Uber scopes

Pisces (2/19 – 3/20):  I'm not much of a traveller -- I'm okay with the being somewhere else part, but the airport part, not so much.  Every time I travel, the planes are delayed by serious amounts, like, 3 or 4 hours at least, and sometimes days. No one else I know has such trouble.  Example: I got snowed in overnight in Atlanta on my way to Nicaragua.  Who gets snowed in in Georgia?  And so on.  It took us about 12 hours to get home from SF the other day, and it's almost as quick to walk.  But the main reluctance I have is that I really like this planet, and lifting off terrifies me.  I spend my time in the aiplane switching wildly between sheer boredom and fearing that I'm going to die.  Fight or flight!  No, fall asleep.  Fight or flight!  Fall asleep!  As my daughter says, the plane makes me more hamsterish than normal.  Pisces, don't let this crazy holiday season make you even the tiniest bit hamsterish.  Use your very mature nervous system for good.

Aries (3/21 - 4/19):  You know that saying, "I never gave it a second thought!" -- who does that?  Who thinks about something exactly once?  I don't believe that situation exists.  Like, "Yeah, I thought about that once, and then decided to never think about it again. Just about every thought I've ever had, every thing I've ever noticed, swirls around and around like a whirlpool, maybe eddying out for moments or even weeks or years, but eventually getting swept back into the tide of things I think about.  Each thought sets up a household, sometimes a whole village in my brain.  Aries, see if you can find things to think about exactly once, and then never again.  Let me know what you find out.

Salmon skin shoes.  As if feet
don't smell already.

Taurus (4/20 – 5/20):  It's that time of year again, when everyone gets all "year-in-review-ish".  I even got a knitting e-mail, "A look back on what we knit in 2014."  Really?  I'll tell you what we knit, Taurus:  the same things we knit in 1814: sweaters and hats, and for the people with the persistence to knit two of the exact same thing, socks and mittens.  Just like every other year since Mesopotamia, the cradle of knitilization, and birthplace of looking back over the year.  Taurus, let's not be too rear-view-mirrorish. Stay in this moment, right here, full of optimism bias.

Gemini (5/21 - 6/21): Yesterday I went to the grocery store, and it was all mingly at the checkout line, reminding me of the way I feel at the end of an airplane ride.  I want to hug all the other passengers, as if we'd lived through something harrowing, but they're usually not aware of just how close to death we came, so instead of being all, "Keep in touch! Don't ever change!," I patiently wait for like a week or two while everyone reunites with the overhead bins, and I can finally exit my Row 18 seat.  I try to act cool and not inappropriately mingly.  Anyway, back to the grocery store.  I get in line with my 18 items, and the person ahead of me, a woman of about 60, gets carded for buying one bottle of wine in the midst of a typical suburban glob of purchases.  She doesn't even make a joke -- just obediently gets out her dl.  I get  panicky because I have no idea where my dl is, and I'm buying brocolli and beer, (do they card you for brocolli?) The man behind me sees my little look and suggests that I go into a different line.  I feel grateful again, just like at the end of the plane, maybe because it's still so close to the surface.  Gemini, keep grateful close to the surface this week.  

Cancer (6/22 – 7/21):  So in the new line, the checkout man says, and he seems to really

mean it, "So, how are you?"  The way a friend would, not a clerk who's said that 6,000 times in a row.  I'm caught off guard, and possibly get a tiny bit weepy.   Sometimes in the big giant world, you're hurtling along in your own orbit, and the attention of a stranger is all it takes.  I say I'm doing alright, and turn the question around.  He stops scanning and says, "It's been a long week in this business, and it's only going to get worse.  People don't know this, but we

sell a lot of cleaning supplies at this time of year.  You probably knew about the roasts, but did you ever think of all the cleaning stuff people purchase?"  He seemed so tired from selling cleaning stuff, as if it's harder than the other things.  Cancer, try not to buy any cleaning supplies this week.  (Is the difficulty due to mops, do you suppose?)

Leo (7/23 – 8/22): So, is Adnan guilty or not?  I think not.  But why did Jay know where the car was?  I know.  It's confusing, Leo, but let's just assume the best of everyone and everything for now.  Why not?  

