I ate popcorn while watching a YouTube movie theory, and now I’m about to become the proud owner of carbon knitting needles and an electric kettle. Let me explain.
Since I don’t own a TV at my dorm, I watch quite a bit of YouTube. I have a favorite channel. It’s a guy who calls himself The Theorizer, and he makes movie theories. But he does it in a very…interesting way. He started going crazy, I believe, when he came to the (scarily plausible) conclusion that Mort from Madagascar is actually the Grim Reaper, and that most of the villains of every movie Dreamworks has ever made are part of a French cult out to suppress intelligent animals.
Anyway, he released a video yesterday about (among other things) Boo from Monsters, Inc. being a robot developed by the megacorporation BNL to spy on the monster world. It had a premier at 1:15, so I paused my schoolwork, threw some popcorn in the microwave, and sat down to watch. But my popcorn was salty, I got thirsty, and about halfway through the 35-minute video, I leaned across my bed to get the glass of water I keep on the edge of my desk.
I put my hand down to steady myself, inadvertently squishing my knitting project in the process. If you know anything about knitting, you probably know that socks are made with very thin yarn and very thin needles. I’m talking 2.75 millimeters thick, which is probably something like two or three toothpicks taped together. Needless to say, I snapped one of my needles.
I wasn’t mad, for two reasons. First, I got these knitting needles for extremely cheap–I think I got fifteen sizes for something like $11 on Amazon. They were made in China and good quality for the price, but they were starting to warp and I always anticipated getting new needles anyway. Secondly, my set blessedly came with five needles per size, and I’m working with four, so I’m free to keep knitting! But I decided to buy another set anyway.
Several people have recommended a particular brand of knitting needle for sock-knitting–Karbonz by Knitter’s Pride, I believe. And I know that a good pair of knitting needles will last me years, so I had no problems with spending $20 on a pair of them. But since I bought them off Amazon, I needed to spend just $5 more to qualify for free shipping.
I thought. I browsed. Nothing I wanted qualified for free shipping. In desperation, I texted my mom. She encouraged me to spend my leftover Christmas money and get an electric kettle. I’ve been wanting a kettle for a while. I want to be the sort of person who drinks tea regularly, and microwaving a mug for three minutes produces a cup of tea that’s too hot for two minutes, just right for five, and then too cold for the rest of eternity. Plus, my dorm microwave is…not the cleanest.
So that’s my story. Eating popcorn while watching The Theorizer has led to me purchasing a kettle and knitting needles. And it’s also the most interesting thing that’s happened to me since last Friday, when I was told that I’d been accepted to present a paper I wrote at a conference–the Medievalists and Early Modernists of North Texas and Oklahoma, or MEMNTO. The conference is Saturday, and I’ll tell you how it went in next week’s post! Until then, dear readers, please keep me in your prayers. I’m a bit nervous about the whole ordeal–and what will I wear?