Spirits, Guardians, Figments and Projections

This was going to be titled "The more I learn, the less I know," and it was going to be a fairly anguished post about the current struggles I was having with knowledge, purpose, and being so exhausted by the world of human beings that I was ready to quit.

The War For Christmas had raged on my Facebook feed, among those who wanted to put the Christ back in Christmas, those who want the other score of celebrations in December to get equal recognition, and those who believe that the public expenditure on trees and lights could be better spent on education and health care.
Being on several mailing lists for First Nations culture, I was also inundated, at American Thanksgiving, with reminders that the festival celebrates the invasion of North America by English colonists who rarely kept their word. The word 'genocide' popped up a lot. And I got into a hating mood, which is rarely good even if it's for a real cause. I got to hating the celebrations and symbols of the dominant culture here, which is very WASP; got very sensitive about the visible presence of Christian groups on my campus, of the churches I go past on my daily bus route, of the stoopid Christmas music, of the presence of Christmas trees and nothing else but the occasional token menorah. There is a place for that sensitivity, but it was just being... well, hate. I was even glaring at the pretty tree set up in the foyer of our apartment building.

I had also spent quite some months worrying about the outward forms and names of things, and about 'doing it right'. If I'm going to look into Pagan religions and I'm interested in this and that culture, I should research carefully and learn everything I can, right? So I don't become one of those unintentionally irreverent New Agers who act very learned but are actually hanging up decorations that read "idiot foreigner" in Sanskrit or something. I 'chameleon' far too easily - mirroring what I hear and read, unconsciously thinking that I must obey whatever I come across if it seems to be from a good source - so by reading and enjoying a Recon source uncritically, I was absorbing the idea of doing it right, not as a personal choice but as the only way to be. This is no fault of said source! I can't even hear an accent without having that accent flavour my own speech for the next fifteen minutes.

Thankfully, I'm back to myself now. And there's something I have to do. This is the point where you commit me to the loony bin if you're ever going to...

Everyone, this is Nix.

Well, this isn't Nix. This is the best-seeming picture off of Google of a red wolf, a sub-species thought to derive from an intermixture of grey wolves and coyotes. But it seemed to capture him reasonably well, as well as a photograph realistically can.

Nix is my daemon, as in Philip Pullman/Golden Compass daemon. I'm even fighting with myself as I write this, firmly telling myself that you don't have to have read the books to understand, and I don't have to link you to anything, because my interpretation is the one that's important right now, and not anyone else's, because no one but me can explain what I believe. And what I believe is that Nix is my daemon, which is somewhere between a Jungian animus/anima other-half-of-the-soul and a spirit guide.
I do not believe that there is a physical wolf tagging along behind me, as there would be if I lived in the world of Golden Compass (although that would be AWESOME). But a few years ago, maybe 2008 or so, I was poking around and found a forum where people had expanded on the idea from the trilogy... and turned it into a surprisingly believable thing. And I thought about it for a while, and I did some research on different species... and I found Nix, stepping fully formed from a corner of my mind that I'd never looked in before.

'Nix' as a name is nothing incredibly significant. It's the last name of Garth Nix, who wrote The Ragwitch, a book I didn't even finish. Yet somehow the name stuck, like glitter. I've asked Nix about it, and he seems to like it well enough.

Nix is a male red wolf. The traits of red wolves generally mirror mine: they run in smaller packs than grey wolves, eat smaller prey, and so on. They're a #2, something I've always known I am; this isn't a self-esteem issue, this is a realistic fact. I am not big and powerful, and I cannot take down an elk. The species... fit.
As well: my second roleplay character ever was a Harry Potter character with the Animagus form of a wolf - except I always pictured him as turning out very leggy and lanky, with more brownish than grey fur. Lo and behold, this is what red wolves look like... So Nix had been hanging around for a lot longer than I thought. I just hadn't looked for him yet.

Nix has a wry sense of humour, can be a little snooty on occasion, and says smart-ass things I want to smack him for sometimes. But he is a guide: when I need him to be serious, he snaps to attention immediately, and almost always says what I really needed to hear when I ask him something. Sometimes his responses surprise or startle me; other times I already knew the answer, I just needed to hear it from somebody else. He kept my spirits up during my shifts at the Book Depot, which were pretty cold and lonely sometimes; he'd curl up on a stack of book boxes nearby and watch me work.

Now, when I use the word 'say', I do not mean speaking. I don't hear a voice through my ears, or even a voice in my head. If I were to try to write it down, it wouldn't have quotation marks around it, not even italics. I only know that it's not me because the response will sometimes interrupt me halfway through my question. Because I do not, otherwise, argue with myelf. And because, as I mentioned above, the responses will sometimes surprise me.
When I speak of some action by Nix, I do not mean - as I said before - that there is a real wolf in the room with me. That would be absurd. But I have a... sense of where he is, if I think about it; I could point, and it would be pretty consistent. He doesn't suffer the limitations of a physical form (although he complains about the rain anyway). I don't see anything, and rarely even get a mental visual; but I know that it is happening, in the same way that when a dream begins, I know the starting premises rather than having to puzzle it out along the way. In the same way that I know where my feet are even when I can't see them.

I've just listed some pretty weird things. Like I said, this is the point where you lock me away for life if you're ever going to. But the funny thing, especially after I've made so much noise about trying to find a path to follow for so many months, is that I don't believe in Nix. I know that he's there. He's not intrusively there; I have to ask him to come out (and sometimes, if I'm moody, he refuses), and concentrate on him to keep him around. But he's there.

What is he exactly? I could spend a very long time trying to figure out if he's some projection of the under-used parts of my personality, or an adult-sized imaginary friend, or some other psychological figment. I could spend even longer trying to fit him into this or that belief system; an awful lot of systems could handle something like Nix in theory, although in practice he doesn't usually act that other-worldly. ...He just started laughing at the very concept, although he won't (and can't), of course, tell me where he is from, besides that he is 'from me and also from elsewhere'. Helpful, hm?

He's certainly not the only Being I feel is out there. There is Something that I am lighting a little oil lamp for, in the kitchen, with nothing more than vegetable oil and string for a wick; but despite the tininess of the outward form, the sense of putting a little something out there to honour... well, Something.
That's as far as I've gotten. I'm open to more if and when it happens. I won't push; pushing will, if anything, make it happen slower.

Spoon Theory

To update VERY briefly from my last, long-ago post: I did get in to see the counsellor, twice. I wrote up most of two separate posts about it, then never finished either. Basically, I ranted about how I needed my parents to be responsible for themselves so I could stop worrying about them; then I realized, over the next couple of days - rather as they have, I'm sure, forced themselves to do for me - that they *are* adults, and whatever they do is their choice. They are not asking for my help, and I have only a limited responsibility to bail them out unasked. This required a deep breath, and coming to grips with that the choices they are making right now may cut years off the time I have with them. And that this is not my responsibility. I was nearly sick afterwards, but after it settled out, that... fury I mentioned in my last post seems to have dissipated, and has not really returned.

Now that that's done, I want to talk to you about spoons. But you need to read But You Don't Look Sick first, for context, or else you'll think I've gone totally insane.


The author of this posting may have invented the best idea ever for explaining chronic illness. I was talking to one of you, my dear patient readers, a few days ago about Asperger's and how I believe I have a mild case of it; here is a much better explanation of why I hold said belief than I was able to provide before.

To synopsize from the article/blog post: 'Normal people', especially young ones, have a nearly limitless reserve of energy. (Note: I don't think I know very many of these so-called 'normal people' personally, but I know they exist because I see them in my class seminars, talking about how they stayed up all night drinking and partying and cramming.) This energy and capacity for 'getting stuff done' is symbolized as an unlimited supply of spoons.

Those in the tails of the standard normal distribution (read: not in the middle of the bell curve), however, have a finite number of spoons to spend in a day. Depending on their circumstances, they may have a fair number, or maybe only a very few.

According to the author of the posting, her friend, to whom she was explaining this (with the aid of real spoons), looked at her in a kind of horrified sadness and asked how on earth she manages to live a life of counting her spoons. Now, I may be jumping to conclusions, but I infer from this that the 'normal healthy person' 's reaction is generally going to be roughly similar to this - rather than nodding in agreement.

Well, that's okay. I already knew I wasn't a healthy, normal person. So let me explain to you the spending power of a spoon in my world.

Now, I obviously don't have lupus, unlike the author, so the situation is so incredibly different that I would never presume to know what she's going through. My body is so functional. My hair doesn't pull out by the brushful and my fingers generally bend when I tell them to. It's a blessing that I should cherish more.

I spent a fair bit of last night and this morning puzzling it out, and I think I have my answer. It is not so much physical tasks that cost me spoons, but rather mental/organizational and social/emotional ones. If I have incorporated a set of actions into a routine, the entire routine only takes a little effort. However, if something is new or out of the ordinary, its spoon cost can skyrocket.

