Socks Therapy


 


The socks displayed in my previous post were completed in a bit of concerted effort last night.  Generally speaking, my weeknight knitting tends to be of the desultory sort: a couple of rows here, a tink or five there, all preceded by an embarrassingly long period of staring at the work in question in order to figure out what I was doing last time I picked the project up (the better to avoid frogging the entire evening’s output when I realize what a colossally chuckleheaded move it is to just dive in without re-consulting the pattern and re-measuring the current length).
 
But last evening I sat and knitted with a concerted fervor.  It was our annual Home Owners’ Association meeting, and if the HOA meeting needs anything, it is a distraction from 90% of the actual content of the HOA meeting.  (The first rule of HOA – don’t pay attention to HOA).
 
Normally, I ignore the HOA meeting so much that it actually goes by without my attendance.  Yes, I am a bad HOA citizen.  No, I don’t think that my virulent allergy to lengthy meetings which mostly consist of spontaneous, repetitious rants by individuals who generally get no platform for their particular grievance except for the annual HOA would be materially cured by an increased exposure to same.  Nor do I figure my hotheaded impatience with this sort of quasi-civic tomfoolery will help anyone else.  I rationalize my nonattendance as part of an arrangement that benefits all parties.  This year, however, John insisted upon my attendance, since we had an item officially on the agenda: the massive, non-indigenous white pine trees the developer helpfully planted on common property next to our house and other houses in the cul-de-sac 20 years ago which are now the size of dinosaurs and are similarly doomed.  We’d sort of prefer that their doom be something that happens on a schedule, with a chainsaw, rather than unscheduled and on top of our house. 
 
So, I picked up my sock before leaving the house and sat in the meeting, knitting furiously.  I knit through the lengthy introduction of board members.  I knit through the somewhat rambling agenda.  I paused in my knitting to swiftly second the motion that we accept the four people running for four vacant board seats by acclamation rather than by a vote (who knew that my exposure to Roberts’ [Bloody] Rules of Order in high school would ever come in handy?  Certainly not I at 16).  I knit (faster, and with a certain amount of eyerolling that caused John a measure of concern) through a neighbor’s rants and rambles about what he thought the county should be paying for (everything) and his muzziness on the concept of “easement” (confusion I have had occasion to learn about in ugly, firsthand fashion when he decided he didn’t like the cable company utilizing its tiny example on his postage-stamp yard and demonstrated his irritation by ripping out the cable that services the rest of the block, including our house, and then threatened the cable technician who came to repair it with bodily harm).  They talk about knitting as therapy, but in this case it also worked as prophylaxis.
 
By the end of the meeting, I was about ten rows of rapidly decreasing size and one episode of relearning the Kitchener Stitch from a sock.  And I hadn’t killed anyone.  Not a complete waste of time.
Posted: Thursday - April 06, 2006 at 08:58 PM         | |

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