HOROSCOPE: catchup 1/2

fuck it we ball

Hello my dears. It has been way too long since my last horoscope.

Here’s the thing. I did get busy with music stuff and with my other creative endeavors, but honestly the real reason I’ve fallen so behind on the horoscopes is that I fell prey to my anxieties about doing a bad and stupid job. I like these horoscopes. I like the NPZ. I think about it in my day to day life, and I didn’t want to write these answers when I was in a “bad headspace” because I worried that the advice would not be enchanted or whatever.

That is uniquely stupid because the whole point of the NPZ is that it’s a creative tool to be used anytime and anywhere, wherever it is needed or wanted. Its primary function is to get you out of a creative rut and help you think through things flexibly, and I avoided it because I was stuck in a creative rut and didn’t want to contaminate the NPZ with my spiritual fogginess. Am I high? That’s like refusing to take a tylenol because you don’t want to contaminate it with your headache. I am literally preaching sacred contamination and messy divinity, and then procrastinating on tasks I am passionate about because I’m afraid of contaminating them. Are we hearing ourselves? What the fuck? Why did I do that?? Lunacy.

But I am nothing if not genuine, and the NPZ is nothing if not a robust tool for creative growth, so what else can I do but model persistence in the face of anxious avoidance? Sometimes in life you start a project and then avoid it for the better part of a year.

Oh well. Fuck it we ball.

Without further ado, happy Spirit (angel) season. When I started writing this horoscope it was System season, and when you guys sent in your questions it was Ghost/Seal/Woman season. The weather has turned and it’s my favorite time of year. The angel is born pure and must choose to get contaminated in order to participate meaningfully in reality. She is fascinated with perfect abstract models and ideas, but must learn to compromise her perfectionism and obsession with purity if she is to make any real use of these beautiful concepts. She must learn how to love something enough to do it imperfectly, instead of loving it so much that she doesn’t do it at all.

This is a time for leaps of faith. It’s a time for walking through the fire of anxiety, boredom, and shame, and finding beauty in mistakes and failures. Only now as I sit here writing this introduction do I see just how foolish I’ve been in putting off this horoscope for so long, and how remarkably fitting it is that I would finally get around to it during Angel season. Sometimes we call our shot more accurately than we ever realized or intended to. Sometimes we draw a perfect picture of our blindspot, and it still trips us up. Sometimes in life you - oh whatever, let’s get this fucking show on the road. Once again, fuck it we ball.

I’ll answer your questions as I normally would to model NPZ usage, but I’m sure things have changed in recent months. You’re welcome to write back in with a little blurb about how your situation turned out if you’d like to update us!

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Q1:

Hi, Penelope!

I’m EchoesOfHeart, and I was born on April 25th, so that makes me a Spirit (ghost)! My pronouns are she/her, and I am 22 years old.

It’s a bit awkward for me to ask this, but do you have any advice when it comes to opening up your heart to the idea of dating and falling in love? I have never fallen in love before and the idea of being vulnerable with someone like that is terrifying for me. I’m usually pretty open, so I don’t know why I have this fear of romantic love specifically.

I know that I will (inevitably) be hurt during my first relationship or that I might hurt them. Even with friendships and families, there is always a time where we hurt each other, both intentionally and unintentionally, and relationships are the same. I know, I KNOW this, but a part of me tells me, “If you know, then why bother? You really want to give someone that power over you?”

I surround myself with books, movies, and music all about love (both happy and sad), and I desperately want to feel it someday, regardless of whether I get hurt or not. Unfortunately, my heart tells my brain “no! :(” whenever I do get the chance with a good person I like.

Please help, love you lots!

EchoesOfHeart

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A1:

Hello EchoesOfHeart.

I’ve actually also been giving thought to the puzzle of romantic love recently. I think you’ve already touched on a big part of this, which is the problem of giving up control. Your sign Spirit (ghost) is about the magic of things that are greater than the sum of their parts. It sees divine forces like love as epiphenomenal, emerging out of various layers of our reality but belonging to no one in particular. To your question about how to remain open to love and vulnerability when you are acutely aware of your anxiety towards it, the Spirit (ghost) reminds you that no one choice will make or break your fate. You don’t need to force yourself to feel a certain way or worry that you’ll sabotage yourself, you only need to maintain some level of spiritual harmony in your life. By this I mean, try to make little decisions consistently that align with your dreams for yourself. You want romantic love and to transcend your anxious avoidance of it - alright, is there a small choice you can make today to raise your tolerance for anxiety? Can you choose to follow your passions in a small way today, even though you’re afraid, so that it will be easier tomorrow? Magic is made of so many little decisions. You might contain fear, but you are not your fears.

