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Rob Breszny told me to tell all that I know. To not be the guru on the mountain who shares only, "know thyself" and cackles with madness. To share from the heart, from the soul.

This is what I know. It is pretty much all I know, with any certainty at least.

We are like the sun. Even though science tells us the earth revolves around the sun, the way we see it, the way we know it, the sun revolves around us. But we don't see that it revolves at all, at least not with our naked mortal eyes.

We see it be born every new day, watch it rise to its peak and fullness, grow old and dim, and sink into the sea. And in the morning, if we've been good, sang the right songs, made the right offerings, the sun returns to us anew.

Our lives are like the sun. We are born on a fresh new day, we grow into our strength and fullness, we age, grow dim and slip past the horizon.

We are like the sun in that, after a time of rest and darkness, we too are born again, and again and again.

What the sun does while it's away is Mystery.

Our loved ones are like us, as well. As we watch the sun falling into the sea with a measure of dread in our more primitive moments, wondering if the sun truly will come back, wondering how long will the night last, how long will winter's icy grip tighten around us this time, our loved ones see us begin to fade, begin to falter, and finally fall into that most mysterious sleep. They miss us, they cry for us, they truly believe we will never return. In their turns, they too follow the sun's path.

But in the new day, our souls wake again, in shining new bodies, and we behold our loved ones have also taken on new shapes and new faces. How can we recognize one another, time after time, in our new bodies and forms?

No matter where we are, no matter how many times the sun has risen and set, no matter how many times we've risen and set, when we look to the moon, and the moon gazes down at us, we can always recognize that familiar beloved face.

Our souls are like the moon. The moon may wax and wane, but the face we see is always the same, and we would know it anywhere.
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'Heteroflexible'

WTF?!
perzephone: (Default)
TWAIN - technology without an interesting name
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Read a headline today in the dailyrotten about monkeys defenestrating some government official in India. For some reason I've never looked up what 'defenestrate' means - it sounds dirty, though. Or painful. Actually, it sounds like a combination of dirty and painful. And whenever I hear it, Beavis & Butthead start laughing in my head. "Huh huh huh, you said defenestrate, heh heh heh".

All it means, though, is to 'throw someone or something out a window'. Monkeys chased some poor gov'ment guy in India out the window of an upper floor of a gov'ment building. Ouch. It does give this not-so-dirty word a lot of possible applications, though. You could defenestrate a television, for example. Or defenestrate a cow. Or your kid. Or someone else's kid. "I defenestrated my neighbor's kid soooo hard!" It comes from an architectural term - fenestrate, which means 'to have windows'. My computer is fenestrated. (snork!) Something can be defenestrated, to - if you remove windows from it. "I installed Linux & now my computer is defenestrated." The root, fenestra is bastardized Latin - the Romans borrowed it from possibly the Etruscans & the French got a hold of it & turned it into fenetre (w/a caret over the last 'e').

Watched this thing on crocodiles last night - or more about a guy looking for fabled 20'-long 'monster' crocs. Most of them have been killed - but he still found a couple in the 18' range. Crocs live long lives - once they reach a certain size, their only predator is human. Takes a saltwater croc about 80 years to hit 20'. They showed some old footage of this guy feeding a captive crocodile that was about 20' long. He held a dead chicken at the end of a pole & dangled it above the crocodile just over his own height, which is 6'. The crocodile he was feeding just lifted its head up & snatched the bird from the pole. The croc didn't even have to lift itself up on its front legs to do it, either, so just this monster's head was about 6' long, if not a few inches longer. It could have eaten the guy feeding it whole, with not an arm or leg outside its jaws. Just one big bite - chomp! That chicken was a chicken nugget to that animal. Made the hair stand up on my arms. I started thinking about how much trouble golfers have with average-sized alligators on Florida golf courses... These things are only about 8' long & they eat golfers regularly. A person wouldn't have a chance in Hel if one of the really big crocs was intent on eating them. I kind of creeped myself out & came to the determination that crocodiles are one of the few creatures on earth that make me feel like potential prey. Rob's friend Ken felt that way about polar bears - said just the fact that polar bears were on the same planet as him made him nervous.
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Spaghettification: the process of death caused by being sucked into a black hole.
perzephone: (Default)

Words that wound, words that heal, words stolen, words given new meaning. Words and their meanings and usage... having the power of language and the ability to communicate is probably one of humanity's greatest curses and greatest blessings.



