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Pallas Antigone Dorris, Erdrich's daughter

(Antigone is all about what the living owe the dead)

I remembered the name because of a crow 

Crows must be helped to leave you (safely), to be returned to their murder

1. Chicago Review of Books — Erdrich talks about animals and says she and Pallas raised their most recent crow
   This is the 2026 Python's Kiss interview. The relevant section begins with animals and dogs and reaches Pallas + the crow.
2. Minnesota Star Tribune — the Kismet crow story
   Pallas rescues an injured crow; the crow's family stays nearby and brings her gifts; Kismet eventually rejoins the flock; and Erdrich gives the crow's name to Kismet in The Mighty Red.
3. Louise Erdrich — “How a Writer's Study Became a Thing With Feathers” (*Washington Post*, 2004)
   Mab/CROW. This is Erdrich herself, and Pallas is right inside it: Mab officially belongs to Pallas; later Pallas sits underneath the crow trees listening after Mab has returned to wild crow society. 

she (the other historian) is taking all forty of my students in with hers in the same big room that I described with the podium, me at the front of it and David shouting. I will rework all the assignments of the class (add grit). And she will get paid to teach it. It's a comp class for gods sake with 80 students. And how is she gonna? There are no ta's, so obviously I have to teach her all that I figured out about what AI can do. And not do! she's the one getting paid for it #godspeed

If I actually give a shit about any of that, it should go to someone(s) else. If only you can do it, do - if you can teach it instead, do that.

If it could be anybody you wanna talk to, then do go to anybody. #godspeed

❤️

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Conversations are a real education today. People become far more interesting because you don't see them as your audience. Instead of waiting for your turn to talk, you see your connection as a chance to collect clues. Got some flirting to do? Get it done now while fun is in the air, relationships feel playful, and Mercury is still clowning around in Leo. Also, it's a good time for karaoke, open mic night, taking a dance solo, posting boldly, dressing with whimsy, cutting your hair and speaking up at the town meeting. Do keep in mind: Whatever you say today, they'll hold you to it tomorrow.

I can't imagine how to make that 👆 funny. I've got campus meetings in front of me all afternoon. I am not going to say anything. Which I know will ripple out from me, a deadening ~QUIET~ (Patti used to hate it when I did that, heh 😏)

I am done crying. Got it out of my system yesterday. Now bone dry.

I have a metric fuckton of flirting to do. So much backed up unused playful that it has "barn soured" as my mother would say. 

I will not be doing any flirting. And nobody has the balls to flirt with me if I don't start it. 

I dreamt of cats all night. Three of them, but none looking like the 3 I know of - they were so clear, I can still see them. Diving away into tall grasses.

looked like this - google says it's called a Pallas

August 24, 2026

Trust the signals, Virgo, because they’re probably pointing where you hope they are. That colleague suddenly paying attention or the boss lingering over your work is worth noting, and following the thread could open a door professionally. With the moon lighting up your theatrical fifth house, a project or presentation could put you in front of an appreciative audience. This is no time for modesty. Send the message or float the edgy concept and get the ball rolling yourself.

No.

"Missionary Position" - the course title comes to me (delightful 😏 heh) as I am opening the back door to smoke precious last dregs of gnite Drum tobacco because it was that kind of day 😪 oof - and sitting there on my driveway staring at the back door(wall) is a cat. I didn't have my phone so I couldn't snap a picture and can't prove it, but there it was just sitting there, black with white paws, a mittens. it flicked its tail once, "hiya", and then scooted down the driveway outa sight. I think that's the kind of shit that tells you you're a witch, whether you like it or not, which for the most part frankly I do not - it's feverish then lonely by turns. you're heard, somehow, because you very rarely call out, in that way, while in pain. you get a "yep" when you have finally lit a candle for your yourself (your mother) and prayed for help abjectly, giving over, lighting the most audacious candle I had in my arsenal, the "Adult Play" and the one I know my mom would immediately choose given the choice 

fucking brutal 😭

too much Death and Dying

I am so not okay today

I smoke half a joint and then a cigarette. Then go back to the book. If I have to live in bunkers, let them me books

"Elusive, pregnant with history, his thoughts finned off and vanished. The same color as water.."

on the heels of laying stones of the grave an historian

beset with grief still over the father and friend I buried this month last year

desperate for my mother's cat-thoughts not to fin off forever now

not yet, please

come back 😭 I promise no more worry no more saving anybody (they're all better off without it, anyway) nothing but laughter and beauty, leaf colors, however much jason mamoa ya want, whatever you want, just don't go yet please I need a little more time 🙏😭

finally I light a candle for me 😭

the view (will be) thru the patio door - at graveside, I stood with Craig 

heart shaped box - nirvana

Thoughts are catlike. Imagine one, wet and crabby and you gotta grab it out of the current, hissing and scratching at you, wants not to be probed, but it's worth it, alive and yours. So you shake it out, poof it up and get a good look: that's your thinking. 

