pjthompson | Entries tagged with astrology

I have a Sun in Virgo and Mars in Virgo. I have a Moon in Pisces in almost pinpoint opposition to my Sun. I also have a Pisces Ascendant. The Pisces part of my brain spends a lot of time trying to trick the Virgo part into staying out of its way so it can get on with its creative work. One of the methods it employs is list making.

I am constantly making obsessive lists that keep track of things, from the mundane to the esoteric. Like a catalog of the books I've read or the books I started or the books I've completed. Or the first lines of books I pick up during the course of a year. Or lists of synchronicities. Or quotes--many, many quotes. Or screenshots from Postcards From the Past on Twitter of places I've visited myself. Or... Well, any number of lists that really no one should care about but me (and perhaps even I shouldn't care about).

But that Virgo part of my brain is rather like the legend of the mythological monster who can be tricked into stillness by throwing a bunch of seeds on the ground so that the obsessive creature is forced to stop and count each seed before moving on. Virgo has many fine qualities but its left brain proclivities tend to get in the way sometimes when I just need to go deep and dream my dreams and put those dreams on the page. With militant Mars in Virgo those tendencies can be rather extreme. Hence, the lists.

My mother, who was borderline OCD, may also have been some influence in this regard. There may be a genetic/nurture as well as an astrological component to my obsessive drive towards list making. Lists are a fairly harmless way of curtailing that dragon. Certainly my housekeeping does not benefit from this Virgoan drive. I could wish that it did a bit more as my current environment is suffering greatly from the Pisces tendency towards sloth and distraction and love of chaos.

The housekeeping also suffers greatly from my lack of mobility, of course. With my bad legs I can have a productive day of cleaning up but the next day will most likely be taken up communing with my heating pad. Maybe more than one day. I would like to say I have resolved myself to this but I have not. I was always strong and energetic and could work my way through a lot of crap in a short period of time (after spending a longer time letting things pile up) but those days are gone. I have to find a new way of doing things and I admit that I'm still flailing around trying to find it.

I am trying to be satisfied with my mantra of "do something then rest" but it's hard to accept limitations. Still, I don't have much choice in the matter. Accepting limitations is not accepting defeat and I am trying diligently to teach myself that and to work within my new parameters. It is a work in progress, and like any organic WIP it's making it up as I go, striving to reach the realization of the dream on the page.

I would say to my pagan friends the same thing I would say to my friends of any religion: beware thinking your way is the One True Faith. There are many paths back to the Source, but judgement and rigidity are not amongst them.
*
I'd start calling him President Cthulhu but that's an insult to Cthulhu.
*
You know, I've supported Nancy Pelosi all this time but mostly kept quiet because I didn't want to fight with people, often people I liked and admired. I'm a little ashamed of that, but oh well. I knew, you see, that Pelosi is one of the canniest and most experienced politicians in Washington and I knew she was holding fire for a good reason. Last week that reason became eminently clear: she was waiting for a smoking gun. One that these cretins couldn't wiggle out of, one that the general American public could readily understand. It may be argued that the Mueller report was a smoking gun, but even Mueller himself obfuscated and demurred so much that it wasn't something that could be easily conveyed to the larger public. But everybody understands the kind of brutish and heavy-handed strong-arming Trump attempted with Ukraine. It was schoolyard bully stuff and illegal and immoral as hell. It's enough to start changing minds--except for his rabid believers, of course. Trump said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and no one would hold him responsible. What he was too stupid or arrogant to realize was that when he did give Nancy Pelosi an easy-to-hold gun of her own, she would have no hesitation in pulling the trigger. Good work, Madame Speaker. I'm sorry I didn't defend you.
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You know that overworked and ridiculous phrase in writing: "She (he) released a breath she didn't know she was holding"? I've always loathed it in a work of fiction, but when the Ukraine news broke and with all the revelations that came out... I released a breath I didn't know I was holding.
*
I used this deck quite a lot at one point in my life. Can you tell?

