Just so you won't think I haven't learnt anything...

Yeah, those readings I did last Wednesday were pretty much a headache, but I did learn something from them. I mean, aside from deciding that I'm not a Fortune Vending Machine, I have found new ways to look at old cards & card combinations, which is something that always amuses me.

How can the same pictures come up in a reading and surprise us by representing something completely different than what we are used to?

This is one of the marvels of card reading, one of the reasons I never grow tired of it.

So, some new combinations I have learnt during my ordeal. Remember that I use the Playing Card Oracles method created by Ana Cortez, so these combinations probably only make sense within this system.

Q♦ + 5♥  – She who is not what she seems - specially someone hiding behind a kind and compromising mask. In fact any court card accompanied by the 5♥ can represent a person who is hiding their true face, so to speak, but it's specially dangerous when people are pretending to support you when in fact they are not.

9♠ + 5♦  –  While reading, I usually took this combination as 'beware of whom you trust'. But a comment from one of my friends who was in the room brought another aspect of this combination to light: that of someone who is making their life dry by mistrusting everybody. Of course, the context of the reading made this interpretation possible. A third possibility would be when someone is manipulating you into putting your butt on the line, so to speak. But for readings about romance, I found that the second meaning tends to be more common.

I am not a Zoltar machine!

Wednesday night. One of my best friends is moving to a new house and she invited the girls to a "good bye" pizza. After a few pieces of wonderful vegetarian pizza and long conversations about love-spirituality-work and everything in between, they all decided they wanted card readings.

Very well. I was rather tired to be honest - unlike some of them, who are on vacations, I have to wake up everyday at 7 am to work. Even my body was achy due to exhaustion but, not wanting to be the one to disappoint the girls, I sat down with my cards and agreed to read for each of them.

Bad idea. Bad idea.

You shouldn't read when you're almost falling flat on your face, but that is not the reason why I considered that night a cartomantic disaster. Nope. The problem is that none of them had actual questions. They all wanted to know about their love lives, of course, but... there was no intention behind their enquiries. In fact, they would copy the question of the last person, because there was nothing they really wanted to know about.

A long time ago I wrote a post about the importance of intention when doing card readings. When you approach the cards with a vague, mildly unimportant question, the cards don't give your their best. They give you equally vague, and sometimes rather unimportant answers.

That's what happened. There I was, sitting on an old mattress and frying my surviving brain cells in a pitiful attempt to give them meaningful readings. My eyeballs were about to pop out of my skull due to an insidious headache that began to spread when I realised the next hour would be dedicated to "wot's comin' up in my love life?" sort of questions. And not only that. When the answer appeared vague, and I was having a bit of a hard time trying to pinpoint exactly which aspect of their love lives the cards were focusing on, I could feel that aura of disappointment growing quite thick around me.

Mea culpa. I shouldn't agree to read when I'm nearly at the melting point in mental fatigue.

When I got home at 2 am, I was so exhausted that my mind actually felt empty. This is serious coming from a person whose mind is usually rushing at 120 mph.

No, don't turn on your (virtual) heels. Not yet. There is a purpose behind this jeremiad.