Two pairs of my hand-knit socks get ready for a spin at the laundromat.
Well, it’s February, but it’s also Chinese New Year, which means for those of us (*cough* me *cough*) who are a little slow with New Year’s resolutions on the Western calendar, it’s a chance to start over. My birthday (which I am not going to disclose, because I fear sharing such information on the internet) is somewhere in these winter months as well, so that gives me another “new year” to look forward to.
I have lots of new things planned for this year, partially spurred on by some seemingly bad news: I was laid off. But actually, I’m rather happy about it because I think it gives me some time to think about the future and to develop my own projects. I’ve worked in publishing* since I was in college, briefly in books, and then in magazines, working for a decade now, and the landscape has changed. The pressure to generate profit in a dying industry is awful–I joke that we’re like monks illuminating manuscripts after the invention of printing press, insisting to our customers that our gold-ornamented capitals have a value that no Gutenberg-come-lately can match.
With my newly freed up schedule (I’ve held on to some freelance clients, including a small column at my old job, but these commitments are relatively few) I have lots of plans: (1.) Some just general life experiences (I’m lured by becoming a television extra–someone must want to hire me to walk around in the back of an episode of Law and Order, no?); (2.) a desire to return to truly “old” media (I was a history major, and I have lots of random things I want to research, study, and write about); (3.) knitting and blogging (I’m going to try and blog every day–we’ll see how that goes, maybe every weekday will be more likely); (4.) learning more about “new” media (I’m sick of trying to deal with the internet from a user’s perspective–I’m going to try and sign up for some computer programming classes); and (5.) yes, improving this website and my own professional site (I know that if you’ve been signing up with your own website to comment here on newyorkminknit.com, the links aren’t working, which is because this theme is not compatible with the latest version of Word Press–see number 4 for why this drives me crazy).
* All copy-editing errors on this blog are mine. I know, I know, sometimes I am not the best speller or grammarian, though in my defense, I was never a copy editor, I only date one. Every time I think about lie vs. lay I end up humming “Lay lady lay” and wondering why Bob Dylan starred in a Victoria’s Secret commercial. I get stuck thinking about this despite the fearsome warning from my high school English teacher that a person who didn’t know when to use lie and when to use lay would never get a job. (A curse that might be true for me, if not for Bob Dylan.)