Rantings of an Air Witch

A lot of this blog is just me ranting about whatever pops into my head at the time, and I tried for awhile to keep it light and loose but quite frankly the pagan tag does not allow for light and loose and needs a swift kick in the teeth a lot of the times.. Feel free to ask me anything! Draco Malfoy is life.

[rantingsofanairwitch]

Help request

There is a group called the “County Citizens Defending Freedom” who are going county to county around Florida trying to destroy students access to diverse reading materials. They are trying to ban books around schools (specifically books with LGBT themes or about African American characters) and this awful group has even been buying billboard spaces to try and get more people onto their cause

I know the internet is amazing at coming together to take down these types of organizations. How can a person get a group like this taken down? They are asking for volunteers to email and call, how can someone get the wrath of the web to break their phone and email lines? I’m begging you all, please help to stop these book banning assholes before it gets further than it already has

[forthegothicheroine]

I’m not a classicist, but I suspect one of the reasons so many of the Greek gods are portrayed so unflatteringly was less because they were seen as villains than because they represented their domains.  Of course Zeus sometimes misuses his power, that’s what a king does.  Of course Artemis’s wrath is wild and painful, that’s what nature can be.  Of course Hades snatched away a young girl from her mother’s arms, that’s what death does.  This is one of the reasons callout posts for some gods comparing them negatively to ‘nicer’ gods are kind of missing the point.

[soloontherocks]

IF YOU ARE A DEITY ROLEPLAY BLOG, A "GODKIN", A "GOD SHARD", OR A REGULAR POSTER IN THE #ACTUALLYDIVINE TAG, GET OFF MY BLOG.

DO NOT: -follow me -talk to me -reblog my posts -like my posts -reply to my posts -use my posts for your shitty modern gods rp -reinterpret my religious posts as being about you (they aren’t) -interact with me in any way

IF YOU ARE ONE OF THESE BLOGGERS, UNFOLLOW ME.

IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THIS POST, UNFOLLOW ME.

Hubris is a violation of the ethics of Hellenic Polytheism, and while I cannot stop you from being a useless piece of shit who insults the very Gods they dare imitate, I will not permit you to use my words and content to further your personal blasphemies.

In conclusion:

[rantingsofanairwitch]

A shining light to pierce the darkness A soft note to break the quiet An arrows whistle with feathers gleaming As laurels line the field He who watches over me He who brings me such sweet warmth He who calms my fraying nerves He who is my brightest star O’ sun above me beaming down O’ happy whisper in verse O’ guardian who brings peace in my madness O’ Apollo my soul is yours

Apollo (via rantingsofanairwitch)

[northern-witchcraft]

People Finding Out You're a Witch

Person: So you can like, make stuff fly and shoot fire?

Me: Nah mostly we just light candles and stare at the flame until we get bored

[missbellesmagic]

Hey guys, need help again because I’m useless

this is mostly for Apollo worshipers. Need suggestions for a song that reminds you of him.

Please?

[christowitch]

Sunshine on my Shoulders- John Denver.

[soloontherocks]

You Want To Make A Memory – Bon Jovi

“You wanna make a memory? You wanna steal a piece of time? You can sing the melody to me And I can write a couple lines”

[rantingsofanairwitch]

Happy - Pharrell

There's no lyrical reason, it's just one that somehow always creeps up when I know he's near, usually when I'm especially down and out to the point of seeming like a combination of sweet and cruel irony.

[septemberequinox]

Prayers for Suicidal Hellenic Polytheists

(I’m having a really bad suicidal day, so this is inspired by @aro–aphrodite)

May Zeus provide you the strength to live, and the safe refuge of his protection for when the urges become too much.

May Hera remind you in your darkest hours, the most important relationship is the one with yourself; and may she bless and strengthen the bond of that very union.

May Poseidon keep you safe in all voyages, including the journey that is life. May he prevent you from drowning in both your thoughts and the waters deep below.

