Moving home gracefully and temporarily. (Part II)

I'm not sure I'm doing such a great job at this whole graceful thing.

For those of you who know me pretty well, I'm not a crier.  I can probably count how many times I've cried in the last 3 or so years on my hands, and they've typically been by all accounts cry-worthy events (break ups, loss of a loved one, loved ones diagnosis of cancer, etc).  I don't get overly emotional and cry very often (okay fine, sometimes in sappy movies).  My therapist thinks I need to cry more, and I think she's probably right.  I hold it in, keep composed and sometimes I need to let it all out.

And that brings us to this morning.

This morning I sat on my bathroom floor crying as I was sorting through bottles with 1/5th left of shampoo or body lotion left in them, feeling overwhelmed with what to do with them all...on top of the chaos that is my apartment in order to get it ready to move out tomorrow. (Note:  I ended up combining all the shampoos I liked regardless of the brand, to one super shampoo.  My hair will not know what to do with itself.)

I'm sad.  I'm sad to be leaving my amazing apartment with the amazing view of the city, its tall ceilings, crown molding and beautiful natural light; I'm sad to be leaving the city that I've lived in for 5 years and love so much;  I'm sad that while I have friends moving in to apartments to live alone for a year or so, or in with their boyfriends...that I'm moving home; I'm sad that when people say "It's what's best for you right now, it's a smart move for the time being to save up some money", that it's true.  I'm sad.

This week, and the last two weeks, I've just not really been myself.  I've been half moved between my apartment and my old-now-new bedroom, which means that it has been chaos in both places. I've slept like crap and woke up disoriented when I was at home, and at my apartment, forgetting where I slept that night (I've been alternating as I bring loads of stuff home), we had a friend tragically lose a parent which was so sad, and also brought up so much for me in terms of my parental situation...especially since I'm moving home and the last time I lived at home my step-dad lived there too.  So it's just been a loaded week.

Who wouldn't want to get therapy here? :)

I've also, in the midst of all of this, began to set up of my office for my new job (the work in progress is pictured right, I'll spare you from pictures of what my apartment looks like).  It's tidy, clean, kind of serene, I've gotten compliments on it from other therapists at the office, and I feel really proud of it.  Basically this is my criteria for places that are mine...it's been my oasis this last week, oddly enough. I'm very much looking forward to building the beginning of my career there.  I'm very thankful that the work aspect of my life is starting to take shape and feel grounded, while the rest of my life feels fragmented.

So after I stopped crying, I felt much better. I guess I needed a release, and since I wasn't getting laid on that bathroom floor, crying was how it manifested.

I decided to get my obligatory Venti. I felt a little weird ordering at Starbucks with my sunglasses on given that it's been pouring out, but I'm not one of those attractive criers...my eyes puff up and it looks like I've been stung by a bee and need an epi-pen.

Alas, halfway through my Venti I feel much more clear headed and determined to make this apartment, and all my stuff in it, my bitch.

I didn't want moving to be an emotional thing, I fought it. I've been talking about it rationally since it is smart for me to do right now, and will pay off (literally and figuratively) in the long run if I take some time to not pay rent.  But what I know about myself, and what I tell my clients, when you fight the emotional piece of things it gets bigger and bigger.

Bigger and bigger until you feel like you've lost your mind and are sitting on your bathroom floor crying to a bottle of Panteen ProV.  Oy.

Okay, so in all of this I've learned a few things.  Most importantly, a slow move by doing it piecemeal is counter to every fiber that makes up who I am.  I'm an Aries (freakily my horoscopes have been right on lately, anyone else?), I'm impulsive and quick in my decisions, I need things to be the way I need them (type A, order and control are desired), I function better when challenging things happen like ripping off a band aid: over and done.  Frankly, you're all probably sick of hearing about my packing and moving at this point, so we'll all be much better off come the end of this weekend.

This long fiasco that I thought would be helpful in terms of moving things bit by bit was a mistake.  Next time I'll hire (hot) movers, I'll do it all at once, and I'll be moving somewhere that I'm really excited to live, or maybe even own depending up on how long I can save rent money.

Okay, enough procrastinating.  I'm off pack the rest of my stuff for really real this time.

Until next time,
E

Horoscope, Schmoroscope.

I am an Aries.

I don’t really care what they come up with to say that I’m not…I’m sticking to it, until my horoscope app tells me differently, and ONLY if I can relate to what it spits at me every day under my new “sign”.  Until then I am an Aries.

You may have seen in the news, on Facebook, or in the stars, that there is a hubbub around the horoscopes “changing”.  There has been a finding of a 13^th horoscope between November 29^th and December 17 called Ophiuchus (serpent something or other).

What the deal is, might be or could be:

This Ophiuchus has been around for quite a while.  It’s not like stars are born every day. Okay I take that back, stars are born/die every day I’m sure, but in terms of what we see, it obviously has been in the making for a while.

The other thing is, a lot of astronomers are not in agreement with this finding.  So hold your panic for the time being.

There probably already was 13 horoscope signs, with one of them being removed somewhere along the lines, making only 12 “equally spaced” zodiac signs (like 12 months, perhaps?).  If you look at the actual dates for when these stars are aligned, they are actually not as equal as we think, and depend where in the world you are and how close/far to the equator you live (Check out the chart on Wiki below).  So in terms of your original original horoscope, we’ve already been wrong for a long time.

Jews actually have something similar to this phantom 13 slot.  There is a rotating 13^th month which pops in and out seemingly randomly (but it’s not) and accounts for the time loss that the Christian (the one we use typically) calendar with leap years, etc.  Who knows if there is a connection, but I’m a big fan of 13’s.  (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/calendar.html)

The stars move, the world’s orientation moves, so the view of the sky is different.  Really the only accurate telling of “what sign you are” and how MUCH you are that sign is more of an “exact science”.  I haven’t gotten my chart done before, but what I’ve been told is it takes into account your exact location of birth, exact time of birth and the view of the sky at that point.  Only from there can you really know where your true “identity” is in terms of the stars.

So in terms of how I feel about it:

It doesn’t really matter what your sign is.  I know, for someone who is so classically “their sign” this is galaxy shattering.

The point of horoscopes when you read them in the newspaper, in the back of a magazine, or on your iPhone (ps, congrats Verizon users, wait until June when it’s with LTE)…is to help guide you to making good decisions, give you some “insight” around what might cosmically be going on for you that you can’t quite make sense of and piss off your boyfriend who could care less about what your day looks like “In Love”.

I’ll task you with this.  Have someone “read you your horoscope”.  Tell them to read you one that may or may not be yours.  See if you can figure out if it’s yours or not.   I bet that realistically it’s hard to really know without the label across the top.  We are able to make a lot of things fit our context, even our “real” horoscopes fail us sometimes, I’ve had a few that are so far from what I’m experiencing, that I could have sworn it was a Pisces or even a Virgo.  Alas, it’s just a nice tool to help cope and is fun.

With all that being said, I’m an Aries.  My personality aligns very accurately with the headstrong, leader who is a great starter of things and then gets bored and finds a new challenge…These things will not change if I find out I’m “really” a Capricorn, or even a Gemini.  Who I am will not change, how I identify will not change, and ultimately how I live my life will not change.

Does this shake things up? Sure.  Are there other things we assume that are probably untrue? Absolutely.  Let it just be a lesson to take things in context, don’t live and die by any printed word, because the reality is, someone created it, who knows who/what tampered with it before it got to you, and the only thing we should be living and dying by is ourselves.  Which like I said, fundamentally doesn’t change with any new discovery, or old wisdom uncovered, of the cosmos.

And with that, I’ll tell you, I’m an Aries and I’m sticking to it.  How very classically stubbornly Aries of me…

Until next time,
E

Some sites to further your anxiety or your knowledge around horoscopes and how much they matter:

http://thestir.cafemom.com/in_the_news/115009/scientists_behind_new_zodiac_signs

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sciw-astrological-signs-20110114,0,5854664.story

Zeus, I love Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac#Early_history