what i did all day yesterday...

... instead of working on a shawl commission.
(now available on Etsy)

woodland wrap, finally blocked

 Cascade Heritage Paints; Knitpicks Kettle Dyed

in the mailbox tonight

(or, yet another reason to laugh and cry at the state of New York politics)

oh nanci how i love you

Funny how you can know a song practically your whole life and then be listening to it one morning on your iPod on your way to work and a particular line you never noticed before will leap out at you, leaving you momentarily aching and breathless.

I had one of those moments this morning while listening to a song so comfortable, so worn and loved and old and known, that I didn't think it had anything new to offer.  And yet caught up in the cliches and silliness and catchiness is this line, sung by this feisty fragile woman with her big old guitar, and something in that moment left me reeling.

"These broken wings are gonna leave me here to stand my ground..."



(Nanci Griffith, Outbound Plane)

from the comments, or, when dangers call

I was gratified to get feedback on a recent post about a knife (and secretly relieved to learn I'm not the only person who sometimes feels these things), and wanted to share this gorgeous quote:

"Kinves, on the other hand, are about cutting the Gordian knot. They offer immediate gratification, the opportunity to make decisions first and live with the consequences later. The sharper the knife, the quicker that choice is made - almost quicker than thought itself... Each cook finds the tools that pull their temperament and their kitchen work into some sort of synchrony. I have always been an anxious and impatient person, and this was especially so when I was young. That sharp carbon-steel knife allowed me to grasp anxiety by the handle and point it away from me. I tended to agonize over decisions; here was something that made them for me, lickety-split. To pick up a carrot and cut it into bite-sized chunks was to confront a series of choices, however inconsequential, and resolve them immediately, chop, chop, chop. Of course, being young, I didn't realize that grabbing anxiety by its handle is like getting a tiger by the tail - the sense of relief is only momentary."
(Jim Thorne, Pot on Fire)

Thanks, Katrin, for sharing this (something about it resonated deeply), and thanks, ladies, for sharing your compulsions (and your decisions to not follow them).  I loved reading your comments and look forward to more of them - I can't tell you what a pleasure it is know that some of the things about which I find myself thinking sometimes resonate with people I know and respect and care about.

lunching with the professors

I had what I perhaps egotistically imagine was a somewhat unusual college experience, in that I went to the school where my father had been a professor (and eventually chairman of the history department -- I remember family friend Bill and my father joking once that though he loathed being Chair, at least it would get him an obituary in the New York Times) until his death a year and a half before I arrived on campus, a ridiculously angsty and constantly clothed in black teenager.

Barnard College is a small school and is, as one professor said at the memorial service the school had for my father (in the long-gone Lower Level McIntosh, for those of you who remember that ill-planned student center), in many ways one gigantic, convoluted, complicated family. This may have been a little more true for me than for most students.

Some of the professors who had been particular friends of my father's kinda sorta took me under their wing a little bit during my years on campus.  There were three in particular with whom my family had been close, though a whole plethora with whom I still exchange smiles as we pass each other on Broadway or Amsterdam Avenue or College Walk.

One of these three would sometimes take me out for coffee (my idea) and orange juice (his idea) and affectionately lecture me on going out in the winter with wet hair (I was usually coughing and sneezing and sniffling back in those days) and finally bought me a fancy new hair dryer (which I sometimes remembered to use until the summer I shaved all my hair off for the first time, but which I kept for many years after that) to keep the colds away.

One of these three asked me to babysit his kids up in the suburbs once or twice and always made (and continues to make) a point of asking after my mother, my brother, my self.

One of these three, our beloved Santa Clause Gone Bad (or at least ironic), canceled at least one recitation on the eve of Thanksgiving when he knew my mother was in town,  and found me not too long ago on Facebook where he now helps keep me honest and grounded rather than all caught up in things like the strangeness that is the roll-call of video-contributors for Dan Savage's It Gets Better Project.*

My mother, even sixteen years after leaving New York for the wild wild west of her birth, continues to make an annual pilgrimage back east.  We don't always manage to see the Professors (I have a half-formed suspicion that she, like me, worries just the littlest bit that we will bore them or somehow not fit into their intellectual worlds without the mediation of my father, her husband), but thanks largely to my-former-professor-turned-FB-buddy, plans were made for last Thursday and Mom and I were treated to a delicious lunch in the brand new faculty dining room in the Diana Center.

It's an odd and endearing tradition, this lunching with the Professors, and one that I hold very close to my heart.  Sometimes a bit awkward, sometimes a bit sad, often enough funny and and always interesting, but more than all these things. These were my father's friends and colleagues and it means a lot to have them still a part of our lives rather than disappearing into the ether, as it would have been so easy for them to do. For that continuity, and for their years of kindness, I am grateful.

*Contributors now include everyone from the usual celebrity suspects to heartfelt common-folk to President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and Speaker Pelosi.  It makes you wonder where the Republican voices are in all of this, and why they don't want to publicly encourage LGBT kids to not kill themselves in response to bullying

the bridge, 10.24.10

don't even think

the bridge, 10.23.10

They say the lights are pink but they look more purple to me.

infrastructures

I have always believed that it goes without saying that we should know the infrastructures of our jobs.  I expect my staff to be comfortably familiar with the ins and outs of our library and any questions pertaining to it:  its policies, its hours, its floorplan.  I expect that I and my colleagues know these basics and more:  the ins and outs of Columbia's 20+ libraries, the ways in which we interact with other library systems (NYU, New York Public, the other Ivies, etc), the Library of Congress cataloging system.   I know that DS557s are books about Vietnam and that DS557.7s are about the Vietnam War and that the HV6400s have exploded since 9/11 (no pun intended) because this is the category for books on terrorism. I know that GNs are anthropology and HQs (rather humorously) encompass queer and gender studies and PSs are fiction and BSs are bibles and dictionaries tend to be in reference collections but you can almost always find older editions that circulate.

I do not know how Congresspeople get picked for all the various committees that (theoretically) help to run our country.  I have not memorized the Constitution and all of its amendments in chronological or any other order. And I definitely do not understand how it has come to pass that the Pentagon has leap-frogged ahead of the White House in regards to Don't Ask Don't Tell and is now instructing its recruiters to recruit openly homosexual men and women.

But I do expect our politicians, the people we elect to represent us and to govern this vast and sprawling country, to know and understand these things with the same familiarity that I have developed within my own job of choice.

I do not expect my fellow Americans to send to Congress people like this.  And I do not understand how this woman can even hope to be on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when she does not have a clue about the intricacies of our own government, let alone anyone else's.

miss behave (LES, 10.18.10)

petit cochon (LES, 10.17.10)

the spitters

llama's namesake