I am by no means an expert, but I am definitely something of an enthusiastic hobbyist in the area of language, and somewhere between family full of cops and Chicago-style, I have between my ears a rather large compendium of slang for about any occasion. Then, beneath the sub-heading of seekritly a 12-year-old boy, well, I thought I had my informalities for the johnson pretty well sewn up, particularly for someone who does not actually possess one.
Then I was reading Esquire today and read someone in an interview referring to theirs as a hammer. Hammer? I have never heard this and I love it! Love! Hammer? Yah, yah, I can hear it now -- the violence and the implementation and the savagery and carpentry of penetration, blahblah -- I went to a university with a loud-talking women's studies department, and hammer is still fucking brilliant. Hammer! I love it! This is the thing I love about men!
I am particularly weak in the knees for a certain kind of a man. Hemingway, for example. I would bet he had a hammer. When I was a girl, I flung Farewell to Arms across the room, told my junior-year English Lit instructor I would not read it. Later, older, I was shocked to find out that Papa was so my type: midwestern, inimitable, bombastic, tormented, macho, physically imposing, well-armed, self-medicating with whiskey and adrenaline. All of which -- replace whiskey with vodka -- describe someone else I know, plus being the kind of guy who will call and find me in a sleep-weakened condition to sing Wilco songs in between the first and second asking charmingly and with something quite studied after a pair of socks.
There was no need to go alt-country; Hank Williams would have sufficed. Or the Louvin Bros. After all, the socks do not fit anyone else I know.
I love the toes so much. They are kitchener stitch, which was not a part of the sock pattern, but improvised from the sketch in the back of the book, because the drawstring-finish written in the pattern seemed dodgy to me.
But more than the socks only being made to fit one person -- although they were quite cozy in my try-on here -- the fact is that I have always done everything Kowalski has asked, as he finally put together rather late in our acquaintance. Late, too late, same difference. I rarely do anything people tell me, and I never never fulfill anything unspoken, but I generally do what I am asked. The tricky part is that I am hardly ever agreeable at the same time as being amenable.
As in, for example, making socks. Kowalksi asked for years that I knit him a pair of socks. And I refused, each time. The more often he asked, the more quickly the refusals came, the more elaborate in their unremitting no-can-do. So, he stopped asking. Then, one day, last spring, a few weeks after his birthday, I called him on the phone and in the middle of a usual send-and-receive roundup, I asked him to tell me what color he envisioned when he harassed me about these hypothetical socks. He was quiet for a long time, while the gloating he loves so much went up against his desire to have a pair of hand-knit socks, and then he told me, in his v best impersonation of an actually-taciturn midwesterner, that the color was haze gray.
Oh, god, why? Will I find that on a paint can? I snapped that I did not know what color that was and rang off. Fucking Navy.
When I was a girl and I finally, mostly, after nearly a year, seemed to give indication that I might be in his thrall, Kowalksi would call and say, for example, "I wanted to take you with me up to my brother's this weekend, will you come?" and I would say no, citing 100 reasons I could never. Then, by Thursday night, every obstacle would have vanished before my machinations, and I would call and relent. Friday, he would find me waiting by my front door with a tiny overnight bag. About three years ago, apropos of nothing, he said suddenly, "You were always waiting to see if I would take someone else, weren't you?"
On the long list of things I love about a certain kind of a man? Smart is sort of toward the bottom of the top ten, as that anecdote clearly proves. But Kowalski tends to be a certain grade of smarter than he lets on. Smart enough to shut up about the socks until he knew they were finished and I was waffling, and then he asked. There is a way with me: ask & ask again; be sure I understand; at my first illuminated-plus-obtuse-at-once refusal, immediately cease all talk of it. He knows. Serenading was not necessary, but ensured I would follow through and not be sidetracked by my own brooding. O, mandolin.
The socks were dropped off at the post office today, before lunch. Later, while I was clicking through sock jpegs, I realized that serendipitously and also quite by accident, though surely subconsciously right-on, this month is 15 years since your sister told you to go out with me, for surely I was not as horrible as I pretended to be. I was never; but it is only fifteen years later I might be willing to let on a little. I predict an absolute stupefaction to follow receipt of such an obvious creation of indefatigable compliance, and I will surely in the end get some of the distance I wanted as a result of this project. At least for the rest of the winter. Because in the absence of my relentless resistance, there is never much one can say.
The socks are from the Eesti Trail Hiking Socks Pattern in Interweave's Favorite Socks book. I used 3 hanks of Malabrigo's worsted weight yarn in #508, Blue Graphite (and I still have no idea wtf color is haze gray). For reinforcing the heel and toe, I used a silk thread in blue, manufactured by YLI. They are 12 inches tall, weigh about 5 ounces each , and are finished with kitchener stitch and wet-blocking. It took about 60 hours over three months to complete the pair, not including time for do-overs and the two days it took them to dry. I am a slow knitter, because I am not Norma Rae.
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