Sweet Buddha of Gouda, look what I found when looking at knitting patterns.

Why not knit a racist toy for your little one? Actually, I can give a whole metric buttload of reasons why not to, but I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

This golly thing is wholly new and foreign to me. Has anyone else seen these things? Ever? I just flip through page after page, my jaw cleaning the dust off the floor.

It happens, sometimes, that I find a little evil bit of humanity, doing something in plain sight that I didn't even realize existed anymore. It gets me mad, though for a very selfish reason: I've spent a lot of time thinking about stratification in society, explaining to tough crowds why calling someone a "fag" is unacceptable, spending my money on social justice issues (now that I have the means to), and banging my head against a brick wall trying to get upper-middle-class college friends to understand that poor people eat scrambled eggs at the end of the month because they can't afford hot dogs, and that yes, I had to work on weekends and didn't want to waste what little money I had on beer. I have about as much street cred as a white girl approaching the academic elite can, and I don't like being shown up as the rube I really am.

It's time for a side story:

I used to get tripped up on unknown prejudices a lot more, particularly surrounding ethnic stereotypes. My family never got around to teaching me any of those, thank goodness, though it would've been nice to know where to tread lightly.

I got in serious hot water with Dan soon after we became friends when I said that I would let him tally the dinner bill because he was so good with money. I'd been thinking of his years as a cashier, the way he rolls his eyes impatiently when I slowly recount my change, forget what it was supposed to add up to, then start all over again. He assumed I was referring to his Jewish last name. D can correct me on this but I think at that point I didn't even know he WAS Jewish, much less that there was even such a thing as a Jewish last name. (I'm dopey, I know. I was even working in a Kosher kitchen at the time. Give me a break.) In any case, I sure didn't know about any stereotypes beyond that of the smotheringly loving Jewish grandmother, though I learned all about them about 10 seconds after I saw the OMG-I-just-had-dinner-with-a-Nazi look on his face.

1532 stitches... 1532 stitches... 1532 stitches..

A little uncontrollable mantra that has been running through my head the whole time I've worked on the body of the Mediterranean Shawl. 1532 is the number of stitches that need to get picked up for the edging. Because of the odd shape of the shawl, the edging requires a LOT OF FRICKIN' STITCHES.

1532 stitches.

Fifteen hundred thirty two stitches to pick up, and I hate picking up stitches. Things that need stitches picked up often sit in the yarn tub for a month or so, while I pretend that the messy yarn pile doesn't exist. Neckless sweater? Armhole-free tank tops?

Never heard of them. Go away.

I knew that 1532 stitches would be much too high of an energy barrier for me to get over if I left it undone for any time at all. (If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm Super Inertia Girl. I need a theme song. Someday I'll make one up.) So, in a fit of New England Puritan work ethic, I laid the shawl out and started picking up stitches the second I'd finished with the body. No time for pictures to commemorate the moment, even.

And I got through it! Being Super Inertia Girl, the trick was breaking it down into small enough bites that I was an Object In Motion at all times. So now those many, many stitches are sitting nicely cramped on one very long needle, a little ways through the first row. Phew!

After all that work, it was an extra treat for me to see a Mediterranean Shawl in all its completed glory. I've still got a a few month's worth of work to go before it's done. It's nice to see that it'll be worth it.

Fag: I wish this woman's thoughtfulness and compassion on every parent ever. (swiped from Xopher.)
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Them Crazy Scientists, a digression:

So science has a lot of acronyms, which I'm sure you already know. The further you go into your discipline, the more likely you are to say them all the time without thinking much of it. Surrounded by your peers for long enough, linguistic laziness happens, and pretty soon what sounds like typical English to you is heavy obfuscation to anyone but the hundred-odd people that actually do what you do. (Incidentally, this is why I cut military guys some slack when I can't understand their interviews. We all have our own vocabularies.)

When you have lots of acronyms in your vocabulary, certain sentences don't sound nearly as strange as they should. When that happens, you say things like:

"The unfolded form of GOD is observed very rarely."

And not only do you say them, but you don't notice how funny they sound. And then it gets published, and then I read it and laugh.

I can't laugh *too* hard, though, considering SAMs are my constant companion, but really. You call something GOD, and eventually something unintentionally blasphemous is going to come out of your mouth. Like "The observation of GOD clustering at both low and high coverages might seem somewhat surpizing..," or "Images of GOD [...] are possible, but the image quality is poor."

