Queen of Swords

I'm continuing to struggle with the same issues that I've been working on for the past couple of years. Each new insight seems to come slowly, with very little actual progress manifested in my external life. It's frustrating to the point of shame some days.

Today, despite my expectations of last night when I was tired and frustrated and wrung out after a week at the day job, I'm going to drive an hour to attend a study session of a Co-Masonic group I've been getting to know. I am desperate for adult, non-family contact outside of my work life, and I genuinely like these people. The fact that the lodge has a metaphysical focus is very important as well. I am lonely in my spiritual life, with the only friends who come close to being "co-religionists" living a very long way away.

I'm tired of feeling frustrated, trapped, isolated. . . but have yet to find the way out of the box.

Also looking forward to today's visit with Hob for a gaming session with him and Wolfling. But I'm even a bit afraid of that. I'm not sure I'll have the creative energy and juices to roleplay well. On the other hand, Wolfling is a brilliant rpg'er, and Hob is always inspiring. At worst, just hanging out with them will be fun.

One of the big blessings of my life is that I truly enjoy hanging out with my kid -- and she enjoys it too.

I didn't run a lot of games during the decade-plus that I was a member of a regular group, probably a half-dozen or so.

One of the unexpected challenges I ran into when creating a scenario was how bad to be.

Our games were almost never fatal, so it wasn't an issue of how hard I was going to work to try to kill the characters, it was more an issue of how evil my main antagonist was going to be, and how much of that evil I was going to need to play out in character interaction. What would the NPC body count be? Would I do terrible things to the PC's if I had the chance? How far would I take it? I would have visions of possible encounters, then flinch back from them, certain I could never actually play them out, even across a tabletop.

You see, I was afraid of how much of my own shadow might come out. I was afraid that if I tapped into my own darkness, even for the sake of creating an adventure scenario, it would reveal too much of a part of myself I didn't usually admit was there at all, much less put on display for others.

I don't think I'm a particularly bad person, and I don't want to overstate this. . . but as I've been working on "old business" I started thinking of this.

It made me wonder if other GM's ever worried about this, or has it always been so much "just a game" and/or "just a story" that it was never an issue?

I think the issue was heightened for me because my old group was very self-conscious about the degree to which our characters expressed different aspects of ourselves, whether we planned it that way or not. Perhaps with a different group I would never have worried about just how much of my shadow I was letting out to play. I don't know. . .

Wolfling really likes my Star Wars fanfic that I sent her -- a re-write of A New Hope based on my group's RPG characters.

*does happy dance

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. . .

Saturday mornings are better than Friday nights, but last night's plunge into the grieving abyss has left me feeling empty and a bit fragile. I want to curl up in a fuzzy blanket on my comfy couch with some soup and my book and just be gentle with myself.

Unfortunately, there are couple of things I need to get at the grocery store, and nothing I actually have on hand appeals for breakfast, so I'm going to need to get myself together and go out, at least briefly.

jillwheezul's Hob is coming over mid-day to run a solo Star Wars one shot for me. I'm looking forward to it, but also worrying that I won't have the energy to fully engage. But I shouldn't worry. Either his presence will be sufficient to lift my mood (he's one of my dearest friends) and we'll play -- or we'll do something else and he won't be upset about not playing. Actually, what's likely to happen is that I'll do a bit more grief processing with him, and then we'll play.

Star Wars was the longest ongoing campaign that our old gaming group had (10 years, off and on), and I loved my character. Today I'll be playing someone entirely new -- which is probably a good thing -- but it will feel strange to go into that universe and not be D. For a complete change of pace, I'm playing an Imperial Intelligence agent. I've never played a spook before, much less an Imperial.

You know: I could use some fun.
I don't have much authentic fun these days.

Last night I connected emotionally with a gaming character for the first time in several years. It took several sessions, but I think the whole being-set-on-fire-after-the-Cardinal's-head-exploded incident tipped over my emotional switch. By the end of the scene I was laughing almost hysterically, caught up in the awful absurdity of Jehanne's situation. It was great.