Your complement, the Spirit (angel), cautions you against black and white thinking. She knows from personal experience that perfect purity does not exist in reality; to truly love your loves in real life, you must get messy. This is true for anything that is deeply precious to you, including individual people and the concept of romantic love itself. Your neighbors Naiad and Seal double down on this message and advise you to try to get more comfortable living in the grey area. They remind you that reality is fluid, a technicolor messy sea of blurred boundaries and natural structures, and you have limited control over how things will turn out. You might change your mind about your romantic desires. You might not change your mind and get exactly what you want, and still feel afraid sometimes. You might make mistakes in your relationships. You might get into a relationship where you and your partner hurt each other, and look back on it years later as an overall positive learning experience where nobody actually did anything wrong. When we think about our branching potential futures, we sit on a sun-warmed rock in between infinite worlds. This rock is actually where we live, and where we will continue to live, so it’s important to make sure that the rock is well-kept and that we are making it a pleasant place to be.

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Q2:

Hello! I am Mint, He/Him, I am a ghost (march 18th), and am struggling currently. My long term partner of nearly four years now (he/they) (I’m unsure of his zodiac placement, but he was born sept 25th so I’m guessing somewhere in the latter part of the wheel) is also relevant but that’s later.

Upon rediscovering your music recently (I have always enjoyed it, but I managed to miss the release of Water Dogs until just a short while ago, and I’ve been adoring it) I immediately resonated with Spirit before even learning about the NPZ. It nearly made me cry with how strongly it stuck with me. I’m sixteen years old, and newly medicated for my depression and OCD for the first time in my life, and it’s changing my entire world. I didn’t know I could feel this way. And it sounds silly, but I think that new medication linked up perfectly with me listening to Spirit for the first time and brought forth a ‘spiritual awakening’ of some sort (funny how that works). I think it’s like you described in your diagram about Ghosts, physical changes (medication) allowed me some new possibilities on the spiritual level, and I feel hope for the future and am enjoying the life I have now more than ever before. I feel like I have the ability to be happy and grow up into a person with a life.

My problem is that I think I need to break up with my partner. This has been an issue pressing on my mind for a long time now, years even. I broke up with him once in 2022, but that only lasted about a week. I don’t think he’s a bad person, but I do think he has problems that make our relationship unhealthy, and even though there’s good days it makes me pretty miserable. I have no idea how to communicate this with him though, and I’m almost certain that if I end things he will do something drastic (whether it will be an implosion or explosion I’m unsure, but either way it terrifies me). This has been hanging over my head for probably too long, but the introduction of medication has made me feel that much more like I just have to, and then my ‘spiritual awakening’ only solidified that.

I feel like saying ‘this song makes me want to break up with my partner’ sounds completely ridiculous, but it’s true (on some level). More accurately probably, the tangible problems in our relationship and my life has been something that I’ve just been ‘living with’ but I’m coming to the realization that I don’t have to.

Sorry for talking so much !! I love what you’re doing here <3 -a very minty ghost

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I rescind my previous email. I keep forgetting that April is not before March. Not even the first time I’ve made this mistake. Don’t know how that happened and I feel a tad ridiculous </3 so sorry. You can still respond if you like but I feel like this messes with a lot of what I said :( I guess this means I’m a mermaid ? Doesn’t feel right though

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A2:

Hello Mint,

First of all, congrats on your spiritual awakening! It sounds like you are a Mermaid like me, but it’s not at all odd for you to identify with the Spirit (ghost). I do too. The NPZ is a tool, not a mandate, and if a certain archetype jumps out at you then there’s no reason to try to force a different metaphor instead. Furthermore, I often write about the twin spirits with my personal experience with OCD in mind, so no surprise there either. Anecdotally, I find that theory of mind seems to be very important to people with OCD. I think that the Ghost vs. Angel paradigm is kind of a way to work through competing theories of mind, and the Angel specifically is a direct attempt to engage with contamination anxiety of all kinds. The Mermaid too is coherent with an ERP worldview, insofar as she is a constant sorter who resists convenient sorting. She’s the kind of creature who is constantly aware of branching paths in all directions, and in order to find peace and joy she has to come to understand that this fractal pattern comes from her and moves as she moves. She will never reach “the end”, and she must learn to “live in the grey”, as they say.

Anyway, onto your question.

Finding some level of harmony in your life is, of course, a gift, but it does often come with some level of grief and scary change. It is totally normal to outgrow relationships and behaviors – everybody knows this – but it still feels different when it’s happening to you.

