Tuesday Project Roundup: Some Sewing Again
As I finished this dress, it seemed like a long time since I had sewn something else. My short-term memory is really shot lately (I couldn’t remember what I did Saturday night when someone asked me yesterday) so the last sewing project before the quilt was a blur, but it turns out I was right: This is the first dress since the beginning of September.
Here’s a more detailed shot of the pattern, which I made in December, as well. This time I remembered to lengthen the sleeves and added a belt. The gingham makes it feel very French New-Wave to me…that, or The Womenfolk‘s album cover from 1964*
*I didn’t even know this group existed until two weeks ago, when I was going through my dad’s old (mint) vinyl looking for some new music.
Let’s Talk About Shoes
Instead of talking about our feelings today, let’s talk about brown shoes that aren’t too high-heeled. After watching Help! Thursday night, I did some major googling to find a pair of boots like they were wearing in that clip I posted Friday. While all the ankle boots for women this season seem stuck in 1986, I found some: They’re Florsheim, for men.
Sometimes I am happy to not have tiny ladylike feet, because a men’s size 7 is a women’s size 9. My only hesitation? A size 7 isn’t available from a site that offers free shipping and returns, so I’d be gambling a little that they’d work.
What do we think about these mod boots? They’d look great with jeans, but not so much with skirts or dresses. But they’re a decent price (unlike these $350 boots of magic from Sweden) and I had a pair of jodhpur boots in college that I loved. Also, I could pretend I was a Beatle.
Friday Unrelated Information
1. Check out the Letters of Note blog, which posts scans and transcripts of, well, notable letters. The variety and historical background is really fascinating.
2. I watched Help! last night and now I want the sofa, the chair, and John’s boots from this clip:
3. And here’s something from McSweeney’s that tickled me (click through to read the other two-thirds of it):
What to Expect: The Third Decade
Keep in mind that all adults reach their developmental milestones at their own pace. It is important not to compare your adult’s rate of development to that of his peers. The following list is meant only as a guideline and not as a cause for alarm.
By thirty-years-old, your adult will probably be able to…
Feed and maintain a house pet
Hold down a job
Maintain eye contact while speaking
Refrain from discussing high school
Cook a meal (three-course)
Make small talk
Forgive his family
Acknowledge other viewpoints (social)
Detect and respond to ambiguity
Finish school
I Love Stories About The Large Hadron Collider
From a NYTimes article about the latest escapades at CERN (other than terrorist physicists):
A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
Really, what commentary do I need to add to that? Read it all here.
Get One Last Trip To The Farmers’ Market In
They’re winding down for the season, as is the garden. I’ll make it a two-poem week and post this one about the harvest. (Now I’m going to think “human brains covered in red oilcloth” when I cut up the last tomatoes to freeze.)
It’s autumn in the market—
not wise anymore to buy tomatoes.
They’re beautiful still on the outside,
some perfectly round and red, the rare varieties
misshapen, individual, like human brains covered in red oilcloth—
Inside, they’re gone. Black, moldy—
you can’t take a bite without anxiety.
Here and there, among the tainted ones, a fruit
still perfect, picked before decay set in.
Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants.
Pumpkins, a lot of pumpkins.
Gourds, ropes of dried chilies, braids of garlic.
The artisans weave dead flowers into wreaths;
they tie bits of colored yarn around dried lavender.
And people go on for a while buying these things
as though they thought the farmers would see to it
that things went back to normal:
the vines would go back to bearing new peas;
the first small lettuces, so fragile, so delicate, would begin
to poke out of the dirt.
Instead, it gets dark early.
And the rains get heavier; they carry
the weight of dead leaves.
At dusk, now, an atmosphere of threat, of foreboding.
And people feel this themselves; they give a name to the season,
harvest, to put a better face on these things.
The gourds are rotting on the ground, the sweet blue grapes are finished.
A few roots, maybe, but the ground’s so hard the farmers think
it isn’t worth the effort to dig them out. For what?
To stand in the marketplace under a thin umbrella, in the rain, in the cold,
no customers anymore?
And then the frost comes; there’s no more question of harvest.
The snow begins; the pretense of life ends.
The earth is white now; the fields shine when the moon rises.
I sit at the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.
The earth is like a mirror:
calm meeting calm, detachment meeting detachment.
What lives, lives underground.
What dies, dies without struggle.
Tuesday Project Roundup: Patterns
Today I mean patterns as in the designs formed from repeating groups of stitches, not the schematic for making an object.
There’s a popcorn pattern on the beige cardigan:
And there’s a horseshoe cable pattern on one finished Twilight mitten:
The cables got a little off on this one because I had to keep stopping and starting on the plane, and I had to fudge the top to make it longer to accommodate my fingers, but I’m actually kind of liking it. Maybe it will gaze at me in science class and make me flustered.
In Need Of Re-Posting
I know I put up this poem last year, in the heat of the election and seasonal change and economic apocalypse, but let’s put it up again this year, for another time of transition:
“How to Like It,” by Stephen Dobyns
These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let’s go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let’s tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let’s pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let’s dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn’t been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let’s go down to the diner and sniff
people’s legs. Let’s stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man’s mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let’s go to sleep. Let’s lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he’ll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he’ll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let’s just go back inside.
Let’s not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing? The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let’s go make a sandwich.
Let’s make the tallest sandwich anyone’s ever seen.
And that’s what they do and that’s where the man’s
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept-
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.
Friday Unrelated Information
1. Have you heard this? First Conde Nast shuttered Domino magazine (which I miss so much, as next year I start advance furniture buying for The House To Come), and now Gourmet will fold after November–the same Gourmet that’s been around since the 40s and been home to writers such as MFK Fisher (not to mention the online cocktail gallery). Damn.
2. It’s John Lennon’s birthday. He would have been 69.
3. I just learned that ravens can live up to 40 years in the wild; the average raven lifespan is between 15 to 25 years, depending on your source. (Collective noun for ravens: An unkindness.)
"A Love Of One’s Fate"
Yesterday, the poem featured on The Writer’s Almanac was called “Amor Fati,” a phrase I didn’t know. Wikipedia gave me some good stuff:
[The phrase] is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good. That is, one feels that everything that happens is destiny’s way of reaching its ultimate purpose, and so should be considered good.
Nietzsche used the concept and phrase a lot; Wikipedia also gave me a good quote from him:
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. To not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but to love it.
I like this concept of amor fati. There has been a lot to deal with in my life lately and I think this is a good approach to it.
In other words…SERENITY NOW!