Thursday, October 24, 2019

Your Fall Horoscope


It's Scorpio season, motherfuckers! Time to pull on a goth sweater, light a dank/legal joint, and flirt aggressively with basically everyone who crosses your path. Here are your fall horoscopes.

Aries: Time to embrace all of your so-called "embarrassing" pastimes. You know the ones: the hobbies you don't bring up until the seventh date (Gilmour Girls Trivia nights!); the unsexy kinks; the obsessions that you keep hidden because you're scared of letting your freak flag fly. You know why? Because, despite your ongoing conviction that everyone else is cooler than you, this is patently wrong and you need to come into your adulthood in this final way. Get weird. Own your weirdness. Put it on a leash and walk it back and forth in front of your neighbour's house. Make direct eye contact.

Taurus: I have basically zero patience for people who sign up for something and then shirk their responsibilities. (Is this about my former landlord, who declined to provide pest control, which is definitely part of being a landlord? Maybe. Motherfucker was a Taurus if I ever met one.) Have you committed to things that you're feeling half-assed about? Time to commit. People are counting on you. This goes double if you're slacking off on commitments to yourself; your unused gym membership/pile of unread New Yorkers/filthy bathroom is not the Everest that you envision. Just do the things.


Gemini: I want to encourage all my favourite Geminis to embrace this fall and winter as the season where you integrate your inside self and your outside self into one amazing, imperfect, human being. Geminis are secret-keepers, by nature; your twin halves are private and public, and you keep them rigorously separated. But I will tell you a secret, Gemini: all of you is worth loving. Your secrets, your inside-self, the part you keep hidden away because it seems unbearable to share it? That part is...you, still. You can't lock it away. Let some folks peek in on that part of you, and shine a little love on those secret corners.

Cancer: I always like checking on your self-care. Are you going to your appointments? Scheduling those follow-ups? Are you getting your veggies and/or your protein? Have you slowly pulled back from the people who wear you out and wear you down? Have you thrown away your uncomfortable and too-small underwear? Treat yourself the way you would treat a beloved friend who has just had a minor surgery: move slow, examine your incisions, and keep your health bar high.

Leo: I am afraid of heights; but that's not quite accurate. I'm afraid of the barely-controllable urge I sometimes have to throw myself from a great height. Sometimes this urge is funny, but when it comes in a blue mood or a dark season of my life, it takes a new dimension, revealing to myself that I'm actually not as okay as I want to believe. It's a neon-sign way of checking in - do I feel abject terror at height? Or just butterflies? The answer will often reveal a deeper truth about if I need help. This fall, look intentionally for your neon-signs, and pay attention. Are you backing away from the edge slowly?

Virgo: When I was a kid, my mom set up a book club for me and some other nerds in my fourth-grade class. It was pretty awesome: we read The Great Gilly Hopkins and ate popcorn balls and there were at least three girls named Jennifer in the club. I really look on that experience fondly, and I hope that one day, I can do the same for my kid, and whatever he is into. Creating the chance for someone you love to experience something they might love is such a heady part of loving someone. Virgo, have you done this for your favourite people lately? Not done something, per se, but rather, have you created an environment where they could do something rad for themselves? If not, think about where you can inject some of that into your relationships.


Libra: I recently discovered that, aside from being Sagittarius, nearly all my other planets reside in Libra. My high school bestie was a Libra, and suuuuuper into it for a long time; I, on the other hand, never really connected with my Sag side. I am neutral about travel and prudent about drugs, so typical-Sag excursions like taking molly in Bali sound tiring, not #goals. It was a relief to find out that we are entitled to many dimensions in our lives, many facets, many houses. We can constantly discover new versions of ourselves when we dig a little deeper, and what we find may attune to who we actually are.

Scorpio: You are red wine and gummy bears. You are making out in hot tubs in mid-tier hotels. You are death's head hawkmoths. You are ankle boots and rainy days. You are paying bills the day after they're due. You are a job interview where you feel nothing after. You are windows that don't open. You are fine, not fine, knowing you're not fine, feeling buried under a mountain of not-fine, and pretending, because you are who you are and in the families you're in and have the obligations you have, that you are fine. But Scorpio, you gotta move through all that bullshit and sadness and fear and come out of it, because you are so much more than your pain. Crack yourself open. It will feel like a heart attack, but do it anyway.


Sagittarius: I am a Gryffindor sun, Ravenclaw moon, Slytherin rising. I resisted my Gryffindor-self for a long time, despite literally every online quiz, include the official Pottermore one, sorting me into the red-and-gold house. I felt it was...hacky? Too obvious? I wanted very much to be a Ravenclaw, dreamy and intelligent. But truth be told, I am persistent to a fault, and brave in my own way (I am much more of a Neville than a Harry, tyvm). Like we all do, I have elements of the other houses too: my Slytherin side, which is cruel and conscious of social status, is present, but I do my best to tamp it down or use it for good. And these days, I aspire to Hufflepuff-ness: close to the kitchens, deeply loyal, deeply kind. The house system is, obviously, about as fake as astrology, but I feel like attaching these labels to ourselves sometimes helps us understand what we want to embrace and what we want to resist. We are all more complex than a quartet of houses...but are we?


Capricorn: The most delicious cereal is Honey Nut Cheerios and I will brook no argument. Much like the best diet is Paleo (and keto can go fuck itself), or cycling is the best mode of transportation, or Temp #9 is the best cider, it can be reassuring to decide that something is The Best. It feels final. But sometimes we grow out of our childhood favourites (although I actually still think Honey Nut Cheerios is the best), or what used to work stops fitting into our lives so well (Paleo is great if you don't have a toddler who only eats pasta; cycling is great if you live within 4 kilometers of all your friends and family). What favourites are you hanging onto that still actually click, and which ones are carry-overs from other days?


Aquarius: Whenever I think about Aquarius, I think about swimming at sunset, the water washing over us deep purple and sparkling orange, the waves crashing around our bodies as we get tired and hungry but stay in the water still. I think about golden moments, tinged with a faint sadness because golden moments don't last. My dad and my son and my grandfather, all Aquarians, none of whom are strictly golden but whose shine is shot through with deep thoughtfulness and care: the deep purple water over which the golden sparkles shine. It is possible to carry light and dark in us, and you Aquarians are the best at it. In these dark months, unleash that golden shine and remind us all of August days.


Pisces: Here is your reminder that it's fine to go to bed with the dishes unwashed and the counter unwiped. It's fine to not put every piece of kid art on the fridge. It's fine to spent an afternoon reading in the hammock, and not reading the book-club selection, but something frothy and encouraging instead. Unwind yourself a little. Unclench your jaw and your ass. Let things go undone. Let your life be about more than just your to-do list, and relax. We don't think of fall and winter as chill-out times, but do your best to channel that hammock energy in an ice-storm season.