And I don't blame students for being allergic. Thoughts don't behave very well. They can't be made to sit and give paw - if you have thoughts that easily respond to stimuli, those are just habits (which should also be interrogated, but that's not my job, that's psych). 

My job is to add disconcerting to your certanties. 

The irony is I'm a fucking doorstop of a person. Spectacularly good at emergency response, which can conceal the absence of any other skill for a very long time. I have built so much stabilization and redundancy into the institution that I work for that they literally have to kill everybody to get rid of me - now a proven fact. I built A BUNKER. That I am now circling like a cage. 

I'm extraordinarily privileged in being able to define my own exit strategy, but I keep tightening the job skill instead, and I don't know how to stop that. I myself need a me - someone who can throw a monkey wrench into my thoughts enough to disrupt the pattern. Students outgrow teachers and shuck them off, and I need to shuck this one (me) off. 

I just don't know how to be anybody else than this. And no one knows how to treat me other than this either so there's the problem of the echo effect. I want (like an addict wants, an adrenaline-driven anxious craving) every day to check-in and make sure everybody's okay and fix whatever might be making someone not okay; I simply force myself to not do that anymore. I am capable of changing a habit, including that one. 

But I don't know how to fill that space otherwise. So, even really important relationships go quiet because I don't have any other role, really, than emergency contact. If I let it go quiet (stop constantly asking areyouok/howareyou) and it does go quiet, then I'm just a phone number that never changes. And I just have to let it be that way. That's hard on me. But how will anything else ever happen if I don't? In the space that leaves, which is a loooot of quiet, tooo much, I spearfish for cat-thoughts. And migrate more because I am pretty good at moving me / stomping around.

I summoned too much and now I have to go to a cemetary to walk to the grave of another dead coworker friend in a virgo-season thunderstorm. This friend was older, not a sudden wtf tragedy. But it's still hard to imagine that GIANT of a man, 6ft something barrel, with his BOOMING voice, just not-there on earth now. 

Imagine me, tiny like I am now again, at the podium in a large lecture hall, the place filled with faculty for whom I am the new Madame President. I have a gavel, which are louder than you expect. I don't like to bang it - YET - ohhh, I will grow into liking to bang that gavel a LOT. But this was years ago, I would stand in silence and wait, which does work to quiet over 100 people once they begin to notice, the quiet spreads. But Dave would get impatient and bang his HUGE voice, COME TO ORDER! And everybody would shut up, turn to face me. "The meeting will come to order."

Him in the office next to mine, calling Ears through the wall, and my then-toddler son scooting around the doorframe and going to Dave while I taught a class. 

Us all doing the charity corporate run ("run"), lying on a blanket for lunch at the zoo, Ears in a stroller for the "run" part, yelling bullafo!bullafo! at the bison, Dave booming BULLAFO! over the heads of everyone for Ears, impromptu PSA.

Us all hanging out at their place. Ruth, a former student now his wife and historian in her own right, we were thick like an extended family. I hung out the most because every Thursday, Dave ran a little how-to make-stuff woodworking club, like a book club only he had every tool imaginable in an extensive bssement of saws and auls and whatever else. I made frames for my weird mishapen art collection. The largest one, nearly as tall as me, Dave had to carry it up the stairs and home in his truck. That piece of art, "black breasted woman" which was a beautiful huge discarded sketch an art student had made on a cardboard scrap (like from a fridge delivery) - she and the frame I made for her still hang above my old friend Marta's fireplace bc my ex got that in our divorce. 

I can still smell the sawdust in that basement. Still remember him teaching me how to run a router along the edge to make the groove for the glass. The art still hangs, my daughter looks at it when she visits her father, and still remembers its origin all those years ago. I infiltrate her step-mother's space. ("You infiltrate a lot," discerning TJ observes.)

David is gone now. 

I wish the sky would clear. I bought a black umbrella yesterday just in case it doesn't (virgo practical).

How do you prepare for your graveside vigils? What do you wear?

the "fixed" roof, leaking - I almost don't have the heart to tell Craig

 

when my mother met Nebraska, she summed him up in apx two sentences

her: why is he so much higher up in the world when he's not as smart as you? 

me: white male privilege, ever heard of it? and he's very smart, he's just not funny 

her: huh 🤨

and

her: must be a lot of cold women in his world, he's up your ass like you invented the blowjob

me: right? and he lived for a year in France 🤷‍♀️

her: huh 🤨

us: 🤣🤣

the edition of Love Medicine I'm reading is a signed first print that he got me as a gift not long after we met. my response was to take his Dartmouth hoodie. gimme a break, it's like wearing a fucking class ring, on me it's sexyfunny on him just douchie 🤨 reminded of it, I popped that baby into the laundry today to freshen it up for cooler weather (it's a nice heavy hoodie, $ buys nicer stuff)

it was always a strange/strained dynamic of his privilege(s) being what he had to offer, and I took it but was also crabby about the fact of it. summation: 4 years of my trying to be nicer + another couple learning my lesson (I should not have been nicer)

then

her: good riddance, don't let the door hit you in the ass

me: yep 🤷‍♀️

her: what was his name again? 

