Quick Feather and Fan Afghan: March 5th to 6th.

Whatever you do, do not join Pinterest. It will take more of your time than playing Angry Birds, Seven Little Words and doing your washing, and then ironing and hanging it—all combined—will. More time than having a job. Why do you think this blog is so far behind (beside the inordinate amount of time knitting takes, of course, silly me.) BUT. That said, I think I may have changed the world with Pinterest. One pin at a time. It may also have nothing at all to do with me. There was this pin. It has a man in the background, crouching down, gazing thoughtfully at the camera. Superimposed onto it is the following:

Smart girls are the overthinkers, the insecure ones, the different ones. they know what the real world is like. They analyze every little thing in life. Why? To avoid getting hurt. To find happiness. They stay up at night trying to think about every possible situation to get through all the problems. They think too much. They trust less people. Their insecurity proves their respect towards themselves. Of course they try to live away from a drama-filled life. Smart girls know their worth, now that's the ones worth keeping by your side.

Beside being insulting in its absolute condescension, this actually treats smart girls like fools! People. When are you going to understand the difference between less and fewer! If you can count it, even if it takes an awfully, awfully long time, like to seven billion, four hundred and twenty-eight million, nine hundred and three thousand, four hundred and twelve, it is fewer! Like people. You can count people, trustworthy or not. If you can't count it, technically, without a staff of millions and an infinity in which to do it, like stars, grains of sugar or happiness, then it is less. Not like people. You can count people.

And. If Mr Crouchy is trying to bed women by appealing to their brains, then he should try to come over a little smarter himself. He really has a problem with counting, although possibly not with the amount of space between himself and a smart girl. This and that are singular; these and those are plural. 'Smart girls' is the subject. The subject is plural. One and two is three. Those are the ones worth keeping by your side. If they actually were by his side though, then it would be these—those denotes distance. But he is right, I think he is talking about the girls as they wisely run miles away from him.

This is a much extended version of the comments I left on this particular pin when I found it. (Lucky you. If you were on Pinterest instead of here you could have missed the ramble, had a sneer or a giggle, and moved onto the next picture.) The other day, while trawling through pictures I noticed the same post. Except. This time. Oh, my Lord. The grammar was correct. They had also shifted out Mr Crouchy and replaced him with a dude from the 'hood' with a humongously peaked baseball cap and diamonds the size of Liz Taylor's in his ears. (Breaking stereotypically biased ideas of who can and can't speak grammatically?) I was convinced I had finally got someone to see reason with regard to the world of grammar. But searching Pinterest by the key words 'smart' and 'girl' has since brought up so many versions of the same saying, most correct, only the original still wrong, that I realise I had no effect but to spend so much time on Pinterest that I managed to see both versions. In the end, beside regarding 'less' and 'fewer', and 'this', 'that', 'these' and 'those', my only advise still is don't join Pinterest.

The impetus for this rant was not only Pinterest. This project coincided, all those months ago, with World Spelling Day. Another coincidence: I started writing this blog on the day I posted the last. September 24th. National Punctuation Day*. Freakey, eh? And I will endeavour to have this project finished a year after it was started (the current estimate is probably right on track for that date), March 4th. You guessed it. National Grammar Day. The project is an Afghan. Since my frugal purchasing of the materials for it, I have discovered an afghan is actually a blanket. This will be a blanket for small people or animals. Or a shawl, which is what I previously thought an afghan was. It is created in Moda Vera's Marvel, a one hundred percent acrylic yarn (soft and washable, hey acrylic has it's merits). It is a nifty little pattern that uses two yarns in an aa, ab, bb combination. My colours are a black and a changeable in dark brown, mid brown and a silvery blue.

When I was a child I was subject to bouts of tonscillitus. We were camping. With lots of people and a really big tent. I got sick again and I can vividly remember my Mum and Dad pulling up at the hospital and telling me to go inside. I didn't want to go in by myself. It was scary. Turns out that my childhood memory was a fever-induced dream. But for years I thought it was real. [Freud, jump on that little percieved snippet of parental-child relationship malfunction will you.] In a way, this memory, in its falsity, is a boon with regards to what Osho is (I think) trying to say this project. It is complicated, but basically the goal, or the goal of the path, or the path of the goal, is to be able to remove your reality from your body, mind and place in time. You are none of the latter three. It gets back to creating a gap (remember all those breathing gaps early on in the game?) Start with your day. As you lie in bed, go backwards through your day, rewinding it. This apparently has many benefits health wise, like loosening a tightly wound screw (especially if you are stress-bunny orientated). But it also has the effect of making you a viewer rather than a participator—bingo, gap! In time, start to do that with your whole life. By creating the gap between the essential you and the you that things happen to, you make the two visible as seperate. You enable the realisation that the fundamental you exists. My false memory creates a gap. If I can't tell the difference between a 'lived' memory and a 'dreamed' memory, are they then not essentially the same, and essentially irrelevant, in a way. Dreams are like movies. You are a viewer. If dreams and memory can be confused then life is like a movie and I can make the jump to viewer quicker. But Osho still likes the backwards approach so I'll have to start now and move back to that childhood car and the image of the gate and the path up to the hospital door. If what he says is right, I can also then go further back, into infanthood, past my first memory of being injected by a doctor (food poisoning that time I think), to the womb and even onto the point prior to entering said womb— to when I died the last time. Then I can find out for sure if that psychic was right and I really was a height-challenged Sicilian male in a former life. Mmmm!



