It's called "The Men Who Stare at Goats."

The Men Who Stare At Goats is about warrior-monks with psychic powers, who call themselves Jedis over and over again. But the movie's structure also echoes the original Star Wars trilogy, and it's full of fun Lucas riffs. .


I was looking forward to seeing this movie anyway, but this article means that I must go!

Any hour with Him.

And I wouldn't change a blessed thing.

Wolfling has been down with the flu since Monday night.
It's not as bad as it could be, but flu is never fun.

Today is my Friday for work. I'm very, very glad.

All kinds of major spiritual motion in my life. A huge transition is occurring that is startling but welcome. Tuesday was one long theophany after another. Yesterday I got to rest and process -- although I haven't really had the bandwidth to process the way I need and want to.

Tomorrow is more scheduled than usual: good things, but they're going to take time and effort. I'm hoping that I don't get sick.

I should be heading out the door for work right now and I'm still in my pj's.
Better get going.

I was walking to the cafeteria at TempCo today, looking at the rows of nameplates belonging to people I still don't know after almost well over six weeks on the job, and I was suddenly struck by a startlingly intense wave of nostalgia for FormerMyCo.

As most of you may remember, I left in April without a single look back, didn't even stop to shake the dust from my sandals. But one thing I have to say about the folks there: I always felt valued, welcomed, and liked. (With the exception of Miss V, of course.)

I still don't know anyone at TempCo besides the four or five folks I work with directly, and two of them are temps as well. I'm not a part of anything there. I was often frustrated by my job at FormerMyCo, but the people were always great.

Today, I really miss them. I miss the conversations, the laughter, the regard in which I was held.

And really, that's kind of nice. It's nice to have the good memories.

Comes around every so often, most recently seen with eryn999

The problem with LJ: We all think we are so close, but really we know nothing about one another. So I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away.

Anonymous queries okay.

Last night I went to a meeting of the 40-something peer group of the large intentional community I've recently discovered. It was a small meeting: just three regular members, one of the community elders, and myself, but that was for the best as far as this introvert was concerned.

As with the women's circle, I felt like I had found a piece of my tribe -- and this one was perhaps even more compatible. There wasn't a spiritual overlay to the meeting; we were all the same age; there were both women and men. As I listened to the men talk (which was in proportion to the amount that the women talked), I realized how much I've been missing male energy simply on a friend/comrade level.

( Values are more important than beliefs )

As I drove home, I had another important realization about myself. This is the first new group I've been part of in the past several years. I've done a lot of growing and changing during that time, and it was interesting to reflect on the evening and my observations of myself.

Both last night and Sunday (but especially last night) I felt calm, confident, grounded. I could see the interest and response in the way people listened to my words, and I was able to remain focused on others as they spoke. I felt like I spoke and kept silent appropriately. I felt like I was poised and relaxed at once. In short, I felt like a grown-up who was comfortable in my own skin, who was able to engage from a place of relaxed strength, wanting to be courteous to others and respectful of established norms, but not in the least bit worried about "being liked" or making a misstep.

And that was an amazingly good feeling.

Okay, I know that the urban fantasy genre has become increasingly popular (right along with supernatural romance). And I understand that not every author can be a Charles de Lint or Neil Gaiman. But I can't seem to find words to describe just how mind-bogglingly outlandish this plot description is:

When a serial killer targets fairy prostitutes in a Boston neighborhood known as the Weird, Connor Grey, a crippled druid and former Guild detective, discovers that the killings are part of an ancient magical ritual that could bring about the apocalypse.

I mean, if I were an editor and this was the lead-in for a book proposal, I'd think one of my colleagues was playing a joke on me and hit the delete key.


Please understand, I like Harry Dresden and the Nightside, and those can get pretty over-the-top, but I don't think that they've ever managed a combination like this. Not in such a brief synopsis, anyway.

I strongly object to any and all terms which characterize women's bodies and beings as being "less", with being a failure -- especially when explicitly contrasted with warrior culture. I particularly object to women's genitalia being used in this way. Make any case you like criticizing the current state of our culture (or anything else), but do not use women, women's sexuality, or femininity to characterize what you think is wrong.


Criticizing individual women is as valid as criticizing individual men, of course. My objection is using the "idea" of women, of feminininty, as inherently derrogatory.

