The Musical Stylings of Knit King Cole

"Malabrigo, Malabrigo, I adore you,
Yarn that I would like to eat, read, knit, and purl.
I’d give up tofu and dark chocolate just for you,
And become your cute and sweet and loyal sweater girl."

"Damn, damn, damn," she said, awestruck. I recently bought two skeins of Malabrigo worsted in a Duke-esque blue to make a hat for a friend who loves his alma mater, and it's perfectly cracklike. I mean, this is consider-selling-the-books, occasionally-rent-out-the-dog-for-children's-parties, and eat-nothing-but-pasta-for-three-weeks-a-month yarn. It's like knitting with well-conditioned dreadlocks offered when there's no money for yarn by someone you love who has read "The Gift of the Magi" too many times. Maybe dreadlocks don't strike you as soft, and perhaps the image of someone donating dreadlocks to be knit into a hat doesn't cue the romantic music in your head.

I dated a guy with dreadlocks once (he had been adopted, and his birth certificate claimed he was white, even though his baby picture looked like a little James Brown) and, after I convinced him that maybe he didn't need to bury a half-cup of shampoo in his hair with every washing because his hair wasn't dirty, regardless of what his white suburban parents who didn't know shit from dreadlocks told him and after I had him dunk his head in a sink full of a water to which a liberal dose of vinegar had been added before rinsing it several times and after I administered a much-needed hot oil treatment, his hair was wonderfully soft. Yum.

What was inside his head needed more intensive therapy. He's just another few entries in The Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders VI; you know, the one that will be completely illustrated with pictures of my ex-boyfriends.

Maybe it's because he was so skilled in the sack that I think of dreadlocks as being intrinsically sexy, which affects how I feel about this yarn. Don't worry, there's nothing sick going on here; the yarn just makes me sigh occasionally.

(This is as close as I will get to giving excuses for not posting for so long: When I tried to get Blogger to remind me of my password for this blog, it wanted to be clever and tell me that I have other accounts, and to link them to this one. But my other accounts are for work, and I don't need the little darlings having access to all of my fucking life. I can't remember how the solution presented itself. It did. Here I am.)

So I'm in the coffeeshop, which ought to be one word, damn it, listening to Algerian rai music, some of which sounds pretty Bollywoodish to me. (Related to Aishwarya Rai's name, perhaps?) I recently discovered two musical distractions that may keep me permanently plugged into the Internet: here and here. The first is from National Geographic and has information about and videos of music from all over the world. This is one song that I have to hear a few times every week. It's that good. The second is an all-Indian music station from (where else?) Paris. So far, I have heard no more than three songs in a row without knowing or recognizing a song from a movie I've seen. I've also figured out that I know Sanjay Dutt's singing voice. I'm good.

The good folks at the coffeeshop are closing up, so I must go. Topics for the next go-round may include: rewatching Dil Se and actually getting it, what I'm knitting and what's waiting to be knit, why the urge to shop for yarn is becoming troublesome, being a single white woman in Bollywood theaters, the book covers I'm planning on knitting, why I never want to knit anything with the hair of my dog Gabriel, Shah Rukh Khan's biography, and why Kunal Kapoor should just move to North Carolina.