This morning I was awake first, and spent about forty minutes journaling about the experience with game and then close to another hour journaling about other things -- the longest sustained writing I've done in a very long time.

Every so often I would get up and go over to the patio doors of _storyteller_'s apartment and look out into the gray-lit morning. It was very quiet -- and I suddenly realized how many times I'd been in this situation: the first one up, being alone, writing, enjoying the solitude. Whether at camp, on retreats, or even in the dorms, this first-thing-in-the-morning time was when I connected with myself.

It was also a time that reinforced my sense of being different from those around me. Chances are that I had gone to sleep earlier than everyone else, that I had not been as deeply involved in whatever socializing had gone on before. The nurturing and renewal the others found in each other's company at night, I found in the quiet solitude of morning.

It's been a long time since I felt so connected with my own past.

These last few days have been amazing. I don't know if the eclipse had anything to do with it or not. Most people who wrote about it seemed to be battening down the hatches. I experienced a tide of positive change -- or at least energy going in positive directions, waves for me to catch and ride and urge on. _storyteller_ suggested that it's a good time for me because I connect with Void energy, which is how he experiences/interprets an eclipse. It's as good a hypothesis as any, since I don't do astrology.

But I had a great tarot reading on Saturday morning, which I did for a close friend. It should not have worked out as well as it did: we were under a bit of a time constraint, and there were several interruptions, but we both knew I needed to cut the cards, and instead of creating a spread or following one I simply knew what each card related to before I turned it over. And it was perfect. And my friend and I used the same words several times to describe what the cards meant, even when they were not the usual/common meanings.

Now my daughter is off with her father visiting his side of the family. I've gone grocery shopping, bought new pillows and a new medium-sized garbage can for under the sink, and balanced my checkbook. I have time and space and silence to savor before _storyteller_ comes over again this evening.

The bathtub drain is broken again, this time in the closed position, but I'll deal with that, with my brother-in-law's help. No big deal. It's a good day.

It was a very full weekend, and I haven't had time to do more than glance at LJ from my Dash since Friday late afternoon. And while I can read LJ on my gadget and make posts of my own, I still haven't figured out how to make it submit comments.

In brief: game was a lot of fun on Saturday, even though an angry ghost murdered several of our passengers and a couple of crew members. I managed to combine diplomacy and fast-talk to persuade three security cruisers not to "purify" us by blasting out of existence, thus winning the extra experience point awarded by my fellow players.

On Sunday I experienced embarrassment to the point of mortification when returning to my old church for a visit, followed by disappointment by the spa treament I had been looking forward to. By mid-afternoon, _storyteller_ and I decided to just go back to my house and spend time with my daughter rather than venture out to a workshop we had been contemplating.

Life got much better then. I made a fire in the fireplace. We cuddled. The daughter announced that she is ready to have her own room! So we spent some time looking at how we would transform The Yellow Room from catch-all space into a pre-teen's bedroom. uncrowned_king showed up a little later, and the grown-ups watched Dangerous Beauty while the daughter played a computer game.

Now it's back to the routine of the day job, made more pleasant by the possibility of lunch with Jeannie on Wednesday, a definitely lunch date with kateri_thinks on Thursday, and some ideas for a new story hopping around in the back of my head.

Dear Tavia:

Saw this today and thought of you:

Let's not let morality stand in the way of a good plan.

*kisses,

Jehanne

On Saturday night, _storyteller_ ran his game Prometheus Shadow in my living room. a_belletrist was there, as was my old gaming friend Hob, and a guy named Tony I met for the first time when he came to my door.

For a long time I had been nervous about playing with new people, but it was great! All the players were fine role-players, creating unique characters who had their own quirks and didn't always get along but ultimate were a successful team. Everyone around the table was smart and funny and able to share the spotlight. Not everyone was active all the time, but people were willing to let the story unfold and take turns as appropriate. Overall, the action kept going at a good clip, everyone remained focused, and we wrapped up the plotline a bit ahead of _storyteller_'s schedule.

