A Los Angeles writer's paean to the 'point.

摘要

Nature made me nervous as a child, SO I spent a lot of time avoiding it. It was the 1990s, and the great indoors offered so much: Nickelodeon on TV and "art" projects galore. (It seems a stretch to call the papier-mache of a Cafe du Monde coffee can art without quotation marks.) It got messy around the house, with glue adhering to fingers and flaking off on the floor, oil paint rubbing into shag carpet, and the smell of turpentine lingering like bad cologne. These pursuits, which demanded vast swaths of space and time, could not be packed for the road when my parents wanted to, say, take a family trip to Yosemite, which was my own kind of prescribed hell. I was more moved by the music playing on my Discman than by the towering sequoia groves. That's why I took up needlepoint: as something for my small, idle hands to do while in transit.