Tune in, turn on...

It's finally happened. I got my Reiki attunement.

I had a perfectly foul day at work. They had a video crew in to do this thing for this conference, which meant everything was all upheavaly. And I started sneezing, allergies or something, and I couldn't stop. Then, half-an-hour before I ws supposed to come off my shift, these guys came in and contrived to run off with some phone credit and cigarettes. Then to cap it all the guy who was supposed to take over from me didn't bloody show. I mean, I'd been on since bloody eight am, I was supposed to finish at six pm, and this little git just doesn't bother to turn up. By the time I left it was gone 20 past and I was hugely and massively dischuffed. World full of total wankers who come into work anytime they like and ripoff merchants who go through life taking anything they want; me total wanker and idiot because I turn up on time and actually do the work I'm paid for and I'm still washing and re-using Bacofoil and I never have any fun. Bleph, yechh and rghghghghghh.

I had just enough time to pop home and change out of my vile uniform before running off to my Reiki sesh. Half the class got attuned tonight, the rest will get hooked up next week. (I was in the attunement half because I was bouncing up and down in my chair and going "mepleasemepleasemeplease!")

It was odd. Not mindblowing or extreme or anything, but odd. When the Reiki master was doing the thing where they make symbols in the air over you, I could feel the symbols on my skin. Could have been psychological but I had my eyes closed all through the attunement and only worked out what had been going on afterwards, when I watched someone else getting attuned. I got a breif moment of weighlessness when the attunment was sealed.

We talked about how the initiation had felt for us, then we all did a healing on the non-attuned members of the class. The guy I did my first ever Reiki sesh on said afterwards that when I put my hands on his head (over the crown chakra), he felt as though he'd been given an electric shock-- ZAP! all down his shoulders and arms. Then he went to sleep. Hah. I came home... not happy, exactly, but free of the anger and bitterness I'd been dealing with before the class.

There's more, but I think I'll put it in a proper article. If anyone wants to chat about it, tho, I'll be bunging a thread up in Thee Mudshow.

That Bhopal rant in full: "Something we do today will touch your life." @ emergency.PARADIGM

"X-Men Aren't Human", decides judge.

I for one am disgusted by this infringement of Mutant Rights.

Spanish Word of the Day

Kewl.

(Via Google.)

War.

I hate it when there's really only one thing to write about, and I can hardly bear to write about it because the subject fills me with despair and something that used to be anger but is now so worn out with overuse that it's become unrecognizable. But the West must have blood and so here we all are, on the brink of yet another pointless conflict that probably won't even shift Saddam's arse half-an-inch from the throne that we put under him.

I wish this shit didn't make me so damn tired. There's only one thing I can really do, only one response that I'm capable of making: to write about it. I can take no action except to be a commentator on the action, I can do nothing but bear witness. And that one thing gets harder and harder to do because I feel like I'm trying to empty the sea with a sodding teaspoon.

Somebody hate-mail me, please. Tell me how pathetic I'm being, how I'm no better than the despots and the terrorists. You know, the stupid bollocks you're so good at. Maybe you'll actually manage to piss me off. Maybe you can get me to feel something, anything besides this big fat apathy.

Reiki

I would like to make it abundantly clear that the following does not mean I've gone soft. Right? You still don't mess.

Had my first Reiki class this evening. Much as I was looking forward to running whining to my weblog about how it was all new-age chicanery and I'd wasted my enrolment fee, I have to admit that this looks promising.

Tonight we had an overveiw of what Reiki is, the history and all, and what we're going to do on this course. Then we had a divination sesh with... uh... angel cards. Bless Now, I'm not convinced by the idea that we've all got blond feathery types with Timotei hair and loincloths looking over our shoulders (and if we do then I want to find out who their supervisor is and get him to introduce drug tests or something, because someone's clearly asleep at the bloody switch). However, when you use Google as a divinatory aid you're not best placed to point fingers.

