I wasn't sure whether I wanted to post this, but hey, why not. At the end of that Dark Goddess course I was taking we had to write on an aspect of them, whatever we wanted, and this is what I ended up writing. I hope the format isn't screwy since it was originally in word with some endnotes.

( Creativity in Darkness etc. )

Happy birthday shadowfax!!

It's almost Halloween--wee! I had a nice choice of horror movies on TV last night, all of which I already owned, and decided to go with IFC's showing of The Wicker Man. I was hoping to get the longer version, which legend has it is better, but I got the version I've already seen. Not that this is a bad thing. The Wicker Man is one of the most wonderfully weird horror movies ever, with Christopher Lee in a truly groovy zone. Also, it's essentially a musical--how many horror movies can you say that about?

The thing about the movie that makes it memorable rather than just plain silly, imo, is that like many great horror movies it takes a simple idea and follows it to its logical conclusion. In this case, it presents you with an extreme religious situation, and yet never really sides with one side or another. I can't help but make you think. That's why I never regret it when I decide to ( make an appointment with the Wicker Man--spoilers within. )

Happy October! October is my favorite month, not only because it contains my favorite day of the year, Halloween, but that's part of it. Maybe that's why I was inordinately interested and pleased two weeks ago when my mother revealed I was born a month early. I knew I had been medically induced early due to this RH-negative thing. My mother had once mentioned talking to a woman who did astrological charts and she asked her about my being induced because I guess for her she'd always thought my sign should be Libra--which is interesting since I've never read a single horoscope in my entire life that was ever remotely accurate for me. The astrologer said whatever day I was born was the day I was "meant" to be born so it didn't matter, but this seems to have been something that stuck in my mother's head (maybe she just wanted all her kids to be Libras). Anyway, so I always knew I was induced early but I always assumed it was, like, days early, not a whole month. So although I've got no problem with my real birthday, I sort of like the idea that my "phantom birthday" is in October.

It being October, slippyslope had mentioned doing a sort of theme month for those of us who love horror movies and just don't get to talk about them enough. I've done posts here and there where I talked about some I liked, but I love the idea of a special month for October. I can't promise any regular horror movie or horror-anything posts, but as it happens I finally picked up the DVD to The Shining and was watching it this weekend. It spurred a lot of thoughts, which I will now spit out here.

( The Shining--a horror movies about writing--spoilers within for the movie and book )

Neat!

I'm trying to get all my Livejournal friends' locations plotted on a map - please add your location starting with this form. Username: (Then get your friends to!)

( I'm putting this under a cut because it has spoilers for Halloween H20. How pathetic is that? )

I had a really interesting conversation with P today--interesting in the way you can know somebody for years and then they say something surprising. We were talking about Halloween, and Guy Fawkes Night came up. She said she would probably prefer GFN to Halloween.

Needless to say, I was shocked. Not because I've got anything against GFN, but because I can't imagine picking anything over Halloween. I know that P shares my love of horror movies and scary things in general, we just wrote a Halloween picture book together and have also written other spooky stuff together. It turns out, though, that she loves all that about Halloween. As a kid she liked getting candy, of course. What she doesn't like is...costumes.

She hates dressing up in costumes. She doesn't mind other people doing it, doesn't hate the idea of it, she just really really hates being asked to be anything other than herself. She wasn't saying it to be weird or anything (I don't know if she's really capable of that anyway--she's the most straightforward person I know). It was obviously something that struck a chord with her. She said, "I guess I feel like being myself is something I fought hard for for so long I won't give it up for anyone."

Coming from her, I got what she was saying. But it made me think...I don't think I ever looked at it that way. To some extent I loved "being someone else" when I put together my costumes (and yes, I was one of those kids--and am now one of those people--who gets really into making a costume) but it never felt like a disguise to me. In fact, it was almost revealing because whatever I was dressed as was something I really really wanted to be on some level. I think I do feel like I'm dressing up as something that's already inside me somehow. One tradition of Halloween, for instance, has girls dressing up as boys and vice versa. I don't consider that a disguise so much as each sex being able indulge the parts of themselves that "are" the opposite sex. For some people this is even more literal. I think this is a big reason Halloween's become so associated with the gay community in a lot of places. I remember reading about a club that had a big party every year; this was the only day of the year that drag queens could go out on the street as themselves without being arrested.

This is one of the things I like about knowing P, really. On so many "primal" (or whatever) things we're completely in tune, but then we're coming from totally different directions in others. Things like hands. P loves images of hands reaching up, like coming out of a pool or the earth or just space. I see that image and think of the old Chiller Theater show with the six-fingered hand coming out of the pool of blood. I adored that image and looked forward to it at every commercial break, but for me it's a scary image. For her it's inspiring. She sees the hand as reaching up, breaking out, breaking free. I see the hand as reaching up to pull me down.

I love Halloween.