Thus, I can get up in the morning; get dressed, (not to be graphic) use the washroom, put on my shoes and coat, check my laptop, get P her clothes and something to drink, and help both of us get out the door, all for maybe half a spoon or less.
However, if I have to a) shave b) wash my face c) choose my clothing by any criteria other than grabbing one thing at random from each of separate drawers d) plan and make breakfast e) make a phone call f) pack something unusual g) take some painkillers... or a host of other things beyond the routine... it starts costing me. If I had to do all of those things in the same morning, it might take me three hours, because I have to approach EACH UNUSUAL TASK with a kind of conscious intention and planning that chews through an incredible amount of time.

It is now my routine to be outside in time to catch my bus, and after I catch that bus my responsibility is over until I reach class. That's pretty much spoon-free. However, if I had to spend extra time to get ready, the entire schedule could be off - and then I'm in uncharted territory again. If I miss the first bus, I have to jog the couple of kilometres to where the next bus in my route picks up from, and that's a spoon. If there's nowhere to sit on the bus and I have to reach up to the bars way above my head (since I'm short) to stay stable as we go on the highway to my university, that can be another spoon. All in all, one five-minute addition to my morning routine can leave me exhausted and sore before I even start class.

I calculate that approximately each hour that I spend at school costs about one spoon, depending on the activity - and, more importantly, the environment. Some lecture halls are better than others; some have a bank of fluorescent lights that seem to glare into my eyes no matter where I sit or if I sit anywhere but a select few seats, or that flicker - or the speakers buzz. Add up to a spoon for every one of these environmental influences present, per hour. Then, time spent not in class can be restful - such as if I find a padded bench somewhere quiet - or it can be worse - such as if I somehow get stuck in crowded hallways.

A Monday requires me to walk to the bus; I then spend 8am-4pm at school. A bad Monday could be 10-14 spoons' worth of energy expenditure and physical exertion and pain, and that's if I didn't have to open my mouth.

When I get home, if I know what I'm making for dinner - and if the kitchen is clean - and if I still have any energy left - I can swing right into cooking and it barely takes any 'work'. Still some, but I wouldn't call it a whole spoon. If I ran out of spoons yesterday before I could do any dishes, though, and the counter is covered in dirty cups; or if we have to - while getting increasingly hungry - hammer out a plan for a nutritionally useful meal that we can both stomach despite varying levels of nausea, which tends to then lead to me trying to cook a piece of meat straight out of the freezer, with all the problems that entails - dinner could be a multi-spoon endeavour all in itself. But eating something junky loses a spoon, too, because that means that my entire nutrition for the day was half a glass of juice or milk in the morning plus whatever I scrounge in the evening.

Then homework is extra. I've managed to make my statistics homework into a routine, so that's now a relatively easy task. My essays are making me want to cry, though, because I'm trying desperately to learn "how to write good papers in university" and I'm learning this year that THERE IS NO SUCH THING. There are no rules. Each grader in each course has a completely different set of requirements. "You're not citing enough!" then "I want to see some original thought! Don't cite every sentence." "Make a strong argument, only use enough facts to back it up," then "I want a review of the current state of knowledge - you're not presenting a case, just the facts." I need some consistency! How am I supposed to learn if the lesson is always changing? As I'm trying to emphasize here, I need solid rules to follow and as much routine as possible, and this is exactly the opposite. The social aspect of this - the confusion, anger, anxiety and frustration this is generating in me towards my professors and the university system in general - means it's costing me a spoon just to *think* about any of my homework besides my statistics.

There are what I call 'meta-school' things - handling our OSAP grants and loans, choosing courses, planning exams. These involve dealing with officialdom, and are never routine, so they take at least a spoon per effort.

Every two weeks I have to get a fresh injection of testosterone. The process of remembering to pack the vial, get to my appointment on time, make nice with the nurse, get stuck with a needle, and remembering to put the vial away again when I get home probably totals a spoon. It's reducing slowly as it becomes ever more routine. Having to go get a new vial when the old one ran out recently, however, was such a time and energy expenditure - planning (1), phoning the pharmacy (1), getting to the pharmacy (1) - that I had to move the actual appointment to the next day.

One of these posts is probably two to three spoons, considering the hours I spend typing and thinking, and attempting the difficult process of expressing my thoughts and feelings in words that other people will understand.

Spending face-time with other people might be the heaviest expenditure at all. I have to carefully craft a plan - I use that word on purpose. The reason for visiting (I can't just 'drop in', it doesn't work in my head). A way of asking to visit or to be visited. Food or drink to be consumed; I may have to pack us our own food because of dietary restrictions. I have to plan how to get there, tally up how long it will take; frequently it would take more time on the bus to get to a friend's house than I/we can spend actually visiting. Is this bus accessible? If not, P can't bring her wheelchair. It can take me half an evening to plan; carrying it out is then like winning the Olympics. Whoopee! I got there on time! I didn't get lost! I made it through a two-hour social interaction! I made it home before midnight! The entire process guarantees that I'm 'borrowing against' my spoons for the next day - so a quiet visit for tea will have me as laid up tomorrow as someone else's wild party.

I'll calculate that I have - as a very rough estimate - maybe 20 spoons to spend on an average day. As you can see, social/emotional tasks and tasks involving planning, rather than following a well-trodden routine, are my big 'expenses'.

This. This is why I think I have Aspergers. Not because I prefer books to people. Not because I have a limited diet. Not because I have a crappy memory for faces. Not because buzzing lights hurt me. Not because being crowded in a hallway makes me intensely - yet indescribably - uncomfortable. Not because I will sit and debate the definition of a word instead of understanding the emotional message behind it. Although all of these are potentially symptoms, reported by a vast majority of people with AS.
But because the core things that people with AS have trouble with are the things that cost me spoons. Time management. Social interactions. Planning outside a routine.

So. As the author of the posting said, please: feel honoured (just a little tiny bit) that I'm spending this time with you. You're worth the price.

Spilling Over

I had every intention this morning to, right now, be playing my Diablo III starter/demo version, and gleefully lett my mind shut off but for the simple tasks of avoiding and killing monsters, collecting treasure, and enjoying the intricate graphics. Instead, it seems that  the gods have a different plan; one way or another, I couldn't get the blasted game to connect to the internet (a requirement) where I was, so instead I'm on a bus (with no internet at all) grumpily moving one step closer to my eventual destination today at the dentist's office. Meanwhile I'll try D3 again at my university, which is between here and the dentist's.

But here I am, with eff all to do for twenty minutes. Well, not really; I've been to my first four classes for this term, and now know about all my assignments from now 'til December. (Forgive any overuse of swearing; I'm already leaving out a lot of 'goddamn's.) I will never, between now and May, really be able to claim that I have nothing to do. I love (not) how unless a person is paying their own way through university and has the money up front to buy their textbookss a week before class starts, we all automatically start a week behind on readings... As an OSAP (Ontario Student Assistance Program) student, my book money might not be here for another two weeks, putting me even further behind. I'd love to be that great student who's read all the required material ahead of time, but it's just not financially feasible.

Why, you may be asking, is this so unstructured - just a sort of multi-topic rant about whatever's on the surface of my mind? It's related to that I haven't done a post in weeks. I'm spilling over. The bag's so full that even touching the zipper produces little noises of ripping fabric from the shift in pressure. I can't start talking about anything to anyone because everything would explode at once and it would become an attack against them without me even meaning to. Instead I'm at about the point of the song The Hit (Smile Empty Soul; don't laugh):
Just take me away from
These people
Who want shit
From me
Just tell them
I'm busy
So fuck off
And die

I'm moody. I'm bitchy. At times I'm actively angry. Someone just let a door go instead of holding it as I started to walk through, and I almost... I'm not sure. The urge, the impulse, the desire to rage was there, but I don't know what form it would have taken if I'd let myself act on it. I'm like a pan of extremely hot oil: there's almost nothing to see when I'm left alone, but touch me with a drop of water and I will spit. I will take your face off.

And then in other hours or on other days, I'm fine. This will be even choppier than I expected because I'm writing it over the course of at least two days. Before this paragraph was written Tuesday morning, before a dentist appointment; by the time the appointment was over, the anger had drifted away. I found an injured swallowtail butterfly and carried it fifteen minutes to my parents' garden, in hope that it might live better there than on the sidewalk; I talked to the crossing guard at my old school, who has been there since my brother, 17 years older than I, was in elementary school. I calmed. Then, later yesterday I hit my third major mood at this point, which is depressed and overwhelmed; I thought for a few seconds about checking my OSAP loan status, for instance, and felt my strength drain away like someone had opened a tap in my leg and drained out all my ATP.

