It's raining today (as it has been all week, not to make you think that the weather's unusual), but it's heavier than a drizzle and steady and the air is completely saturated. I wore my full hazmat raingear to walk to work today: 100% waterproof ripstop nylon, baby, and none of that breathable crap either, that stuff leaks after 10 minutes. I may make a dorky swishy sound with every step, but by heaven and hell I'll have dry jeans.
Some extremely stoned-sounding man on the train today said "Yo, what you knittin', bro?" He then apologized once I turned around and revealed my gender. I displayed the current sock and described its sockiness (I'm used to the excuse-me-sir by now. I doesn't annoy me, I'm kind of big and it's any easy mistake. What pisses me off is that the catalog for Patagonia had many women's clothes that crested in a size L but their men's clothes went to XXL. Thanks, Patagonia, I see there's no double standard AT ALL). He told me his grandmother had taught him how to knit a long time ago but he'd kind of forgotten. I should have encouraged him to knit again but I wasn't feeling very chipper this morning and I don't think on my feet quickly, especially in the morning.
Now that the current sock has its heel turned, it actually does look like most of a sock and not some stylin' fabric tube. Which is a boon to identification during random train encounters. That makes 2 this week, a bit of a record: Wednesday was the "Oh, look at YOU! You're doing needlework!" lady, who really was quite nice despite how she came off in that exclamation.
My favorites were the teenage girls who were completely engrossed in what I was doing. They kept asking these questions in awed voices. And people, I am not cool. I do not look cool or sound cool or act cool. But they thought my knitting was cool. There's a reason why I stick with DPNs--makes me look like some kind of badass look-what-I-can-do-with-toothpicks knitter.
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4 comments:
I don't know why it is such an ego boost to impress a teenager but it totally is. Maybe it is because they are far more likely to label us adults as hopeless losers...
Cool, I just turned the heel on my sock tonight. I need to finish it up because I was some kinda fool and signed up for Sock Madness, and I hate wasting good yarn money buying needles I already have because it's currently in a WIP.
I think the thing with guy sizes is not Patagonia, it is a differing way of thinking for people in general. For women, it's better to be smaller. (That's the thought, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing) So designers increase the size so we fit into smaller sizes even though our butts haven't changed. (We feel happy, we buy more.) For men, it's a curse to be small. The bigger, the better. So their sizes are shrinking. (Look around - ever see a men's small anymore?) That's my theory and I'm stickin' to it.
I love when I can awe the public with my knitting or spinning. Something that I find so relaxing, that I have been able to do such childhood, and it causes such amazement. Very cool.
A couple of weeks ago, on the subway home from work, I was working away at the infernal Michael Kors tunic I've been knitting since the dawn of time (why I thought this would be a good starter sweater was beyond me). At one of the stops before mine, a teenaged girl said to me, "That's a beautiful Aran" as she exited the train. I almost wept from shock and gratitude.
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