Oh holy hell, I've signed up for NaBloPoMo. Wish me luck.

(This is me. I will of course do all my posting over here; probably I will cross-post a few sentences and a link over there, due to my well-documented stubbornness about people reading my site someplace that is not here. Obviously I am not down with all this hip social networking business.)

So, the Red Sox have won another World Series, and I am, of course, thrilled. Lots of Red Sox fans didn't even get to see this once in their lifetime. What was also really exciting for me was to face teams like the Indians and the Rockies in the playoffs. When it's the same teams year after year, it gets boring, and it's not good for baseball.

It has crossed my mind, of course, that the Red Sox, sans curse, are just another ballclub with a really high payroll which seems to (knock on wood) be making it to the playoffs pretty often. As a habitual fan of the underdog, I am not quite sure what to make of this. All I can say is that, if you stick with a team through all the bad years, it certainly seems silly to feel obligated to find another underdog when they are doing well. So even though I have an uneasy feeling that the years to come might make Red Sox fans irritatingly arrogant, I am still here enjoying the ride.

I don't feel the need to win it every year. I don't want us to become like the Yankees, where thirteen consecutive playoff appearances and a bunch of rings are somehow still not enough. I want to play hard, and if in the end we don't make it, be able to say, "They played better than us. It's their year, this time." What irks me about professional sports is that it seems like there always has to be some kind of blame game involved. During the middle of the ALCS I was perfectly prepared to say that the Indians deserved to win it, the way they were playing, except that I didn't want the big story of the end of the season to be how Terry Francona should have started Beckett three times in that series instead of two (which, dear sweet lord, the Fox commentators could not stop talking about.) Finger-pointing seems awfully pointless what with the amount of players, coaches, management, etc. involved. It's never about someone not doing their job. It's about guesses and probabilities, and, sure, skill, but the coin's not going to flip your way every time.

Much has been made around here about the fact that Red Sox fans, while still excited enough to flip over cars and set small fires in the street, are somehow just not as excited about the World Series this year as we were last time. Commentators and sportswriters have been pondering this as though it is a deeply perplexing problem. I would like to point out that it is a simple question of mathematics. Last time, we had not won a World Series in 86 years. This time, we have not won a World Series in 3 years. 84 > 3. Assuming that people's enthusiasm increases during each year of waiting, people will be many times as excited, and set many times more fires, the longer they wait. See? Math! But people who are confusing "slightly less enthusiastic" with "not caring" are horribly wrong, and also stupid.

One of the most interesting articles I've read this postseason has been about Bostonians trying to find an identity, and a storyline, in this newfound success. If I were writing a new ending for my anthropology thesis on the Red Sox, this is probably an article I'd use. It's far, far better than this whiney back-in-my-day article, which is a comfort in its own way: no matter how much may change on the baseball scene around here, at least there will always be Dan Shaughnessy to be annoyed with.

Continuing in the vein of "things I have been doing besides blogging" -- I finished another sewing project this month, too.



I bought fabric for this project back in the spring, then kept telling myself that I was going to make the skirt after graduation. I told other people that, too, and in fact one of my co-workers signed my graduation card "Have fun making skirts and taking over the world," probably because I'd rambled on about sewing projects an awful lot. Oops.

And then I tried to make myself a dress for graduation, cleverly began it only a week before graduation (when I knew I had guests arriving halfway through that week), and then all at once my guests arrived, I ran out of thread, and I realized I was going to have to re-do part of it. So that dress never got done, and my marathon of obsessive sewing left me a bit burned out of sewing projects for a couple months.

Then fall came, and I realized the following things:
1. Stenny's wedding was approaching, and I needed something to wear.
2. I had fabric to make a skirt that would be perfectly appropriate for the occasion.

