Tomorrow's the day!

 Tomorrow is the 21st anniversary of my first tentative posts on this blog.

Yes, my blog will be old enough to drink (In the US, and if it were a person) tomorrow.

I don't know. I admit I have mixed feelings. Sticking with anything for this long says something, I guess. I KNOW though I have been less interesting in the past several years, as my life has increasingly turned inward and also I have felt  (much of the time) less inclined to make stuff. Too much abyss-gazing: the result of suddenly losing a couple friends (starting with Steve's death in 2018) and one parent, and also having a couple health scares that turned out to be nothing. But I know I'm still dealing with the combined shocks of the deaths of several people I was very close to, and the whole upending/eyes-opening/life-changes of the pandemic. As I said: I now trust people less; I am less willing to want to just meet people because there really some folks out there who are absolutely oppositionally-defiant about certain things and while one of the current ideas making the rounds is "it's not good to live in a bubble," I also think we should not be FORCED to spend time in places that feel hostile to us. 

I also find I am MUCH less tolerant of crowded spaces, after several years of feeling like "being within 10' of another person could kill you"

I've also realized how very small my town is, and how it has relatively few things (other than the quilt shop, and I am really not buying fabric these days until I use some of it up) that seem designed to be welcoming to me. 

Another thing that's changed in the past 10-15 years is the general decline in blogs. Oh how I miss the heyday of knitting blogs, where there were dozens of people chatting about their projects online, and there'd be comments back and forth. (These days it's uncommon I get a comment. I get that maybe my writing seems not to encourage them but I was always jealous of the blogs that received like a dozen supportive comments on every post). 

I guess what happened is some of the knitters "grew up" and married/had kids/their lives got busy and they stopped blogging, or they wound up in a work situation where a presence on social media - even a blog that was clearly "off hours" - would be a career detriment. Or others got bored.

And I suppose the "new generation" of knitters coming up mainly use Instagram (or perhaps some still use tumblr). I am not really into the almost-entirely-visual (and especially video-heavy) media: I am not a good photographer, I am not unusually attractive nor do I hang out in photogenic places, I don't do exciting things. My life is mostly my little round of work and church duties and if I can muster up the time and energy at the end of the day, a little knitting. 

But yes, I miss being able to steal a few minutes at work and read about what someone else is making. (You can't do that with video - the sound, for one thing, but the other is that you can't dip in and out like with reading). 

I suspect also the Internet has become more corporatized or something (she says, while writing this on a blogging platform owned by Google). Like there aren't as many little places to hang out and be your weird self any more - and again, that might be partly the supremacy-of-Instagram thing - the idea that you have to be pretty and well put together and do cool/exciting things to seem worthy of posting.

It's kind of like...like how craft has changed. I've talked before about the "Woodstock Craftsman's Manuals," which I have both volumes of: a very 1970s set of books that gave some of the basic skills in various things (I remember needlepoint and quiltmaking and making tipis, but there were other things). The idea was to equip the novice with basic skills but then let them have at it, trusting them to find their own inspiration and to be able to find materials - even the idea of using "used" things (I remember in the quilting chapter, there was some comment about using part of someone's old workshirt, and "the jeans my sister wore to the Stonewall riots" which I read for the first time long, long before I knew the history of what that was). And there were other books where supplies/quantities were listed, but they weren't so *prescriptive*. And there were books about making things from things you already had, or might otherwise have discarded.. But now, a lot of the craft manuals are very prescriptive: "buy this much of THIS yarn" and in some cases they don't describe the qualities of the yarn that make it ideal for that project or sometimes even the yarn WEIGHT or wpi (and yes, you can probably figure it out by looking up in an online database, or from the given gauge). But it does feel more now like (a) craft projects are designed to make you buy and consume more and (b) that the book and its instructions are intended to be ephemeral - because yarn lines get dropped and yes, in some patterns from the 1970s it can be hard to guess what the yarn used was like. (I will say there are some pattern authors, good for them, who list the "recommended' yarn but then describe the weight/drape/properties a substitute yarn would ideally have).

