I started on the "Stuffie" kitty (scroll down to the post a week ago Saturday for the link to the pattern) using the Plymouth "Oh My!" that I bought at Stitches N Stuff.

It is a furry type yarn - sort of a cross between a chenille and a fur yarn, actually. It is suprisingly pleasant to work with - it is neither slippery nor "grabby" and it has just enough give to make knitting with it enjoyable. And it works up into a nice fabric. (I am using a size 8 needle, two sizes smaller than recommended. That's sort of SOP for socks or toys; you want a firmer fabric. For socks, it's to prevent wear, and for toys, it's to keep the stuffing from showing through).

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I had a kind of unsettling dream last night. As always, when I have experienced strong emotion in a dream - emotion I usually don't let out during my waking life - I wonder what in my life is unsatisfying to me that my dream-life has me reacting that way. Maybe it's pointless to try and psychoanalyze my dreams this way but I kind of think that what my mind does with the random brainwaves means something.

It was one of those horrible complex mash-up dreams where lots of oddments of things I had seen over the past couple days wound up in the dream (Seriously. The black "Dracula" character - kind of Dracula-as-James-Brown-parody - from "Billy and Mandy" was in there. And also a pack of ravenous dogs - my neighbors have a new dog that they stake out in their back yard, and the beast sounds like it would like to tear my throat out, if it could just get through the privacy fence).

But anyway. The main theme of the dream - and the thing I'm trying to sort out this morning - is this.

I was an actor in a play. My part wasn't huge, but I had lines, and some of them were fairly important lines near the start of the play - part of the setting-up of the whole situation of the play. So I was surprised when I arrived at the appointed time for the dress rehearsal and found that it had already started, and another actress was doing my lines (in addition to her own; it was as if they grafted my part onto hers).

A younger, thinner, prettier actress.

And I got angry. Angrier than I ever allow myself to get in my daily life. And quite in opposition to what I would have done had this been a real occurrence in my daily life - which would have been to stand on my marks and smile and assume there was some simple explanation - I stormed off the stage and went to find the director.

And I started SCREAMING at her. I was enraged. (Normally - in my real life I mean - I never get that angry at a person. Or if I do, I walk away or avoid confronting them until my anger has cooled, and I can reason with them). But this time - I was just screaming. I was accusing her of all kinds of things - of sabotaging my career, of promoting the younger-thinner-prettier person over me because of simple prejudice, that I was better than the person she gave my lines to, that they didn't even need me know and could have at least called me and told me not to come because I had other things I could be doing, etc., etc.

And on some level (yes, my dreams are this complex and it's probably why I'm often tired when I wake up) I knew I was being totally out of control. I said to myself, you shouldn't be this angry at this person, just go back and stand on your marks and smile and suck it up. And yet - I was HAPPY to be angry, to be letting it out, to be showing this person what happened when you took me for granted and made changes without letting me know. It was like I was through with being pleasant and meek and sucking it up, and I was just letting out all the pent-up frustration of a lifetime of smiling and sucking it up when people took advantage of me.

And in the end - it ended by my taking off what pieces of my stage costume (I remember a pair of striped gloves, for some reason) that I could remove and THROWING them at her as I left the theater and went home.

And I don't know. As much as I do talk about laboring in obscurity and all that and being okay with it, I'm really not. One of the not-very-pretty things about my personality is that I do want the good I do to be recognized - I want people to thank me. I want people to recognize when I've worked hard on something and done a good job. And it doesn't happen enough in my opinion. (I will hasten to say that I am scrupulous to thank people for things they do for me; I just wish it were a two-way street). Part of it may be that this week is just The Week From Hell- I sort of snapped at a student last night who wanted to hand a paper in late - I told him I'd take it but that today was "my only window" to grade them, and so he might get the paper back in two weeks, he might get it back in a month, because I didn't have time to grade late papers right now.

(It is kind of true about today being my only window in the next week to grade papers - Wednesday is my other long day, and I also take up a take home exam on that day. Thursday and Friday I am out of town, and when I return Friday night I will have an exam that was given in my absence to grade. And Saturday is supposed to be one of the town trash-pick-up days, and I have to prepare a Sunday School lesson, and Sunday is Youth Sunday so I have to herd cats make sure the Youth all know what they are doing. So I think it's partly looking over the coming week and being exhausted in advance for all the things I have to do.)

But still - I'm puzzling over the violence of my dream-reaction to that slight.

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And Socktoberfest ends today.

And I didn't finish a single pair of socks, or post any pictures to the flickr group or really do any of the memes or anything.

And this teaches me a couple of things:

first, I am a bad knit-along-er. I think it's that I'm too distractable in my projects - or perhaps too cross-grained - to want to do what everyone else is doing. And I have a life that is monumentally good at getting in the way of my knitting anything. (I'm already starting to worry about the Christmas gifts: my plans were two hats, a crocheted purse, and a knitted hedgehog, and I doubt I will finish any of those on time).

I also need to accept and embrace the fact that I am Not One of the Cool Kids and I Never Will Be. I think knit-alongs are a cool-kid activity and that's why I'm so bad at them. I don't have the background or the social skills. In third grade, when the other girls were all about talking about and sharing the different varieties of Bonne Bell lip "gloss" (I realize now it was actually more like a big chapstick), I just couldn't do it - I kept thinking (even as a third grader) about germs. And I had no "disposable income" to spend on Bonne Bell - my allowance was very small and there were other things I was more interested in spending it on. And when people made plans to dress alike for school - I either never got invited to, or I didn't have "alike" clothes, or they were in the wash or the mending basket or something.

So I don't know. I guess part of me does still yearn to be one of the Cool Kids - but, paradoxically, I want it on my own terms - figuratively speaking, I don't want to have to spend my miniscule allowance on Bonne Bell just so I can fit in. And for some reason I fail to recognize the fundamental tradeoff - that you cannot both be and do what you want and also be one of the cool and popular people; that you have to be willing to accept some degree of conformity and compromise in order to be accepted. It's like I was thinking the other day: I thought, hey, I could promote myself as The Only Knitting Blogger Without A Book Deal! and that would make me cool.

until I realized that it wouldn't, it would be quite the opposite.

So, I continue to straddle the fence, even as a getting-grey grown-up. On one hand, I want to be loved and accepted by the cool crowd, yet I also do not want to give up the things that I think make me uniquely me. And I can't have both, and dammit, I don't know which one I want more. I THINK I should want to be true to my own self more...but it's a hard cold lonely world and it would be a lot easier to navigate if I had a little pack, a group of people that I could turn to that I knew would think just like me and would have a set of "norms" about style and living and all of that, so I didn't have to make all the choices myself. And somewhere deep within me there is the 12 year old who ate her lunch alone every day after her best friend* got invited to join the popular kids.

(*I hear the phrase "BFF" ("best friends forever") and I kind of want to cry sometimes, because I recognize that I never really had a BFF. And I tend to think that all of my friends have better-closer friends than me, so I can't justify calling myself their BFF. I know, it's juvenile and silly to want a BFF...but still, there's a comfort in it. Again, not feeling like you're negotiating everything totally alone, that there's someone you could call up, and, say, e-mail a photograph of the two different pairs of shoes you're thinking of wearing with an outfit, and ask for their opinion on which ones look right. But I don't have that - so I often wind up wearing the Wrong Shoes, both literally and figuratively speaking.)