2/23/19: bad ideas

New York City is a really excellent place to be weird. There is no shortage of crazy in the streets of Manhattan, and I am not talking about the mentally ill—let’s leave those poor folks out of this. I’m talking about the guy who was wearing a small stuffed dragon on his shoulder at a party at MoMA. The guys who ride tricked-out bicycles around in Central Park, music blasting from portable speakers, one of the dudes wearing a cape. The guys walking around with the giant snakes down in Battery Park. The person of indeterminate gender who sang opera at full volume walking around in my old neighborhood in Park Slope. The hats, the shoes, the hairstyles, the outfits, the make-up, the willingness to have astonishingly intimate cellphone conversations within earshot of dozens of other people—there is so much public weirdness going on in this place. Living here, I have so immensely enjoyed soaking up all this weirdness that I have to admit I was just the teeniest bit proud when I recently realized that *I* was someone else’s weirdo.

It was almost 50 degrees and sunny the other day and I wanted to make the most of the chance to be outdoors, so I kitted up in my standard Central Park walking-around outfit, which is basically normal people clothes (really) and then Fanny, my beloved fanny pack, to hold my phone and keys and wallet and the ball of yarn for my knitting. I picked out a podcast—that day it was back episodes of This American Life—and then I went out to do the big loop of the park, knitting away and occasionally laughing out loud because goddamn that show can be so funny. I was coming down the west side of the loop when a man entered the roadway about 5 feet in front of me. This was hardly unusual and I probably wouldn’t have noticed him if he hadn’t been walking at a pace that was something like 3% faster than mine, meaning I was right behind him for a good distance and then slowly slowly slowy lost a step here and another there. I am nothing if not mildly competitive, ahem, so while I let the ultra-walkers go by without a glance, this guy convinced me I could pick up my pace just a tiny bit, so I did. So then I was walking about 6 feet behind him, matching his pace, and he probably wouldn’t have taken any notice of me if I hadn’t been caught up in a fit of snort-laughter during this one particularly outrageously hilarious segment of the show.

I want to stress here how much noise there is in this city. So. Much. Noise. Even in the park there are the horse carriages clopping along, the fast-bike guys whizzing by, the slow-bike people wobbling around and shouting to each other; there are runners and walkers keeping up a chatter or just breathing so loudly I sometimes think whoever is making that noise cannot possibly be improving their health. There are the street sounds that carry in. There are occasionally vehicles going by and in certain spots you’ve got the saxophone guy or the accordion guy and sometimes there’s a particularly ambitious hot nuts guy yelling “Hot nuts! Hot nuts!” Which is to say that my snort-laughter must have been something much more astonishing than I have ever been led to believe, as first I saw the guy in front of me peek over his shoulder a couple of times, then he actually pulled off the road onto the grass to let me go by, and then he walked behind me for a little while before he seemed to judge me harmless and walked ahead of me again, where I resumed my spot six feet behind him, at first working to smother my laughter because I was so embarrassed that whatever noises I was making had caused him such distraction that he had to do a 360 on me, presumably to make sure I wasn’t…crazy? Sobbing? Dangerous? But then we passed an accordion guy and I realized that if a person can hang around in the park playing the accordion then another person could certainly be allowed to laugh out loud at a podcast and so I gave up pretending not to and the guy only looked back at me a couple more times before he peeled off to the left and I did not follow him but instead took my snort-laughter to the right to surprise and presumably un-delight a whole nother section of the park. Which also, how are there SO MANY people doing stuff in Central Park between 2 and 5 pm on a Thursday? I’m not complaining, I’m just amazed at how many other people seem to have free time during normal business hours. I hope some of them also got to enjoy a laugh-out-loud podcast experience without upsetting or arousing suspicion in the eyes of their fellow man.

