#3 Brew a batch of beer
#10 Pass the DLAB
#15 Knit an entire scarf
#20 Finish “On the Road”
I’ve decided to try to group this list so that I get to the good stuff (items I’m excited about working on or excited about having completed) by the time the big day comes around.
Yesterday, I wrote about some more significant ways my personality has evolved over the past five years. Today, it’s about the silly stuff. Seriously, what was 25-year old Ila thinking with these?
#3 Brew a batch of beer
When I was 25, I thought I liked beer. I want to give past-Ila credit for this one. I really love the idea of beer. I like how it makes Seattle more interesting. I like how local it is. Did you know Washington grows most of the nation’s hops? It’s why, I assume, this town is so obsessed with IPA’s.
What I really like are sours and goses, which are far more like cider than beer. Someone once told me that they taste like New Jersey, which I think is a bad thing?
My point is that I definitely don’t want to make beer. I’m not sure why I even wanted to do this in the first place, especially as a human whose apartment was like, 190 square feet at the time.
#10 Pass the DLAB
There’s a couple of important notes here:
First - Once upon a very long time ago (like in 2011 when I wrote this) I dated and then married a soldier in the Army. Second - DLAB is short for Defense Language Aptitude Battery. It’s a military exam that measures your aptitude for learning foreign languages. My ex-husband took the test and explained it to me in a way that made me think I’d be awesome at it. Basically, the idea is that you have to decipher a fake language based on clues they give you. I took four years of Spanish in high school, the last of which I took while also learning beginners French. I love language, especially its structure and organization. I would kick ass at this test.
Unfortunately, despite a tiny blip in college when I tried to enlist in the Marines (long story for another time), I do not want to be in the military. At all. Pass on this one.
#15 Knit an entire scarf
This one comes with a cute story! Yay!
My mom knits. She’s amazing at it. She knit my dad one of those crazy 12 foot Dr. Who scarves. She’s made me two amazing bags, a scarf and matching fingerless mittens, and coffee cuffs. She’s knit countless hats for the homeless.
When I was a Resident Assistant in college, my mom would drive all the way to Ellensburg from Seattle just to teach my tenants how to knit. She’d bring her own yarn and she’d sharpen take-out chopsticks and pencils to use as knitting needles. For the next couple weeks after that program, I’d watch my tenants sit around their dorms or the common lounges working with the yarn and their pencils. I loved it, and I get inspired thinking of how my mom uses her gift like that.
I did not get her talent, focus, or dexterity. I can’t read a pattern. I can’t ever remember how to cast on or what the heck a purl is (or if you make it? Or do it?). I have a knitting kit that I brought with me through about four moves. It’s sitting in my closet right now.
It’s time to give up and leave the knitting to my very talented mother. I’m going to finally let this one go.
#20 Finish “On the Road”
Oh man is this a long time coming. Giving up, I mean, not finishing it. I have started to read this book almost every year since my last year of high school. Like a lot of things on this, I love the idea of it. Jack Kerouac is iconic. It’s romantic, this idea of spending your life wandering across the nation meeting people and following the flow of the universe.
But really, the characters of this book are insufferable. And you just start to get to know them and then they disappear, probably to never return (though I guess I’ll never know).
I once made a very tragic mistake, in my many occasions of buying and then “losing” this book, of getting the ‘original scroll’ version of this book. The story goes that Kerouac sat down at his typewriter and wrote the whole book over a couple of days on a single scroll of paper. The ‘original scroll’ version is apparently the legendary first draft. It’s missing pretty vital but often taken for granted items of novels like paragraph breaks and most punctuation. It hurts your eyes to read. I ran out of breath reading it. It felt like a marathon. It sort of fit the theme of the book like that, so I get the appeal.
Before I moved in with my boyfriend, he and I stared at this book on my shelf. He’s incredibly gracious and is less concerned with this romantic notion of finishing a book for the sake of being a part of the culture it’s created. He convinced me to donate the book instead of moving it into his condo. That dear boy liberated me from this curse, so I’m letting it go in his name.