The kind of notion that takes me while I ride the bus:

The type of crazy that requires talking to oneself could be easily masked by buying a cheap cell phone and not getting service for it. Sometimes the half-conversations I hear make me wonder if most people with cell phones are doing this.

My buying a cell phone for this purpose wouldn't fool my family, though. T bought a cell phone? The only possible explanation could be insanity.

What did I ever do before I had a British friend I can ask to explain Cockney slang and Britcom jokes? Granted, I remind myself of the dopey kids that would stand up at Zaps and ask why gay guys "talk that way", but at least now I know what to do with my unsprouted pepper seeds (the book I have says to put them into an "airing cupboard", which is apparently kind of a closet-sized boiler room that's really common in British houses).

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My being sick of talking about weddings, and then coming here and writing all about them, is hypocritical. But hearing about it lately means it's in my head, for better or worse.

I'm pretty sure I said at some point that I wouldn't get married until American gay marriage was fully legal.

Clearly I was full of hooey.

So what changed my mind? First of all, for most of my life the idea of marriage was terrifying, as I've watched a whole lot of seemingly normal people wreck their relationship with rings. This made my marriage boycott more like my childhood moral superiority about not eating lobster as a kid (when really: ew! Bug on a plate!) than any sort of civil rights demonstration.

It's surprisingly easy to make your support for someone else's cause all about you.

(hint: if you expect thanks from the poor downtrodden whoevers, I'm looking at you. Not that I'm perfect, but I spend a lot more time shutting up and digging in than I used to.)

Secondly, there's something to be said for making many tiny disruptions in people's consciousness once they trust you, rather than being loud and irritating and easy to label neatly. A good high school friend of mine, the guy I went to the prom with, once told me a story about how he showed our prom picture to some new artsy friends of his. They saw him--this gay, green-haired kid, in a red cummerbund and tie, one earlobe with a pencil-thickness ear-stretchy thing in it, standing next to a short brownhaired girl in glasses and a perfectly ordinary black sleeveless dress.

"Who's the square?" they paraphrasedly asked.

"Oh, that's T," he replied, "she's just as freaky as me, but all on the inside."

If looking the way I do (which is the way I'm perfectly comfortable looking, incidentally) makes someone listen to me a little more carefully than they would otherwise, then so much the better.

Nearly everyone I'm friends with in town is getting married soon. Really, now: 5 people within the next year-and-a-smidge. And everyone else in my knitting group is involved with someone else's wedding that's happening in the next 6 months.

I'm happy for all these people, of course. I understand that there are many details that need to be sorted out for that particular party, and I'm perfectly willing to help someone sort out those details, since I started off as utterly clueless about the process as it's possible to be.

But I'm tired of thinking about it. I didn't talk this much about weddings when I was actually getting married. (And yeah, that's true, I just checked the archives--I talked more about J coming to live with me and writing up all the driving directions around Ithaca than flowers or dresses or any of that. And ugh, note to self: Don't read old writing.)

It's just a one-trick pony, a wedding. All it says is "We've decided to start something important. And eat cake." Hopefully it's fun. Hopefully everyone doesn't get food poisoning. Hopefully you don't look over and regret the decision that first night.

But it's not a relationship. It's not a life.

I worry about the people that are succumbing to pure wedding insanity right now. I think building up the wedding so much is just a setup for disappointment; a private lifelong promise should have been made long before the bridesmaid dresses are picked out. Would these people still be having panic attacks about cake flavors if their public promise wasn't legal? From what little I've seen of our Best Woman's very-sane-but-unlegal-outside-of-Massachusetts marriage plans, I think the wedding fluffies could use a twinge of bitterness.

I can't decide if my response to this stuff is insufficiently romantic or overly so. If romance is a transcendent, instantly transformative thing, then I suck and will never know twoo wuv. If romance is a re-proof of love shown by behavior, then it's something we get every day that I don't have to do all the dishes, or when I help Jeremy find the spots he missed when he shaves his head, or when he writes Invader Zim-themed magnetic poetry while I knit with my friends. It's an earthy thing. It costs very little. It's not up to committee decision by a jury of my friends and family. It's not dependent on the perfection of June 1, 2002.

And thank goodness for that--I had a cold that day.

