HOROSCOPE: catchup 2/2

Hello my dears, welcome back to the NPZ horoscope. This is our second “catchup” episode and to be honest with you, all I am feeling WACK. I don’t know what exactly is going on with me - probably a combination of things. I’m at that stage of bitterness and low mood where I am actually irritated by sources of hope and comfort, and when I try to follow the guidelines I set forth for myself to keep my life on track, I suddenly find them stupid and annoying. I think, “this is fucking stupid. There are clearly more important things to worry about.” But alas, the important things turn out to be made up of small and mundane things. Can you believe this shit?

Anyway. I’m grateful for your guys’ questions. It’s very good for a person entrenched in some annoying bout of low grade depression to think about other people and their concerns. To interpolate the mother from Mean Girls, you kids keep me young.

Without further ado, let’s get into it.

Q1:

Hi Penny! I’m Eternal, my pronouns are she/her, I’m 15 years old, and my birthday is May 31st, so I’m a seal :). This season of the System is the start of the new school year, and since I’ve struggled to make friends this past year, I’d like to know if the NPZ could tell me if I’ll be lucky or fail miserably in the attempt.

I’d also like to know if I should join my school’s book club to meet new people :).

Thanks ^^.

PD: i don’t really identify as a Seal to be honest, i think i am more like a Dog or a Woman :(.

A1:

Hi Eternal,

I hope school has been going well for you so far. Making friends is hard, but luck rewards those who keep trying. The System teaches us to look at our lives from a neutral, impersonal perspective and find opportunities to make our preferred outcomes more likely. I think joining a book club and other things like that are decisions the System would support, given your stated goal of meeting new people.

To your point about not identifying as a Seal, and instead resonating with Dog or Woman - there are two things to note. The first is that the NPZ is a tool, not a top-down mandate, and you can use whichever lens (sign) calls to you in any given situation. We have assigned signs simply because we are meaning-makers by our divine construction, and some amount of chance keeps us sharp and creative. But if you want to borrow another sign or make a case to yourself for why you ought to be somebody new, it’s no problem. As long as you don’t undermine the legitimacy of the tools you choose to use, you can toy with the game however you like.

The second point is that the Seal is perhaps the most easily misunderstood sign in the zodiac. Before you cast her aside, you might check if you’ve given her a fair chance to speak. The Seal deals with the indescribable nature of things as they actually are, and with an obvious sense of truth that is only accessible when you don’t look too hard. Importantly, she is not the person looking at this truth - she is the truth itself. Clear, actionable, magical. While the Un-Seal is ironically lovable in its horrifying unknowableness, the Seal is eerie in its normalcy. She is the ambassador to reality, simplicity, and truth, none of which are convenient, finite concepts.

If you think about how to make friends from a Seal perspective, she might ask you to take stock of the relationships you already have. What is your social world already like right now? Are there any areas of your social life where you are perhaps being abstract, perfectionistic, or stuck in your head when instead you could choose to really live in reality and form good-enough friendships in the moment?

Your complement, the Dog, reminds you that you are a social animal. Making friends is hard partly because we are social animals who feel very anxious about our relationships. Remember that you already know how to be a friend - you already have those instincts. Your neighbors, Woman and Spirit (ghost) remind you that the story of your life emerges from a tapestry of smaller facts. Be careful not to confine yourself to a story that doesn’t serve you. There are a lot of ways to interpret the tapestry of your life, and you should pick interpretations that help you.

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Q2:

Hi penny! you can call me magic for short. :3 I go by any pronouns but have the slightest preference for she/her. and I am a spirit(ghost), born on may 15.

So, let’s do what I do best and get to the issues. I dropped out of highschool (cuz of my anxiety disorder and a sprinkle of trauma :p ), can’t drive, don’t have a job, and am generally in the middle of so so so many decisions, mysteries, and questions! Such is the nature of becoming an adult... (I assume?..) Now, why am I mentioning all this? Well I can’t seem to get a good foot in the door into any of it! So how exactly do I pull myself together and begin to make progress in the things I want to do? Instead of... you know... procrastinating on it all and waiting for life to solve itself of course. p.s. You are really great at your job and your non job in my opinion. So best of luck in all of your future endeavors! Sincerely, magically unmagical.

