I would like to share with you my ire at the stubborn, stupidity of a woman I had to deal with tonight at work. A woman who cannot pronounce Thoth. Who believes she is right because she’s studied for sixteen years at the sphincter of her so-and-so teacher of some so-and-so magic shop in New York who told her Thoth is pronounces with a soft TH at beginning and end. And she had to call me from home after calling her so-and-so teacher from New York who assured her that, yes indeed, her pronounciation was in fact the correct pronounciation thankyouverymuch. Yay! Whoopie! Congrats on paying long distance to get an incorrect answer and call me up to whine about my correcting her pronounciation.

I would just like to say WHATEVER!

You know what? Set aside the fact that I’ve studied Egyptian hieroglyphics and proper pronounciation since elementary school. Set aside the fact that I’ve studied all forms of Paganism and Khemetic magic for nineteen years. Set aside the fact that I have two frikkin past lives in Egypt. One of my patron gods IS Thoth and until he appears before me and says, excuse me, but you’re mispronouncing my name everytime you pray to me, I’m not going to start mispronouncing his name just because some ignorant, beligerant woman likes to pay long distance rates to get incorrect answers from deluded people who think they have to the right to teach.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAgggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Thank you, thank you for bearing with my tirade. For those interested, the proper pronounciation is Tot, sounding almost like taught as in, the ignorant savage who invaded my store tonight was almost taught the right pronounciation of Thoth but had to screw it up by asking someone who doesn’t know! Not that I told her any of the above because you cannot argue with the customers, especially not the beligerant ones who like to make useless long distance phone calls. You never know who else she’ll call up and I need my job.

OK… I feel better now. Really. Well, not really, but at least you all know how to pronounce Thoth now and hopefully the proper pronounciation will spread to the world through you. Go my people, instruct the populace.

I suppose this encounter would explain the blurry dream I had last night about being a supernatural continuously reincarnated mass murderer. Maybe I was working out my aggressions before hand so I wouldn’t rip into the Pagan wannabe. It’s sad when ignorant people rely on other ignorant people to teach them. It just perpetuates the whole thing until it all comes piling on people like me like a ton of manure bricks.

It’s so odd. During most of the year I’m an insomniac averaging less than five hours a night, but around the end of July through August and early into September, I sleep about ten hours a day. And frequently I feel the need for a nap (though I resist). I feel completely like a lazy sack despite the fact that I get home from work at midnight or later… I average a wake up time of 11 AM. I need at least 10 hours just so I don’t feel lethargic through the day.

So earlier today, when I was sleeping away the summer, I had an interesting dream. Because of course, with all this sleeping, I have to be dreaming something.

First I dreamed I was at a picnic with lots of famous movie stars and muppets. I met Whoopie Goldberg (I really like her movies), but she already seemed to know me. It was somebody’s birthday and I asked her if she was going to sing. She was surprised because she thought I already knew she was. Then I went up the street to a pharmacy and met Miss Piggy coming out, but it was really an old friend of mine from childhood who I haven’t seen in years and who had been Miss Piggy for years without my knowledge.

Then I dreamed I lived in an impoverished town in China with my mother, an older sister and a younger sister. An evil shaman moved into town and set up a stall in the middle of an intersection. He was really an agent of a company that wanted everyone to move off the land so they could buy it up and build a factory. While people slept, he could go into their dreams and kill them. Soon everyone in town was packing up to leave, but my family had nowhere to go.

While I was asleep in my dream, I saw the shaman go to sleep and come as a shadow to attack my sisters and mother. I woke up quickly and tried to wake up my little sister but she died before I could. My mother was already dead, and he got my older sister just as she was beginning to wake. So I jumped up and rushed to the stall where the shaman was sleeping and I smothered him.

Then, with nowhere to go and knowing the company would come for me, I packed up all my belongings and began running down a hill. I took a leap into the air and began flying. This was something I had always been able to do and something my family had tried to keep secret, but since they were now gone, I didn’t see a reason to hide my ability. (Actually, I can often fly in my dreams.)

