Knitting philosophy

First off, I'd like to assure you that I am not completely losing it, as I was starting to fear this week. I mean, more than usual. I work in an engineering building built in the 70's, so naturally there are very few women's restrooms (insert obligatory feminist rant here). Whenever I need to tinkle, I have to make a journey slightly shorter than that of Odysseus. Which is fine, it prevents me from melting into a lump of goo in front of my computer. But for the past few days almost every time I made a trip to the john, I heard a cat crying from somewhere. The sound didn't seem to be coming from anywhere in particular, but it was pathetic sounding, like a 'me-yowwwwwl'. No one else seemed to be noticing or reacting to it and I was remiss to bring it up to my co-workers for fear of, well, sounding nuts. I started picturing that someone like this had set up camp in some of the ductwork:


which would actually rate pretty low on the weirdness scale for the locale, because hell, it's Berkeley. Coming back from the little gal's room today, I decided to step outside for a stretch because it's gorgeous weather here right now (sorry Wisconsiners) and as the door closed behind me, it creaked a "me-yowwwl". I stared at it and realized I wasn't crazy, just stupid.

But what really stuck in my craw today (well, knitting-wise anyway, I'm sure there is lots of other stuff in my craw right now, like this or this) is some advice that I read on a how-to website that shall remain nameless. It had a paragraph about yarn selection, which boiled down to "choose the loudest/most bizarre colors you can find, so everybody will know it's home-made". Which is distasteful to me on two counts, one being that I lived through the '80s once and have no desire to bring back loud colors--


but more importantly, my overarching goal with knitting is to create something that is unique, but that no one will ever suspect is home-made. If a stranger (a non-knitter, because we can smell our own) ever said to me "Did you knit that yourself?" I would breathe in the sweet scent of failure. No matter how kind the tone, it would sound like this to me: [disdainful look, speaker wrinkles nose] "Did you knit [spat as though the word tastes bad] that yourself?" I want them to ask "From what expensive designer store did you acquire such an item??" but I'll settle for "Is that from Macy's?"