us: 🤣🤣

me: you shouldn't keep practicing dementia, ma

her: well it was a dumb name, I remember that much 

me: truth

us: 🤣🤣

fell outa the back flap

made me miss her. so, dodging chores (I hate mowing lawns!), I called The Knife. she sounded much better, still kinda half outa her mind but more in the typical way, not that deathspiral worrymongering version. that was truly awful and it had not improved much by Montana. but today, we talked for nearly two hours. mostly about her flowers and visiting my aunt and my niece is taking her to water areobics 2x a week. no A-bone shit, thank god. aspirationally, she could/might be able to return again for Oct. she was here last Oct, the house was still a disaster but she was fine, her usual batshit. I don't think I'd put her on a plane - I or one of the kids would fetch her by car, after the new patio is done, so worse comes to it that'd be her "bedroom" off the kitchen with a pretty view of potted fall mums. and Lake Placid would be a 3-day weekend at peak color. 

when she went home in June, my sister took her right to the ER. we ain't doing that shit again. and after a scope down her throat and one up her ass and a swallowed camera therafter, tests all damn summer, it has been confirmed: she's nothing but old but was also clinically depressed nearly to death. for which she still refuses meds cz she's "fine now" 🙄. so. no. not that shit again. people can just decide to die. and I am at just knock that off (or don't) with everyone, and she doesn't get the 'or don't' option. nope. 

she's 83. and there is basically nothing wrong with her except her personality 🤨🙄🤣

my annual physical is coming up this week. teeth cleaned yesterday. virgo-plodding through the checklist of sensible things. my primary will try to talk me into a million tests, and I will make the same false promises to get those done. I know my entire extended family's health outcomes - all the grandparents greatgrands cousins uncles all of it on both sides - nobody has ever died of anything but their personality. not one instance of cancer of any kind anywhere or anything much except self-abuse. a cousin drank himself to death, another shot himself last year, my dad moved to that fancy assisted living and stubbornly died of "fuck this" in less than a month, etc. the only risk factors I inherit (aside from the many personality "issues") is osteo-stenosis shit, which I think I'll let my eagle pose be the diagnostic on that for now. I lost 50 pounds in 6 months dying of Dying - then I dumped 👆 got an endocrinologist and a psychiatrist and a therapist and did all the hard work of knocking it off while dodging bullets. now, I'm rendered down to a concentrate. I don't need a CAT scan to tell me that, so I didn't get one. to appease my primary this year, I'll get the thing where they tell me my tits are "dense" (that tracks lol)

thunder just boomed (told ya)

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). You're already feeling the potential. It's like you found the "easy" button of life. The others are finally picking up what you've been throwing down for months now. No more having to explain the assignment. Full cooperation is coming. 

if things are about to "turn around" that'd be to my best side, my ass stomping away

I can hear crack(l)ing like thunder, hear that? smell it? 

just sayin, I think all my exes would agree the backside of me is probably for the best 

No more having to explain the assignment. 🤣 pffft my ass, which maybe I'll selfie later when I'm bored 😏 

books and islands

gospel first nation - william prince

The first dog is a CAT

 

-_0 it is not today yet, but off Ears goes ...

I've carried that paragraph/idea with me as long as I can remember

"this way"

loving wrong - st. paul & the broken bones 

Having pretty much finished the four classes I thought I had (Grit Class is back - but I'm standing my ground on wanting it to be an online class, trying to) this morning, I'm taking a wee break and focusing on my new Louise Erdrich project. There are three editions of Love Medicine where there is changing to the wording and structure of some of the stories - all of the rest of the editions, upon careful inspection, amounted to packaging. There is no significant forward written by any significant author in any of those editions. So the three I physically have are The Three. While my reference library hunts down that magazine version of the cat story, I decided to read the three editions in order. 

Straight out of the gate, boom:

"written it this way"

If you don't know who Michael Dorris is, the impact of that sentence and its particular wording wouldn't hit you in the face. But it slaps me hard. 

There's an almost obscenely perfect line from Erdrich herself in 1997. Asked about the discrepancy between the celebrated marriage everyone thought they had and the marriage they actually inhabited, she said: “We're in the era when every marriage touted as ideal turns out to resemble a pathology report.”

The only novel of hers I didn't like is the one she wrote about a marriage. It made me nauseous in places, I had to force myself through it, and I swear I could feel her forcing herself through the writing of it. 

Consequential is not synonymous with beneficial. Nor does acknowledging somebody's presence inside the made thing (art) (children) retroactively justify the toll they took / you paid.

I know the cats are not here yet in the first edition. So when did cats begin to show up? If you haven't read the story, you don't realize that it's all about mating. So. Put the timeline of the various editions next to the Dorris timeline - that is the kind of chore fuckergpt can do: 

1984 — Love Medicine, first edition. No “The Island.” And that dedication explicitly names Dorris's “ideas, experiences, and devoted attention” and says Erdrich could not have written the book “this way” without him.

