sweet, sweet misery

What is it with me and socks?  Theoretically, I think they’d be tons of fun to knit and wear.  Every other knitting blog I read seems to extoll the virtues of the sock.  (And, hey, I obviously have to jump off of that bridge too.)  Theoretically, I know how to use dpns and make various forms of ribbing.  In practice, I’ve even made a mini-sock.  And I have a lot of sock yarn and very fine needles.  Why, oh why does this never materialize into sock nirvana?

Sweet, colorful yarn.  Winsome, lithe needles.  And yet, it is the bane of my existence.  I’m not going for anything too complicated.  Just a nice ribbed sock.  But I can’t get past the first row — things go wonky, the join stretches out in a very unbecoming manner, etc. 

And is it even possible to get the same gauge, using the same yarn on size 1, 2, and 3 needles?  I didn’t think so.  But it happened somehow, probably because it was 2 a.m. and I should have been in bed, not starting a pair of socks.

Maybe I just don’t have the mental concentration necessary to start a pair of socks right now.  Dpns with tiny fine yarn (neither of which I use regularly) does not make for the mindless, automatic reading-time knitting I’ve been specializing in lately.  But is it just a lack of commitment on my part?  To just sit down, focus on one task, and not quit until it’s done?  I have the same trouble with my reading and studying … the nagging, little scratchings of suspicion that perhaps this isn’t what I want to be doing with my life.  That knitting as escape from the über-cerebral pursuits of grad school is not enough … that I shouldn’t be constantly searching for new means of egress from my daily life.  I don’t know. 

Maybe I just need to practice making socks.