Then we had a group visualization, which was kewl. It was all pretty standard issue stuff (Universal light goes in thru head, down thru chakras, out thru spine and feet into earth; earth energy comes up the other way and fountains out of the crown chakra, etc etc), so I was able to relax and just groove into it. Seemed stronger than usual, though, almost an overload; maybe the group environment plus a semi-conscious desire to please the teacher made the experience more intense. Oh, and my hands started doing that floaty thing so when I came out of the trance state I found I was sitting there like a Thunderbirds puppet. (See, this kind of thing is why I work solo.)

And I'm getting my Reiki attunement NEXT WEEK! Yeeeeerrrrrsssss! I can't wait.

This just in: Another quick lesson on how not to be an arsehole all the time.

Your behaviour has consequences TOO, you pack of self-involved, petty-minded, arrogant gits. God, if I had to pick one thing out of the list of things I hate about you lot, it's your relentless commitment to ludicrously unbalanced double standards.

You spend so much time whining about the terrible effect that every tiny weeny slight (real or imaginary) has on your delicate emotional equilibrium: How angry that stuck up bitch made you when she gave you the brush-off, how that guy really hurt your feelings when he snapped at you for strolling out in front of his car whilst staring vacantly at a chipped nail, how pissed you were when that stupid shop assistant told you that their checkout was closing, how insulted you were when that barman asked you if you wanted diet coke (do you look like you need to drink diet coke? Was he calling you fat?) how disappointed you were when people ho-hummed your latest sixteen-page poem about suicide/revolutionary manifesto/list of reasons why beer is better than women/list of reasons why chocolate is better than men, etc, etc.

Now, how about extending some of that incredible sensitivity to the rest of the fucking world? Let's play a little game. Let's pretend that someone has just done to you what you've done to them.

Let's pretend that you've come out for a nice drink with your mates, and now some guy you've never met before has plonked himself between you and them and for the past hour has been talking non-stop about his tedious life. You've had to remove his hand from your upper thigh about a dozen times. You've tried to put him off nicely but he won't take a hint, so you've got a choice between either going home or telling him to get lost in a way he will understand.

Or let's pretend that you're working behind a bar. It's a shit job with shit wages, but you try to make the best of it and you're always pleasant to the customers. Now some neurotic woman whose earrings probably wiegh more than her entire body is chewing your ear off at the top of her lungs because when she asked for a coke you asked her if she wanted diet or regular, and your boss is looking at you like you're the one with the problem.

Or let's pretend that there's this individual with a sixteen-page revolutionary manifesto (or poem, or list of reasons why beer is better than women, or list of reasons why chocolate is better than men, whatever). And this person is insisting that you read their sixteen page poem (manifesto, list, whatever). And even after you've read the list (poem, manifesto) and told them you're really not that interested, they come back with more. And they won't engage in any kind of discussion, and they won't just back off and leave you alone, and then they start telling you how stupid/insensitive/humorless you are because you're not yumming down their sixteen pages of bumf with the uncritical eagerness of a dog who's just found a fresh cowpat.

See how simple it all is, when you look at it like that? It's called empathy. You acheive it when you have the intelligence to realise that other people have feelings, drives and desires, just like you! Isn't that funny?

Now, if you've read more than a couple of entries you'll know about the whole me-being-a-nutsack thing. You'll know that I'm obsessive, deeply paranoid, irritable, and narcissistic. I've got a massive superiority complex (although that's largely your fault: I wouldn't feel so superior if you lot didn't all suck), I'm a collosal pervert-- oh, and there's the hating of everyone, mustn't forget that. If all of that wasn't enough, I'm a Goth.

I am, in short, a total creepazoid. But despite all these things, there's actually a limit as to how creepy I will allow myself to be when I'm around other people. I don't stand in supermarket queues muttering sexual slurs between gritted teeth. I don't reduce bar-staff to tears because they ask me if I want diet fizzy-pop. I don't scream "Clean your bloody ears out!" if someone asks me to repeat something. I try to show some fucking restraint.

