MARCIA'S BOOK JOURNAL:  May 2000

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5/2/2000

At the moment, Neptune is having a very strong influence as it takes a stationary position on May 8.  Neptune represents subtlety, ruling both intuition and self-deception, and during a station point often creates blindspots, fogginess of mind and temporary amnesia (although it's also a good time for music, poetry, and inspirational reading).

Anyway, with Neptune so strong, it's not a very good time for me to comment on Charting Your Career:  The Horoscope Reveals Your Life Purpose by Stephanie Jean Clement.  Ironically, in my own chart, I have Neptune conjunct my Midheaven, which in one sense means I have no clue about my career or life purpose.  In another sense, it could indicate careers like psychic, priest, or poet -- all of which fit.

Stephanie gave an informative talk at NCGR - our local astrology group - in March and I bought her book.  In order to take time to read it, I put it in the small library off the bedroom -- the one I make pit stops in several times a day.  I've been checking it out section by section, comparing her interpretations against my planetary placements and finished it last week.  In essence, it's a very complete and clearly written text for intermediate level astrology students on the factors in a horoscope that influence a career.  In particular, I liked her sections on Saturn and Mars as vocational indicators.

Did it 'reveal my life purpose?'  Not really.  IMHO, only a professional astrologer, taking the chart as a whole can begin to give you clues, and even then it's up to the individual to wrestle with big concepts like life purpose.  But the interpretative sections in Stephanie's book may give insights into developing and improving career goals.

My life purpose?  I like what 'The Helpfulness Prayer" in A Course in Miracles says:
 

I am here only to be truly helpful. I am here to represent Him Who sent me. I do not have to worry about what to say or what to do, because He Who sent me will direct me. I am content to be wherever He wishes, knowing He goes there with me.  I will be healed as I let Him teach me to heal.

~ A Course in Miracles, Text, page 24

This kind of life purpose may be hard to describe when I'm asked, for example, at a high school reunion, "What do you do?"  So I say my list -- writer, meditation teacher, astrologer, tarot card reader, office temp, wife, mother -- in the hopes of meeting kindred souls, sparking dialogue or finding common ground.  But what I do is not me.  Even my name is not me.  With Neptune at the Midheaven,  name and form dissolve.  And the questions "Who am I?" and "What am I doing here?" cannot be answered by a book.

5/11/2000

After sex and hot fudge sundaes, reading a good novel is next on my list of life's most pleasurable experiences.  Like the alcoholic who never knows what will happen once he takes that first drink, I am unable to stop myself from reading and reading and reading till I finish the novel once I begin that first page.  To cope with my addiction, I never start a book unless I know I have a long stretch of free time.  And I do my best to avoid books that are overlong.

A great disaster occurred when a co-worker introduced me to the fantasy series Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan.  The co-worker was the disciplined type, reading a chapter each night like a nun at evening prayers, then closing the book with a marker and going to sleep.  Me?  I tried, but you can imagine a starving woman confronted with a Thanksgiving feast.  Here was a well written fantasy,  with intriguing characters, convoluted and mysterious plot, multiple adventures and multiple POV's.  I dug in and began devouring them, this series of six (now eight) books of 500 - 1000 pages each.  Inside a novel like that, I'm not really functioning well in my own life.  Any chore that isn't totally essential gets put on the back-burner.  Calls aren't made and agendas ignored.  Dishes and dust stack up. Now I did not quit my job nor abandon my family, but I was "gone" for weeks, and did not stop until I had gorged myself on the last book.

This full dive into books is a type of astral projection.  I am totally out of my body.  I don't feel pain or fatigue. I'm gone. I'm in the story.  I'm entirely comfortable using the word addiction to describe this.  I know I should stop.  I know my life and health will be made a shambles of by the inability to stop reading, my poor neck and back scrunched in a chair or in various stretched-out, face-down positions on the couch to get the book the right depth from my maturing myopic eyes.

