I knitted the Jumper of Sadness in the winter of 1995, running in to 1996, when I fell ill with severe clinical depression. For six months I spent a lot of time going to see psychiatrists and counsellors and crying. And in my spare time, I knitted this enormous jumper. The repetitive movement and need to count carefully to ensure I stayed on the pattern offered some mild relief from the hell I was in. Something to think about besides suicide. As long as I had a jumper to knit, I suppose, I had a reason to live.

When I finished the jumper, sometime that spring, it was much too big for me and even much too big for my dad, who is well over six feet tall. I wore it anyway, like a giant wool hug, as the combination of anti-depressants and counseling and simply learning to cope began to kick in and I felt not recovered, but quite a lot better.

I’ve never been so ill, nor knitted another jumper, since.

When I was at my parents’ place over Thanksgiving, I found the Jumper of Sadness. It has a small moth hole in the back, but it is still big and warm and charmingly executed by my depressed teenage hands. The perfect thing to wear of an evening in my chilly flat.

It’s tempting to think that if my fourteen-year-old self could see me now, she’d say, wow, things really will get better, so I guess I’ll try to hang on.

But in fact I suspect what she actually would say is: why the hell are you wearing a fifteen-year-old sweater?

  11:14 pm  |   December 18 2011   |  22 notes   |  View comments  

Brie and I made seasonal gingerbread cookies, in Australian shapes. What.

  8:34 am  |   December 15 2011   |  2 notes   |  View comments  

I have a new bike! Regular Blogelstein readers will recall my intense love for my old bike, Sebastina, and the tragic turn of events in the late summer of 2010 when she was snatched away. Since then, I purchased a new-old bike, Juliana, who was (sadly) terrible. Riding Juliana felt very dangerous. After I left my job at Conde Nast, I left her parked outside the building for six weeks in the hopes that someone would steal her, but no one did.

But now I have a secondhand but nearly-new bike, who is called Maria, and who is beautiful: curvy and Dutch-looking and most importantly, without brakes that scream every time they’re pressed. Riding around for the last few days I realised I’d forgotten the incredible delight that I get from cycling in London. That cycling is the most reasonable and enjoyable way to get from home to, say, a meeting in Waterloo and on to work in Shoreditch. On a functional bike.

And I also forgot how being a cyclist means that you get to talk to friendly strangers in a way totally unacceptable on other forms of London transport. As I sailed across Blackfriars Bridge (not during terrifying rush hour, mind you) I did a small hoot of joy, frightening a pedestrian. And at the light, a chap on a motorbike clad in an impressive outfit of intensely weatherproof clothing looked at me and said, ‘aren’t you cold?’ and I said, as if I knew what I was talking about, ‘you warm up when you get going!’ and he said, ‘but you don’t even have any gloves!’ and I said ‘I’m really hard!’ 

It was jolly. Ever so.

(If you are thinking about becoming a skirt-sporting cyclist like me, you might like this post, about getting started.)

  8:08 am  |   December 15 2011   |  3 notes   |  View comments  

“Monday morning I like; it’s rather like the second of January. I like the banks opening and getting back.”

—

My perfect weekend: Simon Russell Beale - Telegraph

(I spend much of December looking forward to the second of January, so I liked this)

  7:56 am  |   December 14 2011   |  2 notes   |  View comments  

irishboyinlondon:

Some cool old London Transport posters on Creative Review! This message is still relevant today!

Photo: Heinz Zinram (photographer) via Creative Review/ TFL

  11:12 am  |   December 13 2011   |  126 notes   |  View comments  

I. The train is packed. Properly packed. I am resigned to the possibility that I will have to stand in the aisle for an hour. I clutch the handle on the back of the seat next to me for balance. There is a handle for clutching for balance, because people standing for an hour happens all the time: discomfort is built in to the design. 

I am hungry. Properly hungry. I’m going to Brighton for dinner, but in anticipation of not being able to last that long, have purchased a packet of Doritos at London Bridge. Cool Original flavour. Cool Original flavour is my secret shame.

