Being grateful isn't just for Thanksgiving

Oh gratitude, that most elusive of human emotions: this one is for you.

My kids will tell you that I can out grinch the Grinch himself. And I can. But I've hit the time of year when I can no longer fail to appreciate the Grinch's miserly heart growing three sizes.

Among many things for which I am grateful, I am immensely grateful that I can hand knit at all. Those of you who are non-knitters and non-yarnies may fail to appreciate the why of it.  Why I at times forget to appreciate it at all, is an absolute mystery to me.

Almost 13 years ago, on 21 December 1998, I had a stroke that rendered me virtually senseless for a very long time, and among many other things, I lost all use of my right hand for 6 months, and have not regained fine motor control of my right hand to this day. Honestly it's unlikely that I ever will. My adaptation was to accept that my right hand was virtually useless.

 I haven't buttoned my blouse with both hands for 13 years.  I haven't typed with two hands in 13 years. There are many, many things I haven't done with two hands in 13 years.

Back in 1998 I was an insane crocheter, a craft requiring the use of fine motor control of both hands. Then BLAM!, that was gone in an instant.  No more crocheted baby clothes, baby blankets. No more crocheted toys or doilies. I missed playing with yarn and thread more than mere words can express. And this loss of a much beloved hobby stayed with me, when I've gotten used to the other losses from the stroke.

Then I discovered machine knitting in 2008, which I could do with my left hand and at most one thumb  from my right hand. Yes, that bad boy works a wee bit now. And I could play with yarn again, which felt like a miracle.

Then in February 2011 over a weekend, I learned I could knit by hand in the English method in a very non-standard way. There are no words to express the ecstasy that came with that discovery. I could finally work with yarn using both hands!

Though I can only physically feel it in my left hand, knitting was and continues to be an incredible emotional experience. I can now reason (reasoning took me a long time to recover) my way through how to accommodate most knitting stitches. And if you watch any knitting videos on YouTube, you'll see what an accomplishment that really is for me without the use of the fingers on my right hand.

There are some things knitted that are impractical for me to do without having the use of the fingers of my right hand. I'm hesitant to say impossible because I'm still learning and figuring things out, though I'm sure there are things I physically can't do. I am a much slower knitter than most, and impossibly slow compared to expert knitters. But I knit all the same, and the quality of my work is impressive. Adapt, improvise, overcome.

Rehab after my stroke taught me the usefulness of the military motto "adapt, improvise, overcome." Relearning how to do the things most take for granted, walking, talking, thinking, reading, dressing all in a new way teaches you that there's not much you can't do with a workaround. You just have to look. However, some things just don't seem to have a workaround. In part, adapting means accepting your limitations.

Accepting limitations is highly useful, but there's a large but. Sometimes that acceptance blinds you to what really can happen through improvisation, and it kills the gratitude. Until February 2011 I'd not realized just how far this motto could take me. By improvising past my adaptation, I learned to overcome.

And I am grateful. So if you hear me relate things to knitting, now you know why. It's gotten so much better since 1998 and 2008. Never, ever let go of the gratitude. It is what keeps you adapting, improvising, and overcoming. Hold on to that.

Get a new hobby, this one is scary

Having recently taken up knitting, I've learned a few things concerning my erstwhile hobby.  It's twisting my brain into contorted positions a yogi could never achieve, even over the course of several lifetimes.

For me knitting is not just a hobby, but a meditative technique that frees my mind to think about well, whatever crosses it.  Most people react to my flights of mental fancy with a polite "get another hobby." That's the only polite thing they can say about how my brain works.

Those two seemingly innocuous stitches, knit and purl, once mastered exert a pull on the psyche only matched in nature by a black hole. The comparison is apt: Knitting is the black hole, and mastery of of those two stitches the event horizon. Once you cross there is no escape. Nevertheless, once inside, you discover a multiplicity of new universes. 

My previous universe was knitting a baby sweater. A kind and comfortable place. My current universe is sock knitting. In practice a sock is just a bent tube that is closed on one end. In my mind it became anything but.

In knitting, I embraced elementary school math by adjusting my gauge because I can't match the gauge of a pattern to save my life. For the average knitter gauge adjustment can feel as intimidating as making the leap from counting to calculus.  At times, just the thought of it is enough to make your eyes roll back into your head and induce a seizure. 

