Tuesday evening things

 * I pulled out a stalled project tonight; these are the "book lovers mitts" (The original design has you change colors every time the ribbed pattern shifts, so it looks like books on a shelf, I guess). I decided to just use a variegated yarn

I started these at Christmas but got involved with other projects and lost my place. I managed to find it again (I think, I had to rip back a little)

I'm using a yarn dyed by Purl's Yarn Emporium; it's one of their DnD themed yarns (that also have a slight Tolkien feel). This colorway is called "Healing Hands," which seems appropriate for mitts. 

It's kind of the wrong time of year to work on stuff like this; we're rolling into the hot months (and March was abnormally warm and dry this year). But you work on what you feel like working on, and if I only knit in the winter I'd almost not knit at all.

* Tomorrow is April Fools' Day. I do not love this day. I tend to be literal minded and I also get wrapped up in what I'm working on or thinking about and so I get "caught." And with my past history of having been the butt of jokes (once or twice even by a TEACHER) as a kid, I hate it extra. It makes me feel stupid and I don't like feeling like that, because I feel "if I don't have my smarts I don't really have anything"

Anyway, I'm going to have to pay attention tomorrow. Because while there are sometimes just funny and silly pranks that are okay, there are also enough meanspirited people who like to be able to laugh at someone else's expense - or people who are literally thoughtless (in that: they don't think) and who don't know me all that well, and don't realize that that kind of thing is very painful to me. 

Because I don't make a big deal about it. I don't get mad, or I don't chew the person out, or explain that I don't appreciate it, because one thing you learn as a bullied child is to react as little as possible - even if it sometimes means putting up with some forms of mistreatment. Because if the person you speak out to is genuinely a jerk, they may actually enjoy your being unhappy and may do it all the MORE.

* And yeah, it does feel like there are an awful lot of mean-spirited people out there, and it makes me sad.

I ordered for myself a small giclee print an artist did - it shows a curled-up opossum on a bed of leaves, and has the legend "The world is cruel; therefore I will not be" and yes, that's true, and refusing to be meanspirited is a form of resistance In These Times but it also does sometimes feel kind of weird and lonely and may set you up to be laughed at. 

I hate how often now doing what I know to be right gets you stomped on or laughed it. I suppose it was always thus but it somehow feels MORE now. 

*Though I also saw a sweatshirt that said "I could be meaner" and sometimes I admit, yeah, maybe I could be. Maybe I could guard myself a little more tightly or yell at people more when they trespass on my feelings or not be so accommodating to other people. But I don't KNOW how to be meaner, and I suspect I would feel bad about myself if I were. 

*It's hard trying to be a "soft" person in a world full of sharp elbows :(