Wondrous Apparitions, Provided by Magicians.

( The Good )

( The Surprising )

( The Not So Much With The Good )

( The Exciting (but not in the happy fun way) )

So, how was your weekend?

From a locked post somewhere:

She Says: My real problem (I think) is that I trust people to treat me the way that I try to treat them.

I Say: Oh hell, that never works. It presupposes that they are like you, and they're not. That's the whole damned problem with the Golden Rule -- it assumes that what I think is good treatment is the same as what you think is good treatment. You can completely be in compliance with this thing that is supposed to be the Backbone of All Real Religions, and still screw other people over because you think you're doing the right thing, but it still feels wrong to them.

I Want to Say: You know, that's one of the big reasons why nobody ever thinks they're the bad guy. Either they're trying to treat you like they want to be treated and totally not grasping that it's not the way you want to be treated, or you're doing the same thing to them, and it wounds them and they want to get back at you for it. Nobody ever says, "Hey, there's a person who has done me no wrong! I'm gonna go fuck them over!". Instead, we say "Hey, this person is having a problem, I'm going to go help them by ________", where the blank may be filled by any number of behaviors which are profoundly unsuitable. Then, you get to follow it up with "Hey! I tried to help them and they got mad! Ungrateful so-and-so, see if I am ever nice to you again!".

I understand that, absent the ability to read each other's minds, and without the depth of communication that makes mind-reading an obsolete concept, this is the best we can do. But why can't we see that this is the best we can do and sometimes it still goes wrong?

When I got this job, the office was "decorated" with little Jesus things, the Footprints thing, "A Special Prayer For The Parents Of Handicapped Children", and similar dreck, which all went away as soon as I moved in. (Well, almost all. Someone had taped a Bible verse to the inside of the desk cubby, which reads "Therefore encourage each other, and build up each other, as indeed you are doing", and which is apparently from the epistle to the Thessalonians. Out of context like that, I think it's fine advice for people of any faith, so it stayed. But the rest of it? Gone!)

And since I moved in, the office has been pretty sparse, except for the flat surfaces, which are covered in paperwork. The walls are a crappy sort of putty color. I had intended to paint over that, but due to a miscommunication about when the carpet was coming in, that didn't happen. It's probably just as well, because the sage green color I had chosen to go on the walls would have been really awful with the navy blue baseboards they put in without telling us about. Of course, they look pretty bad with the putty color, too, but I digress.

The point is, my office needs a little love of the artistic variety. I'd like to buy some prints to hang about. I'm sort of at a sticking point, though, because the sort of thing that I like (which tends to include weapons, nudity, wierd machinery, wierd machinery fused to more-or-less human bodies, monsters, robots, and deities of cultures I don't technically belong to) is not the sort of thing that will go over well at the office. (When you come right down to it anyway, I'm not much for art. The one "piece of art" that I have ever actually owned is a colored pencil and perhaps watercolor of a little red-haired angel with gears and struts in her wings.) And I'd really rather not own the sorts of pictures of cats, flowers, serene seaside scenes, sailboats, and little children kissing that seem to be in vogue in office art.

So, surely, some of you lot are more up on art than my humble self. Can anyone point me to an artist who makes things that are office-acceptable and yet still interesting? Or a site that sells prints of same?

EDIT: I could probably get away with something like this, don't you think?

1) Robert Anton Wilson died this morning. Light a candle, ingest a psychoactive substance, or vote for an ostrich in his memory, would you? He will be missed. Sad news reported by kaidevis. For those of you who can't be arsed to click links, Bob's more or less final word on the subject was "I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd."

I'm really down about that, so here is some more appealing "news":
2) If you're in Kansas City, you'll have an opportunity to catch the film Pan's Labyrinth at the Glenwood Arts theater starting 1/19. (Thanks, gamera_spinning!)

3) There's a fairly good article about polyamory in Tikkun this month. Tikkun is a progressive Jewish magazine which runs a lot of interfaith and spirituality of peace sorts of stories.

Thanks to the wonders of antibiotics, I am back at work today. Sadly, triadruid seems to be succumbing to some of my various and sundry germs, and is at home resting. I have profound hopes that we will all three be well by the time we leave to go on vacation in a few weeks. I have it on good authority that it was 85 in Miami on Saturday, so I'm looking forward to getting a little bit of that.

The Bazaar went off with only a few hitches. A few people didn't show up, a few people did show up who I didn't expect, the parking lot was wretched and probably drove off shoppers, and late in the day, we almost had some sort of gang war between bazaar vendors and a group of people who wanted to put on a dance show. Other than that, it was fine. Gaia made exactly as much profit as we always make. It doesn't seem to make a difference where we have the event, how much we pay in advertising and space rental, how many vendors we have or who they are, our profit is exactly the same every year. I have no idea why.

On Sunday, we considered ourselves to be profoundly Off Duty, so we spent a lot of the day playing mindless video games and trying to establish a definitive set of cartesian coordinates to describe the Pirate/Ninja/Monkey/Robot thing. This mostly failed, as we found that it is almost impossible to define any quality that reliably differentiates pirates from monkeys. More research will almost certainly be required.

