Magickal Realism

This is part of my work in the Julia Cameron Artist’s Way series. The work this time is from the book the Artist’s Way at Work: Riding the Dragon. The responses are self-examinations and assessments based on work through a daily series of exercises. While I do keep some material offline as it can be very personal and jarring, I often opt to be fairly open about my experiences, both positive and negative.

Small things that bring me back to reality when stuff gets surreal.

Clearing the dishwasher Baking (gets a touch double-edged.) Decluttering/cleaning closets/clearing space Decoupaging shipping boxes and product bottles Gardening Sex Sketching Going for a walk Talking to a friend I really trust Journaling/blogging
Filed under: Riding the Dragon, Tasks

My revolution will not be televised. This is because it’s all online.

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I’m making some productivity changes. They may confuse some, but have faith! It means, ideally, that I can better entertain you in the future.

1. Email

Checking it twice a day only. Filtered the bejesus out of it, so things are sorted into specific folders as they come in. I’ve found companies that cheat this system and flag everything as “urgent.” These are also the people that send a promotional email daily, a hands-down worst practice. In most email responses (there are obvious exceptions for people I rarely see, am interviewing, etc.) I am striving to make email responses 5 sentences or less. Emails that require longer than 5 sentence responses do get dropped to the bottom of my queue, and will likely get responses on weekends.

2. Social media

Also attempting to go on twice daily only (with breaks for Words with Friends.) May cheat, using Bufferapp. I am doing this yes, to promote the book I’m writing, but also to maintain a presence when I’m unable to share immediately. Also, I find a TON of cool stuff worth sharing in my RSS reader – and posting it all at once is really annoying; this helps me pace it out.

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3. Phone

Phone calls must be scheduled. These can not go over 15 minutes, and must happen after 5 pm, or even 8 pm. I am more flexible if you want to use Skype or Google Hangout, but an appointment is still required.

4. Fridays

Friday is now my official reading day. On Fridays, I read. This is time I also use to catch up on forums, read emails, highlight magazines and most especially READ BOOKS.  I allow myself slightly more latitude on social media that day as well.

5. Actual socialization

I am also making it a point to try to do something at least once a week with a friend. Sometimes I need to hunker down, but if I can do a lunch or catch a movie, that’s totally OK.

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This is part of my work in the Julia Cameron Artist’s Way series. The work this time is from the book the Artist’s Way at Work: Riding the Dragon. The responses are self-examinations and assessments based on work through a daily series of exercises. While I do keep some material offline as it can be very personal and jarring, I often opt to be fairly open about my experiences, both positive and negative.

1. Who am I? What are my group affiliations?

I am a strong, independent priestess. I am a writer. I am a witch. I am an herbalist that needs to formalize my knowledge. I am an organizer – and a damn good one, albeit relatively unsung at the moment. I am the person who knows how to say no and when to say yes. I am a journalist – because that will never end. I am meant, at some point, to be a sociologist. It’s what I know I should have done coming out of high school but I allowed my family’s fucked up worldview to lead me astray from my truth. Besides, what the hell is wrong with being a social worker?

2. Morning pages – I did them. This week focusing more on purging family dynamics memories. I believe this is related to the work I’m doing, because the screwed up family patterns may explain my struggles with work and organization politics. Studying up this year on female social violence has also proved invaluable, and made hanging out at a local pub once a week a lot more pleasant for me (because I can shut that shit down RIGHT NOW without being mean.)

By recognizing how the patterns of how silence and unspoken rules fall – and why that’s bad – I can break unspoken rules and get something more productive and healthy from my interactions. I ended up with the rebel slot despite trying to please and support my family because I broke the unspoken rules. All those unspoken rules led to me +purdah, so having my family hate me and treat me like dirt is unsurprising, but worth the price of getting the fuck away from that. It also explains why most of what I deal with now is people demanding my silence – there’s really nothing I do that sets anyone off beyond expressing an opinion. Which means I’m breaking things that need to be broken.

I also realized that I in terms of group dynamics, I am the de facto scapegoat and mirror, but most people tell themselves they see me as the leader/charmer or some variation of organizer. On a subconscious level, some individuals assume “having things in common” means that a person is a reflection of themselves. Frankly, after a childhood with people constantly trying to force me to conform to some screwed up image of themselves, I don’t respond well to interactions where people talk ONLY about themselves and their interests. It’s possible to bore me with things I actually like that way. I do think that I can certainly be the actual leader/organizer, now that I know where these patterns and “silent rules” come from and I know that they can all be broken, mostly by the simple act of saying something.

3. My time-outs have been a bit lame of late. I need to do another one soon.

4. I have noticed changes in my group interactions, and I have a new opportunity in that a recurring interaction has appeared again. The people I’m working with are trying to do some overt manipulation, and I’ve been mistaken in trying to tell them “why no.” What I need to do is have them explain to me “Why yes.” I’m pretty sure that enthusiasm has overridden consideration for logistics.