A2:

Hello magically unmagical,

The twin Spirits are spiritual and ethical lenses. Your spirit, the ghost, is a version of the soul that emerges from the lower layers of reality. So let’s say we start at your body (even though we could start lower), and then on top of that there’s your social life, and then on top of that maybe there’s the events that you’ve been thinking about lately, and then on top of that let’s say your current consciousness emerges and is your soul, and it’s thinking things like, “I gotta pull myself together and make progress in the things I want to do!” This soul thinks she can make progress by simply willing the progress to happen, but this is actually not how the Ghost works. The Ghost is made of the lower levels, so if you want to really change the Ghost, you must begin by changing the lower levels. It might feel unproductive to start with lower level concerns (take care of your body, satisfy the basic animalistic need for fun and joy, get social time in, keep the living space livable) when your ultimate aspirations are so big and abstract (get drivers license, get job, be phenomenal, achieve dreams etc.) However, this is the order we must move in when the soul is a complex, dynamic organization of matter that arises out of various, less complex organizations of matter.

Your complement, the Spirit (angel), is an alternative version of the soul which begins out there somewhere in the ether and then descends into our reality. This conception of the soul seems different, but her advice is practically similar. The deal with the angel is that she is born pure and must choose to get dirty if she wants to be real. While she starts off perfect, she cannot interact with reality due to her perfection, and she will have to choose to sacrifice it. So, you have these visions for what you want to do in your life, and these dreams hover like angels in the ether waiting for you to reach out and grab them to bring them into reality. But in order to achieve this, you will have to contaminate them. You will have to introduce your perfect abstract plans to failure, cringe, uncertainty, and change, or else you sacrifice them to a dreamscape that never comes to pass.

Sometimes, I think about the complements as Jungian shadow selves. If we were to play this perspective for a minute, I’d say maybe angelic perfectionism is haunting you right now, and this is a chance for you to face it and invite a spiritual growth spurt. It’s ironic, because people act like Getting Your Shit Together™ is about working passionately, locking in, and having a montage study session that fixes everything in forty-eight hours. But in reality, getting your shit together is about the little things, and about being on your own team even when you are… underwhelmed by your own performance at the moment (speaking from my personal experience.)

I will also say, in case it means anything to you, that I frequently question my career path and often feel worried, low, confused, and unfocused about my work. I think that sustained creativity is about doing what you love and what you believe in, alongside anxiety, instead of waiting for it to leave to take action.

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Q3:

Hello! You can call me Locrian, I was born on September 2008, which makes me a machine, I think. My pronouns are he/him.

I’m here to talk about a situation that has been bothering me recently. In highschool, I have some acquaintances who are very enthusiastic Christians, which is not the problem.

The problem is, they’re trying to get me into Christianity when they know I’m an atheist. They ask me questions like:

“Have you ever been to a church before?”

“Have you ever actually understood your mission in a church?”

And when I answer these questions and tell them I’m an atheist, they ask me things like:

“Why are you an atheist?”

“Since when have you been atheist?”

What bothers me is that they clearly do not give a crap about what I think, they can’t understand my belief system. I feel like telling them that I don’t want to be a Christian and that I disagree with what their church preaches, but I fear being rude.

Is there anything the NPZ can help me with?

Goodbye.

P.S. I love Water Dogs, my favorite song is Girl Alone. Can wait to hear what comes next!

A3:

Hello Locrian,

This is a very interesting question to bring to the NPZ.

Your question is deceptively complex. At first, it seems like you’re bothered by your Christian acquaintances prying into your beliefs, but then you say that they don’t actually care what you think, and finally, you bring up your concern about being rude. It sounds to me like you don’t feel like you’re being asked about your thoughts in good faith (pun intended), and it’s entirely possible that you’re correct. Let’s turn to the NPZ.

Your sign, the Machine/System, asks us to take stock of the systematic nature of our problems and see what we can shift to make our preferred outcome more likely. So the System’s first question for you is, what is your preferred outcome? Do you want the Christians to leave you be and stop pressuring you to talk about God? Or maybe, you actually desire meaningful interpersonal connection, and you are annoyed that their bids for connection feel like recruitment instead of genuine conversation. It’s true that some Christians see themselves as ambassadors of their religion, and your acquaintances may not be in a place to have a real, open conversation with you about your actual thoughts and feelings. However, it’s also possible that some of the people you’re talking to are capable of really hearing you.

Before you can decide how to proceed, you need to decide what you want, and if it’s worth the risk you’d need to take to try for it. You mentioned at the end of your question that you worry about being rude, and you seem concerned that if you tell them that you are actually not aligned with their Christian beliefs that they will not take it well. The System asks you to try to consider this part of the puzzle from a perspective outside your own - are they likely to react poorly to your bluntness regarding your atheism? If they react badly, what is likely to come of it? When you consider this risk, you can start to decide how honest you’d like to be in your pursuit of a conversation that doesn’t piss you off, and what goals you actually want to pursue (being left at peace vs. risking unpleasantness to try to talk about your true beliefs.)