Christianity isn't the only religion that has a myth about the Tower of Babel. For those not in the know, the Tower of Babel was built by either the Sumerians or Babylonians under direction from their king... Nimrod (okay, yeah, I know... Nimrod. Whoda thunk?! Where did they get these names from?). At the time, apparently, everyone could speak the same language. At any rate, they wanted to reach heaven. As punishment for their sheer audacity, the western Judeo-Christian deity knocked down the tower & sent the people to the four corners of the earth and unleashed a confusion of language so no one could collude against him anymore. The central American cultures have similar stories, as do the Nepalese and a few others - audacious humans trying to build towers to heaven & getting smoted by their gods in the process.



It's funny how, after all the time humans had to spend learning to communicate with one another, mainly through traders and political exchange, we now have this powerful tool at our command that makes it ridiculously easy. Via the internet, we can talk to people from all over the earth in an language understood by all parties (at least in places with internet access). As a result, a lot of stereotypes are being broken down and done away with even as new ones are being perpetuated (all video game gold comes from China is a pretty good example - some of it comes from Korea). There are very few mysteries anymore - if I run into an unfamiliar term or concept, I'm no longer limited to my personal copy of the Oxford English Dictionary - I can look it up on line. Of course, I'm also having to put some trust in unreliable sources, like wikipedia - things that are edited by users and such. But the OED wouldn't have something like harajuku or gasho in its venerable pages. If it wasn't for the internet, there are quite a few things out there I wouldn't know existed, like vore fetishes. Sometimes, knowledge isn't necessarily a good thing.



I've never believed that words are just words. They convey too much to be just anything. Most of the power of a word belongs not to the speaker, but to the listener. Not to the writer, but to the reader. A speaker or writer is only powerful and persuasive if the words they use convey the same idea to the person who receives the words. I think this is why, even though I am highly literate and well-read, I prefer Stephen King to say, Dostoevsky. Or James Joyce. When I read Ulysses I was at first intrigued by the stream-of-consciousness writing. However, I got to a certain point where I realized that most of the stream-of-conciousness was just disguising the fact that the character was thinking about how kidney meat tasted like urine and that's what he enjoyed about kidney meat... and then the guy went to take a dump in the outhouse. If you're going to go for the gross-out, just go for it - don't couch it in rambling prose. A lot of the failure of the Bush administration is based in the fact that when the president speaks for himself, he speaks like a plain undereducated person - but his speech-writers try to turn him into this powerful orator & use words he can't pronounce and probably can't spell. Because Bush stumbles along, he loses his audience to eye-rolling exasperation. Watching him makes me want to storm the podium and snatch his cue cards out of his hand & read things for him. Rob & I caught a session of Parliament one time on television & it was kind of amazing to me because they televised a quirky moment in time. The Parliament building had mice and they voted to bring in a cat. It took them maybe three minutes to go from describing the problem to implementing a solution by means of a yea or nay vote. If the White House had mice it would have take Bush twenty minutes to even admit the White House had mice and even longer to determine if someone needed to go through the phone book & find a pest control company. The speaker of Parliament simply stated, "Mice have been sighted in the building, so-and-so has a cat. Can I get a yea or nay?" Powerful problem-solving words, even if the solution was delayed by some good-natured chuckling in the ranks.



Words used as labels can be self-limiting, or they can be liberating. A person can take a word and strip away all that is non-essential and turn it into a fierce war-drum beat, or a person can further complicate a simple term and twist it into something useless and stripped of all meaning.