January–February 1991 — “The Island” appears independently in Ms. magazine. That's now verified bibliographically, not guessed. This is Lulu's first-person story of going to Moses Pillager on the island—the material that later gets folded backward into Love Medicine. And importantly, the Ms. text is not identical to what Erdrich subsequently puts into the novel. Chavkin [scholar] specifically compares the two and finds meaningful revision between the 1991 story and 1993 chapter.

And look what else is sitting right there in 1991: Dorris and Erdrich's eldest adopted son, Reynold Abel, dies at 23 after being struck by a car. The family subsequently relocates to Montana amid severe trouble involving another adopted son; they return to New Hampshire in 1993. 

(side note if anybody's interested, there is a book and movie version of the adoptions - it's an important story because Michael Dorris is the reason we have the phrase "fetal alcohol syndrome" - in the film, he's played by jimmy smitts, and my favorite author, Louise Erdrich, shows up at the end of the movie, she was his student and she says something almost exactly like "I know this is crazy, but let's get married" - that's why I remember it) 

1993 — Love Medicine: New and Expanded Version. “The Island” gets incorporated into the novel, along with three other new chapters and a new section of “The Beads”; Erdrich also resequences and alters existing material. This isn't a reprint with bonus material: scholarship describes it as a substantial rewriting of the 1984 book.

So the sequence is:

1984: I could not have written it this way without Michael Dorris.
↓
1991: Erdrich writes/publishes Lulu's missing history as “The Island.”
↓
1991–93: catastrophic family period, including Abel's death and major upheaval involving the children.

1993: she opens the already-finished Love Medicine and puts Lulu's story into it—while changing other parts of the old book as well.
↓
1994: Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris appears; publicly/intellectually they're still very much presented as a literary partnership.
↓
1994: Sava [other son] sends the threatening/demanding letter that leads Erdrich and Dorris to take him to court.
↓
1995: Erdrich and Dorris separate.
1996: divorce.
1997: Dorris commits suicide.

So “The Island” does not belong to the post-Dorris Erdrich. That's important. It arrives inside the marriage, four years before the separation, during a period when their literary partnership was still publicly active.

But it's also not the 1984 marriage preserved.

It's written seven years after that dedication, during the beginning of what becomes an extraordinarily difficult family period, and then Erdrich takes that story and changes it again before inserting it into the marriage-produced book in 1993.

<giant fucking pin here>

The character she chooses to write back into Love Medicine is Lulu.

Not simply additional plot. Lulu gets a past she did not have in the 1984 textual object. And that past concerns mother, abandonment, institutional removal, language, sexual/kinship connection, and the attempt to locate where one comes from. The Ms. version is actually more explicit about Lulu believing she had turned her back on her mother and needing forgiveness; Erdrich makes that relationship subtler when she absorbs the story into the 1993 novel.

And that's where the cats enter.

Which means the cat trail has unexpectedly landed exactly where your Dorris trail lands: in material Erdrich wrote in 1991 and then deliberately used to reopen and alter the 1984 book in 1993, while the marriage that was “so much a part” of the original book was still intact but the family's history was accumulating weight far beyond the 1984 book.

And it's LULU (I think she's my favorite literary character ever, if I had to pick one), that slinks her way into that shit and onto the page...

It's funny how life keeps working like that for me these days. I was just like "cats, siiigh" and then decided to follow that thought/feeling to wherever my mind took it. I like this Erdrich project so far. The overhaul of my standing classes I also like very much, I think it makes it possible ( not probable but possible ) that a record incoming class of freshmen survive the fact that only one full time English professor exists there. But no matter what I make now came at a very high cost to me as a human being. 

"Andy" is the first man encountered in Love Medicine, the first edition. I knew that although I had forgotten his name. What I remember is that's not his real name, and he's got his own book later. In that book, it turns out that what "really" happened is they got married the night they met, the night the woman (June) commits suicide in every version that same night. I ask fuckergpt to confirm dates in a line with the dorris-erdrich marriage. I've read all of these novels at least twice, but I didn't memorize the dates of their publication obviously. When does a CATASTROPHIC MARRIAGE slink its way in? I know for a fact that no edition of Love Medicine includes that. But it does happen, so in which novel and when does it?

1984 — Love Medicine
June + “Andy.” No marriage. Andy is essentially an anonymous mud engineer.

1991 — “The Island,” Ms.
Erdrich begins supplying Lulu with the history absent from the original novel.

1993 — expanded Love Medicine
“The Island” enters Love Medicine, along with substantial revision elsewhere—but June's encounter with Andy still does not become a marriage.

1995 — Erdrich and Dorris separate.

1996 — Tales of Burning Love
Erdrich goes back to the very first scene of her first novel, reveals that anonymous Andy was Jack Mauser, and gives June and Jack something that had never existed before:

a marriage.

1996 — Erdrich and Dorris divorce.

