In Comes November

Unless you're here for the first time and know nothing about witches, you know by now that October is my absolute favorite month. This one was a little rougher than most, but in true October fashion it all came together and created a stunning bigger picture for the season and I am so happy with how it all came together. Here's some snapshots for the month as we move into November. I often forgot how lovely November can be too. This year I might have some fun semi-surprises going on in my personal life, and will have some events/press/etc. going on that I'll probably talk about here. Here's where October took me:

• My Tarot Practice: took a bit of a hit this month, and after a real rollercoaster year in my creative life, I struggled to find spiritual and emotional centeredness, eventually getting there by the end of the month. I've decided to shelve my push to work events for awhile (inspired in part by this post), if not forever. I was shocked when that decision resulted in a new burst of individual client work, potential writing and collaborative opportunities, and a few exact ideal events (but not an overwhelming amount) cropping up. Sometimes you have to kill something that's been stressing you or bringing you down to achieve the greatness you know you deserve, and that's a core tenant of my life, yet I am always surprised by how quick that turnaround was.
  
  My tarot highlight of the month was reading at the anniversary party for the Eye of Horus--I had such a lovely time and got to read for a store regular dressed as Rose Quartz from Steven Universe! I love my work family so much. They have been so supportive of my tarot career inside and outside of the store and I really feel I've grown as a reader and a witch in ways I never anticipated when I nervously went in for my audition gig. I'm so grateful and so happy for such a celebration of their 13th year.
• Things I Wrote: While I kept up with my steady writing gigs and am happy with the (sparse, few, but lovely) things I posted here, one of my best memories for the month (and year!) was featuring at Story Club, a local storytelling event in which I talked about one of my worst and least talked about trauma sources. The crowd was perfect and I feel such an intense relief--and an intense eagerness for more storytelling opportunities!
• Theatre Life: GADFLY KILLED IT THIS MONTH. I am beside myself. Our first mainstage show at the Gallery sold out it's entire closing weekend, and in fact oversold one night (which was stressful in its own right, but the right kind of stress). In addition to that, we welcomed long-time queer art icon company Patrick's Cabaret into the space for regular events, and got to see some of our all time favorite performers at Outspoken queer open mic's third anniversary.
• Other Things I Loved: Manny and I's queerplatonic partnership turned 13! Exciting stuff. We met right around Halloween--we didn't get to celebrate until just barely into November, but it was marvelous nonetheless. Our Samhain ritual with another friend was very special and really magick (and unexpectedly invigorating). Other fun things from the month:
  • All of my friends' Halloween costumes were so cute! Manny went as Tina Belcher, and I spent time with a Ghostbuster. Those were my faves, but everyone rocked it this year. You can see some on my personal instagram. I also do a (mostly daily) free promotional reading to help guide your day there.
  • I saw Chastity Brown in concert again, this time on her own! Her voice alone brings me to tears, and the intimacy of the space we were at made everything extra evocative.
  • I guess I live here now? A couple of my favorite nights of the month were spent with a fancy overpriced OR really crappy beer, long intense games of oversized Jenga, and some very hostile (on my end) pinball. They have them in more places than just Minneapolis, so see if one's near you if you aren't living here!
  • Walks along the Mississippi never get old, and Pokemon giving us extra candy and ghosts made that extra true. I also love just sitting by the dam and listening though, and there's usually a busker I really love right nearby.
  • I did try to go to the Luke's Diner pop-up because I am an unabashed Gilmore Girls fangirl, but the place I was at ran out of everything! I was so disappointed but consoled myself with Tiny Diner because it's also amazing.
  • Book recommendations! Even This Page Is White by Vivek Shraya left me unable to move or even blink in multiple places. One of the hands down best poetry books I have ever read in my entire life. Buy it right here. Just do it. In lighter news, Spider-Gwen took me awhile to get to. It was on my comics list, just not high priority. I'm glad I delved in though, it's pretty rad. I've also been plowing my way through 11/22/63 by Stephen King. I'm not finished, but I'm super into it. King is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me--I don't love his protagonists most of the time, and plotholes exist pretty plentifully in his world, but this one is really absorbing and a great offset to a hectic, tumultous, but ultimately good month.
  • TV & Music Recommendations: This season of How to Get Away With Murder is seriously heart attack inducing. I just want my big dumb babies to be okay. I also hopped on the Steven Universe bandwagon late in the game but I'm ridiculously here for it. I already talked to you about Chastity Brown but WOW. Her CD and EP will cut to your core. It didn't get much notice, but Rufus Wainwright has a CD of Shakespeare's sonnets set to music. It's not for everyone--but it is amazing if you're into that sort of thing.