Ken on the East Side webring was recently talking about a movie called Picnic, which I've never heard of, but he described the theme from it so clearly that my mind immediately made something up to suit the description.

Unfortunately, what my mind made up was a glorious mashup of the musical Peanuts theme, the loud jazzy bit from the Pink Panther theme, and occasional vocals from Grazing in the Grass. It's so gloriously strange that it's been running through my head ever since. If only I was better musically, I could write it out. It's danceable.

I hadn't noticed how similar my Willy St. Co-op member number was to my office room number until I locked myself out of my office and recited my member number to the department secretary. Whoops.
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This bit of magnetic poetry was written with Jeremy in mind, but then he told me that this isn't his precise problem with coffee. So instead I'll dedicate it to John and his coffee withdrawal:



A thing of beauty, no?

A picture and a pattern right away!



And the pattern for these is here.

A bit about pattern-writing process (not at all technical, non-knitters, but feel free to skip):

I needed something to keep my hands warm before I go climbing, and as I warm up. If I really start going to town when my hands aren't warmed up (and my hands are naturally cold, so this was a problem for a while), my joints ache, sometimes for a day or two afterwards. This was the reason I stopped climbing for a few months last year. So this was a pretty practical project. I started the plain red wrist bit with a vague idea to put some color into them somewhere--the white yarn was the same brand as the blue, all of them ripening in my stash.

At the same time, I've been reading this book, which is excellent by the way, and which talks a lot about symbolism worked into traditional European folk costumes. She spends a lot of time talking about the popularity of the lozenge as decoration on women's, or men's wedding-specific clothing--the lozenge is that flat-topped diamond shape across the back of the hand. The ways it's used, it's largely associated with a female's power, probably due to its, um, suggestive shape.

I had this swimming around somewhere in the back of my head as I poked through my knitting pattern books for ideas. I found a star pattern (think of this pattern) flanked by these chevrons in a really old Scandanavian Sweater pamphlet I got from a friend of my mom's. The star didn't really fit, but I liked the zigzags, and a lozenge fit into them nicely. Sketching it out reminded me of what I've been reading lately, and I thought it'd be appropriate for me to have strong female symbols to call on when I'm hanging upside down.

Since I'd already put some symbolism into these, I figured I may as well do the thing properly, and arranged the back to be sort of a stylized climbing figure. If you look at the picture, there's a circle on top for the head, and one underneath--that's the chalk bag hanging from the climber's waist.

After that it was just a matter of making the hands the right shape, and not making two left hands (more difficult than you'd think when you're riding the bus and not thinking).

If you skim through the pattern, though, you'll notice that I don't talk about the symbolism bit at all. Because really, it doesn't concern anyone that'd want to make them. They're pretty. The symbolism kept me amused for long enough to work out a nice pattern. But I feel like the second something becomes openly symbolic, it also becomes immutable, a Ritual. I mean, look at the lozenge. That shape has been getting placed onto garments since the Iron Age, and here I am, continuing it as a Girly-Girl-Girl-Woman thing, even if it is being placed in the context of a gender-displeased female-born person ripping up her hands and admiring her developing forearm muscles.

That symbolism's just a lot of weight to put onto little fingerless gloves that keep my joints warm. For now, it's just our little secret.

My collection of self-absorbed cartoon robot toys is complete:



If we lived in a Toy Story world, I'm sure that very interesting things would be happening in my apartment at the moment. At the very least I'd come home to a beer and ice cream free house.

Now, the pattern.

J and I have been disagreeing about this over the past few days. Basically, I just don't want to do anything that even gets close to copyright infringement issues, and I don't want to put up the pattern and call it "Adorable robot friend" or something goofy like that. Reminds me of when the Beanie Babies were so popular, and you'd see all these knockoffs called things like "Bean Friends". J thinks it's okay so long as Nickelodeon isn't selling knitting patterns of their own. If anyone's got a thought one way or the other, I'd love to hear it.

From the Obvious Department of Stating What Is Clearly Apparent:

I was looking for an unrelated article (the author shares a last name with the author I was looking for) when I found this:

"Investigations to diagnose cause of dizziness in elderly people - Algorithm should ask whether patient is taking drugs that may cause dizziness."

Sounds about right to me. In other news, when trying to figure out what caused a fire, you should ask if someone was playing with matches.

