Iron Man rules!! It is one of the best movies I've ever seen. Every aspect of it was masterfully executed with razor-sharp precision. The story, the dialog, the acting, the cast, the interplay of comedy and action--all of it blew our socks off. I want the soundtrack so I can work out to it and feel like a total bad ass.
I feel good because I've gotten ahead of schedule on my novel. In keeping myself accountable, I've kicked it into high gear, and I'm ready to pound out the rest of the pages. Yay!
I realized that I missed one of the most important personal anniversaries in my year. Mid-April 2008 has marked 5 years without cutting. It's hard to believe it's been half a decade of success in this part of my life. If I never accomplish anything bigger than that, that should be fine, because this was bigger than a lot of people would be able to understand.
Speaking of understanding...I know I should stay off Internet message boards, but I got drawn into a discussion about the new Narnia movies. Some people didn't care for the christian allegory, so somebody got their knickers in a big twist and attacked Harry Potter for filling Hollywood with "witchcraft and Satanism." I don't know why I bother getting upset over christian ignorance, but after I calmed down in record time, I came to a new conclusion. I remembered a conversation I had with a woman who teaches Sunday School. She told me originally, she had told her students not to read Harry Potter, but after reading it for herself, she realized it's the same old struggle between good and bad, and she didn't have such a problem with it. So my revelation was that paganism and atheism and all of these non-judeochristian ideas need to just flood pop culture. We need to represent ourselves the way we want to be seen and combat ignorance by trying to reach people through their need for entertainment. And of course it's not lost on me that in the case of this Sunday School teacher, it was children who changed her mind. Children love fun! What's fun? Not christianity! If you have fun, according to the bible, you're gonna burn. And according to the saints, they're going to laugh at you while you do so. Anyway--children love fun, not rules. If nothing else, we can appeal to the children, and christians shouldn't have a problem with that because they bombard children with preposterous myths on a weekly basis. You're barely out of the womb before they start telling you Jesus came out of a womb without sperm going in. (Every teenage girl's father's nightmare, I suspect.)
I'm still scratching my head for ideas on what kind of Pagan-Goddess-Witch book I want to write. Maybe I should write either a thick volume or a whole series, just an autobiography of how these layers came into my life and at the same time inform others. I might leave witchery out of it, especially if I choose to focus on the historical battle between Paganism and patriarchal monotheism. I don't see the point in simply combining many other authors' information on this history, although I believe it would be helpful to have it all in one place. I would certainly want to include some other aspect besides history. I love doing comparisons between christianity and Paganism, but if they all get explained during the history section, I don't need to walk my readers through it again. And if I'm too critical, no one will listen, but I'm not aiming to write a long assault on their religion. I just want to raise consciousness about the real history of the world because we need it to help straighten out all the socio-political-religious bullshit. I want people to stop acting like men have always been in charge; they haven't. I want people to stop accepting sexual assault and blaming it on the victim. I want people to wake up and realize that women aren't trying to claim men's power; we're REclaiming our own.
One last beef. One of the biggest arguments for patriarchy is that men are smarter, stronger, and more capable than women. They're arguing that there's a difference between the two sexes, right? However, the second a feminist suggests that a woman take a position of power, say, the presidency, the response is usually, "Do you think things would really be different if women were in charge?" All day long, people talk about differences between the sexes, but when you try to get the "fairer sex" into authority, they back-pedal. I do not believe that all men think alike and all women think alike, but I know for a fact that a truly empowered woman would make most people's heads spin. Too many people spend their time and energy thinking about how women should be dainty, kind, and quiet while men should be making decisions, building things, and enjoying their hobbies. The feminine principle is nurturing, life-sustaining, all-inclusive, sensitive, and intuitive; the male principal has been used to blow things up as much as build them. It represents characteristics we need, certainly, but you can't have a healthy society based completely on ideas like logic, war, inflexibility, polarity, seriousness, and exclusiveness. Most people need to widen their narrow minds and do their homework. Women's brains are wired for multi-tasking, making us more natural leaders. (How many things do you think George W. Bush can think about at one time?) Women bring life into this world. I adore the thought of men having sympathy symptoms during their significant others' pregnancies, but in the end, we're the ones who usher in the next generation. Who better to make decisions about life than those who are closest to it? I cheer for stay-at-home dads every bit as much if not more so than career women because they are doing what feels right to them and opening doors to a brighter future in this country. Only when we break down these unnatural, rigid walls can we move forward in any real sense. (A fake sense being the mistaken belief that monotheism is some kind of religious enlightenment at the end of the road from Atheism and Paganism.) In an age when christians are continuing to recruit new members, it's high time that pendulum swung back over. It's time for the witch hunts to get studied beside the Holocaust, and it's time somebody demanded an apology from the pope about the Inquisition. If the catholic church can decree Mother Mary's conception immaculate in addition to that of Jesus, I think they can fess up to something that really happened.
