Here's where I tell you...some personal stuff, hats, books, & a not-exactly-holiday observance...

Wow...since my divorce late 2009 I have lived three places, and done so many things, but now I live in a new city I love, have a wonderful dog, a cool series of temp jobs, and am astonished by the beauty of the seasons.

My new BBF is amazingly inspiring and encourages my lunges towards mental hygiene: for example, cured my fear of spiders completely. :)

I can totally deal with the 9-to-5 office work I do, I get to focus my attention, have gorgeous views of the Charles or trees or wildly ornamented old buildings and the sky to shift my eyes to twice an hour, and, usually, nice co-workers.

Also working on the third and fourth chapters for a serialized illustrated novel a very splendid publishing group is interested in, and drawings for other clients and loved ones, numerous fiber projects (mostly hats of course!) and designs for clothes--yep, lotsa hats here too, but not ONLY! Dresses and upper body garments are also in line. My multi-yarn hats are so nice and warm and wonderful-- people wear them forever--one of my exes even wore them during a period of extreme anger/resentment etc. toward me, is how good my hats are!!! :)

That reminds me, are you familiar with the annual Fur-Free Friday tradition. Please, if you have never looked into the practices of the fur industry, either look into it on an animal rights site or youtube, or, if you feel you'd be too traumatized, look at the Berdyaev fox experiments, some actual video if you can find some. These experiments, conducted by a team of women and men, just named after one, are very important to students of the canine mind/being, so material on them should be sought out. Anyway, it isn't upsetting, but lovely. These foxes are so beautiful, bright, sweet, such lively intelligent beings!

In the Nerdy Book department, I have just finished the  last "Hollows" book, my favorite part of it as always being the pixy family life that continues around and intersects with the life of the main character's story. I find the series to have a truly weird morality, contradictory streaks of raunch-feminism (thanks, Ariel Levy, for that pejorative, even if I abhor what you write about Andrea Dworkin) and prudery, and other flaws, but still love and recommend it. In the latest, Pale Demon, there are big changes for, and much, much more learned about, the Jenks-Matalina family, including their home life, traditions, emotions, abilities, and enemies. (And even the Rachel Morgan plot is less annoying than usual! ;)

My present fingernail color is naked. Not nude, naked nails, buffed to a very soft glow, not that tacky over-shiny buffing one associates with salesmen. That reminds me, I just read Christopher Isherwood's Ramakrishna book. Very interesting! Recommended! R's disciple Vivekananda had such influence in the West--a salesman for all the right reasons, one could say--that it's worth reading for that reason alone. But some of the stories about the goofy saint himself are just lovely, and hilarious, like the one where he's throwing rupees and poop in the Ganges.

Ow ow ow pain pain ow

Middle eastern dance's isolation drills helped these wretched cramps earlier in the day but not anymore. Just breathing helps. This pain really has gotten my attention. Keep wanting to hold my breath. Bad idea. Ow. Beautiful day, got to take lil dog walking, slowly and deliberately, letting him do as he would. He got to be his sweet self with two tiny children, waving his plumy tail and being sweet and gentle and beautiful and letting them feel his wonderful soft fur. But he does not move quickly, and had to be carried across some streets, so deliberate was his progress. By the way, OWW.

"Wai, Seeling Cat, Wai??!?! Wai u so krool?!" EVERYTHING'S upsetting right now. I'm'a disappear into a book. Ow. My fingernails are a deep beautiful shimmering absinthe color that's very pretty.

Fave song lyric-al inspiration of the day...despite a most vexing event!

"Sometimes my back feels like it bears all the weight of this house, these three cats, and my truck full of crap....but with every little bang, every little push, every step I take I get closer..." ---Melissa Ferrick

I am so happy to have discovered this caffeine-demented performer whose life and lyrics rillyrilly seem like, "Whoa, that's, like just what I woulda written! I woulda written that! If I had any talent!" She's funny as all get out, playful, vulnerable, sexy, and a brilliant musician. The above song: far better than the little excerpt suggests. She's about to drop "Enough About Me," a CD of sublime covers & studio versions of two of her fan fave originals, and just got a new website up which I'll link to once a glitch or two's solved.