👁 huh

I am two pages into this project and feel like I am uncovering a writing process of continually folding life in. This is what happened in real life / this is what I made out of it. #witchcraft

card of the day: 8 cups (moving on)

Sometimes we can't see the horizon because the city, fog or windowless room prevents it. Certain circumstances, relationships and responsibilities act in much the same way, blocking our view. Today's lunar aspect urges us never to cease imagining horizons we can hold in our mind's eye and carry wherever we go.

I have very much tried to🙏

I got a call this morning at 8 AM on the dot, he was waiting for it to be a decent hour. T'was of one of the Fireds calling me to tell me that he got a job - thanking me for all I did, he's going to be a program director for a lot more $$ and he gets to move home to florida (where his family is). Since I built those programs from scratch and needed all of their help, and I was careful to give them titles, acknowledgment as program designers etcetc, they're finding it easier to land jobs like that. But what he wanted to thank me for was the candles, allll the candles 🕯🕯🕯🕯

You don't know if witch-hopecraft is gonna do anything, but you don't know that it's not either.  

I can't wait to visit him once he's settled / one fewer to mourn 👍

song tbd - still a long day ahead and I'm crying already, but at least they're happy tears (for a change) atm

I want chickens 🕯

grit class reading (cats)

"The Island" - Louise Erdrich

Tracking down this story and getting it into readable form took several hours. In the process of doing so, I didn't just make a reading for students, which I did, but I also discovered a scholarship project. One that has absolutely nothing to do with artificial intelligence, thank fucking god. 

The classes are done. I said after that I could write fuckingstuff if I wanted to, but I really did not feel like it. I did this instead. 

This author is known for shapeshifting (authorial witchcraft). Characters have multiple versions of themselves and multiple different permutations of family relationships over time. In the case of this story, in particular, there's an added layer of difficulty. It is a chapter included in her signature book, Love Medicine (*medicine* being the operative theoretical term). However, it was not included in the original publication of that book in the 80s. It didn't get included until the second edition, 1993. And subsequent editions have subtle changes, so that you would have to read them all to follow the shapeshifting. Add to that is the difficulty that even the most recent edition of Love Medicine (6 editions by my count), has no e-version of any kind. Not kindle, etc, NOWHERE can you find the book in any electronic form. Not even behind a google books firewall, nada. You must hold a physical book in your hands if you want to read Love Medicine. Add to that (!!), this particular story was also published separately as a standalone in Ms Magazine - so there is yet another version floating around out there that my reference librarian is now tracking down for me (shockingly, Ted still works here). 

I have gone down this rabbit hole of dogs once before with this author. Dogs do a lot of work, including talk sometimes, which was the inspiration for my own dog's narration in one little "chapter" of Grit. 

Now I'm on the trail of her cats...

To get this story into a version I could post, I had to scan each page of it (earliest novel version) to make it into one artifact. Then, I had to download an app that would make jpegs out of artifact pages. Blogger doesn't support pdf format. Nothing really does online because everybody's just posting pictures of their fucking dinner or their ass. Mass Sheepletude. Nothing supports anything except taking a picture of your ass (or cat). Then, I had to extract those pics using an obscure function inside this new expensive fucking phone. Then upload them here in order. 

To the best of my knowledge, this is the only "electronic version" of this story anywhere. 

(What are you making?)

how human consciousness accumulates a world, how everything touches everything else, how people fail one another without becoming disposable, how animals exceed the stories humans tell, how eras erase while individuals remember, how sex and knowing and kinship and rage and jokes and death occupy the same life—and how attention itself might be an act of making rather than repair

"suicide note"
needless to say, chatgpt didn't get the joke 🙄 - what I really need to keep working with AI is a sidechat survival feature - stupidfuckingidiot predictableaf

status update: 3 of 4 classes done / as good as they're getting given the constraints of 1 the #grit-concept that no one understood and I am the only one left standing in it 2 AI (dumbfuck hallucinating liar [and that's only the sins I've discovered so far]) "in everything" (like someone farted?) 3 enrollment of 140 students to start next week (40 more will be added added in Nov)

Despite allllll that, I'm going to guess that the students are going to fucking lovvvve the classes - I am the magic that turns that pile of utter shit into something safe to consume. So there. 

Not every friendship is forever, Virgo, and today gives you permission to step back from the ones running on fumes. 

"solitary witch from the gecko"

lots of people are just dead, pics of which I can summon but not them. and among the living it's the same diff a lot #realitycheck

What does it actually mean to be a witch? How do you know if you are one? I think everyone is one, at least nascently. Not everyone would agree. And it is true that skills are earned. They don't just come out of the fucking ground up your asshole out the top of your head like fucking glitter. You have to have a Way, first of all - probably several. A Way is a thing that you do faithfully, a practice, a focus, of control and self-reflection that can be sustained and returned to, not for comfort but to "screw your courage to the sticking-place" - and it must entail your body, your whole body, and not just consume it like burning fuel. You have things in common with both a living tree and a log but you are neither. These and distinctions like it must be front of mind much of every day. It is your job to figure out how they stay front of mind for you. (Otherwise, you may do some very damaging things to keep your body doing what it is, burning itself right out.) 