Now, the next time you're in the middle of a lengthy whinge about how [insert incident here] has ruined your [insert time interval here], and has furthermore reinforced your low opinion of [insert gender, race, profession, or other social group here], maybe you could take a quick reality check. Enjoy a refreshing whiff of introspection. Take a quick ride on the consideration choo-choo.

Pillocks.

"Drawing pictures of mountains that look like bumps..."

Had my first Spanish lesson on Monday night. Me llama Mordant Carnival, yo soy Dependienta. Bet you're all jolly impressed now, eh?

Cracked open the novel for the first time in a couple of days. I'm not not writing enough. On a day like today when I've had a ten-hour shift, I should be aiming for a minimum of three hundred words; I think I wrote about three (unless you count a few lines of notes). Some days it's even worse. I've just got to my first big alien city and I'm sort of stuck. Well, not stuck really, but a lot of the easier make-it-up-as-you-go-along stuff is done for the time being, leaving me with the background of the fantasy world to fill in-- culture, maps, social structure, all that sort of thing. Arrgh. Ordinarily of course I'd be well up for that (nothing I like better than drawing cute li'l maps and inventing ridiculously overblown titles for wicked despots), but I'm having trouble making these guys ring true in my head. I wish I hadn't learned all that history and reality and shit when I was a kid. It just makes everything more difficult. It's hard to do all the nice romantic pseudo-mediaeval stuff that fantasy thives on when you're acutely aware of just how un-romantic the real mediaeval stuff was. Ho, hum. What it is to have an inner child that's more cynical than the outer grownup.

Still, tomorrow is my day off. I'm sure I can profitably employ the time in fleshing out my imaginary friends. Sometimes there's nothing to be done except to smack your head against that writer's block until the blood flows and you see The Colours.

Toxic.

Finally finished my piece on the Dow/Union Carbide/Bhopal thang this evening. Y'know that phoney-looking press release that's been doing the rounds? The one you all thought was a hoax? I hate to break this to ya'll, but it's the real deal. It's an actual factual press release from the bowels of Dow and they're proud of it. So I decided that having promised a big ranty thang for a certain webzine and having promised myself a big anti-Dow rantfest, I could kill two birds with one big satisfying stone.

Jesus wept. Remind me to write about stuff that doesn't make me want to kill people in future.

Researching that shit had me wanting to stroll into the Dow head office with many big guns and just blow the living daylights out of as many people as I could before the SWAT team brought me down. Actually, check that-- I'd like to move all these souless fucking breadheads and their spoilt bastard families out into the shanties round Bhopal and see how they like it. See how they like watching their children grow up on a diet of poison. See how they like getting cataracts before they hit forty. See how they like fighting for every breath of polluted air. See how they like watching their grandkids born so deformed they can't even survive. See how they like...

No, sorry, sorry, supposed to be all healy and snuggly and good vibey now. Me goooood little chaoette. Whatever.

Book-larnin'

Me'n the bloke finally bit the bullet and signed up for a Spanish Beginners' course. Time is marching on, and despite having made tentative inroads into Spanish For Dummies I'm not making much progress. This'll give me something to shoot for, plus I'll have a Lurid-shaped study-buddy to poke me along when I get slack.

Also I've signed up for a course in Reiki and Seichem. Hopefully this will give me some much-needed magicky focus and put an end to the increasingly unsubtle hints that the forces of synchronicity have been dropping in my direction. Okay? Learning the healing now! Look! Reiki course! You can stop sending the freaky dreams and the sliced fingers now!

Boggle.

Finally saw Donnie Darko yesterday. I'm so disappointed. Everyone's been going on about how great it was for months, and I wanted it to suck so I could put on a superiour tone of voice while telling you all how bad it was. Instead, it had to go and be all cool and stylish and moving and good and stuff.

Not sure why people were talking as though it was this huge mind-warping headrush, though. It was good and all, but it wasn't boggle material (unless you're one of these people who found 12 Monkeys incomrehensible because you can't get your tiny rigid brains around the concept of time-travel). It's not that I don't understand the concepts or the ideas. I mean, maybe it's because of all the stuff I experience with the epilepsy,maybe I'm missing something, but I don't seem to get blown away by the things that other people seem to find mind-expanding boggle material.

