Yup, everything was in her shopping cart. But I talked her through moving it all to her actual wishlist. I told her she was getting nothing but coal for Christmas, and she said that she deserved it after that stunt.

The idea here, I guess, is that you can learn how to be sensitive or something -- that it's a skill, not a talent. Which, maybe, but my mother is not the person to develop that skill.

My opinion is that it's not something you can learn. I grew up in a couple of haunted houses; things moving around the house and TVs and stereos randomly coming on with no one in the room -type of haunted, in addition to figures I saw. My dad believed me and experienced the household electronics part, but never saw anything. He wanted to, and even worked with me so he could see things, but it never worked.

So, I'm still side-eyeing the conference organizers.

Sheesh, Steph, that sounds like something my sister would do.

msbelle, if you don't say that on Le Twitter, I'm gonna steal it from you! Too good.

Matt, I love hearing about people's ghostly encounters! Do you feel like sharing?

My opinion is that it's not something you can learn.

I don't think you can learn it either. It's sort-of like a musical talent. I took piano lessons for years and it never stuck, but my mom could play anything she'd heard once without a score. She taught herself to do that, but she had the talent to start with. You know? I think if you've got that "talent", you can improve it, but if you don't, you don't, and there's varying degrees of don't. Some people hear music as just noise, and some people could walk through the Amityville M-Fing Horror and never notice a thing.

I've seen a bunch of self-styled "psychics" going cuckoo over the "dark energy" of something that looks a little creepy, like a fake skull decorated with quasi-Satanic stuff, and I don't want to pull attention but there's literally nothing there. It's an inert object. They let their own feelings take charge.

Oh, they'd love my living room, with skulls all over the place.

I know, right, Connie? People have totally gotten the wrong idea about me, seeing all the skulls and weird bones and magick stuff in my place. I put most of it away when I started having housecleaners over, I didn't want to upset them, and I never brought them back out when I stopped the service. I should dig them up. So to speak. It's been literally years.

I love it when psychics and other magical practitioners tell me "how dark" my energy is, and that I should do more to bring myself into the light. They usually do this in front of my big brother, who bursts out laughing at them.

Yes, black clothes and jewelry made from bones equals dark magical energy. Of course.

(Mind you, my big brother is the one who occasionally reminds me that "we don't hex", and I laugh at him. I don't do it often, but I will hex people who really deserve it. Does it work? I don't know. But it makes me feel better.)

I've got people coming in quarterly to clean the furnace filters. I never thought about what my decor might look like to them.

Connie, trust me, they have seen scarier!

eta: I can no longer say trust me or believe me without a shudder thinking of the liar in chief.

Matt, I love hearing about people's ghostly encounters! Do you feel like sharing?

Sure. When I stayed at the Hollywood Roosevelt back in 2004 I was in the haunted room on the 9th floor. On two consecutive nights the light in the open closet opposite my room clicked on as I walked past in the hall. The first night I just assumed it was someone from Housekeeping since I'd seen a cart back toward the elevators (it still might have been). But the second night it struck me as an odd enough coincidence that I peeked in, and found a small unoccupied closet with no other exits. Also, as I approached my room door I heard music inside and discovered the clock radio playing *loudly*. I don't think hotel staff would have left it on after cleaning the room since it was impossible to miss, and if it had been a radio alarm thing it would have gone off the previous night too.

I mentioned it to a housekeeper I saw the next day, and she got wide-eyed and said my room was where all the weird stuff happened, like lights and faucets turning on and off by themselves and the toilet flushing. I never saw any apparitions or got a creepy feeling while staying there (I suspect I'm not sensitive enough to pick up that sort of thing), but having something I couldn't see apply enough force to a light switch to make it audibly click on as I approached pretty well turned my skeptical academic interest in ghosts into sincere belief.

AHAHAHAHA.

[link]

Short version: The Senate Republicans accidentally got rid of a bunch of deductions that corporations could take, because they jammed the fucking bill through so quickly that no one noticed.