Virgo (8/23 – 9/22):  I'd like to say that Uber is my favorite new thing, because the parts of human engagement that are annoying (like the phone, for example, where people are known to tell the most lies) are removed from the transaction.  Click "request" on your phone, and the phone knows right where you are, and a car arrives, and then you can chat with the driver if you want.  Virgo, chat with the humans all you want, all week long!  
Libra (9/23 – 10/22):  Wait!  What if we had an uber-like app for everything?  Picture this: you're sitting on the couch and want a sandwich - just click the app!  Or you want to change the channel but the remote is just out of reach -- click the app!  Need that spot on your shoulder rubbed?  Click the app!  It could be kind of a bidding situation, where you'd put the max you'd pay if someone were to show up and cook you a nice dinner, for example.  And everyone out there with the app could decide if it were worth it.

What's not to love about a moth?

Scorpio (10/23 – 11/21):  R. told a joke the other day, not to be funny but to dissect it with us, to see what we thought was funny.  It's from Mitch Hedberg:  "One time I saw a wino eating grapes.  I told him, 'Dude, you hafta wait."  None of us thought it was hilarious, just mildly funny.  But R. has a friend who thinks it's the funniest thing ever, and the funny part, for him, is the alliteration.  The Wino who has to Wait.  (I'm a little more amused by the word "hafta", myself.)  But Scorp, it all goes to show that funny isn't always where you mean it to be, and can't be bought or sold.  Laugh where you can.

Sagittarius (11/22 – 12/21):  As we know, the world is full of guilt and misery.  (Who said that?)  Anyway, it's also full of sighs, and I think it would be kind of cool to make this, eh?  What do you say?  We could put it in the workplace and show it on a webcam, how much sighing is going on.  Breathe in, breathe out, all week long.  Save the sighs for another week.

Capricorn (12/22 - 1/19): Wendell Berry said this:  The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life. For despair there is no forgiveness, and for pride none. Who in loneliness can forgive?  
Yikes, Wendell.  I'm going to think about that for a while (actually that phrase has just set up a tent in my brain with a rainfly, a campfire, and two little folding chairs.) Keep doing what you do, Cap.  Create!

Aquarius (1/20 – 2/18):  Is this the coolest thing ever?  Having the bees make art for you!  Oh, right, honey!  That's why we have the bees, as Winnie the Pooh knows.  (Did anyone else hear that podcast about the guy who's mom commissioned a giant replica of his head when he went to college?  Anyway, I digress, as they say.  The point here, aquarius, is that it's christmas time.  It seems like a season that happens to others -- I don't really participate, except to notice that traffic is a little worse, the lights are a little more abundant and sweet, and there are more inflatable plastic camels than I'm accustomed to.  Aquarius, tolerance in all matters.  We're all just how we are, deserving of love and clean air and being forgiven for our failures.  May it be so.

'Scopes

Pisces (2/19 – 3/20):  Usually I'm an early to bed, early to rise person, but I've made new rules, one of which is that if it's dark out, it's okay to be in bed.  As you know, it's dark from about 4:30 pm to 8:30 am around here, which means I miss a lot of stuff, but I am keeping up on the 68 podcasts I subscribe to.  I'd like to recommend sleeping through the dark times, Pisces.  A little dormancy never hurt anyone, and in the case of bulbs it's essential.  It's not time to bloom just yet.

Aries (3/21 - 4/19):  As you know if you've ever e-mailed with me, one of two things is true:  I either have a cousin in Uzbekistan who needs a new kidney, or I've been hacked.  You decide.  The worst part of all of that is that my entire inbox was wiped out.  I'm not a hoarder of things, but I do hang on to the e-mail.  It's better than a diary -- you can oflook back and see what was going on a year ago, for example.  And oh, how I love words.  They arrive in little tidy packages, and don't take up any space, and sometimes are just lovely.  And, I lost the chocolate cake recipe!  I know!  It seemed dorky a week ago, but I actually thought about printing e-mail out and putting them in a little notebook, kind of a lazy-person's journal.  Then I decided that was a dumb waste of trees.  Now I wish I had.  I know, I'm supposed to be excited about the blank slate of it all, but I'm not there yet.  It's not quite like the relief I'd feel if my house burned down.

Taurus (4/20 – 5/20):  What I really want to do is create a tiny diarama of the Catalhoyuk site.  Little skeletons under tiny little beds, and ever so miniature people sitting on the floor trading skulls.  Arrgh.  How I wish I were doing that right now.  I'd decorate the tiny little cave walls with bad cave art, and it would bring me great gladness.  I have the gene lurking in my dna from my grandfather who spent his retirement creating what I call "situations", like a blacksmith shop with a very tiny bellows that really worked.  Taurus, just writing your horoscope made me want to go draw a bull, so I did.

