worldmegan

If you’re going to make chia seed jelly—you know, by soaking chia in a little bit of water—please don’t put it in the fridge and just forget about it. For three weeks. It might… yeah.

Why yes—I am posting to shamelessly promote Crow’s workshop on Sunday! No no, don’t second-guess yourself. You’ve got it right on the button. ;}

Awhile back Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno went to Sundance, and now it’s been released online. You are going to love these shorts. They are incredibly creative and engaging, and they catalogue the sexual practices of insects. In fact, Isabella performs the male role in several of them (with her brilliantly constructed, papercraft-esque co-stars) and I can’t insist enough, you’ve just got to take a look at these.

I haven’t the vaguest idea as to whether this is work safe. It’s science, people! It’s very hot. ;}

Green Porno, by Isabella Rossellini

(Link: Garfield minus Garfield)

Before I went camping this weekend, I was having the worst allergy attack of my whole life. In absolute desperation I emailed Crow Mitchell, who I knew previously through Marty’s gaming group, because she had mentioned something about Psych-K, which is a method of communication with the subconscious for the purpose of reprogramming a belief system. It has ostensibly been applied to many ends, including allergies (among other things), and Crow is someone I trust — so it was worth looking into.

Crow’s explanations and my own research revealed a solution that seemed to run along the same lines as psycho-cybernetics, which I adore, and the world views of people I respect, like Steve Pavlina and Wayne Dyer. I had recently picked up a book by Bruce Lipton, too, and that didn’t hurt! I did not research Psych-K exhaustively, but I did schedule a session with Crow last Wednesday afternoon. It was super interesting. Although neither of us expected all problems to be solved in one session, I don’t think I expected as nice a result as we got. As with any work involving the subconscious, or unconscious, or other-than-conscious, Psych-K seems to be a continuing process. Before we can alter a belief system and achieve the desired result, we have to know what’s really going on. And sometimes figuring that out is a challenge!

To make a long story slightly shorter, we did affect my allergies. The session lasted about an hour if I remember correctly, and we did a lot of muscle testing to determine our best course of action. Most of you are aware that I am super allergic to cats. Er, at least, I was. Now I’m not so sure, because after Wednesday’s Psych-K session, I sat on the floor and snuggled kitties! I petted and played with them, and snuggled my face into their fur. Yes. Yes, I really did. And for the first time that I can remember, it wasn’t about my allergies — it was only about whether I could keep from choking myself on flying cat fur. Ha! I didn’t sneeze, or experience explosive itching, or end up blowing my nose every five minutes. I felt… absolutely fine.

For me, it doesn’t matter whether we dispensed with a real cat allergy, or just a mental conviction that I was allergic to cats: If the result is one where I spend an afternoon covered in cat hair and don’t run home crying and miserable, it’s a great result. And the fact that I went to her with seasonal allergies but ended up fixing an animal allergy — temporarily or permanently — doesn’t bother me, because it’s clear that something really fascinating is going on with this Psych-K stuff. Incidentally, the awful seasonal allergy symptoms I was having did go away, almost entirely, for most of the weekend. Friends who are experiencing the same symptoms didn’t have them let up the way I did, which makes me really wonder. (I felt a little bit guilty listening to people blowing their noses and sniffling through the day when I felt mostly awesome. Oopsies.) We’re planning another session soon, and considering the subject material we covered last week, I can easily see not only how we ended up helping my cat allergy but how we might concentrate in a better direction and affect my seasonal allergies better this time around. It’s so interesting to have people around who work in these ways! And hell if I’m going to pump myself full of drugs for three weeks every summer. You know? That’s crazy.

I don’t know whether the cat allergy solution will stick or need to be reinforced. I don’t know what will happen next. But I never, never expected such an interesting experience, and such a promising set of results. This is an experiment I want to continue! It’s such a new area of interest for me, and I plan to do more exploring. I do feel the need to put in a plug for Crow, however, as brilliant as she’s been. You have never met a person so connected, complete and understanding as this woman can be. She works in Psych-K, energy healing, life coaching, sacred geometry, and we’ve started referring to her as a raw food alchemist. You would not believe the awesome food she fed me this weekend, either. She makes a mean raw cacao-avocado dip, I’ll tell you. Here’s her link and some more information. And her cell number is 512-626-7700, because I believe in her strongly enough to engage in some shameless promotion — and because she’s incredibly useful to have around. She’s just good people, man. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Thank you for reading about my experiment! I’m going to go finish off the chocolate dip… yum…

We’ve only posted a few updates since getting to Aggiecon, and they’re both at Marty’s blog—a brief check-in after our first evening and a cryptic sketch addition.

