A long day at practicum… I decide to ignore the huge writing assignment looming over me and spend the evening goofing off. I’ve been trying to learn how to knit socks. It’s a coping mechanism for dealing with my ever-advancing case of senioritis. I pull out my sock project and the cryptic unillustrated completely impossible to understand instructions, and start trying to make sense of them while simultaneously not poking out either of my eyes. I’m soon engrossed, my fingers tangled in what looks like a hopeless snarl of yarn, tiny double-pointed needles, and something that, if you squint and hold your mouth just right, might actually be starting to resemble a baby sock. (There’s no baby. In totally amateurish fashion, I misled myself into thinking a little sock would be easier to make than a big sock. Ha.)

Jeff comes in and starts channel-surfing, occasionally glancing over at the snarl in my lap. Suddenly his voice breaks my reverie. “So why is it so hard to knit socks, anyway?”

I return, with some effort, from my hyperfocus universe, and look blankly at him for a moment. (This is mainly because I’ve momentarily lost contact with my speech centers, which are nonessential for knitting tasks.) Finally I find my voice. “Because. They have to be shaped like feet.”

“Oh…yeah,” he says, and flips the channel again. Dorothy and the Tin Man vanish, replaced by a bloody-faced Rocky Balboa, winning his 6,982nd fight. I return to my knitting. Life is good. Quirky, but good. 🙂