D'oh!

M-pyrical is no more... It'll rest here for all eternity, but for fresh posts visit us at m-pyre, where we're folding in all that was m-pyrical with the best of what's always been m-pyre. Enjoy, and let us know how we're doing!

Seeing Stars - final m-pyrical post...

Mikaela says:
It's that time. With our third anniversary of m-pyre, we're shutting down m-pyrical.

This will be the last horoscope posting on this page. Sniff, sniff...

Happy October, everyone!

Aries (March 20-April 19)
If it seems a never-ending quest to keep the peace at home and at work, remember what the two have in common. The bonds that tie people together are remarkably similar no matter what the setting, though we allow some to become more intimate than others (or deem them so). Depth or passion does not change the basic necessities of communicating our expectations, of stating grievances out loud, and most meaningful of all, asking for assistance when the burdens of life become too heavy to carry alone. You need to guard against what is in truth baseless insecurity about yourself; you may at times swing through extreme moods and decide one day that you're king of the mountain and another day notice you're struggling for any sense of worth. If you are defensive and protective, you will likely feel less safe. If you seek cooperation, balance and honesty, you will find that these things come to you with surprising ease and grace -- even if at certain times during the next few months you display no such qualities.


Cancer (June 21-July 22)
Mars is now in your birth sign, where it will remain well into 2008. (Mars turns retrograde in Cancer Nov. 15, so it spends about six months of its two-year orbit in your sign.) This is your invitation to focus your intentions and experiment with the power of desire. Note that this era doesn't appear to be a transient phase of your life, but rather a threshold to a new understanding of yourself and how you can relate to your world: directly. You are soon to learn that you're more likely to get what you desire than what you don't desire. The key to this equation is to make your desires conscious, and to learn how to cancel the ones you don't want or need. This will require a constant exercise in awareness, and then the additional step of making choices. Part of what you sort out are your past desires from your current ones; all while making room for what you may want in the future. As you do this, remember: feeling secure is more of a choice than a matter of chance.


Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
All the potential you have been secretly brewing these months and perhaps years is getting ready to hatch, or is at the moment coming out of its shell. Can you feel it? Well, it may not feel so thrilling; it may however feel like this huge pressure to come to terms with yourself, like there is something you must reckon with complete honesty. That urge to be boldly, blatantly honest with yourself is the feeling of being reborn. I suggest you give it a try, or another try -- let out whatever you are holding in, even if it's into a notebook, anonymous blog or digital recorder. To some, Saturn's presence in their sign may seem to be sending the message that you must wait, contemplate, and organize yourself. I get a different message: wake up, and let go of the past -- and quickly. Be aware from your attempts to reach your truth of all that is outmoded in your life. Use your brain; consider your own thoughts; state your priorities. Last month's solar eclipse in your sign started a process that will continue for the next six months, at least.

Goodbye to Threadbared

Mikaela wails:
What a week. Madeleine L'Engle AND Threadbared? Two bastions of womanly strength and pride ... lost.

Threadbared announced in August that they are shutting down their site.

The blow to womanhood is felt oh-so-deeply in the breast.

I've been pretty keyed in to the whole women's sphere lately. Reading Jane Austen for the first time... Enjoying Sarah Vowell from This American Life. Mourning Madeleine L'Engle's demise.

And now ... sniffling that Mary and Kimberly of the satirical blog riffing on sewing patterns are moving onto to other (not nearly as funny or gratifying for me) projects. Not only were these ladies individually hilarious, their friendship was also commendable. They just had so much fun doing this collaborative hobby for free and for the public!

Will all the smart girl projects suffer a similar fate?

Well, now that you mention it...

This might be a good time to mention that our little colony for the stuff of m-pyre might be going the way of the Dodo, too.

Consider this fair warning that soon, m-pyre will be the only M3 blog.

Embroider those hankies and get them ready!

For now we are,

Yours,

m-pyrical


P.S. Threadbared's hilarity is immortalized for all ages in a book, although not everything on the website made the cut. Purchase your memento here.

September - Happy Birthday to Mikaela!

