looks like no baby black holes next month :-(

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/09/22/large-hadron-collider.html

This is pretty cool, and they're starting it up on Wednesday! Will it be the end of the world? Or just the beginning? (dramatic musical interlude)

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1838947,00.html?cnn=yes

A virtual rollercoaster of awesomeness and complete shite.

I went to an SCA event with a bunch of friends. After long delays in actually getting on the road, around 11 we finally get to this seedy little motel in the middle-of-fucking-nowhere (the only place near the event site that will take pets) and meet up with another friend and his dog. Courtney goes in to pay the cash pet deposit for her Schnauzer while the rest of us wait outside the motel office with the dogs, glad to finally be there after a looong car ride. Some asshole grabs Courtney's purse in the office and runs out and across the parking lot before we even know what's going on, and she screams "he's got my purse!" The guys tear off after him, and I grab the dogs, who also want to join the chase. When they come back, her husband Tom limping, we find out that the red car that peeled out of the parking lot moments ago had been the getaway car, and they had hit Tom when he tried to grab the guy, hence the limping.

Courtney spent the next morning and afternoon cancelling credit cards and notifying her bank, and I stayed with her and tried to nap. What a crappy thing for her to have to deal with, and the worst is, that fucker will probably never get caught, but will spend the wad of cash she had to pay for the room and throw away her purse and the stuff in it. It's probably a good thing that Tom didn't catch him, because he would have seriously messed that guy up, and ended up in jail.

After that, the rest of the weekend was brilliant. There was much socializing and excessive partying with great people, a food fight in a Mexican restaurant, synchronized motel bed jumping, and hot guys in tiaras ... and instead of staying in Courtney and Tom's room, I ended up staying in someone else's room all weekend. ;-) We'll see what happens.

(to be continued?)

... and so do you. I'm reposting a bulletin from "The Invisibles" on myspace, it's an excerpt from an interview:
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(Arthur Mag)There seems to be a new "head" culture developing. But we went through that before in the '60s, didn't we?

(Grant Morrison)The problem with the '60s was that they just fragmented…there wasn't magic in a coherent enough form for people to properly contextualize their experiences at that time. So what you got was a lot of people taking massive doses of acid and other psychedelics and having these intense transpersonal or transcendent experiences without an awful lot of context to place them in. They were dealing with a lot of darkness in the form of Vietnam and the fall-out from World War II and having self-imaged themselves as peace-loving, sweetly-smiling Aquarians, they couldn't really integrate that darkness very well and it seemed to explode all over everyone. So they became prey to the unacknowledged, demonic, qlippothic aspects of their rebellion, and what you got was heroin, speed and that type of death culture. What magic does is provide a framework for these unusual or extranormal experiences. I think that's what we need. We really need military discipline in these areas. I think the heads in the '60s lacked military discipline, and god bless them, they did a lot of cool stuff, but they fucked it up in the end. They cracked up and they went bad and they turned to the dark side of the Force. We can't let that happen again. We can't be scared of our own violence, our own fear, our own culpability. We have to recognize these demons when they arise and utilize the formulas to dispatch them, which is what magic does. Magic has a time-honored, thousands-of-years old methods for dealing with the type of demonic energies that arose at Altamont, for instance. A bunch of highly-trained warrior magicians at Altamont would have defused the situation; unfortunately they weren't there. And there is the failure of the '60s written right in front of us.

So I think what we need is a much more disciplined approach, which means using the methods of the perceived 'enemy'. It's kind of the opposite of the '60s. The hippie was conceived as a kind of wilting anti-matter negative of the traditional image of the soldier. What we need now is a Don Juan role model, a shamanic soldier priest who can cope with what's going on, to deal with the type of energies we're up against in the jungles of our democractic cultures, where the new word for demon is 'corporation', where mind-devouring glamors are used in advertising, where sigils become logos and warlocks are called spin doctors. Because you can't go into this like a little child, like Syd Barrett on mushrooms, dancing with the faeries. The faeries here are dangerous.

Everyone hates discipline but I think the fact that we hate it means it's something we need. [laughs] Steal your enemy's stuff. Wear his shoes and get a feel for his thinking. Stop freaking out. Stop fucking up. Stop becoming depressive or conflicted. That's the nature of the way 'outsider' types tend to think so we better just get used to it and call 'depression' something else. You have to steal the spirit of the culture, the fire, which is what colonial powers did to indigenous populations in Australia and America and Africa. They stole the gods, replaced them with the Christian gloss and its morality through fear. They bulldozed the sacred dreaming places and made them dream new dreams. Destroy the mythology and you destroy people's spiritual underpinnings. It's really clever.

