Weekly-ish thingy and the Page of Cups/The Girl -Fish

This is a new favorite fairy tale for me, I actually hadn’t read it till a few weeks ago.

It’s apparently not super well known despite having been part of the Andrew Lang series, but it’s got EVERYTHING you want. Mermaids! Giants! Magical transformations! Terrible choices that end up working out ok for no good reason! Ludicrous love at first sight! Anyhow you can read it here, it’s a great ride.

I particularly dig that not only is this a girl sent on a magical quest, she gets the power to transform into any animal from the mermaid queen who sends her to retrieve her stolen crown (so she can become human again and get her throne back) and so you get this magician’s battle-style set of transformations where every step of the task involves her picking the form best suited to it. It’s while she’s running around as a deer that she runs across the prince (son of the mermaid queen) out hunting. She begs him not to kill her and he somehow intuits that she’s an enchanted maiden from looking into her eyes (not from hearing her speak?) and decides that’s the girl for him. And then we get a series of tasks for a giant in exchange for the crown, everybody transforming back into themselves, and when the prince tells his restored mom about the hot deer he met she gets them married post-haste.

It’s a SUPER packed story, and I love that the peril is fairly minimal, the problem-solving is fun, and both active characters pushing the story forward are female.

Places to buy stuff!

• TEEPUBLIC: mostly t-shirts, a few other products.  Watch for sales, when shirts drop from $20 to $14!
• REDBUBBLE: Just, I don’t know, a ton of different stuff.  T-shirts are more expensive than Teepublic, but there are a lot more options.
• AMAZON: Home of the Geeky Gals Coloring Book!  Daydreams and Whimsies!  AND NOW, The Neurotic Owl Compendium!
• ETSY: paper dolls, a knitting bag pattern, and a bunch of vintage dolls of various sorts from my collection

Did I miss something?  I think that’s everything.

What’s making me happy this week:

This is another hard week, I’m really tired and work is only getting more stressful and holding boundaries is hard. But I found a psychiatrist to start seeing and purely by luck he seems really great and understanding, and I’m back on Zoloft for the first time in a little over 20 years. It’s only been a week, I can’t expect to be seeing much effect yet but I think maybe it is starting to help a little? Fingers crossed.