Depending on other people

[cjsmith]

My shell account at my ISP is currently pretty much unusable because my homedir's disk is full. This happens every few months. They eventually get around to doing housecleaning, but until they do, I'm stuck. In particular: no personal mail. Grr! I hate depending on other people for stuff like this. It means that if someone else is slow or sloppy, I pay a price.

The only alternative to depending on others, though, eventually means mining some ore myself, purifying the copper and the silicon, creating a computer... you get the idea. Plus growing and weaving my own fibers for clothing... Somewhere, I have to find the right place to draw the line.

Speaking of where to draw that line, why is it far more common to create one's own food than to create one's own clothing? There's a huge support infrastructure for that: competing megagrocery chains, Williams-Sonoma, whole industries devoted to making special sauces for the "cook" to heat up and pour... the list goes on. The support infrastructure for sewing, while still biggish, is far smaller. The prevalence of that choice is pretty ingrained in some ways. But cooking for oneself every day takes more time than maintaining a home-sewn wardrobe would take. Food that isn't right is usually merely annoying, just like clothing that isn't right -- except clothing that isn't right annoys for a longer time. Why pick cooking over sewing? Did all that structure grow out of those infrequent cases where food that isn't right can cause serious illness? (All that and we haven't eliminated those cases, either!)

Speaking of sewing, I really need to get my sewing machine overhauled. Depending on other people again... and yes, the fact I have procrastinated this errand has a lot to do with the fact that I don't know whom to trust with the work! :-)

Hey. How come LJ has a mood selection for "exanimate" (WTF?) but not one for something so prosaic as "whiny"? (Or is what I need now the also-nonexistent "rambling"?)

Comments

Re:

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, clothing production was a community activity not too long ago... before sewing machines made it possible to do a lot of work quickly solo? Hmm. One appliance gets invented, and look at the social changes!

True. After I wrote my response, it occured to me that women often sat in circles and spun wool, wove cloth. Sewing and mending was part of the evening social time. When my grandmother sat down, she'd pick up a bit of tatting or darning or knitting.

Me too, and I mourn the loss. I like sewing. (Plus, mass-produced clothes SUCK! Even I, a hobbyist at the "dabbler" level, know how to make 'em better than THAT!)

I made beautiful clothes when I was in high school, and college, and before I had children. I loved the creative aspect of it as much as I took pride in a well-finished seam. But it really does seem to be dying out. I've seen 2 large fabric stores near me close in the last few years.

Ooo, another proximate cause: the meme that anyone with the right level of discerning taste and ten minutes of practice can produce "gourmet" meals.

Like anything else worth doing well, it takes a level of basic knowledge and some knowledge of food chemistry. It's hard to follow the recipe for Eggs Benedict if you can't manage to poach an egg.

But there *are* the means of making a "gourmet" meal from packages and jars and the frozen food section. I can't think of something comparable in the clothesmaking venue. The closest thing I've ever seen is precut material.

What all that rambling means is that I agree with you:). And I agree, there *should* be an icon for "rambling".

That show sounds really fun, btw. I hope you weren't TOO sleep-deprived!

Oh, it was! And I made up for most of the sleep-deprivation already. Thanks!