5. I could do better with self-care and time-outs. I tried doing a back to back at the gym last night and almost passed out during yoga. Qigong was worked in, and it happened after that. So while it could be dehydration, it could be a Qigong thing or breathing wrong or something. Still, making sure I hit the gym, but I need to get back on my weekly program of skin buffing, facials and hot oil treatments. They really do make a visible difference.

Filed under: Riding the Dragon, Tasks, Weekly Check-In

orion_mk3 – http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com (link to this month’s post)
MamaStrong – http://writingofme.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
pyrosama – http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Turndog-Millionaire – http://turndog-millionaire.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Alpha Echo – http://aprilplummer81.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
LilGreenBookworm – http://themayhemofwritingsahm-style.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Domoviye – http://lets-get-happy.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
writingismypassion – http://charityfaye.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
kimberlycreates – http://www.kimberlycreates.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Suzanne Seese – http://viewofsue.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Diana Rajchel – http://blog.dianarajchel.com/

Ralph Pines – http://ralfast.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Alynza – http://www.alynzasmith.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Literateparakeet – http://lesliesillusions.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
in_one – http://quirkythomas.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Tomspy77 – http://thomaswillamspychalski.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Inkstrokes – http://drlong67.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
kiwiviktor81 – http://storygenerator.net/ (link to this month’s post)

For the AbsoluteWrite January Blog chain.

This is FICTION.

Minnesota is its own winter nightmare. Just being here tests the soul, forces you to face fear daily, and can make a quest out of an ordinary action like getting from a parked car to a workplace.

I am tempted to simply post a picture of what I see outside my window. I live in Minnesota. I don’t even live in the bad part of Minnesota, where there’s isolation, lousy wireless access and living conditions that swing halfway between bear hunting and bear hunting you. Even so, it’s life threatening at this time of year, a walk down the block can hobble you for life if you forget that second or third layer, and every year we lose some bodies to the cold. Anyone who lives in Minnesota, from the lifelong natives to the outlanders like me, retreats inward around January. Oh, we say it’s to detox from the holiday parties and because of the  new fiscal quarter. The truth is, it’s too cold to smell the death on the air, but we can still feel it. We retreat indoors and knit and write and fight with our loved ones, grieving for the people dying, people we don’t even know we’ve lost. Minnesotans are a cold lot, and they don’t welcome in strangers, often cleaving to the people they’ve known since high school with the occasional college exception thrown in. But while they refuse to acknowledge or include their outlanders, they still feel them, and on some level recognize them as part of the mass organism that forms this society of sunlight and snow.

It’s been especially bad the last two years. The bad economy and police restrictions have pulled tighter, tighter, tighter every year – now some of the homeless can’t even rely on a garbage can fire, and every shelter has had to resort to a lottery system. Remember, the house always wins.

Especially when you don’t have a house.

I knew these things, just like I knew that the people standing out on street corners with signs saying things like “hungry, please help,” or “need money for the bus,” are, for the most part, really just gathering untraceable cash for things decidedly not food. Restaurants don’t lock their dumpsters in this city, and while giving someone shelter was sometimes too much to ask, people feed each other here. Even though the food shelves are getting wiped clean, and malnutrition abounds, no one is actually starving. No one who goes out on the street with a sign about it, anyway.

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The abandoned gas station just outside of northeast Minneapolis had clearly already had its tenants. One of the boarded-over windows hung out at a crazy angle: a scrawny kid or group of kids could easily climb inside. The pillaging opportunities were pretty good. While people evicted from homes were generally forced to take all their belongings with them, when a business goes under, all the flotsam usually gets left behind. Those television images of the disappointed business owner packing box after box right down to the fake plants in the lobby is fiction. The fake plants are left to molder until the rats eat it or the roaches make it a luxury resort. Kids would loot the place for 3.2 beer and candy; the enterprising (or addicted) might find uses I was better off not knowing for the over the counter cold medicines and caffeine packs marketed to truckers.

I went during the day, mostly just looking for a place to bury a jar – one of the byproducts of my spiritual practices – where the snow-minded natives of the area would not freak out. It had been my experience that the “mainstreamers” of Minnesota were among the most superstitious in the world; most found tarot cards terrifying (rather than cardboard) and explaining that I was burying a bottle of urine and nails because my neighbors imagined that I threatened them so I was using this superstition to counter the morass of superstition cast upon me, drawn from a religious culture that tromped on without outward verification, was just not going to fly if I had, say, elected to argue my tax dollars allowed me to bury the bottle by a tree in a public park. Best not to tweak the natives; they already got pretty damned hostile with any of us from foreign tribes.  While the park police had developed a sense of humor about me over the years, this situation was already too delicate for me to try to expand those limits.

