Today’s deck is the Jane Austen Tarot.
Even if you don’t know Jane Austen, you’ve definitely heard of Pride and Prejudice. She’s the Pride and Prejudice lady.
Today’s reading is inviting me to look inwards and analyze what I feel compelled to do compared to what I want to do.
It sounds a bit like nonsense, but think about it like how I WANT to get back into programming but then I feel compelled instead to do a bunch of chores in the house that leave me exhausted.
The reading is basically telling me to look into what’s going on there so that neither side is neglected.
The post from two days ago made a peak in visits.
If you’re gonna visit this blog for any political takes please keep in mind that you’ll be severely disappointed. I only speak of politics as they become relevant to my immediate proximity which I make damn sure is as few times as possible.
My political stance is “Politics are bad, politicians are worse”, I only care about the wellbeing of people and anything that stands in the way of that is something I’m against. You all can have all your big ideologies with big names, go have fun. I want nothing to do with any of it.
I’m not really a fence-sitter, I think both sides of the fence have their issues and I take a bigger issue over the fact that they want me to choose between those two sides of the fence when it’s not even my backyard but they make it everyone’s problem. Even worse when one side thinks that because I’m not with one side that automatically means I’m siding with the other when in truth NO FUCK YOU ALL AND YOUR LOYALTY GAMES.
If you still wanna call that fence-sitting, awesome! Leave me alone, I don’t owe you anything.
More importantly growing up in a country that’s been collapsing ever since I have use of reason has led me to never ever reading news and as soon as I confirmed that there was no immediate threat to my family I stopped reading any news again.
I’ll be back to only learning things as needed and try to keep myself sane.
So if you’re one of the Firstname Mclastname gringos that found last post somehow (I suspect because I used a deck called Ukrainian Tarot) you’ll find no allies here.
Okay, I got that out of my system, let’s talk about something a bit more positive.
I woke up straight to paying taxes as soon as the banks opened, and while on the way back I was checking Amazon and I got recommended a tin of Prismacolor pencils.
Allow me to quickly explain a bit of context before I proceed.
As a teen I loved drawing. I went to oil painting lessons, saw a future in drawing one way or another, got into Graphic Design in college as a venue for that sort of goal.
One of the most pivotal moments for me growing up was when I saved up the money to get a tin of fancy shmancy Prismacolor pens.
THIS tin.
I remember it vividly. They had Prismacolor tins and other stuff on a small alcove of the supermarket in Las Americas in Maracay.
They felt like a game changer because compared to the Faber Castell that were still kinda fancy (by my standards) these were so smooth and didn’t break so easily.
Eventually I managed to save for the 72 color tin which I also just saw on a listing.
Now, with this context in mind I can explain how when I saw the picture of the 48 color tin I felt filled with…
With…
I guess the main point is trying to explain what exactly I felt, or at the very least what it wasn’t.
It wasn’t nostalgia, for one.
I’m not a nostalgic person, in fact, the one time I felt nostalgic about things immediately led me to realizing things were very very wrong (which they were).
Now, the thing I felt was… I guess more akin to the joy I feel when I’m in a bar and Karaoke comes up, or when I publish some writing, but also “fresher” in the sense that it’s a sensation I’m less used to so it still feels a bit stronger.
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s basically the love for drawing I felt growing up resurfacing.
The truth is that out of all the stuff I’ve done, drawing isn’t something I stopped because I grew bitter about it specifically, in fact I have more reasons to be bitter about game development and that’s something I still wrestle with sometimes.
Long story short, there was this overlap during college (I took Graphic Design) between me growing disillusioned really fast with the career (or the institution if nothing else) and me meeting Kiririn which resulted in having someone around with more predilection for the visual part of things.
I didn’t even have a chance to burn out on illustration, it was more like illustration just got lost in the shuffle.
Cut to Present Day Present Time, where I’m doing my God Damn Best to have hobbies that don’t become my dayjob and illustration is on my mind.
Admittedly at the start it was born out of a sense of “can’t trust anyone must do everything myself” (which is another thing I constantly tackle and try to fix). But as I’ve addressed that, the wish to get back into drawing has gone nowhere.
One episode that always comes to mind is the first time I went to Minoh Falls. It was in August 2020 and even outside of the woes of the pandemic I was in a really bad mental spot due to a LOT of external factors. And the sight of nature was so… overwhelming, so overstimulating that the first thing I did as soon as I got back was go buy a set of colored pencils and a sketchbook.
I did nothing with either because depression meant the whole set of emotions died in a black hole, but I still remember it, like, I felt something and I wanted to do something with those feelings.
I also felt that back in my last night in Miyakojima, the one with the moon so big it looked like a sunset. Just that overwhelming sense of “this is so pretty, I’m overwhelmed, I must do something with these emotions”.
Kinda interesting that it’s always the good things. Now that I think about it it’s not like I’m against adding the bad stuff into what I make, but it’s the pretty stuff that fill me with the drive to put pen to paper.
tl;dr: I got the tin ’cause if nothing else I want to grasp onto as many threads of that joy as I can until I can easily and safely yank it out of the depths of my soul.
The rest of my day wasn’t too exciting (thankfully). I stayed inside because I wanted to call my bank to check how the whole transfer process was going only for them to not reply to phones.