Doing some transferring of materials between the -80C (-112F) freezer and the liquid nitrogen storage tank (77 Kelvin, -321F), I hum "She's as Cold as Ice" to myself. I only realize what I'm humming after the lid's back on the tank.

Stupid Journey, with their scientifically appropriate songs worming their way into my subconscious.

At dinner, J was telling me that the people primarily responsible for putting melamine in Chinese formula had been sentenced to death. I generally have a huge issue with the death penalty, because the people in the US who are sentenced to death are typically irretrevably mentally ill, and I feel some sympathy for the awfulness of their brain chemistry or the messed-up life that led them to do terrible things.

But I have a very, very difficult time working up the same level of sympathy for people who, out of pure and entirely logical greed, choose to add the goddamned precursor of Formica to infant formula in order to game the system to think it was packed full of nutrition. There's a bunch more levels of understanding there, a lot more intelligence and wherewithal which could have been used to help the world. A person who takes those abilities and uses them to sicken a third of a million people in exchange for some money makes it really hard for me to recognize and welcome their inherent worth and dignity.

I watched I'm Not There over the weekend while plying yarn that will become kneesocks. Maybe it would make more literal sense to me if I knew tons about Bob Dylan to begin with, but as it was I just enjoyed the dreamlike sense of one person inspiring so many different interpretations.

It reminded me very distinctly of something that Jon-Jon once wrote about--about how something can be true without being factual, and his attempts to write truthful things while occasionally avoiding facts or changing them wholesale. Watching a person be a 9-year old black boy, a washed-up Christian preacher, an androgynous mumbler, and Billy The Kid, all at once, gave me a stronger sense of what he was saying than I'd felt before.

Sometimes, you need to make something up in order to tell the truth.

And it got me thinking about this space. Part of my quietness lately has had to do with getting too bogged down in the listing of facts at the expense of truth, I think. The blog was turning more and more into "I made this. It is this color. I ate cereal for breakfast. It is cold outside." And all those facts seemed to be adding up to a smaller and smaller percentage of all the rest of my life. Except that in this real life, right now, the Really Big Things and the Teensy Little Details are so mixed up in each other that to even start posting is daunting. After planning the future in generalities for so long (when I finish my degree, when we're settled in with jobs, when we have a bit of money in the bank) J and I are suddenly presented with many, many specifics--interest rates and radon levels and floor refinishing and square footage and counteroffers, and at exactly the same time, and precisely because of all these little details, we're choosing whether or not to lock into some of the biggest long-term decisions that people make. This is the supposedly the gratification I've been delaying my whole life, and now that I'm here I find that the "gratification" is even scarier than all the stuff that came before.

So life is complicated, and it feels wrong to be so casual as to blog about it.

This space has been turning more and more into some kind of catalog, sterile and factual. That sterility was repelling me, so I chose to stop until I had actual things I wanted to say. What I seem to be saying now is that I don't know what I want to say, and that was a really long meta-post to say nothing, which I know gets tiresome way fast. But I'm thinking about what I can write here that expresses more truth. I have no idea what will happen to the facts in the process.

If this sounds tiresome, I still have plenty of knitting bits cooking on Ravelry, where, as everywhere online, I'm TChemGrrl. If not, join me for the ride.