Well, I went to the doctor and she said it was natural for some women to faint when they are sick the way I was. She said it was nothing to be concerned about, but gave me a slip to go get blood tests done. Now I just have to find the time to get myself to a hospital and let the bloodsuckers get to work. And at some point find the time to get myself to the gynecologist as well (I’m even less enthusiastic about that visit than the first). Can you tell I’m not overly fond of our medical professionals? Bleh… I have better things to spend my money on… like books!

A. Lee Martinez has come out with a new book, Too Many Curses. He’s a master of humorous fantasy and scifi. His previous book, the Automatic Detective was about a sentient robot who, through a series of bizarre twists and alien machinations, ends up becoming a detective. I like his other books, Gil’s All Fright Diner and A Nameless Witch, very much too. His other book, In the Company of Ogres, was okay… but not my favorite. Martinez writes fantastical absurdity very well, but not in the same nonsensical vein as Pratchett or Robert Asprin. More like Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat books, I think… absurd but in a serious voice. Anyway, I highly recommend his books.

Another recent purchase was kind of on a whim… Yokia Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide. It’s kind of a whose who of Japanese spooks and specters. It’s obvious that the writers took great pride in poking fun at the ghosts and ghoulies. Though most of the references are taken from movies instead of books, it’s still an interesting look at the supernatural in Japan. If Martinez’s books are too long for your tastes, the little articles on each Yokai in this books are sure to give you a chuckle.

Speaking of Asian entertainment though, I caught part of the funniest kung fu movie ever on TNT the other night… Kung Fu Hustle. OMG! Hilarious. It’s like some unholy combination of kung fu, superhero, and mobster movie. So I went and bought a copy. Ha! If you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend it! And if you have seen it, you know what I’m talking about! lol

In other news, I think my IPod stereo is dying. This sucks because I just spent $50 at the doctors and will probably spend at least that much for the bloodtests, if not more, much more.

Chapter 1.1 in which Glory is not mindful of the store
Chapter 1.2 in which Glory is made to do something she would really rather not
Chapter 1.3 in which Glory thinks she might be sick
Chapter 1.4 in which Aaron makes a mistake
Chapter 1.5 in which Glory is made to see the error of her ways
Chapter 1.6 in which the circle remains unbroken

Chapter 2.1 in which Aaron makes another mistake
Chapter 2.2 in which Glory reflects on her path
Chapter 2.3 in which we learn Aaron is not really a nice boy
Chapter 2.4 in which Glory speculates on the holiness of salt
Chapter 2.5 in which Glory learns of the necessity for upper body strength, but makes do with  what she has
Chapter 2.6 in which Aaron tries to make amends, but is still pretty much an ass

Chapter 3.1 in which Glory is spat on, twice
Chapter 3.2 in which a cop is threatened
Chapter 3.3 in which someone is crying
Chapter 3.4  in which there’s more to the moon than meets the eye
Chapter 3.5  in which Glory comes face to face with an loony environmentalist
Chapter 3.6 in which Glory gets turned around

In the Nigerian capitol of Lagos, masqueraders called Eyos wander the streets concealed in white robes, carrying long sticks. Each represents an individual family and symbolizes authority. A person crossing the path of an Eyo must remove his hat and shoes as a sign of respect. An offended Eyo will attack with its stick.

The best way to get over writer’s block is to write…. If you can’t write what you want, write something else. If you normally write essays, write a poem. If you normally write about others, write about yourself. If you normally write fiction, write an essay. Even if you write the worst thing of your life, at least you’ve got it out of your system. And there’s always editing.

Another technique, when writing fiction, is to put random words in a hat. Then try to make a story around what you pull out. If you happen to use tarot cards, you can also pull random cards and use them for character and plot development. Even if you don’t own a deck, it’s something you might want to try as it provides odd quirks to characters that you might not have thought of on your own. This can also be done with playing cards. The trumps of tarot cards and playing cards are essentially the same, though playing cards obviously don’t have the colorful and descriptive pictures to go with the number.

Of course, you could always stop trying to write and just read something instead. I good writer writes what they know and if you’re not willing to do the research, there’s not much you can write about convincingly. So… worse comes to worse, if you can’t write, there’s always more books out there than you could ever read in one lifetime.

This was the first day of the New Year and the first day of the month of Thoth according to the Alexandrian calendar. According to another Egyptian calendar, this is the 13th of Paopi, the Day of Satisfying the Hearts of the Ennead.