Gemini (5/21 - 6/21): I went with TG (The Gangster) to get salt this week, and we went through the border four times, and I didn't even panic once, even though TG kept saying, "where's your passport?" as if it were missing, just to freak me out because she knows I have border anxiety.  And there, at latitude 49.0000 (gasp!), I waded up to my waist in the cold dark ocean, the same ocean where the titanic is.  Ok, different ocean, but still, filled with danger and ominousness.  Even with ocean warming, it was inhospitably cold.  But the point of this is that after making, like, 17 trips into the water with my pitcher to fill up the jug, the water spilled in the car on the way home.  I have some sort of weird thing with water that I'm spending my whole life on.  I've always been a spiller. I wreck stuff -- I'm not very good with things.  I see other people take care of their possessions, and it's oh so lovely, I wish I'd do that too, but I forget, and I get in a hurry, etc.  I do try to take good care of the people, even though it doesn't always work out, but I slow down and listen.  Wait, where were we?  Oh, right.  I was explaining how cleaning a trunk filled with saltwater is a good gangster skill.  Substitute body for saltwater, and it's the same process.  Anyway, Gemini, peace lives in your heart.  Listen.

Cancer (6/22 – 7/21):  If I were a hacker, getting into other people's e-mail accounts, rather than wiping the email out, I think it would be fun to just write to their friends.  Maybe work on some troubled relationships, and enjoy the good ones.  Rewording things carefully so they go down a little smoother, keeping in touch with people that the owner doesn't have time for, deepening with aquaintances.  Wouldn't that be fun?  Kind of like a dog-walking service, but completely different.  Cancer, offer your own version of a dog-walking service.  Oh, I see that you are.

Leo (7/23 – 8/22):  Speaking of dogs, I almost got one this week, or at least came seriously close to giving the nod on that idea.  Because what's not to love about a dog?  But alas, the poor dog would be lonely lonely lonely, so I can't do it.  I even had a name picked out.  (Kerberos, sort of an outside joke.)  In my imagination, I have a super-well-trained dog that can go with me everywhere, but I know better.  And, I still hold out remote hope of finding companionship within my species.  A companion with thumbs.  Is that too much to ask, Leo?  

Virgo (8/23 – 9/22):  Khortnee got a letter! 

Dear N'3lvra, 

If you accidentally ignore a leaking roof for several years and then discover that an entire section of your house has dry rot, and you're in the middle of trying to sell it.  Can you tell your friends that the William-Sonoma Mushroom Logs are very nice, but you were doing a home-made version of that years ago? 

-Pablo Magnifico

Dear Pablo,

Oh, you bring up all kinds of TRAUMA for N'3lvra, involving a rotting house (but not just one section) AND the mushroom logs, if you can believe it.  The rotting house, and the horrible breakup that involved someone hurling the mushroom log at her.  Sheesh, I'm not even making any of this up, sadly. I guess houses and mushroom logs are over-rated.  What's the deal on the gutter repair people, btw?  Do those people not even have phones?  Oh, wait, your question?  Yes, of course, boast about your DIY rotting house!  You're ahead of the curve, Pablo.  But you knew that.  Thanks for writing!

- N'3lvra (pronounced Khortnee, the three is silent)

Libra (9/23 – 10/22):  I was at a party recently and walked over to a small group of people chatting. As soon as I arrived, the person I actually wanted to talk to walked away, and it took about three seconds to understand why -- I had arrived in the middle of what is possibly the most boring story in the world.  It involved a child, a rash, and a mis-diagnosis.  (Not athletes foot at all!  Instead, excema!)  But it took about a week to get there, and it turns out this whole thing happened more than a decade ago, and didn't pertain to anything else.  (Like, this wasn't a holiday party for skin doctors or anything.)  Anyway, my point is, tis the season, people.  Try to be a little interesting.  I deeply believe (doesn't that phrase sound weighty?!) that if we took as much time preparing for party converstations as we do fussing over food, housecleaning, and cute outfits, the world would be a better place.  Crime and war would cease, ebola would be cured, the turkeys would get along better. Make it so, Libra.