I flew past a city where people were gathering in the streets, discussing how the companies and city planners were building over playgrounds and parks and other cultural centers. They stood around in professional clothes, suits, ties, business attire, wondering why their companies would build over places where their children could play. As I flew past I shouted, “It’s because they only see you as numbers!” And I kept flying while people stared and pointed, too startled by a flying girl to think about what I said.

I kept flying, but eventually I had to come down to eat, and that was when the company caught me. Years before, they’d dumped some toxic waste in the soil under the town where I grew up and some people got special powers. So they had sent the shaman (actually another person effected by their toxic waste and turned mercenary) to get people to leave so they could clean it up and no one would be the wiser.

So since I’d killed their agent, they wanted me to replace him. They locked me up in a room. I was chained to the walls on either side, with a length of chain also between my hands. They put a bowl of soup on the floor in front of me and left me, hoping to break my will. I had just enough chain to bend and reach the bowl with my tongue, but couldn’t get any in my mouth.

I was in the room for a long time, until finally a group of people like myself broke in and rescued me. There was one guy could make his shadow solid, and the shadow was super strong. But I can’t remember what the others could do. I was very afraid of him though, because he reminded me of the shaman’s shadow.

**

For those who read my comic and Newsletter, I haven’t forgotten you. Arkana remains on Monday, but I’ve moved Free Range Poetry to Fridays. I’ve moved the Newsletter to a bi-weekly schedule, so I’ll be updating it every other week from now on, but still on a Wednesday. Which means, there is an update there, waiting for you if you care to read it.

This edition of the Ancient Whispers Newsletter covers the Lammas/Lughnasadh holiday. The article, craft, and all of the Sites of Interest will give you more than enough information to make your holiday fun for all ages.

Some Sites of Interest

Irish Fire Festivals: Lughnasadh
Lammas, Lughnasadh
Lughnasadh Dance
Lughnasadh Recipes
*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*

This Pagan Week : July-August
Humor : Little Lost DOg
Article : Lughnasadh
Quote : Jerome Blattner
Craft of the Week : Lughnasadh Associations
Humor : Jay Leno
Who’s Who in World Mythology : Badari
Quote :Anonymous
The Magi’s Garden :China Berry
Cartoon
Poem : We live by the sun
Quote :Oprah Winfrey
The Power of Stones : Cacoxenite
Humor : Hard Decision
A Dreamer’s Guide : Peddler to People
Quote :Leo Rosten
Previous Newsletters

I am so bad, not coming to Xanga for so long, making everyone worry.

I’d like to say I’ve been very busy, but that would be a partial lie. I’ve been busy at work due to an impending inventory, but not so busy that I couldn’t drop by and just leave a note or post a dream or two. Of course, those who read my comic or my Ancient Whispers Newsletter know that I’ve also missed updates there.

The only excuse I can give is that this time of year I get very tired. I have extreme pollen allergies and my medication makes me tired.  And this year they seem to have hit me a lot sooner than usual… early winter perhaps? So when I haven’t been at work or shirking my creative duties, I’ve mostly been sleeping when I haven’t had a migraine.

By way of apology, here are the dreams I neglected to share…

~~~

July 20th: The Raven is one of my spirit animals, but I rarely dream about them. I see them more often in the flesh near my home, following me in my car and showing up wherever I might go. I dream much more often of spiders and snakes, my other two spirit animals.

So anyway, I dreamed my mother and I were in her car when we saw a youngish raven and its mother. Since we always try to get pictures of ravens when we can (in the waking world), I asked for her camera, but we couldn’t find it. Finally I found it in her purse and took off after the ravens (I had become much younger -maybe 12 or 13), while she had to go to work. In my dream, she was working as a waitress in a scummy little diner, and we lived below it in a one room efficiency in the cellar.

So I ran off to take pictures of ravens, but they would never sit still long enough or allow me close enough to get a good picture. I ran all over a town where we lived when I was about the age I was in the dream, but had no luck. So finally after twenty-five bad pictures, I returned home only to find the younger raven strutting around the steps of our home. He looked up when I approached and said, “I thought you’d never get here. What? Are you giving up?”

Then he flew off to perch on a telephone pole with his mother, and they both sat still so I could take the picture. Then I followed them all over town again and got lots more pictures of them and of other ravens flying or sitting, etc.

Finally I used up the whole roll of forty-five pictures, and went home very happy. When I got there though, there was a gremlin in the house, tearing it apart and looking for some kind of magical stones which he insisted we had stolen. For some reason, I was afraid he’d take the pictures, so I tucked the camera behind the cushions of a sofa bed.