I remember the contortions of my youth:  sneaking into the spot where the light fell into the bedroom from the hallway light left on for my sister's fear of dark, staying up hours past bedtime reading.  The Marcia mainlining a book at night is not the friend of the Marcia who must wake up in the morning.

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Last Monday, I was in kind of a slump and I tried to self-medicate with Terry Pratchett's latest book, The Fifth Elephant.  I'm a huge Terry Pratchett fan, but I think my down mood skewed my feeling about the book, or maybe it just wasn't as funny as some others.  I'm not as much a fan of the Watch characters as I am of the Witches or Death (Death is *seriously funny* in Discworld).  "The Watch" which is the constabulary in the major Discworld city Ankh-Morpork, is continuously taking on a more diverse set of employees, reflecting the immigration of other races to the urban areas in the Century of the Fruitbat.  Starting with the humans, they have added Dwarves, Trolls, Golems, Gargoyles, Zombies and a Werewolf, combining all the humor and pathos of the old Barney Miller show of the 70's.  Each "ethnic" group has their own issues and skills that they bring to the quest for law enforcement.  Into this mix, Pratchett throws the plot of the mystery of a missing relic, diplomacy involving vampires, and a romance between a human and a werewolf.  Only Pratchett's novels can integrate references to classics such as Anton Checkov's, "The Cherry Orchard," labor unions, and characters like the scruffy, talking, "Gaspode the Wonder Dog."

After "The Fifth Elephant," I tried to content myself with magazines and newspapers but by last night, I grew restless again.  I took a library book off the bedroom shelf and started to read, only to find that I'd already read it.  What a space out I am!  I didn't remember that I'd read Bruce Sterling's Distraction last year, even after reading the inside flap.  I knew it sounded familiar almost instantly but I couldn't remember what happened.  So, I read it again.  And I liked it again.  But I never would have read it again if I didn't space out.  Bruce Sterling is a science fiction author who constructs believable futures in which the 'net is a powerful force.  In Distraction, he brings in political campaigns, genetics, biomedical and neural engineering, and well as huge groups of eccentric disenfranchised poor living below society's radar.  I'm looking forward to reading a book he's written that I haven't read. ;-)

In the meantime, I'm on to my last library book, The Years Best Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois which fortunately is all short stories.  I can go out of my body briefly and be back in time to make dinner.

5/21/2000 Wake Up, I'm Fat! by Camryn Mannheim

Hey, she used the "F" word (Fat!), but I loved actress Camryn Mannheim's autobiography.  I was happy for her successes, and sad for her disappointments.  I loved the way she learned to be positive and accepting of herself, and self-assertive in the face of both well-meaning and nasty comments regarding her weight.  As a large woman myself, I related to her life above the norm and appreciated the humor she brought to her storytelling.

We've recently become a fan of Camryn and the cast of "The Practice" on Sunday nights (ABC).  Somebody (not me) started flipping around "the dial" one night, landed and stuck on "The Practice.  We couldn't resist the intriguing ensemble cast and the twisting story lines of this courtroom drama.  Over the past couple years, we've watched enough "Law & Order" reruns on A&E that we consider ourselves legal experts.  On "Law & Order" the heroes are the prosecutors.  On "The Practice" we are beginning to learn about the defense.

What a butt disaster, though.  For us, Sunday TV watching generally starts at six p.m. with the Fox line-up of Futurama (love it!), King of the Hill (it's a pretty good show but I don't mind cooking dinner during their half hour), The Simpsons (I'm getting tired of them, but Rich and Dave are still fans), Malcolm in the Middle (our favorite!), and The X-Files (inconsistent but compelling).  Adding in The Practice makes four straight hours of TV and boy is that hard on the rear end.  I'm glad the shows are hanging their cliffs and rolling out the reruns for the summer.  That way we can X-out Fox, see the old "Practices" we've missed, and still have plenty of time for our non-couch life.

(c) 2000 Marcia M. Sacks