I AM DECEPTION INCARNATE.

From shower to stage.

How I learned to stop worrying and killed a Smurf.

The Saturday before last I strolled into the salon my cousin works at and sat down in her chair. I was badly in need of a cut - I'd let my bob grow out a bit and the back was starting to drive me nuts. We chatted a bit and then I asked her the question I'd been considering since I'd booked the appointment.

"Can we bleach this?"

She looked me over, considered, and said, "Let me check my time."

Luck was in my favour, and soon enough I was sitting there with my scalp burning in that itchy, not-quite-horrible way anyone who has ever stripped their colour knows.

I've been dying my hair black for years - it's my default. As such I couldn't exactly go blonde, but my cousin bleached me out pretty good. (Took two sessions.) We then slathered on a deep cobalt blue.

Yes, at 32 years old, I have blue hair.

 Here are things I'd forgotten about having unnaturally-hued hair:

- Your bathtub will take on a new shade. Mine looks like I dismembered a Smurf in it.

- If you're like me and you figure you may as well go all the way, you'll spend time in the drugstore holding eyeliners up to your hair to try and match your eyebrows. (Shadows tends to have sparkle, so they're useless.)

- Your makeup routine may need adjusting. The blue tends to highlight the circles under my eyes (which I swear get worse every year) and also wash me out a bit. I actually had to buy blush.

- You will spend a few days adjusting to the looks you will naturally draw.

- Little kids will LOVE your new look.

So why did I dye my hair blue? I love being a brunette, but I've wondered since hacking my hair off what it might look like lighter. So this is basically Step One in that direction - once it grows out some, I'll talk to my cousin about taking it a bit lighter. Eventually I'd like to see if I can't rock a pale colour or possibly even a platinum. This may not work with my skin tone, but we'll see.

In the meantime, I am finally used to the bright colour in the mirror every morning. My biggest concern when I dyed it was that I would look too young - like I was trying to be a teenager again. Thus far that doesn't seem to be an issue, thankfully.

I realise that I may come off as a very shallow person, as I tend to talk about glamour and the power of visuals a lot, but I'm a Libra, what did you expect?  More seriously, I find it continually fascinating how our self image is entirely malleable and the past year has been an exercise in shifting perspective for me personally.

Every so often you need to shake up your image of yourself. 

Right, Creepy Tiki Mug?

Blue hair means relearning not to give a fuck. It means taking myself a bit less seriously. It means not settling into patterns because that's how I feel I should be. I can get locked into ideas of myself, and while they don't tend to make me miserable, they can limit my experience. Drastically altering my dumb hair colour proves, in a weirdly tangible way, that I can do shit I might not usually. I'm taking a can-can class next month. I'm seriously considering putting together an occult group. My body continues to become stronger, and my brain seems eager to catch up.

I encourage anyone reading this to do something just a little bit different with themselves, if only for a day. You might not shift your whole paradigm, but you might open yourself to the idea of such.

New Year, New You:: Something You’ve Been Putting Off

Stop being a slag, stop complaining, stop coming up with amazing awesome reasons as to why you can’t do it right now and close your eyes and grit your teeth and just do it. 

I've been meaning to write this post for a while. 

Yeah, sorry, that wasn't funny.

 Got several things sorted - financial and organizational. Fiddly little things that have needed to be done but I kept putting off because they were not immediate concerns. Have maintained my housecleaning, which is no great shock since I seem to be naturally fastidious in that regard. More happily, I've forced myself to go running more regularly and have also been sticking to a weekly offering schedule for the non-corporeal entities that hang out in my space. (I use Jason Miller's offering ritual, as seen in both The Sorcerer's Secrets and Protection & Reversal Magick.)

So there's not really a big awesome post to be had for this one, because there isn't any one big thing I've been avoiding. Although I DO have to work out my acts for Cabaret du Passe this week, so I guess the moral of this post is that there's always something else that needs doing.

Hurr.

"All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman."

Sometimes I think I incarnated as a woman just to make shit more challening.

I am fortunate - I may have grown up poor, but I currently am employed and have a home and food. I'm Caucasian, able-bodied, and heterosexual, and there is privilege in all of those things. But for all of those advantages I'm still stuck in a meatsack that is subject to a terrifying level of hatred for no good reason.

We live in a society that is deeply ill. I was reading an article about the genre of revenge porn, and the author discussed women whose ex boyfriends had posted not only sex tapes or nude photos, but also their real names and addresses to the internet. These women got a ton of creepy shit, obviously, but they also had a startling amount of anger directed at them. From strangers. Their sex life made strangers who had jerked off to it upset enough to hunt them down and tell them. What?

