This is not a knitting blog exactly.

I’m trying this blogging thing out again. I wanted to document my knitting, since its been so unorganized as of late. I have literally 7 different projects on sticks (real and imagined) at the moment, which is way too many. I’m super close to finishing Zeeby’s bag, but Ysolda’s opera gloves have been frogged about 3 times now. I just got Fantine in the mail and started on her, but the pattern is a bit beyond me. Ian’s scarf is a bit of a mess, but can be easily enough sorted out. A certain scarf doesn’t know if it wants to be from a Godard film or from a Rowan pattern book. The Vogue Cape got screwed up in Richmond when I tried knitting in the dark. Its a simple matter of un-purling a row, but the row is over 100 stitches and I’m annoyed at the idea of fixing it. And about a million washcloths are on and off needles all the time at this house, since I came, in a variety of ways, in possession of about 8 or 9 skeins of cotton of varying socioeconomic stature. That’s one half of it.

The other half of it is that I miss writing and blogging. I miss getting into something that isn’t knitting or schoolwork. I also feel the need to document this strange and fucked up time of my life where I vascilate between being merely annoyed at my inability to eat like a normal person and being terrified that I, like my mom, am being handed off from doctor to doctor who can’t figure out what’s wrong with me, while something horrible is just getting worse. I am afraid sometimes that I am dying. It sounds really silly. It scares my boyfriend. It makes me feel small and fragile and dramatic. And when the fear passes, I am simply angry again. Or if things are going well, just annoyed.

I’m up at 5AM and part of the reason is that I hate the choices I have to make when I wake up. There is a chance I’m going to wake up and not have a choice; it will be made for me. A bulbous tummy that will call all the shots. If I’m lucky, and I will probably be lucky, because I’ve had 3 months to learn how I can be lucky through my food choices, I won’t be in any pain. But it won’t matter, because nothing will fit the way its supposed to. I’m not going out today; I’m going to stay in and work. And knit. Or I will wake up and look almost like myself again. A curvy girl, yes, but a girl with an hour-glass figure, whose clothes feel familiar and snug against my round hips and flat tummy. So I’ll have to choose between hanging on to that for as long as I can throughout the rest of the day, or eating. Sometimes I choose hanging on to it, but a cup of coffee changes everything and out my tummy goes! Sometimes I choose hanging on to it and out I go! into the great city. I do my job, or go to my class, or to the doctor’s office, and when I get a chance, I catch my reflection, and I feel like myself, only better. I do whatever needs to be done and I try and tell myself that its stress, and look what happens when I don’t get stressed. Things are great! When I come home in the evening I notice that at some point during the day, after I saw my reflection for the last time, my figure changed, even though I didn’t eat, and my shirt is tighter; its riding up on my hips, my waist has expanded. I look unkempt. I look about 10 pounds heavier if I’m lucky and no one notices but me and Ian. If I’m not lucky, I look about 25 pounds heavier. I kind of feel duped. But at least I believed I had a good day.

I have gall stones. That’s the latest and first bit of news since this all began in June. I’m writing my Professional Decision Report this semester. It’s the equivalent of a thesis for my graduate program in Policy Analysis; slightly less academic and more client-based. I haven’t found a client yet. I was supposed to do that over the summer, while I was working at my internship, feeling too bad to come in more than 3 days a week, missing some days for doctor’s appointments, and coming straight home from the office and going to sleep. I’m working a little but not enough. I’m 30 years old. Vegan for six years, I drink tons of coffee. I smoke. I quit for three months and then began to understand the relationship between eating and feeling bad, so I started up again. I have always been heavy. In the spring I realized that I had gained 15 pounds and I coordinated qutting smoking with starting a diet and excercise program. I lost the 15 pounds. I worked out until my stomach started hurting all the time. These things were supposed to protect me. I like to knit. I live in New York City. My boyfriend worries about me. We are getting married after school is done. I want an autumn wedding. I am tired of going to doctors. I tried two different naturopaths and although they have good advice, and are willing to see you much faster than normal doctors, they A) want you to come in all the time, B) cost too much, C) yell at you for doing things your normal doctors tell you to do, D) make you feel like everything is your fault. They also E) sometimes give you hugs, which is nice but strange.

This is not a knitting blog. There will still be plenty of knitting.