Today’s deck is the Soul Cats Tarot.
You know, I really love how I’ve used so many Cat Tarot decks for this blog and they’re all so different from each other. I also love the back of the cards because they remind me of Soul Sacrifice for the PS Vita which, in case the quote on the home page didn’t make obvious, I love.
So Of course I pulled the Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon mat to complete the “I really like all of this” vibe.
Today’s reading speaks of an inevitable change that I will face through my independent spirit and emotional control.
As you’ll soon see, not only was the reading on point, it was talking about sudden changes, plural.
As usual I ended up staying up too late before a trip, so I woke up at around 1PM. Thankfully everything was already set so I just had to shower and such.
It wasn’t until then that I remembered my vlog camera might be nice to have and couldn’t find it.
Oh well…
When I went out, there was a little bit of rain. The kind where it’s not big enough to be a problem but also not small enough to ignore.
Then, when I got to the station I actually forgot my umbrella in the bathroom.
Oh well…
To get to Ise you gotta take the Nankai line, and the Nankai line goes out from Namba, so this is one of those trips where the route doesn’t start directly in Shin Osaka.
Nankai is the same train line that gets you to Nara, and I should actually try to go there while it’s still fall.
I arrived at roughly 3 to the station, the express train, however, had me wait until 4:10.
Oh well… I just sat on the floor killing time and starting today’s blog entry.
I’ve been going through Stay A While And Listen, a book about the history of Blizzard through the making of Diablo. It’s good though it includes a lot of the Basic Ass Gen X American Gamer Dude stuff… Though to be fair they don’t overblow it like in Masters Of Doom at least.
Coincidentally, PatricianTV released a video about Classic WoW today. Blizzard is to me a bit like Dungeons and Dragons. I’m allergic to it on a fundamental level but I love media history and those things are fundamental building blocks of that history.
The train actually takes you through a bunch of countryside areas that leave me like “man I wanna explore this”. Satiating that curiosity is probably the only reason why I would consider learning to drive a car or a motorcycle.
For reference, I don’t even know how to ride a bicycle.
A bunch of places on the way had huge campfires that filled the area with smoke you could see from the train. I wonder if there were festivals out something. I know yesterday was Labor Appreciation Day at least.
It’s also interesting to see this route in the dark. The other two times I’ve traveled to Ise we’re in early summer this year and summer of last year.
That said there’s also the problem that it means talking pics of the scenery from the train is harder.
Oh well…
By the way, these trains actually have cars with two floors. They’re a neat novelty, I was on the upper floor of one when I came in May.
I should probably tell that story later, it’s basically the reason why I travel monthly.
I was playing more Ekimemo on the train. In that game your player rank increases as you find more stations so I would just log the nearby ones whenever the express train stopped.
I went from like Rank 10 to 32, something crazy like that.
I finally reached Isuzugawa Station and that’s when the Dumbass part of my brain goes “hey, what if we walked to the hotel? It’s mostly flat and like 20 minutes anyways”.
I also had my luggage with me and it was dark because this is basically the countryside. Moreover, a taxi had just arrived as soon as I thought about that.
So what do you think I did?
Come on, take a guess.
I was slightly regretting my choice soon after in a sort of “Oh well… let’s push ahead anyways” way. The reason is that it was very dark because it’s the countryside and there’s mostly roads, and my Venezuelan brain doesn’t like walking through dark roads because it goes against everything I got drilled into my head
So as I’m pulling my my phone to use as a flashlight, I look around and I notice something.
There was a star near the mountains, it was so bright that I assumed for a moment it was like… a radio tower or something.
Then I keep looking around and there’s so many stars just all over the place. That same darkness that unnerved me was allowing me to see them.
Venezuelan skies usually have a fair amount of stars, at least my hometown does. Nothing too crazy but really noticeable when you compare it to the Osakan sky. And I guess I didn’t notice how much I’d miss them until the change happened.
That, funnily enough, calmed me down and made me happy with my choice.
When I said the road was mostly flat, it was thankfully as I rememebered a year ago. The only uphill moment was going up some stairs to the hotel.
Then they ask me why I wasn’t here yesterday, that my reservation was from the 23rd.And it… was. I got it into my head that I left on Sunday for some reason.
Oh we-… actually no, that one did upset me a little bit. My plan didn’t change but y’know, still a bummer to have lost one day of the reservation like this.
After leaving my luggage and taking out my camera, I went out again to get dinner. Google Maps indicated me there were a couple of places that closed at 9PM so I had plenty of time to find them.
They were closed, Google Maps lied to me. Again. They were probably closed because of the same holiday that had all those pyres lit up on the way but still.
Oh well…
Determined to still eat out, I went to a Family Mart, got ramen, and sat outside to eat it. It was definitely a conviction to eat outside and not the fact that the ramen was the only thing to eat in that conbini and going all the way back to my room would’ve made it go cold again.
I decided to stroll around for a bit since I had never seen this area in the dark before. Last time I was here my sleep schedule was in that weird “sleep at 6PM wake up at 2AM” phase and this hotel actually closes its doors between midnight and 5AM.
The stars around here are super easy to take pics of, I didn’t even need to crank the ISO to crazy levels to be able to catch them.
So of course I tried to take a pic with one of the girls.
You’d think I would’ve realized that if the light around was so little you could see the stars so well, it meant that taking photos wouldn’t be easy.
You’d think.
Oh well…
A random memory that came back to me today was this one time that the one ex friend I’ve mentioned a few times asked me (though honestly it was more like half affirmation half question) if I was “privileged in Venezuela”.
That’s a weird question right? It was almost like “hey I need confirmation that I can put you down a few notches by proxy with something”.
Anyway, I bring it up not just because talking about that sort of thing is part of how one processes past wounds, but because the question itself WAS interesting back then and it’s still actually interesting to think about.
Was I? Yes and no. I always had 3 meals a day, got full education and my parents are still together to this day. In that sense I WAS and still am privileged.
But that’s in the context of the kind of country where even in private schools you’d have kids fainting because they haven’t eaten in a long while. In fact, the most shocking thing for me is hearing what people that consider themselves poor in the US have gone through and be like “I went through that and I wasn’t poor though”.
Among my peers my family wasn’t poor but to say we were “comfortable” would be a bit of a stretch in hindsight.
Sure, I was male but within the colorism that Venezuela has I didn’t stand out one way or the other.
What privilege looked like to me in Venezuela was this one time we asked some devs how they managed to make money out of their game because of all the bank-related bullshit and their answer was “oh we have family in Miami and they opened up an account for us”.
I almost went to to bed without filling a sketch page and that would’ve been bad. I didn’t do any complex sketch, just practicing with shapes.
The main thing I tried today was keeping in mind to keep my sight where the pen is going rather than where it is. That’s actually an advice I’ve gotten in singing lessons (don’t read word for word, keep your eyes ahead of your current point).
I also noticed that a couple of muscles got a bit of exertion but interestingly none near my hand, but rather my back and shoulder. The same ones I feel exerted when I carve wood incidentally.
So I’m using my whole arm even if I don’t make big motions, that’s good to know.