Well, an unfortunate occurrence:

I washed the green socks for the first time (after wearing them for the first time) and this happened:



(I am still feeling a bit sad and discombobulated; the first thought that flashed through my mind as I pulled them out of the washer was "I'm not even allowed to have nice things.")


(Or actually, this is a new feeling of sad and discombobulated: we voted on a colleague's tenure and promotion this afternoon. Oh, he got it - handily and unanimously. But when I read over his packet, and saw all that he had done, and thought about how little I have done...I just feel like kind of a loser. And he gets really, really good teaching evaluations. And he's been nominated for awards. And all that.)

Anyway. I decided to sit down and try to repair the damage:



And this is why it's a good idea to keep at least a bit of leftover yarn. I couldn't simply reknit the thing by picking up stitches because some of the strands were broken. (I suspect the sandbur that attached to the sock while I was wearing it weakened them, and then the agitation in the machine snapped them.)

I can't totally explain what I'm doing here. I grabbed the stitches down low on the sock onto a needle and "picked up the dropped stitches" as far up as I could. Then I sort of cast on into the still-remaining cast-on edge as many stitches as I thought I was missing, and started knitting a flap back and forth in ribbing.

After I had knit down so the two pieces met each other, I seamed (carefully, seaming from the edges a stitch or two away from the ravels and being sure to catch each stitch):



Then I kitchenered the stitches together and carefully secured the yarn ends.




It doesn't look GREAT but then again I'm no plastic surgeon.

All the while I was sort of berating myself - I had been reading journal articles (I really need to do more of that; I really need to budget an hour a night to do that. I really need to cancel my cable service so I won't be tempted to watch anything on television, which will force me to read more journals). And what did I do when I discovered the damaged sock? Instead of tossing the sock in the trash with a curse and finishing the article - or even instead of finishing the article first - I sat down and repaired the sock. This proves your unfitness, the little demon on my shoulder said. This is why you'll never make full professor. This is why you don't have any big grants. You should be over in your office working, not fixing some damn socks...

But I don't know. It makes me sad that there's so much pressure to ACHIEVE! (I expect the motivational posters to show up some day). It makes me sad that there's nowhere on my C.V. that I can put down "I know how to reknit a damaged sock and make it whole again."

It just makes me sad that a lot of the things that are pretty important to me are things that have almost no value in the "outside" world.

That's one of the biggest frustrations I face, really: balancing what I value against what the world values. Because if I'm only true to myself, I'll be out of work (or at the very least, constantly hounded to do more), but if I go too far in the other direction, I feel like I'm losing what makes me ME.

(yeah, yeah, I know down there that my Monster Profile says that I like to torment crybabies, and here I am kind of being a crybaby. Well, yeah, I guess I am tormenting myself...)