- I need to make that cobbler again, and contact either the public library or whoever in City Hall manages the upcoming Halloween celebration. I'm told the city does a public trick-or-treating thing on the common, and I want to see if I can get involved with it. All this because I actually want to cook something to give away to kids (and their parents), instead of just buying a couple of lousy bags of candy in a plastic bowl. God (or anyone else) damn this stupid hysteria about strangers on Halloween slipping razor blades into apples.
- Now that it's Monday, I suppose I can say what the sigil was about. I'd written something like this: "My desire is to receive very few calls on the pager this weekend." And the result? I was inundated with calls on Saturday. That means it didn't work, right? However, the strange thing about all of those calls were: the greatest amount of time (and calls) I'd received on Saturday had to do with one single site that called back several times; two of them were from sites that were sending problem signals to our department every single day, and the sigil certainly couldn't stop that from happening; every other call I received was a very simple one that only took a couple of minutes to resolve; and I even got to sleep the entire night. I was expecting to be woken up by the pager in the middle of the night, which happens nearly every time I'm on the pager, but it didn't happen this time. So, am I making an excuse to justify this? This is what I meant when I said yesterday that these exactly the sort of results to expect when one dabbles in "magic" – especially since I'm am absolute beginner at this. I'd made a very modest request and received very modest results. No results at all? I can't tell.
- What's more, one of the calls I received on Saturday wasn't from a site at all – it was from our department manager, asking me to work some overtime yesterday. I did, which gave me another chance to spend some time talking with someone cute I've been making friends with. Furthermore, after being stuck in the apartment all day Saturday and working until yesterday afternoon, I didn't want to come home right away. I went out wandering to see where I would end up…and I ended up in Salem, Massachusetts. In October. In the middle of their ridiculous "Salem Halloween festival" (which lasts the entire month), as we were having some of the best weather you could possibly expect in New England in October. (It was about 80 degrees and sunny!) I wandered through the crowds of tourists and merchants hawking their cheap witch wares, and I looked for something that would appeal to me. And then, another strange coincidence occurred – one that involved a girl I met there. I'm not going to write about this in detail here on my blog, where the entire Internet can read this. Suffice to say, she appeared not once but twice when I did not expect to see her. I ended up giving her a small gift, because I'm like that (as my close friends know). Did anything else happen? I'm not telling.
- In one of the witch shops in Salem, I saw a couple of young kids looking at crystal balls and asking each other, "Is this one real? Is this one real?" I couldn't resist the urge to whisper in the ear of one of them, "They're all real." If you believe in them, they're real. (That's true whether I believe in them or not – if you do, that's what matters to you.)
- And then I posted an introductory message to the Facebook group for Chaos magic: www.facebook.com/groups/62873153619/
- Next up, to set up a routine to practice meditation. So, what's strange and weird about meditation? The primer I'm using is written by a Zen Buddhist monk, not a magician. I have a genuine goal to aim for with this, too – to achieve something akin to gnosis. (I'd mentioned that yesterday.) As I was in Salem yesterday, I decided to practice "concentration" by using one of the basic exercises while walking through the crowds of tourists. No, nothing special happened when I was doing so, and I don't know how successful I was at "concentration." I simply need to practice this regularly.
- "The U.S. government has obtained a controversial type of secret court order to force Google Inc. and small Internet provider Sonic.net Inc. to turn over information from the email accounts of WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal:" [1] And Reverend Magdalen writes, "Anyone shocked by Google handing over #WikiLeaks supporter @ioerror's email obviously doesn't read @CiscoBlogs." [2] She's right – Google has been handing email addresses to the government for a long time, because they have to. Like it or not, Google has to obey the law, even when the law sucks.
- P.S.: How seriously am I taking all of this? That's for me to know and you to guess. Serious enough to write it down, apparently. Of course, there are several million other bloggers out there on Facebook and Livejournal and World of Warcraft and Second Life – is Second Life still around? – who are also writing down their personal experiences, even though many of those experiences involve Justin Bieber's hotness and the New England Patriots' weak defense.