I’ve been knitting for-ev-er, seriously since our next-door neighbor taught me when I was seven years old, so, math, that’s like 35 years. And that’s pretty much 35 years straight—it’s not really something I’ve put aside for long periods of time or anything, because why? Knitting is fun and can be easy and practical and because there is knitting that can be done when doing other things, really anything that doesn’t require the use of your hands, knitting can be an excellent way to accomplish more than one thing at a time, and/or to keep yourself from realizing you are accomplishing exactly nothing during a particularly long/boring conference call. So, knitting and walking: as long as it’s not too cold or too hot and I have “supplemental” knitting, a project so simple I don’t need to look at it or think about it (no counting or complicated pattern stitches), it’s a perfect combination.

My main supplemental knitting these days is dishtowels, squishy absorbent cotton dishtowels. My sister, god love her, texted me a while back to casually mention that she needed some, and while she was all “You know, if you ever have the chance, don’t want to impose,” I had my shoes on before I finished reading her message and pretty much flew down to Michael’s then interrupted her work day with a barrage of questions and pictures of balls of cotton yarn and urgent demands for her input on stripes versus solids.

I’m guessing most people with a crafty hobby will relate to the elation I felt when asked to make something, even/especially something mundane like a dish towel. It is such a pleasure to have a member of the general pop interested in my hobby and—I must believe—genuinely glad to have something I have made. It’s a little hard to admit, but to be honest I feel like I do a lot of imposing myself on people, craft-wise, especially with the sewing. It’s just that I see something that needs sewing, I have a needle and thread, and it becomes physically impossible to stop myself from raising my hand, except it’s not like I’m a hero the way medical professionals are in emergencies on airplanes, it’s more like I’m a weirdo who is waving around a sewing kit and saying, “Here, just go in the bathroom and take off your dress and give it to me.” (I have said these exact words on at least two different occasions, both at work, both involving patient and slightly bemused coworkers who…needed their dresses sewn. So…I insisted on sewing them.)

I once sewed a guy’s buttons back on his shirt in a bar, after a little dust-up in which another dude—a friend of his, it transpired—had ripped his shirt open. Enter me, sewing kit at the ready in my purse. I took the guy with no buttons on his shirt (and no undershirt, ergo he either got sewed up or kicked out) to a corner of the bar where, as we drank our beers and he chatted away, I harvested new buttons from other places, including the shirttail where they leave extras for just this reason, and sewed enough back on that he could plausibly look like he was wearing a complete shirt, and while I haven’t been on that site in ages I am pretty sure we are Facebook friends to this day. This all happened at a bar called the Hairy Lemon in Dublin, Ireland, and while Robert and I were complete strangers, the siren call of the missing buttons was entirely too much for me to resist. While I acknowledge my intercession here may seem strange, I submit to you that naming a bar the Hairy Lemon may actually be stranger, and surely there are other crafters out there who have exercised their art in similarly odd situations, trading a few astonished looks for the chance to put a needle or two to good use. Knitting and hand-sewing are at once immensely impractical—mass production is wayyyyyyyyyyy faster and cheaper—and yet immensely practical skills to have, not least when they can keep your hands busy and your sister’s dishtowel drawer full, your co-worker’s dresses fixed up, a cheerfully inebriated Irish guy from being kicked out of a bar, or be the cherry on the top of the sundae of snort-laughter that turns me into one just one of those weirdos just doing their thing in this crazy old town we call New York.   

Also I have two very patient and kind friends who have, for years now, put up with my ludditeness (apparently not a word) and taken the time to screenshot the best bird pictures from Instagram and send them to me. (There are some really excellent pictures of birds out there.) After much pleading from both of them I finally broke down and created my own account so that I can have another website to be afraid of and I am hoping that someday one of those nice ladies will show me wtf I am supposed to do with it.

Here is where I confess I was finally willing to create this account not just to relieve G&K of the hassle of screenshotting birds for me but also because I recently had the occasion to form an LLC. I am immensely pleased with myself for doing so, not because I did anything (my accountant did) but because my new limited liability corporation is Bad Ideas, LLC, and I am the proud owner of an (empty) website, badideas.fun. I laugh out loud every time I think about this and that alone would make the endeavor worthwhile but the icing on the cake was hearing my father’s horrified reaction when I gave him the news: that is a terrible idea, he told me, and for just a moment I wished I’d thought of that, first.