Magickal Realism

After serious reflection - and reading a snipped in Chapter 8 about using laundry as an excuse not to do something creative just as I was fishing in my head for such an excuse - it occurred to me that trying to “power through” the creative exercises in Artist’s Way would do exactly what they were trying to undo. I would be using them as my excuse for not doing my work, and well, that would get me nowhere. Just like giving myself the excuse that “I’m still unpacking” is also not valid for why I don’t write as much as I should. The brain can only process so much change at once - it’s why people who are given electroshock pretty much just lose memories and there’s no guarantee they’ll lose the right memories.

So, that said, here’s my exercise from chapter 8 thus far:

My dream: to become a playwright.

My true north: seeing the play produced.

I would finish a script for Fringe Festival (one I’ve had in my head for about four years now) and see it performed. In a perfect world, in 5 years I’d like to have completed the play. In the world I live in, today I can plot out the play and determine the ending. In a year I can have three acts written. In this month, I can write the conclusion and begin writing a scene or half a scene a day.

Color Exercise:

I am gold, reflective yet powerful, extroversion buried deep in the earth. I am the rays of the sun, illuminating, nurturing, casting shadow. I am rare. I am valuable. I am flexible, yet enduring.

Keep me true to myself
on this path to myself
Remind me, dear Eros
at the end of this journey
lies freedom
new journeys
heartbreak
and joy.
Amen.

-Artist’s Prayer by Diana Rajchel

The nice thing about living on the block with the most drug dealers per capita in Minneapolis is that no one, criminal or legit, fucks around trying to be a hero. This may also be why we haven’t seen a single zombie yet. I just know they’re there. I can smell them, even in the cool weather. Odors are bothering me even more than normal today. Rotting-wilting-burning flesh, the decay of the man on the ground in my garden, the smell of sun hitting earth. Joel’s organs, live with oxygen.

Joel and I have gotta move. While I’d prefer to stay here, it’s not going to be tenable for long. According to the early tests, the ones done in the months leading up to my trial, I have a much higher pheromone signature than other people, and the alpha-wave activity I spent years training my brain for will eventually draw zombies to me like an all-you-can-eat buffet in Vegas. We’re going to have to bust into the hospital.

I don’t wanna.

But we need to know. I’m going to have to tell Joel what’s happened to me, what might happen to me.

I might actually be a zombie queen, a dormant genetic bomb waiting to go off.

So, the helicopter was this guy from the Vatican waving around a needle and yelling something about “innoculations.”

Given what I’ve been through in the past year, I decided to shoot him in the face. Perhaps not my best moment, but fuck all if I’m taking an anti-zombie shot - I can only guess what an “innoculation” might do if it went wrong, and it’s not like my immune system operates well as it is.

Joel’s a bit horrified with me; he knows intellectually I’ve done some terrible stuff but this is the worst thing he’s seen me do. Well, the worst thing that I let him remember. I’d worry about betraying his trust, but I’m preserving his sanity, and that really counts for more.

Peeve:
Rather than blurts, I’m listing a peeve: I don’t like it when other artists/individuals try to shut down an idea before it even takes off because “it might fail.” The possibility of failure is the price of attempted change. Suck it up, and quit taking out your fears on other people.

Three Champions of My Creative Self-Worth
This was both an easier and a more difficult job - naming only 3. Interestingly, it brought home to me how very opposed most of my teachers were to both me and my creativity in elementary school. Combine the usual narrow-mindedness of those who have lived with unchallenged lives with my ethnic/class difference, and add in some sick competition that most of my teachers had with my parents because my father was a teacher, and there are great mudslides of piling bullshit appearing before a fat little Polish girl who was prone to daydreaming and who never ran fast enough.¹

Still, there were those who were willing to put aside the politics I never should have been presented with and treat me like/take me for a kid. I was stunned, in college, how easily I was given recognition just for the absence of community politics.

Naomi Owens
She was my music teacher for five years, and neither she nor I bore any illusions about my musical talent. I didn’t really have any. What got her attention was that I managed to get Brad Hodis to behave in class for two years running right before she retired. Because of this, she stood up to a community of teachers who had a tack up their collective ass about my family and sent a message to them that I had real worth, and that I was an individual, not just a product of two teachers who the idiots with teaching licenses tried to compete with through me.

Deb Ciocina
Her homework assignments were eccentric and large. She talked to much about how her husband drove her crazy. But she let me know that my writing really was ahead of all of the “smarter” kids in the class with me, and her emphasis was on creativity over correctness. She also was the only teacher to discipline a student for getting verbally abusive with me. Lime green outfits may be offensive, but there was no reason to shout at me. It sent a message that I had the same rights as everyone else, something most people at my high school didn’t believe until she took action.

March Schott, Ellen Mrja, Chuck Lewis
They all recognized something beyond an ordinary college student in me - and told me about it. It’s still idling potential, but I’m getting at it - really.

1. I don’t run. I hate running. [↩]

There was a weird smell in the back garden tonight. Vaguely rotten, like the really putrid rotten you get when you’ve ripped open a man’s intestines. I haven’t smelled that since last year.

I’ve told Joel to lock the doors and windows, and just in case line the windows with aesfoetida. The official word is that the zombies are gone, but I’ve got this sense that whatever it is isn’t done. Thankfully, Joel doesn’t argue with me like Mike used to - he just trusts my instincts.

