Relax your Hands, Your Fingers, Your Bleeding Cuticles...

I am wearing my America Is Scary t-shirt that I love sooooo much. I'm saving my new skirt for tomorrow night, since I actually have 2 parties to go to for New Year's Eve, a significant improvement over last year when half of us lost the party and I was in that half.

The problem is that I, uh, didn't realize that I have group tonight. And I think it's my turn to do guided meditation, and I'm dead sure I'll be the only one with anything prepared, because we're all a mess from the holiday and this is kind of a last minute thing.

So I used the lovely new CD burner (which makes reallly obnoxious noises that bother me) and the lovely new power strip that means I can burn forty minutes of familiar classical and listen to Bitch & Animal at the same time.

Which is good, because I have music and no idea what I'm going to do with it. I lined up Air on a G-String first for the deep-relax portion (it's fun to type G-string, knowing that it's going to fuck up someone's Google search at some point). That's the first three minutes.

Then Stravinsky's Rite of Spring -- it's the New Year and so a serious meditation, and "the dinosaur music from Fantasia" seemed appropriate -- both soothing and somber, somehow. I was so freaking scared of that part of Fantasia as a kid that I can't watch that section at all to this day. It's remarkably gory, really, and hey, I was really little. So little, in fact, that it took me a while to grasp that the composers had made the music before the animators made the movie (too little to pay attention during the live-action, basically). That's only ten minutes.

Oddly enough the next selection is Fantasia as well, the Pastoral. But that's because it's light, and long, which gives people permission to come out of their deep relax whenever.

It could go either way. Music that's so visually connected to our childhoods (we're all about the same age) may influence the meditation, but in that case it's kind of appropriate for the mix of pantheist and pagan we have coming tonight. Or it may just make people unable to concentrate. We shall see, I suppose.

It's just the core group tonight, which is cool. The Artist, the Kabbalist, his wife the Wiccan (aka CDHSarah), Kevin, and me. I'll talk seriously with the Kabbalist about my horoscope, get some advice about the prevalence of swords and cups in my next year, perhaps get him to run a subsidiary spread with one of his new decks to check out events and causes. I'll probably run horoscopes and Book of Changes tonight because I feel a little hyper. I'm annoyed about a bunch of minor things, and I want tonight to be one of those nights when we have a good, meaningful group -- it's been a little perfunctory the past couple of weeks for various reasons, mostly holiday work schedules and Yule.

We just call it "group", which is weird, because I associate that with therapy. We can't put a more formalized name on it. Five of us, once a week, occasional guests, one person probably about to become permanent, meet and talk about -- stuff. Spiritual stuff mostly, but our lives too.

No matter what moody snit the Artist is in, he'll be at group. If it weren't for group, I'd barely see the Kabbalist or CDHSarah, because all three of us work schedules that are considered "non-traditional." Also, a note about CDHSarah -- she was the last hot Waffle Waitress, and she fucking quit, so Waffle House is fucked now. We live around the corner from one another (literally) and we'd probably never connect if it weren't for group. We've rearranged our work schedules for four months to make sure we have Thursdays free.

I should be happy -- I have the Pirate Van back, I have group, I get to lead meditation, I am popular and in demand -- but honestly all I want to do is sit right here, in a chair that would be womblike if not for its particular shade of green, and play with the Internet. Luckily, the Internet knows I have places to be and has taken time off. Everyone's off in their real lives, and in about thirty minutes, I will be too.

Woody Guthrie is having hard traveling right now. If people want to revive Americana in some great show of national spirit, why not give the Guthries more props? Woody wrote This Land Is Your Land, for God's sake. I guess the current political climate is more Battle Hymn of the Republic, and not as interpreted by Joan Baez, who says yes to boys who say no.

If this stupid Iraq bullshit kills either my brother or my friend's husband, I will hold my government fully responsible. Lucky for them, like the Guthries, I'm a pacifist. The best thing I can do for myself is listen to Bill Hicks talking about Bush Sr. being gone in the "Dinosaurs In the Bible" bit and keep repeating that someday I'll get to listen to that track with the Artist, and champagne, celebrating that it's the next election and no matter who wins it won't be Bush, a victory all its own. At least there's hope.

"I think God put you here to test my faith, dude."

So true, and so scary, especially since the man is dead. (ETA, since I'm paranoid, that "the man" is of course Bill Hicks, who has been dead for some time, and not either Bill Clinton, who I miss, or the President, who is still very much alive, at least to the knowledge of this particular girl, who doesn't watch television or follow the news because her doctor advised her against raising her stress level by so doing.)

Time to pack up my stuff and get ready. We'll see how the meditation goes.

(I just realized that all my previous posts have been in Pacific Standard Time. This one and all future ones will be in CST unless I forget.)