The Basics

I suppose the first order of business is to introduce myself, so here is some pertinent information about me.

I live in Montreal with my partner of five years. I am not a native but I consider this city my spiritual home. My love for Montreal and it's inhabitants will likely figure prominently in my entries here.

I am currently unemployed, despite (or maybe because of) my three (yes, three) graduate degrees - a Master's in science and two law degrees (common and civil law). This may make me the most over-educated jobless bum you know. Since graduating in April I have been exploring alternatives to traditional legal practice, which mostly involves a lot of sitting on my butt watching TV and and surfing the Internet. I am doing some freelance work as a medical writer and copy editor, which I'm hoping will help keep the wolves at bay for a little while - after six years of graduate school, I am beyond broke. My secret desire is to be a 'real' writer (still not sure what exactly that means), but I haven't written anything other than academic papers in six years, so I am using this blog as practice (that way I can tell myself it doesn't matter if/when nobody reads this - it's all about the process).

I knit. I knit quite a lot, actually (see above re. unemployed), but this does not mean that I churn out vast swathes of knitted objects, since I am pretty slow. I started knitting in my last year of law school, as a relaxation technique; however, due to my slightly obsessive nature and a bad case of last-year-of-school ennui, it soon became more of a replacement for, rather than distraction from, my schoolwork :). Now I do it mainly to keep myself occupied in between fruitless internet job searches. I also spend way too much time window-shopping for yarn online and reading other people's blogs. This blog, then, is the natural progression from passive to active participant in the online community.

I am a feminist, and a pretty hardcore one at that. This conflicts rather heavily with my current day-to-day life, which more closely resembles that of a housewife. I try not to dwell on this contradiction too much - it makes my head hurt.

Teal and aubergine are my favourite colours (ooh, two Britishisms in a row!). Aubergines (um, eggplants, for those who aren't up on their snooty colour names) are also one of my favourite things to eat, so it has double significance (teal does not - the only other meaning I can think of for teal has to do with ducks, and I am not fond of ducks. AT ALL.). I realized after naming the blog that I had kind of ripped off Limenviolet - sorry ladies, it was unintentional (though I have been listening to their podcast a lot lately, so who knows what was happening in my subconscious).

So these are the basics - more details will doubtless be revealed in time (if I can motivate myself to keep this up, that is!).