Fortunately, the cards don't look as disreputable as the box. And after literally decades of using this deck, I just discovered that I had two Knights of Swords. I'm not sure what that means. I would probably have never known if they both hadn't come up in the same reading. Reversed. And yes, I guess the day of that reading had been about being, "indiscreet, extravagant, and foolish." I've been through the entire deck now and there are no other duplications and no missing cards. But I guess I'd better pay attention to that Knight, hadn't I?
*
I was born in the last six hours of Virgo, just seven hours shy of the Autumn Equinox (West Coast time), so I have a hella amount of Libra in my chart. I was really feeling the effects of the new moon in Libra at the end of September. I tried to use that energy well. Balance and rectification. Throwing off the shackles of old bad habits that are holding me back.
*
One of the best parts of living alone is that when I'm not feeling well I can sit around and groan and not worry about driving anyone crazy with my drama queen ways.
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I was watching one of those ghost shows on TV and the house owner was talking about how a ghost threw her cat across the kitchen. And there's the cat sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor with its leg up cleaning its nether regions. He seemed very unconcerned in general. She took the ghost hunters into the bedroom to talk about what happened in there and here comes the cat to sprawl on the bed. "I ain't afraid a no ghosts." In fact, I kind of regard cats as a reverse ghost monitor. If they are there and not concerned they ain't no ghost there.
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Every time I watch the science channel I wonder if the people who came up with the SciGo acronym realized how close it sounds to "psycho."
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When the estimable Dr. Lucy Jones, eminent geologist, says that she fears climate change more than earthquakes one should really pay attention. I saw her state just that in a recent interview.
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I may have finished writing something that seemed very much like the denouement of my current novel. Only the coda left, and that's already half written. But it’s been a couple of weeks now and I still haven’t finished it. I can’t help wondering if this resistance is a way of preventing myself from moving on. Or knowing that once I finish that coda, I'm done with this world for the foreseeable future. I can't see writing any more Dos Lunas stories any time soon--and I've lived there on and off for so long (since 2000), I may be reluctant to let go.
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I've come to the conclusion that I like having mindless tasks to do, things that most people would never have the patience for. I suspect it's a Virgo thing.
*
Oh yeah, that probably explains a lot about the last few months. I forgot until just last week that I have summer SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). Somehow I manage to forget that every freaking year.

I haven't kept notebooks all my life, just most of my life. I think I must have gotten the first when I was ten or eleven. Although it was dubbed on the outside "My Diary," I rarely went more than a week with any prototypical diary entries. In fact, it was neatly divided into three or four modest “day” entries per page and I routinely wrote over several days’ worth for each entry. These little books always tended to be more like journals, sometimes filled with activities, but mostly filled with emotional screeds, commentaries on the world, philosophical ramblings. Later, they tended to fill up with bits and pieces of my writing: character sketches, poems, dialog runs, etc., etc.—mixed in with the emotional screeds, commentaries, philosophy. They have mostly been cheap paper-cover books, but once or twice I've bought something really fancy, like this one:

This one cost far more money than rational me wanted to spend, but the excitable part of me had to have it. Or, actually, it had to have the one made of brown leather. Black leather has always had less appeal to me. I kept circling back to the store and fondling that book for weeks, but fortunately, the rational me got the excitable one to wait until the notebook had been marked down and I had a gift certificate. By that time, sadly, all the brown leather ones had sold out—but that did not deter me. I’d obsessed about the damned thing and so I was going to have it. Let's not speak of acquisitiveness gone mad, shall we?

That was a few years ago now and I have never written a word in it. I just can't bring myself to violate those pages with the usual screeds, ramblings, and commentaries. What am I saving it for? I have no idea, but there is sits, beautifully occupying a shelf. Seems a waste, but we're not talking rational processes here. The rational me and the excitable one walk hand-in-hand, but it’s often an uneasy partnership, each pulling hard in the opposite direction.

When I was about thirteen and walking around the back yard of our old house in Venice in a moony state (not at all uncommon in those days), something kept nudging me to go to the little walk space behind the "garage." Garage is a euphemistic term for the structure on the back end of our property. Basically it was a couple of strung together rattletrap sheds which hadn't seen paint since the Trojan War and had a distinct lean to the south. My biodad stored his tools and an inordinate amount of Important Guy Stuff in the larger shed. The smaller shed sometimes held fertilizer and the like for his prodigious garden. Behind this structure was a pathway about five feet wide at the very back end of the property. An enormous wire fence kept the riff raff of the neighborhood (my family) from entering the property on the other side, the Edgemar Dairy.

Dairy is also a euphemistic term, as no actual cows wandered the premises. It was a processing plant and staging area for Edgemar trucks to fill up with ice and cart their loads of milk, cottage cheese, fruit drinks, etc., to stores. An enormous ice-crushing machine sat on the other side of that wire fence and it would start going at about two or three in the morning. (That, and being in the flight path of Santa Monica airport, helped train me to be the talented sleeper that I am to this very day.) The positioning of the ice-crushing machine against the property line was intentional, one in a long series of harassments the dairy management folks concocted in an effort to get us and our neighbor to sell out cheap to them and move. It didn't work. We were made of sterner (and more spiteful) stuff than they imagined. They never did get our property. But that's another story...

