I don't know

I measured the swatch on the size 9s several times...I'll go back and check again. But sometimes I find dropping a needle size does actually loosen up my gauge, oddly enough, at least when I'm working with "huge" needles. I think I hold the slightly smaller needles differently.

Also, it's entirely possible I mis-measured the earlier part of the swatch and that it was 3 sts to the inch rather than 4. Also, it was a less nice-feeling fabric, too loose. (So that makes me wonder if I really was getting 3 sts to the inch on 10s).

***

I found out that my swap box still has not been sent. The swap-mama e-mailed me and said if I didn't have it in several weeks, to let her know and she'd try to arrange an "angel."

I reacted somewhat badly. I wrote back and said, "At this point I don't care any more. I don't want someone else to have to go to the trouble of filling in for a swapper."

And I wondered later why I said that. But I think this is another example of How Junior High School Shapes Your Adult Life Sometimes.

Not receiving the swap - even though it was the other person either being too busy or too broke or just flaking out - reminded me of my school days. I remember one instance where ALL the girls in my class got invited to another girl's birthday party. Well, all but me. And with typical little-girl cruelty, she made it very obvious that I was NOT invited, and everyone else was.

And I also think of the years spent eating alone in the cafeteria, especially after the person I thought was my BFF got invited to join the popular girls' table, and she passed me a note that essentially said, "I think, in light of my being popular now, it's best for me if we didn't hang around together at school any more."

And you know? It amazes me now but I accepted that. I just figured, "That's how it works. Some kids are popular, some kids aren't, I'm just one of the unlucky ones."

Once in a while some well-meaning teacher or volunteer would push another kid to sit and eat lunch with me, but I never liked that. I saw it for what it was: an attempt to get someone to pity-friend me, and I was both made sad and upset by that. I'd have rather been alone honestly, than had someone who was sitting there only because the teacher told them to.

So I think my bad reaction to the swap-mama's suggestion that she would get someone to be an "angel" for me was an echo of that in my mind. Not that my swap partner is neglecting me because I'm unpopular or anything; I'm sure there's something else going on, but it's hard not to feel a slight echo of that, of having been unpopular enough in school to have spent most lunch hours eating alone.

I think that's probably the origin of my suspicion of other people. I admit, in a few cases I've rebuffed instances of guys who were probably genuinely interested in me and were trying to flirt with me, because I'd had enough instances of people of EITHER gender acting like they were interested in being friends, only to have it to turn out to be part of some mean joke that their friends put them up to.

I think about those times now and I wonder if those kids realized just how poisonous what they were doing was. It takes me a very long time to warm up to most people; I've had people tell me, "You're a hard person to get to know" and I think it's because I hold enough of who I am back, because I still remember those instances of being made fun of after I revealed some aspect of my personality that was a little weird or atypical. (Many of my colleagues, for example, are not really aware that I knit and quilt.)

And yeah, I realize that most adults have matured past that point, and that the ones that aren't are themselves worthy of mockery and scorn, but still: it's hard to break old patterns. It's hard not to fear rejection even when it's probably unlikely.

It's funny, though. My mom said something to me the last time I was up there visiting that made me see her in a slightly different light. All through my growing up years, I had assumed my mother - my smart, capable, pretty mother - had not had problems with being unpopular in school, either because:

1. Her school was so small, that kids couldn't afford to be in cliques; that everyone kind of was friends with everyone else.

2. She WAS one of the popular girls. (But not the snotty kind of popular girl: the kind who is popular because they're nice and genuinely talented at stuff).

3. She was too cool to be concerned about popularity; she was above all that.

But this story she told me - it involved going with a couple of slightly older girls for ice cream and essentially being snubbed and treated like "poor trash" (my mom's family did not have that much money but then again, no one in the town where she grew up did).

And you know? It made me sad and angry. Sad that my mom may have gone through some of the same junk I went through in grade school. But also angry at those stupid snotty girls, enough that I would have liked to look them up (even though they are women in their 70s now and probably don't remember the incident) and go give them a talking to for being mean to my mom. (Silly, isn't it?)

You know, I don't know about popularity. As I said before, I'm kind of surprised the number of people I talk to (when we do get talking about school-days) who talk about having been unpopular or disliked. Maybe a lot of kids felt that way, even if it wasn't necessarily so bad. (But I remember it as being BAD for me.) Or maybe the popular kids are now embarrassed about how they treated some of their peers, and down play their popularity. Or maybe the weird kids who got picked on tend to be the ones who end up in academia (who are usually the people I wind up talking about the whole school-days phenomenon with) and the popular kids wound up, I don't know, in Management or Sales or something. (Or in university administration, which would actually explain some of the interactions I've had with administrators over the years).

I don't know. In one sense, I wouldn't go back and change things: I think having been unpopular made me a more compassionate person, more likely to see the other person as a person rather than as an obstacle. And it taught me fairly early on that it's preferable to be true to myself, because even by trying to be someone else I wasn't going to get popular, so it was better to be true to myself and slightly miserable because I was unpopular, than to be doubly miserable because I was denying who I was AND failing to achieve popularity as a result.

I think it also kept me closer to my family; they were the only people (at times) I felt I could reliably count on not to make fun of me.

So anyway: sometimes when a person reacts in an unexpected (and perhaps uncharacteristic) way, it's that there's something else going on, that the situation reminds them of something in their past, even though it might not necessarily be the same.