Friday, January 30, 2004

"And still I rise..."--Maya Angelou

phoenix
You are a PHOENIX in your soul and your
wings make a statement. Huge and born of flame,
they burn with light and power and rebirth.
Ashes fall from your wingtips. You are an
amazingly strong person. You survive, even
flourish in adversity and hardship. A firm
believer in the phrase, 'Whatever doesn't kill
you only makes you stronger,' you rarely fear
failure. You know that any mistake you make
will teach you more about yourself and allow
you to 'rise from the ashes' as a still greater
being. Because of this, you rarely make the
same mistake twice, and are not among the most
forgiving people. You're extremely powerful and
wise, and are capable of fierce pride, passion,
and anger. Perhaps you're this way because you
were forced to survive a rough childhood. Or
maybe you just have a strong grasp on reality
and know that life is tough and the world is
cruel, and it takes strength and independence
to survive it. And independence is your
strongest point - you may care for others, and
even depend on them...but when it comes right
down to it, the only one you need is yourself.
Thus you trust your own intuition, and rely on
a mind almost as brilliant as the fire of your
wings to guide you.You are eternal and because
you have a strong sense of who and what you
are, no one can control your heart or mind, or
even really influence your thinking. A symbol
of rebirth and renewal, you tend to be a very
spiritual person with a serious mind - never
acting immature and harboring a superior
disgust of those who do. Likewise, humanity's
stupidity and tendency to want others to solve
their problems for them frustrates you
endlessly. Though you can be stubborn,
outspoken, and haughty, I admire you greatly.


*~*~*Claim Your Wings - Pics and Long Answers*~*~*
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Thursday, January 29, 2004

More Stuff About the Wonderful Me

  1. I have a fixation on guys like Bobcat Goldthwaite, Dave Attel, and Jack Black, because they seem like what I might be like if I was a guy.
  2. I am unemployed, but I currently have a small dog-walking business. It came at a time when I was very desperate, I was running out of money to pay for a storage unit which had lots of books and craft supplies in it. I subsequently did run out of money for it and lost everything. I try not to think about it too much, it hurts to lose all that useful stuff that I was trying to save. My bad for being such a pack-rat, I guess.

    When I was really feeling desperate, I went on Beliefnet and found a pagan prayer. I've actually been studying metaphysics off and on for some time, but I was going out of my mind. Two hours after I prayed, I was talking to my next door neighbor, who asked how much I would charge to walk her dog, and bingo, I had a small means of income drop into my lap. Recently, another neighbor has been added to my roster of canine perambulation, and so things are looking up.
  3. When I was on Bloop I talked to a young person about Tarot, (I'm not an expert or a pro {I'd kind of like to be}but I was fairly decent at it some years ago. Getting back into it again.) It seems like some people have these preconceived notions about Tarot, that before you can do it you need to do magick rituals, have candles, etc. I'm not that ooga-booga about it. I feel (especially for young people) magick should be a matter of choice, and if you make that choice, you want to spend a lot of time studying and meditating about it. I also believe you should use divination to guide your magick. So if you needed to do magick to read the cards, it would be like putting the cart before the horse. Divination, to me, is a tool to help you know yourself so that you can bring more to the table magickwise.
  4. So last night I was watching videos on Launchcast, I was looking at Stone Temple Pilots (the live version of Sex Type Thing) and also managed to watch that Dave Navarro/Carmen Electra thing. I saw that Dave sports a Unicursal Hexagram tat, which immediately made me sit up and take notice. I then did a google search on him and found out that he's not necessarily the stupid slut-boy I originally thought he was.

    Then I found something that said he had surveillance footage on his website of himself masturbating and whispering, "Is this what you wanted?" Something about that made me decide, "Yeah, that's what I want." So I did more mad googling and came up with bupkiss. There is a page on his website that appears to have been sold off to a toy store website--as if something was there, but now that he's marrying Carmen he doesn't want anything like that out there, which I can respect.

    So basically, the combination of Scott Weiland's naked butt/Dave Navarro's possible online jackage made me one horny Hermgirl. The idea that developed in my mind was that I would like to see a male stripper that acts like a rock star and comes out wearing women's lingerie and maybe a pair of long fishnet glove things and eyeliner. And lets me smack that ass.

    There was a guy I used to work with that was hot like that. In his off hours he was a stripper. He kinda dug me too, I called him "Darryl the Hoochie-Man." Whenever I walked by, he used to do a little snaky stripparella dance for me...

How did the Belief-O-Matic do?

I got this info here.

