Magic and you. And you, and you, and you, and you...(guest post)

Hello, hypothetical audience. I guess on the intertubes, I'm Taun-Taun. Which really has yet to stop being strange when I see it written referring to me on here.

So why am I interrupting the normal posting habits of my better half? As I told her earlier today, I had something I kind of wanted to talk about and I didn't really have an outlet, so here I am, shouting into the void instead. I was listening to Pagan Parents On The Edge earlier at work, which is an awesome show, so listen to it if you don't already. They were talking about the role of Santa in the holiday season, and, as expected, talked briefly about how children generally stop believing in him as they get older, along with a general waning of belief in the fantastic or magical. Which I agree with, to an extent.

As a society, we obviously are fairly down on magical thinking. You didn't cure your headache with that spell, it was just a placebo effect because you thought about it a lot. Smudging your house with sage doesn't purify it, you just made the place smell funny. So on and so forth. I'm sure we've all heard some version of this at some point or another. But then, I got to thinking, which is always a bad idea. For as much as anything supernatural is generally looked down on, you know who the biggest coven in the world actually is? Sports fans.

Stay with me for a second here. Maybe you're reading this from somewhere in Boston, and you have a Red Sox hat on a shelf somewhere. Or Chicago, and your winter coat is a Cubs jacket. Or maybe you're familiar with any of the ENTIRE FREAKING ARTICLE- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports-related_curses

I used to be pretty big into baseball until a few years ago, and I saw people, including my own family, doing the craziest crap because they thought somehow it would help their team win. Or that there was some kind of "bad luck" that kept their team from going anywhere in the playoffs. Hell, I watched my mother adjust the position of a roll of posterboard she'd left on the couch by accident one day because we thought if we moved it a little bit, the Yankees might start playing better. Other friends had certain shirts of certain players they would wear so that they would break out of their slumps. Me and my brother wore a small Yankees symbol on a chain like it was a cross. Another person I knew wore a particular hat when his team was playing at home, no matter how gross it got. It couldn't be washed, you see, that would take the luck out of it. We were all just joking, of course. Right?

Looking back on it, I don't really think that was the case. There's a certain level of vehemence that rose to the surface when these goofy little rituals of ours were challenged. I distinctly remember getting yelled at if the Yankees were playing well and I would accidentally knock that roll of posterboard out of place. It's possible that this makes her sound like a nutcase, but the fact is, this is the kind of passion and faith you see people put in superstitions all over the world of sports fandom.

So what's my point here? Is it that sports fans are batshit crazy? That one doesn't need me writing about it. But let's look at the bigger picture, the one that this post only touches on one aspect of. As a culture, we perform rituals. We wear totems. We make sacrifices. Why do we do this? "Well, you know, it's just this stupid little thing I have, but it helps me calm down/focus/keep moving while I'm doing housework/get through visiting my in-laws without killing them/etc." Frequently said with a bit of shame, as though this is something you shouldn't be doing, or is kid's stuff, and how silly it is that you as a grown, mature adult still hold onto a bit of it. The only thing that's silly about this is that we try to hide it and ignore it. "It just isn't the Way The World Works", we adamantly repeat to ourselves. To that, I say- pfft. The Horned One has helped me finish more than one workout when all I've wanted to do is topple to the floor and pass out in a nice warm puddle of my own sweat.

Unlike disco, magic ain't dead. It just updated its wardrobe. Also unlike disco.

Will we get kitties tonight? I hope so!

Insects outnumber every other species by the thousands. Creepy, crawly, and potentially better evolved for the planet, it's something most people don't like thinking about.

So let's talk about kitties instead! I really wonder, if one were to county up the number of pagans, and the number of cats owned by pagans, would the cats outnumber us 10 to 1? Or would it be more like 3 to 1? For certain, for every pagan I've met who doesn't own a cat (Um, have I met any? There must be some out there. Astruar always struck me as dog people, really.) there are two or three who own several cats apiece.

Taun-taun and I are no exception. Some time ago, we started looking into fostering kittens, because we can't take anymore permanently. We want to do some volunteering overseas, and needing to rehome the thousand or so cats we would own if we could wouldn't be good for anyone. And then we backed off, because of Morpheus. Morpheus was my darling, grumpy old man of 21 years, and we didn't want to risk taking in potentially sick homeless kittens while his immune system couldn't handle it.

