It's been seven years now that I've been working on this quilt. I'm still a long way off, but I've reached an amazing point in that I have the front, the batting and the back all pinned together. I'm now tacking the pieces together with embroidery thread to hold them all in place as I move into the final quilting phase I was actually able to quilt down the central circle in its entirety, which was a huge accomplishment. Just getting the three pieces aligned properly was a nightmare, because I discovered that the back piece is about 8 inches longer than the front and the batting together. Which is good, since I'll have to trim everything down anyway, but it was highly unexpected.

So now the entire thing is rolled up like the Torah and I'm slowly smoothing and tacking from the middle outward to the edge. I spent hours and I only got through one third of the yellow section. If you look at the user icon it's the one on of the right side of my head. I did a little bit of the green section (top of my head), and probably tomorrow I'll work on the blue section (left of my head) as well. It's really slow going, but it's worth it to make sure that the full thing lays down properly, doesn't have a bunch of bumps and lumps, and so that I can get it into the hoop without any further complications.

I have high hopes that I can get it finished this year.

Though, if this outrageous amount of snowfall keeps coming I may finish it this week...

I just posted my first project up on Instructables.

QR-Code Cross Stitch Patch

I'm so proud of myself! :)

I've been listening to some Fairport Convention on Pandora, and one of the songs I ran across in there was "Fotheringay." A gorgeous song about Mary Queen of Scots being imprisoned in the the Fotheringay Castle. While the lyrics are lonely and somber, the music that accompanies it is absolutely haunting. I truly love this song.

Fotheringay
by Fairport Convention

How often she has gazed from her castle windows all
And watched the daylight passing
Within her captive walls
With no one to heed her calls

The evening hour is fading with the dwindling sun
And in these lonely moments
Those embers will be gone
And the last of all the young birds flown

Her days of precious freedom forfeited long before
To live those fruitless years
Behind a guarded door
But those days last no more

Tommorow at this hour she will be far away
Much further than these islands
For the lonely Fotheringay

This morning on NPR I heard an article about the closing of Lambda Rising, DC's oldest, exclusive GLBT bookstore. While I couldn't locate the segment online for this morning's session I did find this interview with All Things Considered from last Saturday. A lot of things ran through my head, well, the economy is sucking and small businesses are failing. Niche markets are hardest hit when disposable income suffers, and queer literature is indeed a niche market.

What hits me hardest though is the sentiment that "every mainstream bookstore has a GLBT literature section."

Though true, Borders and Barnes and Noble both have gay literature sections, they pale in comparison. A mainstream bookstore may carry at most 100-200 titles in a GLBT "section" usually at most 5 shelves versus 20,000 titles in a store like Lambda Rising. Thinking about the selection process alone and only the most highly rated potential sales would even be chosen for that select shelf. Not to mention that most mainstream bookstores would include the erotica in there as well, thus taking up one of those five shelves with literary porn. Throw in biographies and histories and gay literature standards that are always selling (Jeanette Winterson, etc.) and you've got next to nothing left for new ideas, new fiction, theoretical works, subcultures... You only get what the mainstream bookseller thinks the gay consumer will buy, the lowest common denominator.

With the fading of indie bookstores and the move to the homogenous big box store what we get is a watering down of the breadth of gay culture. We become one small, carefully selected shelf in the vast body of popular literature.

This makes me wonder about monoculture.

When I was a child, I grew up in a small town with little to no ethnic diversity. People weren't German, Greek, Italian, Appalachian... We were all just white people. It didn't even occur to me that my family was of Irish descent until we got one of those family reunion ploys in the mail to get people to travel to Ireland. They must have sent every Riley in the country a mailer. Until I was about 18 years old, the only diversity I saw was on television.

