Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Changes

A big weight got lifted this week, and I feel a whole hell of a lot better because of it.

Ever since April I have been pretty stressed out because I didn't have a plan for past December, and the end of the world could have happened then and I wouldn't have cared because I frankly I couldn't see where my life was heading, or if it was in a remotely good direction. I have a direction, and gainful employment, and a future that unfortunately involves several more years in a state I'm most thoroughly sick of. For now, it is the right place to stay, so I'll grind my teeth and continue on. I'm not settling here, and the type of jobs I want when I am done are not here, or where I am from originally.

I made some pretty nasty mistakes, and it would be unfair to blame anyone but myself for what happened.

In the meantime I am in the process of finishing. I am writing my thesis, which so far has been going at lightning speed, though it will be slowing down this week since I am starting the introduction and conclusion. I have decided to be done by Halloween, and frankly I don't see a reason why that can't happen. Mostly it is a battle in terms of sitting down and actually writing down words. The internet obviously cannot be up if I ever hope of actually writing.

In parallel, it appears that I need to start nailing down the details of my wedding. My mom and I had a "gentleman's" agreement to not talk about it until a month after my sister's wedding. I wanted to give her a break, and she seemed exhausted as stressed out when I left. But a month to the day she calls and I have a list of things to do, like getting engagement photos, wheedling information from the venue, asking my friends to be bridesmaids, and hotel stuff.

There are some things about this process that don't make much sense to me, like, does the color of my invitations really have to match the color of my wedding? Blegh, whatever. I have excluded the dear sweet lovable one from the process, because whatever he likes, she doesn't. And the one thing they agree on is probably not going to happen. So, I need to decide things, and it may be that the more things I decide, the more things there will be left to decide. I'm not sure.

It was very strange going to knit night and feeling that I had the most accomplished finished object, and I had completely reconfigured a pattern to suit the needs of the project. I started to stalk off in the direction of design. I changed the lace pattern to cables, and then I had to increase the size of the chart, which also increased the stretchiness of the fabric, just so it would fit just right. Is that the point of having a blog about knitting? Certainly there isn't a very big audience for how you made something among friends and family. Most of them don't care about the how, and they certainly don't love you enough to listen to all you have to say about it. On the other hand your knitting group loves to hear the details, but they only meet so often. But with Ravelry, you find a big huge varied group of people who do care, and will crash servers, and compliment and comment on your cool ideas. On the flip side any internet community gets you geared up to try to be the very best. I've felt I could get published when I was in a writing group, or that I could win in that MMRPG, or I could sell my fractal art. Am I just getting carried away again? Am I actually any good at this, or do I have unrealistic goals?

On the fractal front I've made 2 seriously cool ones.
It is interesting how adding constraints can actually make me more creative. It is in fighting against the limitations that some interesting results can pop out. It is the 100th apophysis challenge this week, and though I have not participated in them all, I'm really glad I did this week, because I think I can mine some interesting images by using bipolar as a basis, even with all of my usual tricks.

No comments:

Post a Comment