Artistic Aid Requested!

In need of donations - incentives included!

There's been an utter and complete lack of art on my part for a very, very long time. The simple reason being that when I upgraded my computer, I lost Photoshop, and my tablet doesn't work with Windows 7.

I need a copy of photoshop - which, thanks to my being a college student, I can get for about $250 through journeyed.com. That's about an $800 savings off the list price. I also need a new tablet - the one that I want is around $100, depending on where I get it - and no, it isn't a high end model; just something that will do what I need it to do.

For over a year, I've been unable to even offer commissions, and I am in a place in my life right now where I really need to be able to do that - both to have an artistic outlet, and to help bring money in to keep bills paid.

Long story short, I'm asking for donations to be made to my paypal - BUT! For donating, you automatically recieve a spot on my commissions list for a commission of equal (or greater, if inspiration strikes me) value to your donation!

I want to raise about $400, so that I can get Photoshop, my tablet, and have a little extra to cover any expenses that may come up with the commissions. Anyone who donates will be kept up to date on how much I've raised and how far I have to go to reach my goal.

If you donate more than once, you have a choice of getting one commission per donation, or having you donations tallied together into a lump sum for one high detail commission.

I don't know how long it will take to raise this money, so I can't offer any concrete deadlines on when the commissions will be completed, but once I have Photoshop and the tablet, the commissions will be completed in the order that the donations were recieved - and again, everyone will be kept abreast of the situation and where I am in the commission list.

To give you an idea:

$1-$3: Quick sketch or simple head-shot icon commission.

$4-$6: Simple head-shot icon commission (500x500, 100x100, 50x50 included)

$7-$10: Detailed head-shot icon commission (all 3 sizes included).

$11-$15: Your choice of previous levels up to value of amount total or 1 low detail full-body painting.

$16-$20: Your choice of previous levels up to value of amount total or medium detail full body painting.

$21-$25: Your choice of previous levels up to value of amount total, or a high detail full-body painting.

$26-$30: Your choice of previous levels up to value of amount total or a high detail full body painting with simple background.

$31-$40: Your choice of previous levels up to value of amount total or high detail full body painting with medium to high detail background.

$41-$55: Your choice of previous levels up to value of amount total or high detail full body painting with high detail background.

$56-up: Your choice of previous levels up to value of amount total, with option to have an 8x10 print of the original(s) shipped to you as well.

Thank you all for reading this and taking the time to donate if you can. This is one starving artist who greatly appreciates any help she can get. Thank you!

Cross-Country Roadtrip 2011 (Part 1)

I'm back! Did everyone miss me? I've been gone for a couple of weeks on one of the most amazing experiences of my life - a roadtrip across the US that took me from California across Arizona and New Mexico, into Texas, then up through the in-between states to Illinois and Chicago where I met my Great Aunt-in-law, Sharon, and went to the Field Museum where I saw so many wonderful things in person for the first time. From there, we drove to Pennsylvania and met with a wonderful friend, then we returned to Chicago to trace the route of a character in a book that Claudia is writing so we'd know where she was driving, then we headed east again and south down to Mississippi to meet with a client, before turning West again and riding the I-10 all the way home by way of Houston, TX to visit my wonderful parents!

It's been an amazing two weeks, and now I want to tell you all about it! (And don't worry - there will be pictures! I got an awesome new gallery plug-in for my site and it makes posting pics so much easier.)

Lona and I left on the 27th of October. We were supposed to rent a car, but that turned out to be fairly cost prohibitive, so we wound up taking Claudia's wonderful car - a bright orange Honda Element, complete with WAMBTAC signage across both driver and passenger doors.

Claudia wanted to first go to her High School Reunion, which was the following Saturday, and happened in Northbrook, Illinois. But it was already Thursday when the money came in to allow the trip to begin. No time to drive it and have her still make it for the Saturday reunion. So, it was decided that Lona and I would drive and she would fly, we'd meet her in Chicago on Saturday or Sunday (or Monday), and then continue the roadtrip from there.

Lona and I left that Thursday around four in the afternoon. Consequently, most of our driving that first day was done at night as we followed our directions north to get on I-40, which passes through Gallup, New Mexico, where we were supposed to meet aunt Bera. That meeting didn't end up happening due to a scheduling issue that is quite frustrating and I don't really wanna think about. Anyway!

The first night, we stopped in Needles, on the CA/AZ border. We found a Best Western, pulled off the highway and stopped, only to discover over the ensuing night that we had both essentially "packed backwards." That is, we each had two luggage bags with us, and both of us had packed all the stuff we NEEDED in the more inconvenient to get out of the car and maneuver of our two bags. This resulted in me getting up and getting dressed early the next morning, then going down to the car to retrieve my toiletries bag and my daily meds, as well as my hairbrushes.

It isn't too impressive that we'd packed backwards - after all, I'd never done something like this before and Lona hadn't done it in a long time - so neither of us quite knew what we were doing or which bag would turn out to be more convenient. What impresses me the most is that we BOTH packed exactly backwards. It took us another night to fix it (which resulted in a very frustrating night of hauling ALL of our bags - four major luggage bags, all full of stuff - into a Holiday Inn and up to our room so we could spread out and RE-pack everything into something more convenient, then reloading the car the next morning). After that, we had no more baggage issues for the rest of our leg of the trip! :D

After the aborted meeting with aunt Bera, we were aimed for another one when we got to Texas. We found out that Claudia had, in the rush of our packing, not actually taken anything for herself (her pills and everything were in the bag she'd put in the car with US) to last beyond the day of her reunion. In the rush that we packed, it isn't surprising that this happened, but still... it resulted in the fact that we had to make a quick turn north before we'd even reached Dallas on the 40 and headed south to meet my parents in Houston. This resulted in a very tearful day while we flitted in and out of phone service, so our information passing was sporadic at best and everyone was upset. That... that was the hardest day of this whole vacation. Thankfully it was rectified later, but still! A very upsetting day in which much crying was done.

Lona and I headed north through Oklahoma. During one of our gas stops, we wandered around a neat little store that was full of native american made stuff, and other little knick-knacks. I picked out a gift for my brother, who's 1/4 Cherokee, and just generally spent some time looking around before we got back on the road again. We drove for a very, very long time in what seemed like nothing but emptiness. We talked about finding somewhere to stop, but then an adventure finding gas (and finding me a restroom that wasn't locked) encouraged us to listen to Dad's voice, which we were both hearing, that was yelling at us not to get off the freeway if we didn't SEE the place we were going to stop FROM the freeway. We ignored him once and wound up gassing up in the back woods of some Reservation town somewhere in Oklahoma along the I-44 - the station itself was closed for the night, but the pay-at-the-pump still worked, so we were able to gas up even though there was no-one anywhere around us. We went on like that for what seemed like a VERY long time, before we finally crossed out of Oklahoma and into Missouri.We stopped for what was left of the night in Joplin, Missouri.

The next morning, after a delicious breakfast at a Waffle House that was right next to the Best Western where we spent the night, we got back on the road and crossed what remained of the "Show Me State," before crossing into it's Prairie neighbor, Illinois. Due to the path we'd taken (the most direct highway route from where we'd had to turn north in Texas), we were entering the state at it's southernmost point, essentially. It took us another nearly twelve hours before we finally reached our destination: aunt Sharon's house in Skokie, a suburb of Chicago.

Much hugs and happiness went around when we finally reached our destination, and aunt Sharon showed us where we'd be staying for the next couple of days. We stayed in and relaxed the following day, playing many games of scrabble and cards. It was nice to not be on the road for a change - I couldn't believe we'd actually made it all the way in less than four days! Even with our abrupt about-face in Texas, it still seemed like it should've taken much longer. This was about when I realized that my concept of distance was being radically changed on this trip.

Before embarking upon this incredible, cross-country adventure, I had felt like being in the car for 2 hours to go somewhere was a long trip. Driving for longer than that seemed impossible - and I'd never stayed in a motel before. Well, once, but spending the night on someone else's motel couch because you visited them all night doesn't really count. And yet, by the time we reached Illinois, I was looking at 12 hour drive times and going "Oh, that's just a day! We can do that." I had the pattern down - stop at the motel office, Lona goes in to book the room, then we park and I get out and get our two important bags out. Head to the room, get inside, get out necessities and shower, then get ready for bed. The next morning, get up, pack up, put the bags back in the car, gas up, and get back on the road. And as proud of myself as I was for being good on the road and knowing what I was doing, it was nice to stop for a few days and NOT be driving.

The second full day we were in Skokie, though, was an awesome adventure! I'd never before been on a train at all, so it was decided that we would buy CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) day passes and take the Skokie Swift train into town, then get on the Red Line El, which becomes the Red Line Subway, and then take a bus in order to get to the Field Museum instead of just driving into town. It was an awesome experience! I've now been on a train, on an elevated train, on a subway, and on a bus in a major city! And it all culminated in a visit to one of the most renowned natural history museums in the world. The gallery that follows is an example of just SOME of the things I saw while there - some of the pictures didn't come out well, and I don't currently have a photoshop-esque program in oroder to fix them.

(PHOTOS ON ORIGINAL BLOG POST! Check them out!)

My next blog post will include the next bit of our trip, since it's all far too long for one update. Tune in next time for more cross-country fun!

Time To Get Up!

Last night, or rather, this morning, I had a very strange dream.

The dream started as a strange...Godzilla-like Japanese movie in which there were these two monsters, one of which was a big reptile and the other was more like a giant moth (but I swear, it was NOT Godzilla OR Mothra - I know what they look like), and they were battling in a large city. I didn't interact with anyone, so I'm not sure if I was actually "there" for this part of the dream or if I was (as I am in quite a few of my dreams) in the role of the camera.

