Weird Science

This ever happen to you?

You have something to write, and you’ve worked it all out in your head: what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it and why – the points to be made, the aspects to be emphasized, the piquant touch of irony here, the illustrative anecdote there, the tiny quaint dADa-ist non-sequitur somewhere near the end where it won’t even be noticed at first but will come back to mind later like a lurking aftertaste. If you’re like me you may even plan a few “unscheduled” digressions to sweeten the pot and broaden the relevance. You can hear the style and syntax and phrasing and rhythm in your head and you’re full of steam.

You sit down to write and you’re going great guns, all of it just rolling smoothly off your fingertips and falling beautifully into place. It feels right. You know it’s good.

And you’re well into the fifth paragraph before it dawns on you that what you’ve written – right and good though it still may be – is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from what you planned and crafted.

Mind you, I’m not talking about black toner turning magenta here. You read it back and yes, it’s good and it turns out to be something you really wanted to say, something almost certainly more relevant and immediate than what you expected to say – it’s just… not what you expected to say.

Not your Regularly Scheduled Programming.

Somehow your hands, or whatever it was that did this, knew better than your conscious mind.

(I remember in my programming days – speaking of Regularly Scheduled Programming – we used to joke about writing the perfect two-line function:

all bugs off;
do what I’m thinking;

Yeah, kind of like that, except… thinking?)

Well, that’s what happened to me the other night with the shawl.

I had reached the point where I needed to start the insertion, and I had the whole strategy worked out and I knew exactly how I was going to knit it. I needed to make a series of large eyelets, spaced at regular intervals in a garter ground, for threading the cord or ribbon that I’m going to use to gather the bottom of the fan. So I did some garter stitch, and then I set out to do a series of double-YO eyelets in the appointed locations.

I was knitting merrily along and was maybe 1/3 of the way through the row before it struck me that I had done a major self-correction without any conscious intent. At some level it had registered that a double-YO eyelet calls for an even-numbered stitch pattern – i.e. one where the center-point falls between two stitches rather than on a single stitch – and that what I needed was a hole that would center itself on an odd pattern. So without thinking about it at all, or at any rate without realizing I’d thought about it, I had changed my approach and, instead of trying to squeeze in the double-YO where it couldn’t go, I’d been binding off three stitches over each centered point, to be counterbalanced by three cast-on stitches in the next row.

You shoulda seen my face. Running on auto-pilot is one thing when you’re working no-brainer stuff like ribbing or straight stockinette; but making big strategic course corrections to accommodate the laws of mathematics and physics – well, that’s something you kind of expect to be aware of when you’re doing it. No?

It was, of course, totally the right thing to do. I’m grateful that some part of me figured that out and did it, incidentally sparing me the whole Learning-the-Hard-Way stage of the process; but it felt a little weird to discover after the fact that that part of me hadn’t bothered to notify the rest of me.

Kind of makes me wonder what other twilight-zone shenanigans I may have been getting up to without realizing it….

Which brings me to a twilight-zone shenanigan that I’m pretty sure I’m not responsible for. I can’t tell you all the details right now, because it concerns a Semi-Stealth Project. But… well… I woke up this morning to discover that a member of my staff apparently has a weakness for… cork. (Also apparently possesses a surprising degree of tenacity and skill: whoever it was extracted the articles in question from my knitting bag without – luckily for him and for me – compromising the knitting and needles that were closely intertwined with them.) So somebody is in the doghouse. That is – I think it’s the doghouse. I don’t have a positive ID yet; the slim circumstantial evidence visible at the scene of the crime was highly suggestive but not actually conclusive.

I imagine I’ll be… harvesting…? further data when the time comes to take an afternoon walk – though given the nature of the missing evidence itself I can see where it might create, er, an obstacle to further investigation. So it might be pretty late in the day before any new developments… um… emerge. Just keep an ear peeled – and if you hear a loud POP from this direction… DUCK!