Just before last quarter finished, I found a neat little bag at the dollar store. So I bought two. One to use as a bag (the perfect size to carry a smallish knitting project, or use as a purse now that it'd getting too hot to wear a coat all the time), and one to take apart and analyse. So this evening I settled in with the seam ripper and my monkey brain, and took the thing apart.
There's an ad playing on the radio now that sort of offhandedly presumes that great musicians and artists are born that way. I can't think of any better way to devalue the years of work and study that goes into developing real skill and experience in a field than to insist that the practitioner was born that way. As if the talent were no more than luck, and the reason the rest of us don't have it is not that we didn't work as hard, but that we somehow drew the short stick in the gene pool.