I think everyone is selfish. Even people who are seemingly as selfless as they come, are probably selfish about something. Just because you cannot see the immediate benefit to someone’s actions, does not mean there is no benefit. Even a mother who sacrifices for her children benefits by the satisfaction she derives from seeing her children thrive. If you asked her, would she rather see her children thrive or someone else’s children, she’d choose her own. Who wouldn’t? But that preference for one’s own is in itself a selfish preference. You don’t wish harm on someone… that’s malicious, but showing a preference is still selfish. I’m not saying it’s wrong to want your own family to thrive, but what if it was due to someone else’s failure to thrive. Say you or your child needed a heart transplant. Well, you wouldn’t wish for someone to die so that you (or your child) could get the heart, but by wish for a heart, you are selfishly wishing for someone’s death, even if that someone is unknown to you. Is this not a selfish wish? Even (hypothetically) if you made the ultimate sacrifice of your own life in the hope that your child would receive your heart, would this be a completely selfless act? No, because even as you died you would feel a surge of pride and self-righteousness that you were giving your life for your child. The need for emotional vindication is selfish.

There are various levels of selfishness, obviously. It ranges from sociopaths and the morbidly greedy to people who could be considered selfless unless you look hard enough to find the hidden benefit, the spin or the angle if you like. One should obviously try to be as selfless as possible. Otherwise they are infringing upon the rights of others. But it is nearly impossible to be completely without desire or preference, and it is in the urge to placate one’s desire that selfishness is expressed.

Taken to an ridiculous extreme, when you choose to eat, are you depriving another of food? When you use water to bathe, are you depriving someone of clean water to drink?

Closer to home, when you throw trash out the window of your car, are you choking a fish? When you refuse to recycle, are you depriving someone in the next generation of the resources required to make that item new?

Levels of selfishness… if you have to be selfish (as all life must be if it wishes to continue living), shouldn’t we strive to be as selfless as is feasible if we wish to continue life? That is an act of responsibility, of self-awareness. Selfishness is inescapable, but integrity is something we should all strive to learn.

The Yoruba of Nigeria celebrate Gelede. This is a rite to control women past child bearing who are considered witches.

My favorite childhood game was one that we may or may not have made up. I don’t remember anyone ever telling us how it was played, but it seemed to have grown out of playing hide&seek in the dark. I remember playing hide&seek with the neighborhood children and playing well after twilight when it was too dark to even see anyone beyond vague shadows. We’d play in a one block radius. No crossing the street… backyards within the block fair game if they belonged to any of the children playing. After a while, twilight hide&seek was the norm, rather than the exception. I remember hiding nearly in plain sight, but invisible by dint of not moving as the seeker passed me. I once stood behind a tree no thicker than my arm and was the last person to be found.

If it was too light out, we’d go indoors, cover all the windows where light slipped in. That was a different kind of game, played more by sound than actual seeking. You had to listen for the people hiding, since you could see even less in a darkened room than you could in a twilit backyard. This was by far my favorite game, and I was very good at it.

Of course, if I’d had my way, we’d have all played scrabble, but I could never get anyone to play boardgames with me. At least there was the off chance that they could win at hide&seek. No one could ever beat me at boardgames, especially not spelling games… so I didn’t get to play them often.

Illmatar or Luonnotar, the Water Mother was the Creatrix of the World according to Finnish legend. Upon her knees, the duck laid the six golden eggs and the one iron egg from which the world was made.

Consus, the Roman god of grain stores, was honored as the grain stores were replenished. Sacrifices were made at his altar located beneath the floor of the Circus Maximus, and games were held in his honor in the stadium. Mules and horses were decked with garlands and given a day of rest. This was later tied into St. Anthony’s Day.

The Olympics began as celebrations in honor of harvest rituals.

Answer any one or all of these questions in the coming
week. I try to mix the whimsical with the serious here, so hopefully
there is at least one question here for everyone. Again, since Xanga has been so thoughtful as to add the new SHARE button, please use that when answering any of these questions. Using the Share button allows you to answer the question almost in the same way that you would a normal Xanga-sponsored featured question.

On the last day of Odin’s Ordeal, he discovered the runes.

The Opeconsiva honors Ops goddess of abundance, and an old Italian goddess of fertility. The day is so called from Ops Consiva ‘Lady Bountiful the Planter. As goddess of sowing and reaping she was worshiped under the name of Consivia today by the Vestals. Only one of the pontifices could be present in her temple at Regia at this time. As her abode was in the earth, her worshipers invoked her while seated and touching the ground.

