Monkeys in the bloodstream!

Today, I take time to celebrate the Fall Equinox. I celebrate it with cats, gaming stuff, the company of cool people later on, and by immersing my brain in cool acadamia-type subjects. Also, I celebrate it by drinking the tasty and delightfully memorable and expensive Monkey Tea, putting monkeys in my blood stream and feeling it kick the sickness out of my sinuses. Fall is my favorite of all seasons, and worth using up the last of my present ‘o tea from Q from a while ago.

Plus, it gives me an excuse to go on a rambling review of tea! Hurrah! Seriously though, just as an exercize for those who are as obsessed with tea as I am – go buy the *expensive* green tea you occasionally run across. I mean, the $20/100 grams kind of expensive. Be careful when you’re brewing it, so you get to notice the taste difference. Now, you know how when you drink *good* black tea – the difference in kick you get from it – alertness, caffeine, flavour, sensation going down, versus regular bulk package red rose stuff? Now, take all the green tea we usually get, and assume that most of it is the equivalent to the red rose stuff. Rare/expensive green tea has the same –oomph- going down and in your mouth. I don’t mean it’s bitter, any more so than regular green tea can get, but there is a finesse to everything about it that makes me crave it more every time I have it. Mmmmm.. Monkey tea. Bad for bank account, good for the rest of me. *^_^*

What else is on my brain? The fabulousness of my brothers. How incredibly lucky I am to have siblings who are as inspiring and loving as mine, without being intrusive in any fashion about what I do or how I choose to live my life. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I can’t say it enough. I only hope I’m half as good for them as they are for me.

Vacations to Taiwan will cost me what, exactly? I’m currently trying to estimate it, so I can plan for next year. I blame an elder brother for that new and peculiar brain obsession. He wants me to travel. Heh. Foolish mortal, I will seduce the world with my spicy brain, and then what will happen?

Urrm. What else? Lately, I’ve been dreaming again. Not once in a while, but multiple times a night. Anyone who hasn’t heard me mention dreams in the past knows that I regard them as a temporary death sentence for my state of mental health and/or comfort. Apparently my brain is trying to change that opinion, because these aren’t disturbing ones. Not sexy ones either, sadly. Just ones that involve conspiracies, or spying on people, or cleverness in some fashion. Or sharks, or random things my brain decides to throw in there. Yet there isn’t any terror or emphasis on anything in particular, just general messages or stories that can be pulled out of them. For the first time since I can remember, the themes wind up being heartening ones, or quietly comforting ones. I’m waking up with something comforting there, some sensation of love and contentment that I can wrap myself up in, for the first time since Q and I were still together. The fact that this comes from simply me being in my own life, in my own skin, in my own warm bed with a cat or two keeping watch over me, is probably (by leaps and bounds) the strangest thing to happen to me in years.

Whatever PTB (Powers That Be) love me lately, whatever I did to cause it, I just pray I don’t do anything to jinx it. ‘Cause damn, I’m enjoying the high. 

Ganked from Tigersong

1. Go to http://www.careercruising.com/.
2. Put in Username: nycareers, Password: landmark.
3. Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions.
4. Post the top ten


Apparently, I am best suited to work as...
1. Architect
2. Management Consultant
3. Landscape Architect
4. Environmental Consultant
5. Paleontologist
6. Agronomist
7. Corporate / Commercial Lawyer
8. Taxidermist
9. Building Inspector
10. Industrial Engineering Tech

Now, with the exception of the Engineering/Environmentally slanted careers, all the rest involve giving people hell sooner or later. And *taxidermist*? ... wow, that's so... Words escape me, but anyone who knew me back in high school is going to laugh their ass off.

Also included in the list further down were amusing choices like 'lobbyist', '' and all of 'lawyer', 'criminal lawyer', 'civil litigator', 'forensics specialist', and 'judge'. Methinks I missed my calling to the nastier arenas of our legal system, or to work with dead things. Huh.

Also, what the hell is up with the test giving me things like 'interior designer'?? Seriously, does -anyone- want a house that I've been given free rein to decorate?

Today, literature hates me.

There were times, back in ages past, when love was cherished as the ideal to which all of the arranged marriages or affairs with courtesans or corruptions of the established Order Of Things was supposed to be in aid of. Whether or not realization of that was as tolerated in real life as in the literature (the writing reflecting the times or the times following the ‘marketing’ of the ideas displayed in the writing – it doesn’t really matter for the moment), it still displays what people held up as a dream of something better, or something that at least could have made their lives meaningful.

“What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I’m talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if you heart is built like the Titantic you go down. That’s the size of it, the immensity of it. It’s not proper, it’s not clean, it’s not containable.”
- The Power Book, by Jeanette Winterson

This passage, when I read it, hit me with the difference between ages past and now so profoundly. Now, the goal or ideal which interrupts the established Order Of Things isn’t perfect, romantic love. Isn’t love against all odds. It’s sex. Pure and primal. The refrain of ‘if you cheat on me, I’ll kill you, but if you ever had a chance to get with__(insert hot movie star here)___, I’d completely understand’ I’ve heard so frighteningly often. Not ‘if you left me for someone that you really loved, someone that made what we had seem pale in comparison, I’d understand. I couldn’t see you again, but to leave me for True Love would be forgiveable and I would move on’, as we might have seen in ages past.

Instead, today we see the hero gets the hot chick he just met, and the sidekicks die not to save the city that their true love resides in, but 'to keep their word' to the hero, or for revenge, or whatever. For the most part, love has been pushed into sappy, unrealistic 'chick flicks' for people looking to escape the cold indifference of the relationships in their lives.

I am by far –not- the romantic, in any company I’ve known or kept. Far from it. And yet, the shift in society’s dream leaves me inexpressibly sad. Can’t imagine why.