Today I've managed exhaustion to the point of cheer, irritable, nervous, and driven to deal with some of the otherwhelming stuff (thankfully not feeling all of those at once, but rather in sequence). I would like very much to only think about my Dungeons and Dragons campaign and a planned Falling Skies-based roleplaythat are about the only two things I'm looking forward to right now... Unfortunately I instead am worrying about my classes, my homework, our books that I can't buy yet, our finances, my wisdom teeth, an eye exam, a tax return that hasn't come back yet, P's transport to and from school, a doctor's note to prescribe her the massages she needs to be functional without pain, my parents, a vet visit for our kitten who was supposed to get his first rabies shot two months ago, dinner, the inevitable fine-motor tasks that P will be assigned that she cannot physically do, the complete lack of a meal schedule, housework, needing a new binder because my current one is becoming non-functional, and how many opportunities I'm missing to make and maintain friendships and connections and get involved on campus because I have to go home and cook dinner every night. How many things I'm neglecting in the process of keeping two people fed, clothed, and out the door. I hear P talk about getting a third cat next year, and wonder how the hell that's supposed to work because I already don't think we're giving our current two enough attention.

That's completely leaving out questions like the ethics of buying from discount stores when I know the products are made in slave-labour conditions, or how to convince our city to make more bus routes wheelchair-accessible, or the nature of love and friendship, or whether there are gods or Gods, or whether all good character authors/writers are just a little bit schizophrenic. It leaves no time for me to learn to sew, research two-spirits in either Cherokee or Mik'maw culture, or do anything much on my own time that I would consider improving myself. My 'on my own time' is here, right now, on the bus for twenty minutes at a time. I barely have any time to read. Or hike. Or do a bit of real computer gaming; these are things that I used to consider the core of my activities. I'm ashamed of how little I have read in the past five years that was printed on paper and/or more than four pages long, that no one forced me to read; I used to go through novels in a day and a half. I haven't drawn anything more complicated than a tiny pen sketch in my notes for... years? I appear to have become an adult, one who can deal with the outside world and keep the utilities from being cut off, but I think I lost something in the process.

I hate the amount of time I spend mulish and resentful about other people's demands on my time. I will sometimes set myself needless tasks just for the backwards satisfaction of refusing to accomplish them. This isn't the person I thought I was, or that I wanted to be.

The good news is that I have finally, finally, booked myself an appointment with the free counselling service offered to students at my university. It's in about a week and a half - Friday after next. I have this worry that I'm not even going to be able to open my mouth, because I've spent so long denying and glossing over and sucking up and saying the positive thing that I might not actually be able to access how I'm really feeling with my vocal chords any more. The backpack is so full that the zippers are jammed, and nothing can make it out without a serious application of effort.

I feel done like dinner, which is a really terrible way to start the year. Yet I will go home and warm up some supper for us and send some emails and be sort-of-efficient, and watch an episode of Falling Skies and go to bed and never have said more than one word about this to anyone. And I will repeat this until the end of the year unless the counselling changes something.

Cough Syrup

"Be grateful for the opportunity to wake up every morning." I just wrote that a few days ago.



Yesterday was my 23rd birthday. Yay me. I got a huge response on Facebook and a few well-wishes on TUL. I appreciate that.

Yesterday I did not go hiking, nor did I eat exactly what I wanted, nor did I get dinner cooked for me, nor did I get to avoid all my chores. I did not get to be alone with the sky, or play geeky board games with family, nor did I arrange an X-Men movie marathon.

We brought our kitten to my parents' for a playdate, and with the intention of playing geeky board games, listening to Loreena KcKennitt CDs, and having a good time.

So my parents' car had a nearly flat tire, and we had to stop to pump it up. Toki (the kitten) was freaked out for the first two hours of the visit, even though he's enjoyed similar visits before. Mom left for her yoga class for several hours mid-visit. P had an exam to study for (which she's writing right now; hence I have time to write) and my dad was too tired to do much.

I ended up batting between encouraging Toki to play with the other kittens, helping Phina study, and stretching pizza dough in the kitchen by myself. While mom was out, I made an innocuous comment that resulted in a revealing conversation about how my dad's antidepressants are doing shit all.

After we got home that evening, the night wrapped up with a mutual friend tearing up P's faith in humanity by yet again going back on a promise, her nearly crying, and me taking eight teaspoons of DM cough syrup for a non-existent cough.
I think the little adjustment to reality that that much dextromethorphan creates finally wore off about twenty minutes before I started writing this (although it could all just be sleep loss, and I'd have no idea).

I ought to be feeling guilty and worried about this. I hadn't done something like this for over a year - I think the last time had been soon after we moved out of Toronto. I had switched to cough syrup somewhere in March of that year; I had finally run through the obscenely huge bottle of liquid codeine that P's dentist had given her when her wisdom teeth came out (she used two teaspoons and swore off it, saying she didn't like how it made her feel and that it tasted like cherry shit). Once the cough syrup was gone too, I stopped.

It was a direct response to stress from other people, not for fun. I was under a lot of pressure from many directions right then, and I was out of coping. P was very upset when I told her, obviously.

I realized some time in this last year that I don't need counselling or therapy. If I could run away and live in a cabin by myself two hundred miles north of anywhere, my problems would vanish. Except then I'd be lonely. I do have attachments. Usually they do me good, but right now they're making me take cough syrup. The people I love and care about most could use some therapy, but I am actually pretty much okay when left to my own devices. But none of them are getting any therapy, so instead I had some cough syrup.

I'm not guilty and worried about this. I'm not feeling a heck of a lot of anything, except a bit cold and tired. Motivation to write my Dungeon Master post is a bit tanked right now. I really want to go back to sleep as soon as possible and see if things improve, but going back to sleep will not make P stop seeing rejection everywhere and will not get my dad off medications that are only making him worse, nor will it give him a job that doesn't suck.
He admitted yesterday that the back injury he suffered last October is essentially healed. He just feels like too much shit to go back to work. I don't even know whether they actually fired him or whether he's just on some kind of indefinite, unpaid, un-benefitted leave of absence. It doesn't matter; I think he's fired himself internally. NuComm is a shithole and I can't blame him for not wanting to go back there.

I'm kind of trying this morning, though. There's an anger swirling around deep in my mind (anger is nearly invisible to me, by the way, which might be an excuse to see one of the free university counsellors) and I think part of it is directed at him for throwing himself away. Putting up a good front of daily functionality is not enough, sorry. I don't want my father to just act like he's doing all right, I want him to deal with what's fucking him up.
I also want him to take one of my score of suggestions for a first step of action, besides getting the kittens. Yes, they are making an improvement, but that's not enough. He's playing with them and caring for them, but it hasn't gotten him to move that step further and (for instance) water the house plants - which used to be his pride and joy. I'm watching him let them die because he can't make the effort, and my sympathy is wavering. It's not that I care any less how he feels - this is me caring. I want him to be better, I don't want him to suffer.

The urge to smash something is overwhelming.

I don't know how to correct this. I don't know how to correct for this. I don't think that I can or should walk away and ignore this, go on with life as usual, but it seems like I'm supposed to - like I'm being encouraged to. Nobody else wants to look at it, to touch it, to deal with it, probably because it hurts too much and they don't want to share my cough syrup.

It took some deciding to go with the Glee version of this song. The original music video is just too weird, and Darren Criss does a good job (although the original performer has a reality to his physical performance and expression that Darren Criss could only dream about). The important part, however, is the context of where they used the song in the show: one of the characters getting 'caught' as gay and ending up trying to hang himself. I cannot understand this song except in context of frustration, confusion, lost opportunities, and longing for an unreachable better existence.

Writing this post is my way of reaching out to you through the screen, and I'm loath to stop writing and tell it to actually publish. Please; I don't mind if you feel the need to pass some sort of judgement. Say it to me, don't just think it. Care enough to act. Make a suggestion. Send me a hug. Anything. Just be honest about it. I've had too much of people hiding behind a pleasant facade of functionality for now.

Roofless Pillars in an Empty Grove

Someone (you know who you are) recently posted a blog about the pillars of their practice, and invited others to be thoughtful in the same vein. It fit in wonderfully with what I had written the day before about I thought for a few moments about replying with the body of this posting, but realized that it would be much more suited for a post all its own.
(I always have trouble with responding to other peoples' written thoughts. I want to keep my replies about them and their thoughts, but usually what occurs to me to write is something about my thoughts, experiences or difficulties about that same general topic. I don't want to draw attention to myself on someone else's stage!
...At the same time, as I write these, I'm perfectly happy to let you, my readers, ramble on about nearly anything in my comments. I think I may be holding myself to a different standard...)

