I want to be her again. The girl who went off to Europe by herself and didn't speak English for a week, happily.
Instead, I work a mind-numbing job and go to un-fun parties. I drank an immoderate amount of red wine. I got cornered by a coworker for twenty minutes, as he urged me to come to an EST seminar. I broke a heel and sent drunken text messages. Thank god I know how to exude fabulousness! There was someone at the party who wanted to meet me, apparently, whom I very much did not want to meet. Our paths crossed, and I was fierce, fabulous, and fucked up. We didn't meet. It could be very awkward if we did.
The next day, I was hung over. Did I make an ass of myself? Am I too obvious? Can people tell that I didn't make it home? All of those sad insecurities came back. I'm probably not going to get drunk like that again for a long time. Because I need to be fearless and fabulous in my everyday life.

I'm in a much better state of mind than in my last post. No fists of frustration. My email archives were miraculously restored when I synced to Gmail through their POP server. Every email that I have sent or received through Gmail, all 386 of them, appeared in my inbox. I waded through them as I transfered music from my ipod back to my desktop. Being able to rebuild my library that way has minimized the music loss, but there are a few things that are still MIA.
Willie called me late last night to urge me to be more assertive about my missing iLife. It came factory installed on the Mac, he said, so it should come back from the shop with it. I slept on it and realized that if it came factory installed, I must have a disc for it somewhere. I found it in less than five minutes of searching and have restored iPhoto and Garage Band.
So, all is not lost. It's a setback, but there are some perks as well. For example, I got rid of all the music that I'd bought from iTunes and didn't like. I got a free OS upgrade. I've even got a Christmas Lights widget.

Never Give Up

I got my Mac back from the shop today, with a new hard drive and no data transfer. I don't have my address book anymore or any of the music that I bought in the past year. After I picked up the Mini, I went through the phone book in my cell and called all of my friends, leaving a general SOS message. Only four* have returned my calls. Clearly, I should find a better class of friends, haha.
My Christmas knitting is almost done. I was going to post some arty , abstract photographs, except I can't. The geniuses (genuisii?) gave me a free OS upgrade to Tiger from Panther. That's awesome, except that iPhoto and Garage Band aren't included in Tiger and they were in Panther. I can't edit photos or music without them and am loathe to cough up the $70 to buy iLife. Picture me shaking my fists in rage in the general direction of Cupertino.
Back to the knitting: I'm almost done. I'll probably have a few more last minute emergency projects. I should have squirreled away projects over the course of the year in my "gift drawer", but my lack of disk backup should tell you that I'm not inclined to think ahead. The last planned project is in the works: a beret made out Noro Silk Garden. It's dragging itself out by refusing to change gauge despite changes in needle size. I will be the boss of my knitting!
In that vein, I've restarted work on the hateful IK ballerina wrap. It's bulky, it had awful bulky sleeves, and it's been in pieces for months. As I worked on all of my "obligation" knitting projects, I longed to knit something for myself. The bulky, woolly wrap is perfect for this time of year and easily finished in a short period of time. All it needs is sleeves. So, I'm making my own sleeve caps for it, to avoid unfortunate 80s poof. I've adapted a sleeve cap from a similar pattern with the same armscye depth. This looks much more promising than the first set of sleeves. Well, that's very dry and technical. Basically, once I've got the sleeves done, it will be 98% finished. I might also shorten the belt pieces. I could skip rope with them now if I had any kind of coordination.
I've got plenty of other things to say, but I'm so wrapped up in this computer thing. Lately, everything has felt as though it was staged for my injury or irritation. That's too egocentric. I'm not the only person to lose all their files. I'm not the first person to suffer a romantic disappointment. It's just been really hard lately. Besides all this crap, I've also been to the opera lately, had a fabulous Greek dinner, had a restorative soak in the tub with a Lush blackberry bath bomb, and switched skin care systems with happy results. It's not all bad; I just need to frame things differently.
* One called while I was writing this post. He recently went through massive data loss on a Mac and offered love and support.

