You May Already Know What I'm Going to Write

After "Fit Strip," I attended a lecture by the Spa's Clairvoyant.

The Number One reason why I attended this lecture was 'cause it was free.  I generally don't put much stock in clairvoyance, and wouldn't imagine coughing up actual money for a reading, but a free lecture seemed worth an hour of my time.

She started off telling us how she discovered that she had "the gift," and then told us that "ESP," psychic abilities, clairvoyance, intuition, and deductive reasoning were all the same thing.  I sorta sat up at that last one.  Deductive reasoning is when Sherlock Holmes figures out how your finances are and whether your wife still loves you by looking at your hat, picking up on the visual clues there, and understanding what they must mean.  Clairvoyance, I'd assumed, was actually figuring this stuff out from feeling your hat and picking up on sympathetic vibrations.  If deductive reasoning is the same as clairvoyance, well, that just means that clairvoyants are sneakily observant and not as hooked into the metaphysical world as they'd claimed.  It's all observational skills and smoke & mirrors.

Very interesting.

Our clairvoyant lecturer took some questions, then said we were going to run some tests to see how clairvoyant we are.  She passed out pads and papers for this purpose.  She couldn't decide which test to do -- she talked about maybe one where we've got to figure out what color she's thinking or something like that, and then she went with something else.  She asked us all to write our names on the pads of paper, and said something about how we were going to do an exercise with the people on the other side of the room.  And when I'm writing my name on the piece of paper, I think, "Julie."

She decides not to do that exercise after all.  Instead, she takes the papers in her hand, picks a few at random, and does mini-readings of a few of us.  Some people said she hit, others weren't all that impressed.

We move on to the real exercise.  We're put in groups of 2 or 3, with strangers.  We're supposed to hand them something of ours and let them feel it and see if they can't get anything about us off of it.

I'm in a group of 3.  I give my watch to the woman; she hands her glasses to the guy; and the guy hands me his watch.

I go deductive on the watch.  While I'm weighing it in my hand, I sneak a look at the face.  Has about four different dials on it -- it does tricks.  I can't examine it fully without looking suspicious, but I imagine it's a sports watch, maybe even a diving watch.  I think it is a safe bet to say the owner is "outgoing."  I ponder this, trying to think of something else, and the word, "Quiet," leaps unbidden to mind.  I tell the guy I was originally thinking, "outgoing," but ultimately went with "quiet," if that made any sense.  He thought that was fairly accurate, in that he has to be outgoing for his job, but that he's naturally more of an introvert.  I figured the same read would probably work for most people, but accepted the praise.

The woman with my watch, however, said I was a student (wrong under every interpretation I could come up with, although I thanked her for guessing I was younger than I am) and that I lived on either the East or West Coast, but not the center of the country.  I gave her points for that one, as I was born on the East Coast and currently live on the West, and the Clairvoyant was suitably impressed with our results.  (She then read the guy, saying the watch was burning with "energy! energy! energy!" (she must've thought it was a diving watch, too) and that he had a big dog.  He has a cocker spaniel.  Oh, and did I mention that earlier in the lecture, she'd asked us to raise our hands if we had pets?)

But some people in the room had much better hits, with rather more specific descriptions.  One woman read another and got a visual of a red and white tablecloth fluttering on a table with lots of people around it -- the woman she read was in the middle of planning a picnic.  Another woman read someone and came up with "cat's eyes," which is apparently the way that woman describes her sister's eyes.  Both, I thought, were substantially better hits than anything we got.

Until I found out, quite by chance, that the woman sitting on the opposite side of the room from me was named Julie.