Planet Waves declares:

Aries (March 20-April 19)
There is just one way to avoid dramas at work, and that is to focus on work. There is one way to avoid health dramas, which is to focus on your health. In both aspects of your life, you are facing a significant threshold, yet the easiest and most productive thing to shift is your point of view -- that is, your attitude or position with respect to these fundamental aspects of existence. For the moment, where other people are concerned, that position might best be a bit remote or removed. Certain people seem poised to shake the tree, when your calling is decidedly in the direction of patient effort, focus and long-term accomplishment. You are laying a foundation now for when Pluto crosses your career angle and your role in the world begins to take on entirely new proportions and undergo some profound changes. The foundation involves learning to set priorities and being able to maintain your integrity when that becomes the last thing on the priority list of others who are influential in your professional environment.



Cancer (June 21-July 22)
A combination of aspects is suggesting that you pay close attention to your local environment. Local means walking distance or short driving distance from where your feet are at any given moment. Pay attention to the room you are in, the neighborhood you are in, the town you are in, and what you find when you are walking around or traveling at a slow speed. Current aspects suggest that your immediate surroundings will be giving you plenty of feedback, including information about whether you need to be there or not. Yet all the ongoing and impressive astrological developments have particularly vivid meaning for those who consider themselves people of letters: writers, programmers and idea-people of all stripes. In years of working as a journalist, I have often noted that the most important stories and projects choose me. This is one of those moments when your next assignment will choose you, and while details are still forthcoming, the one thing we know is that it will be interesting.


Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
September's partial solar eclipse in your birth sign happens on a day associated with high drama, which is often a ruse for deception. Keep an eye on this syndrome. Keep both eyes on your integrity. The best thing that will come from events this month is that you'll finally open up to the influences of someone who has been trying to get through to you for a long time. Either that, or a circumstance beyond your control does the job for you. Lighten the impact and deepen the positive influence by making your own choice to reconsider an idea that for too long has seemed necessary but impossible. While you've learned to be open to change in recent years, it hasn't always been easy. But you know the struggle comes down to this: it's not always possible to respond to the passion that drives you forward and still reckon your choices with logic. Events this month will go a long way toward demonstrating that you don't have to think things make sense in order for them to do so perfectly.

August Comes ... August Goes

Planet Waves predicts:

Aries (March 20-April 19)
You are not splitting in two. It is, however, true that you are rapidly approaching a branching of the roads where you will get to choose between a life that is predominantly dictated by your social life, and one that is nourished and sustained by your increasing creative passion. What divides the two is less about "what you want to be doing with your life" and more about your willingness to take the kind of risks that change you. When it comes to friends, you may want to choose from among those who are distinctly unafraid to stand out; who refuse to conform to what others expect of them, and who insist on honesty as a way of life; and who define themselves by their ability to change rather than to stay the same. This is what you are learning and these are the kinds of teachers and companions who will be the most supportive of you at this time. You may feel concerned about how meaningful your friends who may not fit this description are; but I propose it's now time for them to come to you, rather than you going to them.

Cancer (Jun 23 - Jul 23)
You are in an excellent process of defining what is important to you. A review that began as a kind of personal inventory earlier this summer has evolved into a careful look at your values system, your attitudes toward money, and what you have learned in the past couple of not-so-easy years of Saturn transiting your adjoining sign Leo. (For two years before that, Saturn was in your birth sign, which brought many similar challenges and points of inner growth and confrontation.) This month is the time to prepare the final report, which will be preceded by your current retrospective exploration. Keep your focus on the past as much as possible. Keep asking the question, "How did I get here?" See if you can identify key decision points that led to turning points that got you where you are today. Through this process, you will find the present, where you can ask the most important question in the universe: Where am I, and what am I doing here?


Virgo (Aug 24 - Sep 23)
One of the great Virgo secrets is how overwhelmed you can feel at times, and how you then ride that energy and break through to new universes of your life. This month promises to turn your inner reality into Bondi Beach of the mind, where you will surf the massive cosmic waves for days and weeks on end. You have learned in recent years that fear is basically the illusion created by responding to your abundant creative potential with negativity. It's a kind of psychic drag created by resisting your natural strength. It helps of course if you can see the positive potential of your creative power. As long as you let go of your past mental habits that is surprisingly easy, and that, in turn, is facilitated simply by noticing what they are. At a certain point, the quest to maintain self-awareness gives way to creative breakthroughs, which in the coming month or two seem poised to come as a series of developments that carry you further from any phase of your life that you remember, or for that matter that you have forgotten.

