Today’s deck is the Flowers and Sparkles Tarot.
I’ve got no clue how legit this deck actually is, but the packaging sure doesn’t give that impression., what with the cover being a sticker and all.
Deck’s fine otherwise though, nothing too noteworthy.
Today’s reading feels like a wholesale reflection of how I felt today, so let’s get to that.
So I woke up with a LOT of anxiety. I was measuring the steps and the time it would take to do all the bank stuff, cursing the fact that I have to go through all the bullshit, being concerned about the downtime that would come before I managed to restore a way to send money to my family, and so on, and so forth.
With all of this still on my mind, I hear the doorbell and the mailman has come and my new visa arrived.
It was just one year as expected. And despite being something I foresaw it didn’t make the bummer any less, which was then heavily compounded thanks to the anxieties.
As it often happens with this sort of thing, my first thought is “did I take my meds?”, which I hadn’t. That in turn reminded me I had to set an appointment for my prescriptions, which I hadn’t done because my insurance card expired, which I couldn’t get until my visa arrived… and while we’re at it, my bank account too was locked because of that.
So I tried to distract myself from all the bullshit stirring in my head by doing that busywork.
As it’s often the case, there’s this very specific frustration I tend to feel in those moments of stress that I can only describe as “wish someone else did something for me”.
What that general feeling means is that in those moments even doing something for myself feels like a chore because I’m like “I’m always doing things for myself, often by necessity, wish the onus of that was taken off me for a change!”.
Now, this is a cognitive distortion with… a lot involved that I won’t get into, but the short of it is that I acknowledge that the feeling exists for a reason but it is, in the end, a distortion.
So thankfully it happened that coincidentally I was invited by V to a thing she got invited to.
It was a party with some DJs, the one V knew came all the way from Hokkaido for this.
He was also a VA-11 Hall-A fan.
In fact, there were five DJs and I know for a fact 4 of them like the game, and some random guy in the party, and yet another guy that had a Jill shirt under a hawaiian shirt.
But you know the crowd was really cool because there was also a guy with a Ridge Racer Type 4 shirt.
I feel like my reaction to people that like the game can be weird, but you have to understand that to this day VA-11 Hall-A isn’t some sort of seminal genre-defining work, it’s our little baby that somehow managed to be pushed out the door by a sheer fucking miracle and that throught consistent trucking on rather than an explosion has let us live a nice life when banks aren’t being capital B Bitches.
Another factor is that I spent like six years with my sense of self-worth tied to my work (and by extension this leading to a loop where depression didn’t let me finish work and not finishing work would make me depressed), which means I might be more dettached from the game at a glance.
On top of it, some people tend to pull a 180 into being nicer when they learn that and I’m of the mind that you should be nice to people rather than just being nice because they made a thing you like.
So I feel like the topic comes up and my reactions tends come off like I hate it? I don’t, at all, if anything it’s one hell of an ice breaker. Also like, I can support my family and live the life I have thanks to everyone’s support.
So hopefully you can see that my reaction to “I need two hands to count the people in this random building that I know for a fact have played our small game” is basically a big “HOW THE FUCK” and my brain BSOD-ing for a few seconds.
This specific element of it all came out at the end, though. Most of the night was instead spent vibing to music. I’ll be the first to admit House isn’t the sort of music I go out of my way to listen, but it’s also not something I’ll say no to. The whole set list was super talented too.
And considering the alternative would’ve been to sulk all day and then make one (1) impulse purchase that I won’t regret but will baffle me in the future, can’t really complain for how the day turned out.