Then, as I was watching, the lizard thing tore it's claws into the moth's body and ripped it open. But instead of bug guts, something that looked like... stuffing...came pouring out. I turned away from the huge tide of polyfil stuffing and dove through a door, kicking it shut behind me. I was obviously now physically IN the dream, whereas before I'm fairly sure I was just a camera.

Inside this room, there was a young, beautiful asian girl. If I had to guess, I'd say she was Japanese, but I really am not a good judge of race. Her hair was long and raven black, flowing, and she was wearing some sort of white, lacy dress. Her legs and arms were bare, and so were her feet. I can still see her fairly clearly in my mind's eye.

She was sitting, curled up on the floor, and looked up at me. I felt my heart start pounding and I backed up against the door - her eyes were solid, obsidian black. Shiny, no pupils or whites visible at all - just black. And then she started to change.

At first, I thought she was shape-shifting into a snake. Her neck became long and weavy, and her arms and legs started lengthening as well, as her body thinned out - but she didn't change more than that. She was a living human-vine-creature, white alabaster skin reflecting the light of the room - the only black was her eyes and her hair. She weaved her head on an impossibly long neck toward me and hissed, opening her mouth and revealing a mouthful of twisted teeth like the Weeping Angels'.

I was frightened now - can you blame me? That was freaking disturbing. I grabbed the doorknob behind me and the door opened backwards, letting me out. I slammed it behind me but I could hear an eerie voice singing (I think it was vine-woman), "Now you've done it... here he comes!"

I started running, and as I have done in dreams for most of my life, I drop-shifted to wolf and kept running. I suddenly became aware of being followed, however, and I kept catching glances of a reddish feline shape never very far from me - and it seemed to be getting bigger.

The rest of the dream is kind of a blur. I remember rapidly shapeshifting from wolf to hawk to owl to fish back to wolf again, trying to lose my persuer, but he kept coming. I was vaguely aware that he was calling himself "Loki," though I doubt it was actually a Norse god chasing me through the area around where I used to live in Houston. But eventually I was exhausted and I turned to face him. It was at this moment that I woke up and became aware of one very, very important thing.

I had to go to the bathroom.

I should've guessed, honestly. Even if I go right before bed, I always wake up in six hours needing to go again, and if I IGNORE it and go back to sleep? I have a nightmare. I rarely have nightmares at ALL otherwise - in fact, every time I have, it's turned out to be a warning of something rather than just a random nightmare. Except when I decide to opt for sleep over getting up an hour or two earlier than I have to (because generally once I'm up, I'm up, no matter how long I've slept). Then, it's just my body trying to shock me awake so I'll go to the bathroom already.

All I can say is... seriously, brain? You can't come up with a less disturbing way of saying, "Hey! It' time to get up!"

Answering Howl

I decided to make another post to answer a friend's questions. These questions came from Midnite (midnitewolf139) on LiveJournal. :D

What branch of anthropology are you drawn to?

I expected to be drawn to Physical Anthropology, due to my love of working with bones and other physical remains. I was right in this respect, but I hadn't expected how wonderful I would find Cultural Anthropology, either. So while the branch I am most drawn to is Physical Anthropology (and in some ways Archaeology), I find that I've so far enjoyed every branch of the science that I've been exposed to and studied.

What specifically was it that made you decide to pursue anthropology as a major?

In a word, convenience. In all honesty, a means to an end. See, I want to be a Paleontologist. But that field of study isn't something you can focus on until PHD level, meaning I needed my AA, my BA, and my MA in some related field that would translate well into Paleontology when I was up to the level where I could go into it. There are three sciences that easily do that - Zoology, Biology, and Anthropology. Of these three, Santa Ana College only offered specialization in Bio and Anthro. Bio is fascinating, but when you get into any system lower than ecosystem (IE, cellular level, etc), I find it incredibly confusing. It took me two tries to pass beginning Biology with a C. I chose Anthropology also because I thought that perhaps learning more about human evolution and history would help me appreciate the human side of my dual nature - and it did!

What is one thing in your studies in anthropology that you never knew before hand, but caught you off guard?

The belief had been, among Anthropologists and scientists in general, that what separated humans from "lower" species came down to 3 things: Language, Metaphorical Thinking, and Tool Use. We were, they claimed, the only creature in the planet's history to possess those three things.

But, see, as we've studied the other creatures with which we share the planet, we've discovered that no - we are NOT as alone in those things as we believed. The first shocker was Jane Goodall proving that Chimpanzees use tools - simple tools, yes, but the concept of using two rocks as a hammer and anvil to break open nuts is something that scientists didn't believe they had the capability to figure out. Much less the other tools they have been witnessed using.

And language! Language doesn't have to be spoken, you know - do we say that people who use sign language are lower animals because they're gesturing to explain things? No! So why should animals that use gestures and body language (far more subtle than anything humans use, in most cases - animals can speak with the way their fur is laying, the tilt of an ear, or the tiniest swish of a tail that means nothing to us) be considered NOT to have language?

It's recently been proven that dogs, when left amongst themselves, bark for one reason - a certain type of warning. It's one bark, and it's the same bark that wolves use for the same warning. But dogs that are around humans have many, MANY different barks to communicate everything from hunger to intruders, to danger of other kinds. So barking as they do is a language dogs have developed for communication with HUMANS. They started barking to talk to US. That shows problem-solving abilities as well that no one had associated with canines previously.

And beyond that, we now have seen all kinds of animals using tools, communicating in ways that can be thought of as language, and demonstrating metaphorical understanding to a point (dogs understand where people point - most animals can't understand a gesture like that, and dolphins can associate flat 2D pictures with real objects - another thing people thought animals couldn't do, etc). So where is the line drawn between "higher" and "lower" animals now? Turns out there's no black and white line.

I suppose what caught me the most off guard was the fact that this has only been discovered so very RECENTLY, and I had just understood it and taken it for granted most of my life.

Last but not least--where/how do you think therianthropy fits into your studies of anthropology?

It fit in very well in both my cultural anthropology class, in which I was able to even write a paper about it for my participant observation paper - well, technically, I wrote about furries, but I had to bring up therianthropy to explain how I came to be aware of the subculture. I also was able to bring it up a lot in our religion class. The teachers have been fascinated and receptive, and in most cases just asked me for more information. :) I think it's kind of awesome. :D

This Blog Is Late!!

This blog isn't late because I didn't have anything to write... but rather because I had too MUCH to write. There's been a lot going on in my life in the last few weeks, and I'm just not quite ready to lay it all on the line yet. But it's foremost in my mind.. And I didn't want to wimp out and put up another Tooth & Arrows when everyone's waiting for TAE posts. (I can always babble about gaming. :P)

Instead, I'd like to do a bit of an open forum. If you have any questions for me, feel free to ask them in comments! I'll gladly answer whatever I can. This goes for all platforms across which this will be reposted (livejournal, blogger, facebook, etc.) as well, so even if this entry gets no non-spam comments (as is usual, lol) I'm sure that some of my followers will have questions.

So! I'm a (mostly) open book! Ask your questions, and I'll answer everything I can! (And I might save them for future Q&A blogs as well if the answer is too long for comments!)

Six Years Gone

I didn't post on Monday this week because it seemed far more poignant to post today. Not because today is Friday, and not even because I had (and am fairly sure I passed) my first Statistics exam yesterday, but because today is the six year anniversary of me moving out of my parent's house in Texas and coming to live with my now fiancee and her family, who took me in as their own.

A lot has happened in the last six years - a lot of discovery, loss, joy, pain, and growing has happened on the part of me and everyone around me. I feel more like "myself" than I ever have before, and I've accomplished so very much in such a little span of time.

When I moved out here, I never thought I could go to college. I didn't think I was good enough even to pass the GED. But both my biological parents and my "adopted" parents (Lona's) encouraged me, and I passed it. Then I tested into College and began taking classes. I maintained a 4.0 GPA for many semesters and made it into Phi Theta Kappa, the 2 year college national honor society, the equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa. I will wear their pin when I graduate - which is going to be sooner rather than later.

Once I pass Statistics, I will only have 2 classes left, not only to transfer to Cal State Fullerton (where dad went), but to officially get my AA in Anthropology: my first degree.

In all of this, I've grown a lot as a person, and learned to trust the things I've always felt were right. I don't let other people pressure me into their points of view, and I have learned to listen to things fairly and evenly (though I admit I still have a problem with arguing even when I know I'm wrong), and have discussions.

I've grown to have actual emotional responses to things, rather than just crying or running away. I've learned to stand up for myself when I feel it's important, and to back down when it isn't. I've learned that I am an incredibly intelligent and talented individual, and I am still growing as a person, as a student, and as a spiritual being.

So many things I never would've learned if I wasn't here - I learned that I love roller-coasters, but hate falling. I've learned that love itself is an incredibly powerful emotion and can do things and get you through things you never thought you could survive. I've learned that sixty years of life doesn't make one person wise, and that twenty years of life doesn't make a person dumb - everyone is unique. I've learned that people do things, both good and bad, when you least expect them. I've learned the difference between the pain of losing a family member long-distance and losing one you share a house with. I've learned how to say goodbye, and how to say hello. I've learned that I like the scent of cherry blossoms, and I prefer softer materials to denim if I can help it.

