1 – Saw Eat Pray Love. It was bad, but not intolerable [like, say, Le Divorce was]. I understood most of the changes, bc after all, you had to simplify the number of new characters and give the whole thing a bit more of a focused plotline and you couldn’t necessarily stay in her head w a movie like you can w a memoir. My BIGGEST gripe though, was that Tutsi got married and that she was the focus of Liz’s ‘Gita love in said arranged marriage – essentially Liz could pray better by focusing on hoping that Tutsi would be happy in a marriage that she didn’t want to be in. TOTALLY hypocritical seeing as the whole precipitating factor to the book is that Liz “didn’t want to be married anymore”. NO WAY. =P
2- Reading “Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously” by Adrienne Martini. Have to urge to knit or otherwise craft. But also trying to simplify life as a whole. Very interesting counter emotions. We’ll see where we end up at the end of the great life purging. Other thoughts:
New favorite word: abecedarium [a picture book of letters, where each letter has an object that represents it included in the design].
“Have you heard that Buddhist thing about the teacups? There’s the teacup that has a little crack in it, so that when you pour tea in it, the tea just goes right out. And then there’s the teacup that’s already full, so you pour tea and it just overflows. Then there’s the teacup that’s turned over. The best teacup – or student- is the empty cup.” p.130
I am fascinated [or upset maybe] about the Church’s idea that only within the Church can you have “real” community, bc it supposedly only comes through fellowship w Christ. But time and again I see that you have so many different people groups, interest groups, whatever [knitting groups is where this came from this time] who spend inordinate amounts of time together [in person or nowadays virtually -- which is a rant for another time], and who take full, true, and overwhelmingly LOVING interest in each other – willing to open up their home on a moment’s notice, as if to family, willing to drop everything and anything for a crisis, or even something less dire. I rarely rarely RARELY see that IN the Church body. And that is a super-major-sad indictment on Christianity as a whole. Jesus himself even said that priorities are to love God and love your neighbor, not all the other crap we’ve turned it into – not even four steps or a simple prayer. Dude, WHERE is the love?
I wonder if I am a knitting “grown-up” bc I realize that acrylic yarn is gross [in the same way that I no longer drool over 100% polyester clothing] – unfortunately, it’s more my budget range [and the polyester clothing is so washing-machine and dryer friendly!].
“The Internet is like that. There is this huge community whether you want it or not. You can’t sign on for part of it. If you want the pleasure of being able to say ‘Where do you think I should put this button?’ then you also have to put up with the fact that once you’ve decided, hundreds of people are still going to tell you your button is wrong. You have to learn how to take that the same way you learn how to take your mother’s pants advice.” -Stephanie Pearl-McPhee on p.173
“It’s like the argument, ‘Is knitting art or is knitting craft?’ For me, it’s the same terrible, wishy-washy answer. It’s both. It depends on how you’re doing it. If you buy a pattern and buy the yarn the pattern suggests and knit it in the color suggested, you’re executing someone else’s directions, no matter how much joy you do it with; that’s craft. That’s execution. THe definition of art for human beings is that it is self-expression. SO the minute you say, ‘I think this would be better in pink,’ or the minute that you say, ‘I think the sleeves should be a bit shorter,’ the minute that who you are begins to influenece what that thing is, now it’s art.” – Stephanie on p.180
3 – Don’t know WHAT to do w technology. I’m completely disenchanted w this blogging thing. Between feeling like I should be fixing the damn comments code, that I need to edit the ten or so posts I started that are in my queue that are incomplete and utter drivel and thus unfit for public consumption, that I have to post pics of the baby, that I should be writing more regularly, that I should update my studio site or pursue more clients. I also need to break my addiction to FB. – In any case, I *think* I need to break from the grid – a whole heckuva lot. BUT I acknowledge that that world is “online”. And I’m GOOD at the whole techy coding, designing, writing surfing kind of thing. So along w some of the other simplification questions, and self-ponderance, is whether or not the technology, the blog, the studio, are really truly good and right and supposed to be, or whether it’s just the wide road/gate that’s easier and where everyone else is, but might just be utterly wrong and sad. We’ll see.