#8: pisces season (2024)

dreamy cazimis

Mar 19, 2024

Hi! Thanks for being here. Aries season starts tonight and with it, spring. We’re so back! Thank the Virgos in your life for changing your clocks last week.

Here’s a collection of takeaways and faves from Pisces season this past month (Feb 18th - Mar 19th). You can find an overview of Aries season’s upcoming astrology at the end of this newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed or would like to upgrade your subscription, you can do so below.

seeing red

Recently, I did another sixth step (“we were entirely ready to have our higher power remove all these defects of character”). Sharing the list of my character defects with my sponsor left me feeling so ashamed and like I must be the most deeply flawed woman alive for how many there were, but also like a self-actualized angel who is beautiful inside and out because my defects are comparatively not that bad and mostly aimed at myself. I’m told feeling all of that is not uncommon. It’s a powerful thing to list out your shortcomings and confront the patterns of thought and behavior that you find yourself falling into over and over, and to think of how those have negatively impacted you and others. It’s also, if you’re an anxious eldest daughter like me, the content of a regularly-occurring 2 AM negative thought spiral.

My list of shortcomings honestly isn’t very exciting though, and they aren’t that unique to me. The combination of all of them together, maybe, but who isn’t a ruminating, self-critical procrastinator with people pleasing tendencies? I decided I’d make a list of my more personalized character defects and share some of those here.

Aside from the whole ~mentally ill alcoholic~ thing, a big one for me is that I can never remember who I’ve told what to. I’m not just an outfit repeater — I’m also a story repeater, and that’s actually not a good thing. I think it’s because I’m someone who processes externally and needs to talk something out to figure it out, so while I usually know that I’ve talked about something before, my memory is less solid on who heard it. “Did I already talk about this?” is a common question I ask before recounting a story or sharing some feelings, and the answer is Yes a little too often. Sorry, friends.

Another big one is my indecisiveness. Blame it on all the Libra placements or blame it on those people pleasing tendencies, but please don’t ask me to pick something. “What do you want to listen to?” Whatever you want to because if I put something on I’ll be worrying about whether you like it the whole time. “Where should we get food from?” Wherever you want to because– you get it. I have gotten a lot better at making choices in recent years though. It’s just stressful and it feels like so much is on the line, and that’s rarely the case.

Some lowkey humblebrag red flags: I am good at using a phone and keeping in touch with folks! I respond in a timely manner, I initiate and follow up, and inbox zero is my resting state. These things come naturally to me, but they aren’t expectations I have of my friends — just the people I date (jk jk). Also, being a small business owner might be a red flag? I personally don’t think so because I have good business practices, and besides, I only call myself a girlboss ironically now.

I am also such an eavesdropper. I love to listen in and I can hardly stop myself from listening. I feel self-conscious sitting near strangers when I’m with friends — or worse, on a date — because it’s hard for me to ignore the fact that they might be listening. I find myself censoring what I’m saying sometimes in those situations because I know I would be eavesdropping.

On the subject of other people’s business, I have been called gossipy (derogatory) several times before. I won’t deny it but I’d like to push back on that here. At the risk of sounding like every Normal Gossip guest when they’re asked about their relationship to gossip: I love gossiping but only when it’s harmless. I believe I am a kind person who’s surrounded by kind friends, and I can’t think of any instances of gossiping in a mean-spirited way that I’ve taken part in in a long time. It’s just fun to know what’s up! Who’s sleeping with whom, what someone did and the impact that had, how this person feels about that person. This (harmless!) gossip sustains me, and it doesn’t matter to me whether I know the people involved. If you’re here reading my blog, that says to me that you’re interested in gossip yourself to some degree. That’s not a bad thing, and I’m glad you’re here. I only wish I had more of it to share sometimes!

And on that note, while I don’t think that having a Substack is a red flag, I would say that my having this one is.

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just my luck

St. Patrick’s Day came and went. It had me thinking about how non-alcoholic Guinness is honestly undrinkable, and about how I’m a little down on my luck lately.

My hot neighbor friend is moving out unexpectedly and I’m sad about it, not only because it means it’ll be a little harder for us to hang out, but also because we never took advantage of the great booty call potential that we had in living across the hall from each other, despite mutual interest. And by we I mean I never got that call — a call I would’ve gladly answered 🫡

Speaking of not getting calls, I tried this new dating app that I recently started getting IG ads for. I thought it probably wouldn’t have many people on it, and to my dismay it did not, in fact, have many people on it. It’s this sober dating app called Loosid, and I was loosing it because there were only eight women and nonbinary folks within a 50 mile radius of me. I was hoping there would at least be enough people that I could maybe get a match or two and have something more to write about, but I swiped right on only one of those people and haven’t matched with her. There are three “sober questions” you can answer for your profile, a la Hinge: My idea of a perfect Sober Saturday, The biggest gift sobriety has given me, and My favorite mocktail. My idea of a perfect Sober Saturday is actually getting laid though, so I’ve decided to delete my profile. You could call that a moment of loosidity.

