My blog is not predictive, nor does it deal with mundane events. It deals with how astrology affects people- specifically one person, me. This is partly because I don’t feel I have the adequate abilities in mundane astrology, and partly because doing mundane astrology would turn me into a paranoid freak. And it’s also because I’m very much in favor of dealing with the things that are explicitly in your control, because certain events are for the most part out of our control, and it only fosters guilt, frustration and despondency to worry constantly about how we could be part of the problem because we’re not singlehandedly rushing in to stop it. Even without looking at World At Large events, I think a lot of people are going to find that Uranus’ entry into Aries will bring huge personal changes, significantly enough for enough people that we will see ripples of collective change. When I think about the typical associations of Uranus and of Aries, I immediately think of difference, of initiation, of independence, of high electricity. There is simply no context for what we were doing before, and as such, wherever Uranus affects our natal charts is going to be strikingly different from now on. Like I said- there’s no going back.

Uranus is no longer in my 10th House. It feels like such a relief to add “Uranus is no longer in my 10th House” to my catalogue of statements of relieved finality, like “I don’t have to take precalculus anymore,” or “I am no longer a virgin.” (Incidentally, transiting Uranus was on my natal Venus when I lost my virginity. Okay, okay, Dr. Freud, you win.) Because seriously, having a full 10th House natally is hard enough, but try having it constantly electro-shocked by Uranus for about nine years. Even though I’ve always been and will probably always be preoccupied with achievement, it was never just a pedestrian “get good grades, get into college, get job, rinse, repeat” kind of preoccupation. For me, more than just doing well, it’s always been imperative that I am DIFFERENT from everyone else. That I am NOTICED by teachers and professors and bosses and superiors. That I am EXCEPTIONAL because I am GOOD AT EVERYTHING. And Uranus transiting through my 10th House has over the years both accelerated and challenged that impulse. In many ways that’s been a good thing, such as clarifying for myself that while I’m good at making art and I enjoy consuming art, it’s not my whole identity, and that I don’t actually want to be a career artist, and that art-making serves a different, more private function for me now than I once thought it would, and that that realization doesn’t have to be the jarring soul annihilation that every other artist I know who cannot be friends with you if you are not also an artist seems to think it is.  But on the other hand, it has at times been slightly disorienting to realize that over the years I’ve accumulated so much information and don’t always know what to do with it. The teetering between everyone publicly marveling at “ZOMG LUCY HOW ARE YOU LIKE SO SMART AND HAVE DONE ALL THIS STUFF” and me privately freaking out because “ZOMG I LIKE TOO MANY THINGS AND I’M NOT GOING TO HAVE A CAREER BECAUSE I CAN’T FOCUS I’M GOING TO GO LIVE IN THE WOODS” has been an incredible psychic drain. But now it’s over. Last July when Uranus went retrograde, I made the decision to go to grad school and take all the necessary prerequisites for the programs that interested me. It was a really impulsive way to start doing something that most people prepare for before they’re even halfway through college, but I just did it. I said fuck it.

And even though I’m doing well in all my prereqs, and discovering I have an affinity for disciplines I never even touched in college, and making really good connections, as the time to actually apply to graduate school looms closer, I am not gonna lie- I’m getting really nervous. Really, really nervous. I mean, of course I am, right? It’s a huge workload and commitment. But this is what I’ve become used to doing. I throw myself into something, only to wonder if maybe there is more and better in some other discipline. I agonize over whether becoming a psychologist will make me too “square,” and if I will still be able to maybe go to Burning Man one day or get an astrology book published or just wear my giant magenta feather earrings and still be taken seriously in the academic community. I worry that if I ever actually become famous, it won’t be for any one thing, that I’ll end up having to be a “personality,” like that lady with the giant glasses who was in all the Old Navy commercials for a while. (Who was that, anyway?)

Uranus loves anxiety and restlessness. I don’t, especially not in my high-achieving 10th House comfort zone. But it’s not there anymore. So I take this to mean that as I said above, there is no going back. I have made a decision, and if I stop and really think about it, I can be confident that it is the right decision. And not only is it the right decision, but the incredible anxiety I’ve felt regarding achievement can finally start melting away. I’ve also noticed that since it left my 10th House, Uranus has also taken on a different shade in my 11th House. Now that I’m more focused in a career path that requires commitment and collaboration, and going further with astrology, and possibly getting ready to relocate, I feel more prepared and open to being around people that are better-suited to me, and to let go of the ones that aren’t. And I’m doing better at attracting those kinds of people to me in recent months. That is very different for me. But this is how it is now, and I want to go forward with how it is going to be instead of clinging to what it once was- even though I didn’t really like that too much.

So even though I had a panic attack last night (although I’m sure part of it had to do with the fact that I had an exam this morning), and even though I acknowledge that my anxiety is totally valid and that I need not chastise myself for what I’m actually feeling, I’ve taken a deep breath and I’m ready to embrace Uranus in Aries. I’m ready to stop using my own curiosity to undercut what I’ve accomplished. I’m ready to do interesting, dynamic and beneficial work. I’m ready to stop depending on people who don’t actually serve me and introduce people into my life who stimulate me. I think I want to get a different haircut.