May Demeter keep you warm and love you just like a mother. May she send forth gifts of a still soothed mind, and allow all your efforts in recovery to be fruitful.

May Athena, destroyer of Giants, slay the urges and intrusive thoughts too large to defeat on your own. May she protect you and bless you with the will to keep fighting.

May Apollon be by your side, whether it be during therapy or at your bedside in the ward. May he be a ray of light to give you a glimmer of hope.

May Artemis shield you, and provide you relief. May you never be thrown to the wolves, but rather have the courage to bear your teeth for your own defence.

May Ares cover your battle scars, and protect you from more. May he give you the courage of an entire army, and the support of one to. May you be reminded that you need not to win every battle to win the war.

May Aphrodite shower you with the love you deserve, including the love of yourself for yourself. May she remind and teach you that you are beautiful.

May Hephaistos provide you a creative outlet; a distraction to keep hands busy without a blade. May he teach you you can’t forge yourself without the flame, but you have been setting yourself on fire far too long.

May Hermes provide you a safe haven; be it a support group, or even just long drives in the rain to clear your head. May he hold your hand as you cross bridges, and let you find change on the ground after you do not jump.

May Dionysos put a smile on your face, and stand strong along side you, urging you to dance; he knows mental illness all to well. Dance away the demons, dance into relief.

May Haides, somber but not always impartial, lead you away from the incoming cars, and drop sweet nectar into your mouth. It is not yet your time.

May Persephone remind you that the greatest fall can lead you to the greatest heights. There is something honourable about walking out of rock bottom with your head held high, or walking on through like you own the place.

May Hestia keep you warm when your emotions are spent, leaving you numb and cold. May she bless you with a feeling of home whenever possible, and keep those hearth fires burning. And your own inner fire strong, as well.

The Gods demand Arête, your personal best. Arête is not being the most successful person in the world. Sometimes it is merely staying alive. And staying alive, well, that makes the Theoi very happy.

[whynotzoidbergdotorg]

🔮🏛🗽🇺🇸🚫💩🚫🇺🇸🗽🏛🔮

Emoji Spell for Clinton to win the election

Likes charge (say blue)

Reblogs cast (say dump trump)

[succubarbie-deactivated20190205]

persephone: whos a good boys?? cerberus: :0 ??? :O ???? :o ???? persephone: youre a good boys!! all of you!! such good boys!! cerberus: :D!!!!!!! :O!!!!!!! :Dc !!!!!!!!!

[thoodleoo]

my favorite thing about the contrast between early christianity and ancient greek and roman religion is that the difference in the ways they think and talk about their gods is really similar to the difference between how dog and cat owners talk about their pets

[thoodleoo]

early christians: this is our god he’s omnipotent and omniscient and he is better than all of the other gods greeks: this is our party god dionysus he got into an argument with a bunch of frogs once and we love him

[hellenecstatic]

FYI the name Dennis is derived from Dionysus. That is all.

[terpsikeraunos]

this means…denny’s….

[demonbloodsausagedog]

I mean have you ever been in a denny’s parking lot after 2 AM because the etymological ancestry makes perfect sense

[pagansuncensored-deactivated202]

Hey, doesnt solo live in florida? So I wont say it but were all thinking it

[rantingsofanairwitch]

What are you thinking bitch? What could you possibly be saying? If you want to claim Matthew hit because you cursed Solo you are a shit person. If you want to claim Matthew hit because of Solo you are a shit person. You realize there is more than one pagan in Florida right? Also, you are a shit person.

[decemberdancer04]

Reblog this if you had to learn cursive writing as a child

If you were ever told or were made to learn cursive writing when you were in grade school. I wanna see how many of you suffered like I did.

[maryjfoxx]

“Oh , you need to know this. Everything in high school needs to be turned in In cursive.”