I've learned that when someone leaves, they don't necessarily stay gone, and sometimes that which you can't see readily can be as real as that which you can. I've learned that I possess talents I didn't know about, and I'm still learning how to harness them. I've learned that love can turn a vicious alley cat into a snuggle kitty. I've learned that being half bobcat doesn't go well with half housecat.

I've learned that cancer can kill faster than you'd think possible. I've learned to treasure every moment with every person, because you never know when you'll speak the last "I love you." I've learned that you can impact people's lives without ever having met them in person. I've learned about balance, and decisions, and the value of silence and meditation. I've learned how to clean a kitchen and a bathroom without hurting myself. I've learned how to manage money (ok, so I'm still working on that one, but I'm better).

I've learned that cutting your own path means dealing with the rocks you uncover on the way, and that sometimes the experience of making the path smooth and easy is more than worth all the hard work that goes into it. I've learned that I don't need to visit a museum every couple of weeks to maintain that connection within me. I've learned to listen to the silence, the trees, and the wind, and feel in my soul what they have to say.

I've learned that it takes more than a year for a traumatic connection to fade in your mind. I've learned that a year after the fact, I still drive by certain buildings and find myself crying. I've learned to let myself cry. And I have learned, most of all, to love wholly and completely, without reservation.

Lona, I owe all of this to you. You came to Texas, six years ago today, and brought me home. And while I do miss my parents (I wish I had more time to talk to you guys!), I know that being here is where I'm supposed to be. And I am more than content.

Thank you, babe, for the gift that is your friendship and love. Thank you, mommy, for accepting me for who and what I am, for your encouragement and your love and your never-ending help along my path. Thank you, mom, for encouraging and helping me through all this growing I've had to do since moving here, and thank you for believing in me. Thank you, daddy, for your support and your intelligence and tips for dealing with things I never realized I'd need to. Thank you, dad, for being there for me out here until you couldn't be anymore - I will hold on to those memories forever, and I will never stop missing you. Thank you, aunt Bonnie, for teaching me to say goodbye - I still miss you, so much. Thank you, kitties, for showing love, acceptance, and patience with this confused puppy. Thank you, kitties I never even met while alive for teaching me that everything is a decision - and thank you for deciding to hang around.

Here's to another six years of joy, pain, excitement, passion, adventure, and most of all, love. Life is an adventure - but until you start living it, you never know just how incredible it can be.

Cat Bite = Annoyance

I know, it's Friday and I haven't blogged yet. School is starting to weigh on me and I'm fighting harder to understand Statistics. However, I'm dealing with a physical problem that's now taking away all my planned homework time, at least for today. And that is frustrating.

Two nights ago, I was walking through the hallway in the middle of the night, and I stepped on Zig. Zig is an orange tabby cat that, after dad's passing, has kind of glued himself to me and claimed me as his new person. He's on my desk now as I write this.

Possible physical TMI warning, btw. Stop reading now if you want, though I promise not to post pictures or be too graphic.

I point out that I stepped on him, because I want it clear that I am NOT holding this against him in anyway, though it's frustrating. He twisted around and bit me, sinking a fang into my right calf muscle. For a moment, I thought I was fine, then I felt the blood start to well up and slide down my leg. I went and got Lona, we went into the bathroom, and she cleaned the wound out as best she could, then bandaged it. By the time I'd walked back to my desk, the bandages had soaked through, so she bandaged it again, this time with a gauze pad taped down over the wound. That didn't bleed through, and it felt better.

Flash forward to the next day, yesterday. In which I had to walk to my Statistics class, in the heat, wearing hot jeans. About halfway through my class, I felt the first twinges of pain at the actual site of the wound. I thought I was pressing it against the chair I was sitting on, so I shifted my leg. By the time class was over and I got back to my car, it felt... really weird. I was feeling pain in the FRONT of the leg, too. As if someone had shoved a dagger through the back of my calf muscle and it was sticking through the tibia and fibula, almost breaking the skin on the other side. My leg didn't enjoy driving, and when I went to get out of the car, it didn't want to hold me up.

Now, I should've been more careful. I should have said something about it right when I got home, but I let myself get distracted. As a result, I didn't think about it again until around 9 pm. About the time it started randomly twinging and twitching, which naturally drew my attention to it. And it hurt worse than it did before.

This time I talked to Claudia, and she reopened the wound and scrubbed it out with hydrogen peroxide (OW, if I may say), and then packed it with cayenne pepper to draw out the infection. Thus began what turned into a very long night.

The pain from the cayenne made it worse. My leg kept twitching - I couldn't go to bed, or I would've kept Lona up all night. So I tried sitting up in the living room and sleeping on the recliner with a pillow under my knee to elevate the wound. Not too long after I sat down, I started shivering.

Then I started shaking. I've never shivered that hard or that uncontrollably before. I put blankets over myself, which immediately started me sweating, but I didn't stop shaking. The last time I looked at a clock before I fell asleep, it was about 3:30am. I woke up at 5am, having to use the bathroom. To make matters worse, because my leg didn't want me to stand reliably, I hadn't done the dishes. I used the bathroom and started the dishes, but I was exhausted and my leg hurt. I was leaning on the counter... and I decided to do something about it. I took a cayenne pepper pill (to try and warm me up - it's good for circulation and equalizes your blood pressure, as well as I figured it would only help the infection be removed faster). I also took two ibuprophen for pain/fever, and a digestive enzymes pill to try and counteract the hell I knew the cayenne was going to send my stomach into. It worked to a point, in that the horrible, nauseating heartburn only lasted an hour instead of four or five hours, so that was good.

I finished the dishes around 8am, and then it started hitting me that I'd only slept for like an hour and a half. Lona got up later, and I crashed.... and woke up 2 hours later, almost exactly. I've been up since. My insomnia of the last few days is not helping me get better.

I feel weak and tired, I'm having trouble concentrating and focusing (hence being unable to do homework), and I know that when Claudia's done with what she's doing, she's going to clean out the wound again - remove the contaminated cayenne and pack it anew. I just hope that the cycle doesn't start all over again.

I hate hospitals, but for awhile last night... I was considering going to the ER. Shaking like that was disturbing - I almost couldn't breathe, and my heartbeat was erratic. I rode it out, but... maybe I shouldn't have. Maybe I should've gone to the ER.

Then again... it's only a cat bite.

Shameless Plug

So, it’s come to my attention that some people follow my site so they’ll see when I write something new – new fanfiction, a new book, things like that. I think it’s only appropriate then that I let you all know about an amazing new opportunity from a company that’s very near and dear to my heart.

For the first time ever, WAMBTAC Communications is offering a new class, Storytelling 101! If you’re part of the majority of the population (approximately 81%, to be exact!), then you have a book bouncing around inside your head. A wonderful story! Most of your friends and family you’ve told about it think you should definitely write it. But you don’t know where to start or even what to do with it once it’s written. You don’t want a Ghostwriter to write it for you – but you know you need the skills an experienced writer has to offer if you want your book to succeed. And we all know you want your book to succeed.

In the new class, the world’s first teaching Ghostwriter will personally show you (via teleclass over seven weeks – think of it as an accelerated college level course) so many things that every author needs to know both before and during writing their own novel. You’ll find out how to create a plot from scratch (and how to turn a sequence of events into a wonderful and viable story – also, what the difference IS between a sequence-of-events and an actual story), how to find the “deal breakers” in an already mapped out plot (usually implausibilities and contrivances that will make traditional publishers put a book on the “deny” pile), and how to fix them! You’ll learn how to use point of view to advance the telling of your story to the next level, and how to minimize that annoying author intrusion (after all, the author knows the whole story, and it’s incredibly easy to let something the reader shouldn’t know yet slip into the text a tad too early and ruin the reveal you have planned for later in the text – I should know, I’ve DONE this).

Do you know the difference between passive writing and active writing? You will, by the end of the class – as well as what it can do to turn a drab novel into bestseller material. You’ll learn how to create compelling character studies (no – not just answering a bunch of questions about the character – a true character study is so much more!). And, one of my personal issues – the difference between conversation and dialogue, and how to know when each is appropriate to use in your novel. Finally, you’ll learn proper structure that will keep your novel from immediately ending up on a publisher’s reject pile, and the basics of the professional composition that the book industry requires for any book to be accepted into a traditional publishing house.

The course starts September 6^th, from 4pm to 5:30 pm, PDT, on Tuesdays. And you don’t even have to leave your house! There’s no other course like this in any school on the planet, and certainly no other opportunity to learn from two professionally published authors – one of whom is the foremost authority on Ghostwriting in the world. To pay a professional Ghostwriter to do these things for your novel will cost tens of thousands of dollars – you can learn to do it yourself for less than $500.

This is the first time this class has been offered to the general public, and it won’t be the last. If you can’t make this class, but are interested, please watch this page for updates and new class times. You can write your own novel, make it shine, and get it traditionally published by big name publishing houses, and get the knowledge of how to do so from industry experts. This is an amazing opportunity for every aspiring author out there, and as an author myself, I greatly encourage anyone who’s interested to sign up and take advantage of this awesome offer.

Thoughts On Another Series...

I'm a day late in posting. Bad me.

This is the first week of school, and I have my Statistics class today. Math.. doesn't like me, and I'm nervous. Everyone says I'm going to do fine - heck, I even say I'm going to do fine - but I'm still freaking out a bit. I admit this.

Anyway, I've been contemplating what my next series should be, and I've come up with three possibilities. One is a beginner's guide to therianthropy - this would cover topics like how to tell if you're a therian, and basics in narrowing down your theriotype to overall species, if not particular subspecies, and a section on how to start searching for that elusive label that the human part of us wants so very badly - the actual "diagnosis" of your subspecies.

