Patina

With every new adventure, new knitting, new relationships, new jobs, there comes a point where a patina begins to develops. At the very start its all bright and shiny but that wears a little with time. There's nothing wrong with that exactly. It doesn't mean there's anything the matter with that drop stitch cowl you've been belaboring, or that you should run out on some kind of errant love affair, or that you should quit your new job and go into hiding in the back of a cube van and knit socks for a living - it just denotes the natural progression of time.

It actually is a realization of imperfection. Everything is absolutely perfect until the moment it isn't. As humans we tend to be a little overambitious in our expectations of just about everything, never cutting ourselves any slack for fear others will notice that we are living imperfect lives too. The fact that I'm now a little worried you all think I'm ungrateful and depressed for using the words imperfect and life in the same sentence is a testament to the negative connotations we give to the admission of imperfection (come on, this cannot just be me). Imperfect isn't bad though. Perfection, as in Stepford wife / Leave it to Beaver lifestyles would be immensely, and wholly boring. Challenge is the fuel to life's fire, we just all bitch about it anyway because, well, if we didn't we would quickly run out of things to talk about.

While I'm still very in love with Mr. Frogged I may not spend the same two hours getting ready for a date and giggling that I did when I was 18. After living with someone and having them see you lying on the couch for a week solid with a cold, frankly two hours seems excessive. This is probably a good thing since it leaves more time for the actual date and, as a bonus, results in more intelligible speech than that of a twitterpated teenage girl.

And though I'm still plugging away on those loose ends for my ripple blanket, I'm still excited to finish it. I think that project may have slipped below patina and into a slightly tarnished state of being, to be honest. I mean really, the amount of ends to weave is both obscene and masochistic. It doesn't help that I am seeking perfection and am a little paranoid about random ends wiggling loose so I split my yarn before weaving it, resulting in double the work.

And lastly, while I'm still enjoying my new job most of the time, there are days where it occurs to me that no matter how fast I learn on the job, I'm still learning. This is arguably a good thing. Surely switching careers entirely at this point in my life in combination with my knitting will provide sufficient brain exercise to cure all worry of dementia and Alzheimer's in my golden years. But when I've been a fairly competent person for a good 4 years I now feel like I'm playing the intellectual equivalent to pin the tail on the donkey. I know I'll get it eventually but in the process I end up feeling a bit of an ass.

What I'm really getting at is when the going gets tough, and the tough go knitting we should all remember that perfection is elusive, perfection is often impossible and frankly, perfection is overrated! Embrace the challenge. The results will be better for it.

Happy crafting!