That was my month! I hope you all had a marvelous month of spoop and celebration and witchery. Feel free to tweet at me, leave comments, etc. to tell me about your own month or chime in about my recommendations. Until next time,

Blessed Be.

Los Angeles, Queer Art, and the Eye of Horus

Oh gosh, friends. March 2016 will go down in my personal history as one of the best and worst months of my entire life. The things that were good were unbelievable, but the things that weren't have made me feel like crumbling and giving up on various dreams for the first time really in my life. I absolutely love everything I do, but when you are trying so hard in one area and it feels like you're getting nowhere, it is a hopeless feeling. After many tarot readings and much soul-searching, I once again know I am doing the right things in the right place in generally the right time. I know things are going to turn around, I do. In the meantime, here are the highlights of where I went when I wasn't writing this blog:

• My steady tarot gig gives me so much solace. Everyone was so happy to see me when I came back from LA, and I have some clients going through much tougher things than I that are handling it with so much grace. Sometimes my clients truly do inspire me as much as I hope to be helping them, and it's such a joy be at The Eye of Horus a few days a week.
• I road tripped to LA with two of my dearest friends to marry off one of our other dearest friends. I never did do an official travel diary in spite of feeling incredibly spiritually connected to so much of what happened, but I ate some of the best food of my life, saw some friends who are so, so special to me when I wasn't doing wedding stuff, shopped Studio City, did so much tarot on patios and reading in hot tubs, and the road trip itself brought me to tears with the beauty of the Rockies, the desert, and so much more.

Ignore my total femme fail nail situation going on here.

• My beloved theatre company curated what I honestly think were three amazing nights of all LGBTQQIAP+ entertainment, and while so much of the process didn't pan out like we hoped, the generosity of performers, the venue, and the audience that did come was unparallel to anything we've experienced thus far. Honestly, by the end of the process I could have been a million times worse off but so, so many beautiful people around me gave so much of themselves when I needed them too, and in the end we did raise some money for a space, and we did make new Gadfly fans, and we did have so much to be grateful for.
• After L.A. I planned to get reacquainted with my new living space, and get the cats used to everything. In between writing articles, planning my next artistic ventures, and everything else that went on, I did manage too. My fluffy cat is still a jerk to the dog, but the dog's learned to let it go, and they DO all sleep in the luckily King sized bed with me.
• You might hear more about this later, but the QPP and I have been in a weird headspace so we've been adventuring around the Twin Cities by checking out new spots...but also by checking out old haunts from when we were other people with other squads. It's been interesting, and we're not done yet, so I want to see where this ultimately takes us and why before I say too much else.
• Among the great new things I've tried, there is an innovative new ice cream place that I'm in love with (so not vegan, so don't even care). I know that sounds hella pretentious, and it kind of us, but it's also a total party in your mouth. I also love the rebranding and new menu at one of my old faves, and two of my dearest friends took me here for belated birthday treats (pictured below).

• I was on a few podcasts and it was really fun. Check out Magnotronic here and Broadside here! I also did KFAI's Fresh Fruit again, but I'm not sure if the recording is still up.