So, the body of this post. I started thinking about the things I already do, and the things I might do, and the things I would like to start doing. In terms of practicing, I mean. Before researching, before committing myself to making another groups' practices meaningful to me, this is the sort of stuff I do and would do if I had the time. A lot of it feels very un-spiritual.

• Light a candle before going to bed. (It is a very small tea candle, in a tall candle-holder, on a very wide stove.) I'm not sure what this is in aid of. Maybe to honour the night; maybe a prayer to wake up in the morning. Maybe it's just practice being mindful. Current, as of the last four days.
• Walk (or sit) in a green space every day; the greener the better. Hug a tree. Forest grounds me in a way that nothing else does. It helps me let go of petty personal troubles and the equally petty problems of human society, alike.
• Greet the stars every night. The moon, too, if she's up.
• Track the moon's cycles.
• Pay more attention to all of nature's cycles. I want to have a sense of when the apples will be ripe, when Samhain is coming, when the leaves will fall, when the first snowdrops will sprout. Time gets away from me too easily.
• Stay focused. Do things because I intend to, not because of some outside push or on a whim or by accident. Have all the threads of myself gathered into both hands, like the reins of a powerful chariot.
• Keep a detailed calendar.
• Be kind and considerate.
• Extend the same benefit of the doubt to both myself and every other person. If the action harms no one, then do as you will.
• Always be learning.
• Keep a garden.
• Be prepared for anything within reason. Keep a good sense of humour when Murphy strikes.
• Be grateful for the opportunity to get up every morning.

I recognize some of this as Wiccan, more from unspecified pagan sources; some just straight philosophy, some organizational, and some appears rather Boy Scout. It's not complete, but it already seems like too many 'things' for every day! I'll have to re-examine this in a few days, and see what I missed, which things I might actually try to incorporate, and which I'm already doing and don't even realize.

The Things You Believe, The Things You Know

I'd touched on this in one of my first postings. I was trying, not even to unravel, but just to find a thread end in the huge tangle that is me + irrational religious spiritual beliefs.
...Yeeeeah. Apparently the atheist critic in my head is still trolling strong. Hell, I haven't even gotten off the Brock Atheist Group on Facebook yet. I've been taught so strongly, fiercely even, to examine beliefs for flaws in logic - to slice and dice with Occam's Razor, the philosophy stating that any argument is stronger if it doesn't have to involve the supernatural - that I tend to fall back into that thought pattern quickly if I don't keep its opposite fresh in my mind. Since I didn't post anything for a while here, I've been drifting.


It's a danger. As soon as I get something written down, it's out of my head, as if I solved something about it even when I didn't.

So...
I'm coming at things from a different angle - again, one I touched on weeks ago. Despite the Razor neatly organizing many parts of my world, there are others that completely escape its touch. And maybe if I write them down, I can show them to my neocortex and be like, "See? You do believe in fairies. Now STFU."

(My apologies for the writing style of this one. It's not terribly late, and I've only been up for twelve hours, but I am terribly tired. Or headachey. Or something. But I'm not missing this opportunity to write.)

So, let's take a look at these 'irrational' beliefs - the things that survive despite that label because I know that they are so, no matter what logic says.

1. My dad has seen ghosts. He once sat in the lap of a ghost, as a child. He picked up a hitchhiking ghost.
2. Ghost, or possibly some other type of spirit, cats exist. They live in houses where cats have lived and been loved for years. I am not sure whether they are directly the spirits of the cats that lived and died there, or other spirit cats, or other forces which simply choose to take the form of cats for easy viewing.
3. Poltergeists exist. They particularly enjoy hiding things that you sort of need right now, and that are going to piss you off if you can't find them, but that aren't essential to your survival. ...Probably. It's funny to see you get frustrated, not so funny to watch you freeze to death. The poltergeist will eventually return the item when it sees fit, which is only going to be some time after you give up on ever seeing the item again.
4. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. (Accepting this fact is part of the worship of Murphy.)
5. I saw a fairy outside my window once. It was a little glowy yellow light, maybe... two inches across, based on the glance I got? It wasn't just out of the corner of my eye - but when I blinked, it was gone. I have no other explanation for what I saw. Besides...
6. There are plenty of fairies in my parents' back garden, and that's where my bedroom window faced when I saw the fairy light.
7. The basement that we used to live in had until recently been home to a very angry man, and the place was black with unpleasant energies. We had to cleanse it once or twice yearly, and I marked up a Norse protective rune (I think it was a World Tree, but I can't remember) above every entrance and window for good measure. Without these efforts, P and I spent sleepless nights huddled up, staring at the corners of the room in fear of some unnameable thing.
8. Something came into my parents' house on, or with, the stuff inherited from my grandma Eve (which itself had come, barely touched, from my Great-Aunt Virginia). Or maybe it came off the nasty furniture moving guys who had come in for the day at about the same time. I suddenly couldn't sleep a night or two after it came in, and found myself drawn to look at the pile of stuff in the living room in the very late night... then suddenly had to book it (backwards) down the hall to my room and slam the door, and stuff the crack under my door so that 'it' couldn't get in. The fear was intense. Mom helped me do a banishing ritual the next morning, and... well, it was fine henceforth.
9. All animals and trees have spirits. I can hug a tree, if it's the right tree and I'm in the right mood, and fit into it like it's hugging me back. I can feel... something, and it calms me down and roots me back into the soil where I belong. I try to remember to always thank the tree afterwards.
10. Anything that is unique has a certain value; it has brought Dust - life - ness - into the universe. This is the stuff missing when things are too well organized, or too sterile, or too efficient; it is the opposite of barren. Efficiency can be endlessly reproduced, but something unique, once destroyed, can never be put back together quite the same... This includes people, animals, plants, books, movies, and even the way you arranged your bookshelf. It is stuff, 'information', and once lost it is gone. Thus, it is valuable. (If you haven't read the His Dark Materials series, the first book of which is The Golden Compass, you need to. Now! They're amazing, and they should probably get their own post here sometime. They're where the idea of Dust comes from.)  I used to hate throwing out anything that had words or images on it and that wasn't obviously mass-produced.
11. Good things will come back to you. Bad things will come back to you manyfold, although it may take a long time for it to show up. This is sort of like karma, but not exactly. Real karma is looking beyond the immediate rewards-punishments system this seems to be, and realizing that movement towards enlightenment leads to more comfortable lives and movement away from enlightenment leads to lives meant to teach a lesson. Thus, - I dunno, rapists are clearly not learning what they need to from this life, and their next life is probably going to suck because it's going to involve learning why rape is bad.
12. This doesn't always sit easily with my belief in free will. I did an essay in the fall about free will and whether we have it. My conclusion was that the amount of free will we have is directly related to our ability to understand our own motives and foresee the consequences of our actions - to understand ourselves as complete beings in every dimension - and that because that is a very difficult feat, few to none of us have completely free will. ...Then again, maybe it does fit in just fine: gaining personal knowledge and control could be considered heading towards enlightenment, and full enlightenment grants full choice - including the choice not to be reborn. Damn, I just sorted out how predestination fits into free will! Am I good or am I good?
13. Whether God, the Goddess, the God and Goddess, or the Gods are the same thing as this karmic force, or whether Their influence on us shows up as the workings of karma, I am not sure. I'm not well-read enough in either Hinduism or Buddhism to know for sure. I do remember something from Buddhism which considers even the Gods to be caught up in the cycle of life, death and rebirth, and that even they are not fully enlightened - if they were, they too could cease to worry, fear, and grieve. The Gods and Goddesses of antiquity certainly seem like they just have super-sized doses of anger, fear, grief and pain, rather than freedom from them.
14. Something set the universe (multiverse?) going.
15. Sometimes things just happen for no discernable cause.
16. There are limits to human knowledge.
17. Apparently, I believe in reincarnation.
18. I also believe in an afterlife. I think its properties depend a lot on what you believe it to be (so if you think you're going to hell, you might end up treating yourself to a dose of punishment until you feel like you've been punished enough). I think it can fit in as another state of being; after a certain period of time, we might or might not be reborn again. I'm not sure whether this conflicts with the enlightenment theory or not; maybe we have to be sufficiently enlightened before we can choose whether to return or not. (Boddhisatvas, in one Buddhist tradition, are people who have reached enlightenment, but who have chosen to stay and help the rest of us get there. It's like they're holding the door open instead of going through themselves.)

I think that's quite enough random unfounded beliefs for one night. Damn, where is all this Buddhism going to fit alongside the First Nations spirituality and/or Celtic and/or Wiccan and/or something-else traditions I'm interested in? I don't consider myself Buddhist! Gack! Help?

Not Waiting For New Year's For This One

As part of the overall self-improvement project, I'm going to start trying to leave no dirty dishes in the sink when I go to bed. I grew up in a house with a dishwasher, and when I moved out, I fell into a 'why do dishes if there isn't a full dishrack's worth?' habit that was really just an excuse to procrasinate.

