While driving on the highway this afternoon, somebody in a van with curtains covering its windows cut me off, coming very close to putting me into a wall, a la Kyle Busch. Stuff like that never makes me angry as much as it makes me scared, and today's incident was especially precarious because we'd both been going about 70 in pretty heavy traffic. ...So thinking about how close I was to dying got me in a rare, paranoid state of mind that stewed for the rest of the afternoon... After work, Jamie invited me to go to a psychic with her, and since I'd spent the better day putting off work to think about my mortality, I thought, "Why not?" I guess I hoped that I'd find out I SHOULD'VE died, thus giving me the right to claim that I'd cheated death, which I've never done before. ...That's my idea of excitement. Not the cheating of death itself, but the prospect of being able to truthfully claim that I've done so.
So we went to this psychic around the corner and down the street from the office. Even though it's in a reasonably safe neighborhood and it's perfectly legal to pay money to have your fortune told, for some reason you have to ring a bell and be let in, like it's some sort of underground gambling establishment, or a speakeasy in the 20s, or one of those places where you can get a special "massage" from an illegal Korean immigrant "masseuse". The lady gave us a run down of the services available and I decided I wanted a tarot card reading for $20. ...Because for $5, a palm reading either can't be that reliable or will only tell me so much, and $30 for a tarot and psychic reading is just plain ludicrous. As she began leading me behind some curtains into what I assume is the "reading room" I asked if she took credit cards, and of course she didn't. ...What is this, '02? Who doesn't take credit cards these days? Even tollbooths take them. So the psychic, Jamie and I started talking about ATMs and what we were going to do, and I said, "Let's just start going toward the ATM and figure out what we want to do." The psychic, worried that she was about to lose business, said, "You're going to come back, right?" and we were like, "Of course we're coming back."
...But I'm pretty sure it didn't take a psychic's intuition to tell her that we wouldn't.
So that was my first near encounter with pseudoscience. Tomorrow I'm going to visit a holistic medicine store and pretend to think about buying something.
3 comments:
I'm glad your story ended this way. Psychics make me angry. If you want some "psychic" advice, just send me 20 dollars and I'm sure I'll give you a more accurate reading since I'm not just blindly guessing.
i love pseudoscience!
am i the only one who watched America's Psychic Challenge on the Lifetime Network? it was incredible!
it is funny that a psychic wouldn't prefer to be paid via the mystic transfer of money from one account to another. it's far more magical than the use of cash. but i suppose cash transactions can have the magical ability of not showing up on one's income tax earnings report!
we have some crazy technology at work that shows the burner flame inside a boiler based on a computer screen. It's all pixely and it's all various colors of reds/oranges/yellows based on what the temperature is at each point. it's actually pretty cool. but anyway, you can record it from the screen onto a tape. and i saw someone with a VHS and i said "what is this, 1995?" and he replied, "actually, we bought this equipment in 1995." crazy.
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