* The New Yorker runs a competition each year for entrants to invent a new punctuation mark. Short-listers here. Two particularly suit anything I write about: the questionable period (.?) for things that I make sound like facts but which have no real proof behind them, and, even more accurately, the [unamed] (-:) which indicates the preceding statement, again presented like a fact, has actually failed to make any touch with the world of reality.

Mitered Blanket: January 23rd to 26th.

Four squares in four days. One hundred and forty-three squares in one hundred and forty-three days? Eek. What are these people doing to me? There are three blankets to make this year. Supposing they are all the same size as this one—and despite them not all being a square derivative pattern—that would mean four hundred and twenty-nine days of this year will be needed to make just the three rugs, let alone the other one hundred and nine projects. Why do we ever add? No good ever comes of it. Not that I am implying minusing, dividing, timesing or even square rooting ('scuse) are any better. I'm starting to feel a little overwhelmed by the project. Other non-project projects are also trying to sneak their ways into project allocated time (japanese crane hanging, facebook creative chain-letter promises (otherwise I'll die and lose all my money to charlatans) and b-word based uniforms for bifurcating Britain, just to name a few). I'm getting burning skin sensations with no obvious causes. I think I'm stressed.

There are four yarns in this little number (two pictured so far). They are: Moda Vera Gardenia (seventy-five percent acrylic, twenty-five viscose derived from bamboo) in cream; Moda Vera Marvel (acrylic through and through) in a sagey green (if you squint it looks neutral; neutral is hard to do when there are four colours and you're trying to make an interesting balance that is not just black white and two shades of grey—yeah. I know, excuses, excuses); Moda Vera Noir (three quarters wool, one quarter polyamide) in a multicoloured brown and grey; and; Cleakheaton (phew, another brand; hundred percent wool) in mottled brown. It all sounds a bit like a weird tree, but trust me, I used to be a colour consultant. I like making these squares—they epitomise the wackyness of knitting: you start with two sides effectively cast onto your needle and then knit them pointedly into a square through the middle. That is as hard to visualise as it is to describe, but amazingly easy to do. Buy the calender, try it, become as project-obsessed as I am—I recommend it.

If however, I start to feel the prana (given an acceptance of becoming able to feel it in the first place that is) leaving my body any day soon, I may give the project up. Maybe. Osho is dropping little dung bombs this project. Prana comes into the body normally. The breath brings prana in and leaves the body empty. If at some stage you feel the reverse start to happen, it means that in six months time you will be dead. Eek. But eek is not meant to be the reaction. 'Shall I spend the last six months of my life knitting?' is not meant to be the reaction either (not that he makes that exact point). When we feel this directional change we should already not be afraid of death. This weeks technique moves us toward losing that fear because death, after all, is just a long sleep (and we all know how much I like to sleep). But it means trying to change something else I like as well: dreaming. Osho says: feel the prana at the time of going to sleep through, ideally, the third eye technique discussed last project and as you fall into sleep you will be able to control your dreams. Benefits of controlling your dreams include choosing which ones you want or don't want, creating dreams, being aware that you are dreaming, and stopping dreaming altogether because, he says, it is absurd. I subscribe to the Camus school of thought already and all 'life is absurd'. I don't know if I want to give up dreaming. It is an absurdity that doesn't have to be made into sense. I wish instead that I could accept the awakened parts with the same disregard for their not making sense. Life may be a little easier to not react badly to. But he does offer on panacea for non-dreaming which is you get a better quality of sleep. Given last nights effort, I am all for that—although technically I needed to be asleep before dreams affected my sleep, not just lying there watching extremely large pylons drive slowly past with men sitting on the back of them. (That was weird).

I am (of course) off track. If you can become the master of your dreams, Osho says, you become master of the big sleep—death. You can choose your dreams or not to have them, but when the big sleep comes, you can choose how, when, why and what you come back as afterwards. Sleep is a day-to-day death; death is a life-to-life sleep.