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

A short thought on magic and science: It doesn't WORK that way

I have a backdraft post hanging around somewhere on the subject of terminology and how it's misuse drives me nuts. I can't remember if I ever posted it or not. Ah well.

Anyway. When confronted with "Well, if magic worked, then why can't you turn me into a toad - get all A's - date the head cheerleader -whatever", my first impulse is always to sputter and try to explain, "It doesn't work like that!" The response is generally some kind of patronizing look. Hey, I never said I was terribly persuasive in argument, especially in person.

In fact, the whole exchange bears remarkable resemblance to one you can see daily on the internet between hardcore Christian fundies and science-minded types. This argument can be summed up best by the inestimable example used by too many people to count:

"If evolution is real, then why aren't we all born as monkey's, huh?"

The sound you just heard was thousands of science-minded types choking on the words "It doesn't WORK like that!" because that's the first reasonable thing that comes to mind.

And it makes the creationists look all skeptical, with a "well then, what is it good for anyway?" sort of vibe.

For me, the question of magic working in a repeatable, laboratory-style fashion is about as relevant as wondering why we don't evolve from monkeys in a single lifetime. The basic premise is wrong. You could probably find several basic premises that are wrong.

At it's heart, magic is contextual. Spells work within the universe happening at that very second, and it is not repeatedable in it's very nature. It's like asking the ocean to repeat a wave, and then saying that since they can't be repeated exactly, they don't count. There's too many factors, and most of all, there's too many factors that we don't know about and really, truly don't understand.

This is the nature of mystery. It can't be explained, or told. It has to be experienced to be understood. Magic is mysterious, science is not. And I love them both, very much - in their separate areas, thank you. :)

Blessed be,
Pennanti

Mini Replies to Inciting An Evil Riot

Finally caught up with my podcasts! I'm in the middle of the most recent Inciting a Riot now.

It occurs to me that Firelyte takes on these giant, overarching scopes, and my first impulse every time is take the precepts and boil them down to personal actions and thoughts. Not neccessarily a bad thing. So on the process of defining hurtful speech -

Isn't intention part of the prosecution system? My single criminal law class is years ago and very fuzzy, but I seem to recall there being multiple parts in deciding how a crime was prosecuted.
         The professor demonstrated it as: If you have a gun, and live in an apartment that the president passes, but no intention of killing the president, they can't prosecute attempted assassination, because you had ability but not intention. If you dance and wave your arms around your yard at midnight, trying to kill the president, they can't prosecute attempted assassination, because you had intention but no method. You've got to have a method, and an intention, for a prosecution of attempted crime.

FireLyte, feel free to correct me on this. I feel like there was a third thing in there too.

Anyway, I'd like to see this standard applied in questions of terminology, honestly. If someone calls you a scalawag, and they're a history major, the argument could be made that they had the intention, but no method. If someone calls you gay, when you prefer queer, (Or fill in whatever), and it was an honest mistake, why can't more people just say, "Hey, I prefer...whatever" because there was no intention?

Now, if you've already stated a preference, and they keep doing it, we run into the right to be offended. I'm also willing to throw in the caveat that if you can't say it on primetime, or at least not without making it clear that this is NOT the network's word, this is a QUOTE from a REPREHENSIBLE ACTION(Midget Palin Facebook, anyone?)then the offender already has fair warning that this is not a good term.

But seriously. I get called a Wiccan all the time, when I'm not, and I just shrug it off. It's not that difficult to tell the difference between "clueless" and "I hate you".

Mini-posts to continue whenever I feel like it.
Blessed Be!
Pennanti

Nanowrimo Ate My Life

It's been a while. I've been writing, just not here. :) Oh well!

I thought I'd pop out of my self-imposed seclusion briefly to mention the Podcast Awards. Oh, how I hate Hate HATE the Podcast Awards.

Here comes an avalanche of blog and pod entreaties to please vote for and nominate . Every podcast will be front-loaded with ten minutes of begging, pleading, and promoting, either themselves or others. My GoogleReader, I will probably just stop checking for a bit. After the commotion has settled down, all the podcasts and blogs will still be front-loaded; This time it will be with gratitude, along the lines of "Thank you SOOO much for participating! And listening! And voting! I love all you guys SOOO much!", which still gets annoying after about ten minutes. The only good part is, I can run down the nominee list and maybe find something new, so it's a little preferable.

Right now my husband is reading, silently agreeing, and also thinking, "Hun, you sound like some kind of misanthrope." I can dig it. Because there's something that bothers me even more than the blitz of self-promotion.

Does it bother anyone besides me that so many people treat this like some kind of referendum on paganism? Seriously, I wish everyone would just stop. Yes, there is a Religion and Spirituality category. Yes, a pagan podcast has never won, which doesn't bother me at all. Why on earth am I being entreated to vote on the idea that we need to be driving the other religions down the list? What does this accomplish?

You know what I do every year when I look at the nominee list? Silently discount the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, whatever, topics as I scan down looking for the ones that I like.

You know what a Christian, Jewish, Muslim, whatever person is going to do if "we" suddenly take the top spot, or the top three, or top ten? Silently discount the ones they aren't interested in as they scan down looking for the ones they like. Because where the 'other' religion podcasts fall on the list means something between jack and squat as far as everyone is concerned.

It's really more like they took several religion top lists and squashed them together. It's a popularity contest, and those always suck. Just sayin'. The whole masturbatory nature of shameless self-promotion just gets to me, you know? That kind of action is supposed to be private! (Unless you're in a club for that kind of thing. But you get my meaning.)

On a lighter note, it is pretty much the only time you're going to see Inciting a Riot and the Wild Hunt agreeing with each other, so that's kind of funny.

It's not that I want the Podcast Awards to stop. I think they're a great idea, and they help people find more of what they're looking for. I just want people to stop pretending that high standings means something more than "hey, people listen to my show!" Take the Wigglian Way, for example. It definitely deserves high standings.

I also, personally, can't stand listening to it. I don't know why. The topics are good, the people are definitely people I'd want to chat with over coffee or a beer. There's just something about it (too professional radio?) that I don't like. Taun-taun likes it, though.

On the flip side, I enjoy listening to PCP, which Taun-taun once described as "I'd rather stab a pencil into my ear drum". So I listen to one, he listens to the other, and we give each other the cliff notes for anything interesting that comes up. And neither of these opinions means squat for the actual quality of the show. Such is the nature of popularity contests.

Back to fiction!
Blessed Be,
Pennanti