Turned the heel and began the foot of the Welt Fantastic socks last night. I hope to be done with these before my Spring Break starts - I'd really like to take some new projects to begin with me.

Well, people posted to the Knitlist about some advice columnist ("Miss Behavior," which I suppose someone thought was a cute name) and knitting in meetings. The columnist nixed it - saying it was rude - but then went on to make some rather, shall we say, impolitic statements about knitting and knitters. (Interesting that she's a "manners" columnist).

I don't know. I never have knit in a meeting. I've brought my knitting and knit before, or on breaks, or after the meeting was over while I was waiting around for the next meeting or my ride, but I've never knit during a meeting. I'm well aware that most non-knitters don't realize that for many of us, doing something with our hands WHILE we listen means we remember better. (Which is why I like to knit while I read journal articles - it sort of "sops up" my excess attention so it's not zooming around inside my head like a 3-year-old on a post-Hallowe'en candy binge). To a non-knitter, it looks like we're diverting our attention - like we're saying "this meeting matters so little to me that, look, I'm working on a hobby while I'm at it.

I realize that some people are in milieus - Perri Klass, for example - where they seem to be able to get away with it. But I'm not. At least at this point in my life, I'm still one of the more "junior" people at meetings.

That's not to say I haven't been at plenty of meetings where I WISHED I had my knitting - the annual "all faculty all staff" meeting at the beginning of the year, where the university president tells the SAME FIVE JOKES every year and we get the same d*mn "Vision Statements" and "Mission Statements" that we've seen before (I'm sorry, but I think "Mission Statements" have no place in academia. Call them "Goals" if you need to list them, but don't go all business-model on us, please. Avoiding the business model is why many of us are here). And I've also been in PLENTY meetings that were apparently convened for the good pleasure of the moderator hearing himself or herself speak (coughAcademicEffienciesMeetingscough).

But, I'm an overly polite person, so I don't. Instead, I sit there and fume. I count the minutes of my life that are ticking away - minutes where I could have been, I don't know, analyzing data or writing a letter to a friend or reading a good book or counseling a troubled teen. I look around and see the people who have surreptitiously snuck in Sudoku and crossword puzzles and grading - and all of that's legit, because it looks like they're taking notes. And there are sometimes even a few folks in back, nodding off, but that's permissible, because, you know, they work reallly hard or they've travelled from very far away or something.

But I don't knit. It's not fair, I realize that. But life isn't fair sometimes and once in a while you have to do things that go a little bit against your inclinations in the interest of other people's feelings - even if those other people are being boorish and self-important and spending 2 1/2 hours lecturing you on why you shouldn't teach using lectures (or on how the human attention span is limited to 45 mintues).