We also did a little bit of espionage, and went down to the Holly Holly Holly Holidays show, which seems to be the main competition for the Winter Bazaar, both for vendors and for shoppers. (I think there are three Hollys in the name. Some perverse part of my brain often renders the show name as Polly Wolly Doodle Days, but what can you do?) We picked up some good ideas, which will need to roll around in my brain and rattle out at the 2007 Bazaar Planning Meeting, which we'll probably do in a few weeks. Ah yes, it's the biggest, most stressful event of the year, so as soon as I finish one, I have to start planning the next one. I'm not in charge of the next one, though. I mean it this time.

I've often dealt with a surplus of opportunities to have a good time by imagining that in an alternate universe, an alternate me is doing the things that the current-universe me has chosen not to do. This keeps me from getting bummed out about the things I'm missing, and often prevents me from trying to cram too many things into a single weekend, or whatnot.

However.

This weekend was still overly full. In fact, although I'm pretty sure I know what alternate-universe me did on Friday night, I can't recall what I actually did. I think that's a bad sign.

Add to the list of Irish Coffee Failures:

- At home, in my own fucking house, with my own fucking coffee machine. I failed to put the lid on the coffeepot, which for some reason I can't fully understand caused it to produce some aromatic brown water instead of the coffee I had hoped would result. Why the lid should be a functional part of the process I have not a fucking clue. Nevertheless, I wasted the last of the actual coffee in the house in this manner (we have some chicory coffee, but I can't imagine that would work) and got no Irish coffee. After triadruid was so kind as to buy me a bottle of Jameson's, too.

Much of last night was like that, where I was going "Wait. It doesn't work because What? That's not even related to the process that doesn't work! How is that possible?"

orcjohn came over and found the issue with triadruid's computer, which was that I hadn't cleared the CMOS, which was somewhat alarming, since in my brain, all of that should happen after the power comes on. Oh well. It then was kind enough to POST, which was good. Following that, his Windows 2000 installation discovered that it wasn't sitting on the same board it had been, and Freaked Right Out. Hence, I spent most of the evening attempting to repair Windows, failing, and deciding, well, fuck it, I'll just reinstall. And reinstall. And update. And return drivers. And so on and so forth. This means that tonight, I'll be reintroducing the OS to all the other programs still on the drive, which should also be exciting, by which I mean irritating and time-consuming.

Anyway, hell of a Yule gift, no? "Here, let me give you this, which will cause you to be offline for several days, and then probably lose all your stored email, and have to reinstall all kinds of things! Happy holidays!" *grumble* Much of the later part of the evening was spent acknowledging that I am about as useless as the cat, and that this was one of the specified conditions in my living will, that if I ever became useless like the cat, someone was to take me out back and put a bullet in my brain, to save everyone involved from future suffering. triadruid declined to accept this provision, for some reason. But hey.

Anyway, he should have email again today. If you have sent him anything in the last three days, he didn't get it, and you should send it again. If you have sent him anything really really important at any point in the past, it is probably gone now, and if you still have it, you should send it again. And thank you, for your support.

Yesterday, a Mysterious Package arrived in the post. "ThinkGeek" it said on the label, and I went, "eh?". For lo, I am a ThinkGeek shopper, but I was pretty sure everything I'd ordered had already come in. So, there was a rush to open the mysterious package, to find a Polarity game, from someone who I presume to be lexpendragon. Or, at least, I think so. The internet is really, really great (for porn!), but it sometimes leads to situations in which you only know people by their internet names. But thank you, Probably 'Lex, for a very excellent toy. I've not gotten to play with it yet, but J., our houseguest, was doing some quite impressive things with it last night.

Me, last night, I was running about getting the last pieces for triadruid's upgrade. At some point during the contemplation of this process, possibly when J. was mocking me about being excited about the fact that the case came with extra screws, I announced to the household, "I like things that go beep!", at which point kittenpants chimed in with "Beep! I go beep!", and there was much amusement.

The putting together of the new machine was met with the usual disasters. I bled on it, cursed at it, dropped a thumbscrew down the front of the case where it was a pain in the ass to retrieve, looked at some bits of it and went, "What even are you? I don't know what you are or where you go!", and so on and so forth. Finally got the thing together about midnight, then plugged it in, and *pfffft*, it won't turn on. Not like it won't POST, it just won't turn on. No power nowhere in the box itself. Don't know why. Got pissed off, went to bed. Probably, in my sleepy and addled state, I've forgotten to plug something in, or plugged it in backwards, or something. Or, triadruid might have been trying to tell me last night that he hadn't flipped the power switch on the back of the machine. Maybe. I knew he was saying something about the switch, but was too sleepy to tell if he was saying he had flipped it, or hadn't. *shrug* So, I'm going to look at it again tonight, and if I can't manage to make it work, I imagine I'll be crying for help. Can one of you technical creatures back me up here, if needed?