“Probably not.”  

“TV?”

“Sure.”

“Yes! The cards see you writing a television show. You will probably live on the East Coast, or the West Coast,” she continues, “but not in the middle. Now pick three more cards.”

She frowns at my cards. This is disconcerting, and I am worried that one of the cards that looks like a baby on a horse to me is actually the tarot card of death.

“No,” she says, “You do not have a brain tumor. The cards just want to talk more about your family. I sense that your brother is going to get married soon.”

I laugh, slightly out of relief but also because neither one of my brothers is even in a relationship. I tell her this.

“Is it possible that one of your brothers hasn’t told you about his girlfriend because he is in a secret relationship?”

I nod. Theoretically, it is possible.

“It’s that then!” She beams, “I predict that he is going to surprise you with his engagement.” She moves on.

“I’m seeing lots of boys,” she continues. “Not in your future. Your brother’s, they are going to have lots of sons. You, however, you will be single for the rest of college.”

I’m laughing now, hysterically. I am angry, not because I am going to be alone for another year (or forever, depending on the length of my graduate program) but because I could have told her this. In fact, I probably did. I had basically told her everything that she had predicted.

I was paying to have someone listen to my life and then reconfigure it into something that could apply to a card with a picture of a forest on it. She was just an under qualified psychologist, or an overpriced mirror. I guess that this is the true mystical power of the psychic: listening comprehension.

I tried to blame myself. I wanted this to be a PSA about over sharing, and about how when we are too eager to share our lives with strangers—via iPhone apps, editorial articles, and small talk with psychics—we make it too easy for people to impersonate soothsayers and rip us off. But this is not true. This is not my fault. This is not Twitter’s fault! My psychic is just a fraud. Imagine how vague my reading would have been if I had given her no information with which to work with. She probably would have just told me that I had green eyes. Even that’s not true; they’re hazel!  

No. There is only one conclusion that comes from this. Never pay to see a psychic. If you want to see a card trick, go to a magic show, and if you want someone to tell you to stay in school, call your mother, or, just ask anyone really, any stranger on the street.

Nicole J. Levin ’15, an FM editor, is a government concentrator in Dunster House. Her column will appear every two weeks this summer.