JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Dear Saffy,

Edrie

Dear Edrie,

Mazel tov! May you and your feline companions be very happy. We have received thank you emails from readers who were wise enough to do what I told them to do, but this is the first time my brilliant advice has led to a match. Perhaps I should start a matchmaking service, there seems to be a great need for that.

To celebrate, I shall be The Oracle for the next 24 hours (until Friday 10 August at 2130) and answer readers’ questions about their relationships. Post them in Comments.

Saffy

We cannot access the Saffy Oracle post from 2012 with all the readers’ questions, but here is the request from Edrie.

Jodorowsky is wise.

My friends and I like to consult tarot card readers. Such readings can bring up alternative outcomes that would never have occurred to us. Some readings are as good as psychotherapy.

Of course, 90 percent of professional tarot card readings are bullshit. The charlatan will fish for information, guess at what you really want, and promise it to you. The salesperson type of card reader will read something scary in your cards—An elemental is in love with you so he is thwarting all your relationships!—and then offer to sell you a spell or amulet to counter the elemental’s powers. Or else the card reader says there is something fabulous in your future—But you have secret enemies!—then offers supernatural countermeasures, for a fee.

Years ago, I tagged along with my friend Otsu to a card reading. This fortune-teller did not use tarot cards, preferring ordinary playing cards. He laid out the cards, looked at Otsu, and said, “In the 70s, you lived in Forbes Park.”

He was correct.

“Your house was white, with a green gate, and there was a path made of stones leading to the front door.”

Otsu nodded in amazement.

“Your mother is very strict and intimidating,” the fortune-teller continued.

“Yes. That’s amazing! You can see all these in the cards?” Otsu asked.

“No, miss. I was your houseboy in Forbes in the 70s.”

At least he was honest.

I knew a spookily gifted tarot reader. (Don’t ask me for her number, she died some years ago.) She said: “You will receive a job offer. Accept it, it will be good for you.” The very next day, Abe Florendo called to say he was organizing the lifestyle section of a new daily broadsheet and would I be interested in writing a column?

We are always looking for gifted tarot card readers, so let us know if you find any.

Here’s a tarot reading with a cat.

Photo from Catster

I love tarot cards—the symbols, the myths, the far-out designs. In Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies they communicate using the tarot, and it’s so arcane and esoteric I can’t find my damn copy. I enjoy consulting tarot card readers and distinguishing between the bullshit artists who are only trying to sell you stuff, and the truly gifted who are not bound by regular time (Like Dr Strange and his 14,600,000 possible outcomes). There are a couple of tarot decks in my house, but I cannot read them to save my life—the rational part of my brain starts mocking me and I cannot take it seriously. I have no faith in my tarot interpretation abilities, but I have faith in the movies.

Noel, who is now based in Singapore, gave me these Criterion Collection movie postcard sets. I like them so much that like my Penguin Books and New Yorker postcards, they will never be mailed out. However, it’s occurred to me that each movie poster summarizes an entire cinematic universe with its own language, characters, stories, and could therefore be used for divination. Or as I prefer to think of it, studying the themes that surround an issue.

First I had to pick out the postcards of the movies I had seen and remember well, so I had to leave out Carnival of Souls, Cameraperson, Lady Snowblood and others. This left me with 28 cards, whose meanings can change according to the context. These include

You are ambitious and will go far in life, but nobody likes you because you’re a busybody and a teacher’s pet, and your EQ is low.

What you have is not love, but co-dependency and addiction. Get out of that relationship before you kill each other!

Self-explanatory.

Bitch, stop popping those pills, you’re an addict.

Your plan is idiotic. You think you’re going to solve your problem, but your dumbass strategy is only going to make things worse. Just stop.

So you think you should abandon your successful career and try to be a “normal” woman with a husband and brats, bake cupcakes and do home improvement projects. Hah. Hahahahah, you’ll be dead of boredom in a week.

Okay, who wants a reading?

* * * * *
Question from Ronigurl: I just went paragliding last weekend, and I found it as sedate as my Lola’s rocking chair. Conversely, I hate sliding down playground slides, and will never ride Anchors Away in this lifetime. Is there something wrong with me?

Rumble Fish is about a disaffected teen abandoned by his mother and living with his alcoholic father, who wants to be badass like his brother, a gang member. His brother says gang life is not as exciting as he thinks it is, and wants to be free and see the ocean. They break into a store and set the Siamese “rumble fish” free. In the end the protagonist gets to see the ocean.

Reading: The thrills you expected turned out to be duds. Go see the ocean.

Happy Birthday, Drogon Targaryen-Targaryen!

Do you have questions about life, love, work, cats, sleep, tennis, hair, coffee, sex, hopia, music, dogs, space, ink, paper, travel, anything that matters? Ask The Oracle!

Post your questions in Comments or @jessicazafrascats on Instagram. Then go and feed a stray cat, or watch A Quiet Place. By the time you come back, your answer will be waiting. Quick! The Oracle gets bored easily.

* * * * *
From Shona.

Happy Name Day! I hope to survive April, the cruellest month. Will I be able to?

Drogon says: Of course you will survive April. For starters you have to drop T.S. Eliot (It’s only temporary), and muse on other lyrics about April. I do not mean “Early morning, April 4,” because we know that the assassination occurred in the evening. Also: assassination.

I suggest e.e. cummings. Not April-specific, but spring.

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

Believe that all will be well.

Next!

If you’ve heard this story before, please accept my apologies and move on. I bring it up again because something similar has happened to my friend.

Eight years ago, during a particularly bleak period in my life, I had what I like to think of as a visit from the future.

In retrospect, I had no more reason for despair than I do now. However, I felt like I was trudging through a dark tunnel with no end in sight. Usually I am very good at cheering myself up—why else would I read so many novels or watch so many movies—but I was convinced that I would never get out of that cave. I knew I was being irrational and self-dramatizing, but I could not help it.

Mercifully I could still sleep nine hours a day even in this state, so my mind could take a break from thinking about itself. Early one morning—it must’ve been just after sunrise—I woke up from a deep sleep and saw a figure in brown robes standing at the foot of my bed.

Immediately I doubted the reality of what I was seeing. I had the impression of an ancient person calmly watching me sleep. It was a dream, I told myself, then I noticed my cats crouched on either side of me like marble library lions. They were wide awake and staring at the foot of my bed. Which, when I looked again, had no one there.

Here is where it gets truly odd. Instead of leaping out of bed, inspecting my house for intruders, or taking my temperature, I went back to sleep. Suddenly I felt better. The darkness had lifted.

Someone said it was a Jungian archetype: the wise old person, mentor, or guide. She thought it significant that I had been comforted instead of freaked out. Since that time I have thought of this split-second incident as a message from the future: nothing grand, just, “You’ll get here.” My visitor was myself.

This afternoon I was having merienda with Chus when he told me about his own visitor.

Early this morning he was awakened by a noise. When he opened his eyes he saw a small boy in a striped t-shirt rummaging among his papers. He said, “Hoy!” The child jumped onto his bed the way children do when they want to play, and Chus held his arm up to keep the child from landing on him. Except that the child had vanished. And Chus went back to sleep, untroubled by this home invasion.

“Could it have been you?” I asked Chus, and he said he thought so. What was he trying to tell himself? Was there something in his past that he needed to remember?

Of course, it could’ve been a dream. Or a product of indigestion. Or a trick of the light. But wouldn’t it be great if our past or future selves could show up once in a while, to remind us where we came from and assure us that we’re going somewhere? You are haunted by the memory of a figure at the end of a jetty. That figure is you yourself.

I can’t find La Jetée online anymore.