[thelastunicorg]

“Everything you write in university has to be in cursive”. -high school

“I don’t give a shit as long as I can read it.” -university

“THIS ASSIGNMENT MUST BE TYPED” – University

[athos-silvani]

Ok, so I’m a college professor, been teaching for more than 5 years, have had *does quick math* about a thousand students, and graded approximately 1800 hand-written exams and assignments. 

I dread when students write in cursive, because I can almost never read it. 

And I remember when I learned cursive in elementary school, and the loops and arounds were inefficient and I didn’t like them but I was told that I had to learn it because “cursive is standardized writing so everyone will be able to read what you write.”

THEY LIED. 

[out-there-on-the-maroon]

They teach us to write in cursive. 

But they never teach us to read in it.

And then we never use it except for signatures.

What is the point of cursive? Does anyone know?

[prettyarb]

Before the ball point pen was invented, writing with quills or fountain pens means that lifting the pen from the paper and then putting it back down was courting an ink blot.  When you’re proficient at it, it’s also faster than printed letters.  Because of this, for a long time it was culturally considered the proper, adult way of writing.  A neat cursive hand was a saleable skill!  Not just anybody could copy over a manuscript well enough to make it worth spending money on, or take down somebody else’s dictation in a way that’d be readable and usable.

It’s still useful for purposes of research!  We’ve had a bunch of students doing research in the library who’ve been stymied by their inability to read cursive script.  Which is pretty notable considering that hand-written documents–letters, diaries, lab notes, recipes–that date back only a couple of decades are still often written in cursive, so it’s a really sudden and still pretty painful gap.  As cursive falls out of the educational system, people are suddenly losing access to things like family historical documents.

But it looks like the time is not long in the future when the cursive alphabet will become primarily a historical artifact, a dead knowledge preserved mainly by specialists for niche purposes.  Kind of interesting to watch it happen.

[out-there-on-the-maroon]

Ah yes, that explains it!

Yeah, growing up I had trouble reading the cursive letters from my relatives and had to ask my mom for help reading them. Otherwise it’d take me ages to read letter by letter. 

I imagine we are moving to that point when this will be an archival problem. Hopefully someone will invent a scanner that can decipher cursive quickly to help with this process and preserve historical documents. 

[akamarykate]

Writing in cursive also engages different parts of the brain and helps build connections between the linear verbal and visual areas of the brain, and develops tactile and fine motor skills (one summation of studies is here). Which doesn’t mean I think everyone needs to learn it or develop a perfect style. But there are schools that still teach it and I think that’s part of why.

Also, as a writer there are times (early rough draft stages especially) when I can get my ideas out better writing with a pen and paper than I can with a keyboard. I can stare at the screen for an hour and get maybe a hundred words out, but if I pick up a pen and notepad all of a sudden everything’s flowing and I can do a thousand words or more in the same amount of time. 

[emilysidhe]

Proficient cursive writing is quicker than proficient print writing, and I remember my teachers telling us it was important less for formal writing (because we were already typing everything by the late nineties), but because it would be necessary for taking notes.  Which it was for me, because I started college in 2003, which was back when it wasn’t very common for professors to allow laptops in class for taking notes (some did, most didn’t) and being able to write quickly by hand was a big bonus.

Interestingly, I’ve had to train myself back out of cursive writing because my students can’t read it.  I still write more quickly in cursive when I remember that I’m writing for myself and can use it (all my shopping lists start out in print and then shift when my mind goes “Wait, only I’m reading this!  I can do cursive!”), but now that I have such little practice with it, I’m starting to make weird mistakes in joining the letters that I never used to.

(fyi I’m about to turn 32 now, so I’m right on the edge of the last generation to learn cursive well.)

[stephanemiroux]

I remember my cursive was so illegible my teacher finally allowed me to use print.

[jacensolodjo]

Cursive writing for those with ADHD and other attention issues you’d think would help but no. it looks even messier than print. 

