Life as an Extreme Sport

Taro 2

...and everything else, life and living

I’ve taken to asking friends with tarot decks to do readings for me when they have their cards out. I find it’s an interesting way to see what other people are thinking, and to lay out my own thoughts. This was tonight’s reading:

C~J: OK. Strength, queen of cups, and the magician. Strength: kinda like the name says. It portrays a woman holding open a lion’s mouth. Courgage, energy, stedfastness, etc. Queen of cups [ed: different link, one C~J prefers the interpretation of]…cups are emotion, water, etc. Queens are the ones who make things real (if the kings are the ones who are a motivating force) sorta kinda. Not sure of the context.

K: *snort* it’s suggestive, isn’t it?

C~J: Magician…”as above, so below” creation, order, etc. Once again, my tarot deck shows it’s got a fucked up sense of humor. I’d take the queen of cups as suggestive of the person I’m reading for and read the other two in context. So it seems like there’s some sort of balance between creative, primal stuff and something requiring a bit more control and courage.
Also the court cards may be situations. So in a given situation where there’s some sort of manifestation of something in the emotional realm, you could interpret it that way. Come to think of it, I’d think the queen is more of a situation, not a person.

K: so… *muse* the cards are suggesting being strong in the face of change?

C~J: Yep. The other thing with the Magician is it’s representative of the idea of “as above, so below”. At least in the emotional realm of things. Not really change change. That’s a given. It’s more of a snapshot of what is, I think. If change were involved, you’d get something like the Chariot or the Wheel of Fortune (or the devil, tower, etc.) The cheesy interpretation of the queen of cups is develping a romance

K: *smirk*

C~J: Hence why my deck has a fucked up sense of humor

Sitcom

life and living

My life occasionally steps into a sitcom, and then it gets really entertaining. Rachael’s dinner last night was one of those moments. The entire cast of characters, main and supporting, were at the table for dinner, and the result was a lot of belly laughs and sharp comments. I think my favourite line was Sean saying how much he’d been wanting to get his mouth around someone’s big, meaty balls…

(In fact, the two large – and I mean large – meatballs were the source of much humour, quite a bit of it teenage…)

I figure my/our show would be something between Sex and the City and Friends. I mourn for all the poor folks who’ll never catch an episode… 😉

I’m often told that my life should be serialized, or turned into a movie. Since general input has been that it’d be a cute comedy, I don’t mind so much…

Grieving Baboons Comforted By Friends

...and everything else, Thesis

Female baboons that suffer the loss of a close friend or relative turn to other baboons for comfort and support, according to a new study that encompassed 14 years of observing over 80 free-ranging baboons in Botswana’s Okavango Delta.

The study provides the first direct evidence that certain animals mourn the loss of individuals, even when the rest of their social group remains intact. The findings also suggest that friendship may be just as important to some primates as it is for humans.

Researchers particularly were struck by the behavior of one female chacma baboon (Papio hamadryas ursinus) named Sylvia, who was described as “the queen of mean” and disdainful of other baboons until she lost her daughter, Sierra, to a lion kill.

“In the week after Sierra died, Sylvia was withdrawn,” said Anne Engh, who led the project. “When the other females were grooming and socializing, she tended to sit alone and rarely interacted even with her other relatives.”

Engh, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, added, “After a week or two of moping around, Sylvia suddenly initiated grooming with several low-ranking females. I think that they were as surprised as I was ”” they seemed awfully nervous at first. Eventually, Sylvia settled into close relationships with a very low-ranking female and with Sierra’s daughter, Margaret.”

Engh explained to Discovery news that grooming is a friendly behavior where baboons clean each other’s fur.

Similar to two human friends chatting over a drink, the activity seems to relax the participants to the point where it can lower stress hormone levels. Those levels rise in humans and baboons after a close friend or relative dies.

The researchers measured a group of such hormones, called glucocorticoids, in Sylvia and 20 other females. Baboons that experienced losses did have elevated levels of the hormones after the deaths.

In humans, this is associated with bereavement, so it is likely that baboons also grieve their dead.

Empiress

...and everything else, life and living

Someone watched me “work” a social situation yesterday, smoothing out ruffled feelings and making sure everyone got back on the same page. Apparently it was a masterful, and somewhat scary, thing to watch. I don’t really know how I feel about that.

On the one hand, yes. I did manipulate the situation. I did lead one person to a conclusion I thought needed to be reached, but I let said person reach it on their own. I just…helped. Steered the conversation, if you will. I suppose if you wanted to form it in cliche terms, I led the horse to the water, and the horse opted to drink.

On the other hand, I feel weird that someone watched me do that, and might have a much different impression of who I am – that I’m some weird manipulator or puppetmaster working things behind the scene to my own advantage (although, to clarify, nothing I did was for my own advantage, other than make sure two friends stayed friendly). I was assured that it wasn’t an issue, and that it was an awesome thing to watch me shift roles so fluidly and just handle the situation, and that, combined with my ability to get just about anyone to talk to me, simply left the witness wondering why I wasn’t working for the government in some information gathering service.

This apparently left a deep impression on my subconscious mind, because when I woke up this morning, I was having thoughts about being empiress of the world.

In other news, I have changed the RSS feed for this journal, so that it syndicates the entire post, not just a summary. I hope that makes reading more convenient for y’all.