Monday, February 4, 2008

How to Be an Old Maid or a Jazz-Baby


All of a sudden, I have become obsessed with crocheting little granny squares out of cotton string, which I am going to start selling on etsy. You'll see. I learned how to make them from this book I found at Knitty City (my new favorite store). The book's cover doesn't really make sense: "lacy crochet" isn't pictured, or even truly represented in the patterns within. I would have called it Retro crochet or something like that. Anyway, I'm obsessed with it, and all I have been doing in my spare moments is crocheting in miniature, making little coasters, placemats, and other odds and ends.

It was funny to see myself tonight: coming home from work and changing into flannels, sitting on the living room rug watching Antiques Roadshow, drinking hot chocolate and crocheting doilies. What makes me not an old maid?


On a totally unrelated subject, ever since I've been reading Fitzgerald's "The Beautiful and Damned," I've been thinking of life in his language. What I mean is that I walk down the street, or step onto the subway, or sit with my roommates at breakfast and instead of having normal girl-thoughts or daydreams, I begin narrating in my mind: "She looked up at the Harlem rowhouses gathering and gleaming in the sun. New York, she supposed, was home--the city of luxury and mystery, of preposterous hopes and exotic dreams. She was haunted by the suggestion that life might be, after all, significant. Glancing around at the collection of people waiting for the train, she felt as if she were growing gradually older, until as the battered A-train pulled into the station, ruminations too deep for words would be wintering in her eyes."

I'm not a Gloria Gilbert or a Daisy Buchanan (thank goodness!) but there's something impossibly romantic and easy about Fitzgerald's language that makes me want to wear a silk dress and be heartbroken and dancing at a jazz club in the middle of New York City.

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