"Wow! Is-he-isn't-he paranoid scizophrenia! Mindjob!"
"Um, no. Not hugely."
"No, but, he's mad by society's rules but all the stuff he's seeing, yeah, might be real!"
"Yeah. And?"
"No, you see, he's diagnosed with a mental illness but, right, get this, the stuff he's seeing-- it might be true!"
"Yeah. I got that part. Still mindjobless."
"Oh. Okay then. Time travel eh? What a mindjob!"

Gordon Bennett.

"My mouth tasted like cold peanut butter. I felt a burning in my head and my left leg, and I jumped against the straps," according to Willie Francis, a 17-year-old who survived his execution in 1946. Francis was successfully executed a year later.

But that's okay, right? He was a murderer, and we're not. It's cool for us to kill people.

Mordant Carnival is not a role model.

I've been checking my referral log and it has come to my attention that some of you younger people have seen fit to add me to your blogrolls. You worry me, you really do. It's bad enough if I know you personally, but now completely unknown teenagers have started sticking my URL in their sidebars. It's weird to see my nomme de net hanging around next to blog entries like: "10-1-03: School totally sucked today. I was all, like, math, whatever, then Darren said hi and I was all OMFG!!!! Egg and chips for lunch. Totally rank."

This sick and disturbing practice must stop. I am everything you should be avoiding, carcass kids. If you have any ambition in your tiny little minds it should be to do whatever you can to not end up a bitter and irascible creature of few morals and debatable sanity, lurching from crisis to crisis via boredom and compromise, detesting everyone you meet on general principle.

Oh, and I hate kids. Sod off and sniff glue or something.

Rant-fu

I have lost my will to rant.

Time was when I could just pop open a txt file and rant away about whatever happened to be getting my goat at that particular moment in time, pouring it straight from my heart and out into the world, black-laquered fingertips dancing over the keys, ratting and raving and setting the world to rights.

I can't seem to do it anymore.

I'm trying to write thins thing about that goddamn Dow Chemicals press release (you know, the one about how their hearts just bleed over Bhopal, they really do, but money is just more important that a few hundred thousand dead people who ain't even Caucasian, let alone shareholders). And reams and reams of stuff have now been written: figures, facts, numbers, details, analysis, legal shit. Everything, in fact, but what I actually sat down to write. I'm all blah blah blah when I wanted to be RGHGHGHGHGHGHHHH!

I'm not saying it's a bad thing to check a couple of facts before you fly off the handle and make a moron out of yourself. It's just that somewhere along the line, the important stuff, the energy, the feeling, has gone astray amidst a welter of detail. Gotta find a space between the lab book and the uninformed drivel of Colour Supplement Land ("I don't know what's going on but I'm convinced I feel very strongly about it! Whatever it is!"). Gotta find a way to unite the brain with the bile.

It must and shall be done.

Viral.

I'm sick. I actually got Friday off because I was so blatantly oozy. My chest feels like someone's had a go at it with a cheesegrater and I'm sneezing yellow Krazy Foam.

This isn't a self-pity fest, BTW. I mention it merely because I'm still on the deli-counter at work. Make your own sarnies, kiddies. Bwahahahahaaaaakoffkofffkofffffhrrgh...

Say you want a resolution.

I've been having a bit of a think about what this site is for. Other people's criticsm has never bothered me ("Adolscently angsty and self-indulgently cynical"? Yeah. That's right, fucker. Watchoo gonna do about it? Eh? Eh?) but after the break, I came back and read the last couple of months over and realised that I'm starting to sound like someone I really don't like very much.


When I first started journalling, it was about going Oh, look, I can get a site and write on it every day if I can be bothered. Then it was about venting my permenantly overloaded spleen. Now... I'm not bored, exactly, but a new direction would be good.

