Moon Void of Course? Mercury Retrograde?

I dunno wtf is up w/people lately - all the women at my job are emotional wrecks & the bosses were smoking some big=ass crack pipes when they devised this latest shift bid. We're down to 2 graveyard clerks - 2am to 10am. They fired one steady extra (it's ok, I didn't like him anyway) & laid off 4. The one boss, Keith, made some offhand remark about the lack of grave coverage, saying, "It's ok, we have night auditors, too." Apparently, my co-auditor, Alea, threw an absolute temper tantrum. Went apeshit. Now, normally I'm the one known for yelling & throwing things, but when I have psychotic episodes, it's about important things, like people never stocking the printers - and I'm scary angry, but it gets things accomplished. Alea gets her feelings hurt & acts like a little kid. She threatened to quit night audit & go back to the desk, or quit her job outright. Which is fine, that's her right & it's a right-to-work state. More power to her. Now me, hearing this... I'm thinking several things:

1) They have tried to use the job description to coerce me into relief lead training. If it shows on our job description nothing that can be translated as regular front desk clerk business, then if we fill in, we're violating the union contractby depriving a front desk clerk of their rightful job when we have clerks on lay-off status.

2) I can always manage to get FMLA. Fuck with me too much - I go home. Good luck covering audit, bozos. Especially with only 2 graveyard clerks, neither of whom will probably be trained in night audit.

3) Between the hours of 9pm and 3am, I have a lot of work to complete. Things necessary to getting the system down on time. At 4am, housekeeping needs to start running their maid assignments. At 4:30, room reservations opens. How many nights of 6am daterolls do you think it would take for them to decide making me work out at the desk for 4 hours was a bad business decision? Especially with me working a 10-hour shift. Say I don't get out of the hotel til oh, 10 or 11am... I come back in at 9pm. That's less than 12 hours between shifts. Overtime for a couple hours a couple days a week, anyone? I'll do anything you want me to for what I make when I'm making OT. And I'd still insist on getting my 15-minute & lunch breaks. Not working through those to make up for lost time at all. So...
For every hour of desk time, I lose an hour of audit preparation time. (In some cases, this is true because I can't do some of my reports & crap when I'm checking guests in. I also cannot bring a mound of clerk work out to check over while I've got check-in paperwork to deal with.)
1 hour on the desk = 1 hour of audit ot (time & a half)
2 hours on the desk = 2 hours of audit ot (time & a halfX2)
3 hours on the desk = 3 hours of audit ot + 1 hour of ot due to shifts being only 11 hours apart... Not bad for 3 hours of extra work
And at the end of my long, arduous, well-paid week, anything over 40 hours is also time & a half. So four days at maybe 3 hrs straight ot & 3 hrs due to short time between shifts... That's an extra paycheck every week just about.

So think about it... Make one lone night auditor go out to the front desk & pull in an astounding amount of OT when you have 10 steady extras who are only getting 80% the regular front desk pay to begin with? And who don't even get assigned enough days of work to earn their health insurance? Hmmm, doesn't seem to add up, does it?

I don't get angry - I get revenge. Fuck you, pay me.

Oh yeah, and this bid goes into effect on the 11th. I'll be getting holiday pay for Christmas, New Years AND my birthday. Go ahead, call me to the f/d on the nights of Dec. 24, Dec. 30 & Dec. 31. I will probably be sincerely and happily grinning from ear to ear for the first time in my entire life.

On to the Less Mundane

I'm reading this 'Healing Your Past With Soul Retrieval' book. It's got interesting concepts. Talks about renegotiating contracts you've made with yourself, with other souls, and even with God. Obviously, the author is both kind of New-Age Christian & into the Grail Cycle. He talks about the original fall from grace & about the story of Parsifal being metaphors for the process of soul retrieval.

I started thinking about it seriously. I cannot honestly say that I see the story of Adam & Eve being cast from the Garden of Eden as a stand-alone story. It's become blended in with so many other myths, legends & metaphors. On one level, it's the tale of the change from a hunter/gatherer society to that of an agricultural society. In another way, well, the Serpent is Gnosis. Speaks to Eve, the primordial female, tells her to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil. Only let's shorten it to just 'The Tree of Knowledge'. Mmm, that's good fruit. The western JudeoChristian's god is mainly omniscient - all-knowing. When Adam & Eve ate that apple/tomato/pomegranate/fruit they became one with the god of the garden. Eve is the gateway to Gnosis. Adam partakes of her knowledge of the god of the garden in a holy communion. They didn't fall - they flew. The Serpent, Lucifer as a Light-Bringer, an Enlightener. Like Raven, like Crow, like Prometheus - he steals fire from heaven and gives it to humans. The all-illuminating Gnosis.

So many archetypes - Serpent, Tree, Man, Woman, Garden, Fruit. Lilith, Asherah & Ishtar were all associated with Trees, Fruits and Serpents. The medicine-man's staff, the Caduceus - Serpents wrapped around a rod - the Serpent & the Tree. When you cut open an apple in the right way, it reveals a five-pointed star. Cut open a pomegranate & it's an ovary, full of seeds, full of eggs. Same goes for a tomato - cut one way, it reveals the five-pointed star, but it's also an ovary, like a pomegranate.

I get all these symbols and archetypes floating around in my brain whenever I think about the story of Adam & Eve. None of it equates with sin to me. Nothing seems dirty or wrong. The western JudeoChristian god didn't cast Adam & Eve out of the garden out of anger - he did it because that's what you do when chicks learn to fly. You kick 'em out of the nest. They became knowledgeable, they raised up to an equal level with their god... and he set them free. Knowing what they did, they were a bit reluctant. They knew what was on the other side of that wall - the great big world, full of Pagans and lions and bears, oh my. So, sensing their eagerness to stay all-wise and all-knowing in their cozy nest of honey and ambrosia, their god said, 'Get the hell outta my house, ya bums!' He also told them, 'be fruitful and multiply'. Now, if you are really pissed at your creations, you smash them into the ground (or eat them) while muttering obscenities, like the Titans, or piss them into nothingness again like a drunken Coyote playing with mud. You don't tell them to go out & have kids.

At work, there is an office door covered in Excalibur stationery, and I walked past it a few times, trying to resist the influence. A bunch of people had added Christmas/holiday greetings to said door. Some tasteful, some in other languages, some kind of stupid... in the middle is a big heart with the words 'Jesus is Lord' in it. When I first saw it, I thought to myself, "Jesus is Lord, huh? His Mother must be so proud." I laughed out loud to an empty hallway. I got my own joke without intending it to be a joke. Yes, I'm sure His Mother is proud - He's gone home to Her already. He'll be back in about a month - Jesus, Dionysus, Horus, Bacchus, Attis, Tammuz... They'll all be back. Towards the bottom, I drew a big yellow sun with orange rays. I wrote in bold green highlighter 'Blessed Yule' & added 'Dies Natalis Solis Invictus' in blue-green sharpie. I'm not expecting it to be there when I come in tonight. Maybe someone will take the time to look up the Latin. I thought about adding a pentagram to the middle of the sun, but I realized, nah, Old Sol is enough.

There was never any Fall. The garden has a hidden gate. It's the gateway to the Summerlands, to the Elysian Fields, to Sha'ol, to the subterranean depths where the Goddess sleeps with Her son, Her lover, Her brother, til Spring.