I finished all the knitting on Gir last night, though it still needs a run through the wash and some stuffing. But even limp and flat, I couldn't stop giggling and putting it in amusing positions. J found it this morning looking almost exactly like this on the couch, facing the tv, with a hand on the remote control.

What's to account for my one accession to the disturbingly cutesy? I blame my mom--when I used to come home from college, my stuffed animals would be arranged on my bed reading my physics book, learning to play the guitar, or having a party. We know it's silly, but it's still fun to be a kid.

And now for something completely different. It's probably of little to no use to non-academics, but of high to "oh my god where have you been all my life" importance to academics, if my officemate's response was any indication.

So, I've discovered the joys of EndNote. If you've done grad school you're probably rolling your eyes heavily at this point, because a grad student discovering that EndNote is useful is like a dog discovering that licking itself is fun--it's an obvious and foregone conclusion.

Yes, I'd heard of it before, and I'd looked at the program very briefly, but I was turned off by its mishmashyness. Mainly, I was disappointed by the lack of subdivisions. One library equals one thesis, and since I've got chemistry, biology, and physics side projects going, and since I can never remember article authors or titles, a 200-article long list of last names is less-than-useless to me. Why would I spend 20 minutes scanning through a bloated chunk of text, trying to remember some umlautted German name that might not even be the first author when I could just go to the spectroscopy folder in my cabinet? And why would I spend any effort to turn my cabinet into that useless computer file?

I needed the EndNote equivalent of the manila folder.

Thanks to J, I figured that a program written by librarians would NEED some space that'd allow you to flexibly and meaningfully arrange things. And I figured out the way--or, at least, *one* way. And so I present this in the hopes that someone finds this useful. I know my post-doc officemate found it handy when I showed her this morning. So long as it prevents me from printing out the same papers over and over, it will be worth it. So, with that, I present:

Making your own meaningful subdivisions in EndNote

If you're starting with your full EndNote Library:

-Open it up and look at it. If you haven't messed with any settings, you've got a column for Author, year, journal title, and article title. The amount of pure information presented to you on the screen may make you a little nauseous, but don't worry--you'll get some meaning out of it soon.

-First, we're going to make a column on the left hand side that will give the general paper topic.

Go to Edit, click on "Preferences". On the little menu that pops up, click on "Display Fields" on the left hand side. A thing comes up that says "Fields to display in the library window", and you'll see that the arrangement of columns in your library are described here. To the right of the text that says Column 1, pull down the scrolly bar and change it to "Custom 1". To the left of the scrolly bar, under "heading", type in something like "Folder" or "Topic".

To the left of Column 2, change the field to "Author". Change column 3 to "year", column 4 to "Title", and column 5 to "Journal/Secondary Title".

Now you know that this menu is here, you can change those to whatever you prefer. This is the way I like mine.

When you're done, click ok. Now on the left hand side of your main screen there's a blank box labeled "Folder", or whatever you called it. Now we can put information into that box.

-We need to choose some articles to label. Unfortunately (this really bothers me), you can't click and apply changes to articles a few at a time while they're displayed with the whole library, you need to only show a subset of them. Otherwise you'll change every label in the library.

There are a few different ways to separate out articles of interest. You can click and drag to select a few, then right-click and pick "Show selected". Typing control-F and searching for a relevant term will give you a separate list. You can probably do other things I don't know about (I just figured all this out last week). Depending on how overgrown your library is and how many subheadings you need, one of these might be better. As an example, I just searched for "cell" and got a list of about 120 articles. Of course, I could have some articles about cellular behavior that don't have the word "cell" in them. Or there might be a totally unrelated paper in there written by a Dr. Cell. But we can fix those bits later.

-Now we have the articles separated. To label them, go to References, and click on "change field". There's a scrolly bar at the top with a whole range of options. Select "Custom 1"--this is the same field we selected to show up in the left hand column (what a coincidence!). Type your topic into the text window on the right hand side. Continuing my example, I'm going to type in "cell". Then hit "change". Some "are you really sure" boxes will pop up, just hit OK.