Pajama Men to Take on the World...

Mikaela says:
Local comedy heroes Mark & Shenoah are being heralded in Chicago... See the great article here.

But the real story is they may soon be coming to TV on NBC!

Whoa. Stop not kidding!

Books not for summer ... D'oh!

Mikaela says:
Recently a friend said summer was for beach-reading fiction.

Okay, I agree that's true, but summer for me is also a time to catch up on that stack of books gathering dust by my bed, waiting for a spare minute, cooing into my night dreams.

Reeeeeaaaaad me...

So I finally read A Thousand Splendid Suns, a downer of a book about women in Afghanistan from 1950 or so to the present time. Oh my is it beautiful, though. I didn't read this book; I consumed it. It is impossible to put down (yes, partly from guilt). You have a responsibility to read it, to face its horror, to witness and cry and begin to understand.

Some of it speaks the same message as its non-fiction neighbor Daughter of Persia. But the muddiness of reality is cleared to sparkling bone-cutting diamond fiction in this unforgettable novel. My lover kept asking me why I was crying, what the book was about ... and when I told him he was cast backward! One book? About all that? Holy god. Yes, that good. I think better than Kite Runner, his runaway hit of a first novel.

I've also been picking my way through 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East by Naomi Shihab Nye. I really do think it's our responsibility to understand the cultures that scare our government so much we declare them terrorists and keep sending more and more troops to inspire "democracy." What better way to do that than through poetry?

And I just finished Mother of Pearl, that my oldest sister bought me for Christmas. Would have been a better winter book, matching its darkness, but the heat and humidity of my living room provided the perfect venue for the book's depiction of the South. The story is also 1950s, I think, but this time a story woven with threads of black, white, and gay characters and these sentences that will stop you dead to consider them. You cannot consume this book; you've got to sip it like sweet wine or Baskin Robbins daquiri ice (before they changed and ruined it). Worth the time, though. It's haunting. I'm still sitting with the ending to see if I'm okay with it.

I loved the time I spent with these characters, though. I wanted so much to run to the river to hear Joody Two Suns tell me the story of my name. The whole book is a world that's real, yet we fear, yet we want in some strange way. It was also one of the best male friendship stories I've read yet. And wise about how people love. How men love women (carefully), women love men (despite themselves), and people who are different love people who are different from them. It's a sweet story about race. How often do we get that? And all the characters have wisdom of their own kind, which I so appreciate. No caricatures or moral tales or easy answers. Just people living the best they can and offering us their story. Pretty great.

That's my summer! You?

Fuck Harry Potter: How about some REAL entertainment?

Mikaela says:
You want magic? These boys will give you magic. They'll wave their "magic wands" so far up your ass, you'll have to laugh to keep from gagging!

Okay, that's graphic, but you get the idea.

One night only (Tonight!): Stop Not Going
UNM's X Theatre (Hint: Enter the Popejoy building and search for signs)

Before these guys stop not going to Chicago.




P.S. Totally tongue in cheek about the Potter thing. You know I'm down for some boy-wizard love. Marjorie & I saw the new movie last night, and it ROCKED.

Happy Birthday, Marjorie!

Planet Waves* foresees:

* Be forewarned that Eric/Brian Francis will chastise you for not subscribing to his service yet visiting his website monthly. He does not, however, offer a subscription that just covers the monthly horoscope, so ... we say ignore him or leave that comment!

Aries (March 20-April 19)
The time has come to confront a sense of loss and angst that seems to take up all the space you need for pleasure and abundance. It's as if someone took something from you, and you now have the opportunity to go on a hunt for just what that may be. It may seem inappropriate to bring any aggression to this deeply sensitive endeavor, but you must assert yourself in a way that is unusual for you. You are more accustomed to directing your energy outward rather than inward; to seeking answers surfing the usual channels of ideas and emotional sentiment. What you do over the next few weeks will feel like more of a struggle, or even an upheaval against the ways in which you tend to be set in your ways. Just remember, you are looking for a lost item of some kind, but here is a clue. It's an emotional, spiritual or sexual quality that you not only did not lose yourself, but which you were never properly given. Someone else lost it, long before you were born.


Cancer (June 21-July 22)
Focus your intent, but do so gently. Take your time and reflect, and consider how you feel. Make sure that timing your moves is utmost on your list of priorities. You don't want to take action too soon, and you may choose to temporarily slow down your outer-world progress, tracking the current path of Mercury retrograde in your sign. If you seem to be getting nowhere, you can count on the station-direct of Mercury on July 9 to help you shift your energy in a constructive direction. Meantime, I suggest you make no attempt to judge your progress. The hitch you are looking for, so you can unhitch it, is a point along that delicate membrane where your feelings dictate what you think is possible, and where what you think is possible dictates your feelings. This thin sheet of psychic tissue is only a few cells thick. Allow the material of the past and of the present to filter through gently till you get the perfect balance, and while you're at it, drink a lot of water.


Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
You seem to be in the process of negotiating with your idealism. What is realistic, what is possible, and what from the "impossible" category is worth attempting? There are no right answers to these questions, nor can you know in advance which of your current investments, endeavors or relationships will bear the fruit you can almost taste. You simply must persist, but it's not a persistence of logic; rather, you can guide yourself by the tides of your feelings, which at times will seem to be on the ebb and the flood simultaneously. The one thing you can do that will set you way ahead is to be completely honest with yourself about how you feel, and how you feel about the people who surround you. The chances are you will learn some things about friends and associates that you were not expecting to find out. Some of this may fall under the heading of what the world these days calls "too much information," but I assure you there is no such thing.

June Horoscopes -- a little late!

Planetwaves says:

Aries (March 20-April 19)
It's unlikely you're leaving any stone unturned or taking any insecurity for granted. How could you, when your mind is working overtime attempting to figure out the source of what troubles you? The figuring may be part of the problem, however. It does not help that there are moments when you really do feel like you can calculate the nature of your emotional needs and odd hesitancies. That little taste of success is enough to keep you going in what amounts to the wrong direction (forward). Try orienting yourself in reverse: in time, in your assessment of what you want, and internally rather than externally. Consider the child you are rather than the adult you are forced to be. Consider what you do not say as being the most significant indicator of what you truly want to say. Look for your reflection in the fears and dysfunctional beliefs of others. Imagine what they are not saying, and you'll have a clue what you are not saying. Then listen to yourself.


Cancer (June 21-July 22)
You have a right to change your mind. To do that, you have to know your mind, and for that, you need to find out what's there. I trust that you'll discover many things -- ideas, beliefs, patterns of thought -- that you don't need, and once you identify them, you're in an excellent position to let them go. I don't propose you concern yourself with what is new, what you want to create, or what you are seeking, but rather with the process of identifying and releasing, in that order. In essence, you will be making room for what is new, and at the same time, learning to identify what is what, so that you have a basis for deciding whether you really want it; whether it's useful; whether it helps or hinders you. Current aspects are providing you with the potential to reach an astonishing depth in this process, and to see and understand yourself in a way that is typically impossible for human beings. To do this effectively, you will need space and time, hopefully something more than evenings and weekends.


Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
You are in a long stretch of life where others are providing a great deal of your impetus, motivation and creative fire. You have some excellent teachers, just the right kind: not just iconoclasts, but inventors. When you look back on these years, you will be blown away by how much you learned from the people who are closest to you, the people who you chose and those who chose you -- and they are not done coming into your life. Once again, this energy comes to a peak, but now a strategy involving a group becomes the focus. This may not be apparent until later in the month, and you will have plenty to keep you busy until then. The extra energy you put into your professional activities will be well worth it, as long as you remind yourself that your success is not a popularity contest. In actual fact, a little dissent is a good sign, and it will prompt you to invent the strategy for cooperation that seems like an inevitable development. If you find yourself searching for the right people with just a little edge of emotional irritation, you're on the right track.

(P.S. -- Yeah, she doesn't look like a virgin to me, either...)