For the last twenty minutes I’ve been trying to get my hotspot to work so I could blog on my laptop. Alas, for whatever reason, it’s currently defunct, so I’m blogging on my phone, using my thumbs to punch in one letter at a time. What a drag. What a serious drag. I hope I don’t get a callous.

This afternoon while most of America was eating cheese dip and preparing for the Superbowl, I went to the gym to rehab my knee and work out my upper body. As today was my second time this week following this regimen, I’m really surprised I don’t have pecs yet. Geez, some things take forever. And as if that weren’t disappointing enough, when I came home I pulled out a box of medjool dates for a snack, and the sticker on the box said, “Had a date lately?” I thought, Do you have to rub it in? Shit, a single guy can’t even eat a healthy snack without having his lack of a love-life thrown in his face. By a fruit, no less.

For the record, I’ve NEVER had this problem with chocolate cake.

This may come as a surprise, but I’m not a football fan. So while everyone else was wondering if Adam Levine would take a knee during his performance, I took a nap. I did, however, wake up in time for the half-time show, which I watched while I knitted.

Recently my friend Kara asked if I was learning to knit in order to get some sort of gay merit badge.

The answer is yes.

A couple things. In a previous post I said my current knitting project, a pot holder, would eventually have 36 rows. That was (an unintentional) lie. It’s going to have 60. Anyway, today I did twelve rows, so now I’ve done a total of 28. Almost halfway there. My big hangup today was that I noticed a mistake I made a few days ago. I guess I dropped a stitch or knitted instead of purled or something. Honestly, it’s not a big deal. You probably wouldn’t even notice it if I showed you. But I noticed it wasn’t perfect.

Instead of ripping out the entire damn thing and starting over, I forced myself to keep going. After all, this is supposed to be for fun. Plus, I kept thinking about all the hundreds of mistakes I’ve made dancing through the years and how much I’ve learned from them. Indeed, mistakes are necessary when we’re figuring things out. And as my therapist says, “You’ll be done figuring things out when you’re six feet under.”

In other words, mistakes are simply part off living. Like it or not, they come with the job.

The other thing that encouraged me to continue knitting sans perfection was thinking about this blog. That is, in over 600 blog posts, I’m SURE I’ve made plenty of mistakes. I proof each post three times, and I know mistakes still slip through. But whatever. This project doesn’t need to flawless, each word spelled correctly, each sentence punctuated just so. Indeed, the greatest benefit I’ve gotten from writing every day can’t even be measured in terms of the finished project because the greatest benefit has been internal. Likewise, whether you write, dance, or knit, it’s not about the actual thing or what you produce. It’s about how doing the thing changes you. It’s about what you learn and how much you grow.