Rainbow’s Point

a url gleaned from my best friend maire (moy-rah). i asked if i could link to her livejournal, and she gave me an ambiguous answer, so i’ve not done so. but i figured out how to subscribe to it via bloglines, so now i hope to keep better track of her cuz i love her very muchly.

You are the Moon card. Entering the Moon we enter
the intuitive and psychic realms. This is the
stuff dreams are made on. And like dreams the
imagery we find here may inspire us or torment
us. Understanding the moon requires looking
within. Our own bodily rhythms are echoed in
this luminary that circles the earth every
month and reflects the sun in its progress.
Listening to those rhythms may produce visions
and lead you towards insight. The Moon is a
force that has legends attached to it. It
carries with it both romance and insanity.
Moonlight reveals itself as an illusion and it
is only those willing to work with the force of
dreams that are able to withstand this
reflective light. Image from: Stevee Postman.
http://www.stevee.com/

Which Tarot Card Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

tuesday night i went to a memorial service for my friend warren norwood.

a lot of people talked about what he meant to them, and how they met him. family and friends and co-workers told silly stories about his writing, his love for the mountain dulcimer, his wit, his bhuddism, and generally, his attitude.

i didn’t share my story about him at the microphone. instead, here it is.

in the late 80’s my step-mother went to a writing course at tarrant county called “writing fiction for fun and profit,” and the companion course “advanced fiction writing.” warren was the instructor. during the first class, students turned in their writing to warren, and he critiqued it. during the second class, other students critiqued your work.

warren called the second class “hack ‘n slash.”

after the classes ended, she joined a group of other writers in her class to continue the constructive criticism. she’d bring home her pile of other members’ manuscripts each week, and i’d make copies of some of them and read and critique them as well, as the local “ghost hacker.” but i didn’t go to the meetings and i wasn’t a member of the group.

in time i decided i wanted to join the group. joining the group wasn’t easy: you were invited to attend and participate in a series of group meetings, and then you were asked to not attend one. at the one you didn’t attend, the members discussed whether or not to admit you as a full member of the group. admitted by the other members of the group only by unanimous consent.

but there was another qualification: you had to survive “warren’s course,” and you can bet they asked warren whether or not they should admit you.

about the time i decided i wanted to join, that group started to fall apart. but viqui agreed to let me take warren’s course, and off i went to be hacked and slashed.

four or five weeks into the class i skipped a week of writing. warren noticed, of course. but he didn’t say anything about it.

he just looked at me with a look that said, “you can do better than that.”

in time, with warren’s help, the group reformed, and i was one of the new members. it became the first place where i felt like i was a part of the group, where i was a member of what was going on. it hadn’t happened before, and it didn’t happen again until i’d spent several years in aa.

one of those members has now moved to arizona, and another to mexico, and i haven’t attended in almost a decade. but the rest of the group still meets every other tuesday night at a restaurant in arlington for food, socializiation, and hack ‘n slash.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

thanks, warren, for making me realize that, yes, i can do better.

per cecily’s request, here it is: it ain’t all pizzas and cream.

and as i am wont to do, taking another cue from cecily: beliefnet marks me a “spiritual straddler.” and it tells me i should practice religions like these:

1. Neo-Pagan (100%)
2. Unitarian Universalism (97%)
3. Liberal Quakers (88%)
4. New Age (82%)
5. Mahayana Buddhism (80%)
6. Reform Judaism (78%)
7. Hinduism (72%)
8. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (68%)
9. Sikhism (67%)
10. Theravada Buddhism (65%)
11. Jainism (64%)
12. Bahá’í Faith (63%)
13. Secular Humanism (63%)
14. New Thought (61%)
15. Scientology (54%)
16. Orthodox Judaism (48%)
17. Taoism (45%)
18. Orthodox Quaker (41%)
19. Islam (40%)
20. Nontheist (38%)
21. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (36%)
22. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (25%)
23. Seventh Day Adventist (21%)
24. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (19%)
25. Eastern Orthodox (17%)
26. Roman Catholic (17%)
27. Jehovah’s Witness (14%)

and this disclaimer was on there. it’s so good i’m going to add it to my disclaimer page tonight.

Warning: Belief-O-Maticâ„¢ assumes no legal liability for the ultimate fate of your soul.

over the weekend i asked sue if she would please, this week, call the school where we want to enroll ian to find out the particulars: when he’d start, what it would cost, how to pay, that kind of stuff.

on monday she thought she’d call on tuesday, since monday, being the first work day of the year, would be totally insane for them and she would wait until tuesday or wednesday to actually call.

then she thought better of it, might as well just give them a ring to see if they were too busy to deal with her. so she dug out the number and called.

“oh, we’re expecting him tomorrow.”

good thing we called.

while this was going on, i made a visit to my local doctor’s office to have my prince albert examined, because i suspected a minor infection. so i get in there and the aide says, “i used to work in a tattoo shop, and i know what this is all about, but i want to tell you, diane [the nurse practitioner] is gonna bust you for doing this.” i laughed.

and sure enough, diane busted me for it. “what posessed you,” she asked. i could tell by the look on her face that no answer i could possibly come up with could satisfy her disapproval. so i explained what had happened and she actually looked rather accepting.

so i’m standing at the pharmacy getting the antibiotic perscription filled (another adventure in and of itself) and sue calls. she asks where i am. “grocery store,” i say.

“oh could you pick up some bread? ian starts tomorrow and we need to send lunch with him.”

“no problem, do you want me to get some lunch meat too?”

now, if you’re not jewish, this is an innocuous question. perfectly reasonable, in fact.

except that, as someone who went to 2nd grade in the very same room where ian’s class now plays, i should have known better. the synagogue doesn’t permit meat to be brought on the premises, except in very specific circumstances, and school children’s lunches isn’t one of them.

