What is up with all the Anne’s? Spunky, red-headed, saved orphaned girls named Anne/ie/a seem uniquely suited to capture our hearts. Anne of Green Gables, little orphan Annie, and lately Anna of Frozen, have a seemingly endless power to make us love them (and pay to watch them and read them). Can we analyze this?…
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Lunging from a Holmesian Fallacy to a Doctor’s Insight
It’s so rare one needs to disagree with Sherlock Holmes. Or Spock. And yet somehow I find myself doing both simultaneously. In the story “The Sign of the Four,” Holmes famously said “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” Later…
Fandom Parapraxis – The Oddity of Freudian Slips
A parapraxis, or a Freudian slip, is a fascinating bit of human behavior. In it your words betray you – your inner core, your muchness, somehow bypasses your mental/vocal filters. Out comes what you really think or feel – which you may not even know yourself. How strange all this occurs with tissue and electricity…
The Handmaid’s Tale: The Most Pro-Faith Show of our Time?!
(Spoilers for Handmaid’s Tale Season 2, episodes 1-10) Religion is the backbone of the horrifying dystopia that is Gilead in the Handmaid’s Tale. Christianity, in particular, is used as justification for the most heinous of crimes and acts of subjugation. (As it has been, so tragically, in our own world lately.) So why, then, after…
Being a Belief Polyglot (But Not Letting the Bastardes Te Carborundum): High Lunge Twist
Choose two: Compassion. Knowledge. Truth. Freedom. Loyalty. Family. Friendship. Science. Faith. Bravery. Order. No, this isn’t a test to see which Hogwarts House you belong in, although it probably could be that too. (Ravenclaw FTW!) Rather, it just goes to show that out of all these values, which are all arguably good things, we all…
Exactly One Year of Yoga Later…
One Year of Yoga Stats: Pounds Lost: 0!! (Life happens. Cookies happen. What are you going to do? At least in yoga no one cares about your muffin top.) Yoga pants purchased: 10 pairs, at least?! Yoga/Fandom-based Blog Posts Written: 105!! Body parts with substantially less pain: Back, Neck, Knees, Ankles, Hips Body parts with…
The Meditation Styles of Fandom – Which do you have?
Meditation is by no means exclusive to our reality. The heroes and villains of fandom know the value of a good meditation session for kinds of purposes… including plotting, deducing, and rejuvenating. And then there’s the Doctor… who is perhaps slightly *less* effective when it comes to NOT using his meditation time for well-digging and…
Fandom’s Mental Yogis rise from ill to illustrious
It puzzles me when someone says someone else is “mentally ill.” After all, people don’t typically take on a permanent label of “bodily ill.” Illness of the body is just generally considered to be a normal state which you go in and out of, not warranting either accolades or shame. But mental illness of any…
The Finite’s Guide to Dealing with the Infinite, Part 2: Getting What We Want (in Warrior I)
In this vast, incomprehensible universe, we are but tiny specks – but we are tiny specks who want so much. In fact our very specky nature is part of what compels our extreme wants. We want not to be hit by asteroids, we want to have enough speck food. We want the other specks to…
The Unexpected, Serendipitous Fandom Dance (a Perichoresis?)
There’s something magical about a dance that comes out of nowhere. It’s as if suddenly things and people are in tune and in sync – so much so that they produce an art form more than the sum of its parts. Writers know this, of course, which is why they occasionally include them in otherwise…