Britt's Blog

For some reason, recently, it seems like every book I read and every movie we watch has some kind of a bummer ending. Caution: spoilers.

Follow:

• The World Without Us by Alan Weissman. Speculative non-fiction: What indelible mark have humans made on the Earth? Our vast stores of knowledge? No. Our monuments? No. Our cities? No. Our great earthworks and dams? No. The answer? Besides greenhouse gasses and climate change? Lots. And. Lots. Of plastic.
• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. I read this because we are considering it for our Freshman Year Initiative common reading. If you have not read this dystopia, you should. It’s brilliant. It’s a crime that everybody reads 1984 and Brave New World but this novel is so hard to find. Unsurprisingly, the Russians can kick the ass of your namby pamby British George Orwells and Aldus Huxlies in the grim and depressing department.
• I Am Legend. Whereas The Omega Man was delightful postapocalyptic romp with a Playboy Stronghold, a Hot ‘Fro-Wearin’ Mama, and plague victims approximately as frightening as Hari Krishnas, I Am Legend is scary and mean, with the uplifting message that, yes, God exists, and He is one brutal and sadistic mofo. It’s not a bad movie. It’s far and away better than The Omega Man. But, yeek, depressing!
• Children of Men. Oy. How bad can human society get? This bad. Like V for Vendetta without the light-hearted fun of the imprisonment-torture subplot. Dead bodies everywhere. Human life utterly devalued because mankind has no future. Like I Am Legend we have a nominally positive ending that still makes you want to jump off a bridge.
• The Pursuit of Happyness. (Will Smith has been a strange, reoccurring theme in our entertainment life lately. We just watched Jersey Girl, which is a delightful film, and not nearly as bad as it’s made out to be.) Okay, enough of the dystopian postapocalyptic crap, I thought, this movie has to be uplifting, but, nope. I trust I’m not spoiling anything when I tell you he gets the job in the end. Everybody knows he’s going to get the job in the end. But we have to watch this guy go through one defeat and humiliation after another, until… he gets the job in the end. Which we knew he was going to do anyway. I found the whole exercise depressing.

It’s gotten bad enough that I picked up Tunnel in the Sky, which I know has a happy ending about the triumph of reasonable and intelligent people. Damnit.

X-mas Hats for teh nephew and teh cousins’ bebbes. The left and right cap are made from Cascade Sassy Stripes, and the middle one is Cascade Fixation. The pattern is Sweet Baby Cap, and the author is to be commended on an excellent design. The results look shapely and sophisticated, like there must be short-rows and all manner of diabolical shaping going on, but it’s actually very simple. It starts off like a ripple afghan with three points, one at the forehead and two for the ears, and because there are an equal increases and decreases you have the same number of stitches in each row. Then in the second half you stop increasing, and it eventually comes to a point. The decreases are sl 1 knitwise, k2tbl, psso, which takes care of both decreases at the same time makes a bit of a ridge. It’s simple but not totally mindless, and it’s fun to watch the shape emerge. (I’m partial to ripples; you can probably tell.) You can bash one out in a weekend, with diligent effort, which makes it a great pattern to have in your arsenal of “OMG, I thought she was due next month!” baby gifts.

Circular needles were recommended, but I did it on double-pointed needles. I had a little trouble with the larger caps, which were really too big for the dpns—stitches kept trying to escape off the end of whatever needle I wasn’t paying attention to right at that moment. I should have used a fifth needle, but having the stitches on 3 needles matched the threefold symmetry, which made it easier to keep track of the increases. I persevered, though, and I think all three of them are too cute for words.

I think one of my biggest faults as a teacher is that I blame myself for my students’ flaws and failings. I always think I could have… or I should have… but, ya know, if I followed all of my coulda’s and shoulda’s never get any actual work done.

I find myself trying to figure out how to force my students to be more responsible.

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I realize that this is a strange way to start out a post about Christmas trees, but bear with me.

I have some nervous habits, some things I do compulsively, especially when I’m bored or stressed. One of them is picking at scabs and scars—totally gross, I know, but I do it unconsciously, and if I want to curb the behavior, I have to put a bandaid over whatever I’m picking at. The other is straightening out twist-ties. I like to get the wire perfectly straight, with the plastic or paper untwisted and smoothed out as much as possible. If there is a twist-tie in my line of sight, I cannot leave the damned thing alone.

Okay, so back to trees.

Jason is anti-Christmas-tree. He’s anti-frew-fraw in general, and against Christmas-themed frew-fraw in particular, and in past, apartment-dwelling years I either felt like we didn’t have the space or I was too exhausted around Christmas time to muck around with it. But a) Christmas trees are really pagan anyway, so they’re more solstice-themed than Christmas-themed and b) goddamnit, I’m a grown-up now with an actual grown-up house, and I’ll be god-damned if I’m going to go another Christmas without having a Christmas tree. Also, c), Jason’s family is visiting for Christmas, and we’re not gonna sit around on Christmas with Christmas guests not looking at a Christmas tree.

The notion of a Real Tree with Actual Water sitting around on my hardwood floor freaks me out, not to mention the thought of the Real Tree from drying out and shedding needles all over and eventually burning down my new house because the cat drank all the water out of the base, because, trust me, if there’s a Christmas tree base with water in it, San is going to drink it all, ’cause she already drinks my watering-can dry when I leave it on the floor which is why I never water my houseplants.

My family was of the Real Tree school when I was growing up, so I wasn’t really sure what I was going to find when I opened the box of my new artificial tree. I don’t know if you, Dear Reader, are familiar with artificial trees, so let me tell you what, exactly, a new artificial tree looks like. The whole thing was in three pieces, a top, middle, and bottom, plus the stand. There are main branches attached by hinges to the trunk, and branching off from the main branches are sub-branches. The sub-branches are basically wire surrounded by a shredded papery plastic-type wrapping that gives the illusion of pine needles. The sub-branches are all squished down around the main branches, so to get the tree into operating condition, you need to straighten out the sub-branches, unwinding them from the main branches, positioning them in a somewhat perpendicular manner, and unkinking any kinks.

So, let me sum up.

It’s finals week. I’m cranky and stressed. My students are cranky and stressed. I’m eying a pile of about 100 (yikes!) electronically-submitted assignments that have been mouldering, virtually speaking, since (double-yikes!) early October. I haven’t started my Christmas shopping in any specific way.

And there is a 7.5-foot-tall fractal twist-tie in my living room.

Yeah.