Late to the Party

I am coming late to this whole knit blog thing and REALLY late to the general blog thing. Though this will probably be only so knit blog and more sort of a do-what-you-feel blog. Okay, so knitting is usually what I feel--but sometimes I read, and sometimes I rant, and sometimes I just babble. Yes, it’s going to be one of THOSE.

I am an All But Dissertated Ph.D. student in Genetics at a well-known southeastern university (if by well-known, you mean known for football). Like so many grad students before me, I almost dropped out, because grad school is. . .well, to put it truthfully, grad school is insane, and the people in it are even more so. You’d have to be to take the kind of abuse (at its most extreme) or neglect (at its mildest) we do, for the pay we do, with the job prospects we do. But hey, I’m on drugs now (the legal kind), so I stayed. After a certain point, it’s like Stockholm Syndrome. Oh, and I took up knitting.

Knitting keeps me just this side of bonkers. It empties my pockets, but it keeps me from being carted away by the men with white coats. When I was sixteen, my mom was a terrible alcoholic, and I became obsessed with sailboats. Now, I’m from Atlanta. Not a sailboat in sight (doesn’t matter what you say, sailboats in Lake Lanier don’t count). I’d never been on a sailboat, wouldn’t know a bowline from a bowsprit, but I was obsessed with sailboats. I subscribed to Sail magazine and read every issue from cover to cover. One of the pithy little jokes I remember from Sail magazine is the one sailors told themselves: a boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money.

Knitting is like that, too; only, in this case, at the end, you have something to warm to wear. I think I originally thought that I would (snicker) save money (chortle chortle) by (har!) making my own (sigh) clothes. Well, uh, no. No. But what it has allowed me to do is work off some steam and make some much cooler clothes than I would be able to have otherwise. So, at least I have the comfort of knowing that I’m going to be a really stylin’ bag lady when I fail to find a job in this “recovering” economy.

Knitting is for me now what sailboats were for me when I was sixteen. Why knitting? I have no idea. Maybe knitting provides a little (okay, sometimes a very little—but you get do-overs) control in an out-of-control world. I have always felt somewhat lost in grad school. Most of us do, I believe. Success in bench research is often (more often than most of us would like) determined by luck. We all know the bastards, the ones who fall into a project after all the grunt work has been done--and get that first paper out in year two. Everyone thinks they’re the bee’s knees or the mutt’s nuts, or whatever. And you’re still slaving away in year five, trying to get the fucking protein expressed. And your PI tells another grad student you’re “slow,” or whatever. Because data rained down on your PI like manna from heaven when he was in grad school, minimal work required, couldn’t get the fucking stuff to stop, in fact. Finished in four years, in point of fact. Three appendices in his thesis, in another point of fact. Because he was one of the bastards. The lucky fucking sod.

Not that this has happened to me, or anything.

But knitting. . .PI says you’re “slow”? So what? I can knit stranded colorwork like a mug. Western blot didn’t work? Who cares? I can knit intarsia, yo! World got you down? No problem! Knit yourself some bootstraps and pull yourself up. Or at least a wooly blanket to pull over your eyes.