Misadventures in Knitting

Not sure if this story is interesting or not but it’s a weird experience and I felt it warranted mentioning. Also you don’t have to read it. You could go read a different blog, or write your own post. Let me live my life! Anyway.

Before…

Back when COVID-19 initially became a major inconvenience, I learned how to knit for the first time. And it was great. I really enjoyed knitting. I made a bunch of hats. For my friends though, not for myself. I mean I made at least two hats for myself, but I made like three or four more for other people. Anyway, eventually life began again and my gradual frustration that I encounter after a prolonged period of dedicating my attention to whatever current hobby I’ve fallen in love with began to set in. So I stopped knitting for a while. When I went home for Thanksgiving break a few weeks ago I decided to grab my knitting stuff and remind myself how to knit again. And for a few days I tried to knit a hat and failed twice. One of the hats I was making with really frayed yarn that kept coming apart. For the second hat I dropped a stitch, tried to fix it, couldn’t figure it out, and gave up. Because I’m not really that good at knitting.
Last Wednesday though I was knitting hat attempt #2 during UST1000, aka Learning in Community. This is a college intro class that I should have taken last year because it’s a required class. But I didn’t know it existed when I chose my first semester classes, and I was going to take it second semester but I already had a bunch of classes to worry about. It’s irrelevant. My professor, who is a very nice and social person, saw me knitting and said “You should teach me how to knit!” and I said sure, assuming that she was just making a throwaway comment and making conversation. She kept bringing it up throughout class though, and when we were all packing up she asked me when we should get together so I could teach her how to knit. This guy Angus at my table asked if he could come too. So in like nine minutes I’m going to take a thirty minute break and go teach my professor and some guy I vaguely know(Also the TA from that class and her boyfriend because she said yesterday that she also wants to come) how to knit. Again, I’m not very good at knitting. But I wasn’t really thinking when she asked me and I can’t really back out at this point because I also told her I don’t really know what I’m doing and she didn’t care. I’m still not sure if this is an interesting story to write about, but I feel that this is kind of like a slightly duller and less wacky storyline that you’d see in a sitcom. It’s 8:28. I’m about to head up there now. I will give an account of how it went in the After… section of this post. Hopefully something wacky will happen to justify me writing this post.

After…

Aaaaaaaaand nothing did. It was actually really nice. We all just sat and talked and I sort of taught them how to knit but not really? And eventually my friends stopped by to say hi and one of them taught my professor how to knit in a much more effective manner than I could manage. My professor bought us pizza, too. It was really calm and fun and we might do it again. You know, I started this post thinking that I could tell a funny story about a weird situation I got myself into but now I’ve learned and grown as a person, realizing that not everything needs to be a joke. And isn’t personal growth more meaningful than a weird funny story, in the end? We were all a random group of people at the beginning of our knitting club meeting. A guy named Angus that I sort of know, an overworked college professor, a very tired idiot who works at the library and is overly eager to try out the CPAP machine he just picked up this morning, a cool TA, her boyfriend Bryce, and his support dog. All very different people. We’re like the Breakfast Club, in our own way. Except we weren’t forced to hang out as a form of punishment. We aren’t in high school. None of us hated each other at the beginning of the day or fell in love at the end. And we aren’t in high school. So I guess we aren’t really like the Breakfast Club. That’s fine. The principal is the best character in that movie anyway.