Now vexation...the hungry maw of the void into which things disappear with disturbing frequency from my iBook and iPhone when I am not finished writing them! Or in the case of music, when I haz purchased it from iTunes awready! :( When the voracious darkness of nonexistence swallowed a 4152 -character letter I wrote today, oy, the vexation! But "ya can't live on naches and ya can't die from tsuris," and I avoided lashon hara, which is one Jewish value I really believe makes life ever so much freer, clearer, happier, better, by expressing my considerable distaste with stilted, precise language. And I liked it! But losing a long, happy, letter I was writing to a sweet girl I recently met because she'd asked me a bunch of very intelligent questions surely did vex me sorely a little while ago.

The most disgusting thing ever

Had to wait for a long time, Monday night in Center City Philadelphia, for my bus home after an excellent meeting of our scriptwriters' group. It was snowing such huge flakes! One could see them coming at one's face from up in the sky. We caught some on our tongues. My co-writer had very kindly and unilaterally decided to wait with me. The snow changed to smaller flakes, almost rain. Someone driving a car drove too fast and too close to the bus shelter and disgusting dirty water splashed my white down coat and my mouth. I kept spitting to get the salty fetid taste to go away. Truly nasty. On the bright side, haven't yet come down with a hideous malady.

Looking at the upbeat nature of my previous post, I wonder who that person was. I put off moving as long as I could, in shock, not actually living in my new home until the day before Christmas Eve. The first several days there was no heat and the temperature outside was in the 20s, so I dressed warmly and made grateful use of the cold-weather sleeping bag my co-writer had lent. I cried a lot, and have been continuing to do so off and on. My sleep cycle was knocked so far from normal it was almost completely reversed, with days when I woke up at 7 pm. That recently began to improve but was set back recently when I couldn't sleep until nine am.

After moving in, I had the house to myself until the third week of January, as my housemate dealt with family issues in the Midwest, to go through the worst of the shock and hurt. By no means do I imagine myself safe, yet, on the other side. I think the fact I'm writing in this journal is a good sign. Also have decided not to seek a relationship with any of the loa at this time, nor participate in building a new faith around theistic satanism principles; nobly as they have been expressed, they are too abstract for me. While I support every faith's right to Constitutional free exercise, and the Constitutional preclusion of any single faith's being favored by the state, at this moment it would be fairest to say I'm agnostic. Without knowledge or pretense to knowledge. Not without hope. Getting through each day as well as possible. Plan to resume the Sanskrit and Hebrew language studies that in the past were going so very well, but reluctant to put anything on a schedule. First priorities are sleep, healing, caring for my dog. A new name has begun recurring in my dreams: "Shan" as short for Angela; it sounds nice, has associations with a nice girl I knew in junior high, and "Shani" has good resonances in Hebrew. Perhaps like the deathly ill Jews who would change their names to Chaim or Chaya to elude Death, I can help my spirit outfox this emotional malaise via adopting Shan(i) as a nickname for Angela. I do believe I will succeed.

More Fun in the New World

Working with Ganesha, Kali, and Shiva for years, I am thankful, prepared me for the huge changes that fell upon me not long after my last post. My present for our sixth anniversary turned out to be a surprise divorce, with homelessness the ribbon on top. Quite a storm ensued within indeed, despite the fact that many of my friends and family, and substantial voices from within me, had wanted a change of this nature. I had done some serious work on being grateful for and committed to the relationship despite its shortcomings, which seemed to exacerbate the temptation to stamp my little foot, shake my curls, and commit suicide.

Had to admit, though, not only had I prepared for it, but asked. Or offered my willingness. I had been feeding Papa Legba almost every day, had given him a cane, and his Macoute-Legba. I had almost collapsed in front of Ogun, had met the wise Priestess about whom I wrote earlier, had worked under her guidance with Olokun, had spent many hours each week in study. It was strongly palpable, or "in the air," as my older lady relatives were wont to say, that something was about to change. I wanted it to; I was offering myself. For some time I'd had a practice a friend informed me was a variation on one observed by Tibetan Buddhists, asking to die each day if I couldn't be useful. So here was my crossroads.

