friday, twenty-seven august: four of wands
“Completion, celebration … your labors have been steady and strong, and the harvest will be plentiful.” It’s cheating, this was yesterday’s card, today’s is something very grim that feels inappropriate to the day. (Although the day is still young, I suppose I might find occasion later to be wary of my selfishness and need for power leading me to defeat.) In another burst of tarot-sympathy, the day I drew “completion, celebration” was the day that the title report on the new house finally came back! Which was also the day that I learned that when everyone kept saying “all we’re waiting for is the title report” they didn’t mean “and then you’re all set,” they meant “and then we move on to the next six things you need to do.”
In lighter news, I’ve been doing Duolingo Spanish for a few months. I feel way smarter than when I was doing Duolingo Polish, in part because I remember a shocking amount of vocabulary for a language I haven’t studied since I was seventeen years old. Some of the Duolingo exercises are these mini dialogues, where they give you a sentence and you have to choose what the next sentence in the conversation would be. So, like, they give you “My cat lives in Barcelona” and then your choices are “Why? You live in London!” or “I would like sugar in my coffee.” (That’s a fake example, but “My new house has three kitchens” followed by “but it has no refrigerators!” is a real example.)
I love these, in part because they’re easy to get right, and in part because I enjoy imagining the conversation where people are responding with the wrong choice. You’re at a restaurant and you tell the waiter “I would like a salad with chicken but no cheese” and he responds “It’s my birthday and there’s a party tonight!” Or your friend says “My grandmother is very smart and elegant” and you’re all “I think that my kitchen is very modern.”
Okay this is not that funny, but it’s been a long day. It makes me laugh.