Monthly Archives: July 2003

Random Religious And Literary Links

Found on a banner on a web page:

The Goddess is here, and She is organising.

Well, I laughed.

It’s on the interesting Christian Wicca page. Nope, I haven’t yet read it in entirety, but it’s nice to see that some people don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. Here’s an excerpt from an article entitled Christian Wicca: The Oxymoron Syndrome:

To be very honest, I am not the original person to set about Christianizing the practices and sacred Days of Power of The Wicca, Pagan religions, or any earth-based religions. As much as I would like to take credit for this – the Roman Catholic Church did this first. The Catholics are truly in many aspects the original Christian Wiccans or ChristoPagans.

Heh.

More oddness: S.A.L.V. (Slytherins Against Lord Voldemort). Aside from the spelling mistakes, it’s an intriguing idea.

Gnash

Tori Amos will be in Toronto this August 13th on her LottaPianos tour. I, however, will be in Pennsylvania.

Sigh.

Neil Gaiman on seeing Tori at some point during this North American tour: And no, I don’t yet know which ones I’ll be going to. Given that this is going to be the last time she’ll be on the road until at least 2005, I want to make as many as I can. (“Look, I’ll just ride in the bus and write a book. You’ll hardly even notice me. Promise.”)

As if Neil Gaiman could ever not be noticed.

Drawing The Line

Nothing, nothing infuriates me more than people who can’t time-manage their way out of a paper bag. Especially when a good portion of that time involves my work as well, in some fashion.

After thirty-odd years, you would think that people would know how good/bad they are at these sort of things, and allot time accordingly. But no; people appear to turn cheerful blind eyes to this particular fault, or maybe they just don’t care.

I, however, do care. A lot. And when I do work to hit a deadline of some sort, and everyone else lags behind, I get damned angry. Why? Why do I care, when my work is done? Partially because I usually end up looking bad as well; partially because I sometimes end up having to take more time out of my schedule to solve the problem thusly created, occasionally forcing me to cancel something that had been planned; but mostly because I get sick and tired of watching people make the same mistake over and over and not learning from it.

Time management. It’s tied up in procrastination and the inability to understand that other people are depending on you. And maybe the whole concept of time passing, or being able to quantify time, or whatever.

Whatever it is, I’m tired of it. I’m tired of being yoked to other people in projects where people don’t understand that their work affects others. And I’m tired of snapping into being off-the-deep-end enraged about it after making an effort to be as understanding and as supportive as possible.

Writing Notes

Things I forgot to mention, which I ought to:

I wrote three-quarters of a short story on Friday, after my crisis. I’m usually in agreement with the whole “who says an artist needs to suffer in order to create?”, but lately it seems I need some sort of traumatic emotional upheaval in order to calmly sit down later on and whip something off. Word total for Friday: a very respectable 2,510.

Today, while the power was off (muttergrumblegrr) I researched and made lots of dialogue notes for that potential collaboration project. Out of the blue, I also wrote five and a half poems. (A half, because it’s not in its final draft yet.) Dedicated readers will remember my odd yearnings to be writing poetry this past spring (not that I had poems in mind, I just wanted to be engaged in the act of poetry writing). I find poetry very peaceful. Mind you, it’s also distilled emotion, which is like handling fire and ice at any time, and even more dangerous in my frustrated and fragile hands these days.

It’s even more special, because I started a new notebook. It’s Coptic-bound, with a Japanese print of a plum tree in blossom on it, and the pages are a dark ivory colour. I use my dip pen with black ink, too. Of course, it’s all to recopy the original pencil scribblings in my current notebook of ideas, complete with cross-outs and arrows indicating line rearrangements and so forth.

However — poetry. Goodness. I believe the last time I wrote poetry was around eleven years ago.

A Curse Upon Hydro And Blogger

Joy. Remember I was growling about how the power was supposed to be turned off last week, and it never was, so I wasted a whole day of work? Guess what happened this morning with no warning at all.

Blogger had a hiccup yesterday and ate not only the penultimate post on the Hogwarts quiz, but the long and involved post I did on Frida Kahlo as well.

So, to recap:

Apparently Defence Against the Dark Arts would be my best class if I attended Hogwarts. Hmm. I thought for sure it would be History of Magic.

July 6, 1907 was Frida Kahlo’s birthday, although she popularised her birthdate as July 7, 1910 to identify herself with the new Mexico born with the outbreak of the Mexican revolution.

Currently, my favourite work of Kahlo’s is her Self-Portrait, 1926; I find it quite Mona Lisa-like: mysterious, solemn, quirky, and each time that I see it I come to a different decision regarding what lies behind those eyes. Here she is.

Self-Portrait, 1926

(The original post was longer, and more articulate. Really.)

Enthusiastic Endorsement, Complete With Muppet Nods

Some of my regular readers might not click randomly on links, so I want to draw your attention to t!, a man I’ve known for thirteen years. Long ago, we bonded over Shakespeare, Star Wars, pasta, and the Muppets.

[…] The real magic was on The Muppet Show.

It wasn’t aimed at kids. At least one third of it was musical numbers. It was vaudeville, on the medium that killed vaudeville. For those who could still appreciate vaudeville. Adults. But their children knew the Muppets, so we watched Kermit in his night job, when he wasn’t reporting for Muppet News.

And we got show tunes. Stand up comedy. And awful, awful puns. Plus just about every other entertainment staple you can think of: Stuntmen, jugglers, science fiction, hospital drama, sportscasting, westerns, educational science films (?!), Grand Guignol, a piano man, a full orchestra, a modern rock band, even heckling for crying out loud, and all of it aimed over our heads like a boomerang fish.

So what happened? We raised our heads.

He’s perfected the art of debating, pushing his limits and yours to force growth, and he also happens to be one of the most intelligent people I know. And, like the Muppets, his writing refuses to make it easier; you have to raise your head. What are you waiting for? Go read Baker’s 12.