Magick and Mayhem

So I see that the “cancer awareness” and “only brave people will repost this bs about cancer” posts making the rounds and I have some shit to say about that. You aren’t helping anyone. Everyone is aware that cancer exists. You’re only patting yourself on the back in front of an online audience. If you want to help people with cancer, try actually doing something. For instance:

Use Charity Navigator to find a highly rated charity to donate to. Here’s their list of charities that get a perfect score: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=2203 anything 4 stars and above is good though.

Donate to ExtraLife, Children’s Miracle Network, Ronald McDonald House, St. Jude’s

Use smile.amazon.com so that a part of your purchase goes to a charity of your choosing. I donate to Gift of Life Transplant House because they helped mom so much.

Donate Blood: https://www.redcross.org/give-blood.html I’m donating on January 21st at the Webster Community Center

Become a Bone Marrow Donor: https://bethematch.org/

Register to be an organ donor: https://www.organdonor.gov/

Get vaccinated for HPV. Gardisil vaccinates against the strains of HPV that cause 80% of cervical cancer. According to the CDC, roughly 13,000 people are diagnosed with cervical cancer every year in the US.

Stop smoking. According to the CDC, secondhand smoking causes more than 7,000 deaths a year from lung cancer (34,000 deaths a year from heart disease).

Get cancer screenings, encourage loved ones to get screened. No one likes mammograms, pap smears, testicular exams, prostate exams, etc, but they save lives.

If you have breasts or testicles learn what they should feel like and look like. If you’re not sure, ask your doctor how to do a self-exam. Make sure your teens know too. Don’t trust Health Class to keep them informed and safe.

Donate hair. It can be tricky to find a charity that doesn’t profit off of hair donations, so research first. 

Donate books, toys, magazines, etc to your nearest oncology ward.

Donate and share GoFundMe campaigns

Vote for people that support banning carcinogens. Pesticides and asbestos cause cancer. Asbestos killed 237,000 people in 2017 according to Asbestos.com

@edric-unsane and I just released the first episode of our podcast The Hard Road today. Check it out and let us know how we did! It’s available on Pocket Casts, as an RSS, and soon on iTunes. Episodes every Wednesday.

I got The Contemplator as my card to concentrate on for the day. It’s kinda all about taking a mental break from a problem and coming back later with a fresh perspective. Since a good part of my day was spent debating philosophy with my therapist and working on chapter outlines for the book I’m supposed to be developing, I took the contemplator’s advice and took the evening off. 

I had a similar thought today. A lot of the mindfulness and visualisations I've been taught in therapy remind me a lot of magickal practices, energy work, etc.

When I think about the way my therapist encourages me to think and the exercises she has me try, I think of the Mitch Hedberg joke where he said that his mail man was a drug dealer and didn’t even know it. Because my therapist basically just has me practice magick but calls it by different names. She’s had me charge items with a certain feeling and then discard them, she’s challenged me to look for things that work instead of getting wrapped up in the mechanics of it all, and she’s encouraged me to see the world as a spectrum and not a duality. All of these things are all already really important to my magick. My therapist has just helped me expand it all to the entirety of my life. Which I thought I had done previously, but I was very mistaken. Oops. But now I’m working on it.

We got a call back on an apartment we’re interested in renting. It’s a nicer neighborhood, a small building with bigger apartments, and it was a place we’d never thought we’d get a call back on because there’s always a huge waiting list. We’re waiting to hear back about seeing the place and asking all the important questions. There are a bazillion little things that would mean we’d have to turn it down. I’m excited and stressed about it all at once. Even more stressed that we didn’t get a return call to set up a showing right away.

I decided that I should probably reach for The Servants to help out. I did a reading and everything looks like it’ll turn out well, though it’s going to be tough. I’m down with that for sure. So, I’m planning on calling on The Contemplator and The Witch as needed this week so stress and worry don’t keep me from getting anything done. 

The 9 days are up and tonight we’re making an offering to The Chaste. Each night of the 9 days we added a word that helped build on what success would look like, and 1 penny to represent the slow build towards success. What started as an insignificant cent is now nearly a dime. The idea is that change takes small steps and time. Since I feel that the novena was a successful start on the path to healthy choices for my friend, we’re making offerings to conclude it.

I missed posting yesterday because I was feeling under the weather and I’d gotten The Healer servant 2 days in a row and decided that meant an evening off with my partner was in order. We binge watched some Bleach and ate nachos and it was awesome. 

Drawing The Healer reminded me of something else awesome that I haven’t mentioned here yet. 23andMe is doing a study on depression and bipolar. If you agree to give them access to your genetic data for their study and do some questionnaires each month for 9 months you get some of their services for free. according to their fact sheet about it, you will “... receive over 70 personalized genetic reports online about your health, ancestry, and traits.” As far as I can tell, it looks like that would usually cost about $200. Regardless, though, I think the more research into mental health the better. The way I see it, even if I feel like, at the end of the 9 months of questionnaires, that it wasn’t worth the time, at least I contributed towards research. I think that this is a really neat way of getting genetic data from a large number of people who suffer from major depression or bipolar.

Also, the insight for ancestor related magic could be pretty sweet.

Link:

I started drawing cards from The Servants deck 8 days ago now and when I started that I also started keeping a Google Form that I fill out every day so I can keep track of which Servants show up often and which ones never appear. 8 days isn’t a lot of data to go off of but I’m looking forward to seeing the breakdown after the month is up. I know that The Guru and The Master have shown up a few times and have been very helpful.