One Down, One to Go

I'd like to pretend I've never fallen victim of that one sock curse. But somewhere in my apartment, stuffed into the back of my closet no doubt beneath the one bit of laundry I always refuse to do, hides a house sock made of springy, pink Rowan Calmer. Part of me knows I’d like to find that sock. I want the yarn back. I have things I can do with it.

But I don’t want to confront the sock because if I never find it again, it’s almost as if it never happened. I don’t have to question my judgment: a house sock? It is always three hundred degrees in this apartment summer or winter. And Calmer socks are too bulky to wear outside. What was I going to do with this sock other than nail it to the wall and stare at it? Besides, I was noodling and the pattern for sock one was on a receipt or something and I think my cat ate it and I don’t remember how many stitches I cast on and I don’t know which lace stitch I used for the bulk of the sock or what size needles or . . .

Really, truly, likely I will not find the pattern again. (Yes, glove number one I am talking to you and I’m recording right now, for the record that you absolutely have to be on size four needles because I stopped working on you to cast on for Mom’s Christmas sweater. Or were you on two’s?) But I could figure out what I’d done. I could even [shudder] do a gauge swatch again. But we all know what one sock is about.

I admit it. I can’t commit. I dropped out of an MFA program one semester before completion because I despised it that much. I’ve worked my current unchallenging job for five years (without a raise, no less) because I’m terrified that I’ll go to law school and hate it and then what would I do?. You don’t drop out of law school owning people $60,000 in student loans. Besides, law school gets you a real job, not just a chance to get to be a waiter at Breadloaf so you can attend without paying. So I sit here surrounded by lawyers becoming more convinced by the day that I don’t want to be one, wondering if this is the kind of job you can do without being passionate about it. Or if you’re frustrated by the whole inefficiency that runs rampant through the field. Or what if you don’t want to work late all that often? And I still watch cartoons on the weekends so I cant work then and . . .

Dad says it’s not enough to talk about taking the LSAT’s. Well, Dad, I’ve started my second stocking.*

* In the interest of full disclosure, because a thigh-high stocking is, like, totally the length of three or four socks, Bottle reserves the right to consider a pair of socks finished even if second stocking on needles never progresses any further. Bottle further insists that in order for the seven inches of stocking currently on the needles to fit over her, err, dancer thighs, that there is so a sock's worth a knitting already there.