The second is a series about working with animals - both living and in spirit form, and how to get in touch with and find out what creatures may be lurking around you - be they totemic spirits with messages, individual creatures who are interested in working with you one way or another, or who have otherwise been attracted by your energy, or simply the presence of more familiar beings - pets - who were not quite ready to leave you.

The third possibility is a more scientific look at animal emotions, and how we as human beings aren't quite as different as we have liked to think for most of our history. This one would be more in the form of a research paper, but split into several individual topics, each of which would get their own blog. These would be topics such as animals and mourning - do non-humans understand the concept of death?, animals and love - the meaning of unconditional, and animals and hatred - can a pet hold a grudge?, among others.

So, I leave this to my readers. Which series would you be more interested in seeing first? I plan on doing all of them eventually, but I'm at a loss as to which one should come first. Any and all input would be appreciated.

Q & A #1: Misanthropy & Therianthropy

Since I've been having trouble lately coming up with blog posts regularly, I decided to try something new. This post is an open forum in which I will be answering the questions I've collected in the last few days across platforms such as LiveJournal, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, DeviantArt, and Blogger. I've decided that this is going to be a monthly feature on my blog - so feel free to submit more questions in comments for use in future Q & A's!

And now, on to the questions!

Angela Mauro from Google+ asks: "Do you think it is common for therians to be misanthropes? Many, but not all, therians I meet seem to have a particular hate of humans."

Well, Angela, it turns out that misanthropy is a bit of a side effect to therianthropy, especially with people who are "new to the faith," so to speak. It's easy for a therian to become so obsessed with their animal side that they begin to not only discount their human sides, but start to actually hate it.

I have some personal experience with this line of thinking, as much as I'm loathe to admit it now. It's fairly embarrassing and something like being caught with your spiritual pants down to admit that I was once one of "those" therians as well. The first, dramatic instance that I remember when I realized I disliked (being polite with the terminology) humanity as a whole was when I was in the car with my mother back in Texas. We were leaving the bank’s parking lot, and a truck in front of us hit a songbird and killed it. There had been two birds, one chasing the other, and the truck hit the second bird. My mom gasped, and I just started SHOUTING. I don’t even remember what I called the person driving that truck, but I know it wasn’t very nice. To make it more heartbreaking, the first bird came back and landed next to the body of the other bird and just sat there. It was heartbreaking.

My mom explained to me that there was no way that truck could’ve stopped without endangering the other people in traffic, even if he had time to have seen the bird before it was too late, but I was too furious. I said he should have put the other people in danger – that’s the risk people take when they drive cars. The birds don’t know any different – they’re just sweet little birds, and now that one is all alone. What if they mated for life? What if it’s like my mom’s pigeons and now that other one is going to be so lost it’ll go off and drown itself? (A really heartbreaking story there as well, but I won’t get into that as I’m fairly certain that’s one of my mom’s anecdotes to tell – if you want to comment and fill in the story, mom, feel free!)

To put it mildly, I was being a complete and total jerk to a person I had never and would never meet, over something they probably couldn’t have helped if they’d tried… And in my head, I extended it to this huge, horrible rant about how humans are unfeeling creatures who don’t give a flying flip about the creatures with which they’re supposed to share the planet and instead take every opportunity to just take and take and take and don’t care who they hurt in the process- I really just kept going. I think my mind was stuck on that for days afterwards and I still remember it vividly.

All those things I’ve thought, and worse, I’ve seen expressed in the opinions of misanthrope therians across the board. It doesn’t matter their theriotype, it doesn’t matter where in the world they’re from or what experiences they’ve had in their lives – the bigotry is the same, and it’s always there.

Perhaps bigotry is too strong a word – but in all honesty, let’s replace the species we’re talking about with ethnicities or genders or sexual preferences, and there is no doubt that’s what we would label that kind of hatred. Those white people don’t care a thing about the land, stealing our land and our food, imprisoning us and treating us as savages…. Flip that: Those humans don’t care a thing about us – they invade our territories, shove us in to smaller and smaller areas until they don’t like that we “encroach” on them again, and then they imprison us or simply kill us. Whether it’s the native Americans talking about the English, or a wolf therian talking about humans, ultimately it’s still just bigotry. And that brings me to my theory as to why misanthropy is so prevalent in therians across the board.

The well-known blogger, 2 – The Ranting Gryphon, wrote a story back in 2003 that has recently been brought back into the spotlight by none other than Therithere, the therianthrope-centric comic strip that has had some of their strips featured during my Shift Happens series. And it illustrates very well one of the primary spiritual theories behind therianthropy existing at all, as well as why misanthropy is just one of the challenges we are faced with – and if we do not overcome them, we may never fulfill our destiny on this planet.

Summarizing the story, there is a bear therian who spends his entire life wishing and praying and longing to be a bear in body, never really doing anything with his human life. He “hate[d] humans… and hate[d] himself for being one.” An apt description of misanthropy, though admittedly quite a few therians take the route of superiority, believing their animal sides make them “better” than other humans, and so while they hate humans, they don’t reach the point where they hate themselves. Though there are some therians who do hate themselves for being human physically as well. In the story, one day, he gets his wish. He wakes up in the wild as a bear. He’s incredibly excited and cavorts around happily until he meets Bear, the totemic spirit. He thanks the spirit for granting him his life’s wish – and only then does he find out that he was made a human that the bears might have a voice within the human world, and by spending his human life doing nothing but hating humans and wishing he were a bear, he proved himself to be useless to Bear, and therefore the spirit simply brought him home. As the story ends,  “the bear who was once a human lived to see his fellow bears hunted and killed, his forest home demolished, his rivers polluted and his fish taken, and could never again do anything to stop it. And when he slept at night, he dreamed of being human again.”

My point in bringing up this story is that in the last two years, I have fought my own battle with misanthropy. It took my fiancée to point out to me the level of my own bigotry, and a drastic experiment in which I eschewed everything animal for six months and forced myself to live as a complete human (as much as I could – I admit, I failed quite a few times… but the POINT got through my head in the end, and that’s what was important). I’ve known Wolf!Me for pretty much my entire life, though I didn’t know my particular sub species of wolf until about thirteen years ago or so, but thanks to this experiment, I got to know Human!Me for the first time. And when the experiment was over, I found myself becoming a much more balanced person. My wolf and human sides were no longer at war – in fact, I was more contherian (a therian who has a steady balance between animal and human) than I had ever been before.

It was only at this point in my life and my development that I started to realize that I had been gifted this spiritual duality for a reason. I had always been interested in paleontology, but I thought I would go into it to work with dinosaurs – suddenly I realized that wasn’t what I needed to do with my life at ALL. I needed to work where I would be exposed to the environment and animals that lived contemporarily with the beast that lurks in my soul – I needed to become a Pleistocene Paleontologist and specialize in dire wolves… To learn, to bring information to other humans, and to share the world that once was with the humans of today with an understanding that would go beyond perhaps any other paleontologist that had ever lived. And I needed to live my human life to its fullest as well – to experience all the things I couldn’t as a wolf, because this life, this existence, and this very soul is a gift.

To return to the original question, I do believe that misanthropy is something that “comes with” therianthropy, but rather than being a hindrance, I believe that it is something that each individual therian needs to come to terms with, within themselves. To reach a point where you understand that you are both animal and human, and there is a reason for that – that not all humans are bad people, and that there is a reason for you to be who you are and what you are, born in this very time and place. Misanthropy is a challenge to the therian individual to come to terms with why they feel that way, and what it is that they can do to make this world a better place – not just for animals, but for humans as well.

Well, this blog has now gone on for five pages answering one question! Heh…  So that’s it for the blog this week. I have two questions left in the backlog for future Q & A sessions – I’m also taking suggestions as to what I should name this new feature of my blog. I’m leaning toward “Rallying Howl,” what do you all think? Any suggestions? More questions? I welcome them all!

Visitation Of Scent

I hadn't blogged yet this week for the main reason that I didn't seem to have anything to blog about. Not game-wise or spiritual-wise, so... No blog potential.

However, today, as I was on a fairly long(er than normal) trip and very relaxed, I started smelling something that I literally haven't smelled in over seven years. However, scent being the strongest trigger of memory, I recognized it immediately.

Years before I moved to California, my aunt (may she rest in peace) gave my family a dog that she couldn't care for any longer for a myriad of reasons. The dog was a miniature schnauzer named Lady Madison, with a pedigree as long as my arm... Also known as a dog with horrible allergies and enough neuroses to load down a truck, but I loved her.

By the time I moved out, I knew Lady only had a few more years in her. Pedigreed dogs never live as long as mutts, and I could feel her slowing down. She lived I think three or four more years after I moved out... I think three. My parents kept me up to date about how she was doing, so I knew that she was going to be put down. I was unable to say goodbye in any way other than long-distance, spiritually, which I did to the best of my ability. But Lady, in the years she'd lived with us, had become essentially my dad's dog. I didn't have any profound experiences like the one I had when Smokey passed four months after I moved out. She just... faded away. I did have a nightmare involving her a year or more before she died, but it was nothing like that when she actually passed. She was just... gone, and I felt disconnected.

Fast forward to today in the car, when I very suddenly smelled... Lady. And not just any scent - the scent she had just after I gave her a bath. Oatmeal doggy shampoo and a uniquely "dog" smell. And I've bathed other dogs - no dog ever smelled like her, and we only used that oatmeal shampoo for her.