It sounds like you know how you want to proceed here (although I’ve put off this horoscope for so long that it’s possible your whole situation has changed, lol sorry) and you’re just concerned about the fallout. The Mermaid, as always, knows that things can be divided and conquered, but only to a point. She cautions against the mistaken belief that you can fully map out consequences and know the future. You can’t see that many steps ahead – you can actually see zero steps ahead for certain – so focus on what’s immediately before you and leave the rest to the fog (or in our case, ERP).

Your complement, the System/Machine, advises you to step outside yourself for a moment and consider the larger network at play. If you weren’t yourself, what would you recommend you do? If it weren’t you, how would you recommend you communicate your desire to breakup to this other person? How could you be compassionate, but clear and direct, in a way that frees them up to manage their own experience without ambiguity about your desires? Sometimes kind flowery language is appropriate, and sometimes it’s kinder to just be as honest as possible. Only you can know the right balance in this case.

Your neighbors, Dog and Ghost, want you to protect your animal body and your environment as divine entities in their own right. As you go through difficult situations, how can you do your best to demonstrate respect for your Dog self and your Spirit self? When your body becomes agitated and stressed, and when your low level behaviors become unfocused and erratic, or depressed and lethargic, how can you show yourself care to maintain your newfound spiritual alignment?

Good luck, or if you’ve already cleared this hurdle and are onto the next, well done.

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Q3:

Hello NZP,

I don’t quite understand what you’re about, but your latest album makes sense to me. Really an ode to girl and womanhood. My birthday is on the 9th of September, pronouns are he/him, and I’m anticipating a big change in my life. My question for the NZP is: Will my relationships at home last when I move to my other country?

Thank you so much, best wishes,

Pk

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A3:

Hello Pk,

Your NPZ sign is 6: the System/Machine. The Machine sees the world in terms of patterns and paths that are made up of largely interchangeable entities. She evaluates social systems from a morally neutral position, and doesn’t really pay attention to the individual. To your question about how your relationships will change when you move to another country, the Machine asks what you want, and what a system that creates such an outcome would look like. She advises you to imagine that somebody else was in your shoes, and then consider what they could practically do to create a system where your preferred outcome is likely.

Your complement, 2: Mermaid, cautions against black-and-white thinking. She identifies the binary of your question - 0: My relationships do not last when I move vs. 1: my relationships last when I move - and offers you the possibility that this is a simplification of the truth. Are there more possibilities? Might your relationships change character without disappearing?

Your neighbors, Woman and Spirit (angel), are a powerful combination, both particularly concerned with a person’s narrative about themselves and the power this story has. What is the story you tell yourself about yourself? Is it helping you make meaning in your life and pursue your passions, or is it clipping your wings and cluttering your path with noise? Stories are tools, and when they work they’re great, but when they aren’t working, it’s okay to let them go and just find out what is “real” as it happens.

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Q4:

Dear Penny,

Hiya!

I’m Abby (any pronouns) and my NPZ is Woman (August 10).

I wanted to ask for advice on a relationship with my boyfriend (he/they, Dec 27)

We have been dating for almost a year now and haven’t really told my parents yet :P My mother has been getting very suspicious of me since I open my phone to text him good night. I have already lied to her that I’m texting the group chat but I know lies can get bigger until it’s obvious the lie is there.

We’re both out to my parents. My parents have made pretty good efforts to be knowledgeable about both of our identities. We don’t intent on telling his parents because they don’t want him dating until high school (we’re both the same age I just got in before him)

Because we’re both extremely indecisive, we wanted to ask you. So should we tell them? If so, should we tell only a specific parent (they’re divorced)?

Thank you for your time :3

Bestest well wishes, Abby Penny

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A4:

Hello Abby,

I’m answering these questions as if they were just sent to model NPZ usage for my readers, but I’ll bet there have already been developments in your (and other peoples’) situations. Feel free to write back in with a little blurb of how this all turned out!

Let’s dive in. Your sign, the woman, deals with the unbridgeable, magical distance between the tapestry of stories about ourselves and our actual, real self. She is concerned with the absurd, unknowable parts of ourselves as individuals - which are mysterious even to us. Your boyfriend’s sign, the Un-Seal, has a similarly mysterious internal world. The woman is constantly told how she ought to be and what she ought to do, whereas the blatant absurdity of the un-seal is apparent to all who see it. You have in common your distinction from the stories about you. The woman urges you to avoid structuring your life and your relationships in terms of what others might say, and to focus instead on what is real to you.