This is so not a real post. The real one is coming later. It took me this long to settle on a new worthy topic.

I'll leave you with a song:

Have You Had the Talk?

Have *you* talked to your Significant Other about climate change?

I read this article yesterday, and it sent me down a well-worn but infrequently travelled mental path. I saw "The Day After Tomorrow" when it came out in 2004 - I was 15 - and it left a profound although latent mark on me. At that time, I got an impulse to learn to knit - didn't go very well, I never learned how to start a new row. The impulse settled down and I moved on.

But the mark remained. I had seen humanity's ignorance and apathy drive the climate to deadly extremes. Spoiler: the movie ends with a big question mark - with only the warmer areas of the planet still habitable, now flooded with homeless white people from the Global North, what would happen? (I believe that an old roleplay on TUL had a similar background premise.)

And I knew full well that of all the apocalyptic science fiction movie possibilities, the climate roaring down to destroy the world As We Know It is one of the few that might actually happen.
And as I've gotten older, I've heard mounting evidence that it's rapidly leaving the realm of fiction and rushing towards the realm of cold, hard, globally-warmed reality. The afore-linked article just gave more solid numbers to what I've known for years.

Among them: 16 years. 16 years, if we keep burning through hydrocarbons at our current rate of increase, before we will have set the stage for the planet to warm by 2 degrees Celcius: the "okay, fine, you win - the planet is too hot, we admit that global warming exists" number. According to that article, we're already only .2 degrees C away from most of Africa becoming uninhabitable.

Oh. Here's another one, about Greenland experiencing a one-per-every-150-years melting event.

So how old will I be in 16 years? I'm turning 23 soon, so that would make me 39. It's the year 2012 now, so 16 years would make it 2028. At 39, I hope to have been teaching elementary school for years, and have three or four kids, four cats, a dog, a ball python, a car that will need replacing soon, and a house with a garden and a few years already paid off the mortgage. I hope to be living somewhere green enough to keep me sane, yet close enough to other people that I'll have a job and won't have to drive an hour just to buy food.

If the price of gas is already climbing ten cents or more a year, and if it was already as hot as summer in early May this season, how realistic is this dream? The life that P and I have been planning out for years now?

I really don't know. It's not a happy thought, and as I read the article out loud I found myself just as happy to become distracted by another adorable kitten picture online, helping cut the seriousness of the message. I don't want it to be serious. I don't want to have to sit down and say, "Love, what are we going to do when there's no more gasoline except for rich people?" And there's no more tropical fruit at the grocery store because it's too expensive to ship. And nothing's made of plastic anymore because the oil is too valuable as fuel. Will cars be running on electricity and ethanol, or will the highways be deserted? Will we all be at war over the last few oilfields? Will the US annex Alberta so it doesn't have to pay for our thrice-damned tar sand? I wish I knew. I've read my history, and I know that humanity tends to happily wallow in the ruins of its former greatness rather than exert itself to maintain anything properly.

I even didn't want to finish this post, because to send it out into the aether is to admit it. To take a stand and say: I acknowledge that climate change is going to screw all my future plans. I acknowledge that planning ahead for a time when nothing is as it is now, when I can no longer conveniently hop on my laptop with a glass of grape juice, is more practical than paranoid. I admit that all our little energy-saving efforts smack of OCD rituals: if I turn off the monitor, if I install compact fluorescent lighting, if I walk to the store, I will stave off the apocalypse and acid rain will not kill my family... and these little rituals are not enough. They will not stave it off, and nothing you or I or we can do while still living an even slightly mainstream lifestyle will be enough to stave it off.

Either we all start putting up a shitload of windmills and force our societies to STOP BURNING OIL AND COAL (and other hydrocarbons - even burning wood wouldn't really be any better), or we get ready for things to change.

Warm places will become hot. This includes most of the Global North - that's us, folks.
Hot places will become uninhabitable. Those droughts in the Horn of Africa last year? Yeah.
Cool places will become more comfortable. I suspect that areas like Siberia, Canada's Northwest Territories, Alaska, and Scandinavia will become more popular (and populous) over time. Actually: populous, yes - when the hot places, full of billions of people, get hotter, they're not going to lay down and die (and I wouldn't wish them to). They're going to emigrate, they're going to flee, and eventually we're probably going to flee them and go farther north. That's if we haven't already fled the rising temperatures in our own homelands.

I recently wrote a piece in which a character looked back at his life from the age of 56. I was shocked, frightened even, to think through all the scenarios I had thrown him into over the years and weave them into one logical timeline: it's here. An odd but dealable life came under attack from a tyrannical government, and he ended up hiding in a cabin in the woods for a decade. He almost lost his wife and child in the end. At the point of his retrospection, he was dealing with the aftermath of that government's overthrow, in which most of the trappings of civilization were pretty much gone.

I looked at what I wrote and thought: What?? How did this happen? I'd kinda figured that he would go into a usually boring but stable job doing some kind of computer work, and life would continue on in at least approximately the same pattern in which it had started for him: family, house, traffic, supermarkets, internet access.

This character is no Mary Sue, but his problems and struggles have tended to mirror mine over the years more than any other's. Will his, in turn, become mine? Will I find myself, as I reach my silver years, fighting harder than ever just to survive - rather than getting to relax and enjoy time with my grandkids?

I hope I'm just fear-mongering. I hope that more countries start going in the direction Germany has chosen (they get a full half of their electricity from wind power), and that it happens fast enough to make a difference. I hope the US smartens up and changes its slogan: "We need to end our dependence on foreign oil." I hope that ethanol farmers smarten up and start fermenting the talks, not the goddamn corn itself. I hope that electric cars stop being a novelty, that we change our building habits here in North America so we don't need a car to exist - and that other places in the world stop emulating our bad habits!

I hope. But I'm also going to learn to make a fire by hand, can fruit, and sew...

Focusing

So maybe having a safe space to cry out does help. Regardless, it's a bit better today.
Lack of focus lead to boredom and frustration, which lead to P and I snapping at each other about things that normally aren't problems at all, or that we don't perceive as problems. So sometime after I'd written my little silent shout here, she'd said something and I'd said something and she climbed right off the futon and sat down on the floor... Which didn't seem like a good sign, until I realized that she was just doing the stretches that the massage therapist had given her on Friday.

I'm proud of her for taking a night that seemed wasted and useless, a night that we were both going to want back, and making it productive. I helped her with situps and did my own Tai Chi stretches that I'm trying to get into regularly, and we got to bed at a reasonable time. We went to bed happy with each other and with that healthy flush that comes from good exercise - especially good considering that I had seen the night turning out long, cold and angry.

Today I'm up at seven again, this time to get to a dentist appointment and deal with silly bits of paper at my university. Instead of dragging Phina along with the promise of seeing my parents' kittens again, I'm letting her stay home and sleep. She didn't really want to go and knew she wouldn't really be up to going; and I'm doing ever better at recognizing that when people say 'no', even to piddly little things like going out for the afternoon, you can convince them to stop arguing but you can never convince them to be happy about it. It's better for everyone if I let it go and stop trying to force everything to work out according to how I planned.

Focus

I'm losing it. I'm spending hours refreshing TUL, Facebook, and my email accounts again, as if something is going to change. I had a day or two of heyday activity, handing two or three or four online conversations and threads at once, and now that it's back to normal (dead) I'm haunting the forsaken channels of communication like I have no other choice.
I have half a post written about climate change. I haven't touched it since... Wednesday?
Help me. Please.

Life Update

The college situation I mentioned in 'Power' has been resolved

successfully. The professor had asked if I could drop off P's marked papers

on Friday (which I did); on Tuesday or Wednesday, she emailed to say that

it looked like a 'pass' to her, and there wasn't anything we needed to

worry about. The professor is going to note that those three areas ought to

see some improvement during P's next placement term, but she's letting her

go.

Yay.

I'm relieved, and I feel vindicated (on P's behalf), but I can understand

why she said she just feels kinda weird about it all. It's not much of a

fist-pumping situation to have the world shout "YOU SUUUUUCK" and have it

go "Whoops, sorry, didn't mean that, carry on" a few weeks later. Are we

supposed to cheer? Why did this have to happen in the first place? Our

entwined futures were still riding on someone else's decision, and the

situation working out for P in the end doesn't make the whole situation

suddenly have been okay. She still spent several weeks stewing over the

possibility that one of the few employable talents she has appeared to have

been shat all over. Those feelings aren't going to just disappear.

What is nice, at least, is that yesterday two letters came in the mail

informing her that she made the college's Honour Roll in both her fall and

winter terms. I don't know how much the letters were exaggerating, but

according to them, this is actually quite a distinction. It should look

good on a resume, if nothing else... We'll ask about it sometime. I made

the Dean's List at my university, too, meaning that I maintained an average

of 80% or above (I managed an 83%) for the year.