I had the air conditioning on in the car, and the air on recycle, so I know the scent didn't come in from outside. I wasn't thinking about Lady at the time, until I smelled it,so I know it wasn't triggered by me thinking about Lady and then remembering the scent vividly. Giving her a bath isn't even a particularly strong memory, not until I really focus on it.

So it was strange that I suddenly felt Lady and smelled her, so very strongly. I know she'd been in the car when she was alive, but given that she's never even come to visit me before, I'm not sure I know what to think of it now. I've texted my mom to see if maybe Lady was trying to tell me something about back in Texas - it wouldn't be the first time the spirit of a past pet has nudged me to call/text/talk to my parents for one reason or another. But... Her presence in the car was almost palpable. I didn't look in the rearview mirror for the knowledge that not seeing her there would be very jarring, the way I was feeling.

Anyway, I just felt the need to share that with everyone. I'll update this entry later (or make a new one) if I find out something's going on with my parents.

That Canine Perspective

I missed my normal posting day of Monday. If it helps, expect at least 2 blogs today. :P For starters, I saw a movie I’ve been meaning to watch for awhile this weekend, and it got me thinking.

The movie was Disney’s 2006 remake of The Shaggy Dog, with a genetic twist on the normally magic-driven story. Though it isn’t the semantics of the story that got me thinking – it was the juxtaposition of the mannerisms of a dog on a human being. And I’m not just talking about the dramatic “running on all fours” or some of the other things he was capable of doing thanks to the infection of the dog’s DNA. I’m talking about the things I saw that hit the “therian” trigger in my head.

When the main character, played by Tim Allen, is initially infected, his mannerisms immediately begin changing. He starts behaving “like a dog,” but the thing that interested me most was that he didn’t seem to realize it. How many therians occasionally scratch or shake like an animal? I know I do, sometimes. And I remember the first time I’d realized I’d done something like that without conscious thought.  I was maybe… seven years old or so. Now, admittedly, I did spend a lot of time pretending to be an animal at that age and earlier (but, as I learned in my Human Development class last semester, that’s actually a normal stage of human development – trying to find where you and how you behave fits in with other creatures you observe, either in person or through mediums such as TV or movies). However, this was different.    I had an itch. I scratched it. I only realized afterwards that I’d scratched it (albeit with my hand, not my foot, but the point still stands) rather like a dog. Something similar happens in the film, as well as “tail chasing” (reaching for the tie to his robe and ending up spinning around several times before getting ahold of it), and “feral eating,” though I the character in the film took this farther than I think any therian would allow themselves to go in polite human company. He ate a bowl of cereal as if it was a bowl of dog food, despite sitting at the table and holding a spoon in one hand – AND continued to hold a conversation with his (shocked) son while doing so, all without realizing that what he was doing was strange at all.

The ultimate moral of the movie was that none of us should get so caught up in human things that we forget the simple joys in life and that which is most important to us. In the case of the character, his family and simply NOT working his proverbial (and then literal) tail off all the time.  However, returning to the therianthropy angle, I was fascinated by the movie because of the animal actions taken by the human – his obliviousness and the people around him having their reactions aside, just watching it, it was fascinating.

It made me think a lot about what animals have to teach us about our own “higher” lives. Don’t get so stressed you forget what’s important is only one lesson we can take from our non-human co-inhabitants of this planet.  I wrote a paper once about how the extinction of a single animal species can throw off entire ecosystems – it’s the same in our lives. And not just in the lives of therians. I’ve watched people work themselves into the ground – or, more literally, into an emotional breakdown – repeatedly, never realizing that what it was they needed was to take the time to stop and smell the roses. But not just roses – so much delight can be taken out of ordinary things in life. So much pleasure – from the smell of bacon cooking, to the sounds of cars passing by, the songs of birds, the sensation of running your hand over the furry body of a purring cat, the simple and unconditional love of a dog – there is so much in this life that’s so easy to miss if we get so caught up in what we’re “supposed” to do that we forget what we NEED.

So let’s all take a lesson from the dogs, and therians – pay attention to your animal side. Don’t lose sight of the little things that make this life worth living. We’ll all be happier for it.

Beating The Heat

I don't like heat.

This might sound obvious, coming from a dire wolf therian, but heat does not agree with me. You get over about 75 degrees Fahrenheit and I start getting fairly uncomfortable.

Lately, the temperature around here has been rising into the 90s during the day. Needless to say, I've been a very uncomfortable puppy.

But while a wolf in the wild might only have the option of lying down in shade and panting in order to beat the heat, a human has quite a few more options. I can turn on the air, which finances have kind of dictated be kept to the minimum recently, so that option is out. I can turn a fan on me, but the nearest place to put one is across the room, and to get it to reach me I must turn it up on medium - and that gets loud. Loud is distracting in a work environment. Ok, so scratch the fan.

I could sit with an ice pack on the back of my neck or the small of my back! Except that it gets all goopy after a few minutes and ceases being cold, between the heat of the outside world and heat of my body... Ugh, that doesn't work either.

A cold shower! I could take a cold - the bathroom is sweltering. Ok, not a cold shower.

I could drink water with ice. Ahh, the perfect way to beat the heat. Gah! I just gave myself stomach cramps! Ok, too much cold plus hot body equals upset stomach. Scratch the ice water.

I could... ah... There's got to... I'm human! There must be a heat-beating benefit to possessing this physical form!

Then again, laying in the shade and panting is looking better and better all the time.

Things aren't as bad as I just portrayed, by the way. That was essentially playing up for humor's sake. I do have a fan turned on me, and I am drinking cold water. It's nice. But that doesn't change that it's still too hot. Could someone get the world's thermastat fixed? Maybe reset it about, oh... 10,000 years? Kthnxbai. :P

"Escape" Revisited

"If you like Pina Coladas,
And getting caught in the rain..."

Who doesn't know this song? I'm sure I've just gotten it stuck in quite a few people's heads. Certainly over a certain age, pretty much everyone knows this song. It's "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)", by Rupert Holmes, circa 1979 or so. And oddly enough, it is the topic of my blog today.

Bear with me through possibly one of the most random TAE blogs so far.

I ran out to do some errands this afternoon. One of the things I love about my 1994 Jeep Cherokee is the awesome stereo my parents had installed in it before my dad gave it to me about a year ago. And I love using it. I flip through stations, any time a station goes to commercial, I move on. I have preset buttons to all my favorites, and I jump around until I hear something I want to listen to. Today, on my way home from Walgreens, I  happened to stop on Escape.

Now, I've been hearing this song since I was a little girl. I remember hearing it specifically when I was around 7 or 8, and asking my mom what a pina colada was. All I got was "it's a pineapple and coconut drink." That sounded tasty to me! I had no idea for many years later that it was alcoholic as well. :P Though you can make a virgin one.

Though, of the lyrics and the story of the song, that's really all I remembered consciously. I obviously remembered the REST of it, as today I was singing along with it without even thinking. And then I started listening to the lyrics.

This song is COMPLETELY unrealistic!

The premise is that there's a guy, unhappy in his marriage, who starts reading the personals part of the newspaper, looking for someone to... well, there's no delicate way to put this - he's looking for someone to cheat on his wife with. He encounters the personal ad that makes up the first chorus of the song.

He then justifies his interest in it by saying that he and his "old lady's" love life had grown stale. And so he takes out a personal ad in response, requesting a meeting with the Pina Colada person.

Upon going to meet this person (he actually went THROUGH with the meeting! the heel!), he recognizes her the moment she walks in the door... Not because of anything she said, but because it's no one other than his wife!!

Now, here is where everything gets unrealistic. Not only has he gone through with cheating on her, but she was actually doing it BEFORE him, as her ad was already in the paper for him to find. In the real world, this would be a HUGE fight - both people are in the wrong, but it would ultimately be her (most likely) who is proven to have had the intent to be unfaithful FIRST, since she took out the original ad. This whole misunderstanding would lead to divorce, most likely!

However, in the song? They see each other, laugh, admit that neither knew they were talking to the other... and then have an amicable conversation realizing that neither ever knew the other liked Pina Coladas, etc, ending up with a reignition of their relationship. Very sweet. Very nice.

Incredibly unrealistic.

I will never be able to listen to that song the same way again. And now, thanks to me, neither will you. :P Don't you love blogging and it's propensity to spread one person's opinions?  But, then again... that's another blog topic entirely.

Wolf Power - Shift Happens 5

I don’t know a single therian who hasn’t dreamed of waking up one day in the body of their theriotype, myself included. This is with the knowledge that, in my personal case, I would be a creature out of time and out of place with my current surroundings, and yet the desire is still there. To be able to express on the outside that which we know ourselves to be on the inside is a drive that encourages strange practices among therians and otherkin – sometimes this expresses itself in the form of extreme tattooing and other body modification, but more often it’s just a secret longing. And again, I don’t know a single therian who hasn’t longed for that taboo phrase – P-shift.

P-shift has become the accepted therian term for that which we see in every classic werewolf movie and book, and in quite a few ancient stories… but never in real modern life. That is, the actual physical act of shifting into your theriotype, that your human body becomes that of an animal. The desire to be able to do this – especially to be able to do it at-will, is a huge part of therianthropy for most therians. Now, this is widely accepted in the therianthrope community as being impossible – but there are those who believe it not only possible, but claim to have done it. In the interest of political correctness, I’m going to treat this as if it were a viable possibility, though I admit that my own personal opinion is that it is simply impossible. As for what that says for those who believe they have done it, well… That is open to interpretation.