This is a special post, coming to you from my circa 2002 PC laptop. You see, my Mac is in the shop. I was working on my Xmas list last night when it froze up and subsequently refused to boot. After attempting several secret Apple shortcut/key combos suggested by my excellent, sympathetic stepmother, I took it to the local genius bar. The problem is either the hard drive or the cable connecting the hard drive to the logic board. I took this news surprisingly well. They may or may not be able to do data recovery for me, so I may be looking to replace a lot of music that I bought from Itunes and never got around to backing up. So, dear reader, I want you to back up all your important files so that this doesn't happen to you. Let me be the object lesson for you. Keep your fingers crossed for me, too!
What else has happened lately? hmmm.... I went to the doctor twice in one week, which made me feel like such an adult. I hadn't been in a couple of years and needed to take care of all of those mundane, general maintenance things. The horrible GP that I saw last time has since left the practice, and I got reassigned to a much cooler doctor. No lecture about quitting smoking, but instead an open dialogue about a willingness to help when I'm ready to quit. A willingness to work with me, rather than dictating a list of things that I HAVE to do. Because, let's face it, I'm probably not going to do them if a lecture is involved. Oh, and the new doctor knits. Highly excellent!
I hennaed my hair, which was quite the disaster. The Pyrex bowl that I was using as a ghetto bain marie exploded, sending broken glass and water everywhere. Fortunately, the smaller bowl wasn't upset, and the henna didn't spew all over the kitchen. Isn't Pyrex supposed to be practically indestructible? The explosion really shook me, since I had just left the kitchen when the bowl shattered. Had I not drifted back into the living room to watch ER, I could have been impaled by giant chunks of glass. Yikes. Oh, and the henna seems to have seriously clogged my bathroom sink. So, I had to clean up broken glass (including opening the stovetop), scrub two sinks, pour boiling water down the drains, and scrub the bathtub. Wish I could post a pic of what the henna did to my bath puff, but my camera and PC don't talk to each other. It's a dramatic, army olive color. While the henna was on my hair, I had a moment of panic that I would accidentally dye my hair green, like Anne of Green Gables does when trying to dye her hair black. Usually red dyes appear purple in solution. The end result in my hair is fine. It's not green. It's not a definite color, since hennaed hair appears so very different in different types of light. One of my coworkers thinks it looks blonder. My mom says it looks brown (under those damn ugly energy saver compact fluorescent bulbs). It looks red under incandescents, and kind of red gold in natural light. In any case, it's not so washed out looking as it was before the henna and it has a nice shine. I guess that could be the new shampoo and conditioner combo, Reincarnate and Veganese, both by Lush. Reincarnate contains red henna, which should help maintain the color.
Still knitting up a storm. I'm down to three hats and a scarf on the to-knit list. Maybe a pair of fingerless gloves, too, I haven't decided yet. I'm having a hard time psyching myself up for all of those hats. They're not difficult or anything, just not exciting. I long to knit something for myself! This is the time of year that cries out for lots of cozy sweaters. Oh, and I appreciate my own work, which is not always the case with my giftees. I'll try not to knit bitterly.

It's been a tumultuous week. I don't really want to go into any of the details, but I feel shat on. All my friends have been great, but I could still use all the positive energy that you can send my way.

I've adopted/coined a new word: dickish. Use it in a sentence today!

I'd love to post pics of my current knitting projects, but the fear that people might recognize their presents prevents it. I flatter myself in thinking that anyone reads Reciprocity Failure, I know. Actually, a google search for my "real name" + theatre pulled up a link to this site. I digress. Perhaps I will put together a gallery of arty, abstract photographs of my knitting. Only a genius would know that the carefully photoshopped to look like it was shot on a 4x5 plate pic of chunky moss stitch is a cushion. I've said too much.

Today was not the best day for travel. Well, there weren't any broken electric cables (that was last week), but I walked all over the loop to use one of my bank's ATMs and get a CTA day pass. I refuse to call it a fun pass. Public transportation isn't my idea of a good time. All this to go to a passementerie shop. Trim sounds so much more elegant in French. The store is much like the trim shops in London and Paris, full of many beautiful, expensive things. Several of which I purchased. I went there to buy a yard of ribbon to trim a hat (xmas present) and ended up buying four yards of various lovely, imported ribbons and an enameled button for a planned sweater. It's unclear when I will get to make that sweater (see previous post), but I couldn't pass up a perfect color match. That's nearly impossible in greens.

My coworkers must think that I am a grande dame in training. I'm always off to the theatre, the ballet, the opera. Picture also vampish red lipstick, a fur coat, and cigarette case. Maybe it's more dame than dame! I went to my first opera in the Lyric season, Iphigenie en Tauride. It was incredible. The set and all of the costumes were black, all shades of black. the staging was very modern, stark but effective. I was especially touched when Iphigenie erased her name from the rear wall while singing an aria about having lost everything. My mother was less impressed than I. It's funny, considering that she introduced me to opera, that I am more into it now. Well, maybe not more of a fan, but more interested in the less traditional stagings. It could be generational, or because I am such a theatre person. Opera has much more interesting, exciting design than theatre these days. Opera does it on a grand scale, with a grand budget to match.

Last night, I went to see the Kirov dance Swan Lake. For free. It was sensational. The Kirov has such a perfect corps de ballet, such incredible principles, and wonderful technique. Their costumes were lovely, especially the long sheer skirts in the ball and court scenes. It was all loveliness, really, especially after that glass of champagne during the first intermission.

Oh, the Kirov, the Joffrey, the Lyric, the Goodman! It brings to mind the time that I went to see American Ballet Theatre dance Gisele a couple of years ago. There I was, all sweaty from a day of pounding the pavement in Manhattan, in jeans and chiffon, surrounded by women in gowns, dripping in jewels. Hell, I wanted to applaud when they flew out the chandeliers before the show. Oh, how nice it would be to go to the symphony and the ballet and the opera, to marry some generous older gentleman and only take cabs everywhere, I thought. Well, I can do all of those things for myself. I need to be that person who went to Paris alone in my everyday life. I need to find a reason to stay instead of reasons to go. All of those middle of the night thoughts.