You have to have a moral code that constrains your behavior and guides it. It has to be chosen and clearly articulatable. It can't be some vague bullshit about how you were raised Catholic or whatever - you don't get to inherit a vague moral compass, even if that is your inheritance. In that case, it's on you to correct that fact. Personally, I live by the threefold law and the transformative humanities golden rule. Respectively, 1 what you give, you'll get 3x back 2 (much more crucially) if someone else can do a thing, then you should help them do it / don't do it yourself, and if something needs done in the world and you are the only person who can do it, then you must do it. 

The first part of rule two - if someone else can do a thing, then you should stop doing it and help them do instead - acts as a countermeasure for the tendency towards martyrdom that the second half of that rule leans toward. 

You share qualities with the God of your understanding, but you are not Jesus. You should always remember that. Even if you think he's a good guy. And not everyone would agree on that.. I never asked him to climb up on that cross and would not have asked that of his mother. As a syndrome that can metastasize out of the perfectly good, fundamentally good, impulse to be measured by what you provide, martyrdom as a syndrome is deadly droll. Do you enjoy it when someone martyrs themselves for you? I mean as kinkplay sure 🥰 but.... Otherwise probably not so much. 

A witch spends a lot of time aligning your body with energy and want and swerve and persistence, the fundamental states of what's around you, and tries to love every one of them, yet use discernment about what feels in accordance. 

In some ways it's very easy to be a witch. You've always known. You take a deep breath and very often run in the other direction, for as long as you can remember, away from distraction and noise. Or you might do the opposite, follow the surge of the energy around you, like surfing - human energy, animal energy, tree energy, all of it. Ideally, you could do both at any one time. And you've always thought about these things, you've always FELT these things.

And then all other ways it's mostly frustrating to feel like a witch. Whatever is already exists, and you can't hate on it because it exists. Even a plastic bottle harming the ocean, even if you want no more of those plastic bottles to be made, you can't just look at the plastic bottle and think "fuck you" - it didn't ask to be here any more than you did. But here you both are. 

That's you and the whole fucking world. And for me personally, I can't feel it ALL anymore. It's too expensive as the world is presented currently. It doesn't exist in real life mostly, it exists on devices, and that's not real. Even if it depicts factual things that's not the same thing as being lived reality. If you spend that physical actual lived reality looking at the simulations of reality on a tiny device, that's on you. If you are a  witch, you can explain to me how, by doing that, you're surfing lifepower in a morally compassed way to any end that you can articulate. 

If you cannot do any of those things, I strongly suggest you just live out your days in peace and don't think too much about being someone who wields witchpower. Because mostly you do not wield it at all, even if you know all about it. You just feel it. And sometimes with great focus and control and effort, you can shift a stream of power and make reality change course right in front of you. For the better 🤏 If you can do that, people will admire your ability to do so, and/but you're probably lonely. It's not necessarily a lot of fun being singular.

And this extends to holding perfectly still. You don't need to perform an action to be held to the moral codes and the energy all around you. If you are lying in your bed alone or with your pets, and you are thinking about all that you hate, you are throwing up into LIFE. So you better knock it off or not be a fucking witch at least. As I said, I believe everyone is to some degree or another a contributor to Life in this way. But you're a witch if you spend a fuckton of time thinking about what you're "putting out there" from the center of your being radiating out at all times. You are doing that to other people, whatever that is. 

I don't know how to perform a thrombectomy. Different longstudied skillset. Both hard earned. Often both thankless and pointless and doesn't change the outcome. There's no recompense for lighting a fucking candle at all. It keeps you up all night, you don't get paid, and you have no idea whether it has any effect at all (probably not). Practice creates an obligation to practice well, not a right to results. For whatever reason, however you got there, you are in a pull, a current, and you're trying to shift and survive it usually because you're trying to grab onto someone else, which might even make it worse. "If in doubt, let go" has not been a rule that I've been great at observing.

Do you think about the relationship of your corporeality to the universe? And the way you might land intentionally or unintentionally, even for a moment on the corporeality of someone else in that huge ocean of Life? Is that front of mind? Are you alone in that deep blue current, both submerged and floating? 

Are you making anything?

Leanore's aria - Fidelio Beethoven's only opera, he didn't know the ranges/sounds of a human voice, he had to imagine all of it.

"The cats made me one of them—sleek and without mercy." ~ Lulu

a coworker death per August - actual not metaphysical or figurative or whatever other kinds of Dying we're all doing - and they want to make promo out of it  ...  

status update: 👆 shit + one more class in the bag, on schedule

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Maybe it's effective in dating apps [👀 hell no], but in real life, people who want to make new friends don't typically lead with a list of requirements. You learn more in a 10-second face-to-face interaction than in hours of digital interaction.

like Mary Likes Hornet Figging Guy ("Junior")? - that impression landed in 10 seconds 🤣

it's weekly oracle day, let's check those out..