Suffice it to say I didn't understand what being gay was until I was much older, and even then my perception of what it was colored my understanding of who I was. I didn't claim a gay identity until I was 21 or so. I didn't think I was one of the kinds of people I saw on television. I was different from them. It took me actually reading about gay people, going out to clubs, going to the GLBT community center and eventually finding the Radical Faeries before I could truly say that yes, I was gay and that it doesn't look like x, y or z. The kind of gay I am is not even in your alphabet. But it took years and years of learning and time and structure to form the identity I claim now. I had to learn the language, to navigate the wilds of subcultures to find the kinds of people who made sense to me.

I talk to a lot of people, many of them not much younger than I am, who say they're "post-gay" or don't identify as that kind of gay. They're something else, some kind of new-gay. Part of me wonders if they say this because they've grown up with an understanding of gay as some sort of homogenous identity. Perhaps much like I grew up just being generically a white person, these people have grown up with a definition of gay and they reject it because they recognize something more in themselves.

As we transition to a world where the breadth of gay identity is plowed under by mega-corporatizing influences, I suspect I'll hear more of this claim of a "post-gay" identity. Who we are needs the breadth of a library to explicate and understand the diversity of our lives, but our larger society run solely on profit incentive doesn't care about that. They only want to make money, they don't care who we are, where we came from or where we're going. They only care that we'll probably buy erotica, and we probably will.

I've spent the majority of my time recently doing nothing but working and playing on my cell phone. I have the fancy new HTC Eris phone, an Android OS. I've been downloading dozens of applications, and playing with them day and night.

That's about all I've got going on.

After seeing the Space Invaders QR Code scarf from Lendorff.Kaywa I knew I had to do something equally fabulous and cool. I'm going to do this in needlepoint. HA!

Check out these videos about the new Northwest One library. The happy one is first, the controversial one is second. I'm in the second, though not a part of the controversy.

It's been a long time since I've written anything for livejournal, but I find myself again in a place where I actually have downtime enough to share with people.

The last five weeks have been ablaze with activity. From Samhain to now has just been non-stop movement. Everyone is afraid that I'm going to burnout and that I need to take a break. My boss has even forbidden me to come into the office this weekend, because even SHE thinks I've been working too hard.

I've spent the last three weeks solid working in two different locations, setting up the new Northwest One Neighborhood Library and really enjoying it. Even the challenges are fun. But my family at home is seeing me drained of every ounce of energy I have.

It's a good thing we open on Monday so we can see the place in full swing. I'm really looking forward to it.

The only other thing that's been a huge deal is my home life. I've been dealing with an addition to the household and we've been going through the move in process. It's been kind of trying, dealing with all the boxes and trying to find room for this thing and that thing... It's literally taken the five weeks since he moved in to really just find places for everything, and to take what else wouldn't fit into storage. We're still sorting out clothes, boxes, video games, computer parts... But now it's actually at a point where it's reasonably sane in the house again. We just have to micromanage the amount of NEW things that come in.

And with that I'm going to clear out the last minute details here at the library and head out to the local bar and celebrate the end of installation.

Cheers.

Hey Faes,

Join us on Friday October 30th at 7:00 p.m. to light the fires of rebirth, call the ancestors and sort ourselves out for the new year.


DC Radical Faerie Samhain: Phoenix Fire
Friday, October 30
7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.
Potpourri's Bamboo Garden
306 Carroll St NW (Takoma Park Red Line)
Contact Phone: 202-841-2982
Email Fritter at: licinius@yahoo.com

What to bring:

* Food or drinks to share
* An ancestor image for the altar
* Something of the past for the fire

See you there!

Forgive me LJ. I only return to you it seems when I have no access to Facebook, or when I have something that needs room to be said.

So here I go with a basic list of the things that are going on in my life.

Work

I've taken on an additional responsibility at work. Interestingly I think this may help free up some time in unusually convenient ways. Then again, it may wind up being exactly the opposite. We'll see how things play out. In other work news the construction site for my library is coming along amazingly well. It looks like they've installed the ground floor and there are steel girters reaching up to the roof level. This is all incredibly exciting.

Home

Our house has been without heating or air conditioning and we're getting a new furnace in the place today and possibly they'll be replacing the air conditioning unit as well. This is especially interesting since the house is a rental. So my partner is home taking care of the repair people and the installation crew.

