aries: light candles. burn bridges and pumpkin scented candles with the same match. burn all the rotten residue. enjoy life without the hecklers.
taurus: when you trick-or-treat, they will say you are too old. you have always been too old. you are old as the earth and it creaks in your bones
gemini: bitter black brew. it is the deadliest poison. drink, drink until you’re sick, until your eyes are sunken in your skull. add sugar and cream first.
cancer: you can’t keep yourself in the same closet as your skeletons. unless you are a skeleton. if so, sort the bones. find a better place to bury them.
leo: jump in a pile of leaves. take a moment to sink under the pile, in peace. sink, sink deeper and darker. let the ground take you. make friends there.
virgo: what’s better than an over-sized sweater? bury yourself in knit cable sweaters. keep knitting. build yourself a cave of comfort. don’t build a way out.
libra: double-cross the monster under your bed. buy bunk beds. tuck them in at night. everything’s a monster with bags under its eyes.
scorpio: bite your tongue. drink the blood. go see a doctor. tear the stitches out and redo them yourself. what, weren’t you going to do that anyway?
sagittarius: you can’t apologize for the beast the full moon made of you. but the one you became during the crescent moon did some fucked up shit bro.
capricorn: take down your hair, take off your glasses, shed your skin, go deep into the woods, lurk in the dark. it’s time there was a monster to fear.
aquarius: cold, cold hands. blue and veined. kiss mysterious girls and average men in doorways. what happens to them after is not of your concern.
pisces: some flowers only bloom in the winter. wreath yourself in frost, breathe mist into the air. they never told you ghosts haunt themselves first.
Yeah, let's not forget how well "feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice" went over. Lesbians are still terrified that bisexual women will "betray" them by "going back" to men.
honestly landslide is too important of a song to just be played haphazardly on the radio
it should only be listened to if and when you’re ready to accept stevie nicks into your heart and admit that you’re afraid of changing and you don’t know if you can handle the seasons of your life
For Month of Love’s Week 4 challenge, “Metamorphoses”
“Can’t you see where memories are kept bright?
Tripping on the water like a laughing girl
Time in her eyes is spawning past life
One with the ocean and the woman unfurled
Holding all the love that waits for you here”
Yesterday I did one of Jessamyn Stanley’s yoga videos and I only want fat exercise instructors from now on. I am pretty okay at keeping the body image brain weasels away but they find little cracks to get in sometimes. I have not been as active lately (work took over my life in a mean way) and just thinking about being in any kind of fitness environment was so mentally exhausting, I use a lot of energy to deflect all of the little comments that people make about their own bodies at the gym, all the morality that gets superimposed on exercising and eating and having a body. It’s such a relief to see a woman who looks something like me just moving her body, adjusting her belly, talking matter of factly about the practicalities of moving and stretching when you’re fat, to not have an instructor suggest that obviously your reason for exercising is to lose weight. It was such a breath of fresh air. Her tone is just also very warm and reassuring and a bit irreverent. Fat exercise instructors always.
Get this: She was way into magic before she got that role. Now, she does tarot readings at House Of Intuition.
It was serendipity. My friend had just gone through a breakup, her boyfriend moved out and she needed sage to switch up the energy in their shared apartment. When you live in L.A., there’s only one place to go for spiritual healing: House of Intuition, purveyor of all things metaphysical like crystals, candles and incense. Its most magical location is in a craftsman home tucked away and up too many steps off Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park.
After seven minutes of shopping, the sales people smelled my friend Nicole’s post-breakup vulnerability. They suggested a tarot reading, which isn’t cheap, but we did it anyway. Each of us paid $40 for 15-minute private readings. Little did we know that our tarot reader would be Rachel True, who also happened to play Rochelle in the ‘90s cult classic The Craft , a film about a supernatural group of teen girls who end up ruling the high school thanks to witchcraft (and, by the way, that movie is getting a reboot). True as my tarot reader blew my mind because, well, it doesn’t get anymore L.A. than that. But get this: She was way into magic before she got that role.
True says she has always been able to tap into people’s energy. She told me this weeks after my reading when we met at a bar in Hollywood. “The [tarot] cards … help me articulate the situation; and then I use my intuition to kind of springboard off of that,” she says. “As a little kid, I felt living in New York City, I was getting all of this energy and information, and it was too much, and it was kind of overwhelming.” So she shut it down — but not for long.
True moved to L.A. one month after the riots when she was cast in the Chris Rock movie CB4. Boyz n the Hood and Straight Out of Brooklyn had been released a year prior, but she didn’t necessarily want to be in those movies. “We were just trying to get in movies that were not just one thing or just the other,” she says. True grew up in a Jewish family in New York’s East Village. She says that had an effect on the roles she gravitated toward. “I wanted to show the town there are black people who articulated the way I did,” she says. “And it’s simply a patois of where I grew up, not an indictment of my blackness.”
