* I started taking the Sherman paper (it was cheap enough, and it carries some of the news important to me here). There's also advertising, and I hold out hope that maybe I'll see some new nice store or restaurant I didn't know of the existence of.
Well, anyway, in their advertising section this week, they're apparently ramping up for Valentine's day: a local jeweler had a photo of a pendant, with the caption "A woman's worst surprise is no surprise" (Implying: she will be disappointed if you don't buy something for her)
Let me give that again: "A woman's worst surprise is no surprise."
Oh, really? I can think of MANY surprises, a few of which I've experienced in my life that are far, far worse than no surprise at all. A simple example: coming out of the pharmacy on a hot summer day, trying to start your car, and finding out the battery is totally DOA. "No surprise" would be the car starting up happily like it should....dead battery is the surprise.
And I can think of far more melodramatic surprises that would be far worse than no surprise.
* More and more, looking 'in from the outside' (as a long-term uncoupled person), Valentine's day is just a messy minefield full of false expectations and the chance for people to either be disappointed or to stress out over the fear of disappointing the other person. (As I said last year: long-term couples, where there's real love there - like my parents - don't really face this issue, because they show their love to each other all year 'round). But the media has sure done a good job of screwing up Valentine's day.
I liked it better in its grade-school iteration: where you gave funny cards with puns and cartoon characters on them to your friends, and then you had cupcakes and red Hi-C in the afternoon.
* I pulled out the Hagrid Sweater from the bag where I had been storing it and restarted. It's funny, with some of these complex stitch-patterned things, it often seems like they need a period of my not-working-on-them for me to really understand how the pattern works, and then when I come back to it, I go, "Why did I ever think this was tedious/hard?" So I am going to work on that more for a while, and see how close I can get to finishing it before something else grabs my interest.
I did also find the two (long cable and short cable) size-3 circular knitting needles I had bought for a fine-gauge striped sweater (it was a kit from KnitPicks - a Christmas present of several years ago. I had been on the point of ordering a new set of needles so I'm glad I found the old ones before I did. (I knew they were in a "safe place," but some of my "safe places" are so safe I forget where they are).
I don't think I'm going to start it just yet; I want to get more done on Hagrid first, but I think that will be the next sweater I start.
* Saturday is apparently "Love your Local Quilt Shop Day" (yes, an invented holiday, but still: I appreciate that I have a local quilt shop). I think I'll take a trip down to mine, maybe peruse possible backings for the quilt in progress, or consider some kind of wild-colored solid to use as sashing in an upcoming quilt. I have a packet of "Far, far away" fat quarters (fairy tale characters; several of the pieces are a unicorn print) that I want to make into a really simple quilt; I'm thinking of large-ish rectangles or squares with sashing between them. I may take a few of the fabrics with me if I'm really serious, so I can decide on a good color.
* I am temporarily giving up on "A Fine Romance" until I get a couple more "standards" worked through; it's a little more complex. Instead, I'm picking up the arrangement of "When You Wish Upon a Star" in the same book - it's a little more straightforward. And, from what I can play of it (I went through most of it right-hand only; I can usually do hands-alone pretty successfully on a new piece, it's when I put them together that it takes a lot of work), it's a pretty arrangement. I think I'm learning something about chording and how accidentals are used by working on these: it's a different style and a different way of thinking than the mostly-Baroque pieces I practice as fingerwork.
I like the song. Most of us, I think, mainly associate it with Jiminy Cricket, but some years back I had an album of Disney songs redone/reimagined by various pop/rock/alt/country stars. Ringo Starr (with his "All-Starr Band") did a version of "When You Wish..." It was a creditable version, or at any rate, I liked it.
And I like the song. A lot of those old standards, I like them because the lyrics are....well, they're more complex than a lot of more-recent pop songs. (I feel similarly about traditional hymns vs. "praise songs.") Also, in some cases, the lyrics are actually pretty clever and funny. ("A Fine Romance," as an example. Or one of my all time favorites, known alternately as "Bill" or "Just my Bill" - you can hear the version from the old movie of Show Boat here - well, the lyrics were written by P.G. Wodehouse. I like the song in part because it does seem to ring true to experience: when you're young, you expect to find this paragon to fall in love with, but then, someone comes along who isn't that good looking, or that athletic, or that brilliant....but he's the "right" one, so that's okay.)
Anyway, I like "When You Wish Upon a Star" because it's such a hopeful song. For one thing, it presupposes the existence of a dream....that there is something you long for, something you want. And then it expresses confidence that that dream can be fulfilled. (And of course, not all dreams ARE, though I would argue that the ones that are, to not get too theological, in "accordance with how the world should work out," are).
But of course, though the song does talk of wishing on a star, as I have learned as an adult, if you have a dream, as much as the fulfillment of that dream is up to you, you have to WORK to make it happen. For example: I want to publish a manuscript on these soil inverts. So I have to write the darn thing. And I have to read all the background research and incorporate that. And I have to rewrite it multiple times to make it read better, to make it clearer, to make sure there are no errors.
Granted, the acceptance of the paper is not *entirely* up to me - either a dyspeptic reviewer can sink it, or the editor could decide it's not meaningful-enough to publish. (And actually, it's the not-up-to-me part that makes me crazy, and the feeling of "You might have done all this work for nothing" part that makes me procrastinate....)
And yes, I suppose, if you do inject theology into there, whatever you want has to be something that is good for you and good for those around you and in line with what God wants....but at the same time, it seems to me you can't just sit around and wait for that thing to happen, I think we're supposed to, as much as we can, work towards making the good things happen....and while maybe luck or Providence or whatever you want to call it may factor in, you're a lot more likely to achieve something by rolling up your sleeves than you are by sitting around and hoping for it.
But still, I like the song. (And it seems to me that many of those older pop songs are perhaps more optimistic than modern pop songs? Perhaps our general worldview, or at least the general worldview of those in the entertainment business, has changed in the past 70 or so years?)
But yeah: you have to work to achieve dreams, I think that's how it's meant to be. (And with that - I need to get back to combing the literature for information I can use in the Discussion of this paper....)
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