VIRGO - 

I am nursing a hopeful dream that you will give yourself a fun surprise or two in the coming days—maybe even more than two. Not necessarily the most expensive delights, but those that would inspire your nervous system to relax and your spirit to celebrate. Possible options: a few hours of free time with no obligations, a hike where you adore and praise the sky, a conversation you’ve been craving, a daring yes, or a long-overdue no. Or how about finally starting a fun project you keep postponing, or setting down a burden you’ve been carrying for too long? You might ask yourself: “If someone who loved me dearly were in charge of my rhythm, what would they arrange for me?”

uncanny, the "nervous system" language of that. let's crowdsource ideas?? (ask my mom [?] - dicey af lol). what would you arrange for me if the magic wand were yours? all healers, adventurers, ghosts, friends, dogs, even Eggs the cat I've been saving since I met him -DM me yo. I'd love to hear it. I picture like an oldschool coumpouding med cabibet, and every time I pull open a drawer, a different 'arrangement idea' wafts out...

Meanwhile, I have classes to finish,  one more cup of coffee before I jump back on on it - anyone who's been following along if you would like to offer which has been your favorite assignment that might be useful to me, if you care to share! 

And I gotta help get vehicles bought - one per each of the kids who drives. The eldest just got a modest donation of $ - I've learned less is more w that one. Ears, on the other hand, at his request, I am bossing the absolute shit out of him even though it makes him snappy. He is gonna be requiring some cosigning, I believe, now that we know how far short the schmitzes fell of the goal. 

We are getting shit DONE NOW. Enough already.

song tbd

card if day, yupyup

status update: one class is a wrap.

goal: one per day / done by Thursday

on thursday I re-up the class I co-teach w my boss -  so that will require almost no thought / no change, unless he's making any changes.

In my own 3 classes, I am systematically going through every assignment, and adding an AI step to it, and then constraining them to use no other AI, then, make 'em run it through AI for analysis/revision before I see it besides etcetc. 

So far, I have done the easiest class. Tomorrow, a writing class. 

Upside: by doing this now, I am constraining the amount of attention anyone could get from me for the rest of the semester; and I am making it possible for every student to get an A simply by following the directions very strictly. It's got a dominatrix vibe to it for sure. I'm taking all those grit(ty) assignments and adding them structurally into specific course material.Which means wherever I've been reading chatgpt anyway already, I'm just letting them do what they were already doing, and not calling it cheating, calling it prep work. Then one SHORT actual thing that I read. If they cheat on THAT THING, they fail. Period. 

It takes a surprising amount of time to design an assignment that actually works, that a student cannot get around and just hand in bullshit. If you think that by asking them what they feel, or whatever, is gonna get you around that it doesn't - they ask chat g p t to have their feelings for them, and it's getting better and better at faking those. It used to be that you could catch it because somewhere in it, it would say 'of course, I don't really have any feelings' and the student would be too stupid to even proofread the fucking thing before they turned it in. But that was in the days when I could actually read these things and I can't anymore, first of all, and second of all, it confabulates better now, so it wouldn't make that mistake in the first place. I have to plug in the original assignments and make it cheat digest it, right in front of me, so I can reverse engineer what to tell the students to do, which is what they were already doing. And they still can do that. Strangely, that makes them feel as if they're doing homework lol - that's how's how much they use it! I'm just not going to fucking read any of that shit any more. They get to ask chatgpt what they think and then they get to ask chat g p t to write drafts for em and then they have to ask chat g p t what it is they would ask a real human being at that point and then they have to answer whatever fucking question that is in two hundred motherfucking words typa deal.

And let's see what happens.  

I certainly don't want to read any more chatgpt fucking essays. THAT IS PASSING BUTTER. No. So. One class per day. Nothing changes except every assignment. Every one of them is A/F so do it exactly the way I tell you. Including be funny when I tell you (amuse me). This is very tedious work, assignment design, but it's long overdue, really, it's been a couple of years now that I've had my eye on the ball of aliving desperately. One should update one's assignments continually, ideally. But now several very hard years have gone by since I last did that. 

So. There's something satisfying now about going through each one of these classes, and the update is that every single week I crack a leather whip over the heads of two hundred people. I can almost hear it. They are gonna do it my way, or they are gonna fail. And when it comes to the writing classes, I'm going to make sure they fail by week 4, if they're gonna, so that they won't even be there as part of my statistics, they'll have dropped. Self-analyzing to see if they should persist (harder) or swerve is one of the assignments at week 4, when I am mandated to report them for being likely to fail. Or not. They're going to decide. But they're gonna use AI to come to a feeling-less conclusion on the subject based on the evidence. There will be zero late assignments accepted until MIDTERM - after midterm, if you've been on it, then you've earned some leeway. I am dogfooding all of that here because I can't bear to sit in front of that laptop for one more fucking second at ten p. m. But I did get one done. 

