A Fire in My Belly, and My Growing Addiction to Knitting

I have two things I wanted to address today, so let's get to it!


FIRE

"Spirit" by IMustBeDead

There are a lot of times when I'll see something irritating on the Internet.  Someone trolling on an anti-domestic violence video; religious folks saying that, while it's important to affirm the inherent dignity of gay people, we must always remember that gay people are sinning and abominations before God; Tea Partiers.


And during those times, it's tempting to engage, because someone is WRONG ON THE INTERNET.  It's so easy to feel like it's my personal responsibility to correct every single person and save them from their wrongness so that we can all live happily ever after, but then I realize that 1.) There's a chance I'm the one who's wrong, or 2.) I don't have the energy as a human being on this planet to do that for everyone.  There are just too many people who think that religion is poison or that gay people are sinful for being gay; I can't address all of them!
But sometimes, something happens, and it's different from other moments when I want to jump in and start a discussion.  It's like a fire in my belly- a visceral something that goes a little something like this:


YOU ARE HOLDING IN SO MUCH OF HOW YOU REALLY FEEL ABOUT THESE THINGS JUST SO YOU CAN LOOK MORE "RATIONAL" AND "LOGICAL".  FOR GOD'S SAKE, BE HONEST AND TELL THEM WHAT'S GOING ON INSIDE, UNDERNEATH THAT COOL MASK OF LOGIC.  TELL THEM WHAT IT REALLY MEANS TO YOU.

And I do.


I tell them what it means to me when they say that my faith is poison and worthless and the cause of everything wrong with the world, when I have seen how the actions of my church have made the community and the world a better place.


I tell them what it means to me when they say that I'm going to hell because I love and devote my life to a woman instead of a man, and that my joy in that love is worse than a lifetime alone.


I tell them what it means to me when they say that if I were raped after a night of clubbing (I dress well for clubbing), it would be my fault because of how I dressed or the fact that I was out alone at night, neglecting to mention the fact that my attacker would have always had the choice to not rape me.

Grrrrrrr!!!  And after letting out this fire, which has been stirring around inside of me, I feel like I want to cry. It gets really hopeless sometimes; even a boundless optimist like me gets overwhelmed.  Sometimes I wonder why I still do this whole Talking to People thing.


Anyway.  To something lighter now.


MY ADDICTION TO KNITTING

It's truly becoming an addiction.  I do my best to give my hands a break every half an hour, but I don't like not having them working for a long time, so I sometimes only give myself a few minutes before picking my needles back up again and continuing.

No joke, today (Tuesday), I planned on putting my needle into the next stitch to anchor it and lay the project down for a while, and I automatically made a new stitch and kept going with the row.  I just can't stop knitting!

Well, obviously, I'm not knitting at the moment, because I'm blogging.  But I'm literally turning around and admiring my project laid out on the couch while I rest my hands and wait for water to boil so I can make my dinner.

Even car sickness can't prevent my determination to Get Things Done.  I couldn't abide the idea of focusing on my phone long enough to get directions to my mom's and my destination, but I refused to put down my knitting and close my eyes to alleviate my sickness.

When I'm not knitting, I'm reading about knitting.  When I'm not doing either of those things, I'm talking about knitting or updating the info on my project on Ravelry.  Heck, I even manage to sneak some knitting in when I'm playing Minecraft.

So yeah.  Knitting addiction.  I could probably just calm down and take a couple of days off, maybe do some online shopping, and- OH MY GOD WANTING.

THEY GLOW IN THE DARK.