foretelling?
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understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.
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It was between 2001 and the end of 2003 that I used to attend with my little sister a couple of anime club meetings at a local movie theater that happened twice a month (on sundays). Now the anime crowd at my city in that time was not exactly a big one, there was about 4 or 5 clubs that would compeet for members and the regular meetings would be attended by a crowd of perhaps 150 at the best of cases, on a city of 8 million people.
On those meetings I had made friends with hardly 3 or 4 girls and I would chat now and then with them through the internet. It was one of this girls that introduced me (through the internet chat room) to a boy that was part of one of this club´s organizers and this must have happened by the early 2002. I made virtual friends with him and we would talk regularly about our hobbies and lives and we would plan for a meeting that would always get postponed for one reason or another. Through those months I never got to see a picture of him, and when talking about the subject he would just comment that he was a "stand out" among the regular crowd that attended said meetings.
By the end of 2002 my grandmother got diagnosed with untreatable cancer, she died on May of 2003 wishing to be buried in her town. It was the day before the burial that three other cousins and me decided to take a stroll around the town´s main streets. Suddenly in one corner we saw one fortuneteller man seating on a bench with a tarot deck and they thought it would be fun to get our fortunes.
To give a better insight on this story, at that moment I was a 23 year old university student of a science discipline, a full acknowledged atheist, that had actually pass through that silly foretelling experience at least three times before either on a mockery spirit or dragged by somebody else, and who was not at that moment in the best of moods to suffer such nonsense if it wasn´t for the sake of humouring my mates. Wich will explain the little conversation that developped.
The guy asked me to pick three cards from the bunch, which he layed down solemnly before starting his show in a very lame way, saying: you are a fire zodiac sign. I answered: yes, but being right about it having just three other possibilities is not much impressive. He then added: you are an aries. I laughed out right saying: wrong, I´m a leo.
He seemed not to pay attention to my tone of voice or remark, he added another standard statement: you are single, which was true at the time, before telling me I could make just one question about any subject I wanted to know about, and it took me just one second to decide asking about love because I thought that was what I would get the most fun out of since I was completely comfortable with being single and actually had in mind remaining so what was left of my university education.
He then made a hardly extraordinary statement, he announced me that in the next months I would actually cease to be single, that I would have a relationship with a guy that will help me grow up in some way but which was not the going to be the definitive or most important one in my life. I thought to myself and i think I actually told him that wasn´t a very unlikely thing to predict, since I was so young, and to please give me more details about this guy that was supposed to break my plans.
Then the extraordinary statements appeared, he said first right away that I already knew this guy, I asked then, since he said I already knew him, how did he look like, and he said something very odd, he said: he is tall, white, blonde, and has light coloured eyes. Now this was extraordinary because not only I didn´t happen to know anybody with those characteristics but actually spotting someone like that on a city where more than 90% of people are hispanic, and the rest of it african, chinese and caucasian descendants, was actually a bit hard if you were not talking about tourists. So I laugued, really hard. I said: well, you are wrong man, I don´t know anybody with those characteristics, and in fact I don´t plan getting involved in a relationship with anybody at the moment. He seemed not bothered by my reaction and said: oh you will, you will meet with him on a party. At this I started to laugh hard again since I actually hated parties (I still do) because I´m very sensitive to loud sounds and I don´t willingly attend them more than once a year perhaps. I told him: I don´t attend parties nor clubs, so you are again wrong. He replied: it is some kind of reunion with a lot of people, strangers, that is what I see. And the session ended.
I had actually forgotten completely, everything about that experience for a very long time. Even way after the following things happened this memory was, like most unconscequential experiences in one´s life, deemed unimportant and therefore buried somewhere.
The next months I continued with my life in pretty much the same way, it was around August until after much talking the anime boy and me actually met on one of my last anime meetings. He was a tall (for national standards), white skinned, green eyed blonde that did stood out of the regular crowd (like he had said before) and that I had actually "known" and talked to for almost a whole year now. Despite such monumental coincidence, it didn´t make me think or remember the fortunetelling. We started to hang out on weekends and kept talking regularly for about three more months and it took him another three months of official dates and much proposing that I actually agreed on being his girlfriend. I still didn´t remember a bit about the fortunetelling.
The relationship lasted a bit more than three years, and it wasn´t until almost the end of it that suddenly, one day at his place after a long nap when things were actually pretty bad between us and I was sort of depressed but actually sick of the relationship, I woke up and I suddenly remembered the fortunteller´s face very clearly in my mind and all of a sudden I remembered that day with all its glorious and colourful and, at that moment, mindblowing details.
Date submitted:Sat, 22 Sep 2012 19:37:10 +0000Coincidence ID:6490