4th grade math was never as important as it is when you realize the gauge swatch you just knit for your sock means said sock would fit a full grown yeti. It only takes ignoring gauge once and knitting one yeti-sized sock before cracking open your child's math text to relearn calculating ratios so that the suckers will fit a real person. Once applied and happily knitting away, that gauge conversion ratio frees my mind for thought exploration.  Be afraid, be very afraid.

In this way the sock universe becomes Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

At a minimum, a knitted sock could probably best be described mathematically as a non linear function that would turn most mathematician's bowels to water. It sure does that to mine. Remember, I just re-embraced  4th grade math?  The series of twists traversed by a single strand of sock yarn worked toe up are mathematically more impressive than the age of the universe. And my mind begins to wander...

The function gently spirals up in size in size from a line of stitches into a cylindrical ovoid encompassing the instep. To become the heel, the function traverses a plane of stitched short rows worked back and forth. It them continues back into cylindrical form, and is ribbed before the function reaches its endpoint.  I wonder what that equation looks like??? Really? Really. Resistance is futile.

As I work steadily away on my sock, observing my work in progress brings me to the brink of mathematics, with the question "why does my sock look like THIS?" The easy answer is that it isn't finished yet. However, knitting a sock from the toe up generates shapes reminiscent of the most incomprehensible of topological transformations.  What n-fold torus can this sock form, hmmm? 

How does a mathematician really see a donut in a coffee cup? The same way I see a finished sock in a ball of yarn, that's how. I don't think Riemann had socks in mind as he worked, but that something as simple as knitting a sock can bring topological transformations to mind says a great deal about the power of both math and knitting. 

Maybe mathematicians could answer the big questions about the universe investigating socks... 

And all of this came from calculating a gauge conversion. No wonder it scares knitters.

 I'm often told "get another hobby." Now you can see why. Resistance is futile.

Thank you, Anne Rice

Anne Rice has publicly proclaimed what so many of us have privately held for so long: that the Church and/or Christianity no longer walks the walk it demands of it's followers, if it ever did. I've had much the same discussion with friends and family over the years, with much the same result she has received from the christian religious - a stunned "How can you say you're not a Christian?" My response to that question is simply this. I draw a line between what I believe and what I know. I can believe something that is impossible for me to directly know,or experience, whereas I cannot know something that is impossible for me to experience.Where spirituality is concerned I believe many things to be true. Our existence after death in some form is one of them. Do I know this for sure? Absolutely not, as I am still alive to write this. Treating others the way I wish to be treated, absolutely I believe this. And I know from experience that acting on this belief generally works better than the alternative.

There can be a tremendous difference between belief and knowledge. Believing something to be true and knowing through experience that it is true is one thing . Holding something as true while doing the exact opposite is hypocrisy, and a different matter entirely.  Historically, Christianity has preached one thing, love for God and neighbor, while acting in the exact opposite manner. And it continues to do so. This is the crux of Anne's argument. The fact that individuals have sometimes done great and good things in the name of God for their fellow man does not excuse an institution itself for poor behavior.

Is this a secular humanist argument against organized religion? Perhaps, but perhaps not. I would say that it's more a matter of calling a spade a spade.

We could learn a few things from our legal, and illegal immigrants

I hear this argument all of the time from those who argue against immigrants, legal and illegal. They're taking our jobs, they say.

An interesting friend of mine just applied for a decent job, not the best but far from the worst. The company gave applicants training materials to study for a pretest before being given the opportunity for  an interview. Fair enough, learn something about what you'll be doing if hired. The pretest was timed at 30 minutes, and the information was considerable in the training materials.

My friend was utterly amazed at how many people didn't study for this test. Here's where the irony comes in. So many so-called Americans who want work, weren't willing to put in the time needed to learn a small amount of material to gain decent employment.


I'm sick to death of Americans expecting jobs, and pay, without work. Why should any company have to go so far as to give an open book test to people wanting a job with them? I just hope my friend who studied has a prayer's chance at an interview.

At least the illegals are willing to do what it takes to get and keep the job. How ridiculous is that?

Understanding a wayward parent?

There's much I don't understand about the Tennessee mother who sent her adoptive son back to Russia.

If what we've heard through the media in any way approximates the truth, that family was a in a world of hurt. I understand being afraid of an emotionally disturbed child, and I understand feeling trapped with no way out.

