Lucid Food
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When at last the family moved somewhere – away from me, which was what was important – my cognitive development grew by astonishing leaps and bounds. Amazing how that worked.

While not conscious, this experience with Sean created a vector of sorts in my life that has repeated over the years. First, I know that at least where I grew up, not only are women not feminists, but the ones that were teachers were very invested in upholding the ideal of female suppression. My kindergarten teacher even had a rule that girls could not play with the toys with wheels on them. That we are somehow distantly related depresses me no end. I figured out early that women were not on my side, and since my household was dominated by women where I was the youngest – my mother actually referred to a pecking order with no thought to how deeply unhealthy that attitude is – I ended up with the outlook that whenever it counts, I’m on my own.

The other aspect of my exposure to spoiled little Sean J. was that every so often throughout my life I’ve attracted some man with misplaced aggression who wants to find a strong woman and put her in her place. Since most woman passively step aside and demur their ways out of this behavior, and because I’m larger than average, I become a favorite target for this particular brand of crazy. All too often, I’m some suppressive asshole’s Big O. Some of these relationships were, thank the gods, sidereal: boyfriends of roommates and the like. However, post-divorce I wound up in three relationships simultaneously that used suppressive/control techniques and at the time I was too lonely and depressed to care even when I did know what was happening. It led to frequent, bizarrely intense interactions: one man was just manipulating me to increase my guilt, another was using the classic withholding strategy, and the last one was on a mission to tell me what to think. While I’ve cleaned out my life of people who pull this shit – women as often as men these days – I’m aware for some reason lately that gender politics are more important than they’ve ever been, and that the recent rising tide of misogyny is probably going to head straight for me.

And part of that is because, most of the time, I like men and I usually prefer their company to what is offered by women.

I bring up this autobiographical wandering because of the recent Jane Doe Girls Gone Wild case, where she actually said “No, I will not take my top off” to the camera crews, only to have a female friend pull her top down anyway. Despite verbally refusing consent and never signing a form – it’s like she just wanted to dance with her friends! – the incident appeared in a video, and a friend of her husband’s found it on a video six years later. A jury determined that if she was present, anywhere near Joe Francis, and female, she knew what was going to happen and deserved what she got.

I can’t say whether the case was worth the 5 million dollars requested – certainly it did  damage in her personal life, and it’s pretty clear first that Francis is one of the top ten douchebags in America, and second that this girl was clearly the target of some godawful female competitive syndrome. Not only are the men complicit in what is no more and no less than a sexual assault, but so is the woman who pulled her top down. No word on whether the woman who engaged in the assault and humiliation of Jane Doe is in any way being held accountable.

The attitude that “she was there, she had it coming” is absolutely reprehensible. How would the jury respond if it was someone’s son who had his shorts pulled down in front of a camera? Sure, the incident might seem momentarily funny – until six years later he finds out a buddy of his has a video of it, sold for $10 a pop on late night cable, and it is one of the more popular masturbation materials on the market.

I realize attitudes take the longest to change- certainly men and women have tilted at my attitudes about right and wrong to no avail, and this sense of entitlement to someone else’s body, while deplorable, is clearly sunk in pretty deep. Despite Joe Francis’s own arrogance being sufficient to keep him in jail for extra time, the bastard still walks free and spreads his disease among the vulnerable. And yes, often the girls in the videos are complicit in what happens. But in this case, the girl clearly understood what was going on, made her desires clear – and was ignored. Both Joe Francis and her companion exploited her body, against her clearly expressed wishes. So why are neither of them facing charges, and why is the jury blaming the victim for, essentially, going out in public while female?

This is unacceptable. I want to know what the jury was told, and I want to see more women holding each other accountable for female power politics. Joe Francis is to blame for publishing this girl without her permission and in fact in the face of her denied permission he is even more solidly to blame. But the girl who pulled her top down needs to be charged with criminal sexual assualt, now. Female competitive syndrome is what is allowing misogyny to build up again so strongly in the United States, and I for one do not fancy yet another backslide in my basic right to exist and make my own decisions about my life and my body. This crappy attitude affects all women – when you decide to “get back” at a woman for being prettier/smarter/bitchier, you do ultimately end up hurting several someones you don’t know who never did a damn thing to you.