Apparently the MSC —the building Aggiecon is held in—has been bugging Aggiecon for years to get rid of the nudity in the con art show. This year I guess they were extra insistent about it, because when we got there we found out we had to tape over exposed nipples. At a fantasy / SF art show, you can imagine how many nipples were floating around. A lot.

This is absurd for a whole string of reasons, but the short story is that we did it and felt bad for the art show staff, who were obviously stressed and flustered. We doubt there would have been censorship without that particular pressure from the MSC. We don’t blame the con staff, except that we think it’s better to stand up than sit down, especially in such a ridiculous situation. For this reason, Angel obtained a roll of the same blue tape used to censor most of the artwork, and proceeded to censor all willing nipples at con. Yesterday there were hordes of us walking around with blue tape X’s on our shirts, and more today. It’s more a joke than a protest, but there’s something to it. Todd was also supportive (as you can see), and Steve Brust was downright pissed. I can relate to that. If you take this sort of thing lying down too often, you get used to it. That’s not a cool thing to get used to.

In any case, we have our blue tape gang and our backstory. Steve sounds like he plans to write a letter. This con is turning out to be thoroughly weird and nifty. Anyway, I’m having a pretty good time. You can tell:

Update: By the way, Marty’s Iron Artist entry (or result?) touched on this particular issue—so if you enjoyed his pasties sketches, you’ll like the pictures of the competition. Well, with penguins.

If I could only ask you to do one thing for me, for a span of about twenty minutes, all week, all month, I would ask you to please watch this video. It’s possible that this feels so profound to me because of material and ideas I’ve already begun to process, but I just can’t pass up the possibility that you might feel the same. So if you feel like trusting me for a small chunk of your time, this one, this one right here is what I’d choose for you.

Stroke of Insight (Jill Bolte Taylor @ TED)

Let me know what you think.

If you’ve been wanting a Marty commission but didn’t quite have the cash, here’s your chance to get the next best thing for way less monies!

Marty is running a sort of community project. He’s raising pledges with Fundable, which is this neat service that lets people pledge to raise enough money for a project but doesn’t actually take the donations until enough pledges have been made. Once he raises at least $350 in 26 days, he’ll get started on the project, which is kind of a groupthink—the top donors get to actually tell him what to draw, and he has to incorporate all their input into the final product, which will be an awesome full-color work of Martyness. I can imagine this resulting in some pretty wacky things, especially considering the sanity of some of our friends… :P

In addition to that, he’s sending all the donors super awesome stuff like prints and postcards and Marty money and discounts on other prints. So if you were thinking of buying a Marty print, this might be even better: You get possible input on a new picture, you get to know that you helped support Marty in doing the thing he loves best, you got to play a fun game, and some of you will get to heckle him mercilessly in the process. It’s a win-win!

He also decided that for the first 48 hours only (until about 11pm tomorrow night) the $30+ donors will get input privileges like the $50+ donors do—so if you feel like bossing him around and working his fingers to the bone, you can do it pretty cheaply before tomorrow night. (Ha!)

Once he gets started on the actual picture he’s going to blog and post photos of the work in progress, so that we can all look over his shoulder while he works! I can see this being a lot of fun, and I would love to see him do several projects like these over time.

The project started last night, so you can go pledge now if you want! And the deadline for pledges is April 8th, a few minutes before midnight, so you have some time to decide whether the promised stash is worth it. ;}

You obviously don’t have to pledge money to show your support—I’m pretty sure he’d be filled with glee if you just posted some comments on the post he made. And whether you donate money or not, you can watch him work once the project starts after April 8th!

Go take a look at his post and leave him comments while the party’s still getting going. I haven’t seen anything quite like this before, so it should be interesting!!

Guys.

This fear thing does not serve us well.

We might think that it protects us, keeps us from harm, furthers our best interests… but it doesn’t.

Unless my fear is getting me out of the path of a rabid, rampaging animal intent on doing me physical damage, my fear is useless to me. It does not protect me. It does not keep me safe. If it has any use at all, it is only to show me where I am afraid—where I must find courage. And even then, it only serves to help eliminate itself.

If you are acting out of fear, you are chaining yourself down. You are creating something that controls you and impedes you. You are not doing the “wise, prudent thing”. You are doing yourself a disservice. You are darkening your light. You are under a freakin’ bushel.

If you are like me, you have been acting out of fear your whole life, and you don’t even notice it anymore. You do things because you’ve learned that they should be done a certain way. You don’t even realize that the reason you still do them is that you’re afraid. You are so numb to the nature of reality that you can only essentially monkey-see, monkey-do—safe, familiar territory.

If you are like me, you feel good when you break out of the pattern, once in awhile. But by and large, you are still under the fucking bushel. You are still doing so many things just because you’re afraid. Unconscious, unquestioned.

I don’t know. Think about it.