Generally, to claim to have successfully P-shifted is something that will get you ostracized from the therianthrope community. Yet people insist that it be believed without proof – these people usually prove to either be trolls, or delusional. Sometimes they simply drop off the face of the internet after making these claims, which always leads some people to believe that their claims were true – but perhaps the final transformation was one way. In general, though, even the term P-shift is looked down on in the communities – the unattainable mountaintop that all therians wish we could reach but know is impossible. So in general, unless the topic is more of a “what if” topic, you generally won’t see this kind of shift discussed.

So what if? What if I could become my theriotype – run as a dire wolf, or fly as a red-tailed hawk? Would I still retain my human mind? Or would the shift be a one way trip, and the decision have to be made before the shift was undertaken – do I want to never come back from this? I admit, there was a time in my life when the answer would have been yes. But I look around me now and… How many people could I help if I were fully wolf? How could I contribute to the world, be with the people I love, if I were no longer in this human form? The answer is that there’s almost no way – especially if the shift also involved me losing my human mind as well as my human shape. When I astral shift, I am aware that I am a physical and mental human that is allowing her more animalistic side to show through on the astral plane, and I’m still aware of time, and people, and everything – if I could speak, I would. And I always return to my body.

I’ve heard far too many therians scream in defiance that they would simply up and leave their human lives if only they could – and that worries me. What level of intolerance and misunderstanding must you be facing to be willing to turn your back on the body you were born into? No matter what we are on a spiritual level, one thing some therians don’t seem to give enough consideration to is that we are also human. It takes a human mind to even fathom the concept of therianthropy, or of a soul at all. It takes our intelligence, our very humanity, to conceive of being more than what we appear to be.

I used to be one of those therians who would wish to simply shift and fly away, or run away. But I’ve been through a lot in recent years and it’s changed my way of thinking. I realize now that I need more. I need my humanity, and my animal side to make me the complete person I am. I either chose to be this way in this life, or it was chosen for me by a higher power – for whatever reason, I believe there is a purpose to it. Perhaps the purpose is as simple as blogs such as this to help other people along in their discoveries of themselves. Or perhaps I haven’t even found my calling yet. All I know is that I don’t know – and that is a very human concept.

There are other, lesser known types of shifts as well, but in this series we have covered the most prevalent, and most of those lesser known types can be lumped in underneath these labels. For links to all previous articles in this section, please see the Essays portion of my site, or simply click the Shift Happens tag at the end of this post. Thank you all for reading my first blog series! Let’s hope for plenty more to come!

A Morning Of Energy

I've tried a lot of different types of exercise over the years. I've tried aerobics, I've tried biking (which I love, but don't have the stamina... or the equipment for, at the moment), I've tried walking (I get so bored walking without actually GOING anywhere.. and when I go somewhere, I end up eating something that negates the walk), I've tried following work-out videos... But there's one thing that's always spoken strongly to me - and not just because I have a couple of bonds who are completely versed in the practice - and that's Tai Chi.

A little over a year ago, we tried as a family to do Tai Chi from a beginner's video every morning... and it kind of fell apart within a week. When I was done, I felt exhausted and very much.. NOT like it was how I expected it to be, knowing what Tai Chi is and what it's designed to do.

Recently, though, partially due to something I've been working on at work (can't be specific, sorry - in my line of work we sign a lot of non-disclosure agreements), my mind has been going more and more to the fact that I need SOME kind of exercise in my life.. And if I can't find the time, then I need to MAKE the time for it.

Last night, as I wrote in an earlier blog today, I had trouble sleeping. However, I still jumped up when the alarm went off at 7am this morning. Why? Because I knew I would be the only one up. I started out with my usual morning routine - a routine I'd been letting slip in recent months, only to have an epiphany that I felt so much better when I DID it, so I went back to doing it. I begin each day in prayer and meditation, even as I move around the house opening blinds, putting dishes away, cleaning counters, making coffee, sometimes feeding the cats and doing other things. Take that however you will, I'm deliberately being vague and nondenominational here.

My prayers are prayers of thanks - for the day, for the sunshine, for each precious piece of my life. My fiancee, my house, each room, each object and person I interact with, the cats... everything. I also give thanks for my body, my health, and the fact that I am a beautiful human being. And some of this is done aloud, but mostly it's a mental and energy thing.

Now, about half an hour has passed. I still have at least half an hour before I need to do anything specific. I usually sit down in a calm space and commune with the animal spirits around me - the skin spirits and other creatures that share this world and life with me thanks to my own spiritual works. However, today I realized that my mind does not need me to be sitting still in order to do this. So, I started stretching as I communed with the animal spirits... and something I never expected began to emerge.

The first energetic greetings I received were from my coyotes, and I felt urged physically to bend over and touch my toes, slowly and evenly. I had to bend my knees slightly, but suddenly I found myself with, essentially, four on the floor. And the amazing part? I wasn't in pain. The next creature that reached out to me was my badger, Constance, and I felt "stand up slowly, relax and roll shoulders". I did as I felt lead to do. Over the course of the next twenty minutes or so, my mind lost in meditation all but for one moment when Claudia came in and commented that I was VERY close to actually touching my toes without bending my knees, and I thanked her, and my body going through the motions the spirits offered me.

It came out to a 20 minute, tai chi-esque workout that left me sweating, breathing a little bit hard, and the muscles in my back, thighs, arms, and calves burning a bit - but it was a plesant burn, not the pain of shin splints that accompanied my previous attempts at Tai Chi. Looking back on it, I felt my hands heating up with the same energy feelings I got from working with my pelts, and one phrase from the Tai Chi video from last year kept coming back to me - the one move I could do perfectly every time: "Sinking The Chi" - which was the one move that I felt the need to do at the end of every spirit inspired sequence. And now I felt more what I'd expected when trying the Tai Chi a year ago. I felt energized, I felt AWAKE... and I hadn't even had coffee yet. Not only that, but I was running on a fitful five hours or so of sleep. And I felt GREAT.

I sat down at my desk, even though I was an hour and a half early for work, and began work on my transcription, getting it more than halfway done and done WELL before I was even scheduled to start work.

Around the time work was about to start, though, my physical energy started waning, so I went over to the little trampoline we have in the living room and bounced for a couple of minutes. That got the burn going in my thighs and calves again, and woke me up. I was thrilled. I was even HUNGRY, and I can't remember the last time (even when getting up at six and seven in the morning) that I've been hungry before noon. I ate a bologna sandwich, drank some ice water, got myself a cup of coffee, and went back to work. I finished the transcription over an hour sooner than I'd anticipated that I would - which makes sense, since that's how long I worked on it before work officially STARTED.

I did end up napping through my lunch break instead of eating, but I made that decision consciously, as I knew I would have no time for the rest of the day to repeat my spiritual routine, and I needed enough energy to get me through to at least eleven tonight. Whereas I would have time to eat later, and I wasn't particularly hungry at lunch, either.

I can't wait for tomorrow, and seeing what I'm lead to do during my exercise then! This is what I've been searching for my entire life - exercise that gets me excited about doing it. And it's the one thing I've never been able to find.

Funny how, just like my positivity, what I need just seems to show up... but only when I've stopped actively looking for it.

Thank You, for that gift as well.

Quirky Sense Of Smell

Like most wolf therians, I'm very aware of my sense of smell (when my allergies allow me to feel like I HAVE one, that is), but there are certain times when I wish very much that I could be like my friend Nyx, who doesn't have a sense of smell at all.

For instance, everyone knows that scent is a strong trigger of memory. It's also tied to one's stomach in a lot of cases - smelling food can make you hungry, even if you weren't a moment earlier. Or, alternately, smelling something gross can make you nauseated, even if you aren't sick. However, what I'm taking issue with today is that my brain apparently combines scents and finds strange things horrifically repulsive.

Last night, broccoli and cheese was part of our dinner. I'm the designated dishwasher, so before I went to bed last night, I was finishing up the dishes. This included the pot that the broccoli and cheese was made in. I love the scent of broccoli and cheese. It's delicious.

Our current dish soap is green apple scented. I also love this scent. It reminds me of Jolly Ranchers, and makes me want candy.

Now, dinner had been about six hours earlier, but, silly me, I hadn't thought to come in and rinse the pot to make my washing of it easier when I got there. So, I decided to squirt some soap into it, fill it with hot water, and let it soak while I did the other dishes.

I don't know if it was the soap, the broccoli, the hot water, or some combination of them - but as I was washing the dishes, the scent drifted over to my for-once-unblocked nose... and it was possibly the most disgusting thing I have ever smelled. I reeled back from the sink and said "whoa," thankfully fairly quietly. The scent was so strange that I couldn't even PLACE it - it didn't smell like broccoli and cheese, or hot water, or even green apples. It smelled... I can't even compare it to anything, but imagine the worst scent you can - that's what it was like.

Now, as most canines, I'm intrigued by scents. So I began hunting for the source of the strange, disgusting smell. It didn't take me long to localize it to the pot... or to squick out the moment I got a better scent of it. Had I been a canine in the physical, I'd have been pawing at my nose as if I'd just been skunked. My eyes were watering, I kept shaking my head, and I had to take my glasses off because my face was heating up and they actually fogged.

I did the only thing I could do - I yanked the pot into the sink and dumped it, then started running water into it, scrubbing furiously. I breathed through my mouth, wished that my nose would choose that moment to stuff up (it didn't), and got that pot as clean as I could as quickly as possible. Soon, the only scent coming from it was the Jolly Rancher-esque scent of the soap.