Tribal people say that words are sacred. By this, we don’t mean that you should kneel down & worship them. We mean that, in your being, you should recognize that when you speak, your utterance has consequences inwardly & outwardly & that you are accountable for these consequences.
- Paula Gunn Allen



The politician is trained in the art of inexactitude. His words tend to be blunt or rounded because if they have a cutting edge they may later return to wound him.
- Edward Murrow, speech, 1959



Behind naming, beneath words, is something else. An existence named unnamed & unnameable.
- Susan Griffin



We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.
- Anais Nin



“Define interesting.”
“Oh God, Oh God, we’re all gonna die!”

- Firefly: Serenity



It seems like since I was released from the grip of my crutches on Monday, I've spent five days in the kitchen. The kitchen and physical therapy. I did my math final, no grade yet, and my science final, also no grade. Having trouble w/the last page of my website. It needs to have frames. IE7 doesn't like the frame tag, it uses iframe instead. Within each frame is a separate html file and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to line up the top of the elements in the html file with the top of the frame. Now, if I was making a professional webpage, I'd have one link going to a directory without frames and one going to a page compatible with IE and another compatible with Netscape. Which would mean an extra 10 or 15 files for one single page. I may just say 'fuck it' and do a frameless page and take the lower points. But I'm already losing points because I can't put a javascript clock on my page because my computer hates it when I attempt to program anything with java. That and I don't know what the heck I'm doing in java to begin with. Ah well, it'll be over soon and then it's a semester of psychology. Cheers to self-analysis. I've already got a topic in mind if we have to write a paper - Morita therapy.

New words

Jun. 13th, 2006 08:09 am
perzephone: (Medusa Plaque)

Rob & I were discussing the quality of my coffee w/a shot of Jack Daniels in it & joking how it was strictly 'medicinal'. Rob mispronounced medicinal (possibly a side-effect of drinking JD in coffee) & said it was 'medusinal'. 

So he thought about it for a minute & said, "Marijuana is Medusinal. It gets you stoned." 

Hence the new word:

Medusinal, adj.: possessing the quality of a narcotic, i.e. any substance that gets you stoned.

It can also be an adverb. Committing adultery in Muslim countries is Medusinal.

Word Play

Apr. 19th, 2006 07:12 pm
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Rob's right nut swells up after he ejaculates, more often than one would consider normal strain-related swelling. So he's sitting there, thinking about it (especially because it's far more swollen & intensely painful than the normal swelling & pain - I'm thinking hernia because he's not feeling anything really lumpy in there), and says to me, "There's just no right way to ask Dr. Guo about this... 'Doc, I know you're an Internal Medicine doctor, but do you handle testicles?' It took me a minute for how it sounded to really sink in, & then I totally cracked up. Me & Rob were both sitting there, trying that question out, sniggering like Beavis & Butthead... or actually more like hyaenas.

'Doc, do you look at testicles?'
'Doc, do you... examine testicles?'
'Doc, do you... see testicles?'
'Doc, would you look at my testicles?'

See, there's no politically correct or socially acceptable way to say that.

