Weatherbury 2

I started knitting tubes instead of one-edged wonders the third time around. This, I take as personal proof of my wits: hopefully academic institutions will agree, because my second story involves taking the GRE. The testing day comes around, and I jam the whole unwieldy WIP into my purse and then force it into a locker for the whole 2 ½ hour computerized horror . . . only to find that my friend and ride, supposedly a mere 20-minute drive away, got stuck in traffic from hell in the middle of a storm.

My natural intellectual process (flee the testing center! Destroy!) was to leave very suburban Mountlake Terrace—a thing that’s rather difficult to do when you’re sans auto. I only got as far as the bead store next to the sterile testing center. Over the next two and a half hours, I work up the bodice of the sweater while chatting with the hardy and immensely generous bead-store guy about the Native American Rights Movement in the 70s, as well as a great deal about hitchhiking and life without electricity. By the time my friend emerges from stop and go traffic, I’m drinking bottled water and starting on the sweater’s armholes. It’s pretty obvious who got the better half of that bargain, even with a standardized test thrown in (my loathing of this perverse behemoth of an academic contrivance is another grievance for another time). I bought him dinner to assuage his suffering, but then I spent the whole time laughing at him for saying “You’re frigid” when he meant (I presume) “You look frigid.”