finally it's saturday

Sure, I could sleep in late on Saturday, but this morning -- and the last few Saturdays -- I've crept out of bed early to get going on all the things that get lost each week. Seven years of graduate school effectively deadened me to any real difference between the work week and the weekend; it all felt about the same: there was this great big ogre breathing on my shoulder and whether it was Tuesday morning or Saturday at five, I still needed to be thinking about how to appease said ogre. Things have shifted a bit since June, mostly because I told myself that it was okay not to do any academic work for six months (I finally sent out an article last week) and because I started my first ever 9 to 5 job. When I get home each night, I'm tired, really very tired. I usually manage to get myself to the gym or yoga, but then I pretty much want to relax for an hour or two before I go to sleep and do it all again.

But when classes started last week, this all shifted again. I added teaching to an already busy life. I'm thrilled to be with students again, but realistically this means giving up my weekends to prepare all my classes for the week ahead. Today that means reading Ben Franklin's autobiography and about 150 pages of criticism. Fortunately, Franklin cracks me up, with all his errata and schematic charting of virtue. I'm hoping that reading Franklin in Franklin's hometown will feel almost intimate, maybe I can force birthday boy J out into the subzero temps to take a walk through Franklin's life. And in between chapters?

It's all Elizabeth Zimmerman for me. For a couple months I've been thinking about working my way through a year of Zimmerman. But then wouldn't you know it? Soulemama -- who fascinates me for a number of reasons, both good and bad -- steals my thunder. But with two February baby sweaters in my bag and a baby surprise sweater on my needles, I'm forging ahead with all Zimmerman, all year. The surprise sweater is for J's sister's baby who is currently in utero but who is set to arrive when there will be the last hints of a spring chill in the New York air, at least I hope so.

Why is Elizabeth Zimmerman enjoying such a knitterly renaissance? I think it's because she's so funny and so brilliant and so chatty (while also being phenomenally concise, i.e. totally spare). She's always chatting about the "old man" who manages to help her out mathematical quandaries and she makes her patterns into intimate little stories of life in the deep woods. In the baby surprise sweater from the fall of 1968, she befriends her readers and asks them to engage, "Have you realized how unbecoming pink and blue are to a bran-new baby?" You read the pattern and find yourself saying, yeah, I know pink and blue and are bad, and you're ready to do whatever she tells you to do. She has you eating out of her hand....which I will be doing in between Franklinian episodes all day today.