Enchanting Juno

Trout for thought*

Sheep & Goats at large, I am frightened.  I know I am not alone, but the fear is so large now it is sort of preventing me from talking about anything else.  Have to say it aloud to start maneuvering around it.  So here I go: I am scared to death of what comes next.

I was going to tell you a funny story about the cat, but well.....that would be a kind of bullshit, yes? (It was a good story though)

Business is bad.  We've had three of the worst months ever - a term I keep having to redefine - in the last 8 months.  Our single biggest customer hasn't made a substantial order from us in a year.  Yesterday I cut people's hours 20% and my own salary for the second time. 

Today I have to rewrite my personal budget and decide if I can still afford to fund 100% of the healthcare coverage I offer the people who work for me.

Some of this is not my fault - the lack of liquidity in the marketplace is a far more effective illustration of trickle down theory than actual trickle down economics ever proved to be.
But the most paralyzing thing about what's happening is that some of it is my fault and that is not something I need to make any more excuses about.  I don't mean that in a self-immolating way, but yesterday I was hit in the face with the wet trout of truth.

I have been reading The Fluent Self on and off since JoVE first mentioned it and I find it a weird combination of compelling and repellent, in the way of things that have a message you do not want to hear.  I have been talking about feeling stuck for months.  Years really.  And the Fluent Self is about destuckification.  Terrifying. 
So I read and then avoid, read and avoid.  Yesterday, I read "It's Not the Economy" and this I cannot avoid, this is the wet trout between the eyes. 

Read it, I'll wait.

I have this love/hate relationship with my business - love the independence, really not  interested in the product.  Hate the responsibility, love the flexibility.   Wish someone else was holding me accountable, can no longer imagine working for any one else.  Unable to visualize how to transform it into something that is weighted more to the plus than the minus. Stuck.  Much rather think about yarn and perfume and books and love and friends and sex and cooking and the cat and family and ......

What I am living is more than duty and less than commitment, a fucked up middle ground that has bred a kind of panicked paralysis where I can come up with 1000 reasons why changing it for the better is impossibly out of reach and then sit there for another six months screwing around on the internet and seeing it get that much more out of hand.

I think I have been waiting for the universe to make the decision for me. 
My therapist often reminds me that silence is not empty and now I need to add the correlary that inaction is a choice.

I had this revelation yesterday as I read up on marketing consultants: everything I respond to in the material I am reading is aimed at people in creative fields - people selling their ideas and their work rather than goods.  I am not a creative person, but I do not need to be an artist to work in a field with more congenial values.  I need a new career.  But instead of letting this one implode and losing years to self-loathing, maybe I can transform it so I am not hanging my employees out to dry, so I can close or sell or grow it so it gives me more options, not fewer.

(Message to the universe:  I am looking (actually, actively, looking as opposed to hoping vaguely one falls from the sky into my parking lot) for a non-sleazy marketing consultant/business consultant with a perspective that straddles both my industry and my personality. 

And as long as you are looking into stuff, Universe, a yoga teacher. The right kind.  kthxbye)

*title belongs to the goddess Claudia

By the power of Graystoke! Knitting!

I have been very, very worried about something.  I have been working on the same sleeve for months, about three stitches a week.  I hate it. 
I have this scarfy thing I started months ago too.  About 1/3 done.  I hate it too.

Since my shoulder went kaflooey (and yes, yes, yes, I will  have assorted medical persons look at it.  I swear.  Big knot in my trap, and as it has eased the soreness has worked its way up my neck and triggerd this arm thing.  No worries.) I have slowed down to nothing though I have been spinning, 10 minutes at a time.

It's been a slow 12 months for knitting - had a lot on my mind - and I have been worred that the stash was going to become objects d'art around the house only.  Worried I didn't like it any more.
Had to make myself pick it up, make myself take a stitch.  But feeling like I had to finish SOMETHING before I started anything new.  Locked into a little spiral of stupid.

As I mentioned I've been in a bit of a mood for the last little while and this weekend I hit the wall of cranky with the speeding Ferarri of self pity and wailed, I wanna knit cashmere!  My arms hurts!  I hate fat needles!  Woe!

And a little voice said.  You have cashmere.  DK weight cashmere.  Lots of it.

And you know what? I do.

I made a little swatch. 

I LIKED it.

And tonight I cast on.  My arm IS sore, so I can't knit long.  But the 4mm needles are way easier than the 5.5 and 6.5 ones I've been arguing with for months.  I really don't like knitting on anything bigger than the 4mms (4.5 maybe) with or without my little spasm.  I prefer the garment I get at the end too, for comfort and wearability.  It's taken me a long time to accept my fate as a fine gauge knitter.  I may still resist sometimes, for the sake of exceptionally beautiful yarns and handspun, but it is clear to me now. 

