Meet Twitchy

Meet Twitchy on caffeine!

I stopped drinking coffee 2 years ago; switched to green tea. However, caffeine has been finding its insidious way back into my system... I will, on occasion, drink black tea, but this semester I've succumbed to the chocolate-covered coffee bean. Short-term benefits? Excellent - alert and awake for reading and class. Long-term costs? Dead tired but can't sleep, wake up early when planning to sleep in...

That frantic little squirrel there? It lives in my head...

Finished Objects

Finished Object#1: scarf, knit from 2 strands of yarn: a bulky-weight blue-gray wool, with a novelty yarn - not sure what it's called. It's like a string with little feathery things stuck on.

Finished Object #2: 3-page reading response for the "Marxist" class

Finished Object #3: list of questions based on reading for Anthropology and Globalization

Finished Object #4: list of things to read this weekend...

I don't know if a list can properly be called an object; I guess I'll find out tomorrow - our colloquium presenter is going to speak on the Objects of Anthropology. Or maybe it's the Anthropology of Objects? It is a conundrum - a scarf occupies three-dimensional space; there is no question about its status as object. But what about a paper? An assemblage of ideas? What about a reading assignment? I can derive a tremendous sense of accomplishment from plowing through several hundred pages of social theory, but where is the finished object? In my head? Academics are constantly pressured to produce, but how do we weigh the products? Knitting is highly satisfying in this context, because there is no ambiguity. It's a scarf. It warms my neck. The purpose is clear, the value is evident. Are lists a form of reification whereby sets of abstractions (notions of future actions or deeds) become thing-ified?

Anyway, not really new ideas, but fun to toss into the blogosphere on the Thursday night with no reading due until Tuesday... and Terry driving up tomorrow! Time to kick back with my needles and yarn, watch Survivor on the internet, and deliberately neglect to set the alarm clock when I finally fall into bed.

Happy Thursday!

Phew...

... I'm here! Greyhound, always an adventure.

11:30 p.m. - Terry drops me off at the station in DC.
12:15 a.m. - people start lining up for the bus to NYC.
12:30 a.m. - the last 16 people in line (I was 8th of those) are left stranded as a full bus takes off without us...
12:35, 12:45, 12:55, 1:05 - I call Terry with panicked updates.
1:10 a.m. - they scrounge up a second bus and driver!!!
1:15 a.m. - we're on the road! I read Freud, try to sleep.
4:50 a.m. - the bus I am supposed to be on makes its scheduled arrival in NYC.
5:00 a.m. - the bus I am actually on arrives! (Dang, that driver flew!)
5:40 a.m. - I make my connection to Ithaca and sleep all the way until...
10:20 a.m. - I start walking from the Ithaca station to the Commons.
10:45 a.m. - I catch the shuttle bus to campus
10:55 - I walk into the library and grab a computer to send feedback to people who sent me their papers for comments.
12:35 - I finish.

Now all I have to do is go home, shower, eat, put the finishing touches on my own paper, read the 400 pages I still have left to go, and go to class at 4:30. :-) I'm really looking forward to my mattress tonight...!

"Day"

I'm calling it a day, folks. Paper is done; we'll see what my posse has to say about it. Several of us first-years agreed to share our papers with each other and offer constructive criticism. I am done in. Good night!

Yeah, right

In the next six days, I will:

• Drive 7 hours and ride the bus for 10
• Read 600 pages of social theory (yes, evidently Freud wrote social theory)
• Reconnect with friends, family, and church
• Write a 3-page critical analysis of Marcuse's Marxist interpretation of Freud
• Write a 10-page paper on Rousseau's epistemology
• Sleep, eat, and exercise

Check in with me Wednesday night and I'll let you know how it went :-)

There and Back Again

I know, I know, I should be sleeping - just finished the reading for tomorrow's class; time for bed. Had to get a word in edgewise here in Blogland :-)

What a weekend adventure - 10 hours on Greyhound on Friday; met Terry in DC, ate at Union Station then drove to the Burg. Saturday slept in, then went to the International Festival for most of the afternoon - took Suzzette and her friend Brenda. It was great running into just about everyone we know! Sunday met with our Sunday School group as well as our Small Group from church. Monday was crazy reading and errands day - I spent about 8 hours reading Durkheim in preparation for Wednesday's class. Tuesday was last-minute socializing and then on the road for the 7-hour drive back to Ithaca.

Friday I reverse the trip.

It was both strange and wonderful being back in Harrisonburg, and then back here as well. I love my life, although I am beginning to feel "a bit thin, like butter spread over too much bread" - psychically thin, that is!

Just now I feel flush with a sense of accomplishment - tonight I delivered my presentation in class, with positive feedback from peers and prof, and tomorrow I will mail my first fellowship application - I don't know of anyone else in my cohort who managed to apply for this one; it was actually a big boon to be able to go home and collect two of the references this past weekend!

Now I can start thinking about my first big paper, due a week from tonight!