I had a flashlight to peer inside, and a pipe that could double as a makeshift crowbar to poke around the property.  I’d already developed a plan if a passing police cruiser wanted to know what I was doing. I’d say I was “considering buying the property,” and that the  “real estate agent hadn’t returned my calls, so I was looking for myself.” I saw to it that I looked white, and dowdy, with the high-waisted mom jeans and a baggy t-shirt with no bra beneath.  I switched out my actual wedding ring for a faux-gold one I kept for situations where I wanted assumptions made about me to fall in a certain direction. My winter gloves would be enough protection from surface disease, although a rat could easily bite right through the cloth. I made a note to myself to avoid touching any rats.

None of the drivers on this edge of the city gave a damn, apparently. I managed to wiggle the board off and flash my light around with impunity. The interior was more or less as I’d predicted: the previous owners had left a lot of crap behind, and the broken cooler doors and candy wrappers dotting the floor showed where either drunk teenagers or desperate adults (or some combination) had descended on the place for its carrion. A flashed my light around the corners, and saw some predictable scurrying – mostly rats. Roaches needed a place with consistent heat and humidity, and the furnace was long dead at this place.

Someone had spray painted above the wall where signs extolled the pleasures dispensed in now long-gone coffee makers  (probably sold, one of the more expensive and financially salvageable items of a gas station shut-down) “Fuck the pigs!” I grimaced at that; it suggested that anyone I might encounter would be oppositional, defiant, looking for a fight. This was probably not a space I could share and use in peace.

Still, it looked like no one was there, and that would do fine. Chances are that anything I left here would go undisturbed forever. Abandoned establishments with gas lines didn’t get demolished as a general rule.

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I didn’t see it the first time, probably because on my first look there wasn’t enough air circulating to cause movement. And in the dead of winter, smell doesn’t play much of a role.

I came back with my reusable bag, filled with the things I figured I’d plant beneath one of the carts in the emptiest of the coolers. No one was likely to move one of those things for years.  That’s when I saw it, the slight swinging motion above the cash area from the corner of my eye. I turned to look. At first my brain did not fully report – or accept – the vision before me. Maybe it was just a banner that fell, gravity finally ripping away the plastic from the nail over years; perhaps a opossum adapted its lifestyle.

What registered first was the shoes.

Opossums don’t wear shoes.

At last, my mind put it together, and then all the details came in full force. It was a white man, well over six foot five. His feet were 12 inches off the ground. He hung by a sturdy cable, and as I allowed the flashlight to follow up from the track marks I could see on the inside of his arms all the way up to the ceiling, I could see where someone (him?) had punched holes in the ceiling to ensure there was proper length for someone of his height. The story told itself.

My flashlight drifted down again, over his face.

I knew his face. I knew it well.

We hadn’t spoken in six months. Six months ago, my confronting him about his alcoholism had caused him to throw me out of his life. Six months ago, he’d been afraid of needles.

And abandoned gas stations. Especially this one. I realized that I found it today because on some subconscious level, I specifically heard him mention it.

I gathered my bag and scrambled out, ignoring the skittering noises of the local rodentia. Of course I had to call the police. I did from my car, using my rehearsed lie about “possible property purchase” when I spoke.

A blizzard came up as I drove home, obscuring all but two feet of the road in front of me. The nightmare of last winter had become this winter’s bad dream.

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The Stop Online Piracy Act comes with some serious red flags.

1. It comes with corporate sponsorship. Corporate sponsors have no business in the legislative process, and yet there they are, ubiquitous as ever. This particular piece of legislation is one more sign that corporate personhood is the worst thing the United States has introduced into law since Prohibition. Prohibition brought about organized crime in the United States. Corporate personhood has legalized crime.

While the link referred above has an extreme tone that undercuts the very points it’s trying to make, it also has an extensive list of the corporations sponsoring SOPA. Highlights include:

CBS NBC Universal Nike Pfizer Inc. (now why would a pharmaceutical giant want free range censorship?) Burberry, Coach, Dolce & Gabanna, Coty Inc., Kate Spade, Revlon CVS , Rite Aid Harley-Davidson Motor Company Reebok Sony Corporation Dow Chemical Company McGraw-Hill Companies Walt Disney Company (no surprise there, they’re the source of nearly all copyright manipulation that has happened in the history of the United States) Wal-Mart Xerox

I would love it if a more expert blogger might delve into the number of “psychological associate” companies included in the list.

2. The proposal violates the 14th Amendment without question. While some argue it violates the 1st Amendment, there is too much wiggle room on that – government enforcement personnel  aren’t PREVENTING you from saying what you need to say, they’re just going to yank your site after you do say something a corporation doesn’t like or after you link to something a corporation doesn’t like. The biggest problem with the amendment is that there is NOT a check-and-balance. This protest is, ultimately, citizens engaging in their end of the check-and-balance system US government relies on.