Scorpio (10/23 – 11/21):  What does it mean, to prepare conversationally?  Okay, you're going to a party.  You can either spend your time listening to old yarns about skin rashes, or you can bring something to the table.  Let's practice, shall we?

Boring Person:  So one time, in 1998, my daughter, she was 7 at the time.  Well, anyway....You:  OMG! 1998?  That's the year that George Michael got arrested for indecent behavior!  (Then start singing - "wake me up before you go-go cause I'm not planning on goin' solo..."  Hopefully you can veer things off before you have to sing, "You put the boom boom into my heart.")  But, you'll do what you must, Scorpio, to keep things vital.

Sagittarius (11/22 – 12/21):  Seriously, though.  That's not a good conversation either, George Michael.  Scorpio just hijacked the conversation but didn't take it anywhere good.  Party foul!  That's like hijacking a plane and going to Detroit.  But it creates enough of a conversational gap that someone else on your team can get the ball.  (Do you like how I'm using a sports analogy?  I know!  I was going to take it a little farther, but I'm not sure what you're supposed to do with the ball once you have it.) Anyway, Sag, it's your birthday season!  How lucky we are for this time of year, when you arrived. Arose.

Capricorn (12/22 - 1/19): One reason I like studying massage is that there's no room for bullshit.  It's either true or not.  I can talk myself into thinking the whole wetland biz is worthy, and at moments, sure, a tree gets planted or something, but  a lot of it is paper and rules and so much blah blah blah.  Touch is as real as it gets.  But that's not your horoscope, Cap!  Be well in the dark times.  May it be so.  

Aquarius (1/20 – 2/18):  One of my pet peeves is when people get all blame-y in a passive aggressive way, like, "Someone left their shoes in the middle of the floor and now I tripped."  Instead of saying straight up - "Yo, I tripped over your shoes!  Grr!"  It especially bugs me when people blame others for colds.  There are germs in the world, people!  None of this, "I was fine, but I went over to Mabel's house -- she didn't seem sick but next thing you know, I have a cold, so she must have had a little something..." Or whatever.  As if the cold orginated with Mabel.  Anyway, I've been doing this thing to amuse myself -- I live alone, of course, and lately I passive aggressively talk to myself in a blamey way, like, "someone, and I don't know who, used the last of the coffee."  And then I laugh out loud for like, three reasons, but then I quickly silence myself because it seems kind of creepy and Sybil-esque, you know what I mean?  And there's lots to blame myself for because as a roommate, I kind of suck.  Anyway, Aquarius, may all be will with you.

Pisces and Apple Pie (sans the apple pie)

Pisces (2/19 – 3/20): Besides the other crushingly sad on-going news about justice for people of color, the other thing going on is that big companies (FB, Apple, others) are offering the egg-freezing benefit, which means they'll cover the cost for a woman to put her eggs in a freezer for later use, not unlike corn dogs or leftover soup.  

So, rather than letting the world be how it is, where women, mostly in their 20's and 30's, have babies (and adore them, by the way), we're asking women to mold their reproductive timeline to fit with the corporate world.  Because women should LEAN IN and focus on their careers in their thirties, and not get distracted by the love of children!  Why perpetuate the species when you could get STOCK OPTIONS? Women should set their eggs aside and wait for a better time.  (No one has ever addressed the question as to when it's a good time to completely surrender yourself to another helpless needy being who communicates primarily through unconsolable shrieking.)

Oh, this is all so complicated.  I have nothing against women (or men!) who prioritize careers, and in fact, most of us have to, because duh, life costs money.  And, the challenges presented by a career are stimulating, unlike a lot of housework, and that's healthy too.  I get it.  Hell, I might even give me some flack about this rant too.  I sort of disagree with myself.  It's not like I'm all about motherhood and women being home in the kitchen.  Au contraire.  (Although, true confessions: there's something primal in me that longs for that, especially if there were sister-wives to hang out with.  Oh, did I say that out loud?  Is that creepy?)  

Anyway, of course women should have the means to support themselves in a decent manner, and they do miss out and become economically obsolete by checking out for 10 or more years, and sometimes get stuck in crappy relationships because they can't take care of themselves or their children.  GRRR.  

