Draw of the day

[bloodygranuaile]

So the Five of Cups actually *is* the Loss and Disappointment card, which is what all the Cups pips look like in this deck.

In its upright position it represents Mourning, which is not really how I have felt for most of today; I feel like today's feeling has generally been Exhausted Rage. It was a big day on the Interwebs for idiotic young-people bashing, with another article on how YA isn't ~real literature~ (for those of you not keeping up with the trends in Kids These Days writing, young people are reading more than they used to, so the Kids These Days Don't Read Enough screeds of my youth have been largely ditched in favor of Kids These Days Are Reading The Wrong Stuff ones); an article in which NBC blames millennials for not watching its shitty-ass delayed coverage; and one from CNN Money in which the olds blame young people for not taking enough vacation time, because while we are obviously awful and lazy, when we are NOT lazy that is STILL awful, and also clearly our terror at losing whatever underpaid jobs we do manage to grab onto is just a paranoid plot to fuck over baby boomers by making them look bad and is in no way a reaction to the way the modern workforce actually treats us. But perhaps I am in mourning for the future I was promised -- no, not the one everyone *pretends* they promised me in order to make me look stupid, the one where I'm always treated as special and get moneys for just existing; nobody ever actually promised me that. But the one where it was at all possible to build the life I wanted if I worked hard and smart enough and made enough of the right choices and kept my expectations and plans realistic enough; the one where I though I could safely afford to forego trying to be rich because I never wanted to have a house in the suburbs and kids and all that stuff and I thought that living alone and childless in the city would be a feasible and modest boho sort of aspiration, not the prohibitively expensive, laughably unimaginable luxury it's turned into. The one where if I did things I both liked and was good at and didn't give up I would be able to build a career out of it and that would be respected. The one where if I made the right choices I wouldn't get incessantly yelled at for having made the wrong choices, but now that the economy's fucked for people my age and the people who fucked it don't want to admit they fucked it, everything is automatically retroactively the wrong choice. Pursuing your education is VERY IMPORTANT right up until it turns out education is expensive and it's preventing me from buying other stuff and then it's hey, nobody forced you to go to college! Being frivolous and reckless with money is terrible and stupid and a bad idea right up until we're "failing" to "support" whatever fucking industry has gone whining to the newspapers today about how hard it is to get blood out of a stone, in which case it's so terrible that we're not buying houses/buying cars/racking up credit card debt (seriously, there was a New York Times article *yesterday* concern trolling that millennials were ruining the economy and our own futures by not taking on enough credit card debt)/taking vacations/having babies that require hundreds and thousands of dollars of care over decades, as our own parents incessantly remind us/playing the slot machines/buying lottery tickets/buying fucking DIAMONDS (never going to forgive you for that, The Economist)/subscribing to clueless-ass newspapers that insult us incessantly/other shit you'd tell us was frivolous and irresponsible if we were spending money on it. I am in mourning for the idea of an adulthood where I might be independent and not continuously condescended to, continually in need of a little extra help and unable to catch a fucking break; one where I'd be able to accomplish something without someone sneering that it was the wrong thing to accomplish and I did it wrong anyway and why didn't I do it five or ten years earlier, one where I didn't have to second-guess every penny I spent not only to see if I can afford it or not, but also for if I feel more guilty for being a stupid frivolous millennial who blows money she doesn't have on unnecessary things if I do or for being a cheap entitled spoiled-by-being-used-to-getting-things-cheap unsupportive-of-your-local-industries Reason Why (the arts/the neighborhood/journalism/indie bookstores/the economy generally/the environment/Indian tribes/something) Is Dying if I don't.

Guys, I'm so tired. So so so so tired. I'm tired enough because I'm stressed and poor and things get more expensive faster than I can get pay raises, but I could deal with all that if I were at the very least just left on my fucking own to deal with it. But the constant fucking ATTITUDE from the media and from financially comfortable older people is just too much. I cannot deal with that on top of all my own shit. I cannot handle the tiniest bit of unsolicited financial or spending advice from anyone over 40. Cannot cannot cannot. And I think I'm in mourning for not all my ambitious dreams, which I haven't quite had to give up on yet because they were always ambitous and can always just be delayed a little more, but for the dreams I had that I thought were modest: That I'd be able to live by myself by the time I was 30. That I'd pay my credit card off every month. That I'll ever be able to have only one job, with no side hustle. That I wouldn't become one of those penny-pinching people whose every waking moment is consumed with thoughts of money.

That's an idea of Adult Me that I've been carrying around since I was very little, when I didn't really have any idea what it was Adult Me would be doing to support herself, and it's been very hard realizing that this version of Adult Me is never going to happen. Actual Adult Me is an anxious wreck with two roommates and expenses that climb no matter how much she tries to live within her means and an income that seems to not only fail to grow, but actually has managed to *shrink* every now and again over the course of the past two years or so.

Anyway, the Mourning card advises that "something remains to be salvaged from the situation," and that I need to "allow the grief work to proceed and also to revise your emotional priorities." For people, it can represent "people who feel bitter, resentful, or burned out," to which I say: It me