vaxjedi | Turn the clock to zero-hundred...

We are approaching the end of the year, so I guess it is time for one of those nostalgic end-of-the-year posts

So, time to look back over the last year.

I've been through three jobs this year, working at Stream doing tech support for Adobe, working at GT doing tech support for their product, and now working for Adobe themselves. I am still overly proud about working at Adobe - I find myself looking for opportunities to mention it to people - "by the way, I work for Adobe, yeah the Photoshop people". Part of it is just the fan-boy in me - I worked at Stream as connected-yet-separate and now I'm on the 'inside'.

Part of it is just finally feeling truly competent at something. I mean, before I was in college and barely making it at that. Then I was doing tech support, which was viewed as the trained-monkey section of the computer world. It got a lot better being on the Adobe team, but there was still a bit of it there. But now, I am doing real work. I don't feel like I am wasting my education any longer, that it was more than just me trying to prove that I wasn't a complete loser. I am not only doing something interesting, a job which requires me to keep learning in an area which I am interested, I am providing adequitely for my family, finally.

What else has gone on....

There has been a lot of pain. Both

eleri and I have been pushed to the limits of our sanity. I can't say I don't wish a lot of that had never happened.

However, there is a strength that remains. "That which does not kill you makes you stronger" and all that. I remember once a friend of mine from high school said he'd love to go back and do over things, knowing what he knew now... he felt he'd own the place. And that thought has cropped up in my head too. And as the pain of life increased, it keeps cropping up more. But the answer is always been, in the end, no. I wouldn't do over a lot of things. My strength is a result of that experience. And while I still need a lot of support from people to handle my life, the part I am handling is (I feel) far outside what I'd be normally expected to bear. So I am still coming out in a sort of karmic profit, I guess.

And there are things I just wouldn't want to give up. Eleri, my kids, my understanding of various things. I know one person asked me a year or so ago whether I felt my life was worth the pain that had happened. And I told them I wasn't sure anymore. But now I am sure. There is too much good in my life. And if there is more bad than good, that just makes the good that much more precious...

...my preciousssss...

Sorry, sudden tangent.

I have lost a few things, I think. Hair, for instance. I have the 'yer-getting-old' thinning hair and bald spot thing going. That's harder for me to accept than it should be. I guess it always sort of represented the decline of life, the balding hipster who is desperately trying to recapture his glory days.

I really dislike the idea that my 'glory days' are behind me. I mean, I can talk about college and a lot of wild things that I did. A lot of truly beautiful and profound people I met and loved. The profound thoughts I had. And ya know, a lot of that was really good. And a lot of it was bad (out of which I gained some of the strength I have today). But I cannot believe that those are the 'best days of my life'.

I sometimes feel like I am fighting an uphill battle. So much of our culture is about the 'young'. (And it's a weird feeling to finally not think of myself as one of the 'young' - I think that a new feeling, first occuring to me in the last few months.) And there is a little bit of a sense of time slipping away now. And that because I am older with 'responsibilities' that I am inherently sedentary.

I really do like feeling like my best days are ahead of me. And I think that is the case. It's just that some of the best days are going to be quiet days, days of building and building things that few will notice. And I guess that fits who I am a lot better than anything else. I knew that as far back as High School.

But, as the New Year draws near, I raise a toast to the future. May we live in interesting times.

I guess it is time to do that whole New Year's Resolution thing, eh? This is more of a wish list than a resolution list. I never know just how resolute I am going to be.

* I want to finalize most of the development of Sinnish, so I can get it into a usable language. That means writing materials to actually help people learn it
* Develop the Rapture tradition into a more definite structure and follow it.
* Expose the kids to more paganism (Can you believe that Kris, the 14 year old, didn't know what Beltaine was?)
* Become an Adobe Print Master (this requires that I pass the ACE exams in Photoshop and Illustrator)
* Learn more Elvish
* Develop some more of my other languages
* Develop a network of friends and lovers in Seattle (and a face-to-face local boyfriend would be really nice too!)
* Learn to play Go
* Learn some calligraphy
* Write another Raptured porn story

This is the point where I run out of steam and insert a few short sections to kill time to see if other ideas bubble up in my head.

A Raptured proverb:
If the world looks like shit, remember to wipe your glasses off.

We got the Extended Edition of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. We've determined that there are two real morals to the Appendicies on the various Extended DVDs: Viggo is insane, and Peter Jackson can do things that shouldn't work but still succeed at it.

But I digress. It feels weird that it is done now. No more LotR stuff to look forward to now. It's the end of an era. Every year, in December, it was time to get the next DVD, see the next movie, etc. And that is over now. Now, there are lots of stories out there that could easily be as good as the LotR movies. But I doubt any of them will have the attention to detail that we saw here.

The success of the movies should point out something - that fantasy is really a major part of literature and entertainment. I think that is something that the modern world forgets a lot, even though the Lord of the Rings is the second best selling book in the history of books. (That should be a major indicator right there).

Ever notice that some of the most prolific and longest-living pop culture references are science fiction/fantasy. I mean, everyone knows what Star Trek and Star Wars are.

I've been letting the Rapture stuff sit in my head for a bit. It really is a tradition, I think. But it is a lot more flexible than I thought it was. I've been developing my personal mythology and such and kinda shoving it into the tradition. But I think that part of the point of the Rapture tradition is to develop your own personal mythology. I've been viewing 'shaladal as the Goddess of the Rapture. But i realize that she really is my Goddess of the Rapture.

And really, there is a lot to the Rapture. I have begun to think of it as a sort of confederation of like-minded mystics and spiritualist, accepting a common set of symbols and principles in order to be greater together than the some of their parts.

That makes me wonder... should I start getting some likeminded people together and actually create a sort of 'Raptured charter', a sort of agreement to use a common ground for some things? Let me know what you think.

In other thoughts about the Rapture, I had been using Sinnish as the language of the Rapture, because I could express some things in it more easily than otherwise, and partially to give it a level of separation from every day life. I think that separating is useful, because it forces some conscious reflection on what is going on.

However, since the Rapture is less about my personal mythology as time goes on, is my integration of Sinnish a good idea? Or does it provide a good 'ritual language' to the tradition?

One of the things that Eleri and I have been talking about is developing a sort of Raptured lunar calendar. A separate calendar just for our own ritual purposes (and maybe those of others).

A month would be from one full moon to the next. The actual first day of the month would start on the sunrise following the full moon. The first month of the year would start on the first full moon after the New Year (Jan 1). That does mean that some years will have 13 months. In that case, there will be a month with special connotations.

The solar holidays (of which there are four), would be tracked by the normal solar calendar, though. Though we might even track those by the exact time of solstices and cross quarters.

Some other interesting ideas we had were tracking where your birthday would be in this new calendar by tracking the actual solar rotation and finding out where in the solar and lunar calendars it fell.

I dunno . They are ideas. And thinking about how such calendars would work IS fun.

So it's the new year now. I guess I should finally post my end-of-the-year post, eh?