I'm not going to be able to write a post at all some days, let alone a

long, deep introspective one, but I'm trying. Living life comes first -

documenting it is secondary.

A Practical Note

Whatever my practice ends up being, I'm going to have to include Murphy in my worship... After all, there's belief - and then there's knowing that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Perhaps I should light a candle every morning (which will always be going out for no good reason) to Murphy... Then again, I think that my simple acceptance that things will go wrong on a regular basis - at the most inconvenient times - may be worship enough.

I can't be an atheist. I believe in too many things that happen outside of science.

A Leg to Stand On

A Leg to Stand On

There's a problem we have in Canada sometimes. We're from all over the place, rarely full-blooded anything - and being 'Canadian' is pretty well meaningless. We have an incredibly weak national identity; we mostly describe ourselves in terms of what we aren't (starting with American and going from there). We take a perverse pride in our cold winters and black flies, drink strong beer, watch hockey, and apologize a lot. Or something like that. We enjoy our status as non-threatening peacekeepers who just want everybody to get along.

That's... pretty much it, folks. No wonder recent immigrants don't want to assimilate (into what?). Dig any deeper, and you've got an ugly story of the French and English duking it out over beaver pelts and lumber for hundreds of years, both royally abusing (i.e. diseasing, poisoning, raping and killing) the indigenous population while somehow pretending to be their allies against the *other* European colonists.

We have a huge cultural divide built into the country in the form of Quebec - it's like a tree split into two at the base. But even then - unless you're French-Canadian and really identify with that side of yourself, the bigger issue is that we are lacking traditions and a purpose. Being almost exclusively immigrants and the children of colonists, we have in our heritages only what came along on boats and ships. We can't dig down to our ancestral roots more than a generation or two, frequently, before we hit 'where we're really from' - England, Scotland, France, the USA, China, Russia, or anywhere else but here. Being Canadian quickly becomes an eclectic patchwork of other cultures.

I wouldn't generalize this to anyone but myself except that 'the question of Canadian identity' is one under constant discussion by sociologists and politicians alike. Somebody even recently suggested we change our national animal to something more imposing than a beaver. We're all hunting for a leg to stand on - a solid foundation from which to grow.

It's even harder to do if you're not white (or don't fully identify as white), Christian, a sports fan, and mildly alcoholic. As soon as you don't like hockey and you don't drink beer (oh, and I don't like poutine, either!), you don't go to church and you don't feel like celebrating the takeover of the country by arrogant Europeans on Canada Day, you just killed 97% of your already scanty national identity.

Personally: I am as mixed of a mutt as one can be while still being mostly European. I have English, French, German, Sicilian, Irish (which was actually Welsh), possibly Dutch, and who knows how many other ancestries. And, knowing my history, I know that 'English' actually means 'Gallic Celtic Germanic Viking', as does 'French'; Sicilian is 'Greek Phoenician Roman Norman [Viking] Arabic'. I'm then seasoned lightly with Cherokee - my great-great-grandmother on my mother's side. I have potential links to many cultures, but almost no knowledge of any.


When I was younger, my family would celebrate more. We did the usual North American run of Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Halloween, and others, combined with the eight Wiccan Sabbats. In fact I have a mischevious memory of having happily written about my three 'Christmases' in my first-grade journal - one at my (Christian) grandmother's house, one at home, and one other at home celebrating the re-birth of the Sun God! (The moral here is that for a child, there are never too many parties.) Mom would do a Circle in the living room before trick-or-treaters started coming to the door on October 31, and we'd offer a few pieces of my candy haul at the end of the night as part of the Samhain ritual. At the same time, I felt no issue belting out Christmas carols about the three kings coming to give the baby Jesus gifts. All was incorporated in one big, happy, strangely unconflicting family of gods, goddesses and divine babies. Either baby Jesus was just a more modern aspect of baby Horus, or they both played together; when I was ten, it didn't really matter either way. I read my Greek myths and my Judeo-Christian myths with equal enjoyment (likely to the consternation of both grandmothers).

For a number of reasons, this all started to taper off as I got older. Now that I've been moved out for several years, I've realized that I'm going to have to choose, or make, my own traditions. I had thought that they travel with you firmly attached, but no; Christmas becomes suddenly hard to celebrate when you're living in a tiny basement, you have no money for gifts, your mother-in-law has left for Venezuela for the whole of December, and you and your partner sit and stare at each other and realize that you're both pagan anyway, so why Christmas exactly? But without a deep enough grounding in what to do for the Winter Solstice, or any other Sabbat or moon cycle or anything at all, we've ended up doing jack sh*t (pardon my language) - nothing whatsoever.

This slip into a no-day-is-holy lifestyle has been wearing and depressing. If no day is special, then you have nothing to look forward to; with nothing to look forward to, why live the boring existence of daily life? That slips towards 'why not suicide?' waaaay too easily - a theme you're going to see over and over in my writing here, unfortunately. I think too hard, and reality doesn't actually stand up to that very well. Anyway...

So I've been out looking for traditions. I've been over that list of nationalities before, trying to decide what it makes me. The trouble is, the ones which ought to have more of a hold on me based on percentage (1/4 Irish/Welsh and 1/4 Sicilian beat out the others quite a bit) are not necessarily the ones that appeal to me as a person. I used to have more interest in Celtic traditions - one way to get around the strong Catholic influence on Irish culture - but I've been shocked in the last few weeks to realize that that interest is nearly gone. I still found myself properly furious when I recently discovered that the 'Irish Potato Famine' was a myth propagated by England at the time to excuse the wholesale sack of Ireland's food supplies to feed British cities... but most of the rest of my old fascination is just a faded memory.

This is actually really serious, since a great deal of my Pagan ideals had been based on what I knew of Celtic and Druidic traditions. I had made myself a Bridgit's Cross a few years ago, did a Maypole dance with the remnants of the pagan community in Niagara, and at that point had generally felt that Herne was the best aspect of the God for me. Where did it go?? At the very point that I've started to search for a culture to finally sink roots into, the one I'd thought I'd grow *from* has turned out to be naught but loose soil.

More to come.

Power

I don't got it. You don't got it. They have all of it.

My partner and I just finished watching the last season of 'Angel' (the spinoff show from 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'). The whole series (though fun and campy on the surface) deals with big issues like free will, destiny, the soul, and whether the best efforts of the little guys like us have the slightest effect on the world. The main characters' world is repeatedly turned upside down by revelations that this or that incredibly powerful being or organization has been pulling strings behind the scenes, rendering everything they've done for the last - say - four years pretty much meaningless. There is a powerful scene at the end of one season in which the protagonist Angel makes a seemingly last-ditch effort to destroy the 'Senior Partners' of one particular evil organization... only to find that the Senior Partners are merely the personification of the evil that dwells within the hearts of humankind. To destroy them would require the complete purification of humans (how likely is that?) or the destruction of humankind (which is what many of the demons in the show are trying for anyway). Angel, having thought he was travelling down to Hell to combat the Senior Partners, finds himself back on the mortal plane - the implication being that this IS Hell. He slowly walks away down the street of L.A. as sirens wail and children scream...

Whatever the actual background music to this scene is, I always picture it with Mad World playing. I have to be very careful with this song, because it sums up all the little midnight whispers in my head and hands me a knife with a sad smile. But I think I can post it here.



Yesterday, I (almost) went to go see one of the professors at my partner's college, on her behalf. My partner had been reassured throughout a six-week child care mentoring semester that her performance was just fine and that she would pass - but when her grades came back, they have come back less-than-completely-perfect (which, in the grading system they have set up, is a fail). The stated results in the student booklet she got at the beginning of the year would be her being expelled from the entire program for a full year - having to start over in September 2013 if she even bothered to come back.

Excuse me, no.

She is rightly and understandably upset about this - to the point where she is positive she will not be able to carry on a conversation about it with the professor in charge of coordinating the mentoring placements. I offered - offered freely, mind you - to take this charge on myself. I view it not as a burden, not as something that my partner should handle by her damn self and why should I have to do it - no, rather as a task undertaken out of love and as her champion. I'm frightened by the prospect of arguing with an authority figure in their place of power, where they can cite rules and wave bits of paper and sit there with a sad but sympathetic face and tell me that there's nothing they can do. I'm terrified of confrontation, and the two times this week I've tried psyching myself up to go talk, I felt like I was having a heart attack - full physical panic. But I would do it anyway, because I don't want my partner to experience this. I would do this for her, and save her the distress.