I even found myself picking it up without thinking and working another row.  You know how LONG its been since that happened?

(Yarn is DK 70/30 geelong merino/cashmere from the Colourmart.  It's verra nice.)

Pride & Prejudice is still amazing too.   This day is ending better than it began.

Interlude.

I am starting to understand the ways in which basic rules for civilized life serve a purpose, no matter how stuffy or pointless they might seem.

I have spent the day in my bathrobe after a bad night's sleep - a muscle spasm in my shoulder that has been my unhappy companion for 6 weeks or more, causing odd pains to run down my right arm and inevitably waking me after four hours.
I arose cranky at 10 after several disjointed sleep segments, read and made lunch and read Pride and Prejudice until my lids drooped and napped - ironically the couch upon which I slept one night to cause the initial spasm is also the only I can prop myself for comfortable sleep at times - until awakened by a very upsetting dream in which a person whose place in my life I currently doubt did something to rather confirm those doubts.  Thanks ever so, unconscious mind.

Now I am sweaty, cross, mildly depressed, premenstrual, feeling like all my ideas come only from opposition rather than creation, and suffering from that vague feeling of not being entirely upon the earth that sometimes accompanies a day when you do not dress or move around enough. 

If I were the kind of person who never lay down in her clothes or always did the dishes and never let the housekeeping get away....well, I supposed I might take to secret drinking instead, and would not be me anyway, so the speculation is useless.  
But the thing that strikes me in the between the lines reading of Lizzie Bennet's life on this trip through is how much ritualized boredom there is, particularly for the women.    Of course, we have ritualized boredom too, it's just noisier.

Nothing profound to say, really, just trying to get back in the habit of blogging and of not being so guarded.  Maybe, like in the folktales, I hope that naming my mood will destroy its power.  A shower might help as well.

imaginary friends

I am passing my Friday night with the The Annotated Pride and Prejudice.  Cause that is the kind of wild woman I am.  Mixed grains and broccoli with a side of classic literature.

I don't recommend it for your first reading, the footnotes are totally spoilers, but for a lit geek like me who read Pride and Prejudice (unannotated version) for the first time at 11 and eleventy times since then, it is brilliant.  I'm good with words and well able to submerge myself in the sense of other times, but still. Knowing that a piano was a status symbol as much as it was a form of pleasure or entertainment, adds a tiny bit to several key scenes (Lady Catherine, I am looking at you).

I know that Emma * and Persuasion ** are 'better" books in the opinion of many but Lizzie Bennet is my girl.  Quick, clever, at peace with herself, wise and foolish, witty, warm, hasty and yet evolutionary over all, she and Harriet Vane*** are the women in literature whom I love the most.  And watching Lizzie navigate her world and assess the people in it always makes me think again about my own shallow extravagances and quick judgments and odd convictions.  I find it - settling and thought provoking at the same time.  Which is one of the reasons it is a great book.

True story:  Years ago I was working as an educational consultant and this wonderful girl was a client, also called Lizzie.  She was fantastic - quick and self aware, with a clever small face and dark hair that swung straight to her shoulders.  She was articulate and creative and independent  and interested in communication and literature and one day we were talking about favorite books and I said mine was Pride & Prejudice and she made this face, squinched with distaste and perhaps a bit of regret at having to downgrade me from "cool for an adult" to "adult".

You do not care for Jane Austen?

And she said - wellllllll, I haven't read her, but........

Old fashioned, about marriage, girly, dusty, stiff,  mannered, etc, etc, etc.  A bit how I feel about Richardson really (reading Pamela was one of the more painful experiences of my degree).  (Followed immediately by Daniel Deronda , which, I admit, I only read part of) (Sorry, Professor Roy).

And I grinned and said, I PROMISE it's not like that.  I am willing to go so far as to bet you'd like it a fair bit.

And that, I thought, was the end of that, because the chance that a high school student, even an unusual one, will listen to one such as I beyond the sphere of my usefulness, is fairly small. 

Until one day she came by the office in a complete state.  Oh MY god, I'm reading that book and I love it.  I love HER.  She's one of US. 

Which - although I now see her as a younger woman rather than a peer - is pretty much it.  Lizzie is my girl.  Home with her is about a million times better, more useful and improving as well as flat out more fun, that 90% of anything I can think of right now (I had a very bad date last week, no doubt my percentages will change as the horror fades).

Getting back to it.......

* Not a huge fan

** Anne Elliot, of Persuasion, is a heroine who has grown on me as I have gotten older and slightly more battered about the edges.  Less witty, more human.  Excellent.

***Harriet Vane is a character in Dorothy Sayer's Peter Whimsy books.  Which you should read IMMEDIATELY. 

I should so get this tattooed on my ass....

The best thing for being sad, replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, is to learn something. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn.
                    ~ T.H. White

via Feral Knitter, whom you really ought to read already.