1. New Age (100%)
2. Neo-Pagan (97%)
3. Unitarian Universalism
4. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (85%)
5. Liberal Quakers (80%)
6. New Thought (79%)
7. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (77%)
8. Mahayana Buddhism (77%)
9. Theravada Buddhism (77%)
10. Scientology (68%)
11. Bahá'í Faith (64%)
12. Reform Judaism (61%)
13. Taoism (59%)
14. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (56%)
15. Orthodox Quaker (56%)
16. Secular Humanism (53%)
17. Hinduism (47%)
18. Nontheist (47%)
19. Orthodox Judaism (45%)
20. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (43%)
21. Jainism (37%)
22. Islam (37%)
23. Jehovah's Witness (35%)
24. Seventh Day Adventist (34%)
25. Sikhism (31%)
26. Eastern Orthodox (24%)
27. Roman Catholic (24%)

Friday, January 23, 2004

What's My Type?

Enneagram
free enneagram test


INFP - "Questor". High capacity for caring. Emotional face to the world. High sense of honor derived from internal values. 4.4% of total population.
Take Free Myers-Briggs Personality Test


Conscious self
Overall self
Take Free Enneagram Personality Test


Enneagram Test Results
Type 1 Perfectionism |||||||||||| 50%
Type 2 Helpfulness |||||||||||| 42%
Type 3 Ambition |||||||||| 34%
Type 4 Sensitivity |||||||||||| 46%
Type 5 Detachment |||||||||||||||||| 74%
Type 6 Anxiety |||||||||| 38%
Type 7 Adventurousness |||||||||| 38%
Type 8 Aggressiveness |||||||||||| 50%
Type 9 Calmness |||||||||||||||||| 74%
Your Conscious-Surface type is 9
Your Unconscious-Overall type is 8w9
Take Free Enneagram Personality Test


And most importantly:

Recovering the Satellites
You are Recovering The Satellites, you have
achieved success but are not entirely sure how
to deal with it. You're being positive though
and it shows.


Which Counting Crows album are you?
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Tuesday, January 20, 2004

The Darkest Time in My Life--Or, How My Cats Helped Me Through a Tough Time

The lowest time in my life was when I was about 25. I went through the most debilitating depression I ever thought anyone could have. It lasted for about a year, and the memories I have of this time are very fuzzy. Today, if I hear that someone I know is depressed, I tend to be more sympathetic than before I went through it.

There were about four or five different points of crisis that I believe contributed to this state. I had broken off a friendship with a friend I had had for 10 years, it was almost like going through a divorce. This friend had been very manipulative and domineering, so by the end of the 10 years I sort of no longer had a personality of my own, I was more like an extension of this person's life. Psychologists will tell you that these kind of relationships can be very damaging to the ego, and breaking it off like I had to do can then be quite traumatic.

Another factor was the fact that I had fallen in love with someone, the first man I had ever been interested in. In my younger days at school and so forth I had never been interested in guys, preferring to spend my time with aforementioned friend or alone. When I became attracted to this guy it hit me like a ton of bricks, like all that repressed stuff just came out all at once. He was very cute, funny, and smart, and he knew it. Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be.

Another factor was my five-year experiment with Christianity. It caused an even bigger rift between me and the rest of my family than I had already had, coming off my rebellious teen years. They just did not understand what was going on with me. I had always been weird to them, and this was just confirmation. Christianity was sort of like a drug to me, at the end of the five years it just got harder & harder to get "high". It wasn't helping me with the problems I had turned to it with in the first place. In the end I was going to church & bawling my eyes out through the whole service, every time I went. I would kneel in my dark little room in prayer every morning, at the end of an hour I was shouting at the ceiling. One weekend I was tired of not being able to communicate with god the way I used to, so I asked for a sign from him about what he wanted me to do, how I could get back in touch with his will, etc. My family & I were spending the weekend out in the country. Nothing happened until my mom and I were driving home. We were the only ones in the car. Then she drops the bomb: My brother has informed the family that he is gay. I have since come to appreciate & celebrate gay people, but at the time I was a fundamentalist Christian, so this certainly knocked me for a loop. Oddly enough, when we were teens, I was the rebellious one & he was the straight laced young republican (I used to call him the Reagan Youth, because he voted for him both times.)

Also, I had quit my job at Sears, the workplace I had stayed the longest at, in order to go to school. Because of my ADD, I wound up really fouling up at school, and had some trouble finding my next job.

When I went through my depression, I did not have the benefit of a therapist or drugs, I just went through it all by myself. I stayed in my room sleeping all day. I would go without bathing for weeks. The only thing keeping me from killing myself was the fact that I had to get up in the morning to feed my two cats, then I would go right back to bed. The fact that my cats were there was really what kept me alive because they gave me a lot of love.