Your complement, the dog, asks you to consult your body. What feels safe to you? What feels fair? What options here make you feel social, happy, seen, and loved, and what options make you feel cagey, defiant, disrespected, or hurt? Those instincts might help you decide who to confide in and why.

Finally, your neighbors, seal and machine, ask you to take stock of your situation in a practical, good-enough way, and choose your path according to what you think will make your preferred outcome likely. What do you hope to get out of telling a parent about your relationship? If you set aside what you wish would happen for a moment and think about the situation as if you weren’t in it, what actions do you think would make your best-case scenario likely? That’s a more machine-heavy read of your chart - to get more into the seal logic, I’d say take stock of the situation and try to consider it without any “shoulds”. What is real here? What is happening and how do you feel about it in your body? Get back to boilerplate sense data, and let it guide your practical choices.

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Q5:

he/they, jul 9

Is there a specific reason for the aesthetic of each horoscope? like life experiences from each of the timestamps? Did you write the songs because of the aesthetics, or the aesthetics because of the songs?

-eye socket

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A5:

Hello eye socket,

Good question. The aesthetic guides for each sign are to help illustrate the vibe of each one. The NPZ is meant to be a tool to help guide creative flow and flexible decision-making. It borrows from theory of the collective unconscious, from astrology (obviously lol), from religion and spirituality, and from ERP. It then tries to make these tools from all these different fields beautiful and intelligible in our modern moment. So because the signs aren’t entities that I can concretely nail down and define, we have the aesthetic guides to help paint a picture of what each one is like.

As for the album, the songs came first for me, and they are only loosely coupled with their signs. The math of Water Dogs and the NPZ is coherent and while I think that’s neat and feels significant, they are ultimately separate endeavors. The point of Water Dogs is to be fun, ensouled music that means something to people. The point of the New Pinniped Zodiac is to give myself and others a beautiful and interactive model within which to find useful insights and inspirations that we can take, play with, and then apply out in the real and messy world. Each song is related to its sign, but not because I planned it that way, just because both designs came from a similar place, spiritually speaking.

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Q6:

how to segue a lot of this soooooo,,, I’m 14, my birthday is May 19th, and I use they/it (though I call myself a gay man/boy often)

I lost my dad in November 2024 (semi-unexpectedly, he was 70+) and I’ve been feeling very… spiritually disconnected from him. I’m having a lot of trouble remembering anything to do with him. I’m also moving to back to a city I lived in 5 years ago, which also happens to be where all of my father’s friends are. They all want to be a para-father-figure to me (T-T). I hate being around them, but I don’t know if I should just let it happen, as theyre all very close to death. I barely think about my dad, but I don’t think I’ve ‘moved on’ (bc I can’t remember a lot) and idk if I should just let the old men do what they want. Idk what to do and I hope the NPZ helps <3 Sorry for making a text wall -_-;

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A6:

Hello my dear,

I’m sorry for your loss. What a difficult thing you are going through - I hope it all gets easier.

Your sign, the seal, deals with reality. She is uniquely comfortable with the distance between our perfect little models and what is actually real - it does not concern her. She is practical - a true friend to engineers and only a tentative ally to scientists. She advises you to disabuse yourself of ideas about what your reality should be and try to accept it for what it is. So you are here in this complicated situation surrounded by people behaving in weird ways, and you don’t know exactly what’s expected of you. You also feel disconnected from your dad, but it sounds like you may not know how you feel about this experience of disconnectedness. Before you do anything else, the seal celebrates your ability to name these uncomfortable experiences, and to be honest with yourself about your feelings of ambivalence and confusion. She sees that you are not misunderstanding a clearcut reality, but instead you are correctly assessing a very strange and difficult situation as exactly what it is: strange and difficult.

Your complement, the un-seal, deals with unresolvable paradoxes and unknowable truths. Let’s talk a little bit about the un-seal. The un-seal is not understood. This is not something that happens to her, but actually a property that she has. She is not really fathomable. It’s her nature to be outside of our grasp, outside of our control, but that doesn’t mean that she means us any harm. She’s kind of like an eldritch horror in that way - she may play by rules we don’t know or understand, but that doesn’t make her an enemy. It just makes her a blindspot. Under the right circumstances, she could even possibly be a friend.

It sounds like you are facing multiple unresolvable puzzles. You are specifically concerned with the puzzle of how you should act towards your dad’s friends. Death underscores your entire predicament here, and death is the big unknowable truth in all of our lives. Since it’s such a major part of your question, it’s no surprise that you’re unsure of how to proceed. And just like the seal-centric analysis, the un-seal centric analysis of your situation is this: you aren’t failing to see the right path that you should take, you are clearly seeing that there is no one right path.

