Athens and a Little Rant

While "hanging out" on Ravelry (I'm still not quite comfortable with the term hanging out at a website that the kids are using these days.), I came across a group called "ABC Along - 2008." The idea is that you post a picture every two weeks corresponding to a letter of the alphabet. I just made it in under the wire, although I don't think it would take much to catch up. It's really not much, but it's a little something to give structure to this almost-structure-free blog.

The first picture I've chosen is about Athens. Oh. I also said that I was going to try to do this in Dutch, so it's actually Athene. Cheating? A little. And to take cheating to a new level, this is not even from Athens itself. It's from London - the British Museum in London. But it was in Athens a couple hundred years ago.

The room where these sculptures are is pretty amazing and pretty packed with these. What's amazing is how mangled they all are. Apparently, they were all in the Parthenon, which was where some gunpowder was being stored, and someone blew the building up. So all of these sculptures were wrecked. Then they lay in a heap for a couple hundred years until a British guy made a deal to take them away and now some of the Greeks want them back - say they were stolen. I'm on the side of the Brits here.

My point is that it's sort of hard for me to look at these sculptures, always has been. It's like looking at a person who has been horribly disfigured by an accident. Not that it's not fascinating. It's just that it just makes me think of what we're not able to see - the complete sculptures. (There's a really nice naked guy on a horse in the entry hall. Who doesn't love a perfect marble statue of a naked guy on a horse?) Not to mention that on almost all of these, some jackasses took it upon themselves to go along and lop off all of the penises, so they're all castrated. I'm just sayin' that it's distracting. Plus, that kind of crazy conservatism annoys me.

And that's an excellent segue to my next thought. Conservatism. I recently had a long conversation with an old friend from high school who is pretty conservative. With most people, if they're really conservative, I just move along. I don't run into that a whole lot here. It's sort of like NYC in that way. There are the conservatives, but they either don't talk about it or they avoid me. But she's an old friend and I try to look past it - although I must say that I found some of her reasoning flawed, like she insists that Obama is a Muslim (not that there's anything wrong with that) even though he's on the record as being a Christian. The problem is that she holds the Muslim thing against him even though it's not true. Can't argue with that, huh?

So I ran into a group on Ravelry called "GOP Knitters." And one of my favorite people is in there! I was shocked. (They're ongoing conversations are a fun read.) My family is pretty conservative, as I have written here. They all voted Bush-Cheney twice - and of course they voted for him for governor twice. It's almost embarrassing, if it weren't so tragic. (Who are these people?) So I'm on this new thing where I'm trying to accept it. (It's actually not a new thing. It's an old thing that feels new.)

Conservative people are people too. It doesn't always seem like it, but they are. They are not all robots who say things like, "Fred Thompson is a breath of fresh air!" Some people actually think about why they vote like they do, why they hate the environment and why they don't like people who are different from them.

Oh, by the way...political moment alert. Too late.

Knitting update: The fingers on my gloves were driving me a little nuts, so after seven, I put the gloves down for a day or two. Maybe I'll do a couple tonight. I'd love to have them done. I think if I tried, they would have been done in a week. That's pretty cool for a little gift like that. Now I'm doing a swatch for a sweater I like the way it looks, but it feels like a lot of work. We'll see. I'll keep you updated. I know you're on the edge of your chair.

I think I'm becoming a monogamous knitter. I want to work on one project until it's done. This new philosophy is making me seriously consider the next project I take on.