Health

I've been recovering from some horrendous ear infection and have suffered a little hearing loss as a result of it. I need to see an ENT to find out how bad the damage is. The good news is that I can hear again in that ear, the bad news is it's worse than it was before. And it's the ear I had surgery on like 10 years ago. I guess I should be happy it's not the good ear.

Relationships

Things are going fairly well on the home front. I'll leave it at that. ;)

Guitar

The other day I had to substitute for Rock Along at the library. It was a fun gig, even though I couldn't hear myself playing. I was told that my technique had noticeably improved, and that I was doing a really good job with the kids. I think I'll be playing guitar again on Friday when I do the outreach story time to the Kennedy Rec Center day care group.

Family

More of the same. Mom's life is hard, my niece is a growing baby. Not much to report here.

Games
I've been completely obsessed with Katamari Forever. It's an awesome game. Seriously awesome.

That's about all I've got so far.

The other day I got stuck in a situation where I had neither my iPod nor the current book I was reading. So I grabbed a title from the shelf that I'd been meaning to look at for a long time: Secrets of the Magical Grimoires by Aaron Leitch. Part of me resisted looking at this book, mostly because it's a Llewellyn imprint and I question their publishing practices, but also too because the cover art was, well, it was gothy. I'll just leave it at that. So I judged the book by its cover, and that was my mistake.

After picking it up and looking through the table of contents, I saw some things that I admired, and continued on into the preface by Chic and Tabatha Cicero and the introduction by the author as to the content of the book.

There's a fascinating premise at work in this book, and one that requires deeper examination I feel. A lot of folks cringe at the Goetia because it contains some, to be fair, questionable and sometimes scary practices. However, Leitch looks at the rituals of evocation in a different way, placing the act of conversations with spirits into the realm of Shamanic practice. The gist is that the rituals in the magical grimoires are essentially a methodological approach to opening oneself to the realm of spirit conversations, not unlike what the Siberan Shaman does when he/she communicates with the spirits in his/her realm. The ceremonies constructed in the grimoires of the middle ages are a product of interpretation through the lens of Christian society. The practice of conversations with spirits in order to understand the greater picture of both the spiritual and physical worlds was the ultimate goal. The method was simply refined into a practice that could be understood within the western context.

I think it's interesting to pair this hypothesis to Carlo Ginzberg's work "Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witch's Sabbath," viz. that the practices at work in what we have come to know as the Witch's Sabbath were ecstatic shamanic practices among the peasant class using local entheogenic plant and animal products. The two of these practices may well have been going on simultaneously, the difference solely being a matter of class and availability of income to acquire the necessary accoutrements to conduct the ritual.

This last saturday I went to a Festival of Hecate up in Delaware. This was my second time going to see the Goddess and it was an auspicious occasion to do so. Why?

Because my life is changing.

There's plenty more to process about this ritual. I'm glad I went, and it's something that I will reflect upon as I go forward in life.  I hope to come back to the Hecate rite in the future.  She's not one of the Goddesses that I am particularly drawn to, but this ritual is so intense that it's one that I don't feel should be missed.

I've actually been practicing on the guitar quite a lot lately. I've put together an iPod playlist of all the songs that I've got chord patterns for and I'll listen and play along at the same time. I remember my brother doing something like that, only 80 million times louder and using stage monitors hooked up to a stereo blaring death metal. I like to think I'm slightly more considerate to the housemates in that I'm playing folk/rock on an acoustic with headphones on.

I've picked up some REM music to go along with the stable of folktunes by Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention that I've been playing. It's absolutely hilarious to play "Crush with Eyeliner" on an acoustic guitar. Similarly I played "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" for kids at the library on the acoustic guitar. I got nervous the first time around, and hopefully this next time I'll be better rehearsed and less nervous.

There are still some problems that I have in trying to get certain fingerings down properly. B minor is one that I have a problem jumping to from other chords. I've gotten the F down since last I wrote on here.