So I decided that the skirt was finally going to get done, because I was going to give myself a deadline, and that deadline would be October 20, and furthermore, I was going to be SMART this time, and instead of saying the night before the wedding "I think I will make a skirt tonight" (which always goes badly, and is essentially what I did for Sarah's wedding, with the end result that I do not remember what I wore, but it was most assuredly not something that I had made), I was going to begin two weeks before the wedding, and spend a week making the skirt in a leisurely fashion. Which is exactly what I did, and it was done well in advance. YAY! However, at this point there is a whole year before I have to go to a wedding again, so lord only knows if I'll get any projects done in the meantime.

This was the second time that I'd used this pattern for bias skirts, and I felt much more comfortable with it this time around. I opted not to do one of those things where the side zipper is hidden by a flap of fabric, because that went really quite badly the first time I made this pattern. And so I started rationalizing to myself: Is a zipper really so embarrassing that it must be completely hidden? Will people be horrified to discover that my clothes do, in fact, come off? And so I did a regular straight zipper, and I think it turned out just fine, and also I don't think anyone was particularly scandalized about it. Hooray.

Something else I have been doing instead of blogging: moving my photo galleries to Flickr. So that is what all the craziness in my photostream is about. It's not that I've gone anyplace exciting recently, that is for sure.

I only just now realized that Flickr only allows you three photosets on a free account, and that your photostream is limited to 200 pictures (I knew about the monthly upload limit, but apparently wasn't paying attention to the rest of it.) Knowing that, I'm sort of ambivalent about the move. I have plenty of space on this website to store photos, and though I take pictures fairly often, I'm just not that much of a camera obsessive when it comes right down to it. On the other hand, Flickr has all kinds of functionality that I don't have here, plus everyone seems to be on Flickr so it's handy for sharing. I don't mind paying for services that I use, because I like to support things that are important to me. What I don't like is the idea that once I start using Flickr Pro services I'll feel compelled to shell out money year after year so that I can continue to have access to the things that I've put work into. And obviously I will feel compelled to do that, because have you seen the crazy things I do when things from my website disappear on me? Yeah. Let's not encourage that sort of behavior.

Anyone else have thoughts on Flickr? For now I think I'll get around the sets issue using tags, and see how much I use my free account over the next year. I'm not sure whether I'm willing to let my web habit get more expensive than just the domain and hosting I pay for now. (Although paying $25 for a lifetime membership at LibraryThing is awfully tempting, except that I'm still sort of skeptical of the idea that any website is likely to last for my entire lifetime AND not try to ask me for money again at any point over the next 50-75 years.)

I have been doing lots of things over the past month. None of those things, sadly, have been writing. But we all need a break from certain things now and then, writing included. Sure does make this blog boring though.

What I have been doing is sewing projects:



This is the peasant shirt that I was talking about here, which just needed finishing. I actually finished it in late September, just in time for what I thought was going to be the last big heat wave of the season (sorry, October, didn't see that 80 degree day coming. My bad.) After looking at it I decided that there was no need to do sneaky hidden stitches to finish the hem, collar, and armholes. After all, it's not like the fact that clothing is stitched together is some sort of dark secret that we are trying to hide, and no one has challenged me to make a garment without no seams nor needlework.* And then I realized that my sewing machine does decorative stitches and chose something leafy. Ta-da! Shirt.

If I were to make a shirt like this again, I'd probably use just the front and back pattern pieces, cutting a little extra around the neck and armholes, and skip all the extra pieces and interfacing altogether. None of those really did any good in the end; they were just bulky and got in the way (and I ended up cutting off most of them after finishing.)

*Seth Mnookin doesn't have a monopoly on oblique references to Simon & Garfunkel songs, you know.

So, yesterday I was at game one of the ALCS. This is because Sarah, a dear friend and former roommate, who now lives in Colo-frickin-rado, which you may have noticed is not terribly near Fenway Park, somehow acquired tickets and sold them to me instead of scalping them. Isn't that awesome?

