On Lizzo, River Walks, and Gearing Up for April

The river is rushing, wildflowers are starting to bud, and my eyes won't stop watering. It must actually be full-on not-a-joke-this-time Spring! Normally autumn is MY season. Fall is when I come alive, when I feel my dieties working with me, and when I get excited about the year's transformations in my life. That's still very true—nothing like an October chill to reinvigorate me—but this Spring feels really fresh and exciting to me too. As we jump into warmer weather, here's how I spent my March when I wasn't here:

A beautiful Spring day driving past a beautiful spot in Minneapolis.

• Tarot Stuff: As some of you reading have already discovered, I have picked up Sunday day time shifts at my beloved steady gig, The Eye of Horus! I'll be there from 11:30-6 on Sundays in addition to evenings on Wednesdays. In more mundane news, I've started using my Modern Spellcaster's deck in readings, and I've gotten into a lovely e-mail reading groove with a few of you too! You can find out more about my e-mail readings here.

• Writing Round-Up! I did a major big kid writer thing this month—I applied to not one but TWO emerging writer's grants to finish a manuscript for a memoir about finding laughter in traumatic circumstances. There's also some Queering the Tarot action here and here, and a profile I got to capture on a poet I just adore here. I'm also working on a second e-book for y'all. This one is a little more substantial but I hope to finish up this month. You can grab my first, a mini e-book about using tarot for healing here.

• Theatre (and beyond): Oh, you know, just performed improv and front of people for the first time, thus finishing my improv class with a bang. Plus a Drunk Queer History my company organized, a mainstage show I directed, and I dunno, something about us getting a grant for our summer one-act festival. Keep up to date by signing up for Gadfly's mailing list!

• Life Outside of Work! (That's a thing, sort of?): I managed to have a really spectacular month in spite of having three careers, two of which required grants due and one which I produced multiple major events. Most notably, I ended the month at a Lizzo concert with three of my very best friends, brought to tears at a hip-hop show for (I think) the first time. The show has me mulling over self-love and what loving your body truly means. I adore my mind, and I'm a genuinely kind, sweet person and love that deeply about myself. I'm also incredibly fun. Yet for all of my body and fat positiviy and attraction to women and genderqueer people of ALL sizes actually loving my body the way Lizzo raps about is so hard for me. She has completely re-inspired me to take on self- love exercises to help me get there though

  • Favorite things I read: I started the month by breezing through Neil Gaiman's accessible, fun take on Norse Mythology. I got super sucked in to Murakami's weird world again with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I devoured Fisher's Princess Diarist and Mara Wilson's Where Am I Now in approximately a day and a half each. That's a lot, I know but it was a really good book month!

  • Favorite Things I Watched: I went to see King Lear at the Guthrie, not for research or review but just to go. This was the first time I'd gotten to do something like that in a very, very long time and the show was wonderful. The eye gouging piece of the play was SO well executed, and the rest of the show was pretty great too. Alternatively, Manny and I also binged Season 1 of Supergirl in about a week. I am completely obsessed and dying to get my hands on Season 2 even though it's still happening. I saw Get Out in the movie theater and OH. MY. GOD. Even with all the rave reviews I was surprised by how good it was, because it's that good. I don't even like scary movies but I'm raving about this one still. As just a guilty pleasure thing, I've also been watching Trial and Error on NBC. I love John Lithgow and this one is really silly and fun.

  • Other Things I Loved: Manny and I have spent several afternoons or evenings walking along the Mississippi River just chatting about ourselves, art, and the river itself. I'm so overjoyed that we're back in “hanging out near water” season and these escapes have helped my mental health so, so much. Now that it's warming up, if you're physically capable and live near a large body of water—go! What are you doing reading the internet right now?!

One more view of the river before we head out for today!

That's it for me and my theatreific, booktastic, Supergirl-swamped March! Please tweet or Facebook me about your own adventures!

Blessed Be, y'all!

In Which I Discuss Carrie Fisher, Geek Idolatry, and Dark Senses of Humor

There are a handful of people who I regularly quote and who's strength, endurance, vibrance, and stake in one or more of my big identity markers cause me to completely geek out and idolize them with an ecstatic frenzy usually reserved for coffee and my cats. Carrie Fisher was one such woman, those identity markers being "feminist" and "geek," and I can honestly say that this is the first celebrity death of the year to bring me to my knees. Maybe it's because of my level of idolatry. Maybe it's because in a year when Trump won, losing such a fierce woman who was also such an advocate for mental illness, and who is most often seen as a feminist character who fights a rebellion against a fascist regime seems extra harsh. Maybe I have just had my fill of this year and this latest blow has finally broken me.

In any case, I am devastated. Though in the Star Wars universe I have always seen myself more as a Han than a Leia, I have admired and idolized and wished I was as strong as Leia literally my entire life. She was one of my first clear ideas of what being a fierce, fighting femme in a man's world was like, and so much of my radical politic is shaped by the movement Leia is the heart and soul of. When I was eight years old Princess Leia made me realize that when things are wrong, you fight against them no matter what you lose in the process. I am not tough or brave enough to identify as a Princess Leia, and I certainly don't think I could ever do what General Organa goes on to do. That's okay--we all are who we are, and even if I don't feel up to her caliber of power, the end result is the same for me as it was for so many others: Fisher's portrayal of Leia Organa gave me a strength and a toughness and a bravery to strive for before I was old enough to understand the necessity of those traits, and before anyone could have predicted their relevance in our political climate.

But of course, Carrie Fisher is not just Princess Leia. Carrie Fisher is also the woman who wrote a couple of memoirs that featured her alcoholism and bipolar disorder--two struggles of my mom's that, at the time of my reading them, had driven quite a wedge between my mother and I. My mother is a spectacular person. She is the definition of living unconditional love and acceptance. She is kind to everyone and cares deeply about anyone who's ever entered her world. (She regularly asks how my childhood friends or their parents are doing, even though she hasn't heard from any of them in years and years). She has also been incredibly ill in ways that have wounded me deeply on and off throughout my whole life. When I read Fisher's memoirs, I saw my mom's humanity and struggle in a way that I could not have before, and I saw my mom not only as "very nice but very sick", but as strong and as a survivor of a terrible situation. I wouldn't call our relationship perfect or even repaired, but it's repairing, and I get it now. And I largely get it because of Fisher's openness about her own mental illness in a time when no one was being open about that, at all.

Then there's the parts of Carrie Fisher I do see myself in. My life hasn't been easy, and I don't see my survival as brave. It's just what happened. But I do give myself credit for developing this dark, lovely, weirdly whimsical sense of fun and humor somewhere along the way, and Carrie Fisher's interviews and memoirs that also made jokes about her disorder and struggles were a breath of fresh air when I was getting diagnosed and starting my early treatments for PTSD. She was also a good, fun person by all accounts, (like these for example), and didn't let anything she was going through slow her down. I hope everyone remembers that as much as they remember Leia's influence or even Fisher's feminism or writing and advocacy for mental illness. Because laughter is important, and she brought it everywhere she went, and even if we can never be the fighter Leia is or the advocate Fisher is, we can be the person who works to make people feel safe and happy no matter where we are. That's just as valid a a legacy, and one I hope doesn't get lost.

If you're having a lot of trouble coping with this and don't know what to do beyond "watch Star Wars and cry", I strongly suggest the aforementioned books, as well as this amazing, stupidly good comics series.

Blessed be, rebels.