It was like the other night at work when me, Margie & Jeffrey (a slightly older, bald black man) were talking about chocolate chip cookies. Brad's wife makes what I call 'chocolate-death-chip cookies' because it's all chocolate chip & little to no cookie. I'm not a big fan of chocolate, there's something about it trying to be coffee & not quite making it, and so many candy manufacturers eliminate the true chocolate taste w/all the artificial flavors & sweeteners, anyway... but I digress. I said something along the lines of 'I am just not a big fan of chocolate.' & Jeffrey jumped right on that with, 'What's not to like about chocolate', suggestively waggling his eyebrows... and I almost blurted out, 'I just don't like the way it ta...' So I tried to think of other ways to say it without it sounding like I don't like to give oral sex to black men (which, if you ask Eric or any other boyfriends in my past is far from the truth). I just gave up & admitted, 'There's no way for me to explain how I feel about chocolate candy without getting into trouble, so I'm gonna shut the fuck up now!'
perzephone: (poppy)
I've got a yearn for a blank piece of paper, but right now there is no poetry in my life. It's all pretty much crap. Just people at my job, hurting & wanting to hurt others. Ugly, emotional violence at every turn. All I do is sit, listen & dispense the least harmful advice I can, tacking on disclaimers at the end of every sentence. "It's only one person's opinion." "I have no experience with the situation you're in, but the way I see it is..." "I would suggest you talk it over with the other person who is involved & try to work out an equitable solution." "Don't let me be a buzz kill." "You asked for my advice, and I'm giving it to you free-of-charge - you get what you pay for." I could write EULA's & TOS' for just about anybody at this point. I am so non-committal I could easily become a politician or an ambassador. Hel's bells, I am an ambassador. Everything has 'may' or 'possibly' or 'potentially' involved in it - there are no finite terms when you talk to me. I always try to present several outcomes to any given situation, try to lend an outsider's p.o.v., and try to see situations from both sides (or all three sides if need be). Somehow I end up seeing the story from more than one p.o.v. anyway, because for some reason all the people involved end up coming to pour their tales out at my feet. Sometimes I imagine myself a spider at the center of a web, only the web has come to me. It all just adds to my disillusionment with the human race, my world-weariness, my cynicism and depression. Nothing good ever comes of letting people cry on your shoulders.

Coyote-like, I sit back & laugh. It's all I can do to keep myself from running away screaming.

There are times, like right now, when I wish I had a really good, reliable connection for some drugs. Strangely, now that my teenaged rebellious years have come & gone, I find myself wishing I could escape from reality for awhile. Even when I drink, reality follows me like a mangy black dog, drooling & stinking of garbage bins. Trying to rub against my hip, knocking me off my stumbling feet so it can lick my face w/its reeking breath. I smoked opium once, back a million years ago, in a Tennessee gazebo overgrown with kudzu. It was all green inside, smelling of leaf mold & river mist. For a few hours, it was all gone. I don't remember the dragon dream, but I do remember that for those few hours, the world went away. There were no pimples, ugly clothes, abusive relatives, no boys, no men, no hungry yearning in my crotch, no restless boredom, no frustration... it was bliss. Coming back to myself, all I wanted to do was escape again, or kill myself trying. I wish now that I had let myself descend into that lifestyle so I could be just now waking up, a different person or a dead person who had lived a little, instead of the n'zambi I am now.
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I am not sleepy, not one iota. This utterly sucks because I have to go to work tonight.

I saw someone's profile on okcupid, & okcupid tells you useless random things about your fellow sitemates, like, "So & So just added 'witch' to her profile!" It got me thinking. I haven't referred to myself as a witch in a very long time. I haven't used the word 'witchcraft' in a very long time, either. I used to call myself a witch all the time, trying to empower that word & dismiss its negative stereotypes by parading it out in public. But somehow, pantheist & animist & Pagan have superceded witch. And even though the way I 'practice', if you want to call it that, is more shamanistic in nature, I don't feel comfy calling myself a 'shaman'. So Pagan I am. I don't remember when I stopped calling myself a witch. I never called myself a Wiccan, as in "Hi, I'm Janelle & I'm Wiccan!" I'd usually say, "I'm a witch & I practice Wicca", with the emphasis placed on witch. But now it's "I'm a fat ol' Pagan woman".

Weird how we pick up labels.

I had a really funny thought, tho, thinking about old-school Pagan/Wiccan/witchcraft. Anyone remember (or still use) the phrase "93 & Blessed Be"?
I coined a new one, but mainly fans of Douglas Adams will understand the many pop-culture & underlying references (another one just occurred to me involving the Great Arkleseizure): "42 & Bless You".

