Bitch 'n stitch

Being about halfway through the dreaded knitting project (a simple scarf), I feel I should just motor on regardless of the loops and holes and weird variations in thickness I can't explain. So I brought my work to my mom to ask for some advice yesterday and she showed me what I was doing wrong with the purl stitch. She watched me try another row and I was complaining how difficult it was and she thought this was funny because for her knitting (and all other sartorial exercises) is just something she used to do while watching TV before Julia Roberts made it cool. Actually, when she saw me struggling to figure out why I couldn't pull the wool below the needle but had to pull it over the top when I started a new row, she was belly laughing. When I reached the peak of frustration before handing it back to her to sort out, exclaiming "Son of a bitch," that was it. She was just about falling over with tears of jocundity streaming down her face. (You'd have to see my mother laughing to understand just how intense it is. Is she sobbing? No wait, she's laughing. Ha ha. Ha.) At least she told me it made her day to have such a good guffaw. I guess that's a sort of consolation to my lack of knitting skillz. To top it off, I went to a friend's in Vancouver for dinner tonight and she had her knitting project strewn casually on the couch ("Oh, yeah, I just started last week. Isn't it fun?") as a side project to organic gardening and practicing law. Why are the little things in my life so HUGE? I can't even get through a scarf. It takes intense concentration. PLUS, it's not fun. Not really at all. Sitting in bed working through five rows of rib stitch, counting in twos to make sure I don't screw up the order makes me feel like I'm working in a sweat shop. And it's itchy and makes me too hot. That's why I took a knitting hiatus over the summer. But I'm back at it, and I'm going to finish the damn thing by Christmas if it kills me.