When will I learn that if I don’t drink a cup of tea as soon as I pour it, it will be stone-cold by the time that I remember to pick it up for a sip again?

I am currently in the throes of craving a Coffee Crisp.

I haven’t enjoyed the last few Coffee Crisp bars that I’ve eaten. I have, oh, maybe two per year. They just don’t have that same lovely, deep, mocha-y taste that they used to have.

Great. So now my taste buds are indulging in nostalgia. Just what I need.

Here I am, back in the land of the living after sleeping a total of sixteen hours yesterday and struggling through a low-grade fever. I’m still not in top form, but it’s nice to be able to get out of bed and perambulate, y’know?

In fact, I got dressed at noon and wandered into the kitchen to heat up some soup.

“Nice pants,” said my husband. “I haven’t seen those before.”

“I got them from Ceri,” I said. “They don’t fit her any more.”

He looked slightly startled. I’m not sure why; maybe it was a new-ish concept to him. It’s a girl thing, I guess, to swap clothes if you don’t use them any more. Whatever. I like these pants. They’re comfy. And being the height that I am, low-slung hip-riding pants designed for an “average person” (as if there is any such thing) means that the waistband actually sits at waist height on me, so I’m doubly happy. (By extension, of course, it means an “average” regular fit chafes my rib-cage. I’m sort of glad the low-slung trend is still around so I can proceed to take advantage of it.)

Who decides what “average” is, anyway? Taking two extremes and making a pair of pants to fit a mythical person in-between the two simply means that the clothes fit no one.

Evidently I’m still too out of it to function in the real world. I think I’ll go back to bed.

I’m only human. Which means that I like to be recognised for my work, like everyone else. I particularly like to be recognised for the work I do voluntarily, since it’s a gift and I’m not expecting anything in return.

Two and a half years ago when Ceri and I and a couple of others got together to create the Montreal Pagan Resource Center, for example, we were aiming to create something for everyone in the city to use as a resource, Pagan or not. It was to be a place where people could go to do research, to ask questions, and to talk to others in a safe environment in an effort to share information about all sorts of religions. Eventually Ceri, and then I as well, gave up in frustration on the project. It wasn’t worth the crap and resentment that the local Pagan community was throwing at us; not when we were volunteering so much time, energy and effort.

Why are voluntary leaders always unappreciated? Why is it that as soon as someone is paid for their work, it becomes “legitimate” in some way?

Patricia Telesco has written an interesting article that examines the concept of give and take in a spiritual community. One paragraph in particular caught my attention, and it begins with:

Scanning our rather dysfunctional family there has been great growth, but it has also come at a great price. We do not really honor our priests, our elders, our teachers — for the most part I see these people burning out because everyone takes, and few give back.

I know exactly what she means. And unfortunately, it brought up all my old frustration with the local Pagan community again.

Oh, the MPRC is still around. Half of its founding members have washed their hands of the project, though, burnt out, frustrated.

As a teacher, like it or not, I’m a leader. I know that at some point I’ll have to get involved in the community again. I’m not looking forward to it at all; my experiences with it over the past seven years have been 90% negative. Not much of an incentive to return, is it. Every once in a while I think I can make a difference, help create an environment where we can all support and learn from each other, and then I look at the notoriously apathetic local community’s history, and their brick walls that I’ve run into in the past. How many times must I do it before either I or the community learns the lesson?

It’s like a playground: everyone has to co-operate. It just gets so damned frustrating when some of us try and try, and eventually give up… only to hear the community complain about the lack of leadership. The hypocrisy chokes me.

And people wonder why I keep to myself.

Aha!

Something I enjoy doing, if a film puzzles me, is reading about the production team’s reasoning behind their decisions. So, when I found Scott’s link to an interview with Peter Jackson and Phillippa Boyens about the changes they chose to make in The Two Towers, I was rather pleased. Almost as pleased as I was with their reasons for moving things about and re-interpreting characters slightly for the storytelling style that film as a medium requires. Their choices made sense. And it’s not like one could just film LOTR word for word, after all – what a gods-awful bore that would be, if it were even possible.

So yes, there’s mention of Faramir and his apparent contradictions (which seems to be one of the major issues people are having, if they’ve read the book), and Gollum, and other interesting issues that people have decided are just plain wrong. Speaking of which, folks, Aragon and Arwen have their own little love story in the appendices of RotK – go read it and stop complaining that Jackson’s making things up. Inserting flashback sequences isn’t a crime, for heaven’s sake; by creating the appenix, Tolkien sort of employed a similar technique. How Jackson chooses to integrate it into the main tale is what should be focused on, and so far it’s not as horrendous as it could have been. Quit griping.

Ahem.

I would like to announce that my husband has just been contacted to start his old job in animation, as of eight o’clock tomorrow morning, at approximately the same pay he was receiving when he was laid off eighteen months ago.

We’d like to thank everyone who was supportive and understanding and helped us along, and we know that all of you will be as crazy with glee as we are right now. So I just wanted to let you all know before we stepped out for a celebratory luncheon.