Lately I have been attending Tarot classes taught by the weird and wonderful Thalassa, where I made many new friends.
An interesting highlight from the last class was an exercise she called the "Carnack" exercise, in which we acted like the Johnny Carson psychic character, putting a card up to our forehead with eyes closed and talking about the impressions we got. Actually, this seems like a pretty good thing to do, to help open the psychic center of one's brain--I think I will do this once a week.
What really baked my noodle about this was that the guy sitting next to me in class immediately named his card and the colors and emotions evoked by the card. Woo, scary. This is a guy you definitely want reading for you because he's got mad skills.
Anyhoo, on completion of that, it was on to the great celebration of all things divinatory, SFBATS!!!
And of course, I got to hobnob with the hoy and the polloy, first and foremost being the lovely and talented (and one of my favorite people) Lon Milo Duquette, who introduced me to one of the guys working on the upcoming Crowley film and I found out there was no room in the budget to have Jude Law in the starring role (crestfallen though I was about this, at least that means that the Johnny Depp money is also out of reach. Johnny Depp would just be wrong, I think.)
Other highlights included Rachel Pollack, the Joseph Campbell of Tarot, who told a wonderful fairy tale, and then expounded on the commonalities between Tarot and fairy tales. I asked her what she thought about current pop culture and things like comic books and movies like the Matrix having more metaphysical content--I didn't know at the time that she had actually done some comic book art--I read about it later and felt like an idiot.
Then I was having a good discussion with a lady for about a half hour when she revealed that she was Valerie Sim, author of Tarot Outside the Box and creator of the Comparative Tarot.
On the whole, I had a tremendous time, meeting famous authors and getting to talk to them, and totally acting like a book groupie. I made printouts of a couple of my spreads and passed them out liberally to my friends.
I can't wait for the next one. I feel like these are my people--I like them so much and want them to like me too--kind of a dorky thing to say, but that's how I feel.
Five of Cups--I think this means I needn't feel like such a dork up against these Tarot biggies. If I look around me I will see my own potential and the resources that are there for me to be a great writer someday. I must not overlook my inheritance.
And with that, I must go do homework. My sadistic philosophy prof has me reading about something called "hard determinism" which I do not like very much at all.<|P
