Hey, friends.  For various boring reasons, I'm not going to use this blog anymore.  But don't worry.  Mommy and Daddy still love you very much and you can still read me overanalyze stuff every other weekend and holidays at my new blog.  Nlog, if you will.

I'm not deleting this guy, but I probably won't read my friends page much.  (Not that I've been keeping up lately, anyway!)  And if you're not goiing to jump the LJ ship, you should still follow me on Twitter, and if you don't use Twitter, you should.  (I'm looking at you, Jill. Also, happy birthday!)

First off, LiveJournal ate this entry when I tried to post it earlier because apparently it doesn't like to embed YouTube stuff from the rich text entry guy. I'm starting to really dislike LJ. My only real reason for staying is that most of my friends are on LJ. Would you guys still read me if I switched to some other blog that wouldn't show up on your friends page? I don't want to lose contact.



It's entry time now. Since my dumb ass left the knitting that I was going to finish during my travels at home, it’s time for another real entry. Well, real enough. Airport Interbot costs money, so this post was born a Word document but saved up for the reassignment surgery.

Anyway, my last anthro class to finish out my major is this Senior Seminar, but the professor is pretty much teaching it like a bioanth lecture. This means that we cultural kids just kind of drift off into our own happy places[yarn link] from 3.00-3.50 on Monday and Wednesday and only show up if it happens to be convenient on Fridays. Whatev. The upside to this is that evolutionary theory was pretty fresh in my head when I watched the movie Sunshine this weekend.

There is plenty to say about Sunshine, and even if you don’t care about scifi or whether my musings are correct it’s worth seeing because it is just so damn easy on the eyes.



( spoilers and windbaggery here )

I just read this Slate article, and I think you should, too.  Native American studies is a major chunk of my anthropological upbringing, and will probably be useful in understanding something I write in the future.  How Euro-descended Americans co-opt native culture to form a non-European identity is one of my favorite topics, even if my opinions solicit the occasional death threat.  Whatev.

Anyway, I've already written on this topic for classes a ton and was only reading Slate to avoid the most worthless book report of my whole entire life, so I better get back to that.

I want to talk about art today.  Of my friends, I know I'm probably not the most qualified to discuss art intelligently.  I also know that I probably should be brushing up on my geometry for the GRE or doing my taxes instead of blogging, but whatever.  The idea of knitting as gallery or subversive art has excited me since I first heard about it.  And I can't stop fantasizing about what it would be like to be in a knitting crew.  So let me get this off my chest.

Anyway, what I really want to talk about is some new proposed public art in Columbus, Indiana.  Tree cozies!  Which, you know, would mean that this podunk Indiana town only culturally lags behind Cleveland by about three years!  What's got two thumbs as is totally psyched?!  Yeah, me!

But as you might guess, most people are not as enthused.  The consensus on both both the local newspaper's website and this ravelry thread is that this is unacceptable as public art.  Most commonly, people are outraged that the city is paying for yarn to decorate trees when it could be used to make cute little hats for premature babies or scarves for the homeless.

Let's talk about that, because I think the rationale behind this point of view is exactly why yarn makes for fabulous public art.  Knitting, needless to say, is a pretty gendered activity, which I want to explore by pulling in some Claude Levi-Strauss.  (See, I told you I'd mix in some anthropology.)  Levi-Strauss says that human thought is fundamentally a series of binary oppositions.  For example: day/night, hot/cold, true/false.  As cultures, then, we start linking these binary pairs with each other like the questions you see on standardized tests.  This influences our cultural structure and behavior.  For example, it's a pretty common cultural belief in this country that male is to female as rational is to irrational.  Or how about experiment is to reliable as observation is to unreliable.


So here's some of our cultural schema of dichotomies that I see guiding these negative reactions:



Okay.  Great.  But don't all those premature babies and homeless people still need hats and scarves?  Well, yeah.  But if you strip away our cultural bias against yarn as a medium of Art, it seems pretty arbitrary to hate on a few tree cozies.  What about all those hideous "sculptures" dotting my hometown?  Why aren't we melting those down and making incubators for preemies and I-beams for HUD homes?  Hell, what about the trees themselves?  What Columbus will spend on yarn will probably be an insignificant fraction of what it spent on the landscaping that the yarn will decorate!  Surely those trees could be cut down and built into a women's shelter!

Using some yarn for art doesn't mean that the next batch of fertility treatment octuplets are going to have cold heads any more than building a war memorial means that homeless veterans will have fewer places to live.  So let's all start thinking about both/and rather than either/or and start respecting knitting the way we should.

Hooray for the first post!  I'm gonna get right to it and reflect on the SEX I had with Charlie this weekend.  (Hang out with me while I try to figure out if I even like using internet knitting abbreviations.)

I drove down to Kentucky this weekend so we could celebrate Valentine's Day a little early (and also watch unhealthy amounts of LOST on DVD).  Charlie decided to get me yarn.  Nice yarn.  Yarn that I would like.  We spent a couple hours on Saturday and Sunday poking around two out of the three local yarn stores in Lexington.

We didn't buy anything at Magpie Yarn  because we were hungry and unfocused and vexed about our experience at the first store we visited, but more on that later.  We had to ask someone in another boutique where to find it because as far as I can tell it doesn't have a sign out front.  It was really nice inside once we found the place, and I was totally in love with all windows so I could see the yarn in natural light.  My least favorite thing about the LYS in Muncie is that I have to run back and forth from the piles of yarn to the window to check colors.  The selection was adequate but not fantastic, and there wasn't much that wasn't wool, so we left.  (We were on the prowl for some cotton because Charlie's allergic to wool and I'm making him some gloves.)

Anyway, what I really want to talk about is our experience at ReBelle, which bummed me the hell out.  We went in during the early afternoon on Saturday and were thoroughly ignored.  Now, I don't need my ass kissed by people working in retail or customer service, but am I wrong in thinking it's rude to glare at instead of of greet people who walk into your store?  Their selection of yarn and books and other crafty stuff kicks ass, but they were downright frigid to us and I forgot my list of stuff I wanted to pick up, so we bailed.

Due to a too-long nap, we were forced to go back on Sunday.  I got a bunch of great yarn, but the same woman running the place treated us even worse.  Again, she didn't say hi.  She just occasionally looked up from what she was working on with her social group gawked at us.  And it's not like we stole shit or hurt any of her merch.  Charlie bought me a pretty significant amount of yarn!  I would have bought needles there, too, but I just wanted out.  I mean, she didn't even chit chat with us about what we were going to make or ooooh this is one of my favorites or anything like that.  That's never happened to me at a LYS before.  We were actually EXCITED to go to a chain store and get the rest of what we were looking for.

We have several theories as to why she was so mean:
-knitting snobbery/elitism?
-social anxiety?
-male in a "female place"?
-Charlie was wearing leather?
-men buying yarn for women does not mesh with her idea of "reinventing/reclaiming domesticity"?

Ugh.  It doesn't even matter.  The other Lexington yarn shop is supposed to be great, so hopefully I'll never have to go back.