-Hey, look at the left hand column! There's stuff in it now! Now I have 120 articles labeled "cell". If there were 10 or 20, that'd be plenty specific for me, but narrowing my haystack to 100 articles doesn't help me much. At this point I have two choices:
1: I can do another search, for, say, "motility", which gives me 9 articles, and do another iteration of this process, relabeling the Custom 1 field of those 9 articles to "cell motility".
2: If I know what the paper's about by reading the title, I can change fields individually. If I double-click on the first article, a window pops up with all the info I have on that article. Mine happens to be an article written by someone in my group. If I scroll about halfway down, past the basic bibliographic information, there's a field labeled "Custom 1" that says "cell". I can change this to "cell-our stuff" by typing in the window. Counterintuitive though it may seem, closing the window will save the information, and now the first article says "cell-our stuff" in the leftmost column.

This second method is most useful for unique papers--say, the ones that you refer to all the time. I have a few that say things like "surfaces--the good paper".

And then just continue like that until your articles are labelled. It takes a while, but it's not difficult, and this way you only need to search for papers once. I know *I* find it useful. Plus, it's extremely flexible. Do you find that you keep looking for cellular signalling under "cell" when you listed it under "signalling"? Just flip the terms around. If you want the folders to be listed in alphabetical order, click at the very top of the column--inside the gray box that says "folder". If one folder (like my "cell" example) gets too unwieldy, you can break it down however it's most useful to you.

One more note:
-When you throw a clump of papers into EndNote, they automatically form their own little section. This makes it relatively easy to label them straight away. And if you're a dope like me that has gone through a few major writing gigs without doing any of this, it makes putting them in in some kind of order even easier--you just upload all the papers from one real-world folder at a time, and give them the same label.

There! Hope it helps.

I mentioned recently that J and I have been going to church lately. There's a nearby UU church--a storefront place, well put-together, the folks are really nice and welcoming, people are starting to remember our faces if not our names.

J was raised Unitarian, and was pretty involved with his church growing up, so there's nothing new there for him. I'm slowly getting the hang of it, although since I went to Catholic school up through 8th grade, the learning curve is pretty steep.

Doing this has led to me feeling some mutually-incompatible things about my churchgoing. At least I know I'm not making any sense; that's a start.

On the one hand, I really appreciate that everything at this church (which is liberal even by UU standards) is SO heavy on the Love and Social Justice, because even with that I'm towards the upper edge of my religion comfort level.

On the other hand, I kind of feel like if I'm not being told that I've been doing wrong and will be punished, it's not a real religion.

Which I guess means that if I'm not uncomfortable and frightened, it's not to be taken seriously. I know that's foolish and unhealthy. I'm working on it. J has a few... well, for lack of a better word, "Unitarian Catechism" books I'm going to read through. Rules! I need to figure out the rules! So I don't go to UU hell! Ahhhhggg!!!!

Something else finally finished:

A gray felted messenger-bag dealie. It needs another run through the wash, but it worked out pretty well. It's my own pattern, which'll go up sometime soon, once I figure out a cohesive way of describing what I did.

With that done, it's time to go back to some things I've been ignoring--namely Juliet. I'd like to finish that before it gets too warm out, so I can actually wear it.

So, I've been reading an interesting book about the development of textiles through human history. One particularly intersting bit has talked about evidence that people in warmish climates in the mid-Stone Age didn't need to wear anything during the day, but that some women wore a skirt that probably looked similar to a heavy short hula skirt--a belt fringed with foot-long cord, worn with the belt slung low over the hips.

With no obvious practical purpose for something that might have taken a lot of time to make, the author theorizes that it was a way of drawing attention to a young woman's attractive bits. Later, she describes an enjoyable experience trying on a similar item from a young woman's central European folk costume (which may have its roots in the Neolithic skirt). I'm heavily paraphrasing, but she says how a sense of feminine power that comes wearing a low-slung swingy piece of clothing may be the effect of a few hundred generations' worth of our mothers wearing the same thing.

This reminded me of something I couldn't quite place until I went climbing last night, clipped on my chalk bag, and adjusted the belt so it was slung low on my hips.

For the non-climbers, a bag of chalk in climbing serves the same purpose as it does in gymnastics, when you see the women and men slathering their hands in it. It improves your grip when you have sweaty hands, and gives you something to do while you watch other people or try to figure out a particular move. If you're not trying to climb very high, a rope connecting you to someone on the ground isn't strictly necessary (this is called bouldering). In this case you don't need to be strapped into a harness, you'll only want a thin nylon belt that holds the chalk bag, which usually hangs down in back thusly.