The joy of getting tickets for the postseason is that it is not necessarily easy to get a pair of adjacent seats. I went to the game with Leanne and we ended up in adjacent sections -- not actually that far away from each other, but certainly not near enough for us to be able to communicate, other than by text messages* painstakingly typed out by increasingly frozen fingers. It was much like attending a game alone. I realized that it didn't really bother me since I usually watch baseball alone anyway. I just squinted off into the distance and muttered to myself like I do in my living room. (Well, there is generally less squinting in my living room. Also less shivering.)

But the difference was that my mutters seemed to spread like a ripple across the crowd; as I said "beautiful" under my breath when Mike Lowell made a good play, everyone else was murmuring approval to the person next to them, or shouting it loudly to the crowd at large. When another hit drove in some runs, I shouted "Yes!" along with thousands of other people. When they put Gagne in we all simultaneously groaned.

These are the things I miss when I am watching baseball alone in my living room. I remember being at home watching baseball with my dad. I remember being in college and getting friends together to watch Sox games when they played the Yankees. I remember sitting here in Brookline with Sarah cheering on the '05 Sox. Now when I am at home I am only talking to myself, but when I go to a ballgame I have the novelty of again being surrounded by other people who care about their baseball, even if they are strangers and I mostly wish they would stop spilling beer on me.


*For those of you who still doubt the (occasional) usefulness of text messages, let me tell you, when you are at a ballgame and someone is yelling "GET YOUR HOTDOGS HERE" in one ear and a crowd-organizing drunk is calling "WHEN I SAY CY, YOU SAY YOUNG!" in the other, that is a perfect time to type on your phone rather than try to talk on it.

My desire to blog has always waxed and waned over the years, and at the moment it is certainly waning. Lately I have found myself irritated at the blog world in general for reasons that are largely petty and irrational, and I won't bore you with them (I try to be minimally annoying to my readers.) So recently I have considered blogging about things, then started to feel vaguely petulant, and then after sighing to myself a little, gone off to do something else, like sleeping or watching baseball. And then nothing gets posted. However, today I did pay dh2 for another year of hosting, so I suppose this is not going anywhere. Possibly I should change the picture at the top to one of me sitting in a corner and sulking.

Part of it is that the things going on in my life right now are things that I am uncomfortable blogging about, particularly in this space, where lots of people I know visit and read and comment. In person I can be quite reserved, and there was a time when I could maintain that reserve with people and still blog very openly even though I knew perfectly well that the same people would read it later. I don't feel quite that way anymore. I like the luxury of thoughts and feelings kept to myself, and when I want to share I like to share personally, in a conversation, a give and take, instead of soliloquizing in this strange public confessional.

That doesn't mean, though, that there is no use for this space. Its use has changed and changed over the years and it can change again. I'm just not totally sure what it might change into. I might sign up for the National Blog Posting Month and see if every day I can come up with something to share in this space that I feel comfortable with, that makes sense to me. But it's probably good I have most of a month yet to get some sulking out of my system first.

In the meanwhile, I have started using a paper journal for the first time in a long time. A couple observations have resulted from this:

1. It is hard to hand-write for a long time! And when I realized that I felt vaguely uneasy about how easy it was for me to start doing most of my writing on the computer over the course of the last... sevenish? years, and not even realize it. Typing comes quickly and naturally to me now, but I can't even tell you how often I skip letters in words when I'm handwriting, just trying to go fast enough to keep up with my brain. My typing isn't perfect, but it's much closer to brain-speed.
2. People have always had a habit of buying me blank books to write in (most of them are still blank), and some of them have interesting book structures. However, some very pretty book structures do not make books that are good for writing in. I do not know the name for the one I am using, but the text block is glued to the back cover, the spine drops, and the front cover is in two pieces, one which is attached to the spine and one which goes over the fore edge, and they fasten together in front. I think it would probably be perfectly lovely for reading, but to write in it with any kind of comfort I ended up turning it backwards and using only one side of each page. When I was first given the book, which is gorgeous, I never really thought about how it would be to write in, but now I am looking at unique blank books a little differently.
3. It is both easier and harder to write when your only audience is yourself.

earlier -- later