Grilled cheese cures the blahs

This week was the kind of week that made me question whether I belong in this job, or this career. No major crises or events, just that lingering sense of dissatisfaction (possibly attributable to midterm).

Today I was feeling particularly down on work when I headed downstairs for the Friday knitting group meeting. At the bottom of the stairs, a group of watercolor students had set up a table. To raise money for an upcoming trip, they were making grilled cheese sandwiches and selling them for $2 apiece. There were three of them, one with a giant tub of Country Crock, buttering slices of white bread, another slapping on slices of American cheese, and a third "frying" them up on a couple of panini makers.

It's impossible to hate my job when I get to work with students like these. I haven't eaten a grilled cheese sandwich (or anything involving white bread or American cheese) in probably a decade, but I didn't hesitate to get out my wallet, and the sandwich was damn good.

Back on track

Last week's hobby crises were overexaggerated and short-lived, as usual. I stopped in to my "knitting coach's" office that afternoon and she straightened my work out yet again. For whatever reason, something clicked that time, and I didn't have any major problems after that. I even went and bought my own yarn and needles last weekend. Of course, the needles I bought aren't long enough for the scarf I was planning to knit (who knew there were different lengths?), so I need to either get some new ones or knit a skinny scarf. But the whole "knitting is a language I don't speak" thing was an overstatement.

Same with creative writing. I took my Rick Steves piece and braced myself to read it, but almost no one else had brought anything either, including the guy who had proposed sharing our current work. One person read, then we did a writing exercise that ended up being a great icebreaker--several of us ended up reading things that we'd written.

And then another student (girlfriend of the guy, who admitted being too intimidated to read his work and then left early) spoke up and asked if she could read something before she lost her nerve. I don't know what I was expecting, but it was phenomenal. It absolutely blew me away.

She read very quickly and in such a high, strangled voice that I thought she was going to cry. And as soon as it was done and we'd all exhaled, stunned, she packed up all her stuff and left. She didn't come back this week; I don't know if that's the last we'll see of her.

So far the only literary magazine submission we've gotten is an anonymous (and extremely cliched) poem. If she comes back to the club I'm going to beg her to submit something. Although frankly, I think she should aim a lot higher. I've read worse stuff in a lot of published short-story collections.

As for my own writing, I left that meeting energized and then didn't do a damn thing between then and the next one. I was sick for part of the time, but that's not much of an excuse. Hopefully I'll do better this week.

Blocked and knotted

When the semester began in January it seemed like for every New Year's resolution I made, there was a student organization to help me keep it. I resolved to write more--two students asked me to faculty-advise their new creative writing club. I resolved to learn to knit--a coworker started a weekly "needlecraft group" and even gave me yarn, needles, and a personal lesson to get me started.

Of course, now it's February and I'm discovering anew that it's easier to make resolutions than to keep them. Creative writing club finally got off the ground last week after some difficulty with scheduling and advertising. Rather than starting with a group writing exercise, as had been the original plan, it was decided that we should each bring something we're working on to share on Wednesday. Great for the people who have been writing regularly, but for those of us just getting back into it, it's a little more daunting. You'd think being ten years older than the rest of the group and a quasi-authority figure would make this easier for me, but no such luck. I've been trying off and on all week to come up with something and then getting intimidated by the idea that I'm going to have to read it out loud.

Knitting has also been an uphill battle. I've attended two group knitting sessions, where I stumbled along with frequent coaching from my self-appointed teacher. The problem comes when I go home and attempt to continue on my own. The group meets on Fridays; by the following Saturday both weeks I was stuck and had to start over under her tutelage the following week. I'm trying not to get discouraged, but it's a little embarrassing, especially since most of the other participants are seasoned veterans.

After last week's frustrations I started mentally writing something that compared learning to knit to learning to speak a foreign language, since I feel like I'm stuttering over syllables while the others in the group are fluent. But I didn't have a pen on the train while I was composing it and when I got home I was derailed by a cupcake-baking fiasco (story for another time). So I never got it down on paper and now I'm having trouble recapturing it.

February can be so frustrating. I laugh at how my gym, which was full to bursting the first few weeks of January, is getting back to normal now as the resolution-prone are giving up. But I can understand the impulse. Saturday night I was practically in tears over a stupid ball of yarn, and last night I was cursing at the keyboard. At least I have the groups to hopefully keep me going at both pursuits.