I can also feel a noticeable difference in my fingertips.

So, Guitar Time is coming along nicely.

It's amazingly quiet at the office today. Of course it's Sunday and we don't open for another four hours. It's a good moment to get caught up on those little bits of writing that need to be written.

LiveJournal

I haven't taken the time to write on here recently. When I do it's haphazard and out of the blue. I feel like I have not been allowing myself the time to step back and have personal reflection. So much of my life is engrossed by work that when I come home I immediately fall asleep instead of doing the 5,000 things that need to be done to maintain a home. I haven't taken the time to do the simple things. I merely go through the work and collapse. It's clear that this kind of behavior is unhealthy and I must work to change it. Part of that change is to afford myself the chance to write things out again instead of bottling them up inside. I've been living in a land populated by soundbites, twitters and facebooking. That's not enough to get to know things, and it's certainly not enough for me to truly express what I need to say. So I must make a conscious effort to continue the journaling, and to read through my friends pages to keep up with them.

Work

Work has been kicking my ass lately, and it's only going to get worse as we go forward. But things are under control, and I am holding strong. I'm getting things done and am happy to be here every day.

Relationships

I've been kind of maudlin of late. Yet another piece of the "why aren't you posting" question. I've been seeing less of my partner due to job schedules being as they are, and it seems that we've developed a sleep cycle where I see him in the morning before I leave and he sees me in the evening when he comes to bed. However, we both only see each other when the other is sleeping... This is why my mother wrote a romance novel while my dad worked third shift. I can totally understand it now. One of these days we may actually see each other for more than a few minutes and not have a fight when we're dog ass tired.

Spirit

I've been reading through the Golden Dawn material. Got through all the knowledge lectures, and have now gotten into book 2 where it's all the lodge business. Having never been a part of lodge culture, I don't really get this. I understand pageantry and the power of symbolism, but the whole structure of the lodge thing just doesn't jive with me. I'll read through it, but I'm probably going to skim the majority of it. Though what it did strike a chord with was a scene I saw on Big Love. Jeannie Tripplehorn's character Barb goes through the Endowment ceremony at the Mormon Temple and I had no idea how Lodge the Mormon church was. With the knocking and the passwords and the recitation of long speeches, veils and revealing, and entering the inner sanctum... It's a lodge religion. Kinda cool, kinda, huh a the same time.

Body

Here's where I'll cut for the sake of not oversharing in total public. ( my physical health )

That's about all I've got to share today. I'll be popping in more regularly to try and get some more things out there. Probably talk more about the Golden Dawn, and do some more emotional work. I've definitely got to do more of both.

I've been doing a lot of internal reflection over the last few months. None of it structured per se, but stealing moments alone to go within. It's in these moments that I've unearthed competing goals within myself that have been a running dichotomy throughout my life. A lot of this was brought to a head just this morning as I was looking through Israel Regardie's book "The Golden Dawn" and reflecting on my emtional reactions and connections to things. At the end of book 1, the Golden Dawn looks at the 5=6 grade of Adeptus Minor as reaching a point of separation from the self, a mastery of one's baser elements in subservience to the higher authority of the will. Superego Invictus as it were.

This morning I woke up in an emotional funk. Feeling both covered in people who care about me while at the same time feeling utterly alone and disconnected from them. I was rolling in that emotional well, only to be confronted at breakfast by a magickal tome telling me that the highest aspiration of the magus is mastery of himself. I thought about the various other goetic rituals and the purpose of mastering daemons is also a recognition of the mastery over oneself. I just finished reading Lev Grossman's "The Magicians," and this same element of magic as being the mastery of the self plays a hugely important role in the storyline. Should you lose control in Grossman's world the magus is consumed by his own blue fire and becomes a spirit being of pure vengeance.

I am not a dispassionate soul. At heart I am a very deeply emotional being, with needs, desires and wants just like everyone else. True, I want to understand myself, and that I know that I must exercise control over my emotions lest they effect my life unduly. But I don't know that I would ever want to be rid of my passions completely. Much as they cause my tears of grief I feel like that pain is a part of me, just as my joy is a part of me. I feel that my passion fuels my magic, and that the power of my emotions gives me support in the work that I do in this world.

