Let's knit some shit

Is the name of my new Saturday morning CBeebies show!

Or it should be.

Can I confess that I sometimes watch I Can Cook on CBeebies -- a channel, according to Wikipedia, aimed at children under 6 -- because I find it inspiring to watch small children crack eggs and learn what effect bicarbonate has on their baked goods?  Also, watching children's television is an excellent means of procrastination, which brings me back to my original point.

I have this bad habit of abandoning projects, not finishing what I start, getting distracted by new and more exciting ventures (or adorable 3-year olds in aprons), et cetera.  I do this with my writing and acting pursuits, though I've improved dramatically in the past couple of years at kicking myself into gear and making things happen.  On certain days (today, for example), I take my avoidance to the next level by refusing to clean my room, shower, go for a run, get dressed, and all of the other general practices of human beings that I was planning for myself.  I worked 15 hours yesterday.  I deserve a day of lazing.

Lucky for me, I found an ironic tactic for ignoring all of my other obligations/goals for the day: my backlog of knitting projects!

Yarn!

My knitting habits (or lack thereof) are certainly a shining example of my love of starting what I may never finish.  This problem was only exacerbated by my brief stint as a full-time employee of a fabric store in Glasgow.  I worked in the haberdashery and eventually took over the ordering of stock in the wool/haberdashery department, which basically meant that I had license to bring in whatever yarn I thought I -- ahem, I mean the customers -- would enjoy most.  My motives were thinly-veiled.  My employee discount was put to frequent use.

So now I have a bad full of wool!  More than one bag, if I'm being honest.  I have several lovely pattern books, amazing intentions involving cardigans and cabling, and one mostly-finished, but never-assembled bolero.  I have a back, two front panels, cap sleeves, and a trim, but I just can't seem to get around to putting it all together.

I also have lots of fat quarters of quilting cotton and an extremely well-traveled but idle sewing machine.  Working in a fabric store made me fancy myself something of a seamstress, but now that I've bothered to transport the aforementioned machine across a continent and an ocean, I seem to have lost interest.

My mother, clearly an enabler in my craft hoarding, recently mailed me a box of yarn that she wasn't using.

Thanks, Mom.  Thanks a lot.

So, new goal for today: get knitting.  Much better than my plan to clean out my closet, which is how I was accosted by my offending stash in the first place.  

But first I am going to get off my ass and go for a run.  I swear.  Or maybe just knit one more row of this hideous scarf... 

This post has been brought to you by Procrastination.

You have to promise never to tell anyone...

About Ghostwriter!* (Kudos to my friend The 7th Grade Poet for reminding me that this show existed.)

If you don't know about this show, you were obviously not alive from 1992 to 1995, or maybe your parents just didn't restrict you to public television viewing the way mine did, but I was totally the target audience for this show at ages 7 to 10. Like, I totally believed in Ghostwriter. At the age when most kids were writing Dear Diary, I was writing Dear Ghostwriter, I feel sad. Please find out if Shane likes me? (If I were not in France, I would find my old diary and pull a direct quote, but I swear that is not far off.) Also, I kept a casebook where I would write down evidence (of what? I have no idea, I seemed to think there were potential mysteries to solve) and interview questions, in case I ever found anyone to interrogate. Plus I totally bought one of those pen-on-a-string necklaces that Jamal would give you when he made you promise never to tell anyone about Ghostwriter. Oh, Jamal.

Classic Ghostwriter moment. Jamal was so cool for having that computer!

I think I just felt like I had a lot in common with the Ghostwriter crew. They were growing up in the mean streets of New York in mostly middle-income families, I was growing up in the White Bread suburbs of Vancouver, WA; Gabby and Alejandro had to work really hard in their parents' store, I really wished my parents had a bodega for me to work in; they used a computer that pretty much only displayed large text on the screen, we had a computer for word processing; sometimes Samuel L. Jackson would guest star as Jamal's dad, I have a dad.

Also, there was this one episode where Gabby steals money from the till at her parents' store to buy this coat she wants because her friend tells her she can say there's something wrong with it and get a refund. But it was on sale and there is a sign that says NO REFUNDS ON SALE ITEMS and then she's screwed because she didn't read the sign at first and then she's out fifty (of her parents') bucks. Anyhow, it really reminded me of the time I was in Fred Meyer with my mom (when I was like 5) and I found this broken porcelain animal on the ground (I think it had fallen off the shelf) and I picked it up and took it home. But then I realized that I had stolen it (!) and was so overcome with guilt that the next time we went grocery shopping, I took it back and put it in the same spot on the floor of the same aisle. Gabby and I were pretty much the same person.

If you have as much free time as I do (and you shouldn't), take the time to check out some videos, they're pretty amazing. And then wonder to yourself, who decided to make Ghostwriter look like a floating period with two eyebrows right on top of each other?

*¡Fantasma escritor, en español!

Tecktonik

So, this is the shit in France, right now. According to my host sister (18), this is the only kind of dance anyone is doing in the clubs. I wouldn't know, of course, because I just sit at home and dream of friends.

Lili Azian totally reminds me of a dancing, Belgian V-Mars. You know, she's adorable and I imagine her to be sassy beyond belief. And I bet she and Jey-Jey could totally solve crimes together! I almost couldn't chose between this video and dude alone in his garage, but then I realized that d.a.i.h.g. is totally Jey-Jey in his home videos before he got famous and got to be in a real music video! Or maybe after. Who am I to say?

Okay, new goal: learn tecktonik, find Lili Azian and Jey-Jey, and start a Dancing Private Eye(s) service. I think maybe if I was really French, I wouldn't even have to learn, I would just know. Oh, to be French.

P.S. - This video is awkwardly too big, but you know, I'm not very good at this crap yet. Also, did you notice how the black dude (whose name I admittedly missed) was featured like, 0.7% as much as the other two? Hmm...