However, the damage had already been done. My stomach had turned, and nothing could get that smell out of my nose. I sniffed several other things before leaving the kitchen - old coffee, cat food, a piece of bologna, which I also ate in an attempt to clear the scent. But ultimately it was ducking into the bathroom and brushing my teeth for the second time in less than an hour that managed to clear the scent and replace it with the Scope mint of my toothpaste.

I don't know if that weird scent is to blame for the fact that I couldn't get to sleep last night, and when I did, it was incredibly fitful, but I did learn one thing - soaking a cheesy broccoli pot in apple soap and hot water is NOT something I'm going to do again.

Spammy Whammy

My blog dashboard informs me that I have a very popular site. In addition to my five subscribers (of which I'm fairly sure only two are in this house), I have over seven hundred comments spread across all of my blog posts! Now, that sounds really awesome, right? And! To make matters better, I know for a fact that only one of those comments is mine.

As of right now, my blog has 752 comments! However, if you read my blog regularly, you might have only noticed, oh... 3. Because of those 752 lovely comments, 749 of them... were spam. Now, spam is getting tricky. Sometimes it's VERY obviously not about the topic of the blog, such as the "this is getting very subjective, but I prefer the Zune Marketplace...." in response to a post about someone's death. Other times, though, it's just things like, "This was a very informative article! Thank you for writing!", which, I admit, I might have been tricked by - if the name of the "person" leaving the comment wasn't "free sex videos" with a dubious link as their website.

I've been meaning to write this particular blog for awhile, as it's my biggest grievance with Wordpress - it's just so easily trolled and comment spammed. Now, you might be reading this on my Blogger or my LJ blog, in which case - no, I don't have these issues. However, the whole point of changing Tyger's Den over to a wordpress site was so I could integrate my blog with the rest of my concise internet presence, with links to other places I appear because... Well, a few years ago, there was someone else out there who was pretending to be me, and it got me into a bit of trouble with friends I don't talk to regularly. That person's since been caught and hasn't been at it again, but I'm careful to monitor everywhere I exist upon the web in order to stop that from happening again in the future.

Back to the topic, however - the spam comments range from the ridiculous to the inappropriate, to the "normal," except for their attached username or link. And I get, on average, five or six of them, spread across all blogs, every day. The blogs they choose seem to be random, but they do favor specific ones. The Tooth & Arrows in which I discussed Mario Kart DS is popular, as is my tribute to Elizabeth Sladen just after her death. Other posts, such as posts in which I'm giving actual advice, like the Shift Happens series, don't get any at all. Whereas a blog in which I comment that the reason my creativity tanked was that I hadn't been dreaming regularly draws comments such as "a useful idea! I shall have to attempt this in the future!". Pray tell how you will "attempt" to dream, you creepy little spam bot? Leave me alone!

Perhaps the funniest spam I receive, though, are the spams that are "advertising" a way to post comments across multiple wordpresses to "get your ideas out there". IE, Spambots that are ADVERTISING themselves. I love those. Which is good, because I get about five of them a week.

Just a request for those who will actually comment on this blog, you non-spambot people. But never say "this article" or "this topic" when talking about what the article is about... Please, be specific. Because I don't want to be marking comments as spam when they aren't. It doesn't take much - a few trigger words will do it, or even one. But vague comments and names and sites I don't recognize are likely to be marked as spam.

However, I can say this - I personally read every comment I receive. So even if I wrongly mark a comment as spam, rest assured that I have read every word of it.

Now, if someone could invent a mallet that smacked spambots off the internet, I would be thrilled. Can we do that? Please?

Now, let's see how many spam comments THIS entry gets.

Werewolf

When I was writing the Shift Happens blog about Phantom Shifts, I neglected to mention one of the possible triggers of them. One reason for this is that I was focused on how to deliberately cause one and this method is (for me, at least) fairly unreliable. However, the trigger I'm discussing is music.

I'm not talking about a drumming trance, or even instrumental music to listen to while you meditate and try to trigger a phantom shift (Dan Gibson's Soundscapes series is awesome for this - wolf howls set to classical music, and other animal sounds), but when a song speaks to you in such a powerful way that it sets your "fur" on edge and you find yourself wanting to howl, or roar, or whatever your theriotype's sound would be, along with it. When you find yourself skin dancing* without the skin, but with a different covering over your human body.

Now, this can progress into a true Phantom Overlay, but as you could be any number of places while listening to music, it is a good idea to arrest the progress of this (if you can - sometimes the spirit is a little TOO willing :P ) at the simple phantom shift, and just keep enjoying the music.

Why am I posting about this now? Why is it not under the Shift Happens label? And WHY is the title of this post, "Werewolf"? All questions I'm going to answer. Kind of now.

See, the reason I'm posting about this is that I had an awesome experience yesterday. Something that hasn't happened in over a year, and something I absolutely love when it does. I was "seen," and not by just one person... but two.

I went to Wal-Mart to pick up a sprinkler for our front lawn. I took a sort of long drive to get there, because I wanted to time the 2 routes I knew of and see which one was faster (hence one way going, the other way coming back). On the way, a 30 Seconds To Mars song I'd never heard before came on the radio. It was called Night Of The Hunter. Now, my initial thoughts were actually of an epic save that myself and Nyx and Midnite had pulled off in Stonecore in WoW a few weeks ago, in which our Tank and Healer both died, and the three of us (all L85 Hunters) managed to down both Slabhide and the final boss of the dungeon on our own from about 1/3 health. It was fairly awesome, and as I listened to the song, I found myself lamenting that none of us had been using a recording software at the time - we could've made a video of the fights to that song.

However, something else was happening. I don't know what it was about the song, or whether it was the "background visuals" in my head, because every song I listen to has at least 2 ways I "see" it, and I arbitrarily pick which visual goes with it every time I listen to it, and this one tended to bring with it the visuals of a wolf pack hunting at night. Perhaps even the werewolf Pack from Kelley Armstrong's Otherworld series, because I think I recognized a certain large, golden, blue-eyed wolf in the mix. But whatever it was, a phantom shift overtook me in the car, brought with it a lovely energy boost, and was still going strong when I got to Wal-Mart

Wal-mart is huge, (and this was a Super Wal-Mart, so even bigger than normal), and because of my knees, hip, and back, I make a point of riding the electric carts around stores like that, while I walk in Albertson's and other grocery stores. As I was heading back toward the gardening department, phantom shift still in place - an astral werewolf driving an electric shopping cart - I noticed a woman leading a young man gently by the hand. From the formation of his features and the look on his face, I could tell he was differently abled, mentally. Down Syndrome, perhaps, but maybe something more or worse. I looked away, never wanting to stare at someone for any misfortune, let alone one they had no control over, but my head snapped back around when he suddenly started screaming.

He was pointing at me, screaming, and trying to run away. The woman that was with him kept a firm grip on his hand and apologized to me profusely, saying that the electric cart must have frightened him, and trying to get him to calm down. I smiled and said that I'd move away, and that *I* was sorry I'd upset him. Which I was. And I was willing to accept her explanation as well - until I saw another electric cart pass by him a little while later and he didn't react at all. The only thing I can figure is, like the very young and the very old, the mentally handicapped sometimes can see that which the rest of the world can't. And what he saw was a human-sized wolf, driving an electric cart through a store. What else to call that but a werewolf? I can't blame him for screaming.

My shift didn't go away, though, and as I was coming back from grabbing the sprinkler, and heading for the checkout, I had another experience.

A young boy, maybe... 3 years old, at most, was sitting in his father's shopping cart while the dad rooted around in the freezer section for something. The kid had been completely silent, from what I could tell. Then he looked at me, grinned in a huge and adorable way... and started barking. "Woof! Woof woof!" he said excitedly, continuing to grin at me. The way kids who like dogs do when they see a dog. This is the second time a small child has thought of me as a dog, the last one being a couple of years ago at the Irvine Spectrum. However, this occurrence, coupled with the earlier one, made this one even more memorable than the last.

Perhaps I should deliberately trigger phantom shifts while I'm out and see who notices the "werewolf" in their midst. :)

Time Marches On...

A year ago today, I lost a father. Not my biological father, though in the past year he's had his own issues, but still, a father.

There's something to be said for the family that chooses you. You don't have a choice, the parents you are born to, the siblings that are born before or after you, the extended family you end up with - but to choose someone, to think of them as family... That's something else entirely.

Thinking back on the circumstances surrounding my move to California recently, I realized that Tom Stein chose me before I chose him. He was the one who told Lona to come get me. He went out of his way to make sure I was comfortable and felt safe in my new home - and in that way, he became a symbol of my safety in this new place, with all these new life experiences that I'd never had before.

We started to really bond, though, and I started seeing him as "dad" rather than just "man who makes things safe," around the time that he took a day off of work specifically to make sure I got to go to the La Brea Tar Pits and the Los Angeles County Museum Of Natural History for the first time. It was ambitious to think we could do them both in one day... but we pulled it off. And he literally, for the rest of his life, never stopped bragging to people he met about "his daughter" who essentially gave a lecture to a museum employee because one of the bones in the neck of a particular dinosaur specimen was in the wrong place.

The museum's dinosaur halls closed down for renovation less than a month later. They're reopening next month, and part of me is honestly wondering if *I* had something to do with it. A little narsissistic, yes, but the truth is that it COULD have been just the push they needed to do the renovation. Or maybe it's just that dad was so proud of me, that has me thinking that way. It wasn't a big deal to me, but it was something amazing to him.

I couldn't think clearly yesterday. Ironically, I seem to be thinking clearer today. I crashed out around ten thirty last night, and woke up at 4 am. I puttered around the house, I started a patch downloading for World Of Warcraft, I read some stories and looked at some pictures... But my mind was a year in the past.

