Rough Patch

It has been really tough having Wolfling staying with her father this week. I have completely lost the knack of living alone. Instead of feeling comfortably solitary, I'm lonely. I'm almost entirely without motivation when I get home from work, and the house is getting more and more cluttered.

Work is slow and meaningless and saps my energy and mental acuity.

I have done some more brainstorming and note-taking for my Pantheacon class, which is good, but haven't started organizing it yet. Guess that's on the to-do list for today. So is balancing the checkbook, paying overdue bills, and picking up the clutter in the entryway.

I'm also going to check some job listings at other companies, and work on creating a new website for my professional practice. I lost my old site when my friend changed his server arrangement and I couldn't afford the new price he quoted me.

My spiritual practice is in a "slogging through" state right now. Sometimes the divine seems very far away. It's a common state that everyone goes through from time to time, but it sucks to be in it. And of course feeling distant from my deities and allies just intensifies the loneliness of the rest of my life.

I comfort myself with the faith that I do have friends and allies who care for me, even if they aren't right here at the moment, and the awareness that this is a temporary point in a larger cycle.

Warning: Dangerous Kinksters and Gamers!!

As I mentioned recently, my sister's belated birthday gift to me was the season one DVD collection of the tv series Bones, which is about Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan, a beautiful, brilliant, Queen of Swords type forensic anthropologist who solves murders with hunky, intuitive FBI agent Seeley Booth. The primary supporting characters are Brennan's team: a specialist in spores and slime who's a conspiracy theorist as well as being secretly wealthy, a geeky genius kid who is Brennan's protege, and an artist who does facial reconstruction from skulls and holographic sequences of possible murder scenarios. They're a quirky, brilliant group, and fun to spend a few hours with. Since I don't usually watch series television, it's an anomaly for me to be spending an hour or two on the couch each evening since Christmas Eve watching it.

The relentless parade of macabre human remains and murder reconstructions -- not to mention back-to-back episodes about murdered kids -- may also have had an impact on my mood the last few days, but that's not the point right now.

The point is two episodes which made a point of featuring -- in the worst possible light -- two subcultures to which I belong: bdsm practitioners and role playing groups.

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Interestingly enough, I felt more personal offense at the way the gamer kids were portrayed and judged than the way the kinky folks were. It seemed to me to be disingenuous that a tv show would mock the ability of others to submerge themselves in story and escape for a while into another world, another identity.

Of course, normal people don't dress up in costumes and pretend to be heroic characters. Normal people sit on the couch and watch other people pretending to be heroic. Right?

I guess this post doesn't have much of a point except to observe my own reaction to the two episodes. I've never taken things like this personally before, never felt personal indignation that there wasn't the slightest suggestion that even if these characters were bonkers, they weren't representative of their entire groups. Go ahead: write stories about kinky killers and delusional kids. They exist. But there are far more sane, law-abiding members of each group. Not as much fun to write about, I know -- but at least acknowledge that your colorful characters are the lunatic fringe.

This evening I'm sorely wishing I saw a few more stories about smart heroes who happen to like kinky sex, or geeky kids whose amazing research skills and sincere aspiration to heroism solve a murder, and I saw fewer cheap shots at vilified caricatures designed to make protagonists -- and viewers -- feel disdainful and morally superior.

I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I'm treated to an episode in which creepy, "delusional" witches are involved in a murder involving poisonous herbs or an athame.

I can't wait. . .