January 09, 2004
A Trip to ManLand
The Mysterious K’s new hobby, woodworking, is percolating right along. On Wednesday night, she went to a joinery class at a local woodworking shop. This was A Big Deal because it meant she had to enter ManLand, an event which can be fraught with emotional peril, your sexual orientation be damned. Trust me; you can be the straightest, most man-worshipping woman on earth and still find ManLand a scary place.
Let me tell you a little story about one trip to ManLand. Many years ago I bought a custom-made window screen for my upstairs window from an, as they say, “large home improvement warehouse store.” When I got home I discovered that both the frame and the screen material were wrong (which is curious since a screen only consists of (a) the frame and (b) the screen material, which means the large home improvement warehouse store had the dubious honor of having gotten the screen 100% wrong). Anyway, TMK and I procured our requisite temporary Manland visas, went back to the store, and marched up to the immense table where they do the screen cutting and assembling. We stood thisclose to Screen Guy, who was busy with something at the time, and did everything socially acceptable, short of slapping him upside the head, to make certainsure he knew we were there and needed service. When Screen Man was finished with what he was doing, he turned his back on us, walked entirely around the immense table and proceeded to serve a man who had arrived fifteen minutes after we had. Ta-da! Welcome to Manland!
Before the class, TMK was nervous, partly, I suspect, because she felt she was walking into Screen Man Territory again. Would she come out of the class feeling inspired and excited, or would she come out of the class feeling belittled and cut off at the knees? (As an aside, men don’t seem to realize the effort it takes to venture into ManLand. For example, TMK and I spent a lot of time discussing what she should wear. It’s hard to hide the fact that she’s a butch girl, but, still, there are many degrees of butch. Do you wear every piece of jewelry you own plus a squirt from your one bottle of perfume in order to seem more feminine and less threatening, do you go completely butched up and swagger in so the men know you know your sh_t, or is there a happy medium? Or do you not worry about it at all and hope you have enough backbone not to care how the men treat you? Long story short, she picked the happy medium, clean, tailored but not trying to be something she’s not.) Happily, she reports that she had a marvelous time, that the teacher was informational, funny, supportive, and respectful, and, most importantly, of the one woman (herself) and six men in the class, she was the only one who owned a nail gun. I smirkfully take full credit for that. The Gift of the Magi just keeps on giving!
Some unsolicited relationship advice: If your husband, partner or SO starts a new hobby, get your hands on the reference book he or she is using and read the glossary. The day after Christmas, TMK went out for a while, so I spent the time studying the 6-page glossary of her new woodworking book since I knew gobbledygook would soon be spewing out of her mouth. As predicted, within a day or two, she was talking about rabbets (yes, with an “e”), biscuits, s2s, s4s, MDF, bows, warps, dados, jigs, dovetails, miters, tenons, mortises, and who knows what’all but the ½-hour I had spent reading the glossary thoroughly paid off—I kept right up with her (although I suspect eventually she tired of my bouncing up and down, waving my hands in the air like a kid in school who desperately wants to be picked, and saying, "Oo! Oo! Oo! I know what that means! I know what means!"). In return, when I declared that I was going to use larger needles for the Goldilocks Mittens, she was able to toss off breezily, “Oh, are you going to use the size 4s?” I know just enough about woodworking; she knows just enough about knitting. All is right with the world.
(Newsflash: TMK called to report that she was making a jig*, and managed to nail the entire length of the jig to her workbench with, oh, a good 50 nails. This does not bode well.)
*Jig: "A device used to make special cuts, guide a tool, or aid in woodworking operations." Definition from here.
Knitting Knews
Started the Catalina Socks using white Fixation and the Stockinette Ladder stitch from Barbara Walker's Treasury of Knitting Patterns. If I may say so myself, this is turning into one beaut of a pair of socks, short, cottony, airy, just what I had in mind. Photo next week.
Finished the latest incarnation of the Goldilocks Mittens. Again, photo next week!