The feelings I were having were very frightening, I did not realize people could really have feelings like this, I really felt like I was going insane. I made things worse by sort of becoming addicted to sugar. I would literally eat granulated sugar from the bowl, several tablespoonfuls, and go into a hyperactive crying jag in my room.

My mother hears me talk about little snippets of these experiences and says "Where was I when all this was going on?" She was just unhappy with me at the time because I didn't do the dishes or whatever. I remember during this time she got irritated with me because the dishes weren't done and I went nuts. If it hadn't been for my parents allowing me to live rent-free though, I don't know what would have happened.

Anyway, it was a very scary time. I had never been self-destructive or suicidal, but during this time I felt like the unhappiness I felt would eventually drown out everything else, and I would attempt suicide, even though I didn't WANT to kill myself. Strangely, this is a part of the experience that redeemed me, beyond everything else. It was like once everything had been stripped away from me, my beliefs, my friends, even having more than extremely minimal contact with other people, I found a rock hard core of self preservation, way down deep, and I had to journey long to find it.

I began finding little things to enjoy. I started watching All My Children, and it became as though the characters were my friends. I started calling a morning dj on the radio, and I was able to make him & his comedian cronies laugh as they had made me laugh (to this day I credit Alex Bennet as one of the people that saved my life.) Humor really is a strong medicine. I started going to the library again. I found a self-help author that really helped me a lot. Another thing that really helped me out was I would sit in the sun by the side of the house with the cats. We would sit in the sun together and I used to get into this meditative state that I called "Waiting for the Mother Ship" This is going to sound weird but I believe that I developed an empathic connection with my cats by doing this. They sort of knew that something was going on in my brain, and they helped out somehow.

When I finally came out of it, it was like a season changing. Even though it was the lowest time in my life, I feel it made me stronger. I came out of it around 1991, and I sometimes like to say I spent the nineties recovering from the mistakes I made in the eighties.

If this makes any of the Christians out there feel like proselytizing me, please don't. I have since read things that have convinced me that Christianity is just a bastardization of all the different myths and religions that were going on in the Middle East at the time that the Bible was being written. I like to think of myself as a "born again pagan."

This was very cathartic to write about, I hope it helps others.

Books on my shelf

I posted this on the Thelema.nu site, thought I'd let my blog buddies read it.

This is a great topic for me--I absolutely love books--I have worked at three bookstores in my life, and about 75% of the wall space in my room is filled with books

First of all I have a lot of fiction--Saul Bellow, Hemingway, Richard Brautigan, the Beats--Kerouac, Burroughs, Diane di Prima, etc.

Typical stuff like Stephen King, Jonathan Kellerman, Clive Barker, Thomas Harris, etc.

Business motivational stuff like Cluetrain Manifesto, Tom Peters, etc.

Then I have stuff like the Collected Works of Antonin Artaud--one of my literary idols. The edition that has an intro by Susan Sontag is really good, because she talks about gnosticism. Like Crowley, Artaud was an insane(?) drug addict. Like Crowley, his ideas went on to shape the second half of the twentieth century.

I also have a bunch of antique books I inherited from my grandmothers. A set of Dickens, a set of Balzac, a series of children's fiction and history.

A huge passel of pocket paperbacks, with stuff like Nietzsche, H.P. Lovecraft, Pat Conroy, Jackie Collins, and Ayn Rand. I find the Ayn Rand a little embarrassing, but I keep it in there because it tends to weird out & intimidate people who don't read much.

There are also things from the fifties, like Bob Hope's "I Owe Russia $1200" and "Barbara Owen, Girl Reporter".

Tons of Complete Idiots Guides and for Dummies books.

An embarrasing amount of Llewellyn books--They were shiny, happy, pagan books that were about three bucks apiece at one store I worked at.

Tons of books on yarn crafts.

Tons of books on Tarot (my current favorite is the Complete Idiots Guide to...")

Some Hippie dippy type stuff like Ram Dass "Be Here Now" and Timothy Leary "Confessions of a Hope Fiend" and also that book he did with R. A. Wilson, the title of which escapes me now. I also have tons of R. A. Wilson, except for that one about Bob & Slack (post-modernism kind of gets on my nerves.)

One of the first books on metaphysics I ever read was Colin Wilson's "the Occult".

I also have some stuff on Gnosticism, like Pagels & Steiner.

I also have a lot of Ouspensky/Gurdjieff--but the only Ouspensky book I even got halfway through was New Model of the Universe, and that was because I really dug the parts where he talked about his disillusionment with society through his newspaper job, and subsequent search for wisdom. "There are enough lies in the world without mine." There is a very cool book about the 4th Way community called "Struggle of the Magicians: Why Ouspensky Left Gurdjieff" by William Patrick Patterson, which reads like a spy novel. You should check it out if you're into them.

