Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Make Two

I made a toque:


First cabling project, and I only screwed up the top, a little bit, though I never quite got the hang of "knowing" where a cable should go -- it was a feat of memory and a friendly fashion student at the event I was at on the weekend who was a knitter and had a tapestry needle in her bag.

It's Brooklyn Tweed's habitat hat, and the cables on the top on the sample are crisper than mine. But it was fun and it's CUTE.

The yarn is Green Mountain Mohair, colour Jasper. Same yarn I made L's scarf with in the spring. And I really want to make a sweater out of this yarn.

And I also made a new blog for my Africa trip:

findingkasese.travellerspoint.com.

Subscribe. I leave on Saturday.

Monday, November 17, 2008

My Espresso-ed Self

A few years ago, I did an intensive little training session in ethnography, where our task was to deeply observe a place for a couple of days and to produce fieldnotes and interpretive comments about our observations. We were in DC -- Alexandria, to be precise-- and one of the women in my group, a white American who lives an expat life in Mexico, picked starbucks.

There were a lot of interesting assumptions in her approach -- she's so granola, so anti-globalization, so about localized action, that she took it for granted that all of the rest of use would be as prickly about the creeping fingers of this chain as she was. She was shocked when I said I loved starbucks, loved its predictability, its operational excellence (they are the only coffee shop that quickly and perfectly makes my two shot with room americano without any fuss). Anne still likes me, but I think I still confuse her.

That was about 5 years ago, and here I am, back in the starbucks on Mt. Hope in rochester where a good chunk of my dissertation was written. And I slot right back in -- the staff remember what I like, write my name on my cup, give me a plate for my blueberry coffee cake instead of putting it in a bag. The same older woman who seems to have had some kind of stroke is here as every morning, reading something complicated even as she struggles with speech, the same clusters of verbosely signing deaf people arrive on schedule in the afternoon.

I was talking to Liz the other day about all the travel I do. It makes her agitated just thinking about it -- her homebody self can't abide the notion of not knowing where she'll be in a week, missing her things, her bed. I was musing that really, mostly, it doesn't phase me. I seem to have made transition a place. Some of that is about the journey, the movement, being part of the story -- I guess when you're trying to frame your life as being about possibilities, moving around can be part of it.

There other routines and rituals that show up in travel that echo the rituals of homespace -- podcasts and knitting on planes, podcasts and aussie red licorice in the car, coffee shops as time out of time spaces to work in. And that, for me, is where the affinity for starbucks comes in. It's predictable, I can work here, people are friendly but leave me alone, and I know what I'm getting. (I recognize that this is kind of ironically exact to the stereotypical reasons why americans might choose a holiday inn in Phuket instead of a local beach hut, but hey, I'm just musing here).

The thing is, this transitional life is, I think, a blend between trying to find the predictable grooves so that I can be productive, write things, earn a living, no matter where I am, and the space for discovery and improv. It shifts, but a coffee shop where I know I can work, where I know what kind of wifi it is, and I know what to expect is kind of key. I've had some amazing discoveries of coffee shops outSIDE the starbucks zone, of course -- especially in portland -- but also some that are too noisy, too filled with hissing steam, too much live music, too many people on dates or yammering loudly. Predictable ambience is kind of important when your life hovers in the air.

Ken Gergen (the external for my dissertation and the source of a lot of my theory) wrote an excellent book about the emergent sense of multiplicity that we are all living right now, called The Saturated Self. One of the principles in the book is that we have created the ability to live in more than one place at a time -- that we can be on the phone with Uganda in a coffee shop in Rochester, NY, and we are "in" both places simultaneously. Our management of this multiplicity is one of the most profound psychological shifts of the contemporary world. What I'm beginning to realize is that part of that management is the subtle coordination of life to contain predictable strains and patterns. Coherence and fragmentation, in balance.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Aphorisms

"She doesn't have the sense god gave a goose."

That phrase popped out of my mouth today at lunch with D, and I realized I've turned into a Spewer of Corny Aphorisms. It's been a crazy frantic week, with lots of flying, worlds turned upside down, my american friends suddenly clanging with idealism (such a nice shift from the handwriting of the past 8 years), official notice that I've Finally Completed EVERYTHING! to do with the phd (and the legal right to browbeat people into calling me doctor and to dazzle border guards with documents)...

While I was flying back from Seattle yesterday, I was teaching myself to cable on a complicated little hat and thinking about knitblogging. How the best knitbloggers have life at the core but through the medium of knitting, and some are way too much about their cats and dogs, and some completely transcend the knitblogging... but I was thinking about how knitblogging or writing about flyfishing or political jabber can just camouflage the stories of more jagged life. There I was, cabling and counting and watching depressing HBO shows on the little tv, and wondering how much knitting and knitblogging can become the blanket thrown over the stories you could stifle.

Lots going on in my life, mostly good for me, but some trials for people I care about, and lots of questions about What Next? for me that seem to be kicked under the chairs of the airport lounges that are becoming too familiar. Lots of scaffolds going up and coming down without any real construction, like the fact that I'm supposed to be in Uganda two weeks from today but the backing and forthing and opting out among my colleagues because of the unrest in Congo. My feeling is that going would probably be fine, and I was very geared up in my Adventurous Self, and wanting to do something meaningful with our kids, but it seems like the wrong time now, and I'm frustrated that I might never get to go.

So, Cabling. Aphorisms, learning to knit something new. Next diversion.