I still remember the hospital rooms, the smells, the sounds... Antiseptic, blood... My nose hasn't been the same since spending so much time in hospitals while dad was in them. But I was focusing on that night, a year ago last night, when we all sat in the ER, around dad. I remember listening to him breathing, watching his hands and foot twitch. I remember Nyx realizing he was playing the piano in his sleep, which made us all feel a little better. I remember the heavy, cold weight of Death itself in the room. I remember having to run out.

I remember them moving him to a CD Unit, even though there was no critical decision to be made... he was dying. He wasn't registering on the heart monitors at all, but he was still breathing. He was still breathing for over six hours. They had to turn the monitors off because all it would show was flatline, and send all of us into a panic.

The family came in and said their goodbyes, only those of us who lived with dad stayed with him. Exhausted, mom and Lona insisted that Kata, Nyx, and I go home and try to get a couple of hours sleep, and feed the cats breakfast. It was around 8 in the morning when we laid down.

I knew when we left the hospital that we wouldn't see dad again. I said goodbye when we left. I said I loved him, and I did. I still do. I'm trying not to cry right now, writing this, but I need to write it. I have to get it out. Because otherwise it's just going to be bottled up inside me and hurt more.

Looking back on it, I realize that I felt when Death left, and when dad went... It was several hours before he stopped breathing. Around the time that I was suddenly able to fall asleep. I couldn't sleep with that presence in the room, no matter how tired I was. Moe the ghost cat, who had been with dad from the very beginning in every hospital stay, also disappeared around that time. I realized later that he'd gone with dad. He'd come as a kind of escort, I suppose.

Around ten thirty, we were woken up by the phone call telling us dad was gone. We piled into the car and headed back to the hospital, though none of us knew what we could do - we wound up turning around before we got there because Kata (who'd headed back right when we got the phone call, while Nyx and I had to get dressed first) had already gotten there, and picked up mom and Lona, and was bringing them home. So... we went home.

I don't remember much of the rest of that day. I... did a lot of spastic cleaning. I looked up mortuary numbers, and somehow helped mom keep it together while we made phone calls and worked on what had to be done now. Lona crashed in bed, which I can't blame her for... and eventually I know I slept again too. I just don't remember when it was.

The next few days were incredibly strange. We all felt like we were waiting for dad to call from the hospital, or from the end of a night gig. Every time the phone would ring, I expected it to be him saying he wanted to come home now. I didn't know what else to expect. I... well, I've lost people before in my life, but never a person with whom I'd had such a direct connection.

The closest thing to this was in 2006, when my aunt killed herself. And I was separated from that, as it happened in Texas and I made the decision (with my mom's urging) not to miss finals week in English class just to fly out there for a memorial service. There wasn't anything I could do, anyway. I had the same feeling of thinking I should call her and then everything would be OK... It was my first experience with losing a loved one I'd actually known, and because of the distance involved, it wasn't... Well, there was nothing to prepare me for what it felt like to lose someone who lived in your own house.

I still miss dad, every day. Some days are harder than others. There's an undeniable hole in this house that can't be filled... And this is coming from the spiritually sensitive person who has the strongest connection to the dead of anyone in this house. Dad has since passed several messages along through me, from beyond the grave... One of which was a personal apology, as he'd doubted me when I claimed to see and commune with ghost cats in the house. I suppose being on the other side can make you see certain things a little clearer.

Dad doesn't haunt our house... what he does isn't haunting. Lona's seen him several times, and I know the cats see him - he never shows himself to me. I think he knows seeing him would freak me out. I prefer to hear humans and see animal spirits. That makes it a bit easier for me to deal with - I've been seeing animal spirits my whole life, but a human is a whole other thing, and a person I KNEW... I don't think I could handle that, and dad seems to respect that. In a strange way... dad is still my safety. Because I feel him. I know he's still here. He's become a guardian angel of sorts over the house and everyone in it. He's still loud, he still yells when he's angry or when someone's doing something he doesn't agree with (and I'm not the only one who hears him when he does).

Moe the cat ghost came back with him, about a month after he died. I see Moe around the house again, regularly, and that's a bit of a comfort as well.

Time marches on, but you never forget those who you loved and who loved you. And sometimes, the most important thing to remember is that they never forget you, either.

I love you, dad. And I will always miss you.

Lone Wolf Roaming - Shift Happens 4

When you’re in college, sometimes you take classes because they’re required even if you already know all of the information. That was why I wound up taking a class that was literally an introduction to the Windows Vista operating system. An operating system that I’d already been using and was well aware of the ins and outs of long before I took the class. I got an A in the class with no effort at all – however, not having to put out effort in a class isn’t a good thing. It means that I still have to attend the class, and be bored out of my mind. Therefore, I started finding other ways to pass the time. And when I realized that the teacher didn’t take role until the end of class, therefore I could never skip out at break and get out of the interminable boredom, I knew I would have to find some way to occupy myself.

Why am I telling this story in a blog where I’m supposed to be discussing astral and dream shifting? Well, the boredom I suffered in that Vista class inspired me to try something I’d never attempted before – astral travel while my physical body remained conscious.

An astral shift is similar to a phantom shift, except that you are specifically changing the shape of your energy half fully into your theriotype, and then using that to move around independent of your physical body.  The first step is a separation. I will not go through the process of how to separate your energy half from your physical have for a sheer matter of safety. If you know how to do it already, you know the risks and the situation you are putting yourself in while doing it. If you don’t know how to do it, then one blog post will not be enough to teach you. And this series was never meant so much as a teaching series, but as an informative series.

Once you’ve achieved enough separation that shifting your astral energy isn’t going to cause your physical body to ache because of the different shape, you can quickly apply the techniques mentioned in the first post in this series to shift your astral energy self into your theriotype. And now comes the fun part – explore. You can go anywhere within the physical and astral plane. I’ve noticed several times that people in the physical world will even react to your presence even though they quite obviously can’t see you.

On the night I was talking about, I went for a run around the campus. I shot past people, jumped over a bench, sniffed at the food I could smell coming from the Cafeteria and the Denny’s across the street. I didn’t have much to do, and didn’t dare go very far from the class or my body for fear that I would be called on to answer a question or something and would have to snap back to my body at a moment’s notice. I could still kind of hear with my physical ears, and therefore I was aware of the teacher continuing to lecture while I was running around. Thankfully, though, I wasn’t needed to snap back, and after I’d run around for a while and shaken off my boredom, I made my way back to the classroom, shifted back to human form and settled myself in my body again just in time for roll call.

As you can see, being able to astral travel can be a great blessing, but again, it is not something I’m here to teach anyone to do. It’s simply another type of shift – albeit the most freeing type, in my opinion, because you are as close to physically BEING your theriotype and running around with your human mind in total control of the animal’s body and instincts.

As for dream shifting, directed dream shifting is more like lucid (or controlled) dreaming. Most therians, or even non-therians, have experienced vivid dreams in which they are someone or something else. Sometimes these dreams are in the first person POV, other times they are in third person and allow you to get a very good look at what you are. In my case, dreams like this are how I know what my dire wolf self looks like, for the most part.

Triggering a dream shift can be very simple – just think about your theriotype and a normal course of action for it as you are falling asleep. This can be enough to trigger your dream shift. Sometimes, though, should you wish this to be a true lucid dream, a bit more is necessary in order to really get yourself to register that A) you are dreaming, and B) you can control it. Unfortunately, this technique is a bit more advanced than I find myself able to explain right now. It involves giving yourself some sort of trigger that your subconscious will insert into dreams to make you realize that you’re dreaming. It can take years to create this mental image – something that will be out of place enough to jar you, no matter what you’re dreaming about. My personal visualization is a full moon within a dinner plate. I’ve had this show up in the most random places in dreams – from sitting on a rock in the middle of a field, to flying up to me as if it was some sort of flying saucer. But when I see that image, a photorealistic full moon in the middle of a china plate, it jars my brain and I realize that I must be dreaming.

My earliest experience with a lucid dream is something that I’ll never forget, though it didn’t have anything to do with shifting, and it was years before I’d perfected my lucid dream trigger. I was walking through the apartment complex where I used to live (still did live, at the time), when suddenly a ninja dropped down from the roof and threatened me with throwing stars. I was terrified, my heart was pounding – and then somewhere in the logical recesses of my mind, I remember thinking, “A ninja? What is a ninja doing in my apartment complex? This can’t be real…” And I faced the ninja, stood up as tall as a twelve year old can stand, and said, “This is MY dream, and you get out of it NOW!”

And, just like that, the ninja disappeared. But I was still dreaming. I remember laughing, looking around, and deciding that I could control anything in this dream world – and I wanted to fly. Next thing I knew, I was flying around the neighborhood. I landed on roofs, flew around the park down the street, and eventually came home. I don’t remember if I made the decision to wake up when I came home or not, but I did. And to this day, that it still one of the coolest lucid dreams that I’ve ever had. Facing down a ninja and telling it to get out of my dream. It still makes me laugh.

Dream shifts and astral shifts allow you the freedom to change and move about the world in the form of your theriotype. In my final post in this series, we will discuss the only other way this could ever happen – a way which, unfortunately, is more than impossible, and yet I don’t know a single therian who hasn’t fantasized about it at one time or another. In the final post of the series, we will examine the forever elusive P-Shift, or Physical Shift… Actually turning from human to animal like the movie werewolf – the impossible dream of most therians and anyone who’s ever wished to become a bird that they could fly away from their troubles.