Spin Magazine in Universe 616

Adam gets Spin Magazine. (For free. We would not pay for it. If you ever want to get every magazine ever for free, resulting in teetering piles of magazines all over the house, quietly rotting because you never get around to reading them because there are too many of them, Adam is totally your go-to guy.)

In this month's Spin lettercolumn, we have letters from the following people:

Alison Blair.
Lorna Dane.
Rachel Grey - and okay, her name should be Summers, but you could say she's going by her mother's surname. Maybe she's embarrassed about her interested in rock-star babies and is using a crappy pseudonym.
Barak Bishop.
Jared Corbo.

So we have Dazzler, Polaris, the new Marvel Girl, Bishop, and Radius from Alpha Flight.

Spin Magazine is fucking with us.

EDIT: I wrote to them about it. Signed it "Illyana Rasputin".

Travel, mine and others'

I will be in Boston from May 28-June 5! Bostonians, schedule thyselves! And give me your phone numbers.

Adam and I will be in South Florida from June 16-20! Pool party at the parents' house on Saturday! Also possibly free Monday night.

Spooky will be here June 6-8. :)

(no subject)

...were I a better person, I would be more gracious about doing the things I'm called to do.

As it is, I do the stompy boots dance and I glare and I ask when it will be someone else's turn to do the tough stuff, dammit.

And I'm not a saint, and I'll never be a saint. I doubt that I will ever respond to this stuff with perfect, immediate serenity and grace.

But I feel that I should try to be less grudging and resentful.

(no subject)

When I was in the wilderness survival camp when I was 16 and 17, we were not allowed any books that were not religious texts. Everyone got a bible. I was allowed the Torah I got at my bat mitzvah. This Torah had many blank pages in the back, and I took notes.

I'm not looking at that Torah right now; it's packed. But I remember taking notes on one of my favorite bits... something that very much spoke to my imagination, as I was walking through the desert for six months at the time. When Moses led the Jews through the desert, the Torah - or my translation of it, at least - says that they were led by God in the form of a pillar of smoke by day, and a pillar of fire by night.

And I imagined what that would have been like; I wrote a story about it, of course, because that's what I do, and the story sucked, because I was 16, but still. Imagine that - being led by the absolute presence of your God. Pillar of flame. Pillar of smoke. The absolute wonder of it.

And I wonder - is it better to have faith, or to not need faith? If you take the Torah as fact... there's no way anyone could have lived then without knowing that their God existed and loved them.

That's not faith. Faith is not knowing, and trusting anyway.

...yeah. I'm random today.

(no subject)

...and, of course, that begs the question of what I have faith in, what I believe.

As Carroll said, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast. As I told the rapist twelve years minus one week ago, I do not believe that evil naturally exists in the world; I believe in a force of good, and that the evil is what we do ourselves.

I believe in wildly contradictory things! I believe in the JudeoChristian God I was raised to believe in, but I also believe in Raven and Coyote magic; I believe in Pan and Bacchus and Shiva and Kali. I believe in the power of belief.

I believe that everything is part of something wondrous, and that none of us will ever be capable of seeing that something-wondrous in its entirety. I believe that beauty and glory are too big for our minds to encompass, and I believe that that fact, in itself, is beautiful.

I believe that we should be kind. I believe that we should help each other.

I believe in magic.

I believe that there are small miracles every day.

I believe in love.