I couldn’t read my own damn handwriting, print or cursive, because my mind was going faster than i could write which meant sometimes i’d skip whole letters or even words while trying to get my notes down as quickly as fucking possible.

eventually someone let me use my laptop for notes in college. I never would’ve gotten as far as I did if I had to keep doing notes in writing.

Like if i write shit in cursive you might as well just imagine it as a squiggle. And my signature looks like cyrillic cursive. The only good thing about making signatures near illegible is it’s harder to copy/forge a messy one than one you can tell all the letters of. 

[vas-rayya]

As someone else with ADHD, ditto above; in addition, I constantly forget what certain cursive letters look like, and I especially confuse “f” with “b”, and it’s just super inefficient for me purely because I have trouble remembering the strange shapes of the letters. Also my print handwriting is already chicken-scratch.

[rantingsofanairwitch]

A different ADHD perspective, cursive saved my ass. My print is illegible as well as cursive, but cursive gave me an outlet to write fast and get everything out that I wanted out, it also helped act as a calmer for me when my mind would start moving too quickly. Going back and trying to translate some of the things I wrote sucks, but I'm glad I had that as an outlet because print was destroying the muscles in my hand and couldn't keep up with my mind.

[rantingsofanairwitch]

I'm being followed by crows and the smell of funeral flowers

[rantingsofanairwitch]

Life has dealt me an incredibly shitty hand recently, to the point of not being able to function or sleep properly and it's a place I haven't been in mentally in over seven years. Any bit of goodness that was inside me is trapped in a cage and hatred is filling it's place. Raging fire runs through my veins in place of blood and any shred of happiness I thought was possible has been swallowed whole. This life is an inescapable hell that I can't imagine ever getting better.

[pagansuncensored-deactivated202]

I really wish I'd lurked around here longer before I converted to Hellenic polytheism. I love my gods and I don't think I could ever leave them now that I've "met" them, but I grow increasingly despondent over the fact that I feel immoral being part of a religion where the way some of you behave isn't considered wrong. How can I reconcile loving my gods with seeing their followers failing to treat each other with basic human decency with no condemnation or consequences?

[rantingsofanairwitch]

Go fuck yourself anon

[pagansuncensored-deactivated202]

Part A Woah, woah, okay. This isn't pagan related necessarily, but self diagnosing is harmful as fuck, and this fact has been proven over and over again. And don't go screaming "ALBIEST" on me you privileged shits. I have major depression, GAD, OCD, AND a sub category or ADHD which I can never remember the name of. I can understand if you don't have access to medical help wanting to know why you feel the way you do- trust me I do, but self-dxing isn't healthy! Self-dxing when you don't have...

Access to medical help may seem like a good idea, but ultimately it usually does more harm than good. The most dangerous aspect- by not seeking out help, you can wind up missing important underlying issues. They can be as serious as a mother fucking brain tumor people! Not to mention, there is something called a self-fulfilling prophecy. By believing something so much, you may unintentionally develop it. Which trust me, if you don’t have a certain mental illness, you do not bloody want it

Mental illness IS NOT FUN. Don’t believe tumblr bs about how “helpful” it is. Another thing, mental illness is NOT you. It is NOT your entire personality, even if it can feel like it. Not to mention, misdiagnosis is common. If it can be difficult for doctors to diagnose you, what in the bloody world makes you think you would be able to do better than someone’s who has studied this stuff for years. The most common argument I hear is that you know yourself best. Yes, in theory, but you are

Also heavily, heavily biased, leading to in accurate diagnosing. Another problem is people pushing all of their problems on their illness. Being an asshole is a YOU problem. Abusing people is a YOU problem. Don’t be a little shit. Sure- illness could play a role in it, but ultimately it’s your choice. Final note- if you would self-diagnose and self-treat with cancer, don’t fucking do it for something as bloody serious as mental illness.

[rantingsofanairwitch]

All of this. Yes to all of it. If you don't agree the unfollow button is in the top right hand corner.