~~~

July 18th: I dreamed that my sister and I were heading cross country in an old VW bug, but before we left, everyone warned us to be careful of werewolves.

So we were somewhere out in the desert, and I had my window partially rolled down even though it was a clammy gray twilight, when a werewolf ran up and started shoving on the window to force it down.  Everytime he forced it down, I’d try to roll it back up. But he would always get his fingers in the crack before it shut and force it down again. Finally, he broke the window, but we sped off into a town, leaving the werewolf behind.

We drove up to a garage to get the window fixed, and told some people there what had happened, just as the werewolf came loping up behind us. We were scared he was going to attack us, but his mother came out from somewhere and started yelling at him for breaking our window and to think how it made other werewolves look that we was going around scaring people. She practically grabbed him by the ear and was swatting him about the head. He was shouting, “Yes mom. Sorry mom. Ow ow ow. I was just having fun!” lol

“Oh fun, was it?” smack smack smack…

Then she led him over to us and told him to apologize. He stood there with his hands clasped and head down and said in a little kid stammer, “I’m sorry I broke your window…”

“And?!” said his mother.

“And I’ll pay for the damages.”

Then I got woken up by my mother dropping something in the kitchen.

~~~

July 13th: I dreamed that water levels were rising and most coastal communities were being abandoned. However some people were metamorphing into mer-folk. It seemed the transformation was linked to places *and* certain people. If you happened to be predisposed toward transforming and then happened to enter one of these places, you’d change in about a week. But if you were out in the middle of Wisconsin, you weren’t just going to wake up a fish. Some people even got tails, but after the change, everyone could then breath under water.

The government was either clueless or covering it up, because no one knew about it and there were no news stories about it anywhere. So unfortunately, I happened to stumble into one of these coastal towns and was apparently predisposed toward this transformation. This would not be unfortunate in and of itself, but there was a scientist there who was not predisposed toward transformation, but who was waiting for some unaware person to abduct and experiment on. Apparently not only did people transform into mer-folk, but they also became immortal. He wanted to exploit that element of the transformation for his own gain.

I was in the middle of freaking out over scales and my legs seeming to be inclined to join up, and this evil scientist stuck me in a pool with inch thick plastic sheets over the top to see if I would drown or transform faster. It was the latter… but it didn’t dawn on me that I was breathing water until he stuck a hose in the tank. I, thinking it was air, stuck it in my mouth but it was full of some kind of toxic sludge. Apparently having established that the reverse amphibinization could be sped up, he wanted to see how fast immortality kicked in. (Yay… ) The sludge didn’t kill me, but then I started spitting out squid.

~~~

July 9th: I dreamed I went to Hell…  not for being a Pagan as one might think, but for being a murderous vigilante. In my dream, I was an abused child. I killed my family first, then went on to kill other evil doers until I was killed (I wasn’t aware of how I died in the dream).

I ended up in hell, for not respecting my parents (I guess) and for murder. Since I’d been baptised (I really was when I was a baby), they didn’t seem to realize I was a Pagan. (That was kind of weird but good camoflage for later in the dream.)

So parts of Hell were a lot like any earthly city. One of the demons told me that they’d been remodeling since the new Devil took over, but no one ever said who it was. Pagans and dangerous psychotics were sent outside the city, but inside, people had jobs and “culture”, parties, arts, etc. There were these great flowering trees with trumpet-like flowers of a soft peach color and wonderful, one might say heavenly, scent. (The flowers looked a lot like Datura -a deadly poison BTW.)