But is the answer the freezing of the eggs?  It's not simple, like making an ice cube.  First, daily hormone shots for two to four weeks to turn off natural hormones.  Then, a few more weeks of self-injected hormones to stimulate egg production.  This creates abdominal pain, irritablility, discomfort.  Which is fine, because these women are in the workplace, where people tend to be so irritable that it's not even notable.  (Oh, wait -- there's one person at my booty call job who's NOT irritable.  She gives herself helpful little instructions aloud all day long, like, "Time to go potty!" and then she disappears for a few minutes, returning to say, "Breathe in, breathe out."  But my booty call job is not the topic, people! The topic is egg harvest.)

The harvest happens under sedation.  I won't describe it, but it's nothing like going out to the hen house and collecting a warm little loose egg.  After the harvest, women again experience bloating, abdominal pain, and discomfort.  (People in the workplace are used to pain and discomfort, though, so it's not really an issue.)  And then the eggs are in the freezer with Walt Disney, waiting for a good time.  (Turns out that Walt isn't frozen, contrary to urban legend.  But speaking of all that, did anyone listen to the This American Life episode about that cryogenics club where they planned to freeze one another, and then the guy who was stuck with all the dead people couldn't pay the refrigeration bill, and the bodies were just in a warming up storage locker?  But that's not the topic, people!  Stick with me.)

I'm not a luddite.  Really, I'm all about technology.  In fact, I have my new little Arduino kit and spend ridiculous numbers of hours playing with resistors and trying to learn how to program it to do dumb things, like blink out messages in Morse code, which is flawed in so many ways that I won't even get into it.  (For starters, why send a message in code when no one knows how to read it?  If a light blinks in the forest and no one is there to see it, does it make a sound?  Is this the topic, dear readers?  No!)  

But haven't we freakin' noticed by now that when we mess with the natural order, there are consequences?  Remember when we dumped our garbage in the ocean, how that worked out?  (Oh wait, we still do that.  Is anyone as sad about the dying starfish as I am?)  But remember when we used to pour all those chemicals on the crops and all the birds got the thin eggs, and we learned from that and stopped putting chemicals on the crops?  (Oh wait.)  Remember when we started burning fossil fuels at an alarming rate, built our whole economy and lifestyle around it, and it messed with the planet so much that it might become uninhabitable within the foreseeable future?  Oh, this has turned into such a cliched rant that I'm almost sorry I started it, but haven't we freakin' figured it out yet, that we need to take some things as constants?  And if anything is a constant, it's this:

Young women often have an unbearable, primal longing to have children.  When they do have babies, they grow into bigger better people than they were before, because now they know what it's like to love unconditionally, and to be patient, not as an abstract thing, but as part of the grueling demands of daily living.  Because suddenly they have a jagged, immature, weird little roommate who couldn't give a fuck about social norms or boundaries.  And the mothers, they love those people anyway, and they see them as exquisite humans with potential to grow into outstanding, useful people.  And because they see that, the mothers gently, with patience and diplomacy and perseverance, and, lets face it, occasional shots of whisky, bring those little people around into human-hood, where, lo and behold, they do grow into outstanding humans.  

I don't mean to imply that mothers are better than fathers, or better than childless humans, by any stretch, or all mothers are great, blah blah blah.  Everyone is learning a lot from where their life leads them, I know that.  And of course, I generalize.  I just know more about mothers, what they go through and how deeply they care.  I know so many incredible mothers that it's more than the cliche.  I think they're forced to learn something hard, which I can't really articulate, but it involves loving people unconditionally, and truly wanting the best for them.  It's about being hopeful about the world, because someone who looks up to you is counting on it.  Someone trusts you when you say it's gonna be alright, and you want, with everything you've got, for it to be so.  

And over time, as the young people grow, you gently redefine "alright" from fairy tale happy endings to living well so you can live with yourself.  Alright turns from "happily ever after" to a life of being decent and apologizing and giving everything your best shot, and remaining curious and hopeful in spite of the disappointments.  You will fail, people you love will die, mean people exist.  But you can be a light in the world, a light of kindness and compassion and striving, and that's what alright becomes.  It is gonna be alright.

Mothers are in the business of creating the magic for their young, and then, working to make that magic true -- that the world is a good place, worth inhabiting, worth striving for, because it's full of mystery and wonder and good people and grand adventure and things to discover and learn. 

And I think the workplace needs that.  It needs women whose priority is simple:  survival of the species.  They care about building cooperative relationships, health, in all it's forms, and a habitable planet.  I think workplaces would benefit by welcoming that perspective, not just enduring it.

Oh, I'm all tired out from just Pisces.  More horoscopes another day.