Noro, the Women's Center, lost wallets, Plato

Welcome to the Harvard Knitting Project.

Yesterday, Mischa (a fabulous diva boy, and master swatcher) and I held the first-ever Harvard knitting circle in the Women's Center. We're not crazy about the message that a knitting circle held in the Women's Center, but they're buying us yarn and whatnot, and they seem really enthusiastic, so we left our reservations behind and plunged into the project, and so far it seems like a success! Cookies, hot chocolate, and some crocheted flowers...we even had a decent turnout of non-female-identified folk. And I'm crazy about cheap bulky Lion's Pride yarn. It looks fantastic in seed stitch, as Carolyn proved (photos forthcoming!)

As it turns out, it wasn't the first-ever Harvard knitting circle. There used to be something called the Harvard Neighbors, back in the day (Gazette article), the fabulous Amy Spoering held a Lowell House knitting circle a few years back, and there's a great little group through PBHA called "Stitch in Time", who teach knitting at Rosie's Place once a week, and also donate stuff they knit to UniLu's Harvard Square Homeless Shelter (I'm planning on joining them --- drop a line if you'd like to join up, too!)

Anyway. The circle was a predictable mix of girly girls and the queer community. But it was great fun and there are a few category three knitters (angsty philosophers) planning on coming next week.

In other news, I can't find my wallet ANYWHERE! Granted, my dorm is kind of a pit that eats everything, but this lack of wallet is really stressing me out. So, instead of working on my Parmenides presentation and paper (due tomorrow!), I have turned to the legendary Noro. I bought two skeins of Kochoran 10 (lime, grey, denim) last year for no apparent reason, because it reminded me of home (trees, fog, ocean). It's screaming "sweater," and so I guess I'll just have to buy a couple more skeins! I took out the ol' US no. 7 circular on which I knitted my first and only sweater back in prepubescent days, and started to swatch. And let me say....

This stuff is a dream! It knits up into big luscious stitches, and even on metal needles (which I kind of hate) it has a wonderful soft grip to it. I haven't swatched enough to see how the variagation works, but the blue is just beautiful! I've decided that this will be my first formally self-patterned sweater, so I'm sure I'll be blogging extensively about that. But really, there is no tranquilizer like Noro for an anxious Harvard crybaby like me. Mt. Auburn hospital bills be damned, Parmenides be damned, finding my wallet be damned, wool/mohair/angora blends are the important things in life!

Actually, when I went to Lamont last night to escape my knitting fingers and the CastOn on my iTunes (and ran into Mischa, whaddaya know), I did legit enjoy working on the Parmenides. It is such a nitty-gritty dialogue...and it's been a while since I really dug in to anything besides Sartre. It's a unique dialogue, because it features an eighteen-year-old Socrates as the interolocutor, and pre-Socratic giant Parmenides taking the role that Socrates usually takes. It contains pretty much all the standard objections to the theory of forms, and remains unresolved at the end. I'm always reminded of Wittgenstein in this Plato course, and as with the Philosophical Investigations, it's best not to try to make everything here fit into a beautiful, self-consistent piece --- it's not. It's a mess (like the backside of Fair Isle, hahahahahahaha). The regresses seem kind of facile, stuff like this -- if each large thing contains a part of the Large itself, then the Large must be divided and each part of the Large must contain a portion of the Small, because it is smaller than the whole of the Large. Likewise, the whole of the Small contains some largeness, because it is larger than the portions of the Small contained within small thing. So obviously there's some kind of problem -- but there is just such a total lack of solution. Not feeling very articulate at the moment. Maybe I'll do some more Plato blogging after dinner, or tomorrow. But I best leave it here for now.

In other news, the momsocks are coming along great!

and I can't wait until I figure out this whole photo thing...