I don't understand how any parent can fail to see the long term ramifications of such an abandonment: after all isn't part of the point behind adoption to avoid those long term ill-effects of not having a family? I also don't see how she didn't know she could terminate her parental rights in a more responsible manner.

How could she not see that her adopted son needed help from mental health professionals? Perhaps she tried, perhaps not. How can you expect a silk purse of a child to be immediately sewn from the pig's ear of life long institutionalization in an orphanage?

The only thing I know for sure is that her callous abandonment has further damaged an already damaged child. To what end he will come is far from assured to be a good one.Taking the media accounts at face value, there had to be a better way to protect her remaining children than by abandoning that boy to the wolves.

Fixing the unfixable

I was listening to a New Orleans radio station while driving to the store today and heard something startling. A Cardinal just sent a letter to the Vatican stating in essence that allowing priests to marry would help fix the attraction of pedophiles to the priesthood. Since I am all about solutions, I applaud him for suggesting a “fix” for this tragic situation in the Church. But his fix is no fix at all.

I’ll be straight with you here. I’m not sure that anything can be done to fix pedophilia. No one is. Simply put, pedophilia is a fixation on children as the preferred sexual partner. There ain’t no fixing that. And marriage certainly won't. Pedophiles by nature gravitate to any occupation that allows them access to children, such as the priesthood.

Perhaps the answer is in fixing the process by which candidates are selected for the priesthood. Is there a checklist for hiring priests somewhere in the Vatican?  If not, there should be. Here’s mine:

Love God? Check.Love the Church? Check. Love people? Check. Love children? Check. How do you love children? Wait a minute. Houston we have a problem.

That thing about confession being good for the soul doesn't work in this case. Were it only that easy. But, wait it is that easy...

There are psychological assessments that can help the Church identify pedophiles trying to get into the priesthood. I figure if companies can use the Myers-Briggs assessment to help determine if someone is a good fit in the office, surely the Church could do this one crucial thing. Use the assessment as a tool to get the answer to that last question on my checklist. You know they aren't going to tell you they fantasize about children. If the assessment throws up red flags don't bring them into the priesthood.Will it catch all of them? No, but you have got to do better than you are now.

Marriage affixes your paycheck to your family, fixes your regular sleeping partner (unless he or she snores like me), and fixes your spouse to the TV when a game is on, but fix this? I think not...

Just my opinion on viral emails

We all know the saying about opinions, and what they're like. That said, I have opinions, you have opinions, we all have opinions, and for the most part they all stink just like their metaphorical counterparts. I think most of us can agree on that line of reasoning.

But,  some of us cross the line and consider their opinion to be just shy of divine revelation. This is the Gospel  According to the Viral Emailer, straight from the mouth of the Almighty to the pen of the Village Idiot. Their mission: To deliver us from the evil of our ways, be they Republican, Democratic , supportive of the Limbless Latina Lesbian String Quartet, or the wisdom of the 1st,2nd, and/or 14th Amendment. Or all of the above. Or as they're neither fish nor fowl politically, especially…(gasp!) Libertarian heresy. Libertarians somehow manage to offend all sides of the American political spectrum, which is an impressive feat in and of itself. But that's a tale for another day.

As an aside Libertarians DO exist, though they be so rare as to qualify as a cryptozoological species only seen at night by one or a few witnesses through the haze of several beers after fishing and backlit by a bright light from the sky. But I digress…

The Village Idiot spews his vitriolic list of ills as fact, sprinkles in a few  supportive misquotes from historical figures, and issues dire warnings of doom. This bizarre concatenation of ideas is then emailed to like-minded people (what a frightening thought there), who forward it along, and so on, and so on. Even Chicken Little could do no better.

What amazes me even more than the ignorance of the Village Idiot - and his ignorance is awe-inspiring in it's immensity -  is the willingness of the general public to read it and accept it as fact before forwarding it to their unsuspecting friends.

Just one short search online will show the 'logic' of each particular Gospel missive to be buggier than a Roach Motel. I want to blame the American educational system for the asininity spouted in these missives, but I can't.  We, the American people, are the most anti-intellectual society in the world. We don't need to bog ourselves down with facts, and we don't need to think on our own. All we need is for someone to tell us what we want to hear. Voila! Instant Truth.

 In lieu of us taking the time to research just a tiny bit before forwarding a steaming pile of sociopolitical turds to the unwary, may I suggest that computer programmers do a tremendous social good and eliminate the forwarding option for email?