There really were a lot of highlights this month. In addition to my personal highlights above, a good friend of mine won an amateur drag competition I was lucky enough to see, I read a lot of really amazing books (including the new Jhumpa Lahiri, which is one of the single best books I have ever read) and graphic novels, (This one sticks with me the most.) and I'm a little late to the game, but when I really needed to hide away from the world I caught up with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a surprisingly progressive show doing some really interesting things artistically and socially.

Please feel free to chime in promoting your own recent work or letting me know where to find cool stuff online or in Minneapolis I'd be into!

Until then, Blessed Be.

So I Bought the Justice League Tarot On A Whim...

I'm a huge comic book fan. I'm in a WTF Comics Club (the one from the Mary Sue, actually!) and it is one of my greatest joys in life to sit down with a stack of graphic novels and plow through them. My favorite major publisher is Image--I will read almost anything if you tell me that's where it's published, but I'm also a Wonder Woman fanatic and no stranger to the two big house. So when I saw whisperings online of a Justice League Tarot online, I went ahead and grabbed it for my birthday. I was pleasantly surprised by some things, so let's go ahead and dig into my review!

Please excuse the cat hair. It lives on everything I own.

Overall inspiration and connection: Connection for me? Great. This is the first deck I ever bought for 100% novelty value, so when I threw a couple of cards down as daily readings, I was pleasantly surprised by the connection I had. I do think that in novelty decks, strong connection to the source material matters more than the "legitimacy" or whatever of the deck, so for DC fans, this is a very pleasant surprise. I've used it for a few personal readings to great success. In terms of inspiration, the creators made some strange choices. There are very strange characters on some cards, and while this is called the Justice League Tarot, it's basically just all original DC art, which is fine it's just not what I expected. What works in this deck really works. Green Arrow as the symbol of generosity on the Six of Pentacles? Perfection. The Tower was practically made for the chaos that the Joker brings. Harley Quinn as The Fool? Surprising but absolutely fitting if you think about it for a few seconds. But then there were things like Bane as the Ace of Pentacles that were incredibly distracting...

Artwork: For comic fans this deck is stunning. The artwork is all original, and the way they combine the DC character mythology with Tarot symbolism is generally awe-inspiring. My favorite comic book characters ever are Wonder Woman and Poison Ivy, and Ivy's Empress almost brought me to tears. I want a poster of it in my room. It's amazing. It's this decks strongest feature for sure.

Card Quality: What this card has in artwork cred, it lose almost completely in card quality. Thick cardstock, barely glossed. Hard to shuffle and I'm constantly terrified of bending them and making visible cracks.
Queering Potential: Anytime you're working with established material that gets into a tricky area. Certainly there are no opportunities to queer existing characters but many of the LGBTQ+ characters in the DC canon show up in this deck in nice places. And then there's this. This means a lot to me that the card that is the biggest indicator of true, healthy love is a same-sex pairing.

Guide Book and Ease of Learning: AND here is the next biggest flaw in this deck. There is no guidebook or little white book. Not only is there no guidebook, but you can't even buy one separately. If you don't know the entire DC canon (I Don't) it's really hard to gauge how good some cards are. AND if you don't already know tarot (luckily I know THAT very, very well) this is obviously not a starter or even intermediate deck. Because this deck doesn't have a guidebook, those strange choices they made don't have an explanation or a way to reframe your thinking. I was really disappointed in the lack of supplemental materials to be honest. I'm not disappointed in decks a lot, there are just things that work for me and things that don't but to have such beautiful artwork, and to come from a world like comics that are so rick in storytelling and character and have nothing explaining the process of how it came together or giving interpretations? It was a bit of a bummer.

Even so I do enjoy this deck. I know tarot well enough to figure out the direction they took things, and because it is a novelty deck I likely won't use it except for myself and close friends. It's a fun addition to your repertoire, and it's connection with querents and the beautiful artwork were a very pleasant surprise. It's not one I'd necessarily recommend to anyone who wasn't a huge comics fan, but for what it is I'm glad I purchased it and have it in my repertoire, I'm just not as over the moon about it as I hoped to be.

Does anyone else have this deck? Thoughts?