Freakishly tempestuous obsession

The other day, I got a start on the leg-warmers for ________. I had to rip them out once because I wasn't happy with how they were starting, but now I'm pretty pleased with what I've got so far, and they're about nine inches long so far. The trouble is, I started out making them a bit too narrow. ________ wants them to be form-fitting, but if they were too tight that would just be uncomfortable. But I'm compensating by making the tight part the ankle and increasing up the leg.

Anyway, I'm trying something new with these leg-warmers: I'm writing out the line-by-line pattern as I knit them, and hopefully I'll be able to publish the pattern on Ravelry when I'm done.. that would be really exciting, so then I'd sort of be a legit designer.

Now while I'm knitting, sometimes it gets quite tedious, because I'm just knit knit knit knitting for like 20 rounds or whatever.. so I've got a few books-on-tape from the library, and I've been listening to these.

The other day, I listened to The Tempest by Shakespeare. I'd started reading once before years ago, but probably because I was bored I had stopped and returned it to the library. But when I'm just sitting there knitting and listening, I don't get bored, which is quite nice. Anyway, I listened to The Tempest, and it was really fantastic! They had different actors speaking each part, which I appreciated since otherwise I wouldn't have always known who was speaking. I didn't know really anything about The Tempest before I started listening, except that I think I knew that it was once of Shakespeare's last plays and that post-colonial critics talk about it a lot.

So as I was listening, I was trying to infer the trajectory of the play since I didn't know how it would end. The thing was, Prospero was a really active character who seemed to have a good head on his shoulders, and so I was kind of expecting the whole time for the play to end a tragedy, that somehow Prospero would mess up, and all his scheming would backfire on him. I thought perhaps the goons Caliban was leading to kill Prospero would kill the Prince instead, meaning that Miranda couldn't have married him, or that Prospero would be too busy worrying about Miranda and the Prince and so would have actually been snuck upon and killed.

But it wasn't at all! I definitely haven't done enough Shakespeare to talk about this very intelligently, but it seems like a strange blend of classical forms - Prospero seems to me like a truly tragic character, because he's trying really hard to improve his condition and yet has this flaw of pride that could so easily undo him, and yet he succeeds as in a comedy. But he's not succeeding because of his blunders, like in a normal comedy, but he's succeeding because of his own actions!! Crazy!!! Anyway, do you have any thoughts about this stuff?

Yesterday, I listened to Steven Levitt's Freakonomics. I remember when this book came out several years ago - I was working in the Plymouth Library, and suddenly it was absolutely everywhere, and it was on everybody's reserve list. I didn't ever have much desire to read it, though, because I was feeling very anti-economics, and because I don't usually read much non-fiction. Anyway though, when I went to see Joanna at the Ridgedale Library at the start of break and asked her for book reccomendations, she told me that I really should read it, so I thought what the heck!

Freakonomics was really quite fascinating! It did feel pretty arrogant and maybe a little bit rude sometimes.. but really the arguments in there are pretty compelling and mind-boggling! I'd definitely reccomend it. It was all about applying economic principles (or, really, the principle of incentives) to problems that normally don't come under the scrutiny of economicst. So they looked at the impact of a name on a child, at teachers cheating on standardized tests for their students, at the impact of Roe v. Wade on crime rates in the 1990's, and other random things. It was great, and this guy is just really really good at argumentation.


Okay so the truth is, all I really want to do right now is knit these leg-warmers. I don't want to look at facebook albums, fill out my Saint Paul College tutoring application, clean my room, or do anything else. I'm really feeling obsessed, like if I could I would just knit the entire day and not stop.

This isn't such a bad thing, but I really do have other things I need to do. In just a few minutes I'm heading to collect Julia, and we're going to plan a mixed-media sculptural installation. This will be a neat new project for me!

love, Jimmy