how i got here and where i went

(i just want you all to know that i did have a really nice, poetic, pithy little first entry written yesterday, but because i am a dork who has forgotten everything i ever knew about blogging, i previewed it but forgot to save it. what follows is a mere shadow of the genius that was.)

so, a million trillion years ago, i had a blog called PurlJew. Apparently, I still do, and this here blog is its red-headed stepchild. I lived in a small town, had a terrible job, and no friends, and needed my knitting in the same way that I needed red blood cells or lip gloss. (I still do, but now I have friends...granted, friends who can't understand the compulsion to drag a wad of alpaca out of my bag at every moment and make them appreciate my fishtail lace.) I knitted, and I discovered knitblogs, and I wanted one of my own. And so I had me one, and there was love.

And then I moved across the ocean, to a small, crazy city in a small, crazy country, to study Torah for a year. And I knitted, but I was too busy learning Gemara, making a new community, figuring out how to cook kugel for 20, volunteering, and basically building a new and really satisfying life for myself here.

And then: and then I decided to stay for another two years, having applied to and gotten accepted to a master's program in education at the school I'm still at. Ulpan (one of my friends, a stand-up comic here, says that he always thought that there was no word for 'hell' in Hebrew, and then he moved to Israel and discovered that there was one: ulpan.) made for a lot of knitting time (total items knitted: one sock for me, a pair of baby socks, two Mason-Dixon warshrags, one sock for another baby, a Teva Durham leaf cravat, and a fishtail lace scarf), as did a total lack of TV (my friends and I download BSG, but that is sacred and not at all knitting time).

So: Zazti. A weak attempt to garner support for my gauge-less creations, or another aspect of community building? Both, I say! And while I can promise you that non-knitting stuff will creep in (I live in Jerusalem, after all, and crazyfunnysweetamazing things happen here all the time), I can also tell you that without knitblogs, my knitting would never have become as bold and skilled (or however bold and skilled it can claim to be at any given moment, whatevs, you know what I meant). So I add Zazti to the mix, and hope it flies with y'all.

Shalom,

Jessie