Crystal Balls and Tarot Cards

A lot of people turn to psychics for insight and advice when they are at a crossroads in their lives.  The psychic looks into a crystal ball, reads their palms or lays tarot cards out on the table and spews out “facts” that are, to many nonbelievers, a string of nonsensical bullshit.  Still, for some reason many people swear by psychics.

I used to fall into the category of nonbelievers, but now I’m not so sure.  A few years back, in January of 2004, I went to New York City to visit a friend.  I was walking through a flea market, browsing, when a woman with a baby carriage came up to me.  “I’m a psychic,” she told me.  “I’m shopping now and I have my baby with me but there is something about your aura which is just screaming at me, telling me that I have to talk to you and I have things to tell you!  Please take my number and call me so that we can set up a time to talk.”  She gave me a little piece of paper with her phone number and her name, Christina, on it.  I figured that this was just her shtick that she used on every person that she passed that looked naive enough to fall for it.  After all, everyone needs clients.  I thanked her, took the piece of paper and threw it into the next trashcan that I passed.

I barely thought about the woman at all for the next year.  In the meantime I graduated from college and moved to New York City in May of 2004.  Then, in January of 2005 on what I am pretty certain was 1 year to the day that “Christina the psychic” had approached me I was walking down Broadway, listening to my iPod with my huge headphones and thinking about how working in television was not what I had expected and that I wished I could do something more creative when a crazed woman started chasing after me yelling “Your aura!  Your aura is speaking to me!!”  I immediately recognized the woman as “Christina the psychic.”  “I can see that you are a creative person but you are frustrated because you can’t express your creativity the way that you want to in your job, but that’s not all!  I have to speak to you!!”

I was intrigued– after all I was sure that this was the same woman from the year before and what she told me was something that I had just been thinking about.  I thought it would be fun to get a reading– after all, even if it was all bullshit it would still make a good story later.  I asked her how much she charged and she told me that a tarot reading was $60.  I told her “sorry, I can’t afford that” and started walking away but she came after me and told me that she had such a “strong communication with my aura” that she couldn’t let me go and she agreed to do a reading for $15.

To make a long story short, “Christina the psychic” told me a lot of things about myself that really hit home– about my personality, my family, my relationships, hopes and dreams.  Still, I was skeptical because that’s what psychics do– they give you just enough information that anyone could skew a reading to fit their own life perfectly.  However, she also told me a lot of very specific things that would happen in the future.  Though many of them didn’t make any sense to me at the time I wrote them all down in a notebook.  However, I quickly forgot about the notebook as well as my meeting with the psychic.  Recently I found the notebook and when I looked back at what I had written I was shocked.  Basically, she has predicted that I would leave my job and move to the desert in a faraway place (Israel) as well as a lot of other personal events that have occurred in the time since I spoke with her.  All of these were things that I had had no inkling about or understanding of at the time, but they all ended up happening.

I still don’t know if I believe that there’s something to all of this psychic stuff, but it really does make you think.  Anyhow, I look forward to paying another visit to “Christina the psychic” when I return to New York City.  You know, just for fun…