Blog plans, my birthday, and some soaked flowers
There’s a break in the monsoon-esque rains of the day, so I popped out to take my garden pics for the end of this post.
Things are looking weary out there right now, but they got pummelled last night.
Kinda fitting for this time of the year, actually. And not just related to the garden. But in any case, as the growing season starts winding down, the working season starts winding up, or at least it feels like that.
I figure I might start blogging a bit more and on some other topics; I had intended to write a zine-style book of essays and blurbs but then I feel little motivation to actually write a book, so maybe those ideas belong on here. Certainly beats just letting them bounce around in my head or me blathering to my friends who’ve heard it a million times.
First, a little background: once upon a time, I was an anthropology major. Not the hairy-legged “I wanna go to Borneo to fuck strange men to get back at my asshole dad” kind of anthropologist (after all, I could find plenty of strange men at home for that purpose, lol… and no need to go around looking like a chimp in a short skirt, I could still shave and maintain my pseudo-dignity… or as much dignity as 90s fashion allowed), but the kind who was planning to work on archaeology and in museums.
See, I wanted to be a Sumerologist and work deciphering cuneiform tablets. To do that, you need a PhD in one of a handful of schools that teach Sumerian; to do that, you need to learn Akkadian (the language of the Babylonians) at the masters level; to do that you needed to major in archaeology and/or ancient near eastern studies and also take a Semitic language, preferably classical Hebrew.
At UBC, the best I could manage was a double major in Religious Studies (for they had the Hebrew and the ancient near eastern history) and anthropology (for they had the archaeology). (I later changed to a music major, but that’s a whole other story…)
This second major required me to take cultural anthropology classes, and while I figured out pretty much right off the bat that they were 90% full of shit, the 10% has proven useful in analyzing our own fucked up culture.
Some of that comes through in Zamo the Destroyer, more so in the old days of it being a web comic than in its current podcast form, wherein Zamo is actually supposed to be an anthropologist studying the humans Iggy lives with. This came from my actual iguana, who often seemed to prefer to stare at us from her giant cage as if she was studying us in some sort of anthropological fieldwork research than to come out and actually interact with us humans.
Of course, Zamo hasn’t got much of a work ethic, so we don’t get a whole lot of anthropology being done, but it has happened occasionally:
Holy shit, those are old… but anyway…
Point is, I do have a teeny bit of an anthropological bent in me, and sometimes I like to pontificate on shit, and maybe this is a better spot to do it than Facebook or email, lol…
Plus I’m getting more interested in the folklore and pagan practises of my ancestors, and maybe those are good things to spew about here, too.
So, with that in mind, here are some new topics/themes for days of the week that might start showing up here. I highly doubt you’ll see all of these in any given week, and there might be some weeks when it’s just the current posts, but here goes:
Mondays:
- Memorabilia/collections: As currently in the rotation: a bit about the various things I collect and obsess over.
- Modern Day Demigods: Here’s where I would chat about dumb celebrity behavior, shilling, and the obsessed fans who think these people are divine entities worthy of being worshipped and obeyed without question. So… some of my posts mentioning my favorite Irish bleedings hearts are getting retroactively tagged with this.
Tuesdays:
- Beauty Isn’t Sin: This was gonna be a title of one of those zines I’ll never get around to doing. Combo of tips, links to tutorials, and sometimes me pontificating on things like why the fuck did we seemingly all agree women should just wear denim and grey yoga outfits and look like dudes instead of dolling up, etc.
- Book of the week: I used to do these posts on Tuesdays… granted it would require me to actually finish reading a book instead of having 10 partially read books piled up, lol…
Wednesdays
- Witchy Wednesdays: I’ve mentioned this one as a theme for cross-stitching before, ie, Halloween patterns, but it works as a dumping ground tag for when I want to write about phases of the moon or folklore or pagan practises or ancient religions, etc.
- Wednesday WTF: Keeping with the alliteration, there haven’t been any of these yet, but I remember a while back I was going to start doing a post like this about the craziest/stupidest news stories I saw. Not the depressing political shit or sanitation theatre to placate insane old spinsters who want us all wearing security blankets on our faces so they can feel safe because they have no men to protect them from unseen terrors (even if they have husbands, they’ll be henpecked to death and thus useless for protecting), even if that’s all very WTF, I mean shit like stories of crazy women who marry trees and shit like that that we can all laugh at.
Thursdays
- Modern Anthropology: Kinda the same as the Monday one, but not involving celebrities. Might be kinda like expanding what I just said about insane old women, lol… or it might be looking at why we all worship lawns instead of using the land for food production… or it might be me posting about cool shit from ancient Egypt, but basically writing on culture that doesn’t fit in elsewhere.
- This is Awesome: Because I should balance some of the doom and gloom of our cultural decline with posting the best thing I saw or heard this week so you can enjoy it, too.