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It did not.

Instead I found the bus careening down 35W, and I found myself deposited at Roseville Mall. Roseville may boast expensive stores, but free wireless for a writer looking to work it does not. So I sucked it up, bought a ticket to the next movie I could tolerate the idea of seeing and then took myself for lunch at a restaurant where the waiters attempt to ply you with booze when there’s a pretty good chance you’re on your lunch hour.¹ Lunch was pleasant enough – read Proven Guilty from the Dresden Files, the waiter wasn’t excessively pushy for me to leave, and as it turned out lots of people must have taken the wrong bus because that was a fairly busy theater with a mature audience for a weekday afternoon.

It was totally worth it. Not only was it totally worth it, I am elated I got to see it by myself.

If you are in any way magically minded, you will want to see this movie. It explores layers of the conscious and subconscious, lucid dreaming, dream projection…all sorts of fantastic ideas we talk about but rarely try to express visually. While I know some old-school shamanic types get hung up on “well that’s not how it looks to me,” we can shove those aside into the Gallery of Point Missers and carry on with the exploration. There are certain TV shows and movies I bookmark as teaching tools, though I’ve yet to really use them: the tarot episode of Xena, What Dreams May Come, and now Inception.

Thank you spirit of G.O.D for sending me to that movie, and letting me enjoy it alone so I can process it wholly on my own terms.

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1. In the US drinking alcohol at lunch on weekdays is frowned on. We gossip about you Europeans and the beer in your workplace refrigerators with tones of scandal but looks of envy.

This isn’t writer’s block. This is the old-fashioned inertia that creeps up on me when I’m doing something important, something that might change things, something that scares the living hell out of me. It’s also why I feel depressed, disengaged and ever so slightly self destructive. Like it or not, I am an artist, and I am intense. Right now the like it is on “not” because I want to just crank up the back of my brain like it’s an old fashioned car and set it to working and writing, but I can’t quite find the handle.

There’s this section of my consciousness that’s just puckered. Anxiety is sealing it closed. I’m thinking of the people who don’t want me to write, who are convinced that they have the authority to say I don’t have the authority, who will threaten all sorts of bullshit because of some imagined story that has nothing to do with what’s genuinely going on with me. People who resent me for making money. People who just want control over me still. Worse is that I might get harassed by people who pay way too much attention to me, while the people I want to reach might ignore me altogether. How much would that suck?

So today is a day of One Small Thing.

I’m doing this blog post. I revised my Llewellyn article. I also did some revision on the overview for my book proposal. That’s something. I’m also a little hungry – and in Write Yourself Right Cameron does say something about HALT (don’t get too hungry, angry, lonely or tired – which are my four primary emotions.)I pre-made salads this week to make sure I ate healthy at lunch; I can grab one of those. After that, I can write a thank you not to the sponsors of our Doctor Who meetup.

I need to come up with an article appropriate for the Witch’s Voice – it’s a lot harder to do now that they have no regular guidelines. I’m drawing a massive blank, too. I’m also not blogged ahead on Fat Chic, which I find distressing and unusual – but typical in July.

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• On July 18th, we were all ready to go see a movie with friends. We stopped for drinks first. Friends ordered food, went to bathroom after, and one friend collapsed in the bathroom. Evening ended with friend in Intensive Care on a respirator, unconscious.
• The next few days were spent with my friend/hospitalized friend’s wife. She’s deaf in one ear and he was sent to the public hospital because the ER team felt it best for his condition. Turns out he went into anaphylaxis. No effort was made to educate him about his allergies.
• My friend was released on Wednesday afternoon. Complaining from Mike about my not being home. Complaining met with not obscenity but with similar words that were much deserved. On the same day, I attempted to bring my friend to Como Conservatory since his oxygen levels were low but stable. This did not work as intended – the bright sun triggered some wacky, humidifying antics in the fern room. I parked him in the area between the zoo and the conservatory, and I wandered around awhile. I have pictures. You’ll probably see them on here eventually.
• Play date with Joel on Thursday. We watched True Blood and I told him about my week.
• Friday we were supposed to go to a Twins game, but I was breaking out myself (oh JOY) and the humidity was godawful.
• Saturday was the Doctor Who meetup. There’s some – hopefully resolvable – weirdness.