It's like this, see: my job sucks. I'm tired. I'm epileptic, asthmatic and half-deaf in one ear. I don't have a degree and I'm fucked off with being treated like a second-class citizen because of it. I'm fucked off with bigots, rightwing dickwads, lazy-arsed wannabe revolutionaries, racists, sexists and all of you shitheads. Actually, I'm fucked off with everything and everyone*.

But see, that doesn't matter. It's small stuff. The world is full of crap, crap like you wouldn't belive, so starting now-- and I mean NOW-- things are gonna change around here. I'm elevating my sights from you itty little fools: the self-satisfied wankers, the smug rich so-and-sos who jude a person's worth by what kind of car they drive, the petty little gits who spend their time fishing around for any nibble of attention they can get. I'll slag you off now and again for old time's sake because everyone needs some light relief, but it's just not that important. My hate is too big for you, too hot and bright and hatey.

Ave atque Vale, tiny fuckbakes. I've got bigger fish to fry.


*Except possibly marmots.

Flash!

Huzzah for days off! Spent the morning installing and tinkering with Flash. Made a dancey blue circle thing and stuff. Can exploding mole-rats be far off? I say NO! There must and shall be exploding mole-rats! RAHHH for EXPLODING MOLE-RATS!

It's probably going to take a while to get the hang of it properly, but I've already worked with Flash a little. I'm trying to think of ideas for cartoons so I've got summink to shoot for. When you're getting to grips with a new medium it's always good to have a pet project to work towards, even if the end result isn't quite what you had in mind. I'm really excited about this, as it goes. It's cool.

It might seem a bit demented to start learing yet another new skill when I've already got so much on the boil, but I really need some pointless and fun thing to muck about with. Everything else (writing, studying, singing) is such a big deal, even if I genuinely enjoy it. If I'm going to avoid doing things that I should be doing, then at least my avoidance tactic can be something semi-constructive. Beats getting all obsessive over computer games, anyhow.

Life imprisonment for publishing Internet article

Aren't you glad you don't live in the Maldives? (Via Amnesty International. )

Twelfth Night.

First day back at work today. Not too bad. Thought I'd be more bored/anxious/generally cheesed off than I was. I've been sucking up shamelessly to Fotamecus, which might explain why it sucked less than I expected. Everyone else was complaining about how long the day seemed, but I found it was okay. My consciousness has been on a slightly different level than what I think of as "normal" for the last few months, something I only realised recently.

I've abandoned sigils as a way ov moving everything forward, and gone back to affirmations. I write my goals out,like so:

I, Mordant Carnival, will complete and publish a novel

I, Mordant Carnival, will get a job I like

Each affirmation is repeated fifteen times a day. The guy who does Dilbert swears by 'em.

"The radical Goth trend has become a contradictory product of bullshit in its purest form", according to the Insta sentence generator for the obnoxiously hip.

Stuff.

I had an okay break, apart from some stuff I don't really want to put on a public blog as it involves other people. Both me and the bloke were sort of viral and blehh so it was fairly quiet, but we did mamage to catch up with some mates. It was nice just slouching around, watching vids or downloading stuff off Kazaa. Watched loads of Tenacious D and I'm now pretty much up-to-date with BtVS 7. And I got a Bagpuss mug and Flash and GIN and loads of cool stuff, so Rah.

Oh, and write? Did I ever. Once I got over a brief bout of writer's block I worked on my novel pretty much every day. I've put a serious dent in the opening chapters, and licked the outline into shape. I also spent some time getting to know my characters, which I hadn't managed to do before; now I know who the story is about, who we're focusing on. I was also kicking around some promising short story ideas with Lurid which I hope to write up soon. I've got a couple of good articles on the boil, one about how revolting you people are and one about the Dow Chemicals press release (which should be finished today). All-in-all, a good festive season.

But now it's over. I've got an eight till six shift on Monday, and part of me is actually hoping for a bout of pneumonia.

I'm BAAAAAAAAAACK!

Didja miss me? Didja? Course you did. For some reason the PC where I was staying wouldn't let me to log on to Blogger, so I took an enforced yet much-deserved break.

More soon.