I will also throw this question into the mix completely out of the blue, not as any kind of comment on you or your message, but just because I have been spending some time around Christians lately and I was raised completely godless - is it possible that you are a little bit jealous of them, and that that jealousy is causing you to feel a little cagey and antisocial? I certainly feel like that sometimes. And to be clear, I don’t wish I were raised religious, and I don’t wish I were Christian now. I’m perfectly happy exploring religion and spirituality on my own timetable. But sometimes I do feel a little left out around Christians, especially when being Christian is extremely important to them. Sometimes I wish I had a community like that. Sometimes I wish I believed like that. Hell, I’ve got OCD - I’m jealous of anybody who seems to be sure about the truth. And it’s tough to find a place to talk seriously about ethics, shame, hope, and death outside of church. I had to become a philosophy student to find a room like that, and I miss school all the time.

I personally believe in the very William James-core notion that religion (or spirituality, as we’d probably call it today) is a core part of being human, regardless of what specific religion you may adhere to at a given moment. We are meaning makers, it’s very important to us, and when you aren’t a part of any organized religion, sometimes it’s hard to find people to talk about that part of the human experience with. Maybe that’s part of why it’s annoying for you to hear your Christian friends feign interest in your atheism – not only because they’re trying to sell you on Christianity, not only because it hits kind of disingenuous, and not only because you feel caught between the opposing pressures of being honest and being polite – but maybe also because you wish somebody would ask you for real. And to that I say, me too. I wish we all talked about matters of the spirit more. Religious people don’t have a monopoly on religion in the mental sense. We all have divinities and hells to make sense of.

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Q4:

i’m k4y, i’m a Woman, and i’m fifteen. i was born on october twenty-second, 2009. any pronouns work, and i was wondering what my sign says about me in terms of impulsiveness. does it make me more impulsive, and are those impulses good? also i’d like to know if there are any symbols or anything that are attached to my sign.

fame & fortune,

☆•*k4y*•☆

A4:

Hi,

Hi K4Y, badass signoff.

Here’s the blurb and aesthetic guide for the NPZ woman:

The Woman can also be called the First Person or the Man (as in Mankind), but defaults to feminine because the NPZ uses primarily feminine symbolism. The Woman is generative. She is the first computer. She is the mother and the child, the foreground and the background. She is a parsing participant and a parsed subject. Living in the wake of countless nuanced and contradictory stories, standards, and ideals, the Woman is always ironic and yet always genuine. She must define her sense of self against a tapestry of fables, some flattering, some degrading, all smaller than her reality. Each idea of the Woman captures a piece of her essence, but none is capable of telling her fortune.

The NPZ Woman aesthetic is red blood, soft skin, domestic machines, hesitation, courage, imperfect fruits, bows on objects, awkward charisma, quiet moments of growth, lush green forests, lived-in rooms, ambivalent passion, the finite scale of a human life, the gruesome divine, and sets of objects which are curated and arranged in such a way that just by looking at them, you can feel the gentle, desperate soul of the person to whom they belong.

As for your question about impulsiveness and the goodness of said impulses, the Woman has more to do with the distance between her perception and her reality than with any specific truths about her reality. So does your sign make you impulsive? No. But she does advocate for listening to your impulses, and taking responsibility for them. Only you get to decide what you think about your impulses, inclinations, and behaviors. Other people might think they can tell the Woman her truth, but they are mistaken. It’s up to the individual to take responsibility for her own story.

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Q5:

My birthday is Nov. 14, I’m 19, and I am the spirit (angel). My pronouns are they/them.

for my question, i had a large falling out about two years ago and I haven’t found a new circle of friends since then. what should I do to try and make new friends?

A5:

Hello Moth,

Let’s get right into your chart. Your Spirit (angel) is abstract perfection and practical mess. She advises you to open yourself up to missteps and imperfection in your quest for new connections. Your complement, the Spirit (ghost), shows that your high level decisions rest on lots of little lower level decisions. Are you taking care of yourself? Your body? Your daily environment? Your neighbors, System and Not-Seal, are an interesting combination. On the one hand, the System urges you to look towards the divine order of your social environment and see how the patterns are so much larger and more complex than any one person. When you present yourself to the world with genuine desires and vulnerabilities, you give the network an opportunity to meet you and incorporate you. On the other hand, the Un-Seal turns you towards chaos, and the fundamental unpredictability of the future. You can’t know who you’ll meet and how - you can only find out by experiencing it.

Good luck!

(p.s. a little more NPZ advice about making friends in A7!)

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Q6:

Heyy

I’d like to know more abt the spirit, since im one. I got really interested in the npz zodiac and i hope u can help :)

I like listening to ur songs for a while, but i just started getting into the npz zodiac and listening to ur substack.

Luv ya penny, keep it up!