I have some things like Godwin's Cabalistic Eycyclopedia, Regardie's Golden Dawn and Garden of Pomegranates.

Of course I have a lot of Crowley books, one of my favorites being an edition called "Portable Darkness: An Aleister Crowley Reader" edited by Scott Michaelson, which provides a nice introduction to his work. I have the Confessions, Laurence Sutin's "Do What Thou Wilt," The Law is For All, Holy Books of Thelema, Book of Lies, Magickal Diaries of AC, 777, Book of Thoth, Magick W/O Tears, Tarot Divination, Magick in Theory & Practice.

Monday, January 19, 2004

I have arrived...

music
Good. You know your music. You should be able to work at Championship Vinyl with Rob, Dick and Barry (although you know this place could never hold a candle to the greatness that was the Record Exchange with George and Jim.)


Do You Know Your Music (Sorry MTV Generation I Doubt You Can Handle This One)
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Welcome to the Grotto in realtime. The exercise in futility I thought of as getting caught up with my former blog activity so as to give my buddies a better taste of "mah flavah" has come to a screeching halt. The weasle bastards at Bloop saw fit to delete my diary. Not that big a loss, but there were some highlights I would have liked to save. My bad. I will just have to meditate extra hard tomorrow to remember as much as I can.

Note to self: Don't write journal entries without putting them in a notebook first.

I have to go. Got a long day tomorrow...

Sunday, January 18, 2004

Friday, January 09, 2004

Greetings, LiveJournal Citizens!!! (Originally an LJ post)

I bring you salutations from between the Emerald Pillars!


That was a very pretentious way of saying hello (hermeticists should get it, perhaps no one else will.) Generally I prefer a more casual brand of intelligence, rather than intellectualism.


I sort of have an overgrown teenage exterior, on the inside a will of steel. I can hang out with my teenage nephew & watch TV or listen to Queens of the Stone Age, or I could discuss Swinburne & Nietzsche.


I am currently in the process of transferring my old blog over to here, and some of the themes I will be talking about are these:



  • Counting Crows (although probably not as much as I have been, since due to currently being unemployed I have no money for concerts.)

  • Tarot (used to be quite proficient, am trying to get back into it, but a little rusty.)

  • Books, TV, movies, music (all kinds.)

  • Knitting & Crocheting (I hope someday to obtain a digital camera so I can show off my work.)

  • Insomnia (I have a tendency to stay up till six or seven in the morning.  I am going to attempt to do less of this in the New Year--though not eliminate it, I have too many things to do and sometimes it is the only way to get anything done.)

I have been exploring LJ, and I've already joined many communities.  I think I am going to like it here.


The next entries after this one will be transfers from another blog, which end a little before Xmas, these will be labeled, "Blog Transfer Entry"  to differentiate between my regular entries.


So here is what has been going on between my last blog entry & now:


I went up north to my oldest brother’s house, where he lives with his girlfriend, her teenage daughter, and his fancy parquet floor that you can't walk on in shoes.  This is the brother I don't care for, but I went and made nice.  I was almost going to sneak out of the house the morning we were set to leave so I wouldn't have to go, I had a note written & everything, but it was raining that morning so I chickened out.


The whole time we were there, my brother was so tense you could have bounced a quarter off of him.  The stay was made more pleasant by the fact that I got to gossip with my sister, and spend a lot of time with her teenage kids.  Despite the fact that my older sister is extremely high-strung, we get along quite well.  I don't think she realizes how much I admire her.  Also nice was that we got to see family friends.


Then we came home, and there was a couple of days before my parents were going up to Seattle to visit my aunt for New Years.  I was going to have a nice few days all to myself, but unfortunately, there was a little "episode" prior to this.


Mom was a little disappointed that during these few days when she had her vacation that she hadn't been able to get Dad to do some things she wanted around the house, so she was kind of on the warpath (she pretty much had been since since a few days before we left for my brother's--she knew I didn't want to go, and even bribed me with money--saying it was a Christmas gift, etc. {I took the money--big mistake}amongst whatever other reasons she had for being in Bitch Mode.)  This is her basic pattern:  She has some kind of argument with Dad, and when it stalemates, she lays into me.  She can be extremely domineering and mean, and thinks nothing in these instances of raking me over the coals.


So she decides to open my mail and look at my bank statement, which, since I am unemployed she knows is going to reflect my sorry state of financial affairs.  Of course, in her mood whatever she finds is going to be terrible, and she bullies me into closing my checking account.


Man, was I happy when they left for Seattle.


I spent the time cleaning my room (that is another thing that will be covered in this journal, room cleaning--or lack thereof.) and got it to a nice level of organization.


On that note, I will end this rather long-winded entry.