My username over on IMVU is “Guest_CatrionaTarot” because I refuse to pay them $8 to remove the “Guest_” tag. Anyway, I was hit up for chat by another individual and found myself in a very Gothic inspired room, complete with castle stone floors, and plus red and black couches, greeted by a male avatar dressed a lot like the main character from FF8.

He started the conversation asking me what decks I use, and told me that he had one that was handed down from his family so he couldn’t tell me what kind it was…the conversation on his part went through every Emo/Goth tarot cliche I could think of. That his family taught him, that his persona always comes up the death card. He at least knew what he was talking about tarot wise with meanings and things like that.

I kept wondering if it was “Tarot Dude” who we used to see haranguing people on St. Augustine’s street corners, the way he would go, “Oh, no I always use the Celtic Cross. It tells you everything you need to know,” (paraphrased to spell things correctly) except that he went off a little bit about charging for readings, and how he doesn’t do it, and implying I was wrong for doing so, because he has such an ancient family gift handed down through the generations and so on.

When the conversation turned to the fact that I have a husband, and shortly thereafter a son. He told me he had to leave to talk to “his girl”. So, I start to think on it now that he was dropping enough information that he thought would appeal to a typical emo Goth girl, and thus lead quickly to cybersex given my avatar is a pretty vampiric looking dark haired girl, and given that clearly wasn’t going to work he left.

It bothers me because it started an internal debate I’ve gone through so many times before: “do I charge? do I not charge?” so many times.

I know there are lots of people who contact me online who hightail it pretty quickly when they discover I would like to be paid for my services. Some of them try the “woe is me pity me” tactic on that, and I will trade with people for readings, readings for artwork, readings for candles, things like that, but considering a good 3/4 of the people who have got in touch with me online before thing that tarot goes hand in hand with tantra, and want readings only if I have a web cam…it’s a complicated situation. Plus, I’ve become pretty jaded to the “woe is me pity me” angle since the few people I have caved and given free readings to then wanted to draw things out for hours asking me question after question after question, and got really annoyed with me when I pointed out that I had other things I needed to do.

I think if I am going to work out this free sample thing. I need to set some really strict guidelines to prevent that in the future.

But really, compared to other services I’m not charging much at all. It’s not a 1-900 number where you’re paying $5.99 a minute and the money goes to a big corporation and you get a drawn out crappy reading by someone who might not be able to tell a tarot card from a xener card. Or like when I was trying out Kasamba people would be paying four times as much because of all of Kasamba’s fees on top of fees for talking to a person; one of the reasons why I quit working through Kasamba…but that’s a post for another time.

It took my friend’s in college to convince me that I was good enough to ask people for money, and even then I started out with $10-20 given some of that went to the coffee shop I would work in. Prior to that it was $5 tables at a psychic fair, and ten clients in one day. I know I almost had a heart attack when I saw what some other places charge…

Really I think this boils down to two things: 1. People want something for nothing 2. Most people don’t understand how tarot really works; it’s not just shuffling cards and dealing them out as though you were playing solitaire.

I’ve been meaning to do this for quite some time but I kept putting it off because I thought it was more complicated than it was. It turns out I was just mis-reading something.

Here’s to shopping carts, because not only will it make it easier for you guys to order from me, but it also means I can ghost my messenger handles again and will hopefully stop getting harrassing IMs from horny individuals who want me to strip for them on web-camera. Yeesh.

I think using Meebo will much better serve my needs, although that means I’m going to have to rearrange my layout a little bit so that it the meebo widget doesn’t hang over the line of the sidebar and look ugly. Meebo is a very useful messenger service that I was put on to as a subsitute for Aim Express when I was away from home. It functions like Trillian in a web browser. I like it because it’s much more versatile than AIM Express, not only because you can use more than one time of messenger service through it, but also because you can use colors and have an icon at the same time.

I think it will serve my needs a lot better than Twitter was, because it will show that I’m online and available without me feeling as invasive as a plugin which tells the world at large what I’m doing. Blogging about my life is one thing, offering a window to my current whereabouts is another.

Call or text: 352-455-6349.

If you’re on the Sprint/Nextel network it’s free!