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Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Project Summer


Summers on campus are a time of much leisure and relaxation, the time to take on projects like knitting or cooking or become a project oneself. My friend of hued childhood years has adopted me and I too have adopted myself as a project to work on these halcyonic summer days that approach me. I will learn to cook. And no I don’t mean gourmet cooking. I mean scrambled eggs and tossed vegetables and pasta and other basic fare that will allow me to survive one day in the fast approaching future. I make no pretensions at my talents in the kitchen. They will never be anything but passable but I will not be daunted by the knives and the fires and the smells and the constant need to keep clean and dry. I however, will not kow tow to the kitchen gods. Nope. Not happening. I am of that strain of independent liberated women that feels no shame in knowing that most of the men in her life are more domesticated than her. So? They are coming into their own strengths, much like I am with my own.
Strengths I hear you mock? Why yes. I believe I may cultivate some talents this summer. Knitting is the first such challenge. I’ve put it off far too long. I learnt finger knitting off a youtube video even one summer but actual knitting? Purl, weave, blah? I got it. Knitting’s got nothing on me. Armed with a book, knitting needles and yarn, I got this. I will return this world to the yester years when it was perfectly acceptable for a respected woman to take refuge in her knitting in awkward social situations or discuss knitting patterns to break the ice. Knitting is a beautiful art, with history and culture and the mellowness of all that was beautiful about gently faded old women on porch chairs, knitting their years away. And the feeling of seeing something being constructed, of something taking shape from within all those threads and clashing needles is thrilling. I’ve known the joy of bringing colour and grace to a hitherto bland piece of cloth but to make the cloth now? To make the base itself? Oh lordy. This is going to be fun J
Hmmm… other mundane tasks – learn how to drive. More importantly, get the damn license already. Enough dilly dallying now. Grow up, get behind the wheel and stop wimping out at 40 mph. That’s just lame sauce, Ducky.
Prep for the GREs. Sorta important. Need to get educated, remember? Do your research as well. Figure out where you could go. Funsies!
I am my own project this summer. I’m taking it by the horns and telling it to back the hell down. Summer will not make me over think my life. It’s dark and scary in my mind and I tend to not like hanging out in there. So I won’t. I will learn and fill my brain with useless trivia about knitting and cooking and boxes and television and germs and the marines. Reading lists, challenges, tasks, talents, wish lists and leisure, they mingle in my head already, merge into an intangible, incoherent mess which I will sort into neat little piles by the end of the summer. Project Me Starts Today. Yikes!

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