I firmly believe that education, done well, is the greatest force for change.

greygirlbeast's post about the deteriorating state of nature.

I think the sadest line is the second to last one: "The future sucks."

Recently, I was asked to put together a statement of my "philosophy on teaching," for the purposes of a note of teaching excellence, on my transcript, and I really do believe, with each passing day, that it comes down to what Lorraine said: "Education is empowerment and, therefore, the success of any educational experience is measured in how empowered the recipient believes he or she is."

If I do my job well, if i correctly apply the work I'm doing and have done, then my students will leave, at the end of the day feeling like they can make a fucking difference, in the world. In a way that's selfish, I know. I feel like I can make a difference, by making them feel the same way. By making them Know it. I want to give people the tools to excell, to make something out of themselves, and the world around them. I want people to see that there's more to do than sit, watch TV, get an MBA, and fill some low-level administrative job, for the next 50 years. I want them to realise that, even if thy do that, they can do more, too.

I want them to want to do more, to know more...

Fuck. I don't want the future to suck. I'm going to do my fucking damnedest to make sure that people realise they can do something about it. I'm not a climatologist, I'm not a politician, and I'm not a preacher. I teach people things how to think. Not what to think, but how. To take the world in front of them, and engage it in a way such as they can make it make sense. If you can do that, then, at the end of the day, I've done my job.

Maybe that's idealistic. Maybe it's hokey, or whatever the fuck, but I can't continue to simply sit and watch wave after wave of people Not Care. That much wasted potential is a fucking travesty, to me; a crime against existence...

"Sweetness... sweetness, I was only joking..."

Dreams, last night, of needing to be in the general area of Not Here. Something, first, about a movie theatre, and afilm of Dragon*Con, wherein someone made a video of themselves to make them look like the greatest PiKthulhu rancher of all time. I saw him, at Con, taking video of me, and put a stop to him, but there was apparently a secondary camera which I hadn't taken, after breaking. Leaning over to mech_angel and saying "I could get used to seeing myslf on screen," and smiling, because I really couldn't.

A series of not running, precisely, but the need for scarcity. mech_angel had pulled a con or taken something that not everyone liked. We walked/took the train/flew to London, and when we got there, I somehow merged with John Constantine. We couldn't be different people, and we spent the time reliving old memories of each other's lives, and telling them to mech_angel. Reality was in comic format, as well as reality format.

As we and mech_angel walked out of an office building that was also a movie theatre, running episodes of lives, there was a large black man, who was a combination of Map and my friend Johnson. He was pleased to see us, and to be introduced to mech_angel, but you could tell tha there was some kind of edge to him, soimething that was bothering him. We went back to his building, which was the building we had left, and

I'm in a darkened floor of an aparatment/office building. I've been riding the elevators between the floors of this place, for hours, and some floors are nicely furnished, with many wealthy nice people, and others are empty shite-holes with barely any walls. On the shite floors, the real work is done, and chunks of frozen meat, in styrofoam coolers, are cut up into cubes with a plasmalaser, so that they may be more easily destroyed. They meat is sheep and other carcasses, and if they aren't burned, everyone outside will die. While here, John and I are separate people, and he berates me when I fuck up using the plasma laser whip, which is sometimes like a flash light. When it's like a flashlight, it barely cuts anything, and I know that Map is going to ask me something.

He starts talking about telling a tale of John Constantine and John and I are merging again. He starts talking about a poker game, telling a story, for mech_angel, one she's never heard, of something horrible that I/John have/has done. He's walked to the end of the train car/floor, and I/We say, loudly, because he's right next to us, "I'm not a nice person. You know that, Map. And not-nice people need people they can trust." And I look at him, a long time, holding the plasmalaser whip flashlight that sometimes looks like a really big dentalfloss toothpick, only with a string of electricity through it, instead of floss. The tension and the Panel disolve, and the cloud of smoke with purple edges mech_angel was watching becomes

Fingers with purple nails waving in front of her face, asking her destination, and she looked at a very simplified Tube map, and asked John and I if we all needed to go to Heathrow. John said that eveerywhere went to Heathrow, and I said that, bcause we wanted to be out of the city, Heathrow is Exactly where we want to go. We all start to head for the other end of the train, past the man selling Wired subscriptions on his lunchbreak, talking to no one and nothing in particular, maybe talking into an earpiece, for his phone. I wake up

With The Smiths stuck in my head. Couldn't get back to sleep, until I wrote that all down. Too awesomely fucked up.

Reading Low Read Moon, last night, one of my favourite greygirlbeast chracters is no more, but in such a way as to make the rest... have to hold tighter? Yeah, i think that works.

Buy her books. I'll keep saying it, until you do. She's small press, so she really does depend on your buying the damned things. So buy them.

Saturday Night Open Mic

Panacea - [Hellbringer]--- They tell you that writing and defending your thesis wil lbe one of the hardest things you ever do. They don't tell you that the process of getting there is one of the most maddening.

They don't tell you that the work you do will take months to even get started, because no one will think that what you're doing is doable.

No one in philosphy or religious studies wants to hear that you're writing on Magic as a thing in itself, not as a better way to understand ritual, or as everything that is wrong with "The Folk's" thinking, everything against which we're trying to stand. No one likes it when you defend it.

I've come to a conclusion: People don't want to talk about magic, if they don't have to. They'll acknowledge that weird shit happens, and they'll nod and wink and then they'll call it an "outlier" or a "fluke," like becaue it only happens every so often, it's a fucking inconsequential thing. It doesn't matter, right? Wrong. It all matters.

It's all important data, and we should time, measure and recognise the place it holds in the human whatever the fuck.

Jack Off Jill - [Horrible]--- But I rant and rave and do go on. I'm in the midsts of what is possibly the most annoying process of my life, thus far, and it holds a bit of my head-space, because of it.

I want to make the world a place where the weird shit, the magic, the awe and wonder is what we experience every day. Or at least don't dismiss, when we see it, and this is one of the few ways I know to do this, and get more people to see it to do it, too.

Gogol Bordello - [Immigrant Punk]--- Hello.