Today’s Tarot was the Familiars Tarot.
While the illustrations are super pretty, it’s one of those decks with an upright backside. Though the motif is probably a bigger issue, but an issue for me specifically.
The theme of the tarot is to evoke the imagery that animals evoke, and depending on how attuned you are to that imagery you might get more or less out of it.
Let’s take for example today’s single card reading live from the shinkansen (more on that in a bit). My card of the day was The Knight of Swords (upright because it’s an upright deck).
The Knight of Swords is meant to be a rash quick-thinker, a guy literally running with scissors because he has places to be and things to do, so focused that he’s not thinking about the fact that HE’S RUNNING WITH SCISSORS.
Ravens do evoke that idea, quick thinkers of sharp brains and even sharper beaks. The first problem is that to me Ravens evoke a different mental image, and the card featuring two Ravens makes me think instead that maybe I should walk on another street because those two are looking to harass an office worker (real story right there by the way).
It’s like how the mental image of a cat can go from cold and aloof, to majestic, to Small Gemlin (mine). If you attune to the deck’s imagery it’s perfect but in that specificity it might lose you.
But yeah, Knight of Swords feels appropiate considering how I’m typing this while crumbling from exhaustion.
Today’s lesson on the 31 days program was how to “cleanse” your deck and as I was reading It I had a grin on my face thinking “oh you cheeky son of a gun, this is how you get me to get back into practicing mindfulness huh?”
It describes how if you feel like the energies inside the cards aren’t right, which means you don’t feel like they speak to you, you should grab the deck while picturing the bad energies going out and the positive ones flowing in, to use incense, and so forth.
The only thing it was missing was telling me to become aware of every joint in my body starting from my toes and up through my legs.
A key component of this, however, is the fact that the book has already set a precedent in tone of “let’s have fun but not get too carried away”. The sort of thing where it acknowledges that you’re free to think of them as mystic as you feel they might be but to not be the type that thinks crystal healing will spontaneously cure your pneumonia.
I’ve been thinking a LOT about pneumonia lately…
As such, if the book says that you should consider letting your cards bathe in the moonlight or store a piece of quartz with them, then I think that getting a couple of quartz rocks would be neat and the idea of using the cards as an excuse to take an improptu walk under full moon is nice. Whereas without that context I’d be worried that buying a piece of quartz is tantamount to indoctrination.
Today’s excercise was to cleanse your deck with any of the given methods which I wasn’t able to do for reasons we’ll see, but I’ll definitely do tomorrow one way or another.
Ever since yesterday I’ve been doing the mental math to determine if it would be better to stay until Monday as intended or go back one day earlier. And everything was indicating that it was a better deal to go back early, with the not-goodness of the hotel adding to it.
Then my toothpaste “un-screwed” like this and I decided enough was enough.
I packed up my things, left my bag in a coin locker at Tokyo Station (thankfully it was the time where everyone’s grabbing their bags instead of the time where everyone’s putting them in) and went back to Akihabara to hang out a little bit more with E and K before they left.
We got stuff at a conbini and hung out in their room for a bit.
While hanging out, I was remembering my flight back from the US in 2019 (the last time before last year that I met E) and I remembered this docuseries about the dot com bubble that I saw on the plane (it was a stop at Hawaii, which was its own tale). The series is called “The Valley of the Boom”, pretty good if you can stomach the usual docuseries dramatization.
Also, for the longest time I thought “the fat kid from Superbad” had a part in it, but no.
E showed me her Thot Tarot deck that she got in like 2009 and always keeps in her jacket, and I gave her the cloth case where I kept the Lunalapin deck that I always carry with me.
After K and E left I felt… satisfied. I was bummed it ended for now but it also felt like we all got our share of company and experiences and leave happy hoping for the next trip to come.
Afterwards I went to Radio Kaikan to look for playmats and actually found quite a few. Could’ve waited for some of the shops to open but decided to go back.
In the Shinkansen I had to face the all-too-traditional scenario of the foreigner that uses the oversized luggage area without paying for it, which is already aggravating enough but then they HAD to put the bags horizontally to use as much space as possible.
There was enough space for mine and in the worst case I just stack it on top of theirs to make my point, but another funny detail is that they were Spanish and it would’ve been hilarious to see how they react to a confrontation in Japan suddenly being in fluent Spanish.
And of course they got down at Kyoto because if you hit one stereotype might as well hit all of them.
The ride kinda flew because that’s when I started catching up with things like finishing the last post, and daily reading, and sorting my backpack and whatnot.
Oh yeah, E and K gave me a beer from Hakone the day before, which was so nice of them, gonna save it for a nice ocassion.
I bought a can of cookies of some sort in Tokyo station before leaving to keep the Lunalapin deck while I arrived. The cookies were great, I think some of them were sesame-flavored?
I was lucky enough to catch a cab after I got back and after I got back I just zoned the hell out.
I played this DLsite game that has stayed on the top rankings for a few days called NTR Lesson. It was nice though I don’t quite feel like taking a massive detour here into explaining how DLsite has its own ecosystem of tropes and game archetypes and how this is what you would call an “NTR Densetsu”-like.
The amusing thing about the game to me is that it’s the most archetypal romcom setup (MC has GF, then cousin starts living with him, GF also has a hot mom and a hot friend), except you don’t play as the romcom MC but as his dad who’s stealing them all away
Didn’t do much beyond that to be honest, I do feel like I need a couple of days to zone out as hard as I can though, so the beach trip is canned for the time being.
It’s still hot outside so it’s fine.
Sidenote, have I ever talked about why I use Lark as a general username?
Over the years I’ve come up with dumb explanations including one where I claimed it was Les Mis-related but the truth is that the word Lark was always amusing to me.
I’ve been fluent in reading English since High School and ever since then the word “Lark” being both joke and bird tickled me for some reason.
I used to go online by Fer_D because honestly I’m the type that doesn’t wanna be anything other than what I’ve been trying to be lately (as the intro to One Tree Hill says) but at around the time that Valhalla was becoming a thing I changed it to IronicLark (a pun on ironic bird and ironic joke) which was a Tumblr handle I picked on a whim.
Part of it is that my name is the same as my dad’s (and grandpa’s) and my dad also works online so I didn’t want a Fernando Damas disambiguation to be needed.
The funny thing is that ever since then I’ve become more bird-like in some ways. I already loved whistling and then started taking singing lessons, I love traveling but I love going back to my nest just as much.
Sometimes you live up to things, sometimes you grow into them and sometimes they come from a part of yourself you weren’t aware of.