Read More

  12:55 am  |   December 11 2011   |  4 notes   |  View comments  

The nice place where I do my job that happens during the day celebrated its tenth birthday this week. One of our presents was a sweet tortoise. 

  2:16 pm  |   December 9 2011   |  10 notes   |  View comments  

A man and a woman went on a date. The woman found it ‘horrific’. The man wanted to see her again. She didn’t respond to his invitations. He wrote her an email. It went viral.

‘It’s bad to play with your hair so much and make so much eye contact if you’re not interested in going out with me again.’

Most of the resultant internet banter has held up that the man in question is a complete creep. He probably is. But is what he’s articulating — extreme disappointment that someone he went on a date with isn’t interested in him, despite what he perceived to be her encouraging ‘signals’ — not something that pretty much everyone who has ever gone on a date and has not had their affection reciprocated has felt? Yes, most of us have the good sense not to write in an email that

‘I find you less appealing now (given that you haven’t returned my messages) than I did at our first date. However, I would be willing to go out with you again.’

But I’d be willing to bet that a lot of us have thought it, once in a while.

So, on that ‘we are all this mad investment banker in the darkest recesses of our hearts’ note, here are three lessons that can be learned from this:

1. If someone doesn’t call you back, it is because they’re not in to you. Much as it’s tempting to think that it’s because they broke all of their fingers and can’t dial the phone, or because they are misguided in their thinking that you are not soulmates. They don’t like you! Even thought you are exceptional!
2. But if you’re the person who doesn’t want to see someone again, tell them. Just once.  Even if they are vile. This won’t necessarily stop them from sending you crazy-ass emails, but it will make it less likely. Make your position clear. Not responding with a polite (or curt) ‘no, thank you’ is not just unkind — it increases the possibility that the unappealing person will persist. If they don’t take the polite/curt no for an answer, then do by all means ignore future correspondence.
3. If you are writing an email to someone who has rejected you romantically and you find yourself thinking, ‘gosh, I would not like it if this email was reproduced in a wide range of online media outlets’, the person you are writing it most certainly does not want to read it. So don’t send it.

  5:56 pm  |   December 7 2011   |  9 notes   |  View comments  

rachelhills:

I’m currently working on the “normality” chapter of my book, The Sex Myth: where our ideas about what’s normal come from, how they’ve changed over time, and how they impact us as individuals and as a society.

And if you’ve ever felt like, when it comes to sex and relationships, you’re…

Talk to Rachel for her interesting book!

  4:59 pm  |   December 7 2011   |  31 notes   |  View comments  

WHAT WOULD ADORNO DO?

  11:31 am  |   December 7 2011   |  1 note   |  View comments  

lifedeathtoptips:

“Need more chocolate powder” and “buy rice 4 bra” are what we know in the trade as ‘callbacks’.

England is a special place.

  12:13 pm  |   December 2 2011   |  51 notes   |  View comments  

On Tuesday I flew to Madrid for a handful of hours, for work. But I had a bit of spare time before my flight home, so I went to the Prado.

Before I went in to the gallery I stopped in the cafe because I’d consumed nothing but coffee for the past ten hours. I had a plate of tapas and a single glass of Rioja. 

The Rioja was a mistake. Rioja + anxiety + exhaustion led to mild intoxication, and the next thing I knew I was standing in a room full of masterpieces with my heart racing, thinking IT’S LIKE I’M AT A PARTY AND EVERYONE BUT ME IS WEARING A RUFF.

  3:34 pm  |   December 1 2011   |  4 notes   |  View comments  

I had sort of forgotten all about Christmas, but then today I got given this beautiful present.

  3:21 pm  |   December 1 2011   |  2 notes   |  View comments  

Anonymous asked: Wow 3 books in one day! Good for you! What's the Julian Barnes book like?

Thanks! I was on a plane/waiting for an appointment a lot. Thus the reading time. Also both the Barnes and Hustvedt are quite short.

The Barnes is great — a satisfying novella. And I like novellas very much. 

  3:43 pm  |   November 30 2011   |  View comments