too quiet here

Yes. Suspiciously quiet. That's because work on the thesis has ground to a halt. All my anxieties have not been miraculously healed, after all. I shouldn't have expected them to be gone just like that. The idea of finishing my degree after about 10 years of studying has created all kinds of sad and anxious feelings. Going out into the world! Finding a job and a place where they'll pay me to write a dissertation! No more classes! No more student jobs! Something to look forward to - scary as hell at the same time.

I'm still scared, but I decided to accept it. It's okay to be scared, that feeling won't go away for a while, so I might as well finish writing. I finally went outside again today after staying in my cave for the last three days and it's been ok. Maybe I was just waiting for the rain - strangely, right now I prefer going outside in the rain.

I also had a dream, haven't been dreaming in a while what with my screwed-up sleep schedule and it told me that things will be ok. I dreamt that we were still clearing out the old flat (my father's flat where I lived for +20 years) and we got in a whole lot of furniture, beautiful furniture. I was going through my two rooms, thinking about where I would put it all, rearranging everything in my mind. Then the dream changed, I was walking with my mother, crossing a street in Vienna with cars and streetcars (weird, because I avoid jaywalking whenever I can) and there were people singing a stupid song on the streetcar. The streetcar had a handwritten label "EMO" - apparently, people got on the streetcar to sing emo songs? The dream changed again and my mother and I were in Edinburgh and people on the street were singing a sea shanty and we discussed how different those two cultures were and how much better it was to sing a sea shanty than some stupid song. That's when I woke up, remembered that I didn't have to clear out the flat anymore, that I had no space for furniture (no matter how beautiful it is), that I want to go to Scotland and I felt a lot better about everything. (To be fair, I also talked with one of my best friends about my anxiety and had a little "say goodbye to uni" ceremony.)

Instead of writing I have been knitting. Finally. It felt really good to get back to something that I'm actually good at, something tangible, something beautiful, a kind of work that lets me see its quality right from the start. Writing into the void with a bare minimum of feedback is hard for approval-seeking me, although writing a blog isn't all that different, except nobody grades it and you don't get a degree for bloggery.

Where is the evidence that I've been knitting, you ask? Oh well, on Ravelry. I have taken no pictures yet, because that would mean having to figure out how to get the card into the new laptop and I don't quite know how to do that. I *could* possibly get the camera usb cable from the box that is over at my mother's. But I don't feel like taking pictures right now. So you'll have to keep looking at my other pictures. It's all part of an evil plan. Now it's back to work on that thesis of mine.

getting in the mood to write

I'm going to compose a blog post to see if it helps with the thesis writing ;D. It's not like I have writer's block, I just ... have a very large mental wall to climb over. Sometimes that happens in knitting, too. That's when I usually lose my knitting mojo and do other stuff for a while. Losing your knitting mojo isn't all that dramatic, unless you are a knitting designer and actually have to make a living off of your skills. But I've lost my thesis mojo time and time again and every time that mental wall got higher and higher.

So when I lose my knitting mojo or just can't find the right pattern for the right yarn or can't think of anything I'd like to knit (because my queue does not have over 300 patterns on it, nooooo), sometimes I just turn to socks. Back during my first sock phase, I racked up a large queue of socks I had to knit and bought lots of sock yarn. I'm still always tempted by sock yarn and have large quantities of it. But the sock knitting craze stopped after six or seven pairs. It's really boring to have to knit the same thing twice, after all and as with my mittens, the second sock is usually much more even and tighter than the first one. So, when I lost my knitting mojo a while ago, I knit two pairs of socks - but took pictures of only one of them so far (with gratuitous shiny bug).

These are the Parrot Primavera socks - a mere exercise to use up yarn and get the pattern off my queue. The yarn I picked up at a supermarket in Styria along with a lot of other sock yarn, some of it very, very nice. I did regift them to my friend M., whose birthday was just around the corner, knitting is kind of convenient that way. The first pair I made will join my precious sock collection.

When trying to trick the knitting mojo back into flowing, simple sock patterns are best. A lot of repetition, nothing special, nothing too fancy, just a little pattern, because just plain stockinette is extremely boring (ask my lonely stockinette alpaca sock). Like these Charade socks, also made from Styrian supermarket yarn and also gifted to a friend:

Or, if you don't have a pattern and just feel like using up sock yarn, there are plenty of easy structural stitch patterns, like the one I used on my Ginger socks (made out of Lana Grossa Meilenweit):

So, socks that are made while the mojo flows look different. Like these Kew socks, also done in Lana Grossa Meilenweit:

The irony of it all is that I don't wear woolen socks very often. That's also kind of why I stopped knitting socks. I only wear them over cotton socks when my feet are cold and only around the house, so that's another reason why I prefer knitting mittens and gloves. Sometimes I wonder whether I should do a queue purge ... but then, what would I do if my mojo failed me again?

Now I'm going to try and wrap my brain around something thesis-related. I'm trying to imagine my mental wall like below and just picture the blue sky.

Edited to add: Well, whaddayaknow, 3 new pages, bringing the total up to 12! That's 8,3% of the total or over 1/10th.
Edited to add: As has been pointed out to me, 8,3% is less than 1/10. My mathematical brain has shrunk from pea-size to ... grain of sand-size? 12 pages are 12% of the total *blush*.