September Horoscopes -- Fasten Your Celestial Seatbelts!

Eric Francis postulates:

ARIES: You may be feeling like it's time for a new job. Wider horizons are calling, perhaps painfully, but most definitely. Often we need to reach a limit to go beyond whatever familiar territory becomes enmeshed in our patterns of living. Even if rearranging your day-to-day affairs seems impossible right now, you have an opportunity to make an adjustment in the way you express or exert yourself in the place you call work. I suggest you look at how you use your energy; study the patterns; account for where your time goes, and what you actually accomplish. Notice how you feel about it. Because this promises to be such an incredibly busy and productive month, it's an interesting phase for a study. While you're at it, notice what you like to do the most, and what you set out to do first when you have several choices. Getting a new job is precisely the time to choose, so practice now.

CANCER: Many developments point to this being a phase of your life characterized by an intellectual and creative peak. I could describe it a few ways; you're finding your voice; you're becoming clear about what ideas mean the most to you; you are beginning to make an impact; you are letting go of a destructive way of thinking and in its place something magnificently creative is finding its way into your reality. I suggest you leave no problem unsolved, and no situation unresolved. But more to the point, this is the time to enter new territory where your ideas are concerned. This will require discipline you may think you lack, as well as optimism, so that you can approach your work every day with a clear mind, faithful that you're making progress. Most of all, you need to stay in the present and allow the power of your mind to work through each mental challenge, and reap its rewards.

VIRGO: The time has come to let go of an old grudge, grievance, or perpetual crisis. In the next year or two, you'll be doing plenty of releasing the past, dropping outdated personality traits and shedding various layers of thick skin that you've been collecting to protect your deep sensitivity. Yet something is stirring on the deeper layers of your psyche, and it would appear that you're going to begin this process from the inside out, working from the core to the surface. This is in truth more efficient than peeling back the layers from the outside. What develops over the next few weeks is the direct result of two factors: of your tapping into an energy source that is beyond your power to resist it; and consciously maintaining a sense of the direction in which you wish to guide your life. The image is less of a volcano and more of a turbine. You are developing the ability to bring fire under the power of spirit.

Sometimes...

(Maggie muses)

...all that'll do is to curl up with a favorite book, one that you've read a million times and won't ever get tired of re-reading.

It's an immediate grounding, a centering, a softening, a reminder of what's important and what's not.... and sometimes, that's exactly what we need.

Thanks, Isabel. And of course, thank you, Paula.

Birthday Wishes

Mikaela asks:
What's your very favorite birthday?

Some people like to hide, or deny it, or just downplay it like crazy. Other people will do anything for gifts.

I love birthdays. Love my own, love other people's. I guess I just love having a good excuse to celebrate a human being being in my life that I really enjoy. We don't get to do that without ulterior motives very often, and why not just because they happened to be birthed that day?

My favorite birthday party was for a friend when we were 7. Her mom went around "kidnapping" all of us really early in the morning. She gathered us into the car, still in our pajamas. Our moms were in on it, of course, but we didn't know that! We just knew we really liked this mom, and she didn't explain more than just to say, "It's Yvonne's birthday; get in!" When we got to Yvonne's house, we woke her up with a big "Surprise" which scared her so much, we had to leave the room while her mom explained what had happened. Then Janice made us all rolled up pancakes, which she was famous for. Our party favors were these aprons with tiny pockets for 32 crayons. So cool!

Of course, my 30th birthday thrown by my ms was the best birthday party I've ever had.

And this year? This year, I'm having visions of cooking at my house with a few close friends, going to see a movie, hang out afterward drinking wine and shooting the shit. Doesn't that sound like heaven?

31. Unbelievable.

Chi-town with no Glass?

Mikaela says:
I am so behind the times!

On a wild hair, I just checked This American Life website to find out if they're doing any live shows anytime soon.

"I'll fly to Chicago if they are," I told myself. "I don't want to miss seeing it live before it goes away forever."

Boy, was I on the wrong track!

My favorite radio show (and online diversion) isn't going away in the sense of disappearing; it's MOVING TO NEW YORK!!!

Since they're turning it into a tv show for Showtime, which will be produced out of NYC, they'll be doing the radio program there, too.

Isn't that weird? It's a Chicago show! That's one of the reasons I love it so much.

I'm very very nervous about this.

Check out a detailed article from February here.

Perfect closure

Maggie says:
I adored Shopgirl when the Ms and I saw it last year, and just got a chance to rewatch it on DVD. I love this movie... I loved how it continued to settle into me slowly, days after I first saw it. The passage at the end, narrated by Steve Martin, struck me as wise and beautiful then, and tonight it hit me even more powerfully.

Here's to beautiful movie closure and films that end perfectly:

As Ray Porter watches Mirabelle walk away, he feels a loss. How is it possible, he thinks, to miss a woman whom he kept at a distance, so that when she was gone he would not miss her? Only then does he realize that wanting part of her, and not all of her, had hurt them both, and how he cannot justify his actions, except that, well, it was life.

While I'm at it, everyone should read the novella, too. Steve Martin really surprised and moved me with this one; it's beautifully, internally written and unexpectedly insightful.

So inappropriate... yet so HOT!

Maggie says:
Via the ever-delightful Pam's House Blend, I present:

Calendario Romano 2007!

Now we know we're not supposed to drool over priests. And we know that given the major sex scandals that have rocked the priesthood the last few years, it's shockingly insensitive that the church would even allow priests to be packaged as sex objects in the first place...

But we're not concerned with that right now. My concerns include: drooling over Signore Ottobre (I have always had a thing for Italians and Scorpios), and laughing my ass off over this comment submitted to the site:

As a strong Roman Catholic, and a family man, I'd like to say that if I were the creator of this calendar, who I don't even know a thing about (I'd like to learn about the history of this calendar), but if I were him, I'd get down on my knees...and blow each and every one of these men.