So to fight back against that, if you feel you must, you have to study your prey. Imitate Mickey Mouse and Coca-Cola, co-opt them and their colors and their methodology. Anyone who's using the techniques of the imagined opposition has got my vote, y'know? Be beautiful and seductive so that culture wants to eat you up. Be like a prion, an unstoppable replicating germ in the guts of the body politic. Be the little pill that culture swallows, the drug that changes everything and forces new vision. Be the infection that brings shamanic crisis. Be the loving poison that Things As They Are cannot recover from. Be the Holy Guardian Angel.
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"shamanic soldier priest" ... love it

I have been in a constant, low-grade state of mental turmoil lately, and I'm trying to pinpoint the cause(s). I know part is trying to revive my social life, as I'm lonely, but also balance that with all the stuff I need to get done. I think part is the anxiety associated with proving myself at school, but I don't think that's the main part, as all I keep thinking about is how much I wish I was in school full-time, and what my next steps are in regards to my career.
I think the main portion is due to my current (non-career) job, and my growing dissatisfaction and frustration with so many situations there. Even though my full-time job is what gives me the benefit of a tuition waiver for going to grad school part-time, it's also what's holding me back from finishing my degree in a timely fashion. I keep wondering whether it would be worth it, and even doable, to quit this summer, take out student loans, and get a part-time job to go to school full-time. I think I could actually do it in 2 (very full) semesters, and that just excites me. On a completely impractical, emotional level, I want to do that more than anything. But my worry-prone, rational side obsesses over finances and poverty, which would pretty much be inevitable.
Although, that side may soon be outvoted by my job. I feel like a bit of an ingrate when I think of some of the crap jobs I've had in the past, and the one I have now is fairly decent, and I have been happy here until recently. But, I've always known that this was just a job, with nowhere for me to really go, and a paycheck that most people would not be content living on for long. Now that I feel my dream-career is actually becoming tangible, I'm losing the patience to put up with less. Besides the fact that one of my bosses is creating a highly stressful environment here for me, and basically shluffing off more and more of her work on me. The inevitable drama and power games that go on around this office are humorous, but wearing after 5 years. I've had other office jobs, but none with people quite as dysfunctional as some of these.
The laugh becomes forced, and the smile tight.

I haven't updated here in a few months, so here's what's in my life right now, if you're interested:

I finished my first class for grad school with an A, and a powerful realization that I'm doing exactly what I need to right now.

Work is, well, work, and the word for 2008 is ... "boundaries" ... I'm sick of doing other people's jobs for them just because they are lazy and incompetent and I'm not; my drive to excel is actually hurting me in my work-life, which is a sad thing; I need to save that energy for important things, like writing papers

I am actively trying to make my little burrow a little more comfortable, and therefore a little more open for guests, because ...

I need to make more of an effort to stay in touch with friends, my social life is pretty much in the toilet right now; I spent the night of my birthday and New Year's Eve both alone at home, and that's not good; I will always be a bit of a loner by nature, but that doesn't mean I don't need companionship sometimes, and I realize I just haven't put forth the effort required to hold on to my friends, local and long distance

My other resolution is to stop worrying so much about what other people think of me; this is a dangerous anxiety over ego and self-image that can do nothing but destroy self-esteem and make me overly dependent on the opinions of hundreds of random strangers on a daily basis; this has been a lifelong issue for me, trying to make everybody happy and make everybody like me, which never happens, so ... failure
Time to figure out what I think of me

I am finally starting to feel more content, less empty. And the other day, for a few moments, I actually felt happy again, it sort of surprised me to realize that I was happy in that moment, a nice surprise. The cold, wet blanket I've been wrapped up in for too long now is finally peeling back so I can see the autumn sunshine. I'm still kind of lonely, but I'm becoming okay with that. I delight in my own company, and in my favorite bittersweet season of escalating holidays.

Today, I finally decided I'd had enough, and hurled myself in front of a bus.
It was stopped, so nothing happened, I just got a few funny looks.
Okay, so no, I didn't really do that. Just a random daydream to amuse myself with. I'm really just writing to watch myself type.

I hate waking up with a headache because you've cried too much the night before. This is twice in a row now. I'm such a baby.