Today’s deck is the Sola Busca Tarot.
So here’s some quick history: The Sola Busca Tarot is the first deck to have individual illustrations for the pips (or the minor arcana as we know them in Tarot). It also has the curious characteristic that the major arcana are different, like The World being Nebuchadnezzar.
The way this deck depicted cards was influential enough that A. E. Waite took cues from it when he comissioned Pamela Smith for their now iconic deck.
Today’s reading is advising to not let all the financial considerations (considerations born out of responsability) stop my life entirely.
Which, considering how relieved I felt yesterday with all the photos taken, yeah…
Ok so let me tell you about one of my current obsessions: I need to know why pink crocodiles are a thing in Japan.
It all started when I noticed that King of the Class Yamazaki had a pink crocodile.
The immediate connection I made was with Christina, Toriko Kusabi’s pink crocodile in Flower Sun and Rain.
And THEN I’m reminded of Chocobi’s pink crocodile creature Waniyama.
So I look each one up individually and there’s no result. Ikariya from Yamazaki is named after Chosuke Ikariya from The Drifters, sure, but there’s nothing about none of the characters that points to the reference being specific to something.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence, maybe it’s just the idea of a pink crocodile being a silly notion, like talking about pink elephants.
My curiosity will not stop until I explicitly find out it’s just a coincidence, though. For all I know there’s some interesting backdrop to it like how Japan has had so many black people caricatures for a while because for the longest time their only exposure to black people was The Story of Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman.
Main thing today has been taking out the trash from my old office. A task I should’ve started yesterday but I had an appointment at 4PM which meant the whole day was a no-go.
It’s been exhausting. The old office (and thus my old apartment) is in a fourth floor… which is equivalent to Third Floor in most countries since Japan doesn’t have a “ground floor”.
The bulk of it was already done but going down the stairs with the trash and then up in the elevator over and over again is tiring.
First break I took, I took the chance to go back home, eat, and also put in the oversized trash order for the bulkier stuff.
During the second round afterwards, all but the bulky trash had been taken out, but I decided to wait until night to take out the desk and chair and old futon and all that.
I’m left thinking about that apartment, and the memories feel… clausthrophobic. Sure, it’s a one room studio apartment, but all the memories from the period where I lived there feel almost like they could choke me.
It’s not just the space but the general sense of the world as a whole. Of the people in my life, of the possibilities, of my understanding of my surroundings, of my capacity to communicate.
The small bathroom immediately reminds me of when the mere act of shaving my legs was somehow transgressive for me, of when I was so desperate for connection that I couldn’t tell anynmore how much of a hobby ws legitimate interest and how much was a desperate and ultimately ineffective ploy to have a conversation piece.
The me of back then thought about something like this blog, but didn’t have the mental capacity in general to even think about actualizing the idea, much less keep up with it the way I have so far.
It’s interesting because it’s not really trauma, it’s just memories of a bad mental spot. I can remember it and feel the contrast without any fear of that same thing lurking in a corner.
To pretend I don’t have any problems right now or like “oh all the nonsense with the bank is fine compared to how I was” would be bullshit. But it IS heartening to think about how far I’ve come and what I have at hand to deal with all the bullshit.
Makes it all feel more manageable, y’know?
Speaking of which, the Mitsui Sumitomo application bounced off and they were like “please apply at a front desk”. So I go and search where I might have a Mitsui Sumitomo with english support and apparently there’s an SMBC branch called Prestia for foreigners and stuff so I tried putting an application there. It even had the very specific wording of “your visa should have more than three months at the time of applying” which is… encouraging.
Maybe I should try opening the bank account in person. It worked with Yuucho, and I’m starting to suspect it might not have worked online for me.
A few runs of Ball x Pit later I was back into the moving chore. Even more going up and down than before but by the end I was only missing a desk and a chair so I returned to have dinner.
The whole process has kept me busy/entertained, at least.
I am back out for the last round and I realize that I’m gonna need one of those hex screw thingies to dispose of the desk.
Now, as you can tell by me going back and forth so constantly, my office is close to my house. Around 10 minutes or so by foot. The problem is that it’s close to midnight and I’ve been going through stairs all day. If I go back to my house at this point I WILL crash out and fall asleep.
Thank god then, for the Aeon Mall nearby and its Can Do 100 yen shop on the second floor.
Now I go back to bed completely spent but having accomplished all tasks.