Partly Cloudy, 64°
Too good to just shut up and pay attention to lecture like everyone else, Anna Mason '11 has been knitting in her classes since freshman year of high school. To date, she's made 32 scarves people wear only in her presence, 42 hats, tragically lost, and one Itty-Bitty-Kitty sweater that Mr. Muffins swears the dry cleaners must have thrown up on.
But last Friday, Mason decided she was too creative and multifaceted to just sit there, knitting shit, while other portions of her innovative self lay idle. Truly maximizing her potential while "still paying attention!" Mason's posterior is now in on the fun.
"With both ends of me working on my creations, I can now get twice as much done," Mason insists. "But it's a little tiring since now I have to stand up the whole time."
Despite the complete lack of note-taking, Mason is actually doing quite well in her classes.
"I could put up with the smugness of her knitting; that was fine," said Jeremy Adlands '10, a former classmate. "Assholes are nothing unusual around here. But when her actual asshole started being an asshole, I had to draw the line. As if the visual weren't distracting enough, they started getting into little spats because her better half is clearly a superior knitter. He learned how to purl in, like, one lecture. Right now he's working on a pair of booties for a baby shower."
Fellow classmates say it "might have been kinda hot" had Mason not been about a three, according to a Herald poll conducted last Monday (pollsters approached every third person, and the poll has a 3.6 margin of error with 95% confidence).
Accordingly, Mason is the only remaining person attending lecture except for that one perv in the back, who isn't even a Brown student. Once she started knitting on test days as well, Mason climbed to the second-highest grade in the class, after her rear, who "is pretty good at memorization, not to toot his own horn."
Mason maintains that, while she misses her classmates, she should not be denied the right to exercise her kinesthetic learning style. "If I knit you some mittens, can we just forgive and forget?" she implored of Brown.
Mason's teachers show mixed responses. "Sometimes my students doodle in class, which is perfectly acceptable as long as the pictures of me are flattering, and that I can un-tag them if need be," said Professor of Physics Dan Brown G'86. "And is knitting really all that different? As far as her caboose goes, Brown has a very strict anti-discrimination policy, which I am happy to enforce. I treat all my students the same."
Kelly Shipland, Professor of Anthropology, disagreed. "No, knitting's worse than doodling because of the extra self-righteousness that comes with creating practical output," she said.
Mason is now the second-highest ranked player on her intramural volleyball team, and the second-most popular member in her a-capella group.
