Your friendly neighborhood witch

I talk a lot about pagans here, and I realized I have never taken a moment to explain who I am talking about.
Pagans, like most other religions, have subdivisons. By parthenon, by practice, and sometimes by experience of the person practicing. As a rule, when dealing with pagans, if you encounter:
1) the person who knows everything about "the burning times" or whatnot, ignore them.
2) the fluffy, sweetie, teenage girl who thinks magic is all love and cupcakes (and spells is magick, which personally pisses me right the hell off), ignore her.
3) the gothy type who believes that magic (or magick) is all dark and terrible, back away slowly and then ignore them (note, these are the people who get confused with "satanists".)
If you weed out the crazies then you usually get the base of the community. Assuming you can find them, since they tend to hide. Pagans form large communities* and then smaller covens based on religions within that community. Divisons happen from time to time, and groups are not allowed to attend community events, really just normal church politics.
These pagans are your neighbors, or your co-workers. You may think they are Catholic, we blend best with Catholics if we aren't "out". They are the co-worker who works Christmas, or Easter, but wants off on the oddest days in the middle of the week. We are the neighbor who throws parties that involves people burning strange stuff in the fire pit. Nothing bad or out of hand, but just strange. We are normal people with kids and jobs, and too often others kind of lose sight of that. We get confused with those dark gothy types, or those fluffy bunny types and then people assume we are all like that.
So, when I talk about pagans, I'm talking about your average person who just happens to have a small table in there house that you can NOT touch. And a locked chest that you aren't allowed to open. Your regular old person, with regular old problems.

*Interesting thing with that, when the communities form online, which they sometimes do, they can become multi-faith communities who include Christian, Jewish, atheist, and any other point of view out there. I've talked about this before, but it never ceases to amaze me that this happens and that everyone gets along. It gives me hope for people.