Your Future: Add to Cart

Your Future: Add To Cart

The magic of and on Etsy, y’all (via Racked):

Etsy has since removed the penis enlargement listing from Schultz’s House of MagickEtsy shop, but he still sells liquid spells, shipped by mail, including the Wiccan Extreme Love Spell Orange Essential Oil, a 5-milliliter bottle of which retails for $199. …

A one-card reading from Gemini Tarot is less than $2. One of the most expensive readings available on Etsy is something called a psychic archetype reading from The Mystical Rose. For $3,300, you can have a psychic named Doreen meditate on what sort of goddess you are. After obtaining a customer’s birthday, Doreen meditates on each goddess archetype and asks the spirit questions accordingly. For example, “Hag, what in you is ugly and terrifying? How can you redeem this monster?” The shop has 836 positive reviews.

I mean, sure! Or you could just read Galactic Rabbit for free.

Paying for fortune-telling hasn’t ever served me well. One time, as a tween, I gave a few dollars to a psychic who told me that my father was a big guy and very important in my life. Since I was petite, I was impressed by that insight — until I realized pretty much every kid’s father is a big, important guy to them, at least in some metaphorical sense.

Later, in college, the school newspaper gave me some money and told me to see a psychic in Philly and write about it. Dutifully, I engaged the services of someone on South Street. That psychic, a middle-aged white dude with a matter-of-fact mien, told me all sorts of accurate stuff about my past: not just that my father was a big guy, but that I’d mostly had a happy childhood, though I had been immersed in religion and was, at least at times, resentful. Not bad! Then he told me I’d go to graduate school (no) south and west of where we were (double no). And even though Ben was sitting right there, he never gestured to him and said, “Oh, and believe it or not, you’re going to marry this fella, move to New York together, and start a family.”

What do you think, 3/10? 4, maybe.

I’ve never tried paying for fortune-telling again, maybe because I’m not interested in hearing yet once more about the literal or metaphorical size of my father. Of course I’m curious about my future — I have anxiety, for God’s sake; all I ever want is for someone to tell me it’s all going to be okay in a way I can believe — but I don’t believe shelling out $3K will get me the reassurance I require.

Besides, Johnny the UPS guy tells me my future for free. As he gestured to my bump while dropping off a package this morning, he asked, “What are you going to name her?”

“It’s supposed to be a boy,” I said, “although who knows for sure?”

“Let me see your hands,” he said. Based on something about how I showed him my hands, he agreed with himself: “Yup, gonna be a girl. Plus you’re carrying high.”

He did acknowledge that he might be wrong, since I’m apparently not hideous. Another pregnant woman he knew he intuited was carrying a girl, despite what everyone else and sonograms said, because “girls steal your beauty, and she was a train wreck. I told them and no one believed me. Afterwards, he husband was like, ‘Johnny, how’d you know?’ ‘She was a train wreck,’ I said to the husband. And she was like, ‘I heard that!’

“You still got your beauty, though,” Johnny added, “so you probably are going to have a boy.”

Johnny the UPS guy, everyone. He could make a fortune on Etsy.

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