Alright.
Let me be the first to admit that this is one of those ‘hate what you fear becoming’ kinda things. I knew when I signed up for knitting class that I’d be spending time with a particular group of people with whom I had little in common. I see the knitting ladies at the coffeeshop all the time, so I was prepared. I’m trying my best to get along, but it’s hard to be as enthusiastic about their baby-production systems as they are; it’s about 90% of what they talk about. Last night, though, I was squirming with irritability over one woman in particular. She was telling everyone loudly about how she moved here recently from San Francisco. She wanted to come here with her kids and have ‘a quiet life’. So she sold her tiny-but-fabulous house for embarrassingly huge sums of cash and came here, but wasn’t able to settle on a house for less than $300k. And now she has two spotlessly perfect kids and a husband we don’t hear much about. She doesn’t have friends here, but sometimes she talks to the neighbors. She doesn’t go out, and doesn’t know her way around anything but her own neighborhood. But now she has knitting. And her money, which is obviously important, considering how much she talks about having it. The clincher for me was when she yelled, “Oh my god, I miss Marin!” The other ladies agreed. They didn’t have friends apart from their husbands. They didn’t go out. They needed maps to get around. One of them had embarked on a self-improvement project after reading the 7 Habits, in which she learned that she had to take responsibility for her own relationships. Now she goes to movies with her aunt. She took up knitting because she needed something to fill the time between coming home from work and going back to work. Yes, I fear that. I’m afraid of finding myself with an existence no wider than the walls of my house. Of having nothing to talk about except babies and the extensive list of things that other people have told me are worth doing, but I haven’t experienced yet because I don’t have the motivation or time. I’m afraid of losing the drive to keep moving. Of realizing that I finally have enough leisure and cash to get anything I ever wanted, only I’m not really all that interested anymore. It depresses me. I think I mostly feel threatened by this because I know that the fact that we end up in the same room together means there’s probably a lot of commonality. I’m very aware of the ways we overlap. More importantly, I’m clinging to the differences. I believe that the value in experience comes from the places where our lives intersect with others’. When I find myself in that ever-tightening circle of dissociation, I’ll know I’m doing something wrong. Also, when I pick up that snobby rich-woman accent. Is that shit annoying or what? Jenni