Friday chickenIn which I cover the good stuff and the hard stuff in my week, trying for the non-preachy, non-annoying side of ritual and self-reflection.

And you get to join in if you feel like it.

I am completely baffled by the Friday!

Being sequestered at the Playground all week for Rally (Rally!) has been really intense. And time is all warped and makes funny sound effects now.

Mmmhmmmmmmmmm.

But we’re here.

The hard stuff

Tired tired tired tired.

Despite several marvelous Playground naps.

Just tired.

It’s so wet and cold, you guys!

This week felt like winter.

Thanksgiving.

Even though I don’t have to deal with 99% of it because of running the Great Ducking Out (which is awesome), it’s still in the air.

Everyone’s stuff is out and present. Everything on the internet is annoying. Etc etc etc.

Everything needs to change.

The problem with realizing what you want is how incongruent other things become all of a sudden.

Half tempted to take down most of my websites and re-do it all.

Rally is ending today.

Sadface mouse!

Reeling from the epiphanies.

We’ve been doing lots of super-fun and very-crazy Shiva Nata all week, and the realizations are landing about every five minutes.

And some of them are so…WOW WOW WOW WOW… that I can’t even move because I’m boggling so much.

Need time to rest, process, consolidate and find out what this all means.

Something I’m anxious about doing.

It still needs to be done, and I need to find the right way in.

The good stuff

Rallyyyyyyyyyyyy!

Rally is the best!

And this one — #15, aka the Great Ducking Out the Second, is just so much fun.

I have had the most incredible discoveries, and gotten so much done (surprising things! in surprising ways!).

It’s been AMAZING. And every single person there is so great!

The Playground.

So at every Rally, I tell people that the Playground is theirs to play in, outside of my captain’s quarters. And that they can move stuff around and build blanket forts and do whatever.

Which they do, gleefully. But it usually takes a couple days.

This group was super creative and funny about space. They did the neatest things! Like taking the giant pink beanbag chair out of the Refueling Station, and using it to make a napping nook underneath the mast!

Or creating little hidden projects spaces that no one has ever thought of before. And making some sort of weird butt-monster sculpture.

Not sure what the story was but it looked like fun and there was a lot of giggling involved.

It is so joyful for me to see the space that I created for playing to be played with so intensely.

The Day of Ducking.

Our ducking-out-of-Thanksgiving picnic feast was so delicious.

And so much fun.

I could not be happier.

Stars on the ceiling.

There is no way to describe how beautiful this is.

The Playground has this giant and impossibly crazy-high ceiling.

And we have a special projector that projects a planetarium sky (with DEPTH and cloud cover and wind and everything) onto the sky. The sky being the ceiling, yes?

We turn off all the lights, pile the floor with blankets and cushions, put on some music and stargaze from the cozy floor. In the deepest darkest most star-filled way.

And I do not have words to describe how completely magical and restful and play-filled this is.

It is simply the most enchanting experience. We had stars. It was blissful.

Happy hand-on-heart sigh.

Shivanauttery!

So much great Shiva Nata.

We did it with sound effects (and a magical sound effect happened just when we needed one).

And with nouns and with qualities and with numbers, singing, music, stomping, wishes and various combinations of the above.

It’s been fantastic. I can’t wait for Shivanauticon, you guys!

Mmmm pickles.

The Gentleman pickled a ton of cucumbers from the Hoppy House garden, and now I can eat pickles whenever I want.

And they’re really good! So good.

Knowing what I want.

It feels really reassuring, even as parts of it terrify me.

I know what I want.

This is big.

The fun part of the Chickening happens here.

Tabstravaganza! Or: what’s Havi been up to with all those open Firefox tabs?

  • I love the Cranky Shivanaut’s daily helpful persona. The pictures are the best!
  • I spent way too much time enjoying the entire world that this inspired: Beyonce songs re-imagined as undergraduate theses.

From the archives.

Some old, weirdly pertinent posts that I don’t remember having written, encountered while looking for something else:

  • Ten myths of biggification. I’d probably give this a different title now, but the concepts still hold. You should read this. (May, 2010)

Also: not from the archives but yesterday. Did you read about monkeys wearing clothes and all the things you can learn from a proxy? Because it’s useful for later.

Playing live at the meme beach house — it’s the Fake Band of the Week!

Background? Ez and I make up bands. Stu (retired Bolshevik-fearing voice-to-text software) once translated “people will hate me and be jealous” to “they’ll hang out at my Meme Beach House“. It’s just one guy.

This week’s band is brought to you by the Shiva Nata positions Horizontal 2 + 4:

Quantum Hedgehog

They play speedmetal rockabilly in a field of daisies. While wearing bowler hats.

Though did you know? I heard it’s actually just one guy.

Hallo Hallo! I am saying Hallo Hallo. Announcement time.

Picture me wearing that crazy hat

  1. Reminder: Rally prices are out of date. They’re going up. Also we can maybe-possibly sneak you in on the January Rally on a stowawayship scholarship ship.
  2. I highly recommend the Art of Embarking, which is the thing I am most excited about right now. This will be the prerequisite for everything I teach in 2012.
  3. Oooh, and registration for the Floating Playground will be opening later this month. If you’re not on my HAT list (Havi’s Announcing a Thing), you can sign up on the events page.

I think that’s everything? If not, I’ll add stuff to the Very Personal Ads over the weekend.

That’s it for me …

And of course you can join in my Friday ritual right here in the comments if you feel like it.

Yes? Anything hard and/or good happen in your week?

And, as always, have a glorrrrrrrrrrrrious day, a restful weekend and a happy week to come. Shabbat shalom.

p.s. It’s okay if it’s not Friday anymore. There’s complete chicken amnesty — join in whenever (or not) and it’s no big deal.

The Fluent Self