I ♥ Jon Stewart

and I don't care who knows it!

Yesterday was a fun day - a tiring day, but a fun day!

The Daily Show was AMAZING! My ears are still ringing from the rock music and the roar of the crowd, the staff there was so great, and Jon was - well - he's pretty great. He also strikes me as someone I'd really HATE to have PO'd at me. My own personal moment of zen? Gerry watching The Daily Show on my ipod as we stood in line.

They were TOTALLY serious about no cameras, and although my knitting needles were fine (I couldn't take them into Dr. Phil last year...) a fellow in the next section of seats had his camera taken away. Oops.

The warm up comedian got a lot of mileage out of my knitting - pulling out all of the old chestnuts like, I must be bored, Knitting is boring, Why on earth would someone knit unless they were bored? He's nowhere near to getting it. I think he thought he'd shame me into putting it away, but I fully intended to knit right up until the show started (I wasn't bothering anyone - no one even noticed before he made a big deal about it...) He did mention several times, "When Jon gets out here it might be a good idea to put that away..." Of course.

Several women made friendly "knitters" eye contact with me as we were leaving the show, and I seemed to have my own tiny cheering section in the audience section to the right of us (we were in perfect seats - front and center!) so little by little knitting is still worming its way into the mainstream. Actually, this sort of thing makes me pretty happy - as knitters we think knitting is EVERYWHERE and folks are going to get sick of it, but the reality is we're a pretty small little group and there's LOTS of room for growth!

I started by taking the train into the city with my little rocking chair in tow. It's quite lightweight, small, and I wanted to drop it off in person at VK. Since I had to be in the city in the afternoon for The Daily Show anyway, it seemed like a good time to take it down to Soho.

So down I went. I had the chair covered in a very heavyweight black garbage bag, so it wasn't apparent what it was. I did, however, whip the garbage bag off while on the subway and snap a photo. I told the amused riders that, "I can never get a seat..." It made me laugh, at least...

Fighting Cold
I've been insanely healthy this Fall - just one sore throat, and a most annoying stuffy nose that I have right now which will NOT go away. I feel like I have the nose of three strong men, that's how stuffy I am. Last night I bought our Christmas Tree and the fellow who tied it to the car has the same stuffy nose - we both blame it on the kids. Once you have kids, you'll seldom have a stuffy-nose free winter again.

So we're going to decorate the tree tonight as part of our first night of Hanukkah celebration. Yes, we're a multi faith household here on Irving Ave, stuffy, but ecumenical.

Published
As some of you may know, I write about interfaith issues every now and then. Nothing scholarly, just random musings about being the only non-Jew in a Jewish home (please, please don't write to tell me that no, my kids really aren't Jewish because I'm not, we're a proud Reform family and if the Rabbi says my kids are Jewish, that's good enough for me!)

For a few years I've been writing essays for Interfaith Family dot Com, and right now they have one of my pieces up, Holiday Au Lait, about doing two holidays in one home - it's here if you'd like to see it.

It's odd, Hanukkah is really a pretty minor holiday - it's nowhere near as important as Shabbat, which we used to be better at keeping - not in a Kosher sense, just in a more regular way. I'm feeling dissasociated from our Temple now - I need to work on that. Anyway, Hanukkah is a hard holiday because the roots are very anti-assimilationist; by default, very anti-interfaith marriage and family. So it's incredibly ironic that it's become the Jewish holiday that is best known by many non-Jewish folk. Here's an interesting essay on this juxtaposition of themes surrounding the holiday by Julie Saxe-Taller.

So tonight we light the first candle, eat some latkes, spin the dreidle, eat the gelt that mom hasn't eaten and we'll ALSO put up the tree, decorate the house and don our gay apparel. And we may even make our way to the movie theatre to see Eragon or Charlotte's Web (a toss up - wouldn't it be cool if they mixed the movies...?)

Quoted
I'm also quoted right now in an article on Knitty about the percieved slowdown in knitting. You can read the article to see what I think about this - for the most part I feel that rumors of knitting's demise are greatly exaggerated. However, I also feel that there will be a shaking out of less-than-viable shops and designers who thought it would be a cool way to make money, but are starting to see how many hours of work go into every dollar we put into the bank.

I love what I do - I'm very lucky - but it's a LOT of work and draws on entirely separate skills (artistic, communication, organization and MATH!) and that's a hard dance to keep going. When you add in the level of compensation, even if you're relatively well known as a designer, well - it's a labor of love. This isn't a complaint, it's just an explanation of why we sometimes see a designer pop up, then sort of fade away. It's a hard thing to keep going, this self-promotional, designing, writing, teaching dance.

Speaking of Work...
I finished up 2 parts of a BIG project yesterday - a secret project that I'm hoping to unveil this Spring. We'll see. It's a major investment of both time and money, and I'm crossing my fingers that the idea is as good as I think it is. And I started a sweater on the way to The Daily Show and got this far on it by the time we went inside...