So anyway, something urged thirteen-year-old me to go behind the garage, telling me I'd find something special. I'd been back there countless times and the rational was skeptical—but the Believer was game. When I walked this familiar path, what did I spy? A little notebook lying just beside the fence on the dairy side: a cheapie, maybe 4x7, black leatherette, spiral bound. I could reach quite easily under where the wire of the fence didn't quite meet the concrete and pull it to me. It was full of paper, every page blank, and it must not have been there long because it wasn't damp or dirty. Well! The Believer thought I'd been given a Very Special Gift from the universe. The Skeptic (active even at that tender age) thought some schmuck had dropped it in the wee hours while filling his truck up with ice and disturbing my sleep. But I held onto that notebook for years—and kept it as empty as that expensive model. I just could bring myself to violate the pages.

The Believer always seems to be saving these things for that something special that never quite materializes.

( This post is really about Skepticism and Belief. )

Random quote of the day:

“You can be a believer in astrology and still be a good astronomer.”

—Eugene Subbotsky, quoted in “Magical Thinking,” Psychology Today, Mar/Apr 2008

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

From The Onion:

“What begins as a Kafkaesque ordeal, will soon turn into an Orwellian nightmare, before unexpectedly becoming a Judy Blume-ish disaster.”

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

From The Onion:

“What begins as a Kafkaesque ordeal, will soon turn into an Orwellian nightmare, before unexpectedly becoming a Judy Blume-ish disaster.”

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

“You will produce things of beauty, hold them up and open your hands, letting the wind carry them where she will.”

I don’t know about the beauty part, but I am considering the other part. How did the stars know???

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

“You will produce things of beauty, hold them up and open your hands, letting the wind carry them where she will.”

I don’t know about the beauty part, but I am considering the other part. How did the stars know???

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

This morning, the pipes leading hot water to the kitchen went kaflooie. Lotsa money involved. It's an old house. Slowly but surely we're going to be forced to replace all the piping, but the timing always sucks. There is much chagrin in the land.

And Mercury didn't even go retrograde until yesterday. Damnable planet.

These are all small things, very small. No one is dead, we have a roof over our head, sufficient bread. This is the small stuff they tell you not to sweat.

Predictions of our imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Repeatedly and throughout history.

I watched a show last night on the History Channel about the various predictions that the world will end in 2012. December 21, 2012, if you follow the Mayan calendar. This show's gig was all about showing how various prophets of doom from many different cultures . . . all predicted that 2012 is the year!

Of course, a certain amount of stretching and manipulation were involved to make these predictions One Size Fits All—but then, that's sort of the Prophecy of Doom game, isn't it? The late Terence McKenna apparently came up with some mathematical formula for the I Ching . . . that no one in history had ever noticed before! He concluded from this that the Mayans were right and 2012 is . . . The End!

The TV show dusted off the Prophecies of Merlin (Myrddin) from the 11th century, the fake prophecies of Mother Shipton from the early 16th century (actually written by some guy in the 17th, I think), John of Patmos (Mr. Revelations) who was actually writing about Emperor Nero and the political situation in first century Rome, and just to bring it home to the internet and technology . . . the Web Bot Predictions!

They all agree. We're all going to die . . . and soon!

You know, I'm a student of history and science so it's not like I don't know that sweeping and catastrophic changes can swamp a society and end it; that catastrophic planetary or interplanetary events can squish us like bugs. We are vulnerable and fragile creatures sitting on a vulnerable and fragile planet. Doom is infinitely possible. Probable, really, if you look at the BIG picture.

I realize all that and more can happen to us. I just don't believe any human being or group of human beings has a lock on predicting the future. I mistrust our fascination with predicting doom and with becoming mesmerized with patterns and twisting them to confirm our preconceived prejudices. We are very clever monkeys used to picking out and seeing patterns in nature. Sometimes that's our salvation and sometimes that our, well, yes, doom—at least our psychological doom.

(And just as I am writing this Asteroid 4179 - Toutatis from Holst's The Planets came up on iTunes. Funny iTunes! It must be a sign!)

Don't get me wrong: I believe a great many silly things. All my life I've had a cynic on one shoulder and a true believer on the other. As a for instance, the only thing that has sufficiently explained to me this psychological duality is that my Sun in Virgo is in perfect opposition to my Moon in Pisces. Many people find that a silly belief, I find it a fact of life.

But I don't, I just don't, buy into Predictions of Doom. Or more precisely, Predictors of Doom. The future is a mystery and infinitely changeable, depending on what we do with our individual lives at any given moment and how those individual lives effect the society at large.

Unless the Singularity or the Asteroid or the pandemic creeps out of the closet one night and mugs us in our beds. I guess we'll all know on December 21, 2012.

Current Music: Telling Me Lies - Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris & Linda Ronstadt (Trio)

Here's what the astrologers** have to say:

Exciting news, now that they have the correct birth time for John McCain.