3. There is actually a proposal for a reasonable alternative, the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, that has gone virtually ignored. The key to this is that pressure is not placed on the judicial system to enforce already established copyright protections. Instead, responsibility goes to the International Trade Commission (already set up for this stuff!) and they do an investigation of problematic web sites. It allows for due process and everything!

So, while you protest SOPA by writing to your representatives, you might consider advocating OPEN, if you feel that it protects our intellectual rights the correct way.

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Why SOPA but not the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA?)

It’s worth mentioning that while there is a massive hue and cry over SOPA, there are objectors who have brought up the question about why we are not so vividly protesting President Obama’s shiny new power to retain prisoners indefinitely.

The reasons are actually simple. If you are a judgmental/sanctimonious sort, you will likely see these reasons as a moral failing on a grand scale. I encourage you to check these tendencies if you are blessed to be aware you have them: it’s that very mentality that eventually kills progress on a given cause. Consider this as a way of informing a new potential roadmap for activism.

1. People will act on what is likely to affect them directly. In the book the Information Diet, author Clay A. Johnson rightly points out that US citizens have become so overfed on a diet of confirmation bias and news that in fact does NOT impact their lives in a direct way, that most respond with apathy until there is direct interference. It’s very possible for me to interpose myself between Fat Chic and a determined shopper, to get the message to the shopper of “Hey, you need to do something about this if you want to shop or be entertained.” I do not have the means, however, to directly impose myself between a military official and an unjustly detained prisoner. I have a high likelihood in such a scenario of becoming an indefinitely detained prisoner. This has no appeal.

2. The best activists do it for themselves. (This was pointed out in Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.) I am a feminist because I am a woman, and I am continually appalled at the disrespect I am expected to tolerate just because of my gender, for example. When I support causes for groups that I am not a member of, it is because when my personal friends have better lives, we all have more ease in socializing; racism, sexism and homophobia screw with my ability to have a good time with my friends. Ergo, I am a vocal ally and advocate in related causes because the opposition harshes my mellow.

3. Not everyone agrees that the NDAA bill is in the wrong. It’s not necessarily hardcore, let’s-monitor-your-pants Republicans that are supporting it. There’s some serious crap that has gone down with Pakistan, and just as the US depersonalizes people outside the country, the US in turn gets highly depersonalized. That depersonalization is the key to anything from domestic abuse to international terrorism.  Let’s revisit the concept of confirmation bias: when we already have an opinion, we have a tendency to filter out information that doesn’t support it. There is some well-researched information on adding this “indefinite detention” easter egg to the bill on both sides of the issue, but there’s very little out there that gives a whole picture. Obama never advertised himself to be anti-war, but for him to allow himself such an extreme power suggests that there’s much more to the picture than your favorite news source is willing/able to cover.

4. The bill gets revisited annually, because it’s a military budget bill. This does not fix the problem of the human rights violation, but it may be a factor in the low/apathetic response from the citizenship. Also, it does mean that those with loved ones that are detained can keep trying this year, and know they will have a good opportunity to keep trying to get it overturned next year.

5. We the people have been information overloaded into apathy. SOPA is different because it gets between us and what feeds our apathy; by cutting the “drug feed” we are waking people up. There are so many causes that need our attention, and all the clamoring causes a sort of scattered shut-down because so many of us have convinced ourselves the only way to be “good” is to support “all” the causes, while supporting the causes that have the most meaning to us and that affect our own lives the most directly are often cut short of key support because we have convinced ourselves that this is somehow self-serving, on the mistaken and unbalanced theory that ALL self-serving is “bad.”

There is one more thing worth mentioning that links SOPA and the NDAA together: if SOPA were to pass, the ability of the people to speak out against prisoner retention and any other violation of civil rights would be exponentially reduced, reduced to a smaller reach than all citizens had even in the 1960s. Information distribution has changed drastically, and it would be harder to get a message out, organize, or raise awareness. Yes, those of us who have regular Internet access are a privileged class. Poverty in the United States is still, on a comparative scale, some of the most comfortable poverty in the world (this does not mean to imply poverty is EVER comfortable.) We can have fingers shaken at us for simply having this privilege – and some do, using Internet access to do so- but we can also use the tools of our privilege to protect our own rights, making our modems an additional right filed under the “right to bear arms.” Computers and communication can also be used as our tools of self-protection, of protest, and even of dealing with a corrupt government. SOPA, and its protest, is something we can address with the power we have immediately onhand. NDAA is something we have to address leveraging the power that those of us who voted entrusted to someone else.

Therein lies the difference; in SOPA, we have more direct power than we do in the NDAA.

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