Paryushana Parva is a Hindu holy day. It and Diwali are the two most important holy days for the Jains.

I am just getting so sick of work. No one at work is to blame. It’s not their fault that our total store hours keep getting cut while customer flow continues to increase or that head office keeps adding new tasks to the work load without giving us (me) time to get the regular stuff done. It’s no one’s fault that half the time, the tasks they do send down are incomplete or the items they want placed in the store are late or not even published yet. I don’t blame anyone I work with for the STUPIDITY of our corporate slave mongers. Borders leadership consists of fools who draw big paychecks to make idiotic decisions that hurt business more than they help it. They want CSI (the Customer Service Index) to be maintained, but they don’t give us enough hours to get our work down and help customers. So work doesn’t get done in the time frame they expect, and then, apparently we get put on lists. Does it matter than four years in a row we’ve been reviewed by LP (loss prevention) and gotten 100% every single time? Does it matter that when our district manager comes, she Never has a problem with how the store looks? Does it matter that our CSI has been 100% for several weeks and that it’s one of the highest in the district and always has been? Apparently not… we’re on “lists” because we don’t get our work done in the time frame they believe we should irregardless of the severely truncated hours we’ve had to deal with for the last few months. And they keep clipping them even more.

That business class in October can’t start too soon for me. I am so tired of working for other people who obviously have only a very loose grip on reality. This is no way to run a store, unless they want to run it into the ground. I’m all for making money, but they keep pinching those pennies; you’d think they expect if they squeeze hard enough, a second one will pop out. Maybe I shouldn’t be complaining about my job in such a public way.
I’ve heard of people being fired other places for saying for less. But I am just sick of it.
Let them fire me. It would be a relief. Let them try to do as good a
job with the crapfest I’ve been handed. I wish the bigwigs would take
the time to actually familiarize themselves with the day to day
function of a store. I wish they’d come off their high horses and spend
a week in the shoes of a lowly worker. I would not be surprised if they’re doing these things intentionally in order to run the company into the ground in order to make it easier to sell it later. I mean, they’ve cut our hours, took away 401K contributions, killed the fulltime employee gift card program… the only thing they haven’t yet touched is the benefits. I went out and got new glasses a few months ago because I’m not sure how long we’ll have that benefit. I’m almost grateful that I never did sign up for regular health insurance.

Chapter 1.1 in which Glory is not mindful of the store
Chapter 1.2 in which Glory is made to do something she would really rather not
Chapter 1.3 in which Glory thinks she might be sick
Chapter 1.4 in which Aaron makes a mistake
Chapter 1.5 in which Glory is made to see the error of her ways
Chapter 1.6 in which the circle remains unbroken

Chapter 2.1 in which Aaron makes another mistake
Chapter 2.2 in which Glory reflects on her path
Chapter 2.3 in which we learn Aaron is not really a nice boy
Chapter 2.4 in which Glory speculates on the holiness of salt
Chapter 2.5 in which Glory learns of the necessity for upper body strength, but makes do with  what she has
Chapter 2.6 in which Aaron tries to make amends, but is still pretty much an ass

Chapter 3.1 in which Glory is spat on, twice
Chapter 3.2 in which a cop is threatened
Chapter 3.3 in which someone is crying
Chapter 3.4  in which there’s more to the moon than meets the eye
Chapter 3.5  in which Glory comes face to face with an loony environmentalist

The rites of Mania were held in honor of Ceres, Mania, and the Manes. This was the first day for opening the Mundus Cereris, “ritual pit of Ceres.” This pit was vaulted and divided into two parts. The lowest part was consecrated to the Underworld deities and also to the Manes, and closed with a stone. This cover, the lapis manalis or “stone of the Manes,” was removed today, on October fifth, and the eighth of November so that offerings could be dropped down. When this barrier was removed, the Manes rose into our world for a time. Mania was Christianized into St. Bartholomew’s Day festivities, which continued until 19th century in London.

This is the eighth day commemorating Odin’s Ordeal on the world tree Yggdrasil.

Not enough time to make a proper post today, but here are today’s Pagan holidays….

Nemesea was a Greek festival honoring the goddess Nemesis, defender of the relics and memory of the dead from insults and injury. The Greeks also called this the Day of Moira. It is dedicated to the Genia of personal fate. The threads of Moira draw all things in life together. Her particular symbols are the wheel and the scales.