And the excitement mounts now that they have the official birth time for Barack Obama.

But we know what this election is really about, don't we? It's Neptune versus Neptune.

And so, given all the frenzied analysis, Nancy calls the election.

*Yes, this song really did come up while I was composing this post. However, the first song that came up was "It'll Happen" by the Punch Brothers.

**This post should not be taken as an endorsement for either candidate or for the efficacy of astrology in predicting world events. It is provided solely for entertainment purposes.

Current Music: Dear Mr. President - Pink*

I'm not good at it.

I blame all those planets in Libra rather than a lack in critical thinking ability.

Quote of the day:

"Journeys are the midwives of thoughts."

—Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

Interesting sight of the day: I was driving home last night, headed south, and stopped for a light on Pacific Avenue. Some folks were crossing the street—probably headed for the beach a block further west. This first group were a young family. Dad had baby, maybe six months old, slung from one of those stomach slings and [she] looked very pretty in her red-striped hat and baby bib-overalls. She was so happy, too, just laughing and giggling, her little cheeks glowing peachy and her little arms dancing with excitement. I got all warm and fuzzy and giggled along with her.

About six feet behind the family came a late-twentysomething, early thirtysomething guy, short black hair, with a surfboard under his arm—one of the older, bigger ones—hurrying down to catch the last waves after work. His wetsuit was peeled down to his waist exposing a lovely expanse of tight, hunky, naked chest. And I went, "RRRrrrrooowwllll."

And then I felt emotional whiplash from such a sudden shift in response.

But at least I knew I was still alive.

And this morning after catching up on my sleep deficit for the week, with some unpleasantness at work settled, I feel better about things in general.

Writingness of the day: I did a lot of writing last week. I spent it cycling between the short story, "In the Black;" the novella, "The Heart of the Western Tide;" and the novel, Charged with Folly. I decided there's no reason not to keep doing that, seeing what strikes my fancy on any given day, since I seem to be in a cycling kind of mood these days.

And I also decided that it's foolish to set anything in stone about where I'm going to "waste" my creative resources. They are limited, true, and perhaps I should concentrate on what I do best. But I think when you solidly close the door on some aspect of your creativity you really run the risk of choking off something vital. Creativity feeds creativity. Even if short stories, for example, are something I'm never going to master, they're obviously giving me something or I wouldn't keep trying to write them. So I'm just going to let the good times roll and not worry it so much. That chew rag has gone all moldy with old spit, anyway. Time to throw it away and start gnawing on something new.

Astrology of the day: I have a Virgo Sun (ego shell) and Mars in Virgo (Mars being the source of one's energy and drive). I can't help being a neurotic worrier. And just to make things interesting, I have a Pisces Moon (emotional nature) and a Pisces Ascendant (personality), throwing paranoia into the mix—as well as even more ability to worry. My three planets in Libra, however, make me completely charming. Right? Right??? [winky-winky]

Quote of the day:

"Picasso said that everything was a miracle, and it was a miracle that one did not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar."

—Jean Cocteau

There are days, of course, when I feel as if I have dissolved in the bath. It's been a stressful couple of weeks at work, what with lay offs and dreaming that I've been fired and general weirdness. In the rational world, I think I'm okay (though no one is invulnerable), but dreams aren't about rationality. All the fears I talk myself out of during waking hours come out to play in the night zone.

I am writing—because that's what I do—but this week has been a strain. I've managed to do my usual couple of pages a day, but today I stared at the blank page for a long time before I finally got something moving. But it did move, eventually, and that's to be grateful for.

Inspired by

jmeadows's novelist post, I went back and put one of my unfinished mss., Brother Wolf, into SMF to see what the word count was. Over 90k. I should really think about working out the plotholes on that one and finishing it. It's an SF story disguised as a mystery/thriller. Okay, so it has some mystico mumbo jumbo/fantasy elements thrown in, too. Because that's what I do.

In other news: My friend and I were talking and she said she knows a lot of Virgos—and she does, she's surrounded by us. And every one of them is a little off. She was being polite. I said yes, every one of us is a nutcase in some way. We have a skewed way of looking at the world, and we tend towards paranoia. And she said she knew a lot of Pisces, too. She'd be hard pressed to say who was nuttier, Virgos or Pisces.

Virgo Sun, Virgo in Mars, Pisces Moon, Pisces Ascendant...No wonder I'm crazy. We won't even get into my Sun-Moon opposition.

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Echoes in a Hollow Space

I'm here because I'm here because I'm here

Entries tagged with astrology

A list of limitations

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Journey around my room: Notebooks

Magical thinking

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My horoscope

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And a trifecta

If the swine flu don't get me, 2012 will

Forget about political analysis

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I'm still alive

What Cocteau said Picasso said

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