Your neighbor, the Spirit(Ghost), asks you to put high-consciousness questions on hold for a moment and take stock of your environment and your basic habits. Are you able to take care of yourself right now? In this incredibly crazy time in your life, are there small, manageable steps you can take to make your daily environment a little bit better? Big questions about what you should do and who you want to be rest on top of lower-level layers of your reality, and big life changes jostle these lower-level layers. Try to take stock of these basic layers and tend to them in mundane ways throughout your day. Your neighbor, the Woman, asks you to let go of stories about yourself that are no longer serving you. Big, universally recognized life events like grief are hotspots for stories, because so many people write and speak about them. It can be useful to find community in stories about what you’re going through, but the woman reminds us to never hold ourselves too tightly to the standards that stories set for us. She knows that there are always aspects of the individual experience that stories will not capture, and that this is a limitation of the story, not of the individual experience.

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Q7:

Hens (the system) they/them/heart/hearts

Hi, I guess my problem is very simple as is vague . All my friends are getting into romantic relationship and I am feeling left behind, it’s in the small things you know? We had movies that we were going to watch together and now they are watching them without me, in sleepovers I am left on the sofa and they are talking in a share dialect that I do not speak.

I am aroace , and I can’t help but feel that I am going to die broken and alone, that I am being excluded of something human.

I feel alone and I can’t tell my friends cause they will tell me I am too dependent on how other people treat me or that I just don’t get it.

Sincerely, A hive .

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A7:

Hello Hens,

I see levels to your predicament. First, there is your desire for companionship, and then, there is the distinct concern about feeling disconnected from your friends in this experience. Your sign, the system, always tries to evaluate problems on the level of the organization, not the individual. A friend group is itself a complicated living system, and it sounds like you are experiencing a shift in the dynamic as your friends pursue their romantic relationships. The network in which you all participate is changing. Just because change is normal and healthy, that doesn’t mean it’s not uncomfortable.

Your sign reminds you that relationships are a combination of work and fate. She advises you to imagine your predicament as if you were not yourself. If you were somebody else looking at your situation from the outside, what would you recommend? What specifically do you want from your friends, and how can you make it likely that you get what you want? If you took shame and anxiety out of the equation and imagined a dream friend group design where everybody got pretty much what they wanted, what would that look like?

Your complement, the mermaid, cautions you against letting your anxious analytical mind get ahead of itself. It seems from your question that you are thinking too many decision-branches deep in the future. You miss the connection you used to feel with your friends and you’d like to get it back - that is a current experience. But then you let these negative feelings create a whole chain of painful if-thens:

I miss my friends -> it’s because they’re all in on the romantic world together and I’m not -> I’m missing out on some big important thing -> I’m excluded from the human experience -> I’m going to die broken and alone

!!

whoa! That was like four leaps into the future, and it was the least pleasant leap each time, no wonder you feel upset. You’re living in a bummer simulation constructed by your anxiety instead of in the reality where your friends actually live. Sure, it’s possible that you won’t be able to connect with your friends again, but it’s also possible (and more likely) that you will. It’s possible that you’re missing out on something important, but it’s also possible that you’re not missing out.

Also, these binary branches don’t tell the full story - here’s a third possibility in that last one: maybe everyone misses out on some things. Maybe missing out on certain parts of the human experience is itself an important part of the human experience. Maybe if you didn’t experience exclusion and apprehension sometimes, then that lack of missing out would actually be a much more isolating experience. You can’t know these things for sure, so don’t put yourself in future-tripping anxiety jail. Things might actually turn out fine.

Your neighbors, woman and angel, are both concerned with the perils of perfectionism. They ask you to look for places in your life where you are holding yourself or others to an impossible standard, and to try to invite messiness instead. Maybe for you this looks like being open to a version of your friend group that isn’t what it was before. Sure this change might take some adjustment, but if your friends are important to you and you are important to them, then it’s very likely that you can work together to find a new dynamic that works for everyone.

The hard part about things like that is being vulnerable and honest. And just from personal experience, NPZ aside, I can tell you that the worst fights you ever have with your friends are the ones where both of you feel like you’re putting your heart on the line without realizing the other is doing the same. It’s always good to go into hard talks with your friends with the assumption that your friend is good, kind, and cares how you feel. If you really go in with good intentions and with the assumption that they are, in fact, a good friend to you - and they still prove you wrong - then they aren’t a friend after all.