Introduction.

This isn’t about politics.* I don’t have anything vivid and new to add to the blogverse about that: I’ve been slamming my head into flat surfaces shouting “Bush is in office! Jump ship while you still can!” for the past six years, and it’s unlikely that I’ll stop until he’s been out of office for at least a year (if you think that’s tiresome, slam your head into flat surfaces for six years and then get back to me). The Pinko Bitch Knits exists because I wasn’t quick on my toes and some other lucky knitter got to be the Bitter Knitter. I’m bitter, genuinely bitter: it’s a signature quality used to warn strangers off me describe me to strangers. But since someone else is bitter, this knitting blog will lovingly advertise my political attributes.

Now that that’s out of the way, we can talk about what this is about: the bitch who knits.

Every little thing comes out of a larger thing, a greater context. My knitting, for example, came about specifically because I lost the ability to keep my hands still while people talk at me. Me knitting came out of the centuries’ old tradition of women going blind by candlelight while making knots on sticks, brought back to popular culture by frizzy skeins of Berocco and glossy mags. Bitch has a tradition, too, predating my feminist reclamation of an epithet.

So, my knitting came out of an inability to hold still. The actual act of knitting, for me, happens everywhere: at restaurant tables, at friends’ houses, in lecture halls, on public transportation, on the job, over computers, and in bed (but only in mine). I’m a Seattleite, and I live in a tiny apartment in a converted farmhouse, with three big, beautiful windows that overlook the brick wall of the building next door –which means, by the way, that natural light is a fiction in my reality- and my shower is in my kitchen and I’m almost entirely certain that the repairs on my walls were done with painted-over duct tape. I decorate with my sister’s quirky sculptures and spare skeins of yarn. Some of that –say, the frazzled skein of artyarn tacked up over the table- is deliberate. The unraveled sweaters and grocery bags of tangles . . . not so much.

Most of my yarn reaches me in the form of thrift shop sweaters or gifts (read: politely wrapped-up commissions) from family. I used to buy yarn for myself, but I don’t make enough to live on—so that canned that. I’ve been searching for Job the Second for about four months now. Part of me likes to think that prospective employers simply don’t know what to make of my brilliance, but the rest of me suspects it has something to do with working the most awesome near-minimum wage job part-time when everyone else wants me to work their stupid near-minimum wage jobs (also part-time). I’m too obstinate to give it up. For now, I’m getting by. When I’m in a good mood, I tell everyone my life sucks and Social Security (such as it is) will be gone long before I die; when I’m in a bad mood, I say “At least I live in a country with infrastructure, elections, working sewage, and no pillaging bands of guerillas.”

I’ve been knitting for close to four years now, which should have been long enough to vote several sets of Republicans out of office, but other people took awhile to catch onto that. There are many things I boycott, including Wal-Mart and garter stitch (too many requests for monotonous scarves).

People like my taste in hats, and will roll down car windows in order to shout that at me in the street. I’ve only been called pretty by people I don’t trust. Strangers sometimes stop me and order me to smile. I surprise passing acquaintances with my dry wit. I have stupid problems with boys and moon after them instead of moving on like I ought to. Whenever I’m sick, I call the nearest Indian restaurant and limp out to pick up some comfort food: butter chicken, extra spicy. Once I forgot how spicy it was and tried to feed a stray cat with it—it had the good common sense to refuse but I still feel guilty. I have a degree in history and use it to justify my dour world view. I’m left-handed; I can write upside down; I eat lemons; I attract weirdos as if with a magnetic draw; I self-taught myself to knit and made up my own method. No doubt all these things influence what I knit, and why I knit it. Maybe I knit to keep myself sane. But this is about the knitting, not the sanity. Or the politics.

*This is not a promise.