Fridays
- Friday Stitch Day: my weekly arts and crafts update, as I’ve been doing for a few weeks now.
- Fashion Fridays: I think I did one of these in the summer. But basically musings on fashion or what am I wearing that I love or let’s all point and laugh at the hideous shit the runway drones think we’ll be caught dead in next season. I guess what I was talking about for Tuesday with the yoga drabs more properly fits over here, and Tuesday’s Beauty Isn’t Sin posts will be more general or more aimed at hair and make-up… well, there’s kinda an overlap but this one is more textiles-based.
Saturdays
- Life Update: What you’re reading right now. I’ve been doing these since New Year’s and I think I’ve only missed one.
- Storytelling: If I want to write some story from my past. I keep telling myself I will start doing this and then I don’t or they end up woven into other posts, like the comments about my brief foray into an anthropology major up above. Don’t hold your breath for this theme to actually happen, lol…
Sundays:
- Zamo the Destroyer shill posts: Technically I do/will post whenever I have a new release of anything, so it’s not really a theme per se, but since Zamo is more or less weekly and does come out on a Sunday, there ya go.
- Poems: I keep debating just hiding all the poems, but then again, I do write them, and I kinda like seeing them mixed in with my other content, so I guess they’ll stay.
So… that’s that, plus I might start writing posts on the pagan holidays or sabbats… or I might just slap that into the Witchy Wednesday of the week it’s happening, dunno. And as I said, releases.
On the releases note, I didn’t get much done on the web series this week, gotta get back on track with those next week, especially since I wanted the first character interview to get posted in November and that’s a lot closer than it seems. Oh well.
What else… it was my birthday this week, which I kinda ignore other than as an excuse to go shopping. But this year the shopping was online so it kinda just felt like a regular day.
It was nice to get the birthday wishes from friends on Facebook, but apart from that, meh. It’s another day.
Back when I was a LaVeyan Satanist, your birthday was the most important day of the year, but even then I don’t think I made a huge deal of it. Of course, much of my life it got wrapped up with Canadian Thanksgiving: oh great, for my birthday I have to go over and make nice with relatives who I may or may not even like and I have to eat roast turkey which I can’t stand and if it fell on the actual day of Thanksgiving, I can’t even order pizza or other food I actually like (used to be those places were closed on holidays and then even when they were open there was kinda a big stigma about getting take-out or going to a restaurant on those occasions). Yay… blech…
Now, of course, I’m not beholden to such things, but still. Maybe it’s because of having a birthday in the middle of October, but I’ve had to write mid-term exams on my birthday and go to work at shitty jobs on it, etc. so to me the real big joy of a “good birthday” is a day when I get left the Hell alone and can do what I please, lol…
I mean, texts and messages from friends are always welcome, but I mean no obligations, etc.
And for the most part, I got that this year. I had a clarinet lesson and I had lunch with my dad, but aside from that, I got to binge-watch old episodes of Time Team on YouTube and I did some cross-stitching and I ate candy and we’ll call that a good one.
I also wrote half of this week’s Zamo episode, but if I’d been more industrious earlier in the week, I wouldn’t have had to do that either.
As for the shopping, well, I might have done a bit of that leading up to it with the hopes of things arriving on my birthday, but then there’s supply chain issues and hold-ups in the ports.
Some day my 3 pairs of boho boots from China may arrive, lol… the 4 skeins of hand-dyed sock yard did arrive the day before, though.
In other news from this week, I’ve been trying out a red light therapy box my brother had but didn’t want to haul to Mexico, so that’s kinda meditative and if it eventually helps a bit with my rosacea, so much the better, but I’ll probably have to bite the bullet and go get a run of IPL treatments again anyway.
I fucking hate IPLs, but they do seem to help. I was all set last spring to get the series of 3, but after the first one the lockdowns started and I had a hard enough time getting in to get a boob lump investigated (took a month of arguing with the doc, eventually was able to get in for a mammogram and ultrasound 6 weeks later and it turned out to just be fatty and benign), so forget about anything cosmetic.
The IPLs will probably have to wait for when I’m in LA, I guess, same with any Botox.
Purging is continuing and I’ve now got 2 empty tote bins from the storage room and more that are only semi-full. Since my brother’s headed off, the spare room is now a holding ground for the totes, as there’s only 2 weeks til I take down my Halloween stuff and put up my Christmas stuff, and at that point I will do a thorough purging of both to only keep my favorites and all the Lemax to haul down south next year.
And I guess the only other news is after another hiatus, I’m starting to do nightly short bellydance drills and improv again and I’m becoming reacquainted with all the tiny muscles that get used in things like snake arms and isolated chest figure 8s.
Oh well, after a few weeks those will get stronger again and the lactic burn won’t be so bad.
In the meantime, “go go go” as a certain someone likes to say.
Damn, long post this week… well, let’s make it a bit longer with some sad and soaked garden pics:
