overseen in Ann Arbor, plus

[fflo]

bumper sticker this a.m.

Gawwwwd. Is it just me, or is that especially stupid? And I'm all "To the left, to the left" myself. I think it's largely the offensiveness of figurative meaning (and quite fuzzy there, at best) without any literal one that makes any damn sense. Nothing of what left? What the fork are you talking about, couplet?

My smugness is only reinforced by the blurb (at the site peddling the thing) calling it a "soon-to-be-famous slogan."


So, what do you think it means when you hate your horoscope so much you want to decide you're not really going to play that game any more but you then think that must mean it's exactly what you need to hear?

[Poll #973113]

Mr./Ms. Coin is what my old friend called the coin-for-flipping he kept in his pocket. It was "Mr." when it was a Kennedy half dollar (or fifty-cent piece, as 'twas commonly called); it was "Ms." when Suzie B. came on the scene.

The sweet thing about his coin-flipping protocol was that, faced with two choices he couldn't otherwise seem to decide between, he'd pull out Mr. or Ms., assign values to heads and tails, flip, look, and THEN---here's the variant---assess how he felt when the decision had thus been "made" for him by the coin. Was he bummed? Slightly disappointed? Or was he ready to accept that outcome with relative ease, or even a suddenly-found sense of being pleased with the result? So then, realizing (better) his own desires, he'd do what he (now realized he) wanted. A coin flip, for him, didn't make the decision: it just helped him get at what he really wanted. Or at, sometimes, his genuine indifference---in which case he's just go with whatever Ms./Mr. Coin wanted.

The problem with horoscopes that way is that they have more of an implication of what's right or best being located, at least somewhat, outside yourself. Which I'm afraid I believe it is (at least somewhat). Damn it all to hell. (Oh, as IF, Lisa, anyway...)

I'm pretty sure I'm over time on this break. I was just gonna write about that bumper sticker.

Comments

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I think you should do like I do, and not waste any time reading silly horoscopes in the first place. If you have a need for annoying advice that you'll hate but then be unable to stop questioning whether you hate it for the right reasons or the wrong ones, I've always found that friends can supply ample amounts of that sort of advice.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

hah. well, qbc, it's kinda like this. the horoscope's not so much "advice" to me as it is a springboard to meditation. poor man's therapy. any rational sort knows it doesn't "know" anything; thus it's a blank thing to take your own interpretations from, for the sake of seeing what interpretations you take. my astrologer's schtick in the free weeklies is to offer up that sort of thing in a way that (feels to me, anyway, like it) winks at me that it's throwing something up there for me to react to and then see how i'm reacting to it. if that makes any damn sense at all. sometimes something leaps right to mind; sometimes the exercise requires more exercise. either way there can be something there to get at, if you want to get at something, if you've got something you want to get at, if you want something to get at.

i'd add some fantabulously clarifying paragraph here about what, on the other hand, the witness and presence and comfort and reflection and gentle nudging and not-so gentle knocking up side the head---and even the mere knowledge of the very existence---of friends can do and does for me, but let me leave it at this: that's a whole different ballgame.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I had actually already assumed that you were using horoscopes that way. I used to read them myself, back in my teenage years, and I would have given the same explanation for why I was reading them. But mostly I think I was just reading them because they're kind of addicting, like so many other simple daily rituals that all add up to eating away a surprising number of minutes of the day. So now that I've broken the addiction, I can no longer understand the appeal of going back to it. ;-)