Having the players mesh as well as they did was a great relief for me -- but the even greater relief was finding that my brain was working again in an RPG situation. The last games my old group and I played had not gone very well, and I'd come to the place where I'd lost confidence in my ability to role-play at all. Last night, while my character still didn't come fully alive (she was still too much like me), I was able to think creatively and pick up the clues that Storyteller let drop: like a named NPC (non-player character/supporting cast) who made a vivid first appearance and then disappeared for the entire rest of the session, and a holographic tattoo on another NPC who was wanted by a mysterious group for no reason any of us -- including her -- could figure out. Those are things that in the past might have gone right over my head.

The other thing I loved was that I was able to take command with confidence. My character is an entertainer, but after a violent mutiny, she was the crew member who rallied the others (along with a few skilled passengers) to do something about it. When the dust settled, she was calling herself "acting captain" and everyone else was doing what she said. It didn't last long, because it turned out that a_belletrist's character inherited the ship, but that was fine. I've been captain of a crew like this before. It's not a job anyone in their right mind actually wants.

One of my favorite moments was when a_belletrist's character looked at me and demanded, "Why are you in charge?"

"Because I'm the one who did something about the mutiny."

"Are you an officer?"

"I'm an entertainer."

It was kind of like Faramir asking Sam if he's Frodo's bodyguard and Sam replying, "No, I'm his gardner."

In the past, even when my character was the official captain or team leader, I often didn't have the confidence to give orders or outface opposition the way I did last night. It felt very good -- because that wasn't about role-playing, it was about the growth I've experienced in the last couple of years. I truly have come more into my queen aspect, and last night I was able to experience it a new way.

In short, a good time was had by all, and we'll be doing this again, probably once a month. More frequently would be fun, but we have too many other commitments to do it more frequently.

Just got home again after a very pleasant visit with Hob and his wife in Canby, OR.

I spent Friday evening playing Dungeons and Dragons with Hob and his three players: young men between the ages of 17-21. I can't remember the last time I hung out with teenage boys! They were chaotic and funny and smart, and accepted me whole-heartedly. We were all supposed to be playing lawful characters (well, two of them were lawful, and one neutral) but the players themselves were more chaotic than anything. We weren't far into the session before I felt like Princess Leia after her rescue on the Death Star: Put that thing away! You're going to get us all killed! and etc. But it was fun.

Saturday we all slept in, went to an SCA garage sale, and then out to an Oktoberfest, where we walked around the 'fest for a couple of hours, then took a schoolbus out to the abbey and spent time there. The grounds were gorgeous, and very peaceful. I would have been happy to simply sit there and absorb the serenity.

That evening we played the Star Wars version of the board game Life, which I won by a considerable margin. (Most people shouldn't even bother to challenge me in a Star Wars related activity.)

Today, I got home in plenty of time to meet my Mom, aunt and daughter for a performance of Once Upon this Island, a Caribbean version of The Little Mermaid. Not the Disney version, mind you, but the Hans Christian Anderson version in which a young woman allows herself to be destroyed out of love for a man she fell for at first sight and who never truly returns her feelings. (He even takes her as a lover for a few weeks without telling her he's engaged to someone else.) The signing and dancing were terrific, and they managed to take a tragic tale and give it a hopeful ending (the dead-for-love girl is turned into a tree -- not my favorite motif, but they made it work within the context of the story, and there is a promise that the next alliance between a grande homme and a peasant does have a happy ending). I was relieved that my daughter declared that Ti Moun was "a dim bulb" instead of being enchanted with the idea of dying for the love of a jerk.

Since Thursday, I've also had two wonderful telephone conversations with _storyteller_, someone who I've known only via LJ and a few emails. It was really neat to finally hear his voice and enjoy a conversation, even though our written exchanges have been very rich. I'm looking forward to a visit from him -- and perhaps his lovely wife vsmallgoddess -- later this fall or winter.

Now, unfortunately, I'm not feeling well (I actually got sick at the restaurant after the show), so at the moment I'm looking forward to a quiet evening of catching up on LJ (you folks have been very prolific these last few days!), a hot bath, and early to bed.