In the early ‘90s, she mostly landed appearances in TV shows like Beverly Hills, 90210 and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air before the work died down. And that’s when she embraced the esoteric world, she says: “Instead of kind of feeling sorry for myself or fighting against it, I just jumped into my tarot studies and kept notebooks and really got to know the cards, and the combinations and things like that.”
Talk about manifesting your ideal part. Soon after, she discovered the script for The Craft through her friend, actor Jordan Ladd, and she thought: “If anyone is going to be a little black witch in this town: It’s me! It’s me!” Not everyone thought that was the right move, she says. “There are quite a bit of other black actresses who came up to me and said I would never have played that because you know, the devil.”
The devil? She was just happy to get the part — even if it was playing the black best friend. Now, more than 20 years later, she mocks those roles: “Hey, I’m like the black best friend. Are you OK? Is everything OK with you, white girl, because there’s like nothing going on with me and my family or anything, you will never meet my family. I am just here as a prop for you.” There were exceptions, like playing Dave Chappelle’s love interest, Mary Jane, in Half Baked, which still resonates with stoners. “I can go anywhere in the world and get a joint … kind of a good skill,” she says.
If you scroll through True’s Instagram today, you’ll find posts about aging or health and beauty tips. You won’t see anything about spiritual healing or her tarot readings at House of Intuition, where she’s been working for a year. “I find that a lot of people have a misconception that there is something heavy or dark about it. And honestly it is just cards with archetypes on them,” she says. “The tricky thing that I think people miss is the cards aren’t magic, what they do is: they help you — they hopefully help you — lock into your own intuition.”
My reading with True was every piece of motherly advice I’ve ever gotten — and then some — wrapped up into 15 minutes. Surrounded by the smells of palo santo, sage and magic candles, True told me I like to play the victim (oops!) and that I should get better at practicing patience in achieving whatever I want out of life (coincidentally my friends call me “Patience” because I have none). She’s perceptive. And in a tarot reading, she has full reign to tell you how it is. Yet she won’t go full Rochelle on your ass. Her mantra is pragmatic and can be applied to anything, really: “Visualize it, create it and then work really hard towards that goal,” she says.
Oh, and what does she think about The Craft getting a reboot? She’s into it. But she thinks it would be even better with adult witches. “Imagine seeing Fairuza [Balk]’s character as an adult — fucking fascinating. But that’s also because I am my age.” Who knows. With her track record, if she keeps saying that out loud, she might just get her way.
Mary Lambert, Halsey and Lauren Jauregui, Hailee Steinfeld and Carly Rae Jepsen all gave us new queer or queer-ish songs this week, and it’s up to you to make at least one of them the song of…
Queerness, to me, is about far more than homosexual attraction. It’s about a willingness to see all other taboos broken down. Sure, many of us start on this path when we first feel “same sex” or “same gender” attraction (though what is sex? And what is gender? And does anyone really have the same sex or gender as anyone else?). But queerness doesn’t stop there.
This is a somewhat controversial stance, but to me queer means something completely different than “gay” or “lesbian” or “bisexual.” A queer person is usually someone who has come to a non-binary view of gender, who recognizes the validity of all trans identities, and who, given this understanding of infinite gender possibilities, finds it hard to define their sexuality any longer in a gender-based way. Queer people understand and support non-monogamy even if they do not engage in it themselves. They can grok being asexual or aromantic. (What does sex have to do with love, or love with sex, necessarily?) A queer can view promiscuous (protected) public bathhouse sex with strangers and complete abstinence as equally healthy.
Queers understand that people have different relationships to their bodies. We get what it means to be stone. We know what body dysphoria is about. We understand that not everyone likes to get touched the same way or to get touched at all. We realize that people with disabilities may have different sexual needs, and that people with survivor histories often have sexual triggers. We can negotiate safe and creative ways to be intimate with people with HIV/AIDs and other STIs.
Queers understand the range of power and sensation and the diversity of sexual dynamics. We are tops and bottoms, doms and subs, sadists and masochists and sadomasochists, versatiles and switches. We know what we like and don’t like in bed.
We embrace a wide range of relationship types. We can be partners, lovers, friends with benefits, platonic sweethearts, chosen family. We can have very different dynamics with different people, often all at once. We don’t expect one person to be able to fulfill all our diverse needs, fantasies and ideals indefinitely.
Because our views on relationships, sex, gender, love, bodies, and family are so unconventional, we are of necessity anti-assimilationist. Because under the kyriarchy we suffer, and watch the people we love suffering, we are political. Because we want to survive, we fight. We only want the freedom to be ourselves, love ourselves, love each other, and live together. Because we are routinely denied that, we are pissed.
Queer doesn’t mean “don’t label me,” it means “I am naming myself.” It means “ask me more questions if you curious” and in the same breath means “fuck off.”
At least, that is what it means to me.
Excerpt from What Queerness Means to Me by Asher « Tranarchism (via fuckyeahbiguys)