Yesterday I attended a women's circle meeting for the first time. (I've sat in more than a few women's circles over the years, of course. This was my first meeting with this group.)

The other members seemed to all be lovely people: present, committed, really striving, friendly, warm, and quirky. I felt very comfortable there, like I had found a previously unknown pocket of my tribe -- a rare occurrence. I'd had a phone conversation the night before with one of the leadership team, and had been delighted by the resonance between her use of language and my own.

But when the circle actually got underway, I struggled a lot.

( Goddess-y Generalities )

I am a new person.


There is continuity with who I was before, but today I am feeling an intensifying awareness that I am new.

My current guilty pleasure:

http://flipnote.hatena.com/54FECA601E18C8D2@DSi/movie/18C8D2_093180D700745_003


It's about 30 seconds worth of video.

Belated Happy Birthday wishes to queenofhalves!

Have another one today on me!

Wishing you many blessings in the year to come. . .

Thinking about how others will react to my fiction is the worst thing I can do to myself when writing. I completely shut down the creative process on my novel because I stopped writing from my gut and started thinking too much about appealing to a hypothetical future audience.

Getting input from friends didn't help either. At first it was fun engaging my friends in the story, seeing their enthusiasm about it, enjoying their ideas -- but over time I found myself struggling with one or two of them about their interpretations of certain characters.

I just made private a post I made an hour or so ago about male guardian impulses and Wolfling's perceptions of them. The comments I received made me realize that I needed to think the issues through a bit more deeply.

There is definitely a need to be aware of -- and resist -- a cultural tendency to characterize a young woman's sexuality as a commodity to be guarded and regulated by males. HOWEVER, there is also lot to be said for knowing that you are cared for and there are others who are willing to come to your defense if needed, whether that defense is done by men or women.

Hopefully I'll have the time and energy to explore both of these ideas a bit more systematically in the relatively near future.

Thanks again to those who shared their thoughts with me. . .


I've disabled comments because I do not want to engage further in conversation about this until I've had a chance to post a more thorough exploration of these ideas.

A couple of weeks ago, LJ spotlighted the community lightyourcourse, and I've been enjoying it very much.

One of today's entries hit me with particular force:

( Through the wardrobe and over the rainbow and home again. .  )

I showed up 10 minutes early for the 9am volunteer orientation -- only to be informed that they are not set up yet and won't even be letting the volunteers enter the building until 9:30. I didn't even get an apology or expression of regret from the door troll.

Color me unimpressed.

No one is going to be surprised by my response to this. . .



I believe in the concept of a soulmate because of my experiences with uncrowned_king. I have no idea if everyone has a soulmate or not; I only know that I do.

Prior to Lohain, I did not believe in soulmates. Instead I focused on the wonderful richness of having intense and meaningful love relationships with a variety of different people. I was polyamorous and happy with it (once I figured out what polyamory was!).

Being with Lohain changed that. I never made a conscious decision to stop being polyamorous -- and maybe other things might have turned out to be less painful if I'd had that self-awareness. Instead, over time, without fully being aware of it, I turned more and more to him because what I shared with him was simply 'more' than even the wonderful things I was experiencing with LB.

Even now, more than two and a half years after his death, having pretty much come through my grieving process, I have a hard time imagining love, romance or sexual intimacy with anyone else -- even though sometimes I long for it more than I can say.

Because of what I experienced with uncrowned_king, I have a hard time imagining that one's soulmate "gets away." Part of what was so extrordinary with him was the mutuality of it. The only way I can imagine someone being able to walk away from that would be if they were already married or in some other way bound by a lifelong oath and were not free to fully engage in the relationship.

a_belletrist shared this link to an amazing set of images of dark versions of Disney princesses.

For example:

I feel utterly gray and empty inside, and am stuck at my soul-numbing temp job for another 2+ hours.

Morale-raising messages and objects of beauty -- images, poetry, etc. -- would be most welcome.

I've been doing self-help, but most of the energy just drains down the gray vortex.

ETA: Getting out for a walk in the sunshine and crisp air helped a lot. I don't feel like I'm dying inside anymore. . . .

[x-posted]

( On dancing the tension between order and dissolution )