I want to be cool, tall, vulnerable and lusciousSometimes when you wake up in the morning, you wish you were someone else.
You get up and step on the scale and stare at yourself in the bathroom mirror, and you stand in your closet and survey your clothes. And you think, If I just cut my hair. If I lost 10 pounds. If I bought different clothes. I'd be someone new.
But really, you know you wouldn't. The window dressing might be different, but the interior would all be the same. You think these things because some days, you wake up and the weight of all the things about yourself you wish you could change is too much. And you begin, for a minute, to believe that by building a new person on the outside, you could create a new you. One who is confident and calm. One without this weight; one who knows what's coming and what to do. One who isn't lonely.
But you can't bring this new you to life; you have to carry that weight. So you brush your same hair and put on your same clothes and hope you'll win one of the many tiny battles you'll have with yourself today, and maybe it will make you a little stronger and the load a little lighter. Because that's what you can do.
And that's today.
Song: Liz Phair, "Perfect World"
Thursday, October 7
Stitch 'n' bitch*After a lengthy period of skepticism, followed by a period of envy, I succumbed to the knitting trend yesterday. My pal E. taught me while we watched TV and drank tea (and did a teensy-weensy bit of bitching). I bought pretty yarn and have been mangling it ever since. I startd with 26 stitches, and then I had 25, and now I have 32. I was pretty sure I'd dropped some, and I even dropped some more on purpose, but somehow they just keep showing up. Probably I'll have 60 before long. Losing stitches, I get, but I'm not sure where I'm finding these other ones, because I thought that was impossible in knitting. I was sort of excited about the fact that unlike crocheting, at which I was a total disaster, I wouldn't have to count stitches after the first row. Anyway, if I ever solve this mystery and quit creating a scarf patterned after Swiss cheese, maybe I'll make people some scarves for Christmas. They probably won't be finished until July, but it's the thought that counts. I'm told etiquette allows up to one year to bestow a wedding gift, so I bet there's a similar grace period for Christmas. Six months sounds about right.
Incidentally, just in case you had started thinking I was going all domestic, today I bought a tape measure at Target and used a hammer to crush the fennel seeds for my soup, because Safeway had the ground version of every conceivable spice except the one I wanted. And since only people on the Food Network, such as the Naked Chef, actually own a mortar and pestle for these sorts of emergencies, I had to improvise. And the jar of peanut butter just wasn't getting the job done.
Martha Stewart I ain't.
* This is my kind of knitting.