About your confused dick, I mean.

While a modern pagan tearfully encouraging us to "remember the burning times!" makes me throw up in my mouth a little, it is impossible for me to look at something like the Malleus Maleficarum and not want to go, "yeah, not a whole fuck of a lot has changed..." when it comes to gender issues. It's depressing, and more than that it's baffling.

I do not understand how so many men can hate women that much. It does not compute.

Women are objects. Women are weak. Women are dangerous. Evil succubi and hysterical fools. It's almost like a long time ago some old dudes with erectile issues decided that one gender was responsible for their lack of boners, and so decreed that anything female should be reduced to a series of parts that only have value if a man says so. And for some stupid reason we let that sickness rot in our society for, oh, a good several hundred years. It's 2014, and just saying "hey this is bullshit" is enough to get a terrifyingly large percentage of half the species angry. And when they throw their tantrum, they unfortunately use the same tactics that have worked for years and years: intimidation, ridicule, and in extreme cases physical violence.

So. When I realise I can't go jogging because I stayed too late at work and now it's too dark and potentially rapey, when I read magical theory that relegates the 'female' energies to passive roles, and when I see a group of men dismiss a woman by labelling her as crazy or oversensitive... I try to remind myself that these are symptoms of a cultural sickness. As unfair as it is, simply bitching won't help. I need to remember to DO shit, and in a way isn't it good to have the tougher road? Makes you learn more! I mean, I could have been born as Justin Bieber or one of those Rich Kids of Instagram, but then what fucking spiritual lessons would I learn then, huh?

On the other hand, maybe the Men's Rights guys and those German monks who wrote the Malleus are right and I really AM a weak willed, sinful creature who wants to steal penises and fuck the devil and eat babies. In which case...

ROCK AND ROOOOOOOOOLL!

Yeah, take that, Pinterest.

Working in animation means that you sit at a desk all day, and that desk is always directly next to another desk and another and another... Picture IKEA tables in rows, each with a computer tower, a monitor, and (if you're lucky, which I am) a cintique. There's not a lot of space, and most people bring in things to put on top of the computer towers to make their tiny space a bit more theirs.

I really wanted a plant on my desk, but we get absolutely no natural light where we sit and I also want to be mindful of people's potential allergies. So I hit google, and google popped up this article on Lifehacker about moss terrariums.

"Moss!" I said. "Moss is free! I live in Vancouver, moss is fucking everywhere!"

So I took some moss and stuffed it into a mason jar ($2.23) and, because I'm a hippy, tossed a quartz crystal point in there and BAM. Terrarium for less than the price of a latte.

I'm going to put it on top of my computer tower tomorrow. AND LET THE EARTH ENERGY FLOW OR SOME SHIT.

I actually think I'll try this again with, you know, more effort.

New Podcast: Listener Questions (or: Jerry Sadballs)

New episode of Stripped, Scared and Sacred in which Voodoo Pixie and I answer some questions. (Also available on iTunes under 'voodoofortuna' for some reason... I need to figure out why.) We also try a new gin. ...I may have tried a lot of it.

Speaking of Miss Pixie, she's had her surgery and is doing pretty well. She should be ready to go back to work on Monday. Many thanks to everyone who sent good thoughts her way. Ya'll are wonderful.

Saturday

Well hello, internets! Have you missed me? I've missed you! My internetting for the past two weeks has mostly consisted of staring glassy-eyed at Tumblr in the half hour or so between work and bed. It's been an awful lot of overtime at the office, you see, and consequently I've done a whole lot of nothing. I'd not cooked nor cleaned nor run, and was feeling worse for it.

Today, however, I managed to haul my ass out for a jog and unfuck my habitat. My costumes for tonight's Tarantino show at the Rio Theatre are laid out, so all that remains to do is relax and then get all dolled up. I'm excited for the show, and not as nervous as I usually am. Partially this is because we've done the show once before, and partially it's because I seem to have attained a new comfort level. The last Tarantino show was a big deal to me personally, and last week's Taboo was the first time I have preformed and been one-hundred percent happy with how the number went.

Once I have another coffee, I think I'll be damn near blissful.


In other news, anybody who reads this blog should wander on over to the Indieagogo page for A Gift for Amelia. Contribute if you can, and pimp the hell out of the page regardless. I really want to see this project come to fruition. (Also Shawna might get to be in it, so there's an added bonus.)

Lots more I want to ramble about, but that's all for now.