Except I can't. The professor called ahead to get an idea of what the situation actually was, and said that she cannot see me about Phina without Phina present in the room. The rest of the conversation went well, and I'm hoping that I've now prepped the professor with our side of things so that she will be in the mindset of "That's strange, why shouldn't she pass?" rather than "Well, that's what the bit of paper says, so I guess you're screwed.". And there is a certain rightness to my partner at least being there: say I screw something up myself - she should have the chance to jump in, or contradict me, supply more detail, make decisions, whatever. I suppose a champion's battle ought to be watched by the one being contested for. We'll set up a meeting time sometime next week, where all three of us can get together and hammer it out. But it still emphasizes our powerlessness.


I'm taking Sociology at university, as well as Psychology. Most of what I learned in Sociology makes me want to grab the nearest wall and beat my head against it until the pain stops. Joss Whedon (creator of Angel) was right in many ways when he had one of his characters say: Look around. This is the Apocalypse. Read the paper recently? Evil started this race a long freaking time ago, and the tricky thing is that they never actually fired the starting pistol...
There are so many horrible people out there in positions of power. But that's not the really frightening thing. The nauseating part is that there are amorphous, Protean organizations out there that constantly raise new people into thinking that evil and greed are good, or natural, or patriotic, or moral, or unavoidable. What's the quote from 1984?

"WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"

It makes me rage. I hear about a transnational corporation that bullies small countries into creating tax free zones for its factories, so that it can enslave the population to churn out unregulated sh*t to sell at a 90% profit in North America. I hear about a pharmaceutical company buying the FDA so that it can invent a reason to tell its bought doctors to prescribe Oxycontin to children under twelve. I hear that I can try to buy quality alternative brands, but as soon as anything gets popular it gets bought out by PepsiCo, Coca-Cola or Johnson&Johnson. I hear that some untested plastic that's in everything and everyone is a probable cause of some of the spike in autism. I hear another preacher somehow blame gay people for the war in Iraq. I hear that slaves made my shoes. It makes me want to burn everything I've ever purchased and go hide in a hut and raise my own sheep for wool and food. It makes me want to find the SOURCE of all of this sh*t and do some one-time violent act to make it all stop.

The problem is...
How do you kill an organization?
If you kill the people, new people could just flood in to take their places. Besides, most of the people are actually innocent - just following orders, like in Milgram's experiment on obedience.
If you disband the organization, the people could just flee and start new organizations under different names, like metastasizing cancer cells.

If you just try to avoid the organization, it will continue corrupting your government and poisoning your air and water and soil. You can go build your Iron Age village co-op in the north of Saskatchewan and live there happily for twenty years, only to have co-ops banned in year 21 because someone has decided you're a threat to the System.


This post has no answers. Perhaps the next one will have some ideas on what I can do, or at least a listing of the ideas I've gathered.

Memory Walking

This is now my third attempt to get this specific post done. I suppose this will happen frequently, whenever I try to explain a concept that has roots and tendrils everywhere in my psyche. If I could explain it simply, I wouldn't have to include it here.

I left off last night with the idea of growing my hair out, intertwined with the seedling idea of adopting a mostly new piece of self-identification. I say mostly; I'd toyed with it before, and I'd introduced myself at the Brock Aboriginal Students' Organization fairly soon in the school year. I borrowed the book "Changing Ones" out of their library - and returned it three weeks later, almost untouched. I couldn't study this from a book first; I needed people. Go ahead and tell me that a tradition originally passed along around campfires by word of mouth can properly be transmitted in print - I'll laugh, or maybe cry. (I'm not trying to put down the book in the slighest, by the way! It is an excellent text, and I do intend to read it later.)

I needed people, real people, telling stories one at a time. And eventually I found them - in the form of a Facebook group, of all things. Dancing Moccassins is a group formed to share any and all fragments or whole pieces of Native culture that its members and staff have access to. It also frequently shares along information about Two-Spirits in general or in particular tribes; for example, this note about the legend of Turquoise Boy, the first Two-Spirit among the Navajo. This group was exactly what I was looking for, and with it as a starting point, I've started branching out and finding articles like Shaking Our Shells (about and for Cherokee male-bodied Two-Spirits, but not exlusive of others), and this list of other places I could look for information.

And then, about two weeks ago, I had a dream. Now, I dream frequently enough that every one could not possibly be significant, but this night was different. I dreamed that I had searched the internet and finally found a Cherokee elder (on Facebook, of all places - FB, get out of my dreams!) who was willing to tell me whatever I wanted to know. In my dream, I fired off a bunch of questions, and was so excited by the answers I received that I essentially ran off to go process it all - forgetting to continue the interaction. I came back some time later, my head now full of all the new questions raised by the answers I'd gotten, and fired them off too.

In the dream, the elder gracefully responded to the new set of questions, but also included a section of personal reflection. (He?) said, with a certain friendly amusement, that what I had done had suggested the name of "Memory Walker". My memory of the complex significances of the name slipped away like a fistful of water as I woke - which was immediately after 'reading' the elder's response - but I managed to capture my non-verbal impression of it, at least. The best I can describe it as is this:
Someone who walks in memory, both as in thoughts and as in the past. Someone who spends a great deal of time thinking, and thinking about what other people think (walking in others' memories). Someone who deals with information and thoughts and memories the way that other people deal with thread or leather or wood. Also, someone who can get so caught up in the world inside the mind that they forget about the world outside! This is Memory Walker.

And isn't that me, now?

I woke from the dream with a sense of immense significance, that this dream meant something. I shook my partner awake (or she woke herself as I woke) in the too-early morning, and told her the gist of the whole dream while it was still fresh in my mind. I repeated it to her in case I forgot, and I repeated it to myself a few times to try to avoid losing details - I knew I needed to go back to sleep, and I outright refused to let unconsciousness wash away how I had felt in that dream.

I immediately fell into a second, distinct dream. The details of this one are very hazy, but it involved someone finding the body of an animal that had died and somehow scattering its remains. The moral of the dream - and my dreams don't usually appear as fables like this, either - was "Don't scatter the bones of a creature - otherwise it is disrespectful to the spirit of the animal that died". I woke myself up from that one by accident, because as soon as it reached that point, I thought (while still asleep) 'omg! it's another significant dream! I have to remember this one too!'. As soon as I started trying to review the dream, I belatedly realized that I had actually stopped dreaming and woken up. Even still, it felt like exactly the kind of dream that, back in the day, I would've reported to the rest of my village, and everyone would have dutifully started obeying this new request from the Spirit World...

(Side note: okay, probably not new. It just seems like common sense to not scatter the remains of a creature hither and yon with no good reason; would you want some brickhead to come along and make merry with your corpse? I didn't think so.)

There was a third dream, but it is long gone in the mist. Still, all that in one night - within days of telling myself that yes, I was going to actively find out if there is a place for me in Cherokee culture as a female-bodied Two-Spirit individual - is simply too good to ignore.

There is another note I should make - I suck at coming up with names. I liberally abuse baby name sites and fantasy name generators whenever I need to name a character or a location. My X-Men character never got a codename at all. My first SCA name was just what my parents figured they'd call me at events when I was little, and my second one is just my mundane name with 'of Ravenglass' tacked on the end - which is itself also my parents' invention. Me dreaming a name, as clearly as I did, is like someone else dreaming the structure of the benzene molecule.

I sent out a tentative message or two to people I thought might have an education opinion on whether I was full of crap about this. I always worry about my 'significant' stuff being full of crap. The answer was: 'you may have just been named! Congrats.' Relief! Success! Dreams are significant in the very culture I am starting to investigate - and to be named in one so soon after beginning my search feels like both an honour and a welcome. It encourages me to continue looking.

And I like being Memory Walker, there's the thing. It's not just a variant of 'Walking Softly' or 'HikeQuietly' or any of the other variants I've used around the internet for the past couple of years. Those were (actually a misquote) from Theodore Roosevelt's phrase, "Speak softly, but carry a big stick" - something I found very clever around when I really, really needed to stop being Moonshadow, and when I was toying with the notion of trying to be hardcore. Memory Walker is very, very different in its significance. I thought of a half-dozen other ways that the name could work for me in the days following the dream. It would be an excellent name for a psychologist or a teacher, the two things that I'm interested in becoming; one guides people through their memories to help them heal, the other guides the young in forming their own memories.

I'm not going to go around starting to call myself Memory Walker everywhere online, or in person - or even tell very many people. It would stop being special, then. But I have it now, the first feather in my medicine pouch, and I will keep it safe.

Samson's Hair

I've spent the last two posts explaining different aspects of 'why this blog'. Shaking the Tree was originally meant to be itself plus this post rolled into one, but I realized halfway through that the idea of shaking myself clean was important enough to own itself. This will attempt to explain some backstory of 'why'.

To make a long story short (because I know that if I let myself get into the whole story, this post will be ten pages long): I am beginning to take an active interest in my (slight) Cherokee heritage, and how my gender identity can intertwine with it. Though it may seem strange, it started with needing a haircut.