Tomorrow the writing intensive version  (WIP means writing intensive program, and yes, I did come up with it, intentionally sound like whip 🤭, a good fifteen years ago. It used to be writing across the curriculum (WAC) which was a whack lolol but that got dated, so I thought it would be funny to change it - omg the shit that nuns used to let me get away with was awesome - that's an actual program, WIP, and every single student at the college is subject to taking two whip classes lolol very very often misspelled just like that -  we had a middle states commendation for it! - and stillll cracking myself up about it 🤭) of the same course, the worst offender re students turning in total bullshit. 

Wed - Narrative Medicine 201, with an eye towards a Week 4 guillotine of some kind, right before that conference presentation. Oct 2.  Handy timing. What will we want to be able to say by then in that particular one 🤔 - but all of my classes count as narrative medicine, they're all taught to healthcare provider students, and they're all about stories.

Maybe I could get both those classes done tomorrow - yes, let's GRIT THAT OUT. setting that intention 🙏. then yoga Wed. 

Thurs - Graphic Medicine class, the reading list for which ChatGPT hallucinated a book by Ken Dahl and started this whole thing about hallucination and verisimilitude confabulation - but that class won't be changing because that will be up to my boss, the BIO part of the course runs that show. I will tell my boss all about the presentation on Oct 2 and see if he wants to get in on that which he might, we have done many presentations like that together before. Totally up to him. I booked 1-2 hours that morning for us to catch up and get the class out the door. Nobody but he and I have a class that big. It breaks the enrollment rules for a freshman class by one hundred percent - and that's why he and I both still have a job. And I understand that. We are both very pragmatic people (he's a capricorn). 

Then all there is to do, if nothing else bad happens and classes actually begin on the 31st, all I have to do is go to the union funeral picnic on the 28th to confirm that yup we are still alive, then I press the "ON" button on the classes. That's it. Half of my job happens when I'm not doing my job. It happens in summers and in spaces betweens. It happens when I look back, and I look forward and I make these decisions. Otherwise, I'm free to be anywhere, doing anything, while everyone else is going to physical classrooms and I am not. And everyone else is wondering what they're doing next week, and I am not. My students know every single thing that's going to be occurring and that they'll be responsible for - they can see the entire class laid out in front of them on day one, and then they get to decide what to do from there on out. I'll be going to Wisconsin for sure. I wanna get to the high peaks for sure. If I get accepted to that conference, which is almost for sure, I'll be going to kalamazoo michigan. All that is in Oct. in the meantime, I'm going to head out to my cottage. I think the cottage is mostly where I'll be for lotsa Sept, 'cept labor day ( fucking fireworks ) until I gotta close it up for the year.

The only other thing I did today was get that bees nest, which is hornets actually, offa Mary. The guy comes to the door, he's got a yellow shirt with a big bee on it and something stuck in his teeth (like a little bit of a hamburger bun from lunch). He introduces himself as so and so junior, I'm pretty sure this dude is some kind of drunk or high. He's really really happy to see me. And all I've said is hello. So I bring him around the side of the house to where Mary is. The hornet's nest is in the foundation of the house right behind the base of Mary. So it does look like they're flying in and out her ass, to be fair. But this dude actually says that out loud and adds "virgin birth, ya right!? didn't think she'd be KINKY though!!" and cracks himself up completely so then I'm also laughing because it just feels so absurd. All of it. All the time. And he's not alone, he's got a driver too - my guess would be this is the company owner's kid, middle aged guy who probably does not have a driver's license anymore. So Beeguy Jr calls to the other guy, "come see MARY dude, she's got fucking hornets in her ass!" Like, I have little old people for neighbors across the street 🤭🤦🏻‍♀️. Not to mention that I didn't get dressed today because why would I (?) so I'm standing out there in bare feet and this little stupid black dress I sleep in 🤭🤦🏻‍♀️🤣 Janis sitting there, swagging her tail at the whole scene... he wanted the check made out to him personally, no tax, or cash? (no), a check I wrote out fast, thanking christ for the driver dude standing there or Junior woulda hit on me it was feelin like 😵‍💫🤦🏻‍♀️. He told me to write my email on the check so that he could send me a receipt that never came 👀 (sigh range)

grit to self: "you can't have or do anything you want until you get your classes done on Canvas" 

no fuckwriting or streaming cowboy shows, etc. now that the laptop is open it stays on WORK until that's done. I'm waiting on a couple answers (are you sure these dates are right?), and ANY question is bad, as the answer will be MEAN and call attention to the fact that I still exist for now. But I'm co-teaching a class with my boss (he's out of options but HIMSELF, as all chairs eventually discover). so I need to ask him how we're doing that...

I click the announcements, killing time waiting for answers, while joking with Janis, "let's see if they've closed any other departments!"

so weird

hey Janis, do you think that other button leads to a Phish show? 🤷🏽‍♀️

I wasn't feelin it (usually don't lately), and nobody would go with me (typical circumstance), but I went anyway (I don't require a hand to hold or I'da died already). Glad I did. #ontopic

the magician - jason isbell - new

 

Vegas Mary has a halo of bees

card of the day - not feelin' it

I gotta get it up to go to that damn opera..