A Smidge of Navel-Gazing

So a couple nights ago I dreamed that I was walking by a river, with a couple people - seems like it was a woman about my age or a slightly older, and a younger girl (representations of myself?). We saw a brown horse in the river, which was not very deep, but clear and flowing with a strong current. Then the woman called out that there was a snake in the water and we needed to protect the horse. I went into the water, it was below my knees, and I saw an enormous snake - in my mind I identified it as a boa, but it must have been an anaconda since boas don't swim. (OK, like it has to be realistic?) The snake swam past the horse without hurting it, but there was still this feeling of danger. Then I saw another one, lighter in color, like an albino boa. It swam right past me, and just at the right moment I grabbed it behind the head and snapped the head back, killing it. I felt kind of sad and sorry to kill the snake (I've never been afraid of snakes, I think they are beautiful and fascinating, although I will keep my distance when I don't know what kind it is and it might be poisonous), and for a split second I even felt like it was trying to communicate with me.

So I looked up the dream symbols in an online dream dictionary. (Edited for relevance below)

To see a horse in your dream, represents a strong, physical energy. You need to tame the wild forces . . . To see a black or dark horse in your dream, signifies mystery, wildness, and the unknown. You may be taking a chance or gamble at some unknown area.

Oh yeah! Starting grad school again? Big chance, lots of unknowns.

To see a snake or be bitten by one in your dream, signifies hidden fears and worries that are threatening you. Your dream may be alerting you to something in your waking life that you are not aware of or that has not yet surfaced . . . As a positive symbol, snakes represent transformation, knowledge and wisdom. It is indicative of self-renewal and positive changes.

Some sense of threat - below the surface, that makes sense, because the snake was underwater. Undercurrents of danger? Risk always implies danger; what do I fear the most? Failure, probably - being too ambitious - if everything should come crashing down and I realize this whole thing was a huge mistake...

To see a raging river, signifies that your life is feeling out of control. To see a clear, calm-flowing river in your dream, signifies that you are allowing your life to float away and it is time that you take a more decisive hand in directing your life. A river also symbolizes joyful pleasures, peace and prosperity.

The river wasn't raging, but while it was clear and smooth on the surface, the current was very strong. I have taken a decisive hand in directing my life, but I am not feeling out of control - although I do have to stay alert and focused to retain my footing.

Clearly, I feel on top of things enough to take time out for looking up dream symbols and blogging about it :-) I am deliberately ignoring a pile of reading I'm supposed to do for this afternoon (and ignoring the little twitch that's developing on my forehead above my right eye) - it will get done. I still have time. I feel like one more thing would probably put me into the freak-out zone, though, which is probably why I have not gone out of my way to get involved in a lot of extracurriculars.

Well, I should sign off here or I will start to analyze whether my self-analysis is getting out of hand :-) Next time you hear from me I'll probably be in the 'Burg!

Time out for lace

This is my first lace shawl; I dug it out of the bottom of my stash box last night after a conversation with Tara reminded me of it - I think I knit a whopping 3 rows in an hour...! The pattern is from "Easy Knitting" magazine, but I always struggle with the border. It has an odd little increase on every wrong side row, except the one right after you start a new repeat of the pattern. Drives me nuts. Not the best TV knitting on the right side rows. The yarn is fingering weight alpaca I bought in Peru - so should be warmer than it looks once finished!

Tomorrow I leave for Harrisonburg!

Trivial Martyrdom

So now I feel like a "real" grad student; I woke up this morning with really tight trapezius muscles - this is typically my body's early-warning stress signal. I'm nearly finished with my first Fellowship application (I just have to plug in the citations), due October 6; I have picked a really ambitious topic for my first Proseminar paper*; there's the usual reading load, and I'm going home this weekend!!! So, it's all good - there's nothing on that list that is truly onerous or unpleasant, it just feels like a lot. As I listen to a discussion on NPR on the definition of torture, I realize that, as Dr. Rupprecht used to say, "yours is a trivial martyrdom."

*The assignment is to write about universality and contingency in the readings we've done so far (from Rousseau to Marx); we can focus this any way we like. I'm fascinating by the epistemologies of these various writers, who write these grand sweeping generalizations about "savages" and "natural man" with absolutely nothing like what we would call "evidence" to back up their statements. How do they make these knowledge claims? I'm interested in gestures towards empiricism that appear in the texts - little inclinations towards using what modern science would consider "data" - and mapping these moments against statements of universality or contingency. Does empiricism correlate to contingency? We'll find out! The prof said he'd rather see us fail ambitiously than succeed timidly, and he told us on day one we're all getting As, so we should take risks. At least I know I'm not playing it safe on this one :-).

Fun with sticks

So this is what I've been doing with the leftovers from the fruit and veg baby hats :-) It's to be my first felting project!

What is it about the blogosphere...?

