Sylvia's Journal

Last night we watched the third and last (as far as we know) of the three modern day Sherlock Holmes movies. They are delightful, complex and fast and so unintelligible that they leave us wondering ‘huh?’ All three require multiple viewings, and this last one (‘The Great Game’) certainly stumped me. It is about what happens when Sherlock gets bored.

Maybe it is because I was concentrating too much (though not enough) on my knitting. It was attempt # 35 or thereabouts at the same darn glove. The complexities of movie and glove interfered with each other. In the 90 minutes of the movie I unraveled and restarted the wrist section 5 times. I am working on the left hand; not because I finished the right hand (I nearly have) but because the right hand is too big; it would fit the hand of a large man, two of my fingers easily slide into the section that should hold just one; the lacy wrist part incongruously lining the giant fingers.

Although I said several times to Axel that I was going to stop this madness and start another project, with a higher chance at success, I couldn’t help myself and started all over again when the movie was over and the distractions gone. What drives me to continue this project, I wonder?

Maybe the whole thing is a metaphor for my desire to wake up Afghan men to the treasure trove of women’s talent that is in their midst. Like the gloves, I have never done it before and I know it is very difficult, and, I am learning, it requires endless stops and starts. The drive comes from vision: for both glove and women in Afghanistan I have a very clear vision of faraway success.

I came home to a house with all windows and doors wide open despite the winter weather. One of our bucharis (stoves) had misfired and filled, first Axel’s room and then all others, with diesel smoke. I found Axel sitting at the dining room table wheezing and coughing, complaining about a headache, telling me how it could have killed him if he had been asleep in his office room. That was only a theoretical possibility: he doesn’t sleep there, we don’t have a diesel stove in our bedroom and would never have one lit during the night. Still, the air quality is in our face again and would be one reason not to live too long in this country.

When I got up in the morning I noticed a dark black ring around the air purifier and its instruction book lying on the ground next to my bed. It was an unpleasant reminder of the blank gunk that gets attracted to the air purifier and that otherwise would have been in our lungs as well. That, the misfire fumes and the usual fumes that waft unnoticed through our house during the winter months. Right now we do worry a little about the concentrations of diesel particles in our lungs.