With love and admiration, mintus

A6:

Hii Mintus,

I’m not sure which Spirit you are, but they’re so closely linked it’s good to talk about them both anyway. A lot of what I’d typically say about the spirits I already covered in A2 to “magically unmagical”, so go back for that if you’re curious.

I may have said this somewhere else before, but the twin spirits are basically two different models of the soul. The Ghost is a more scientific model that starts low and works its way up, and the Angel is a more moral, religious model that starts up in some divine plane and descends into our reality. Personally, I’d say I believe more in the ghost, but I have experienced the angel. I also feel like the Ghost is a disciplined archetype who focuses on habits, whereas the Angel works in fits of divine inspiration.

Because the Angel experiences her values and beliefs as coming from somewhere outside herself (“from above”, for example), they take on a glittering mystical quality, but can also feel desperate and out of her control. In contrast, the Ghost’s emphasis on habit and practical change makes her perspective much more stable. Reality is somewhere in between - we have control over some things, and not over others. Sometimes it’s appropriate to see your life as a series of little choices, and sometimes a true leap of faith is required. The twin spirits are complements, not enemies.

✩

Hi!

I hope this letter finds you well. My name is Kitty (he/him), I was born on April 4th, I am 19 years old, and my NPZ sign is Spirit(ghost).

Recently, I moved around 1000 miles away from the place I had lived my entire life. I did not like where I lived, and I love this new place with my entire heart.

The problem I’ve been having is that I don’t have any friends here, and I find myself missing the friends I had a lot.

My partner and therapist have told me to go to local community events, but when I go there’s nobody my age there. In the end, I don’t really want to make new friends. I want my friends. I miss them so much it hurts, and I just want to hang out with them again.

My partner, who I moved with, is currently in school, and has already made friends there. My job does not have me interacting with many people, so I do not have a chance to make friends that way.

Besides having no friends, my Partner’s family has the money to come visit him often, but I don’t know when the next time I’m going to see my family again. I just found out he won’t be staying up here for thanksgiving, and I am going to have to be alone while everyone else I know gets to see people they care about. I’ve been feeling awfully jealous, and I’ve been feeling guilty over that.

I really just feel alone. Like nobody else is going through this, nor does anyone understand how difficult this is for me. I am an incredibly social person, and this relative isolation has been killing me. I’ve started to regret moving at all, despite the fact that I’ve been looking forward to this for years.

Do you have any advice on how to make friends as a young adult not in school? Or how to deal with this type of isolation?

Thank you for listening,

Kitty<3

A7:

Hi Kitty,

Wow, that all sounds really tough. The holidays are hard for a lot of people, and I hope you’re taking care of yourself. People often forget that major transitions are tough on the body and mind even if the transition is a good one. It’s great that you love your new place, but it’s still a big change.

The good and bad news about trying to make friends as a young adult is, best I can tell, that nobody is nailing it. Every young adult I know wants to make more real friends, and none of us are confident about how to do it. So for what it’s worth, there’s not some big secret you’re missing. It appears that this is in fact a defining challenge of our age and generation. Now let’s see what your chart has to say.

The Spirit (ghost) always asks us to look at the little things in our routine. So before you venture out into the world looking for new connections, check in with the basics. Are you taking care of yourself? Are you doing little things every day to support your body, environment, and mind? Sometimes when we have an important goal, we let the little things slip. We can get away with this for a while, but it always catches up to you because the little things make up the big things, and the big things make up the goal.

Your complement, the Spirit (angel) asks you to think about what is truly important to you. What do you consider divine? What makes you feel truly, unironically grateful to be alive? When trying to connect with people who share your values, it’s helpful to really value your values, y’know? And yet, the Angel also cautions you against the age old mistake of sacrificing reality for perfection. Pursue connections rooted in your life passions, but don’t hold yourself or your potential friends to the impossible standard of divine perfection. Shoot for the moon, and be willing to land among the stars.

Your neighbors, Naiad and Seal, remind you to welcome the nuanced messiness of reality. Making friends is hard, and the only way to know if somebody is a good fit for you is to try and find out in real time. There will be plenty of missteps and awkward moments, and many people will not be right for you. That is okay! That is life.

The Seal asks you to be on the lookout for practical ways to meet your friendship needs. Can you schedule a regular call with some people from home? Can you send each other snail mail? What practical actions could you take that might make you feel better? The Naiad empathizes with your position, somewhere between the friends you love and miss and the new community you hope to build in your new home. She reminds you that being between worlds like that can itself be a powerful catalyst for connection on both sides.

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Sign: [Redacted]

Pseudonym: [Redacted]

Question: What is the best way to remain anonymous on the Internet?

Hello [Redacted]

[Redacted]

[More redacted]

[Even more redacted]

Hope this helps!

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