intro

[mouthlikeawolf]

what's up, I'm J. I'm a big fan of lists so here's a little bit about me in the form of a list

I love:
- mountains
- women
- sweaters
- YA lit, especially fantasy. big fan of fantasy romance (ex: Sarah j Maas) or straight up fantasy (ex: Tamora Pierce, Kristen Cashore, Traci Chee) or well executed contemporary fiction (ex: E. Lockhart)
- gay repression or homoerotic repression, such as Dead Poet's Society, A Separate Peace, The Eagle, etc. big fan of that
- knitting! just starting out but I'm a HUGE fan
- the social network, enough said.
- about 10 hockey players but the rest of the NHL has BEEN on notice. if I had to pick a team, it would be The Leafs
- over analyzing media like a true English major

I dislike:
- chemistry
- spiders
- oysters. I'm sorry, they're just too salty for me? not a fan.
- George Eliot. Listen. I'm sorry. I'm honestly too basic to appreciate her, I think? I love the Brontës and I love Dickens but oh my god I'd rather die than reread The Mill on the Floss.
- most literary fiction? exception: Days Without End. truly a masterpiece.

I am:
- dog owner
- writer
- kind of private online
- student (until June)
- disabled
- queer
- not used to dreamwidth but I'm here bc Tumblr is dying and pillowfort doesn't seem to have their shit together. please bear with me! <3

Comments

[mouthlikeawolf]

ahh thank thank you! I'm migrating from Tumblr and I have no idea what I'm doing tbh

I just do NOT get Eliot and we were supposed to read the book in 2 weeks which, lmao. No. I haven't read much of Joyce but I despise Hemingway. Recently read his short story Hills Like White Elephants and I wasn't impressed. Did you have something you read for class that you ended up loving??

I honestly just started knitting...working on my first scarf. I kept starting over due to adding stitches but now I've got it on lock and I'm just knitting a proper scarf. I'm still fine tuning my gauge though, I guess you'd call it? What about you? :)

[rivendellrose]

No worries at all! There's also this post that has a ton of stuff, some of which I didn't even know (and I've been on this site for years, and migrated from the very similar but, in the end, sadly evil Livejournal).

I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed a class on modern poetry that I took! I like T.S. Eliot a lot, and also Auden -- I still have part of "Roman Wall Blues" (this site has autoplay video ads sometimes, so be careful) memorized from that class, and that was 12 years ago. Most of the stuff I really loved wound up being things like Austen and Shakespeare that I already knew I liked, though, or more contemporary stuff that I've now forgotten the name of.

Congrats! By gauge do you mean that your loops aren't super even in size? That happens to most new knitters, I think, and it seems to always work itself out as you get used to holding the yarn. Or if you mean figuring out how big something is going to be, you get a sense for that over time, too. Supposedly the thing to do to be sure is to knit up a little square swatch and wash and block it (pin it out to try to stretch the pattern out evenly), but I will be honest and say that I almost never actually do that, and it's only bit me in the butt a few times over the years. ;) I'm working on a little drawstring bag, and a heavy cardigan that, realistically, won't get finished until summer.

[mouthlikeawolf]

Oh I can't wait to read Roman Wall Blues! After going back to school I transferred to my college kind of late and a lot of my stuff is pre-1900s so a lot of it is really new! But I read Wide Sargasso Sea for class (after reading Jane Eyre) and I was really surprised with how obsessed I was with it. The best feeling is reading an essay on a book that blows your mind and makes you look at it a whole new way. For my current class I read Engels and I really enjoyed it - I actually just wrote a paper on Engels and the historical context of pollution!

OMG a cardigan? My entire goal is to knit sweaters! What color are you doing? :) As for me, the size of the stitches aren't even so for a while the edges of my scarf kind of meandered even though I'm only doing 24 stitches but now it seems to have evened out. I've restarted this often (long story) but now I'm cruising and I think I'll have to buy a new skein of yarn soon, which is exciting but also kind of nerve wracking, as I've never cast off before. Excited to try it!

Sorry for the delay, it's actually finals week and I am STRESSED! Cannot wait for it to be over. Hopefully things aren't too stressful in your neck of the woods!

[rivendellrose]

Oh, man, I always meant to read Wide Sargasso Sea and never got around to it. I should really get back to that soon. Is the Engels for a theory class? We read so many bonkers theorists for my lit theory class, and most of them have kind of blurred together by now, but I remember sort of enjoying what a total troll Nietzsche was. I always got the sense he was just sort of yelling things to upset people, you know?

Sweaters are totally doable! The current cardigan was actually a sweater first, but it was waaaaaay too warm for where I live (Seattle is pretty mild, and we don't visit my in-laws in Alaska often enough for me to have a sweater just for when we go up there!), so I pulled the whole thing out and started over with a new pattern. It's light gray, nothing fancy, but it'll be very cozy when it's done. Once you've got the basics down, Tin Can Knits has a lot of good patterns and their Basics collection is meant to sort of lead newcomers through increasingly complicated concepts -- the pattern pages include tutorials for techniques that are new to that pattern. The Flax sweater and the Harvest cardigan are the ones I did / am doing again. Oh, and the first time? Consider doing a baby size even if you don't have a kid you could give it to, because it'll let you get through the basic concepts a lot quicker than you will at adult size. You can always pull it out and reuse the yarn after, if you don't have a niece or nephew or something who'll appreciate a sweater!

And oh my gosh, don't apologize for delayed comments. Half the time mine are delayed just because I looked at the email, thought "Oh, great, I'll reply to that after I've done some work!" and then forgot to come back to it until days later. Also GOOD LUCK ON FINALS!

[mouthlikeawolf]

Engels was for a Victorian Lit class that focused on secularization & the age of Darwin. It is the best class I've taken at my college. It was co taught by a prof who specializes in religion & poetry and a prof who specializes in science & novels. They'd each teach an hour and a half of class and it was all fascinating (...besides George Elliot). I believe we studied Engels to discuss the toll Industrialism took on society and how it was a leading social issue (the cry of the children by EBB; a Christmas Carol by dickens) and also bc of how capitalism kicked into high gear. The victorians, man... But to get back to your point - god save me from literary theory! Especially if it's French theorists like Derrida and Foucault. We learned a lot about Narratology in the Women & Madness class I read Wide Sargasso Sea in and honestly, never again. I love Nietzsche, and I think it's interesting how a lot of his key concepts were taken and twisted =/

OMG you also live in Seattle?! The algorithm must have known or something. I have been hunting for the Ideal Cardigan for like 2 years now (I left treats in the pocket of my old one and my dog chewed thru the pocket) so the power to make one is just...incredible. I'm bookmarking this link, thank you :') and tonight I'm setting up my ravelry before I go see into the spider verse - do you have one? Also the baby size tip...that's brilliant! And I can always try to make it for the dog too :')

Thank you!! Finals are done now and they went super well, I am so relieved. The class I mentioned earlier had a pretty intense exam as well as final paper and then I had two portfolios, one for each writing class, but I'd rather revise for a portfolio than take a math test ever again. I'm working on a fic rn and doing a lot of knitting. How is your cardigan?

Hope you are enjoying the holiday season!