Wedding and Teaching. Yay! :-)

Allo! :-)

We have a photographer! :-)

Laura Armstrong! :-)
I've known her since we were both kids. Sometimes she comes into my office hours and we talk Religion. She goes to my Mom's church.

She does digital photos (200, minimum of good-quality pictures, which we get on a CD). I'm glad of this because she actually does clean-up on stuff that needs fixing, and can delete anything that really doesn't work out.
Yay! :-)
Also, she's giving us a deal. (She normally charges $1000 for her package, but she's cutting it down to $800 for us -- mostly because we'll be doing the photo-printing ourselves. :-)

Hurrah! :-D


We also have our DJ booked. :-)
He did Paul's graduation dance, and has a wide sellection of music. (And runs everything off a couple of hard-drives, so it's easy-easy-easy to get hard-to-find stuff played -- we just give him a burnt CD and he up-loads it. ;-)

We have to fill out the paper-work for both, but we've got them. Yay! :-D

There are still a few things we have to deal with, but those two major ones are dealt with now. Hurrah! :-)



In other news: I taught two lectures last week. Women and the Body, and Women and Religion.
They were awesome! :-)
There was discussion!
The film for Women and the Body didn't run (not a bad thing) and I *still* had enough lecture material to make it through the whole class! :-D
I talked about menstruation, I talked about home-births and re-useable menstrual products as a way of taking back control of one's body (instead of having one's body be treated like a source of income for large corporations that have the Bottom Line and/or a lack of malpractice suits at heart, rather than me, my cunt and, depending on the situation, my kid).
I talked about Our Bodies, Ourselves.
I talked about the de-naturalizing, mechanization, and pathologization of women's bodies. (E.G.: "Pregnacy is a condition", "Pre-Menstrual Syndrome", etc).
I mentioned that Western Culture views male as The Norm. Which sucks for everyone because (A) Women's normal bodies are pathologized purely because they don't act like Men's normal bodies, and (B) Men aren't understood as having cycles of their own, and are expected to be totally static. Which is equally stupid.

We talked about assumptions people make about women based on their body-type -- Remember that informal survey I did a few months ago? I brought that up. It generated conversation.

I talked about The Slut as a social boundary marker between "acceptable female sexuality" and "Going Too Far".

We had good conversations.

I was excellent. :-)


Women and Religion was also excellent. I based the lecture around Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister by Susan Starr Sered. I talked about Male-Dominated religions and what types of Male-Dom religions women tend to gravitate towards. I talked about women in Male-Dom religions working for change -- changing the god-language from "him" to "God", or alternated "him" and "her" -- this lead to a neat (if short) discussion about how "God isn't male or female, he's beyond that" and me asking (repeatedly, because I want them to think about this) "but if that's the case, then why *choose* to call God 'he'? Why *choose* to default to the male pronoun when *niether* of them are sufficient on their own? Why *not* alternate?"
We then moved on to Female-Dominated religions, and I explained what those religions tend to be like (small scale, often-Traditional, localized, and often incorporating the imagery of Motherhood, if only because women -- no matter what -- have to deal with motherhood, whether as something to avoid, or something to strive for, or what-ever).
I talked a bit about Goddess Spirituality, basically to intro the film "Full Circle".
After I ran it, I had to explain a few things such as the use of dance to induce altered states of conciousness. I think they were a bit more comfortable after that was explained -- also after I explained that I, personally, didn't like the use of the term "churchianity" by one of the women interviewed. I think they felt a little more like "okay, she also thought that was stupid... I can talk about stuff that I didn't get, or didn't identify with, and it won't be like I'm bashing something that she'll get defensive about".
So we talked. And I talked about my own experience with Goddess Spirituality, and about the number of abuse (esp rape) survivors who come into this spirituality, and the centrality of healing (ourselves, the earth, etc) to the religious movement.

They asked me to sing for them (in explaining the whole dance as trance/meditation/prayer thing, I talked about my experience as a singer and how "that's how I know how to move energy around intentionally"). Hehe. They liked it. :-)

One of the ladies came up afterwards and said to me "I think I've been doing this [Goddess Spirituality] for years without knowing it".
(This from the woman with a moon-stone-bearing Isis around her kneck. Ya think? ;-)
I gave her some information about the local community and sent her to some websites that will give her more information than I could give her off the top of my head.
But YAY! :-)

That was the Full Moon, by the way. :-)
And a big fluffy black cat came by me when I was walking home, and not only crossed my path, but actually diverted his/her course and came over and rubbed around my legs for a bit. Then sat there for a minute. And then went on his/her way.
I think I just got blessed. :-)

Anywhoo.
That's my faboo story. :-)

Oh. And I got a P.S. tacked onto one of the e-mailed questions about the essay (which they handed in last night). It said:

When I sit in class and listen to you, you amaze me because you KNOW SO MANY THINGS!! It's awesome, I learn a lot. :)


:-D
That made my day. :-)
I must be doing something right. :-)

- TTFN,
- Amazon. :-)