The end result is a belt with a swingy heavy thing in the back. And I do feel powerful when I put it on. Of course, that's partly due to my being 5 minutes from hanging parallel to the floor from 3 fingers and a toe, but still I find myself walking a little more springily to the water fountain.

Craft Corner Deathmatch (via the Making Light comments section).
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An advantage of living in our current apartment is that we have a little deck/patio area that gets a good amount of sun in the morning. I love gardening, and enjoyed reading about Ari's tiny green space in the city last summer, knowing that I'd at least have the chance to do some container gardening soon.

J and I, in a fit of psychic linkage, had the idea to check out a library book on city gardening within about 3 days of each other. Flipping through the book last night made me feel warm and springy, even though the temperature was in the teens (F).

I want runner beans, and snow peas, and morning glories all intertwined along our vertical support beams, blue and green and pale yellow, wrapping themselves around the cord that holds up the bird feeder. I want real tomatoes and cucumbers. I want to notice a buzzing, twitching, closed squash flower, cut it open, and free the slightly confused bee that tried to snag some pollen just a few minutes too late into the morning.

On the other hand, I'm afraid our porch won't be bright enough to sustain much, or that the gutters will leak and drown the lot. I'm afraid that the squirrels, birds, and people walking their dogs, noticing a beautiful tomato, won't let us have our share. I'm afraid I'll forget about all this until June and end up too far behind to make progress.

In the meantime, the thought of it keeps me warm.

I've mentioned before that I'm a very passive consumer of entertainment. Mostly, whatever's on TV is fine unless horrible things are being eaten or terrifying songs are being sung. If it's not patently offensive I just can't tell the difference. I'm constantly amazed by other people's ability to intuit a character's motivation, back story, or the ulterior motives on the part of the author. J and I have recently been going to a local Unitarian church, and yesterday afternoon he talked about a sermon in terms of "the basic rules of Western rhetoric."

I have no idea what that means. (Clearly J shouldn't be worried about his inability to identify anything pop-culture related, when I'm still sketchy on the fundamentals of capital-L Literature.)

When I have to figure these things out for a class, the process is more akin to picking the nouns out of a Word Search than actual reading, which is why I've never understood why my English papers get good grades back. I found the 5 references to the dead uncle, why is that worth anything?

I know that a well-educated person should know better, so I've been giving myself homework assignments on all the books I've read this year, to be written in my journal within a day or so of finishing a book. The assignment: find something to say about the book that someone didn't already tell me.

I've been slowly improving, I think. There may be hope for me yet.
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Here's something I *can* intuit:

A very, very easy blanket I made from leftover polarfleece, which'll be going to the Dulaan Project along with some knitting experiments. (Edited 3/8 to add:A link that describes how to make a blanket like that is here. I was at a crafty store this weekend getting stuffing for Gir (who's coming along very nicely), and noticed that fleece is on super-wicked-sale at the moment, so if you'd like a blanket like that, it can be had for less than 20$ for an adult sized one.)

This numerically-interesting day is my mom's birthday, so send her some of that storebought cake with the frosting so sugary you can feel the crystals grit between your teeth. It's her favorite.

Here's another shot of the Mediterranean Shawl in progress, 1532 stitches picked up and then some, 68,000 to go.

Man alive. Remind me not to caluclate things like that. Though with a quick back-of-the-envelope I see that I've already put about 140,000 stitches into it. May as well do the thing properly.



Why yes, it is a big formless lump! Because the whole perimeter of the thing is on a fairly small needle, there's no nice way of taking a picture. Note the presence of infinite stitch markers.

In the meantime, I started Gir last night, and his head's mostly done. He may get undone a few times as I decide how big a goofy robot companion I want (he seems really small now), but the shape is right.

After working on that shawl so much, I haven't spent much time just playing with yarn. Sometimes I forget that a lack of progress isn't the same thing as failure.

Let's make biscuits! Let's make biscuits...

Need. Need lots. I have grey yarn left over from a bag I just finished (pictures once I remember to download them), and that yarn must be made into a tiny GIR.

Since I don't feel a great need to make the dog costume, here's the picture I'll be using as my model (with a nod to Room With A Moose, a site that is making my GIR obsession seem normal and healthy by comparison).

This will require pipe cleaners. And polyester batting. Hooray!