The first year of university is generally understood as a period of self-discovery, and mine has been no exception (although being already 22, out, and partnered saved a lot of it!). I was awash in many modes of self-expression, and found my lack thereof to be becoming a problem. I should, I felt, find a way to wear my heart on my sleeve - finally pick a dressing and hairstyle, and dive into it headlong. The issue, however, I quickly found to be bound up intricately with my surprisingly fuzzy sense of self - especially my future self.

I'd thought I knew who I was and what I was going to do (well enough, anyway). It turned out that there are maybe about a dozen of me in here, all largely unexplored potential selves - and they all want to dress differently. No wonder I've been going around in t-shirts and the same two pairs of pants! In order to pick a style, I have to pick a life... and I wasn't sure, in October, that I was nearly ready to do that yet. So my hair just grew for a while.

But the question remained. Should I colour it and be hardcore - commit to the fringe? Should I lop it short and go back to where I'd been a year before - trying to live the straight male dream? Get a tidy cut and go straight to being a 35-year-old teacher? Should I grow it out - make it obvious that I'm trying to bend the rules? Or would I keep waffling, and grow up to be an indecisive welfare bum that never accomplishes anything?

I had to decide. My first bright idea was to check out what other people with my hair type have done. I'm partly Sicilian, so going back to the part of my heritage that seems to have produced my thick, dark, curly hair seemed pretty legit. So I looked up Italian, even Roman hairstyles - and guess what they've generally done? Lop it all off. There were a ridiculous number of barbers at the height of the Roman Empire. Somehow I felt that would be a cop-out. I mean, I liked some of the short haircuts I've gotten, but most of them were kind of.... underwhelming. Western culture's idea of men's hair is freaking boring for the most part. So... My hair continued unchecked.

It was around this point that another (largely) online friend of mine started posting about the 'two-spirit' tradition. This is not the time to discuss it in detail (this post is long enough already!) but basically, I found myself drawn more and more to what I was finding. The tradition is Native American, and in the process of looking deeper, I've found a whole... thing. A network of linkages. Many ideas that intrigue me, that all tie in with Cherokee culture. For the purpose of this post, it suddenly seemed like growing my hair out long in a Native American/First Nations style could both a) express my interest in and solidarity with the culture of my great-great-grandmother, and b) help me express my WHOLE gender identity (rather than re-caging myself as fully masculine).

I think I end here for the night. <3

Shaking the Tree

Welcome to part the second. Here I'll attempt to explain why I'm starting to journal in the first place.

At the beginning of June, a friend of mine (a good friend, I'd like to think) began a blog about her transition to Hellenismos, the reconstructionist worship of the deities of Ancient Greece. It's been fascinating, not just because of my long-time love of the gods and goddesses of the ancient world, but also because it seems to be providing a space for her to unpack a myriad of thoughts and feelings and beliefs. Many of the things she has written have struck chords with me so rich and deeply hidden that I felt I might break; that is, if I resisted the frequency and tried to force stillness upon myself. Or, I could let myself resonate, like the body of an instrument, by doing some unpacking of my own.

I think I had come to equate strong, sweeping emotions with immaturity and danger. Tempestuous feelings powerful enough to bowl me into next moon cycle have generally gone along with bad things. Like losing friends, embarrassment, shame, unrequited love. Things I probably should have deleted instead of sending out at 3:30 in the morning. If I feel the need to say or write something when feeling strongly these days, I usually bite my tongue and wait a few hours - take a nap, eat some food, or even try the next day. And by then, the mood has usually (always?) passed. I give a deep sigh of relief that I rode out the storm of my mood without throwing anybody or anything overboard, and continue on with my life.

The problem is that nothing has gone overboard for a while - and, though I hadn't realized it, this stuff piles up. If some of the stuff I'm linked to doesn't get dealt with soon, I'm going to sink from the weight alone. I can't see and I can't move for the mass of people and things and interests and projects and 'liked' pages, so I can't get anything done. To change metaphors, my backpack is stuffed with crap and it's getting too heavy to carry.

I've got to shake some of it off somehow. And that resonance, that inner vibration I've been feeling - it's a shaking. It is dangerous. I may lose things I find valuable. I've been terrified of that, especially since last August. But it needs to be set loose and allowed to do its work. What falls away is done with, and what remains will be what loves me enough to endure a little cleaning. I'd thought it was a good idea to pad out my life with fragile things, but I do not and should not need to surround myself with what will break if I ever test its strength.

The problem is that I do not trust myself. I don't trust myself to be me - or rather the same me in different moods. The terror comes along sooner or later. What if that mood wasn't significant? What if I felt angry because I was hungry? Depressed because I was tired? Overworked because I had a headache? What if I destroy something that I'll want tomorrow? So I average myself out. Whenever I think I'll feel differently later, I pick the more positive or people-friendly thought pattern and make myself believe that the other one is insignificant.

The problem there is that I stagnate. Negative feelings can exist for a reason. I know full well that I tend towards depression and withdrawal as a semi-natural state, but if I'm feeling the same thing repeatedly over a period of time it's probably because I need to do something about it! But I've got nowhere to lay out how I *might* really feel, nowhere to experiment safely with being my whole self. I am too invested in everyone I know to risk exploding in their face...

And so this blog will partly serve as this testing area. Be warned, therefore, as I will be attempting honesty to the moment rather than to my idealized averaged self. I may say negative things - about people you care about, or things you care about, or even about you. But you are warned, now; and this is a fairly private space, though public. If you choose to come here, and read my words - and you are offended by what you read... then, though it pains me to say it, you are part of what I need to unpack and throw out. I need ONE PLACE where I can be all of me, including the nasty bits. I'll end up on medication for a bipolar disorder I don't have, if I don't.

I hope you'll be strong enough to stay.

Opening the Backpack

It's mid-August, and you're preparing for the beginning of the new school year. You've dug out some pens, gotten a new pair of shoes... And last, you need The Backpack.
You forgot to clean it out in June, and now it lurks, hidden behind your door. It's got things living in it by now - mold, bugs maybe. Worse yet, you know that you've left valuable things in there - papers, money... mementos of friendships gone, that phone number you never dug out and called. Someone, you now realize, has been vaguely pissed off at you for two months, and you didn't even know.

You can't do this all in a rush. You need to come at it one compartment at a time, maybe with gloves and a gas mask... Okay, now I'm exaggerating. But you must be prepared for what you find, and for the task ahead. You'll be overwhelmed sometimes with emotions you'd thought were long gone, for good or for ill.

But it's worth it.

Welcome to my August Backpack - full of hastily tucked-away thoughts, half-forgotten until now. They need to be aired; organized; sorted through; and weeded, like books, for those that no longer serve a purpose. If you wish to watch this slow process and lend me your moral support, I appreciate it. If you find yourself able to lend a hand by suggesting how things might better fold flat... even better. Be my guest, and comment.

I have no idea whether this first posting will also be my last, incidentally. I have tried keeping a paper journal - a journal on deviantART - a video blog of my transition, on YouTube - to no avail. I've posted long notes on Facebook, but that site inspires a supreme "tl:dr" attitude (even in me) and those postings never accomplish what they were supposed to. My introspection has tended to drop to what will fit conveniently in a status message... But perhaps every time I see another friend's blog, it will remind me to write; and eventually, perhaps mine will do the same for her when her willpower flags. All I can do is try, and hope.

August is also my birth month. Here, August is the peak of summer, rainier than July but hotter and full of thunderstorms. Paradoxically, the days are getting shorter, and you can feel the rush of life preparing to prepare for the fall even in the midst of summer's plenty. This is my month. It is happy, healthy, and warm, but always half-mindful of its imminent decline: its mortality.

'August', as an adjective, has a different emphasis, and means regal and magnificent. Or maybe well-renowned? Let's check that:

au·gust

 [aw-guhst]

adjective

1.

inspiring reverence or admiration; of supreme dignity or grandeur; majestic: an august performance of a religious drama.

2.

venerable; eminent: an august personage.

Origin:

1655–65;  < Latin augustus  sacred, grand

[stolen from Dictionary.com]

So... both. I don't think that much in here is going to be 'august', but I have always been interested by Augustus Caesar. My month is his month - his namesake. In many ways I think he was a horrible little man, but we'll leave that for another posting much later. (It'll probably be titled 'Lies to Children'.) His reign, and that of Julius Caesar before him, marked the glorious beginning of the end for Rome - still with expansion to go, but clearly a turning point. I think he chose the right month to name after himself.

Can you tell I'm going to ramble sometimes? Yet in others, I'm going to be baring my soul about things I may never have previously admitted - even to myself. I may spend hours avoiding writing some of this stuff, because I don't want to say it. I may change major parts of my life as a result of this journal.

Wish me luck, and enjoy the ride...