That's where I start to see a dichotomy between Pagan practice and Magick. Magick is cerebral and contemplative, less of this world, more of the ethereal. Paganism is more rooted in this world, it's cycles, and the purposes of life on this planet. Paganism is less about ascension and transformation as it is about connections with the here and now. About birth, sex and death and the love that binds us all together as living beings, and our interconnectedness with the world around us. Magick goes beyond, its intention as stated in the prefatory matter in the Golden Dawn, to become more than human. It's almost Nietzschean in its goal.

These two strains flow together in my life. When I was a child the decisions I made, as I have stated on this blog before, led me to where I am today. I wanted to live a life with a family and I made choices that brought me there. I also wanted to live a life of contemplation in service to knowledge, and my choices brought me there as well. Now I am in this position where I have on one hand my emotional self, tied to the physical, looking for love and sex and comfort and life, and the other hand my intellectual self, tied to the ethereal, looking for knowledge and wisdom and enlightenment and to some degree ascension or transcendence.

I have not yet discovered a way to balance these humours, to temper these metals into a single unified being. The balance tips in one direction or the other on a regular basis. On some days I am consumed by my intellect and I drive forward seeking new planes of existence, and on some days I am consumed by my emotions and I hunt for love and sex and material comforts. It's a dichotomy that I have not found a sufficient way to resolve.

So I continue to walk down both paths.

Work

Work is going good. I interviewed for a management position and I have high hopes of where that could take me. I'm also starting a side project that I need to get cracking on today if I plan on really making it happen, and I do plan on making it happen.

Books

I'm currently working my way through reading Israel Regardie's book on the Golden Dawn. Much as I've used bits of it over the years, I've never actually tried to sit down and read it. I mean, it's a tome! Come on... But I'm giving it a shot now, and it's taken me about a week or more to just get through the introduction. I've finally hit book one, and I think it may go quicker from here.

Still stuck in the middle of "The Stress of Her Regard." Yeah, Jen, I know you told me to read this book like 17 years ago, but I get around to stuff eventually. It's on my nightstand, but it's not really a nightstand kind of read. It needs to be started in the early morning and pushed through the day.

Spirit

I've come back to the point of not doing too much ritual stuff, and doing a hell of a lot more reading. My side project is going to be a major focus of this spiritual work, and a gift to the community when it is completed, such that it ever really could be said to be completed. So, I see this being my work. And I graciously, lovingly embrace it.

Heart

My loves will bankrupt me before this is all over and done with. But I don't really care. I'm doing my best to take care of the people I love and at the moment damning the consequences. This is only a blip in the larger picture and I can deal with it over time.

It's interesting to me how the little events in life, and the tiny choices you make ripple out across time and effect your life forever. This is a concept that I return to over and over in my thoughts. In many respects I believe that all of our lives, the whole fabric of creation comes down, ultimately, to binary choices. Yes/No, On/Off, To Be/Not To Be, etc. Though what we see with our macro-life doesn't penetrate down to those tiny binary decisions. Our larger self sees the level of the picture that's most immediate to us, though even then we block out a lot of the incoming information.

But I digress.

Last week or so I spent some time looking at the choices that I made that led me down this career path and the purpose behind it to start a family. Today I was thinking about the little dreams that I had that led me to the career I have today.

I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine who wanted to move away to the mountains with his girlfriend. He drew on a napkin at the restaurant that he would run off to build a mountain home far, far away and live a life of quiet seclusion. I drew myself into the picture as the friend who lived in the village in the foothills, and in that image, I worked in the library in town.

When I was 18 and going through high school I looked at everything I was being taught and thought to myself: I could do better than this. I should teach English and be the best damn English teacher these kids ever saw. I would inspire them. Show them dreams and strange new realities.