But the basics of all this is that I haven’t done a lot of intentional writing. I’ve done my morning pages (mostly) and I did get my most recent Llewellyn article in first draft. While we keep trying to reschedule the movie, at the rate we’re going if we try to get the same group together the movie will have left theaters. So I’m off to see the Sorceror’s Apprentice today, and here’s to a week of getting back on track, my garden in order and my writing underway.

As it is, my garden needs my attention, my blogs need my attention… and dammit, I need my attention.

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I miss my magic giants. These shorter copies they left behind just don’t know any answers either, and they’ll be damned if they admit it.

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I am looking for

• Neopagans who have experienced divorce
• Those who have been divorced for one year or more (it takes about that long for all the consequences to come to bear)

• You need not identify yourself fully – pseudonyms are allowed
• You can skip questions that are not relevant to you or are too upsetting for you to answer, or complete a survey page and simply leave it

You can go to the survey at survey.dianarajchel.com.

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1. As a writer, I am utterly, violently outclassed by that entire group. These writers are really, REALLY good. Every single author I heard had something that’s definitely publishable and fantastic.

2. Their “every genre” is not likely to include “occult nonfiction.” While people went out of their way to be welcoming – and they really did – the first two responses I got to “I specialize in occult nonfiction” were:

“Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

and, “Should we call the police?”

I realize this was meant as teasing to some extent, but I got the sense with this group that jokes aren’t always entirely jokes. Especially since one woman at the table was showing the guy that asked me the oxymoron questions how she used her Smartphone to access Bible verses. It’s true that not everyone there is religious, and while I’ve been the sane public Pagan for many years, little things like that still make me profoundly uncomfortable; anything that says “look, I’m Chrisitan!” in a non-religious environment makes me just as twitchy as people doing “look! I’m Wiccan!” in groups that are meeting for say, political purposes.

It’s also a true old style writer’s group, where everyone reads out loud. I am terrible at the read out loud style of feedback on written work.  So what I can contribute is highly limited, and I often find myself resenting the time taken up listening to someone read who does not necessarily know how to perform.

Although everyone was perfectly nice (more or less) and the guy next to me was friendly enough to share his obscure Italian beverage, at the end of the night the room we were in triggered an asthma attack forcing me to leave in the middle of the presentation from the guy who was the nicest to me, and on the way out of the room I stumbled in a drainage hole and did some sort of damage to my right foot. I take that as a bad omen all around.

It’s a shame. I was really hopeful about this group, especially since they don’t conflict with my water aerobics schedule – and I have decided that in terms of priorities, it’s

1. Writing

2. Exercise

3. Writer’s groups – and this can be lowered. Getting some sense of fitness back matters almost as much as the writing does right now. It’s partially calculated – I need to look closer to traditionally attractive in any author’s photos and public appearances – but it’s also because I’ve been sick for a very, VERY LONG time, and the disease if finally controlled enough that I can do something to recover. I really don’t know what my body’s baseline actually is, I just know it’s somewhere more muscular than where I’m at right now.

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But that doesn’t mean I don’t find some aspects of it just plain silly, so I’m kind of looking forward to this next book poking fun at it coming out. I’ve been around women who only talk about the men in their lives in terms of their zodiac signs. It’s crazymaking to me, undermining the basic values I uphold that every person is responsible for his/her actions, and that your nature is simply the challenge you carry with you – not something that determines your actions for you.

Still, I have to admit. How to Spot a Bastard by His Star Sign: The Ultimate Horrorscope was pretty funny when I went through my re-single phase.

On a related note, Gordon over at RuneSoup has a new theory of using divination forecasting in business. It actually looks a bit handy.

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