Knitting Interrupted

Now that Battlestar Galactica is over until 2008, (2008! Monsters! You can't do this to your fans! We find out who four of the final five cylons are after three seasons, and then BAM! No new season until 2008!? What do you think we are made of, concrete? You suck. Eck! I apologize for my rant, oh great ones, who write and produce the shows. We will wait humbly until you grace us with more episodes. Don't want to make the Battlestar Galactica production gods angry.) perhaps I will get some knitting done. There are certain t.v. shows and movies that are not knitting friendly for me. Battlestar Galactica being one of them.

It isn't that I can't knit while watching the show - I can just about knit a sock with my eyes closed. The problem is the splitting of attention. In a multi-task driven world this isn't something most of us want to admit. We want to believe that we can read and knit; cook and talk on the phone; watch t.v. and have sex; balance the check book while watching the game; knit line by line complicated lace design while yakking with your friends at knit night. Unfortunately, down this path lies the Land of the Half Arsed Job (HAJ).

For a perfectionist like me, this is like condemning one's self to hell. Either, I miss THE line of the show or crap up my knitting because I dropped a stitch during some fantastic, mind bending plot twist and didn't find it until the commercial. So, I have to concentrate on fixing the error and miss the show or lay the project to the side until the show is over. Not good options.

The other major drain on my knitting time is Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire series. These books are addictive. Not a lot in the demanding reading department, just good fun reading. Unfortunately I have not figured out a good way to read and knit. Most systems are by far too clunky. Then there is the whole HAJ problem to contend with.

Why is it I feel compelled to do something else while I knit? Why is it I feel compelled to knit when I am doing something else? I grew up in a household where it was permissible to read despite the toilet flushing backwards, fratricidal feuds of epic proportion, prolonged beeping of the oven timer, rivers of bodily fluids that didn't spell quick death, and repeated calls to set the table. So, it isn't as if I don't have the ethic that some things are more important than getting the meatloaf out of the oven before it is a football shaped asteroid, especially when you are about to find out who has been killing the great chefs of Turkey.

I think for me, it is a prejudice rooted in my collective unconscious (Jung's theory) - what Asimov called "race memory". While parts of my genealogy indicates that some of my ancestors were probably "middle class" - if such a thing has ever really existed - I know that most of my ancestors were probably peasants. We worked the fields, sheared the sheep, spun the wool, knit and wove garments for ourselves and as tribute to upper classes. Given that most people don't have biographies written about them and could not spare the time while they were trying to chop down enough trees to make a house to write a memoir, this is pure conjecture on my part. One of my more ambitious ancestors did start to write his memoirs. We have about three pages - all about his birth.

My generation is only the second to have attended college on either side of my direct family tree. Both of my grandfathers farmed - one part time the other full time. Working with your hands was considered honest work, but they wanted something more for their children than the back breaking labor they had experienced their entire lives. This is not to say my parents haven't done their share of manual labor.

Among the bookish set, manual labor isn't something one aspires to do. Among the elitist, manual labor is looked upon with disdain and those who make a living by manual labor generally regarded as goobers. I know that people do what they have to do to earn a living. I have been lucky enough not to have to engage in the back breaking work that wears you out long before retirement. Knitting, to some degree, is a reminder that times haven't always be so for people who carried my DNA. For me, knitting for pleasure as a luxury creates a bit of guilt, because I know that even today in some places knitting isn't a luxury or a pleasure. Handknit sweaters peddled by top designers must get knit somewhere - usually by Latino or Asian hands whose share of the triple digit price tag is most probably not in the realm of fair.

Knitting is one of those things I do because I enjoy it. I enjoy the craft of it. I enjoy knitting socks for loved ones. I enjoy that I am reminded of my knitting ancestors - those related by blood and those related by craft.