Today I am going to do something that I seldom do… and that is blog about a Xanga feature. Namely the Share button.

I like it. I like it a lot. I wish every site on the internet had a share button so when I found something blog-worthy, I could click the link and get started blogging right away.

Most of my readers will probably agree that I am more than a little long winded, both in my posts here and often in my comments on their sites. So now… if I see that I am being obnoxiously verbose, maybe I’ll click the share button instead and hop back to my own Xanga to respond. The only problem with that is, the share button doesn’t share the fact that someone has used it with the person whose blog inspired the clicky-clicky.

Another thing that I love about the share button is that it lets me post my blog here to Myspace… which I usually neglect. I don’t blog much on Myspace because their blogging tools are just set up so bass ackwards. Mostly I wander Myspace for the message boards, not the blogging. Prior to this, if I wanted to post my blog in both places (for the edification of my coworkers who prefer Myspace), I had to cut and paste. The Share button simplifies that… though it only posts a link to my Xanga, which is kind of annoying. I’d rather have it post the whole blog. I guess maybe they think only readers would be playing with the share button? They don’t expect I’d be sharing my own post in a secondary blog so they think a link is sufficient….?

Ah that’s me… always nitpicking at things, even things I like.

Now, aside from Xanga and Myspace, I don’t know much about the various places the share button allows you to go. I’ve heard of most of them, but I’ve not had much to do with them. So I suppose a further exploration is in order. However, I do like the simple fact that the share button works along the same lines as the “featured question.” It links back to the original topic which spurred the blog you are about to create. I love that. I only wish it also mimicked the featured question in that it created automatic tags. As anyone who’s given my taglist a once over can tell you, I love my tags. If my blog were a book, the tags would be an index to said tome. Other people use tags to get people surfing in from the search engines. I use my tags to find specific posts months or years later. Sometimes I only have a handful of tags for a particular post. More often, I have dozens. There have even been a few posts where I filled up the tagbox not once, but twice or even three times. I’m a tag-aholic. If nothing else, when you use the share button to respond to someone’s post, it should produce a user tag so that the person is aware that they have been someone’s muse. But I guess not everyone is as tag-centric as me. hehe… I love making up new words.

In any event, I think the share button is the most innovative thing Xanga has done in at least a year. The blogged idea was cute but so far, not very useful. The separate Xanga sites like Momaroo, Revelife, and that Dating blog are plain obnoxious. The credits and minis are… well, useless to me. But the Share button is just uber-cool for someone like me, who mostly lives online. I swear, if they had a way to upload your consciousness to the internet, I’d give up my fleshy ways and be a real cyber-haunt. lol The only place I really socialize or seek entertainment is online. I don’t even watch tv any more…. though that will probably change once Heroes comes back in a month (September 22nd). The second season comes out on DVD soon too.

Aedesia, a fifth century female philosopher of the Neo-Platonic school, was famous also for her virtue and her beauty. She was honored today.

This is the sixth day commemorating Odin’s Ordeal on the world tree Yggdrasil.

The Feast of Montu occurs on the 5th day of Paopi.

I’m certain of it. Every living thing has hormones. They are not steadily produced by the body, but ebb and flow like the tides. Nothing exists in absolute equilibrium. Any little event can change their levels, and the body does not produce the same levels all the time. Like women, men’s bodies produce hormones which affect the brain chemistry and cause moodiness. Women just get a bad rap because our hormonal surges are more… visceral. I’m sure everyone’s heard the phrase: can you really trust something that bleeds for seven days every month and doesn’t die? Yeah… and if men menstruated and gave birth, the human race would be extinct in a generation. lol

But that’s besides the point. Men have hormonal surges too which cause PMS-like moodiness. If you charted the times when your male friends and relatives had little snits, you’d soon see that men have a cycle just like women. The trick is to learn to anticipate these surges and catch yourself before you say or do things you might regret. Women have a leg up in that regards because we’ve known about female PMS for generations. We accept its existence and have learned to deal with it. Since most men won’t even entertain the ghost of an idea on male “PMS,” they’ve kind of handicapped themselves. You can’t deal with something you don’t even believe exists.

The Romans sacrificed to Hercules, patron of businessmen. Merchants set aside a tenth of their profits for his benefit. Incredible banquets were held in his honor. So much food was left that mountains of leftovers were thrown into the Tiber River.