Having had no success on that app, I slid back into this girl’s DMs on Insta to share my ranking of the songs on The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess because I remembered Chappell Roan was her top artist last year. (You should give the album a listen if you haven’t and then read my piece — I had fun with it!) I immediately regretted this and would not be owning up to it here had she not responded to say she loved the piece. The sigh of relief that I sighed! The conversation didn’t go any further than that though, unforch. Guess she isn’t going to — I have to do this — take me hot to go! (Sorry.)

It’s okay though because lately, my body has been keeping the score (my wrist tendonitis is flaring up). I’ve been working more and I’m feeling some pain because of it. This means I’m taking Ibuprofen around the clock and wearing my wrist brace again. There’s something about driving over to a girl’s place and taking the brace off before going inside that makes me feel proud to be a lesbian. We’re built different — your boyfriends could never.

faves ♡

🎶 “Shapeshifter” - Mini Trees

I’ve been a fan of Mini Trees for a while, and this is my fav song from her new EP. I really like the polyrhythmic synth and this song feels more vibrant than a lot of her others, I think partly because the vocals sound more forward as opposed to set back in the mix. To my ear that makes it one that you listen to rather than just play like a lot of her other music, and one that’s more suited for performing too. I’m excited to see her open for Eliza McLamb soon!

🎵 “Killing Time” - Nell Mescal

Big fan of this song and breakup songs in general. I found something out about the singer this past month: when she sings “you’re still there standing over me / in my brother’s room,” that brother is Paul Mescal! I was recently re-devastated by a Normal People re-watch, so this felt like an extra fun discovery. What’s the consensus on nepo siblings? Either way she can stay, imo, because I really like several of her songs.

🎞️ Anatomy of a Fall

Honestly, the little I heard about this movie didn’t make me want to watch it, but I’m glad I decided to the night before the Oscars because it was so good! I’ve been thinking about it a lot since. It def deserved that best screenplay win and it was my fav out of the best picture nominations (sorry, Barbie). The courtroom scenes were riveting and Sandra Hüller was incredible. I didn’t know she was also in Zone of Interest but I went and watched that too because of her. And is French court really like that? (Just looked it up and apparently so.)

📕 Body Work - Melissa Febos

Melissa Febos hive, rise up. I took so much away from this book that’s about the radical power of personal narrative, as the subtitle reads. That power can truly be felt individually as well as collectively. I needed to read a lot of what she had to offer about writing about sex better and how to more ethically write about people in our lives. Most of all, it felt helpful to read something that felt encouraging of narrative writing about one’s own emotions and experiences, considering the recent run of anti-personal-essay sentiment — that is, as Febos points out, really only ever aimed at marginalized folks. I’m committing to (trying to!) not take that shit to heart. I’m joining the war on personal essays on the side of personal essays. I think we need more, and I, personally, need more of my friends to share their writing. It can be such a powerful thing, and it can also be so fun! Let this be a sign, if you’re looking for one. I copied down so many quotes from this book. Here are two of my faves:

Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you.

and

You make the past known in order to know yourself as changed.

💆‍♀️ fertility massage

Ok, hear me out — I had another free acupuncture session from this practitioner I know, and she asked if she could include some abdominal fertility massage. I told her I wasn’t trying to conceive or anything, but she said I don’t need to be to benefit from it because it can also help with GI issues. Now, I am not a girl who has ever really wanted to have kids, but I’d be lying if I said that desire didn’t come up for me a little bit during and after! It might’ve just been because it was specifically on my mind and something we talked about, but idk, maybe the extra blood flow spurred my biological clock into actually ticking a little. And I didn’t realize how much tension I was holding in my abdomen! Apparently that surprises a lot of people during those sessions. It seems like the vague suggestion of abs that I thought I had may have actually just been stress I was holding onto though.

Aries season astrology: Mar 19th - Apr 19th

Mar 19th - Spring equinox & Aries season starts 🌷 11:07 pm eastern

Mar 22nd - Mars → Pisces ♓ 7:48 pm

Mar 25th - Lunar eclipse & full moon in Libra 🌝 3 am

Apr 1st - Mercury retrograde (until 4/25) ⏪ 6:14 pm

Apr 5th - Venus → Aries ♈ 12 am

Apr 8th - Solar eclipse & new moon in Aries 🌚 2:20 pm (this is a total solar eclipse visible all across the US! You can check out what kind of visibility you’ll have and when here.)

Apr 11th - Mercury cazimi (conjunction with the Sun) in Aries 🌞 7:02 pm

Apr 19th - Taurus season starts 🐂 10 am