But I did a lot of it. Hot fucking damn, I did a lot of it. I used two skeins to knit this little thing.
It took months, literal months to do, and it would take upward of 20 minutes for me to knit a row sometimes. It’s a really basic shawl, yeah, and it worked up really fast compared to a lot of other shawls I could have done, but knitting… is weirdly hard for me to think about? The different stitches, I can’t really fathom in my mind, so I just do the garter stitch and work it.
It is quite cozy, though. It’s knit from Wal-Mart cheapo yarn and it was my go-to zone out activity for ages. I would sit in front of the television, turn on a YouTube video, and knit while I watched. Or watch a movie. I miss havinga big mindless project to do already, so I’m sort of seeking out the next mindless project I can take on. I may even buy a giant yarn cake and make a whole other one of these. I just love how it turned out with this thick ass yarn. I’m also glad I changed gauge fairly early on, because it worked up a lot faster when I went bigger.
As far as knitting goes… I love it. Oh my god. I love it. I can only really make one or two things, but I really enjoy the sitting and doing repetitive actions and zoning the fuck out. Crochet is good, too, but I have to think a bit more when I’m doing patterns. That said… I understand crochet stitches a lot better than I understand knitting stitches right now.
I’m sure if I put the effort in I can understand the stitches and patterns I want to know of the knitting world, surely!! I want to knit more. I like knitting. I may even like it more than crocheting. Each, I think, has their own place in my heart. I just like knitting more because it just lets me sit and click click click away. It also doesn’t make my hands hurt. Crochet makes my hands hurt for some reason.
In other news, I have been trying to get back into reading again. I’ve been trying to DNF more liberally, which meant dropping quite a few books I was juggling and just trying to focus on one or two. Right now I’m reading Dungeon Crawler Carl and… do I like it? I don’t know if I like it. I’m reading it because it’s very engaging and I see the concept there, I understand what it’s trying to say, but I don’t know if I necessarily like it. But also, I feel pretentious when I read it and I go, this is such friends-around-the-table speak, this is aimed at my demographic and I don’t like it, I feel like I’m playing Jackbox with the guy who won’t stop making foot fetish jokes.
I feel like I could probably finish it and then write a tish about the anticapitalist ideas and how if you count the reader as a viewer, it engages the reader by involving them as an audience member who has been bought by this accursed capitalist machine and makes it a bit meta. There’s anti-algorithmic social medias in here, there’s ideas against trying to use up your life entertaining people, yada yada, but mostly it’s just… yukkin’ it up, man.
The thing is, it’s also one of the most engaging things I’ve read in a minute next to the other two books I recently finished and put up on Media Menagerie.
It’s built to be entertaining. It’s moment after moment of edited action-packed sequences that are feeding me a highlights reel of hijinks. It’s a “what will they get up to next?!” thing. After the initial explaining to the reader what the hell a LitRPG is (old hat for me, man, I praise so many that now assume the reader’s familiarity with the trope) it just ramps up and doesn’t stop rolling. There’s not a lot of time to rest between action sequences.
I’m going to think about this a lot, because it bothers me. It’s like watching reality television.
I wonder a lot what I do the things I do… for.
Or why. Why do I do these things? Why do I own my own lonesome website, why do I try to make all these things, why am I this kind of person that can barely function when it comes to working a normal job in normal society but when it comes to my creative endeavors and the things that I flit to every day, I’m okay?
I went down to part time at work and I’m much happier for it. Oh, gods, I’m so much happier for it. It’s because I have a lot of shit happening with my health, yes, but mentally I feel so much better. I feel less like I’m dying. I go through it a lot. Depression will get me because I don’t have enough time to pursue my interests or even sleep when I’m tired. But now I can do that. I can sleep. I can function. Four or five extra hours in my day changes things so enormously that it’s changed my fucking life.
But now I rely on my friends to help me out even more. They’re fucking fantastic people and I love them and they believe in me and what I can hopefully pull off one day, eventually. I have dreams and things that I want to do. I have a list of so many things that I should be doing.
And you know what, I guess I do it for me, and I do it for all my friends that I want to share with.
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