But it wasn’t all great, which one lady said to me as I attended her upscale party and said how nice it (the city) was. The demons liked to take people out of the “wasteland” outside the city, “alter” them, and let them loose at night to kill and/or otherwise traumatize the inhabitants. Anyone who died in Hell was perminantly dead. So, as a former vigilante, I went back to work, killing off these monster psychos. This was something the demons really did not like at all, but they couldn’t catch me and strangely enough, they didn’t seem to be aware of my past either. In the mean time, I also gathered seeds from the trees and tossed them over the side of the city walls because I felt bad for my Pagan brethren outside without any foliage.

~~~

You know, if I didn’t have to be at work by two, I’d probably go back to bed…

It would have been so nice if my sister had come home today. Because I will be working the holiday, I get an extra day off during the week (Friday). If my sister had come home, I would have had an entire day off tomorrow. No more watching the baby. I could have slept late, got some much needed cleaning done, but no, she has decided instead to come home on the Monday after the 4th of July. Because she is hoping to make more money as a waitress on the holiday. I can understand that, but she was supposed to be here by now and I don’t think that is fair. My nephew is sweet and basically good, but he is still a teething eight-month-old learning to walk and she is taking advantage of the fact that I have no choice in the matter. I’m frikkin tired! Darn it. And I have things I need to do… like the newsletter and my comics. While I may not get paid to do them (though I accept donations! hint hint), they are just as important to me as my regular job. It completely pi$$e$ me off to miss an update or make one late, especially after all the trouble I had at the beginning of the month with my scanner and software. So when I apologize for not having had a newsletter for this week and being late with today’s comic, you can be sure that I am both sincere and irritated beyond measure. And I apologize for the general lack of posts here as well. I don’t have time between watching the little rug-rat all day and working all night.

If my sister comes home on Monday (if), then things will hopefully go back to normal. I am not holding my breath. It’s always something with her, and I told my mother that if she lets my sister get away with not coming when she is supposed to, that she will continue to put off her arrival in favor of making more money. If it’s not that excuse, it will be another. It’s the way she operates. Her life and daily trials are always so much more important than everyone else’s. We exist only to serve her.

My mother is so tired, she was in a car accident yesterday. No one was hurt, but she will be using my car when I am not… Her car may be in the shop a while. She rear-ended someone at a highway onramp, and the front end is all smashed in. I told her to be careful with my car. heh But I was half serious.

Least I was able to get out of the house today. My mother was home to take care of the baby, so of course I had insomnia and couldn’t sleep late. My brother and I went to see Chronicles of Riddick. Initially I had a coupon to see the movie, but looking at it just before we left, I saw it expired last week. OK, to he11 with it, I was getting out of the house despite four hours sleep (3am-7am), a migraine, very little money, and a bad attitude.

Still have the migraine, though I managed to sleep when we got home. The movie wasn’t bad, but the book was better… more foreshadowing and detail. Of course, it was Alan Dean Foster, so a good read was to be expected. Some of the best books I have ever read were written by him.

Despite being low on cash, I decided 1) I need to do something for myself considering how irritated and low I’ve been since becoming the family appointed babysitter, and 2) since transfering all my books to Amazon (from half.com), I’ve made $50. It’s not money readily available, but eventually it will be in my account and so I can stand to “pre-spend” $10 of it without worrying I’ll overdraw my account.

And finally, I read this article the other day and this is the first I’ve had a chance to post it. I am always on the look out for articles and essays on the subject of intelligence because of all things, intelligence and the ability to learn is the most important aspect of my interaction with the universe. The more we understand about mental functions and our individual abilities to learn, the better we can put those ideas to use in advancing the human psyche.

Most people are probably familiar with the IQ and IQ tests, but within the past decade, more reasearch has been done into multiple intelligences. Despite how it sounds, this has nothing to do with multiple personalities (heh), but has everything to do with how we interact with existence. IQs and IQ tests basically measure our ability to learn, the speed at which we assimilate and understand information. The new quotients measure the multiple ways in which individuals assimilate information. Not everyone processes information in the same way. Some minds accept verbal instruction while others do better with pictoral or reasoning instruction. There are now several forms of intelligence – Linguistic intelligence, Logical-mathematical intelligence, Spatial intelligence (artistic intelligence), Bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence (athelticism), Musical intelligence, Interpersonal intelligence (people smart), Intra-personal intelligence(self-awareness), and Naturalist intelligence (adaptable usage of one’s general environment) – and hopefully educators will shortly be putting this new understanding of how people learning new things to use.