convocation is my hogwarts, pt. 2
We got up early to go to a panel about figuring out what your psychic power is. Colleen wanted to go to a Learn to Read Tarot workshop, but she said she was too hungover to concentrate on it, and also she wanted to stick with me. So this mom-like, down-to-earth-sounding lady in a turtleneck spent a while describing and delineating different kinds of psychic powers and how to best use them. She had some really interesting terms, like clairsentience and clairtangency, and discussed some interesting ways they manifested and how to use them (ask yourself questions about the feeling/information you're getting and see what happens). She also told illustrative stories about her powers. She had EVERY PSYCHIC POWER EVER, including being a medium, and she told all of the stories with a folksy, "ha ha life being a psychic sure is weird" kind of tone. (bitch, if you got so many psychic powers and you're such a successful author why you working part-time at Michael's--alternately, why do so many people with psychic powers never use them to get really high-paying jobs or something, they're all working retail and shit unless they're on TV). Colleen said she thought it was a load of bullshit; I liked the advice, but I really didn't believe most of the stories (except for the one she told about finding her brother in a construction site when she was ten). Then she had people demonstrate psychic powers. She gave her ring to a few people and had them hold it and see what they got from it. One guy was like, "Love...commitment...a big occasion...tears..." and she was like, "OMG, YOU ARE PSYCHIC, YOU TOTALLY GOT IT." Then she asked for someone who wasn't very empathic to hold it, and my hand shot up. So she put it in my hand and asked me what I felt, and I'm like, "um my palms are sweaty and it's a circle." Then she asked me what I heard and saw and I ended up having to say, "People breathing, and nothing." She said I was overthinking it, and then she asked me to find the Ace of Spades in one out of three cards that she put on the table as a demonstration of a super easy psychic exercise she told us about. So I looked at them for a bit, and I thought about the Roald Dahl story "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar," and skipped to imagining the images and numbers on the backs of the cards. It worked, I guess; I picked up the Ace of Spades to show the crowd, which was a very nice feeling. However, I did have a one in three chance of doing it. I tried it again with the same cards after, and I picked the wrong card twice. One out of three is, after all, one out of three.
Then I got some coffee and we went to the Michelle Belanger lecture on objectivity, which was in the same room. It was quite a good lecture, and sorely needed in a community where there is a certain amount of social pressure to believe anything and everything--she touched on peer pressure, the desire to fit in, expectation of what's going to happen with any given situation, the desire to make a thing happen, and how people will retroactively edit their experiences to fit in with what they want to happen. One lady asked, "So, I had this experience in a group meditation that was different from everyone else's, and when I told everyone about it they all looked disappointed, but the instructor took me aside afterwards and told me that I was a very, very special snowflake indeed."
Then we went to lunch. There was a thing Colleen really wanted to go to at 2, and Dan wanted to go to lunch and introduce his friends to us, so we went to meet them at the Chili's next door. Unfortunately the restaurant was very crowded and it took a while for them to seat us, so Colleen and I bowed out and got lunch to go. I ended up running into several people to eat with back at the hotel; it was nice to have a little crowd to chat with while shoveling taco salad into my mouth.
The thing Colleen wanted to go to was a lecture on modern knighthood. It was about community service, and she was unimpressed and kept whispering at me about how the lecturer didn't know his history. I was getting dizzy and getting this weird deja vu feeling that I get sometimes that always makes me think that something very important and bad is going to happen, so I told her I was going to get some water and left. Oh my, do I have a psychic power, or do I sometimes get overwhelmed and dissociative when I'm physically fatigued and stressed? MAYBE BOTH. (Actually, the mechanism of this thing makes me think it might be some kind of precognition, but it's a weird complicated thing and I've never bothered to document or "train" it, so it's equally possible that it's some kind of small brain tumor? Usually what happens is that I have a dream that isn't all that weird or fantastical, it just involves people, places, and emotions that I don't really have the context for. Months or even years later, I have a moment of intense deja vu where I start to tingle and feel weird, and then I remember, "Oh, this was a dream." I am usually able to remember the dream as well as the morning after I had it, and I remember what I did in the dream, and the consequences--usually bad--and then I usually either leave or avoid doing the thing I did in the dream, which is often a weird, dumb thing that I find inadvisable anyway. So far nothing drastic has happened from this.)
I told her I was going to go back to the Hospitality suite and get some coffee, but I ended up stopping into a beading workshop held by Mia. I didn't have the cash for supplies to make anything, but I ended up hanging around and kibitzing anyway. It was really calming to be around people who were concentrating happily on something fiddly and repetitive, and Mia was nice and very chill. I met a few nice people and Mia helped me figure out how to make a pendant out of some stones I was lugging around. Colleen apparently wasn't getting anything out of the workshop either and was looking for me, and once I got out we kept missing each other. We went back up to the room so we could drop some stuff off, and I ran into my friend Kirsten, who had called up to check on me after the Poison ritual and said she had something to show me. She works with the Muses, and she wanted to show me the ritual that the Muses had made her do before Con. She wrote it down for me and said, "They're telling me to tell you to use this until you get your own ritual." I thanked her and told her I'd try it. I haven't yet, but I have also been recovering from Con and not in the mood to begin to create. So, I'll probably try it tomorrow night when I'm done with this record and see how that goes. It can't hurt anything.
Then we went to a lecture on Magic and Paganism in Britain 1800-1938 by Jason Mankey, which was informative and interesting. He said that we think of religious tolerance, atheism, paganism, etc. as not really being a thing that existed way back when, but that there were plenty of people who were atheists or played around with occult rituals pretty much throughout the history of the Christian church, and the 1800s were no exception. I'd write up more notes, but I'm writing this at work before clocking in because I got here too early and I don't have my notes from Con :( One of the things he mentioned specifically was the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, which I'd heard of before. Also, people couldn't stop saying "Sandy Balls." Heh.
Then Colleen and I, unable to find anyone to lunch with us, went to Red Robin for beershakes and discussed the con so far.
We got back in time to change and go to Mankey's Big Old Fashioned Wiccan Ritual. I like him as a ritual presenter, too; he combines an air of formality and ritual with a comfortable atmosphere and jokes. He had his wife there, and it was terribly obvious that he absolutely adored her. I got the feeling that the rituals they put on for their own coven were a bit more...ecstatic. He had us shout out the new experiences that we'd had at Con and put them into a cauldron, and then he and his wife gave everyone beads to symbolize the new experiences.
I thought it was really nice. Colleen liked it less than the Gnostic ritual, but then she's been to a lot of Wiccan/Wicca-flavored rituals with Dan's coven with me and it wasn't terribly new to her. We went back up to the room to change, and she had to relax and cool down a bit. She was unhappy that she'd missed some things she wanted to do, and she felt that she was unable to find something she wanted to get out of Con. She said that she wanted more out of the rituals, something primal that she was fascinated by. I told her that a lot of the rituals and things that we were going to were sort of toned down for Con because they were meant to be little tastes of new things, and she agreed that that made sense but she still was kind of unsatisfied. So that's when we started to chat with Ted and Tonya about it...