What do I want?

Yesterday I spent several hours reviewing my resume and preparing for my interview. I had the interview. Then I wrote up my notes, looked up some relevant data online, went to the store, and talked with Brother on the phone for an hour afterwards. It was a very productive day.

Today I accomplished bugger-all, except for sending a couple of (very belated) thank-you notes for the interviews, and going to Sangha in the evening. Maybe it's just a reaction against having actually achieved something yesterday, but I also think that my compulsively doom-scrolling Twitter might be a way to avoid thinking about what I really want.

Do I want a new job? I don't know. But I do think I have stumbled on the worst way to find out.

You know that over the last few years I've been trying to learn to read Tarot cards, as a way to help me make decisions. (Since here, at any rate.) I don't feel that I'm very good at it, even now. Sometimes I get a layout that looks meaningful, sometimes not. Also, when I've had occasion to check the accuracy of my readings against the real world, … well, my success rate isn't 100%, nor even close. So maybe I'm a fool for trying.

Even if Tarot works sometimes for some people (and that much does seem to be true) there's a lot of advice out there to the effect that you can't expect any kind of divination to answer a badly-formed question. Ask a question that is freighted with all of your inchoate and contradictory desires and longings, and you can pretty much figure: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

I know all this, but I've also been fretting for some days over the question whether I really want a job, much less one that will make me move. So in a moment of frustration today, I pulled out the cards, shuffled them, and asked "What do I want?" I assumed I would get back meaningless gibberish, or at any rate a very generic reply focused on my whole life (not just this particular question here and now).

Given that choice, I hope I got the meaningless gibberish. Because if what I got is meaningful, I'm not sure I like what it says.

I drew three cards. For this question, I didn't impose any particular assumptions on position, like "The first card means X and the second card means Y …." 

My three cards were: the 9 of Swords, the 3 of Pentacles reversed, and the 8 of Wands. Does that mean anything? More particularly, is there any way to coax a meaning out of it that is consistent with anything else I already know about myself?

Why, sure.

This reading says that the things I want are: suffering, mediocrity, and travel. Let's look at these up close.

Suffering? Sure, I've discussed this in plenty of posts. You can start, for example, here. And then check all the posts I reference to from there. (The locus classicus may actually be this post here, but there are lots of others.)

Mediocrity? You bet. That aspiration is what D called "hiding" so many years ago—the aspiration NOT to dazzle people, NOT to be exceptional, NOT to amaze. I first mention D's remark here, I think. For comparison you can cross-reference this post where I mention how hard I find it in practice, or this one where I mock myself for standing out. A soberer discussion shows up here. [Update added a few days later: Consider also this post about how I handle luck, or any of my posts fretting over goals.]

Travel? This one is easy. I love to travel.

So yes, it's actually very easy to interpret this layout in a way that makes sense for me. That doesn't make me happy about the reading! Nor does it really address my immediate question about whether I want this new job. But as a big-picture assessment, it looks eerily accurate.

Maybe this just shows that anybody can interpret anything if they set their minds to it. Like finding pictures in clouds. Maybe it's no more than random chance.

Maybe.