I wish I weren’t so woozy. It’s easier to pinpoint my psychic warnings when I’m not sick.

Should I ever be a rich eccentric I may follow Dale Carnegie’s library path. The above book, a perfuming standby, is available at my public library. It gives a reasonable overview of the perfume industry, and while the industry itself evolves rapidly, it at least gives you the feeling that someone out there has some idea of what’s going on in the big picture.

Given my recent explorations into greenwashing, I was unsurprised to find that animal testing may well belong in that category of “claims made without validation.”

I’m aware that animal testing is funded, allowed, even encouraged - I’m especially aware of it living as I do near the University of Minnesota, where a great deal of medical research goes on, and where, consequently, a great deal of protesting follows.

As far as my personal position on animal testing goes, it may not be a popular view, but I prefer to be honest:

• Under no circumstances should cosmetics be tested on animals. EVER. If you’re putting lipstick on a pig, you’re swine.
• I have had many relatives die from cancer. I would like cancer to go away for every living being. Because I would like cancer to go away, I am willing to live with the suffering of some animals, since the Geneva Convention rules out excess use of testing on violent Death Row inmates, my preferred alternative.
• If a really excellent alternative to animal testing exists - something that could happen if we could get over our superstitions about cloning technologies - it should be used.

As to the FDA, there reads a hands-off tone as far as regulations of animal testing goes:

“Animal testing by manufacturers seeking to market new products may be used to establish product safety. In some cases, after considering available alternatives, companies may determine that animal testing is necessary to assure the safety a product or ingredient. FDA supports and adheres to the provisions of applicable laws, regulations, and policies governing animal testing, including the Animal Welfare Act and the Public Health Service Policy of Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. Moreover, in all cases where animal testing is used, FDA advocates that research and testing derive the maximum amount of useful scientific information from the minimum number of animals and employ the most humane methods available within the limits of scientific capability.”

They do, however, link to the National Toxicology Program at the Department of Health and Human Services, where alternatives to animal testing are researched.

In my quest to understand regulations that much better¹ I’m delving even deeper into FDA regulations on cosmetics. So yes, another regulations series from me.

I am reviewing this time some of the layman’s documents provided by the FDA, in this case, their user-friendly document Is it a Cosmetic, a Drug, or Both?

What jumped out at me was this statement:

The FD&C Act does not recognize any such category as “cosmeceuticals.” A product can be a drug, a cosmetic, or a combination of both, but the term “cosmeceutical” has no meaning under the law. ((emphasis my own.))  I found this entertaining because US Vogue in particular has been obsessed with “cosmeceuticals.” Apparently they’re once again chasing after the Emperor’s latest outfit.

In a nutshell, unless the FDA tests and approves it, you can’t say that a product is good for any given condition in any customer communication whatsoever, whether that be verbal, in print, on the Internet or anywhere else. So when someone makes a lotion for treating excema they cannot legally say it is for treating excema even if every study under the sun actually concludes that the tea tree oil in the lotion helps the condition.  So, for instance, that dandruff shampoo? The FDA had to approve it before it could be sold as “dandruff shampoo.”

But this isn’t where it stops. If a product is commonly used a certain way, it will be considered a drug - even if the producer doesn’t have those expectations. Toothpaste with fluoride is named as a specific example of this. So if the public is aware of a certain chemical frequently used for a specific cause, the cosmetic will be classified as a drug regardless of the intended use of the producer (although there is probably a process involved.)

Most difficult among these guidelines is the following:

“Consumer perception, which may be established through the product’s reputation. This means asking why the consumer is buying it and what the consumer expects it to do.”‘

Now that’s difficult - it means that if people begin swearing by, say, Tiger Balm for its healing properties, then Tiger Balm becomes classed as a pharmaceutical even if no such claims were ever issued by the originating company. It basically makes all cosmetics producers responsible for what their customers may say about the product.

Since perception is a grey area, I’m curious as to what is required to fit a given legal definition.

1. though word of written law is so enormous and changeable that 100% familiarity is unlikely [↩]

There are two ways of viewing “naturals” in perfume.

The first is that it smells like something natural. So a synthetically created eugenol that happens to smell like vanilla might be classed by some perfumers as “natural” in that it mimics something more molecularly complex.

The second is that it is or came from the natural. The assumption here is that at the beginning of processing a given chemical, there was a real live plant (or in some cases animal) involved. This is also the area where questions are raised because of what happens in order to distill that chemical or scent. For example, some argue absolutes are not natural because of the hexane used in processing - while it still starts with a plant, it is rendered “unnatural” because of any solvent residue. I disagree with this, personally, although I understand and can follow the reasoning: to me an absolute is still natural, although it may not be quite so environmentally friendly or safe to use as a result of the use of hexane. I expect to see some of these arguments subside as C02 extraction becomes continuously more applicable to delicate botanic sources.

These differing approaches to the meaning of “natural” is in part where the marketing melee originates. Industry marketers may well know the meaning of “natural” coming from a modern traditional perfumer, but will also know that a typical western consumer operates on the belief that the definition of natural falls into the second category; all too few are aware of the difference and that the only guarantee is the USDA certified organic label or the EU equivalent.¹

1. I am unversed in any organic certification available beyond EU and US. [↩]