It's that time of the year where the dominant colors outside are gray, white, brown, gray, gray, gray, oh, and did I mention gray? I've made the mistake of picking gray yarn for my two main knitting projects, too, so I've been spending far too much time in a slightly chilly monochromatic world.

I think it's high time to head over to the Bolz Conservatory, a greenhouse full of tropical plants, birds, and koi. It's pleasant to go there in the summer and look at all that lush green, but in the winter the color's almost indecent. My monkey brain registers the temperature (80 and humid), the twitter of birds, the green greeny greenness that practically seeps into my skin, and temporarily breaths a sigh of relief. Ahh. That crazy superego has finally brought us back where we belong.

There's another "Crazy Things Scientists Do" essay percolating, though it's going to be tricksy. Robin, my apologies in advance. It will doubtless cause pain to any real beam jockeys.

While I work on that, this is a neat essay written with similar goals. Check out the comments, too--I know absolutely nothing about this field, but it's always fun to watch people at the top of their field bat ideas back and forth in a (semi)understandable way. I see this kind of thing at least once a week and I still love it.

This world is amazing. I've been thinking some about this recently because my reading list has ended up Paganism-heavy the past month or so. (A circuitous route, I know. Bear with me.) One thing that was brought up a few times was that a lot of Wiccans know that rites and mythology with claims to ancient ancestry are being made up whole-cloth on a daily basis, and more importantly, they don't really care. And this is the point with most religions where I get stuck, the expectation that the Creative Force is going to *bing!* you with Its magic wand and fill you with that whatever-you-call-it: Bodhi, the Holy Spirit, being united with the Goddess. Because you've been good, as defined by that face of the Creative Force.

This world, no matter how it was created, is gorgeous; impossible to know in its entirety yet right in front of our noses. Do you want to be filled with the awe and wonder? Read an astronomy book, consider the huge accurate leaps in logic made by Newton or Einstein, find that wonder for yourself instead of hoping a higher power will deem you worthy. That's the closest thing I have to worship, the light that comes on by understanding the tiniest snip of the way the world has been arranged.

Another thing in progress:


Juliet pullover in progress. This would be the front and back, with a seemingly infinite number of threads sticking out of it. Keeping to my "no more than three things on needles at once", I'd started socks to keep me busy during a symposium last week soon after I cast off on the front for this, and now I'm trying to finish one of the other things I have going so I can keep on with this.

Mostly, this sweater's teaching me that I don't mind working in a small gauge at all. I may feel differently if it fits terribly, but for the most part I'm more about process than progress, and the more time I get to spend playing with this yarn, the better.
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I was going through the archives for something else, when I found two of my favorite pictures that I thought I'd bring out again:


My dad's parents, from a set of lovely pictures one of my great-uncles sent to me.

I'd been looking for examples of self-loathing caused by education, aka "I feel like an unlovable freak when talking to normal people because I use words like 'paradigm'", because last night J was complaining about TV people using "Ivy League" as a synonym of "unlovable freak". I didn't find exactly what I'd been looking for, but I got close.

I've put up a new pattern. Don't rank down the picture too much--I made the hat for one of my stepbrothers over a year ago and forgot to take a picture.

Oh, man, "rank down"? What am I, in seventh grade? Anyway, enjoy.

You know your emotional reserves are not doing so well when a stray cat's rejection makes you cry. Oof. The time of year, I suppose.

But looking at how far along this is makes me feel better:


And some detail:

At least something is coming out of being inside all day.

This is the Mediterranean shawl, with the rectangles about 2/3rds done--I figured that was enough progress for a new picture. I was actually feeling like I was getting a lot done on this until a knitting friend started asking me almost daily if I've finished it, "because you knit so fast, it'll only take a couple of days to finish, right?".

Rarrrrgh. NO. The constant asking makes it feel a million times slower, and describing the number of hours it takes to get ONE LEAF REAPEAT DONE (about 6, if you were curious), and how there are 12 repeats and even after that I still have to do the edging and AHHGHGHG STOP WITH THE ASKING ALREADY! doesn't seem to be helping.

I'm sick of slippers, are you?

Well all right. Only one more, then. New things tomorrow! And the day after that!

This pair was for my stepmom. Yeah, I know they're unevenly felted--something about the yarn, I'm not sure what. A few more runs through the wash helped.

The stitch pattern was from a recent Interweave Knits--the IK pattern was for these little pulsewarmers, but random re-application of patterns always amuses me.