“it needs to be dairy,” sue explained. “cheese, pb&j, tuna fish,” she went on.

i know what dairy means. boy did i feel dumb.

so on tuesday morning we all piled in the van and went. we got him registered, got the school paid, and we left him there at 0900. he only cried when we left the play room in the center of the school to head for our classroom, and then again when we left for the day. i don’t think he even noticed that mom and dad left in the morning.

so it was a success, and he goes back tomorrow (thursday). i think he’ll really love it, and i hope it helps.

oat willie’s, austin, texas.

so as i now usually do, i spent new year’s eve at home, scratching myself. sue was at work (as usual), and now that we have kids, i can’t go out without childcare. and that ain’t happening. so instead i watched tv and messed with the computer (as usual).

in some ways i miss the socializing, but on the other hand i don’t actually have any friends i’d really want to socialize with.

with any good luck, 2005 will hold some better employment prospects than 2004. but my luck being what it usually is, our house will be foreclosed on, i’ll get shot at by the neighbors, and my cat will die.

so here we go.

so i let my debian mirror get all screwed up, and so i fixed it last night. in the process i did a mysql upgrade that hosed the database that drives wp. well not really hosed. everything was safe but i needed to arrange the pointers again.

so we’re back in business.

i’ve still got a sinus infection from the trip to san antonio. ian remains constipated (this is not news), and life moves on.

my pa is considerably less sore than it was. i’ve changed jewelry a couple of times, and am now pretty happy with the surgical steel that i have now. (i have surgical steel embedded in an artificial hole poked in my penis that i do not want to close. i’m happy with this. what the fuck?)

the very last of my schoolbooks, a calculator manual designed for both my graphing calculator and my statistics book, has arrived. i’m looking forward to using it. i bought it because i found during my algebra class last year that using my calculator properly saved my ass, and if i’d had a manual to learn to use the tool to do the problems correctly, i’d have gotten an even better grade than i did.

obviously having a calculator will not help not knowing the underlying mathematical principles, but my problem hasn’t ever been the concepts; it’s been the fiddly computations. i can manually do 37×48, but i might make a mistake. why bother, when i understand the principles well enough and just suck at the arithmetic?

so for the statistics course i have the calculator manual, the solutions manual, and the book. i’m sorta looking forward to it.

what the fuck?

we’re back, and there are many exciting items of note.

the night before we came home, i took sue out to dinner, and it was actually pretty disappointing. on the way over there, we saw a sign for a tattoo parlor.

after dinner, we said what the hell, we’ll go. so we went and saw what they had to offer. lots of very beautiful dragon art. A really cool mona lisa with her blouse open, nipples exposed, and her smile slightly more pronounced.

sue and i have been joking for years that if she gets a tattoo, i’ll get a prince albert. so. there we were.

and it turns out they were about to close, so we made an appointment for the next afternoon.

and we went. and we got it done.

sue got a fairy on her left upper chest, and I got … a prince albert [explicit content warning]. the one i got is like the one in the center, only thinner wire.

I was actually very happy with the process. Sterile equipment, gloves, the whole bit.

what i didn’t understand is that an object called a “receiving tube” is shoved … up there … so that when the needle is jammed in, it stops without going too far. the needle them goes farther up the tube, and out the urethra. the receiving tube is then pulled out and the needle is left threaded through, and is used as a guide for inserting the jewelry.

an observation: you never, ever want to hear your piercer say “oh fuck” while he’s got a sharp object in one hand and the single most sensitive part of your body in the other.

what had actually happened was that after he was actually done with the piercing, the needle came out and he hadn’t gotten the jewlrey threaded through completely, so he had to … uhm … find the right place.

it hurt considerably less than i thought it would, and it bled much less than i thought. even so, sue, getting her tattoo in the next room, heard me and hoped it was the piercer and not me.

the downside is that the thing has come apart and now i’m going to have to have it attended to and the jewlrey changed out much sooner than i thought. as i write this, what i’ve actually got is a curved wire through the piercing, and a bandaid over the opening so it doesn’t fall out. the last thing i want is for it to need to be redone. and i’d feel bad if it gets screwed up before i have a chance to … play with it in a private setting. (when would i play with it in a public setting?)

sue’s tattoo is a winged fairy, purple background, orange body, greenish wings. Really pretty-looking.

beyond all that, the trip home was pretty boring. we decided to use I-35 instead of the usual road home (us 281) because we’d earlier had to have a tire plugged because we’d picked up a nail somewhere lalong the way, and we wanted to be on a real road in case there was a problem with the plug. the kids stayed up the entire way (which is odd because we left at 9pm, got home about 130 am), and ben stayed up another two hours alternately screaming and running around. sue and i let him stay up until he finally fell over and let me take him to bed.

so we’re home. we’re not returning any time soon. we had too much trouble getting the kids to sleep down there, and are having trouble getting their sleep schedules adjusted again now that we’re home. we’re going to wait a few years until they’re more able to cope with being in a different place.

michelle seems to have banned me from accessing her blog. i’ve tried to be respectful at the very least with respect to the comments i’ve posted there, and i feel free to express myself on my own blog, but apparently that’s not sufficient.

on the other hand, ip banning is actually a pretty silly thing to do; it would be better to simply either develop a thick skin or delete comments, because simply disconnecting and reconnecting will drop the ban, and on dynamic ip blocks will eventually ban people you might want to actually see your site.

even so, when i emailed her about getting a 404 and she didn’t respond, and now (from school rather than home) seeing her explanation, it makes sense, but remains disappointing because i actually liked her blog a great deal.