Morning 'till....er, Morning?

So I pulled an all-nighter, supposedly to do the physics problem set (which I did do, thank you very much) and ended up watching House and knitting the Chevrolace. I got like 5 or 6 pattern repeats done since this morning, and I calculated how many stitches I've knit so far, it comes out to about 9,500. Maybe more.

That just makes me stop and go HOLY FUCK WHAT AM I DOING?!

Almost ten thousand of the same stitch (well, and basic variants) over and over again. Why is knitting so addictive? I could never see myself doing something ten thousand times....maybe it's just incomprehensible and knitting makes it easier to avoid big numbers.

I came across this article at some point in the recent past, and it really made me think about the way humans think about things. It's all experience, really. I mean, relativity would not have been so ground-breaking if we all moved at relativistic speeds, because it would be something so intuitive. We'd feel heavier, shorter, squatter, etc. We wouldn't have to constantly refer back to the Lorentz transformation to back up or refute our (usually-incorrect) guesses.

So maybe, through knitting, I'm getting more comfortable with the idea of big numbers. Maybe I'm getting more comfortable with visualizing shapes, with multi-variable calculus. (Haha, that last one's a long shot, but who knows?)

All I know is that when I knit I get things. It's satisfying and you end up with something satisfying. It makes me happy, that I can say I'm good at this thing and yet I'm also never perfect. But that's ok. I will always learn something more, something brilliant and useful or something mundane and superfluous.

It doesn't scare me to know that I'm never going to stop learning.
It amazes me that everything I know is built upon the simplest of stitches, and that they are all entwined in such a way that many paths lead to the same result.

Yeah, I'm being all metaphorical. I get like this about knitting though.