It was in many respects vengeance against a system that I saw had failed to actually educate me. Revenge of the best kind, to make something better.

That changed in the course of my first year of college. I got the opportunity to do work/study in the Classics department library at the University of Cincinnati and it reinvigorated something that had been latent in me for a long time.

I was always a library junky. I would skip recess and go to the school library in my elementary school and middle school. In high school I would spend time at the public library in town.

I remember a moment when I was probably 3 or 4 years old and my mother took me to the public library in my home town. It was in the grant memorial building, which is basically a small town hall building and little museum. The shelves were polished wood, and the staircase was too. I remember looking at all the books, but I remember mostly the look of going up the staircase and feeling that wood.

It was so huge.

When I was 19, I made the decision that my life wasn't a plot to wage war against the Ohio public school system. It was a life of contemplation, research, study, and literature. My life was inextricably intertwined with the knowledge base of the library. From just being around the collection my knowledge of the topic increased on a daily basis.

My major as an undergraduate remained English Literature. There wasn't a library track per se at UC, but I knew that it was a field that I was going to be in for the rest of my life.

And I've stuck with it.

This is to me is more than just a profession, it's a vocation. It's perhaps the most meaningful thing that I've done with my life. It's guided my decisions, it's raised me up over time, and now I'm at a point where it's all starting to hit me.

This is where I've always been meant to be.
The small joys that stayed with me my entire life have brought me to this place.
I have followed my bliss, and it has led me to a place of happiness, joy and peace.

I am living my dream.
I am living my dream.
I am living my dream,
and it is good.

Last night for the first time in a long while I actually watched the news at the request of my roommate. We watched Countdown with Keith Olberman and the first segment of Rachel Maddow. It was Rachel Maddow that really stuck with me. Not just because she's awesome, but because she's thorough at exposing things that are harming proper debate.

On last night's show she went through each and every one of the advertisers on one of the "grassroots" anti-health care initiative websites, and she identified the leading names in each of those companies as wealthy Republican politicians who receive funding from the Health Insurance lobby and Republican millionaires who have no interest in funding health care for those who cannot afford it. These lobbyists have only their own financial interests at heart and they are driving people in America not only to actually speak against their own interests but also whipping them into so much of a frenzy that they sometimes actually assault people.

I haven't been one to weigh in on political things in a long time. I bowed out of political discourse a number of years ago when I realized that I was completely losing my shit over these kinds of debates and it was actually having a negative impact on my health. I consciously chose to ignore the news because it made me physically ill.

Now I feel like I have to step back into this world, but only to a point. And that point for me is to put neutral information out there and help people make up their own minds. It's clear to me that Limbaugh and Olberman are two ends of a spectrum. Last night Rachel Maddow reminded me of how important it is to provide context to a debate. To lay out facts for people and have informed discussion.

I'm going to start a column on the library blog where I provide links to documents in the news. Things like the health care bill and the public reports. My time spent working at the Printing Office gave me a handful of skills to help people navigate through this kind of muck and hopefully I can translate that into my public librarianship.

This will give me a chance to look at things differently and be able to help add to the greater cause of public information sharing.

So, here's to information.

So, yesterday we had a plumber come to our house to fix our shower. He fixed the shower, and last night I reveled in the glory of our fixed shower. This morning I thought I would make breakfast and take a shower before work. So all the roommates showered and everything was fine. Pancakes and sausage and good things. Then I get to the shower and there's no fucking water. I just freaked out. What happened to the water?

Apparently Pepco broke the water main on our exact street block.

Right before I was going to get in the shower.

Curses.

As I walked out of the house to go to work I saw the water flowing down the street and I started singing "Deep River...My home lies over Jordan." Might as well make the best of it and get a bit of a laugh.

Last night at Faerie potluck we had our Lammas ritual. It was, as usual, a fairly simple and straightforward kind of ritual time. We went around, talked about what we're harvesting as the fruits of our labors, what the group is reaping as a whole, what our intentions for future harvesting would be and our hopes for the group.

And then we ate cookies.

It was a good thing.