thursday, twenty-nine july: father of cups
In other news, I slept really well last night, and I feel like a person again, so that’s good.
Today’s card doesn’t feel particularly useful as a writing prompt–in this exercise as well as in actual readings, I just never know what to do with court cards. The Father of Cups is a patron of the arts, dignified and supportive, but harboring vast and unpredictable insecurities. Good for him I guess?
I was telling Matt yesterday that one of my goals for the summer is to not feel, at the point where I go back to work, like I wasted the whole summer. I think I’m largely successful on that front so far, even if there are days like today, which looks like it might be sort of meh. I’d thought that we might do the American Museum of Natural History today–I have such a conflicted relationship with AMNH. It should be amazing and it’s often not? The special exhibits are always excellent, and they’re the main reason we’re still carrying a family membership. The dinosaur galleries are very beautifully constructed, but my child has weirdly never been that in to them, even when he was more into dinosaurs. Vast amounts of space in the museum are given over to the really old-fashioned stuff like the Hall of African Mammals, big glass displays with taxidermied animals, which seem to exist largely to spur nostalgia among big-money donors. And then there are the weird forgotten parts of the museum–the various “anthropology” halls are frankly embarrassing, and I swear to god there are places in the third and fourth floor of the museum where you can go down the wrong hallway and come face to face with a science-fair-style posterboard of dead seagulls or squirrels.
For all its flaws, AMNH is a good place to spend a few hours, most of the time, and since it’s supposed to rain for large parts of the day, I thought that might be our plan for today. But you can’t eat lunch at the museum anymore, the cafeteria is still closed as a covid precaution. The last time we went, we popped out of the museum for lunch, ate Shake Shack chicken fingers while sitting on a bench in Central Park, and then went back in to the museum to see the planetarium show. Today, with the possible rain, outdoor lunch seems like less of an option, and I don’t want to eat indoors, and and and. (It’s so stupid to think this, because the pandemic has had such real and serious impacts on so many people’s lives, but sometimes in the day-to-day I resent most the way it’s stolen the easiness out of daily life.) If we can’t eat lunch there, then we’re really only talking about an hour and a half or two hours at the museum, and if I’m going to haul myself all the way up to Central Park West I want to not feel like I’m on a countdown timer.
So the plan for the day has been downgraded to something more like “shrug emoji” and will probably involve a lot of Olympics, squabbling over snacks, and restlessness.