The Seven of Pentacles
Everything still sucks!! But these penguins are having the time of their gddmn lives, bless.
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Stop/ Take some time to think/ Figure out what's important to you/ You’ve got to make a serious decision. Sometimes I’ll be doing a reading for someone and a card will be so on the nose that I give a sentence’s explanation and it covers the entire thing. I’m bad at leaving it at that, especially when someone’s paid me and is expecting some hardcore witchcraft. But anything I say past the sentence always winds up being garbled nonsense. It would probably be a better explanation of the Seven of Pentacles if I left it to Laura Jane Grace, so I won’t add much, but: Sevens are about choice, and the Seven of Pentacles is about making choices with patience and logic. Gross. Boring. Extremely important. The Seven of Pentacles is the home card for people who make pros and cons lists. It’s about making sure you’ve thought of all the options, and then thought of all possible outcomes, and then really sat with it, you know? It’s about actually doing the thing you always say you’re gonna do when you have a big choice to make.
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But when I fumbled and when it came down to the wire/ It felt right. Okay but you can’t just make lists and we all know it. The Seven of Pentacles is a plea for balance. (Reminder that everything I write is informed by my Gemini sun, which I don’t fully understand but I’m told is related to being impetuous.) At the end of the day, ignoring your intuition because something seems more right on paper isn’t going to serve you. When you pull the Seven of Pentacles, it’s asking you to spend more time with your practical side than your lizard brain or your gut, to make absolutely sure you understand everything as much as you can before you chose. There’s also an argument in here that this song is the Seven of Pentacles in reverse, that using emotion as the final decider is the opposite of list-making. Ideally, cards right side up and reverse can work together, not as polar opposites but as balance. Tarot loves dualism, and I think it shows here.
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I’m not gonna be what my daddy wants me to be/ I’m gonna be what my body wants me to be. A lot of Mitski’s work is about her experience of being Japanese-American and growing up across thirteen countries and her subsequent sense of not-quite-belonging. So, without erasing the original intent, it’s easy to trans Mitski’s work— she has an album called “Puberty 2,” for g-d’s sake. To me, this song is the perfect combination of all elements of the Seven of Pentacles. Being what your body wants you to be isn’t just about intuition. There’s direct, active choice involved. To get all transsexual real quick, if you want to go on hormones, you have to go to a doctor and listen to a list of everything that your body may or may not do, and sign on the dotted line, and every single week decide to stick a needle in your leg (&c). But this isn’t just a transsexual thing— any purposeful body change requires decision making. Whether or not you’re allowing yourself to know it, you’re weighing pros and cons in order to listen to yourself, to get that hair cut or that dress or that surgery. The Seven of Pentacles is asking you to look directly at the things you’re weighing, and acknowledging all of the risks and benefits.
Stop!, Against Me!
The Wire, HAIM
Townie, Mitski
It’s weird to me that this is one of my emptiest playlists, but it sure is.