He's no longer with us, may he rest in peace. So we looked into it again, and got approved....and immediately moved. Not far, but far enough to have boxes everywhere and no clear space to set aside to keep Foster Kitties separate from Our Cuties while we weren't home. (Kali and Isis, we have a Pet Name Theme.)

Yesterday, we discovered a woman, a Cat Saint, who maintains nine lean-tos around our area for homeless cats. Drives around and feeds them, shovels paths, puts out bales of hay and blankets. Every day. One of the lean-tos is right next to our house, and we had no idea who was helping the cats (besides our friends, who live downstairs. They've been feeding them too.) She maintains a blog - thebean10.blogspot.com - if you live in the Rochester, NY area. I immediately recognized her description of The Tiny Cat with Huge Balls, who we captured by accident one evening. He looks exactly like Kali, except for, erm, /cough/ difference. His name is Louie, apparently.

So Taun-Taun spent all night last night getting our bedroom ready for Foster Kitties! Call it the kick we needed. He's going to fill out some paperwork today, and soon, we should have some cute fuzzy bundles of love who haven't found their Forever Home yet. We'll take good care of them until they do.

I hope tonight! But I'll settle for next week.
Blessed Be and I Wish I Could Find My Camera Charger,

Pennanti

Testing Posterous, 1, 2, 3...

In theory, this doohickey is going to post to every social thingamabob I have at once. Which would be nice, since work finally got around to blocking TwitterGadget on igoogle. (Why they haven't blocked iGoogle, which gives me a backdoor into Gmail, and thus Buzz, Aim, and gChat, I will NEVER KNOW.)

So, if this glitches and spams someone's feed, I apologize, in a "please let me know and I'll adjust it" kind of way.

Blessed Be!

Pennanti

Yule Music: The Searching

I listen to good music, on average, once a week. Ask anyone who knows me, and you'll pretty much get the picture. I have horrible, awful "taste" in music (if you can call it that), and I only get around to decent stuff instead of crap every so often during my day.

The rub here is, when I listen to the 'good' music depends entirely on who you ask. The Fairy and some of my cousins would think it was Tuesday - when I update Groovelectric and Tiesto's Club Life. The Librarian, more likely Thursdays when I run out of podcasts and turn on WITR (local college station) for the day. I get really angry at work at least once a week, sometimes twice, at which point I hit up the angry metal that Taun-Taun and the Viking helped me find. Neuraxis is really the only thing that drowns out stupid coworkers, even if it makes my eardrums bleed.

Goth stuff, like a Darker Shade of Pagan, is Mondays, for the most part. The Professor is helping me find more awesome music in the same vein, happily. And once or twice a month, I get all nostalgic and throw in a bunch of traditional Irish music and soft rock from my Mom and Squirt, who have no idea how I don't kill myself with all of the above.

I also listen to top 40. I listen to Lady Gaga, NOT because she's ironic, but because I like her. Ke$ha, too, which is a death-penalty offense to some people. I know most of the words to Like A G6.

I'm not stating all of the above because I'm trying to prove my nerd/hipster cred. I'm stating it for context - when I say "I have no taste in music", I really, really mean it. I have a hard time identifying genre differences. I can't remember band names or song titles. I don't give a flying crap about the 'context' of a musician (See: Lady Gaga vs. Ke$ha) and who's being intelligent vs. who's in it for exploitative money.

So, with all of that context, when I say I'm having a really, really hard time finding good Yule music, I hope I get the meaning across. Seriously. I am NOT a hard person to please. I'm not picky. I AM slamming my head against a wall, though.

Why is so much of the Yule songs I can find slow, depressing, and angsty? A holiday mix has room for, like, two of those. I want music I can bake cookies too, dammit!

I feel like the depressing inevitability stuff really, really belongs in Samhain. Winter Solstice is about "raging against the night", so to speak. It's about not sitting down and accepting the inevitable onslaught of cold and death. It's about celebrating maniacally in the face of winter, of light and fire and declaring to Hades that yes, I am going to live through this and see the spring. Quiet snow falling to moaning harps is not helping the mood!

I've found a few here or there that I like. Some good nerd-stuff, too. I might post the final playlist I come up with, but meanwhile, I'm throwing a prayer out to the Internet sprites to go kick google in the nuts and help a girl out, yeah?

Blessed Be,
Pennanti