The suddenness and irrevocability of being divorced/evicted blew my expectations up. But within twenty-four hours, magic and blessing began to play their music like a different section of the orchestra taking up the melody. It didn't immediately soothe the screaming kid, of course; I can be as big an emotional mess as the next person, so sometimes there was whining, complaining, cussing, bitching, etc., but the current was in motion. In no time, I found a Reiki class where I'll be get Reiki 2 attunement November 29, was offered a lease in a wonderful new home with an inspiring, smart, dog-loving person, reconnected with many dear friends, and began to hope for a future in which I really could and would be useful. The need to know exactly what's going on in the world(s) of fashion is letting go of me; my costume and makeup collection will be useful for many things, but since at this point I'd only work in those fields for film and performance/ritual and maybe sell some costume stuff on etsy, I don't need to follow the news and trends and changes. Wherever things are going, they are going to be wonderful, and I am so, so grateful.

Finally, I found this article, with so much amazing information in it: http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/afrikanistik/kant/data/ML1_kant1.pdf by Elizabeth Mackenrodt. Certainly going to look for other work from her...so many parts of her article having inspired many questions, ideas, hopes that we can share the benefits of so many kinds of healing.

a long month-and-a-half, & possibly some solace after a REALLY long year!

So much has happened. But one supremely celebratory recent event was that a black lab fur-child we had taken responsibility for, almost exactly one year ago, has found her proper home, thank Azazel Abyzou Legba Olokun Shiva Ganesha and EVERY deity who has helped! She was not happy, and her restlessness, stress, anger and sadness infected us more severely than we even now may realize. I am letting go of feeling that we "failed"--- we gave her the best care possible during the months she was most likely to kill/injure someone accidentally, run in front of a car, or act on some other uncontrolled impulse leading to bad outcomes for her. We carefully interviewed the many candidates who applied for this beautiful young dog. Her new home is with a dogwise person who has another large dog---whom she adores (actually both human and large dog!) and who takes extremely good care of dogs. Exhaling now! Can still feel pain and tension in my back, neck, arms, shoulders, eyes, but now feel it ebbing away more and more.

I thank Papa Legba, been just loving him, providing him a nice offering, a strong walking stick, a pretty macoute-Legba and refreshing him some strong, fresh black coffee every day, and he is bringing such blessing, not only in FINDING (the right puppy-parent), but keeping SAFE IN TRAVEL (the possibility of death/serious accident was very real on the 40-minute ride to her new home: she wouldn't go in the car except riding shotgun, with all the antics that allowed) and BRINGING GUIDANCE (finding really intelligent books on subjects I needed to learn about, meeting a wonderful high priestess, and developing perspective on situations I had allowed myself to consider problems!) Love and candies and coffee and soon, I will also bring Legba some lovely rum. Merci merci merci cher Papa.

here's hoping this head injury will be wonderfully transforming!

I mean, the skeptics are known to remark upon any biological process that can result in emotional or exalted experience. Head injuries are mentioned in this context. But as yet, despite a) concussion, b) post-concussive syndrome, and even c) accidentally smashing MYSELF in the same nose my Labrador smashed (she used her breed-perfect skull, I used a car door) to produce the initial concussion...no visions. No oceanic experience. Pouting now.

Not really...but did do a bunch of praying, the second time I was spazzed into the CAT scanner's jaimongous rotary dial, that somehow, this head trauma would indeed help me be more sensitive to others and to the thoughts of the deities I love. As yet, have neither traveled astrally or mistaken my wife for a hat. Samadhi, bliss? Well, no, only during sex, nothing new there. The semi-fanciful hope of my head trauma shakin' loose previously hidden psychic sensitivities has inspired me to pray & meditate more, and be more vigilant about quickly splooshing away self-beating thoughts, however...leading me to conclude: so far so good.