(The new '93 & Blessed Be' seems to be 'Namaste', which I don't use often or at all because I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce it... is that last 'e' silent?)
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I now know what floccinaucinihilipilification means. I can even spell it.
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The Great Goddess, when She speaks, can always be known by Her words. She tells you What She Is.
I only know what I'm not.
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My last post made me think about the word "fat". "Fat" doesn't make me uncomfortable one little bit. It's descriptive. I tell people who don't know what I look like that I am "short, fat & tattooed." Sometimes I'm "short, fat & dumpy." Occasionally I'm "short, fat & white."
Immediately, they say, "Oh, you're not fat!" They don't care about "short", "tattooed" or "dumpy". They just automatically respond "you're not fat!" Even though they've never even seen me, I'm not fat. I call 'em on it. "How do you know I'm not fat? You've never even seen me!" Fat is a very useful word. I'm not "big-boned", "heavyset" or "a big woman". Even though I do kinda like "big woman" - if I was taller, I'd probably tell people I was a "big woman". "Big woman" has power.

Now, people that can see me... this really kills me. I say something at random, like "Oh Gods, I am so fat. Eventually I'm gonna have to lose some of this". They too respond, "You're not fat!" So I ask, "Well, if I wasn't here, how would you describe me?" I get the blank, shocked stare... "Uh, not thin?" They stumble around & grope for a politically correct, inoffensive term for "fat". Even Rob - he tells me "I hate when you call yourself that." or "I hate when you use that word." He won't even say it, so I pick on him, "Call myself what? Dumpy?" or "What word? Short?" I make him say it - he looks away from me, at the floor, the ceiling, anywhere but at me, as he mumbles under his breath, "fat". I hear more people casually use the n-word than I hear them say "Fat". I think the only person who uses both words equally is possibly Eminem. All hail Eminem, he who can use the most politically incorrect & offensive word in the English language w/out flinching.

I don’t like small cars
Or real big women
But somehow I always find myself in ‘em
- Kid Rock, “Welcome to the Party”

Kiss of Life by Peter Gabriel
From the Security album

See me a big woman, big woman look how you dance
see me a big woman, big woman caught in a trance
dancing on the tabletop, covered up with the Easter feast
you’re dancing for the fishermen,
from the very large right to the least
dancing for the slow release, first the man and then the beast
Then the beast

burning, burning with the kiss of life
burning, burning with the kiss of life

See me a big woman, big woman so full of life
see me a big woman, big woman going to be my wife
watching for the different eyes - they change your face -
they come inside
watch the spirits laugh and cry, watch them find a place to hide
watch the spirits talk in tongues, watch them take you for a ride

Down at the ocean lies a body in the sand
big woman beside, head in hand
with heat from her skin and fire from her breath
she blows hard, she blows deep in the mouth of death

burning, burning with the kiss of life
burning, burning with the kiss of life
burning, burning with the kiss of life
perzephone: (Default)
Wubba wubba wubba. I've got MTV2 now, but haven't really had an opportunity to sit & watch it.
Ya know, I never really know how to respond to people that IM me & say, "I'd really love to lick your pussy." It makes me feel socially awkward. I think it may be in part because I'm not too big on receiving oral sex. I don't know. Maybe it's the word "pussy". "Pussy" makes me uncomfortable on a deep level, so I try to use it often to get over it. I don't think a word should have that much power over me. "Cunt" used to just stop me in my tracks, but Bianca at the Partyline helped me through that one. There's a certain racial term that bothers me, but its ghetto variant, "nigga", as in "Nigga, please!" doesn't. Maybe because one has power while the other takes power away.

"Words are weapons, sharper than knives..."
-INXS, Devil Inside

Tribal people say that words are sacred. By this, we don’t mean that you should kneel down and worship them. We mean that, in your being, you should recognize that when you speak, your utterance has consequences inwardly and outwardly and that you are accountable for those consequences.
- Paula Gunn Allen

Behind naming, beneath words, is something else. An existence named unnamed and unnameable.
- Susan Griffin

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Rainbow Serpent Woman

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