Arrrggh...

Y'know how sometimes your knitting life starts to mimic your outside life? And how when things are going great and your knitting going's great it just feels like the sun and moon and earth all aligned and you can almost hear the chorus singing?

Yeah. Now picture the opposite.

I've knit, ripped, re-knit, knit, ripped, re-knit...ad nauseam on the same. damn. sock. for the past two weeks. I'm knitting the Pembrokeshire Pathway Socks out of some gorgeous Fleece Artist Sea Wool.

Love the yarn. Love the pattern. The two together? So not working the way I'd like. When I first cast on on US 1s, the fabric that I got was this lovely, subtley variagated honeyed sort of colour. Of course the sock only fit over three toes. So I ripped and tried larger needles. The fabric came out too floppy for my taste in socks, and the colour flashed and pooled horribly. So then I went back to the 1s and cast on more stitches. Now I had stripes. So I split the half-a-skein in half again and went up to a needle size halfway in between the smaller and the bigger sizes I've already tried. I'm thinkin' this should be just right. Plus, I'm alternating skeins to reduce the likelihood of colour-related ickiness, so it's all good, right?

Nope.

The damn thing is STILL striping.

I'm so frustrated. I've spent my whole life trying to get okay with not being as small as other girls, and the one redeeming element for any foul mood was always the fact that I could always wear the footwear, no matter how unrealistic the rest of the sizing in the store was. Now the fact that my foot is too damn fat to fit in the sock at the gauge and number of stitches that looks good is getting in the way of my making a beautiful sock.

I am also hitting a somewhat similar wall with career/lifework stuff. It happens every year at this time. I start to wonder if this is really what I want to do; whether I should be spending all this time, money, and effort on a degree that makes me miserable half the time; at a school where I am perpetually the round peg in the square hole.

I take up my knitting in order to get some brief respite from my internal turmoil and only find it reflected in my knitting.

harumph.

Perhaps the universe is trying to tell me something. Perhaps I'm being too narrow-minded. Perhaps I should shave my head and run off into the hills never to be seen again. I don't know.

Perhaps y'all should hide the shears until I figure that out.