This is for Tara ...
btw, anytime I feel like things are getting way too serious around here, I just visit a minute with Traveling Spike and it's all good :-)
also btw, I'm seriously planning to revive Terry's blog... soon... very, very soon... I think I need to revise the premise a bit since it's not working for me so much.

Wednesday nights are for unwinding

Wednesday nights is our Proseminar class, the "social theory boot camp," the class that has 19 required textbooks and 15 essays on reserve at the library; the class that we read Hegel for, the class that I organized a Monday night study group for... so Wednesday nights, after class, are for unwinding. We usually hang out at the Chapter House after class and just chat, then I come home and plan not to work at all for a few hours until I go to bed. I turned the heel on the toe-up sock while at Chapter House tonight - it was very, very satisfying :-) Short-row heel, since I wasn't sure how to do the heel flap/gusset combination from this direction.

I love short rows though. Short rows created an actual bust in Anita's birthday present (with the additional grace of double-knitting - you alternate two strands of the same yarn, every other stitch - I've included a close-up photo here).

The knitting is all done for the tank top, btw - just need to sew down the facing, block lightly, buy elastic and ribbon and other random accouterments, sew stuff together, and Bjorn Stronginthearm's your uncle (or the Yarlot's your aunt, whichever you prefer!)


For all you Vermont fanciers out there, here's a glimpse of fall color - there was definitely a nip in the air tonight; I regretted wearing sandals. Time to bring out the wool!

Counting Chickens

... so nothing is for sure, but I am planning to apply for a summer internship through the Cornell Farmworker Program, (formerly known as the Cornell Migrant Program) that would pay me to do research/service in Harrisonburg this summer! (I don't know how much, and I didn't tell them I'd probably do it for free in a crunch, but it would be nice regardless to be part of something "official"). So I'm brainstorming ideas - the service part would be a piece of cake to develop; I'm a little fuzzier on the research aspect - in terms of methodology, particularly. Last night I dreamed that the woman I want to recruit for my committee chair was telling me that nobody does "ethnography" anymore (you have to read that with dripping contempt) and that everything is post-structuralist and Foucault-ian now. Hmm...

So the plan for today is to work on some library research and sketch out some notion of a theoretical framework and methodology... piece of cake. Right?

Sock solution?

I have not unravelled the sock yet; instead, I started to knit a toe-up sock from the other end of the ball of yarn. We shall see how far it takes me... I suspect that once I get past the heel turn and up the cuff just a wee but, I'll probably find that I really do have to unravel the first one and start over, again toe-up. You bamboo-purists will see that I have succumbed to your environazi ways with this second sock... though I daren't haul it around with me for fear the delicate balance of nature will snap in my backpack... maybe if I had one of those nifty needle-cases the yarlot's always on about...

Regardless, here is a finished strawberry hat to feel smug about!

Dreams of El Doctorado

You Should Get a PhD in Liberal Arts (like political science, literature, or philosophy)

You're a great thinker and a true philosopher. You'd make a talented professor or writer.

What Advanced Degree Should You Get?

Post-blogging

I've decided that my knitting is post-ironic. Not sure where I came across that particular hyphenated adjective but it seems to fit. I am pretty sure that blogging about knitting being post-ironic is, however, highly ironic (unless it's post-post ironic...posting?)...

Stay tuned...

Top Ten Reasons to Unravel a Sock

1. I don't think I have enough yarn for two matching socks, at least not the size and leg-length that I've established with the first one.

2. Related to #1, I've never made a toe-up sock (starting the knitting at the toe and working upwards). Limited yarn yardage is the ideal reason to learn!

3. I can probably unravel and read at the same time.

4. I really only started this sock because I needed a sock project to carry around with me (light, portable, metal needles won't break in my backpack) - I'm not that attached or invested. (Narrator: yes, but there are seven hours' worth of knitting in that sock... seven hours... do you know how much you could read in seven hours?)

5. The pleasure of knitting is in the act of knitting itself (as has previously been discussed on this very blog); therefore, re-knitting the same yarn again in another form doubles the pleasure...

6. Regia! Fall colors!

7-10 - I can't really come up with any more reasons. I'm sure Gramsci, Foucault, and Lenin (see shelf sock) would have a thing or two to say about the social theory of unraveling and reknitting socks. It's an historical inevitability...the sock must be undone in order to bring in the revolution and the dictatorship of the purl stitch. So there you have it. The dialectic of knit.

Reading

This is part of the reading assignment for Wednesday's ProSeminar class:

"The truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential nature reaching its completeness through the process of its own development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only at the end is it what it is in very truth; and just in that consists its nature, which is to be actual, subject, or self-becoming, self-development. Should it appear contradictory to say that the Absolute has to be conceived essentially as a result, a little consideration will set this appearance of contradiction in its true light. The beginning, the principle, or the Absolute, as at first or immediately expressed, is merely the universal..."

I'm actually really enjoying it - how perverse is that?!? It's from the Preface to Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, the full text of which can be found on a very thorough Marxist database. Saved us all from having to buy the book :-).

Slope Sock