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Business cards and Tarot cards
Once I got moving, today was actually a wonderful day. I got some schoolwork done, sucessfully translated Latin in class, and spoke with some level of confidence in my other class. But the real fun started afterwards.
After class I went over to Massey for the Journalism Fellows' seminar, whose guest of honour was Bob McDonald, host of CBC radio's Quirks and Quarks. Bob McDonald is an absolutely fantastic guy. There are very few people I consider heros, in that "I want to be like them when I grow up" sense, but Bob McDonald has joined that list.
He doesn't actually have a university degree, but pursued his passions and talents, and is now in a job he loves and for which he gets public recognition. He is smart, knowledgable about most modern scientific issues, and eloquent. He is able to take complex scientific issues and make them understandable to a lay public (read: me). And, despite it all, he's still humble and grounded. I want to be like him when I grow up.
Oh, and to top it all off, he gave me an autographed business card. Yay me!
From there, I spent a half-hour brushing up on tarot, reviewing my cards and their classic meanings. Then I had dinner and spoke French, as it was another French table. Oui, ça semble que je peux encore parler français, même si je suis en Toronto. Just before dessert, I noticed another junior fellow sitting quietly at the end of the table. It turns out she picked up a bit of French in the miltary, but has no formal training, and obviously could not keep up with the rapid-fire conversation of the rest of us at that end of the table (to her credit, i could barely keep up: it was lots of comparison of French / Quebecois slang, etc.). So I sat next to her for dessert and slowed myself down to let her have a chance speaking French as well.
From there, it was onwards to tarot reading, for a Massey senior resident who had won it at the talent auction. Understand that I was somewhat nervous about this: this was the single most expensive tarot reading I've ever done, by a factor of about ten. Also, it was his first-ever tarot reading. I wanted to make sure it was good and he got his money's worth.
In the end, I think it went well. The cards told a clear and plausible story, and the questioner seemed pleased with it. I still don't know the substance of what it was actually about, but he does, and that's what's important.
Now, before people jump on me for that last sentence, some clarification: I do not believe that the tarot reading is a vision into the future. Instead, I see it as a way of examining a situation or issue in a new way, of finding previously-unconsidered factors, and of proposing possible courses of action. I make no claims to any clairvoyance / presentience. Instead, as a reader, I feel it is my role to guide the questioner through the cards and thus the situation. I deliberately leave my language slightly vague, allowing the questioner to add in his own interpretation and his own knowledge of the situation, whatever it might be. So while I might be able to tell you, in an open-ended way, about the reading, I still only know the framework of the building and not the foundational issue. And that's okay.
So that was today. Tomorrow I've got class until 2, then I'm meeting with two profs. I need to decide whether to go to B5 tomorrow night or to skip it in order to do work. I'll make that decision depending on how I'm feeling tomorrow afternoon. For now, I'm going to take it easy and relax.
I leave you with one final thought: why is it that blogs don't factor in significantly in CSI-type shows? You'd think that, given how many people have blogs and what they tend to put in them, that blogs would have shown up as key pieces of evidence for some of these crime-buster / evidence-collector shows by now. And yet I've never seen one where a blog has even been mentioned offhand. Theories, anyone?
G'night all.
After class I went over to Massey for the Journalism Fellows' seminar, whose guest of honour was Bob McDonald, host of CBC radio's Quirks and Quarks. Bob McDonald is an absolutely fantastic guy. There are very few people I consider heros, in that "I want to be like them when I grow up" sense, but Bob McDonald has joined that list.
He doesn't actually have a university degree, but pursued his passions and talents, and is now in a job he loves and for which he gets public recognition. He is smart, knowledgable about most modern scientific issues, and eloquent. He is able to take complex scientific issues and make them understandable to a lay public (read: me). And, despite it all, he's still humble and grounded. I want to be like him when I grow up.
Oh, and to top it all off, he gave me an autographed business card. Yay me!
From there, I spent a half-hour brushing up on tarot, reviewing my cards and their classic meanings. Then I had dinner and spoke French, as it was another French table. Oui, ça semble que je peux encore parler français, même si je suis en Toronto. Just before dessert, I noticed another junior fellow sitting quietly at the end of the table. It turns out she picked up a bit of French in the miltary, but has no formal training, and obviously could not keep up with the rapid-fire conversation of the rest of us at that end of the table (to her credit, i could barely keep up: it was lots of comparison of French / Quebecois slang, etc.). So I sat next to her for dessert and slowed myself down to let her have a chance speaking French as well.
From there, it was onwards to tarot reading, for a Massey senior resident who had won it at the talent auction. Understand that I was somewhat nervous about this: this was the single most expensive tarot reading I've ever done, by a factor of about ten. Also, it was his first-ever tarot reading. I wanted to make sure it was good and he got his money's worth.
In the end, I think it went well. The cards told a clear and plausible story, and the questioner seemed pleased with it. I still don't know the substance of what it was actually about, but he does, and that's what's important.
Now, before people jump on me for that last sentence, some clarification: I do not believe that the tarot reading is a vision into the future. Instead, I see it as a way of examining a situation or issue in a new way, of finding previously-unconsidered factors, and of proposing possible courses of action. I make no claims to any clairvoyance / presentience. Instead, as a reader, I feel it is my role to guide the questioner through the cards and thus the situation. I deliberately leave my language slightly vague, allowing the questioner to add in his own interpretation and his own knowledge of the situation, whatever it might be. So while I might be able to tell you, in an open-ended way, about the reading, I still only know the framework of the building and not the foundational issue. And that's okay.
So that was today. Tomorrow I've got class until 2, then I'm meeting with two profs. I need to decide whether to go to B5 tomorrow night or to skip it in order to do work. I'll make that decision depending on how I'm feeling tomorrow afternoon. For now, I'm going to take it easy and relax.
I leave you with one final thought: why is it that blogs don't factor in significantly in CSI-type shows? You'd think that, given how many people have blogs and what they tend to put in them, that blogs would have shown up as key pieces of evidence for some of these crime-buster / evidence-collector shows by now. And yet I've never seen one where a blog has even been mentioned offhand. Theories, anyone?
G'night all.