Part of being a scientist is attending seminars about current scientific research given by scientists (usually) from outside your university. These are usually about an hour in length. One of the major draws is that they provide coffee and cookies and graduate students can smell free food a mile away.
I am really not emotionally constructed to sit still in a dark room and pay attention to a talk for one hour. After about half an hour, I get very fidgety unless the speaker is particularly engaging. Once I start to fidget, I stop paying attention. I’ve tried taking notes, or drinking more caffeine, or doodling, but none of these things has helped me.
So, I knit socks.
This probably seems counterintuitive to a lot of people. Generally speaking, these are people who do not knit (or crochet, or embroider). People who do knit often tell me how much knitting helps them to pay attention to what’s going on around them. It’s the same for me. It’s as though it keeps the fidgety part of my brain occupied leaving the rest of my brain free to absorb what the seminar speaker is saying (as an aside, I think this would make and interesting study using a PET scan or functional MRI).
Also, if the seminar speaker is deadly dull, or it turns out the talk is completely beyond my comprehension, no harm done. I’ve got my knitting.
It has gotten to the point that I just bring my knitting to every sort of talk/meeting/lecture I go to. Including lab meeting. I tried to be very discreet about it at first, but now I just haul it out and start stitching. My advisor once said, “You know, they sell socks in stores now,” but that’s it. I still contribute to lab meeting. I still even take notes during seminars.
Sometimes, I wonder what the speaker thinks when they see me there with the knitting. I try to do all of the appropriate things to show that I’m paying attention. I nod, I frown if I’m puzzled, I laugh when appropriate. Still, they probably wonder if I’m really taking in anything they are saying. For awhile, this used to concern me. I didn’t want to appear rude. However, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is better to appear rude by knitting and actually get something out of the talk than to not appear rude by knitting and be rude by falling asleep.
So, why socks? Well, socks are small and therefore very portable. And, I only knit on simple ones during seminars. In fact, I have a sock I carry around with me for the sole purpose of mindless knitting while in meetings, at seminars, on the bus, or waiting in line (or at the movie, or at the opera, or at the symphony, or on the plane, or at a thesis defense, or before church starts). And by simple I mean that I can knit on it in the dark with few adverse effects (sometimes I find a mistake that I made and I have to rip back which I do sometime when I can give it my full attention).
My current seminar sock looks like this:
It’s made of hand-dyed wool. I’m knitting it for my husband. I’m about halfway done with this one sock–I still have to knit the foot, including the heel and toe (which I only do when I can pay attention to it) and the whole second sock. I’ll let you know how it progresses.
