD to take care of before August. See, assistanships pay for instate tuition, benifits, vacation, etc. There was no way I was going to go to grad school without a graduate assistantship. This particular job is going to be mainly helping the chem library go from being mainly print based to 99% electronic. It’s a stellar experience, because lots of libraries will have to tackle this issue at some point. Seriously, this was the last thing I needed to do. I have been accepted to the program, I have an apartment, I have an hourly gig with the Center for Children’s Books, I have my sweet Abbott freelancing gig, and now I have the last piece all fit in.
Now I just need to max and relax until August. I’ve learned from Tim that I should take this time of minor responsibility as a golden age, because I will be stressed to the gills come fall. I wonder if I can get the second level of the knitting masters program done before I go …
I really didn’t take a lot of photos this weekend. It just wasn’t that kind of ‘do. The six pictures I did take, referencing mostly the incredible Bloody Mary concoctions, can be found myah. We knit a lot, we talked a lot. We learned how to make polymer clay buttons/toggles/whatsits, and I learned just how much fun it is to run clay through a pasta maker. I could do that all day.
We also made beaded stitch holders – mine is awesome and orange. I have a bunch of bead stuff at home, so I might just use it up by making stitch holders.
Non knitting events included watching half of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, America’s Sweethearts, and Party Girl. The first two movies were chosen because they supposedly had knitting in them. Breakfast at Tiffany’s crapped out halfway through, so we’ll never know, and I watched the whole goddamn multiple-star vehicle that is America’s Sweethearts and missed the knitting scene. (I was knitting.) Party Girl was the third movie shown because I just got it from Amazon on Thursday, and really really wanted to watch it.
After spending quality time with the owner (Leslie) of Crazy Girl Yarn Shop, I’m determined more than ever to some day run a knitting store. You don’t have to be a business person to have a successful venture. If people enjoy themselves, the store will be successful.
This is exactly why I don’t understand how the Knitting Shoppe in Iowa City is still going. Anyway, I’m totally inspired, and now am scheming a way to make library science apply to the organization of yarn.
Is there some sort of grammatical interpretation of this headline that makes sense? Jake? Anyone? Post a comment if I’m an idiot for pointing out that “tyrant’s” is posessing nothing. Is it like Tyr-Ants in the Pants or just an awkward way of saying “tyrant is in his pants”?
These knitters are crazy. It’s much like I’ve read about the ALA conferences – it’s always the quiet ones who get really drunk.
I have deep purple stains on my lips from the cheap-ass wine,
I’m full of pumpkin pie,
and my SWATCHES ARE DONE! I just kept on knitting – like the little proverbial that could.
Overall, the weekend has been fairly low-key and friendly. I always worry that because we only have knitting in common, an extended period of stitch ‘n bitch will end up in random pleasantries and talk of children and grandchildren, which honestly, I find tiring.
The Chicago SnB had its own flavor of disconnection. The knitters were way more intense and really not pleasant. (I’m sure that’s changed, now that the Wicker Park unit has fragmented.)
Here, everyone is from Iowa or living here now, so there’s a deliberate head-on-shoulders attitude that Chicagoans brag about but rural folk really exhibit. The whole weekend has been refreshing because of that. These knitters have good taste (no Red Heart!) but they don’t get hoity-toity about the whole thing. That’s what I need – noncompetitive knitting.
That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a discussion about [edited for content.]
Good God, I’m tired. I’m going to fall asleep before the cops show up. Asleep is an alibi, right?
Is there some sort of grammatical interpretation of this headline that makes sense? Jake? Anyone? Post a comment if I’m an idiot for pointing out that “tyrant’s” is posessing nothing. Is it like Tyr-Ants in the Pants or just an awkward way of saying “tyrant is in his pants”?