And I don't know. Somehow it seems less individual to me.. And it's.....rather than "okay here's this funky yarn I picked up for pennies at the resale shop, and I'll make my kid a nice warm sweater that will last better and be more economical than one from a store" it's more.....just another form of consumption? Like, it's not fast fashion (of course, because knitting is slow) but it's also not....I can't quite put my finger on it but there IS a certain pleasure about digging in your "stash" for some neglected supply and building a project around it, or getting something someone else didn't want and repurpose it. Or in making something absolutely essential in the way I remember my mom's handknitted mittens were an essential in the cold Ohio winters: they weren't fancy and weren't made off the hottest-and-newest pattern. If they had stripes, it was because she guessed before starting she wouldn't have enough of the main color on hand so she'd work in a few stripes of an alternate color to piece out the yarn.

And yes, I know: I don't want to romanticize need or the sometimes-extreme frugality my parents practiced. But....it was almost like the difference between working at a job you knew MATTERED and made a difference in the world (how I used to feel about mine) to working at one that you seem to mainly do to pay your own bills and maybe you're not meant to care so much about "meaning" (which is how I feel some days - yes, even in my career - now, since the pandemic. Sort of a....not exactly nihilism but a loss of purpose). 

But also, yeah, big chunks of the internet feel less like some weirdo (and I mean that term affectionately) writing about the thing that they get really excited about or care enormously about and more like....I dunno, people trying to sell stuff. Even if that stuff doesn't directly have a price tag and it's something like "outrage for clicks" or something. Maybe less of a connection, maybe that's it.

Because what I want is CONNECTION. I don't want to argue, I want to hear someone else's experience whether it's like mine or not. I want to hear how the tangent of someone else's life and the tangent of mine have, I don't know, a cosine or something in common, and we can relate. (And also, similarly: I don't want "reply people" when I am venting. Sometimes I just want to vent when I've had a bad day without someone stepping in to tell me how I need to change my life to make things better! Because sometimes that change isn't possible, or is too costly in terms of my limited energy OR sometimes I have tried it already and it does not help)

But it seems more and more people don't want connection like "hey I like that too" or "oh, I remember those," they want to fight or they want to pontificate (she says, as she writes a blog). And it feels like it's dividing us when the hope of the internet, I think, at least by some, was to bring us together.

(Though sometimes you do get that: you'll read someone writing about, for example, those little newsprint Scholastic book "catalogs" you would get in grade school, with the long narrow strip you cut off and checked the books you wanted to buy, and you brought in your pocket change - in those days, the books were cheaply produced and probably subsidized somehow and few cost over a dollar - and then a few weeks later, the big box came and you got your books, and oh, it was one thing that made that school day so much better than many others. And almost universally, people who have that experience remember it fondly! I like that kind of thing, where someone shares a memory like that and other people say something like "oh! I had almost forgotten about that! Yes, that was one of the Good Things." I would like there to be more sharing of the simple Good Things - understanding of course that not all things are Good for everyone, I guess, and maybe one of our falls-from-grace is the realization of that coupled with the fact that there are plenty people who are happy to wade into the pools of happy memories and explain combatively how that thing was not Good for them and that it somehow hurts them that other people remember the simple thing with fondness...... I grew up on the line from Bambi about not saying anything at all if you can't say something nice, and sometimes when I read reminiscences of things that I didn't get to experience or didn't care for, I just go "some things are not for me" and wander away)

And actually that may be one of the reasons why I sometimes skip days* lately, or I don't feel like I have much to post: I see other people, their lives seem better than mine or at least more interesting, and I ask myself if it's even worth documenting my little life. Also I admit I have once again become more sensitive to the idea of the "nuffer" - the mean critic whose whole role in life is to make other people feel less than. And I know I SHOULDN'T but I do think in some ways I've regressed mentally/emotionally, back to a place I was in as a tween some days, where I cared really really hard about "fitting in" and was forever sad that I never would - back then, it was because my parents didn't have the money of other families in town, so I had cheaper/less presitigious clothes. And I was a little bit weird. (Some days I wonder if I am maybe slightly neurodivergent, and if the other kids picked up on that even though I had no idea, and they cut me from the pack as a result. I do remember finding the "rules" that girls were supposed to follow, like about what kind of graphics were "cool" on a t-shirt and what were "for babies" sort of incomprehensible and disliked how sometimes we weren't "allowed" to admit we liked what we actually liked)

(*like last night. I literally could think of nothing to say, I had no projects at a stage worth photographing, and yes, I was kind of tired)

But yes, happy birthday once again, little blog. No, I won't buy you a beer, I don't drink it myself.