Fellow SWRAP member Eric Kudzin and a friend will be here in four hours and then we're off to the Lucki Commodore Expo in New Albany, IN. A whole four-day weekend of geeking…*happy sigh*

I don't know if I'll get a chance to post from the road. In case I don't, I hope everyone reading this has a good Memorial Day weekend!

I wish there were more than 24 hours in a day…

Saturday, we had my folks over for lunch, and Amy's folks for dinner. In between, I swapped out the failing 40gb drive in our TiVO for a brand new 80gb drive, doubling our recording capacity in the process.

Yesterday, I spent seven hours wiring a 400W inverter up to my car's battery. That should be enough power for Eric & Jim to geek out when we drive down to the Commodore Expo in Louisville. I also installed spamassassin on my Linux box and watched the first half of Toy Story 2. Amy was out with some friends, and then they came back here to watch The Last Samurai. I would have loved to have joined them, but then I never would have finished.

So, now it's Monday morning already. The weekend is gone, but it feels like it should still be Sunday. I have to take the car in to the shop (it was recalled) and then go to work. Woohoo! I can't stand the excitement.

For those who aren't interested in reading a long & boring entry about religion, here are some pictures of tits.

I was in the bathroom in a coffeehouse this evening doing the types of things one normally does in such a place, and I noticed the large counter they had set up. Maybe it was for use as a changing table, or maybe a place for women to put their huge suitcase-sized purses while they did their business…who knows? At any rate, it was about six feet long with various drawers and doors on the front, a mirror on the wall, a candle, and some scented hand/body lotion. I got to wondering (jokingly, of course) if this was some sort of altar set up for clandestine after-hours Wiccan ceremonies or something. And, that got me thinking back to my days as a channel operator in #wicca…

Every once in a while, an innocent neophyte would come into the channel asking a question about what was "required" for x, or how to do y. One question that seemed to come up regularly was the issue of just what one needed to set up a Wiccan altar. My answer was pretty straightforward: a flat surface and whatever puts you in the right mood for meditation, reflection, and communion. If a fancy velvet tablecloth (altarcloth?) helps get you in the right frame of mind, use it. If a picture of your grandmother works, use it. Did your dearly-departed father spend rainy days reading Moby Dick to you? There's plenty of room for it!

A lot of people (in the channel and the community at large) saw this as the wrong answer. "Well, {insert Pagan author and/or book published by Llewellyn} says you're supposed to have a pentacle, a white candle, a black candle, an athame (a ceremonial dagger used as a sort of reverse lightning rod — for directing energy outward from the body), a bolline (white-handled "working" knife actually used for cutting herbs and so forth)…" Well, you get the idea.

Basically, the religion that attracted me because of the lack of formal structure and focus on personal exploration was nothing but a list of bullet points in many practitioners' eyes. If you're setting up an altar, you need x, y, and z. This is exactly what you need to say & do for this spell. Again, I'm sure you get the idea.

And as much as people wanted the religion distilled into a set of bullet points and scripts for them to follow, authors were (and still are) more than willing to oblige. While I worked at Borders, I saw book after book released with specific "love spells" to use, or my perennial favorite: the guide for complete beginners. When I saw this I about threw up. Everyone jumped on the Wiccan bandwagon and rushed to publish their own introduction to how the religion should be practiced. And each of these books said the exact same things, and gave the exact same bullet points, almost verbatim.

After a while, this and other factors I'll touch on some day made me decide that Wicca wasn't the religion for me. While I fit the technical definition of a Wiccan, I didn't fit the popular definitions used either within or outside of the Craft. So, I adopted the more generic term "Pagan" for myself and moved on, leaving the Wiccan community to either evolve or devolve on its own.

Now that I'm not Wiccan, what do I believe? That's a whole blog entry in itself. But, I believe in my need to figure out what I believe on my own, and on my own terms. I believe in improving myself through my own methods, ones that I know work for me. And, I believe that no matter what higher powers you seek to be close to, you can only do so in a way that works for you.

And, even if the counter in the bathroom wasn't meant to be one, I believe it would still be a kick-ass altar.