“So what do you want for your birthday?” I asked The Geek as his twenty fourth birthday approached.
“Surprise me!”
“No.” That arrangement doesn’t ever seem to end well.
He thought for a moment, then told me the last thing I would’ve expected. “A tarot deck.” Seeing my eyes boggle, he explained, “I think it’d be interesting to understand as a cultural thing. Plus, from pop culture the only card I know of is the Death card. I wonder what other ones there are.”
Well, to each his own. About a day after he’d gotten it, I saw him fiddling with the deck and immediately asked him to do a reading on me – partially because I also didn’t know much about the cards, but also to give him a bit of a challenge.
We started with the “daily cross”, which is supposed to just tell you what the next day will be like. I noticed immediately that it’s similar to horoscopes – vague enough that if you expect it to come true, you’ll find some way that it has.
That seemed a bit boring, so I asked him to do the more complicated celtic cross I saw an example for in his book. It required me to think of a question, and after a little deliberation I decided on “what will I write my blog about?”
The Geek moved slowly, consulting his booklet as he went. After a couple of cards, as he got used to what each suit meant, he started to get into the fortune teller rhythm, embellishing and adding on to each card based on what he knows about me.
He smirked as he interpreted the Devil card as my procrastination, holding me back from writing. In all, he turned eleven cards which looked like a jumble to me into a simple, cohesive answer: I would feel stymied and blocked, and procrastinate on my post, but eventually get a creative surge and complete it in the nick of time.
Well, I wrote this a week in advance. Suck it, tarot deck *blows raspberry*.
Excerpts of Awkwardness 