Grit One, Purl Two

Janes and skeins.

JANUARY

Happy New Year, Virgo! As is tradition, this year begins with a carefully crafted emotional cleaning house—anything that doesn’t serve you must go. Just kidding, you just basically wake up and guiltily leap on a treadmill like everyone else, abandoning any chance of introspection or personal growth. However, after the initial surge of self loathing born from the staggering number of cookies you are capable of having for breakfast each December, you do stumble onto one true desire for the new year: you want to learn to knit. So you sign up for a knitting class and prepare to transform into the crafty woman you long to be.

The class, though for beginners, is almost immediately daunting to you. You manage to make it through the removal of your five outer layers of winter wear without feeling bewilderment, but once properly dressed for the indoor climate you pretty quickly settle into feelings of disorientation. Unfortunately for you Virgo, the feeling always lurking beneath any sense of confusion or vulnerability is white hot rage.

Your anger initially tiptoes out when the word skein is tossed about freely without once being defined. What class does a girl have to take to learn what the hell a skein is, you’ll wonder. Once you beg someone to tell you what a skein is, your initial ire abates. However, it won’t take long for it to be replaced with a rage born from realizing that knitting is not something for which you appear to have any natural inclination. You do not make a habit of signing up for experiences for which you do not have a natural aptitude. (This is, of course, an indictment of the meager experiences you pursue and in no way reflective of a wide ranging personal skillset.)

to you this is a ball…to the world, a skein.

Unfortunately for your pride, your classmates prove to be more mentally pliable than yourself, and therefore take their new hobby by storm. Deeply competitive (though wholly in denial about this), you consider how your classmates could be so gifted and you so clumsy. Perhaps their Grandmother taught them years ago, and a keen set of knitting needles was all their long dormant hands needed to muscle memory the hell out of their skeins. Perhaps they quit their jobs and trained for weeks to make a good first impression in their Knitting 101 class. But alas, the likeliest explanation is that they are simply paying attention to the instruction and their work instead of trying to get a fun little group dynamic going, as you are.

That’s right. Your expectations of your knitting class are two-fold. You think you’ll effortlessly and joyfully provide stylish winter accessories to everyone you love—that’s a given. But what’s clear to me from my porch swing in the cosmos, is that you also hope to have a few laughs with classmates along the way.

The knitting class you THOUGHT you signed up for.

Fortunately for the learning environment and unfortunately for your personal happiness, these classmates are not the laughing type. As mentioned previously, they are busy adeptly acquiring a new skillset. Whereas you—interrupting the silence to ask if anyone watches Sister Wives—will squander every available opportunity to absorb the wisdom of your teacher.

Security footage of your classmates’ reactions to your pressing question.

Undeterred, you’ll make another attempt at classroom harmony. During introductions, you notice there is another classmate with your name: Jane. Though identical in name, your legacies in this classroom couldn’t be more fraternal, for this Jane will be prodigiously assembling a winter cap while you basically socially prostrate yourself on the craft table with your skein stuffed limply in your mouth—the prize pig of the knitting luau. You’ll playfully ask her what it’s like to be the superior Jane in the classroom. She will look up from her needles and say coldly, “I just lost count.” This rejection is surprising in more ways than one, for up until her scolding, you will be completely ignorant to the apparently crucial “counting” part of knitting.

A later, more complex stage of the craft.

Learning that you’ve not yet made it to the counting stage of knitting class—that you have another god damn thing to learn—ignites another wave of rage within you. You are tempted to call it a night, leaving your scarcely touched skein for other, more serious students to use (or “count” as it were). You fantasize about leaving in a huff, putting on your five different outer layers while congratulating them on their weeks-long pursuit of a knitted hat that, best case scenario, will still look pretty bad.

Though rare, you will find a way to muscle through your childish righteous indignation and stay put for the duration of class. Resisting the urge to insult people when you feel threatened is relatively untreaded territory for you personally, Virgo, so in this way your stick-to-itiveness is worthy of some praise—the bare minimum kind, like what you’d give an arsonist for not setting a fire. Thanks for sparing this building, arson man. Much like this hypothetical reformed arson man, you soon realize there is something gained by resisting your impulse to destroy everything. Once you’ve accepted that you won’t make any knitting friends, you begrudgingly begin to learn to knit a little bit. You even get to the counting part!

You did it!!

Your anger is a well-tread subject in these horoscopes, Virgo, and I find it interesting that you deemed knitting a more urgent use of your time and personal discomfort than getting to the bottom of your hot hot temper. Since I am a celestial body, I cannot personally relate to the human impulse to halfheartedly pursue a new skillset instead of addressing one’s frequently boiled blood. However, since I know all, I don’t need to relate to you to understand you and it’s clear to me that the only way you’re capable of examining your rage is postmortem. Maybe instead of a knitting class you could check out an anger management group—there will still be an intimidating amount to learn, but at least you’ll have more in common with your classmates!

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Thank you to all the intrepid google formers for your valuable insights last month. If you’d like to say hi hyper specifically, the google form for this month is here and my IG is here. Thanks for reading!