Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Reina de Bastos

This is my first time to write my thoughts on the net. I am not a very expressive person. Naturally reserved, I keep my thoughts to myself or stomp it off someplace where no one can hear my curses. But I realize that this exercise can help me be in touch with myself. It is a perfectly harmless way to let out my frustrations and my musings. I do not care if anyone who stumbles on this blog will be bored to death. In fact, it is my sacred duty to warn readers who are too adventurous that this blog may cause extreme boredom. I do not wish to add to others’ discomfort.
Oh, right, where are my manners? To start this blog, it is only fair to give a proper introduction…

Reina de Bastos, and what it means….

Reina de Bastos (Spanish) – Queen of Wands
· Emblema de amor, persona extrovertida, casta y serena, practica, provista de encanto y gracia. Los significados inversos son celos, duplicidad, posible desconfianza, inconstancia, intransigencia, obstaculos, oposicion.

There. You have it. The meaning of the name “Reina de Bastos” or the Queen of Wands. You may be wondering about its origin. Reina de Bastos is the name of one of the Tarot cards. The Tarot is in many ways, similar to a regular deck of cards, also divided into four suits. But instead of having hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs, the four suits are composed of wands, pentacles, cups, and swords. In addition to that, the Tarot also has a major arcana, composed of 21 character cards, different from the suits. This is where I get my namesake. In my native language, Reina de Bastos sounds lewd. (Don’t ask me what it means.) But in Spanish, and in the jargon of the Tarot, it symbolizes something beautiful and mysterious.


Now don’t get any wild ideas out of the little background I gave you. I am no fortune teller, but I am no ignoramus either. Yes, I am familiar with the Tarot and its methods, but my overall knowledge about its intricacies is as sparse as hair on a balding man’s head. No, I do not practice divination using the Tarot for I do not possess the deck of cards. And probably if I had the them, I would not take the predictions seriously. What’s more, I find the price of Tarot decks in my country outrageously expensive for my deprived pockets. The prices are in a state of inflation for as long as I could remember. Thus, there is no assurance that I will be able to buy it in the future. Furthermore, my mother would be horrified if ever she found out that I harbor this desire. I can already imagine her angry face and shouting eyes, shrieking curses at me while she throws me out of doors. She’d think I had lost my sensibilities completely to a bunch of esoteric mumbo jumbo! Mortified, she would disown me. She would not want a gypsy for a daughter, not in her own roof! The present circumstances as well as my financial capacity are not favorable for acquiring Tarot decks. So instead I tried to settle with a book about divinations and prophecies which I had a hard time translating because it is printed in Spanish. I will need all the dictionaries in the world and all the patience I can muster.

This is how the name got stuck to my brain, and it would not give me a moment’s peace until I had adopted it for an alias. I personally like the meaning both in my native language and in Spanish. Every time I use it, I can’t help but laugh inwardly at the disparity of its meaning, in Spanish and in my native tongue. But true to my word (or else my conscience will hound me night and day), this is how I’ll refer to myself from this moment onwards.

Unsettling the water…

But even with all the negative publicity about divinations and fortune-telling, I still had not lost my old childhood curiosity about them. I feel that I am really a gypsy by heart, now more than ever. I never seemed to belong permanently to one place, nor held on to some ideas for too long. A changeling, I am. I remember fearing change one moment and then wanting to embrace it the next. One thing that’s always on my mind is to be free. It is a belief and a desire that is as restless and as elusive as the wind, yet I continue to hold on to it. So fascinated was I by the endless chase.

I am single, as created by God, and continue to be so. And I hope that the next lines will be sufficient to impress upon you how stupid it is to ask me about my love life.


My mother and many of my friends inwardly think that I am as stubborn as a mule. I flatter myself sometimes that the last thing people would accuse me of is being a stereotypical girl. So now this is my chance to say “Strike, but hear me first!” Judge me, harshly or kindly, but only after hearing a tiny part of my story.

One word. One difficult and unpopular word that I have adopted because at one glance I think it is an appropriate blanket description of myself in a personalized way. So starts my confession. I am a feminist even before I encountered the term or knew about its meaning. This is not a source of pride or shame. It is simply a fact about myself. The world demands proof yet I can only write about a few. I remember defying my unmarried grand aunts when they tried to teach me lady lessons or lectured me on proper behavior. I argued with my mother at breakfast, lunch, and dinner about how a girl should behave and what is expected of her by society. I beat my brother in races and got into fights with the boys using my fists and my brains. In moments of valor, I resisted the patriarchal tendencies that my kinfolk tried to impose on me, especially the unreasonable ones. At the onset of my adolescent years, I do not think the way my peers think, nor dress in the way girls in my time dressed up. I dress up to feel good, to be comfortable, or to be at ease with myself by looking good. My efforts were not aimed at capturing the fancies of the opposite sex either. I became a self-confessed manhater in high school, mainly because I wanted to be left alone or to ward off any uninvited attention. You may have correctly guessed by this time that my views and my manners have rendered me unpopular with my peers. They say it unusual for a teenager during those times to think the way I did. But I was a glaring example of deviance, and those who were too envious of my certainty labeled me a ‘geek’ or a ‘weirdo’. Ha! Thank you very much but those terms don’t seem to strike me as insults. I would rather be sensible, intelligent, and headstrong a thousand times than be a vain, fussy, dim-witted teen who is hopelessly smitten with some silly fad or fool. All these I did, without knowing what feminism meant.


There was really no conscious thought to be feminist. All I had was the desire to be free from sexist restrictions as much as possible. And why not? It is one thing to acknowledge limitations and constraints, and another to yield to them like cows passively being led to the slaughterhouse. Voltaire had long ago declared that “man is born free but is everywhere in chains”. I should like to finish it by saying that humans have the freedom to choose their chains or to be free from them.

No, I do not hold grudges against my aunts, my kinfolk, and my friends. I love them dearly, appreciate their concern, and no amount of disagreement can blur that devotion. They are simply expressing what they believe. I just think it is a bit unfair if they impose their views on me. This stubborn mule knows the value of respecting others’ beliefs. I am no tyrant. If their values work for them, good. But they do not have a monopoly over mine. My life, my views. And this is my greatest fear. My greatest fear is to live a life that runs contrary to my beliefs. For that is no life at all. I would be like a puppet on strings, letting others do the thinking and the acting for me. Such as dull and unfulfilled existence!

I had repealed the chances of going through flings, side-stepped questions about my love life, and altogether spared of the drama and the trauma of unnecessary heartaches and stress. Also add the blessing of not having to suffer from idiotic choices resulted from rushing headlong into something without sufficient sense and experience. Which brings me to this question. Did I have any regrets? Blood and gore! I did not regret my deviance for a single moment. I even enjoyed it for so many times. So this settles further questions about my affaire de coeur. And as I write on and on, there will be more angst and grumblings regarding this subject.