The ribbing for Brooklyn’s left front was completed, but had to go to the frogpond. Are you amazed that I could make a serious error in a little striped ribbing? It was the nature of the day.
First off, I had a dentist appointment. Some of you may recall that I have a little aversion to making appointments. So you may not be surprised when I tell you that I broke a tooth last fall and still had not gone to the dentist about it. Even though I have Overcome Agoraphobia and was able to call and make an appointment, the morning spent waiting for it was fairly anxious. I had ice-cold hands and a collection of hastily slapped-down irrational fears, in addition to the toothache.
Even with the appointment over (and they were very nice. A little surprised that I had been walking around with a broken tooth for all this time, but polite about it to my face), the day was not completely improved. For one thing, I have a four-appointment course of treatment coming up, about $1500 worth. Then my husband called to tell me that his car had broken down in traffic. All this while we did five times our normal amount of business, with the same number of workers as usual, and the ongoing global shortage of Mavalus tape. And I still have a toothache.
So I have a good excuse for switching back to the natural color from the blue two rows too early. I’ve undone it, I’m redoing it, and all will be well.
On the other hand, my husband will be driving my car, so I cannot get my prescription filled this morning before work, and will be going through another mad rush day with a toothache. And walking to work in the heat. And trying to refigure my budget to accomodate car repairs and dental work as well as back-to-school expenses and tuition.
If only life’s difficulties were as easy to fix as knitting errors.
I came back later to say…
When I redid the two rows of natural color, I had about 8″ of leftover yarn — that is, I used that much less yarn knitting the same two rows the second time. Do you think I might be feeling a wee bit of stress?
Rebecca,
I don’t have your email address because it wasn’t in the comment you left on it, but you’re the “grand prize winner” on the knitting psychos (http://knitpsychos.hello-lovely.org) organizational ideas contest thing. 🙂 please email me at hello.lovely@gmail.com & I will give you the list of prizes to pick from! 😀
THanks,
Manda
Perhaps not one of your better days certainly. As long as such days are the minority rather than the majority. Anyway, that’s what blogs are good for – a wat of excising (exercising?) the irritations.
I’m curious – I also don’t like dentist appointments, or doctor appointments, or academic exams, or first class of a paper…and the list continues – but I accept it as normal. As far as dentist and doctor appointments are concerned I know why I avoid them as much as possible – the others have always been there and are just part of who I am. Are you really able to identify the ‘irrational fears’ tied up with the things that make you anxious?
RYC: Not an expert! Much as I hate to admit this much of what you describe sounds familiar, I just use different reasons. There does appear to be one major difference however – the anxiety usually increases right up to the point in time just before the anxiety-producing event and then it just disappears – completely. Two cases as example:
1) I always get nervous before exams – academic, dancing, music, it makes no difference. The worst pre-exam anxiety ever occurred over a period of about 6 weeks before my PhD oral exam and it was bad enough that – unusually for me – it began to affect other areas of my life as well. I couldn’t even rationalise it – I knew the thesis was ok, I knew that I wouldn’t not get my PhD because I fouled up the exam, I even knew that it was highly unlikely I’d foul up the exam but it made no difference at all. (Things are really bad when you can’t even rationalise your anxiety!) On the morning before my exam the only thing I could do to settle myself down a little was walk – around the block, around the varsity – and it helped a little. The weird thing was, from the moment I walked into the room where the examiners were all sitting it was as if the anxiety never existed. I enjoyed myself heaps, no quiver of nervousness, nothing. Admittedly my nerves acted up again as soon as the exam was finished and I had to wait in another room for the results but it seemed that anticipation of the event was producing the anxiety not the event itself.
2) For about 3 weeks before taking off from here for the US my anxiety levels were only kept in bounds by working as hard as I could on anything I could find that was interesting enough to keep me absorbed in it. Every time I had a bit of down time the nerves came back. (Of course watching documentaries about plane crashes probably didn’t help much either). And then the London Underground bombing happened and it flashed across my mind that I was actually heading off to a place that was much closer to that horrible event than NZ was – a place, in addition, that had its own reasons to fear such attacks. I had expected to be a mass of nerves from the moment I sat myself on the plane here until I arrived at my destination. I missed connecting planes due to planes with broken motors, I had hassles with credit cards, I had luggage going missing and I did more flying hours in 2 weeks than I have ever done before in my lifetime (and I had one slightly scary encounter right at the beginning of the holiday which brought all your sister’s warnings home to me at once – you don’t need to tell her that 🙂 ) but I can honestly say that anxiety in all its forms seemed to be completely absent throughout the trip.
And the point of all this? I think there are many more of us who suffer from apparently irrational fears and anxieties than is generally accepted. I suspect it’s a fairly healthy trait in life (actually I just listened to a seminar on this a couple of days ago). If these anxieties cause you to avoid situations that are not in your best interests to avoid then you may have a problem – if this is not the case then I think it just means that you are still alive 🙂 I usually think of the situations that elicit the greatest anticipatory anxiety as ‘trials by fire’ (there have been a few of them over the years, some of which I even deliberately sought out) and as corny and as new agey as it sounds, I feel pleased with myself when I survive them – after all, don’t they say that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger – a much misused cliche but like all cliches I think there is a touch of truth hidden in it somewhere.