The transit and the weather may look like end times. But it’s really not end times after all. It’s a beginning.

Since the Uranus retrograde and this whole business about going back to school suddenly becoming a looming possibility, all of a sudden I feel like everything has changed. Yesterday I spoke to this incredibly nice lady in the psychology department of Hunter College, who helped me figure out exactly what non-matric courses I’d need and explained how I can still register for the fall semester. It seems like a much more graspable possibility now. And I think I want to do it.

Oh God.

Reading about the eclipse today, the words “security,” “authority,” “boundaries,” “needs,” and such were thrown around a lot. I think what was jarring about this is the fact that I don’t think I actually have any of those things under control. The eclipse only highlighted this realization since it fell in my natal 2nd/8th-House axis (Cancer and Capricorn, respectively). Sounds comfortable and intuitive? It’s really not, actually.

The 2nd House has traditionally been understood as The Things You Own and Money, while the 8th House is traditionally referred to as Sex, Death and Other Peoples’ Money- definitions which are extremely vague until you actually get a job or lose your virginity. Lately, though, I’ve come to understand it in a slightly different way, with another layer on top. I’ve been calling it the axis of, in purely physical terms, What You Can Control versus What You Cannot Control. Think about it: in the 2nd House, you exert a considerable amount of agency in physically manifesting what makes you feel most secure. You can arrange your Le Creuset pots in size order and only use them to make certain foods. You can open as many bank accounts as you want. You can sleep with your head where your feet should be. In the 8th House, however, your terms become somewhat irrelevant, because external forces that no one can truly control come into play, which understandably make a lot of people very uncomfortable. People die suddenly, and no one knows where they “go.” You come to realize that other peoples’ money has a much higher bearing on your own livelihood than may be immediately apparent, and that as zen as you want to believe you are, money really does drive people apart if you can’t even the score. Sex pulls you into a vacuum of intimacy where you look like An Asshole if you try to treat someone else’s body like your Le Creuset pots. This can also apply in terms of another common association of the 2nd House, self-worth: in the 2nd House, you can feel like a worthwhile human being who deserves to be alive. In the 8th House, your self-worth is totally irrelevant, because there are bigger, heavier, darker forces at work than whether or not you feel bloated.

It’s weird, because in a way, certain elements of Cancer/Capricorn have always eluded me, but at the same time I can see so clearly how they play out in my life. The 2nd and 8th Houses are almost the perfect place for these two signs to be, because for me, having suffered from eating disorders for years, my body (Cancer) has been the ultimate symbol of What You Can Control in all my self-destructive attempts to fundamentally change it. Although I’m coming to a place of acceptance as far as my body goes, and finally beginning to view my curves as an asset and not a burden, I’m also realizing that being secure in one’s own skin still does not necessarily mean being secure in the 8th House (in my case, Capricorn) world of What You Cannot Control. I certainly believe in free will, but I’m still hard-pressed to determine whether understanding/acceptance of forces we can’t control, like sex and death, makes them more or less scary, and whether the unknown will ever stop carrying a menacing sense of threat.

It may sound like a weird segue, but I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of weeks already and I realized that none of my thoughts and preoccupations are ever random, that they all trace back to the same root eventually. Two weeks ago I watched David Lynch’s Inland Empire, which I hadn’t seen when it first came out in 2006 and knew nothing about, and it scared me so badly that I had to sleep with the light on, when I finally stopped crying and had watched like three hours of The Muppet Show to cleanse my brain-palate. Seriously, this movie scared me the way Poltergeist scares little kids. It’s difficult to describe what the movie is about, since it doesn’t really have a clear-cut story or even clear-cut characters. But I think the simplest way to try is that through a series of extremely frightening and disjointed events, a woman comes to realize that she may actually have an entirely different identity than the one she imagined she was living. And the scary part is that for most of the film, she’s living out these different situations but even towards the end, she never comes entirely closer to figuring out who and where she really is. It’s like she’s having a really bad dream, but every time she opens her eyes, she’s still dreaming, and she’s still confused.

I realized that I frequently have dreams with that pattern, where I keep “waking up” and “waking up” and “waking up,” and that I’ve sometimes just stopped and kind of puzzled over how very weird it is to be aware of your sentience and your identity, and how easily one could just not exist. Never had it occurred to me, though, at least not before watching Inland Empire, just how irrelevant identity could actually be in a 2nd/8th House kind of way similar to the one I described above. One’s sentience obviously has meaning, but identity and the details of self-worth are really so arbitrary and subjective. You acquire certain vital 2nd House qualities from your environment, those which are not necessarily innate. But in a larger 8th House context, all those identity markers could just fall away. One could very easily enter an alien and dangerous situation and just become a different person.

And this has become one of my fears. In less than two months, I could be in school again, which would not only be a huge shift in both my daily life and my long-term goals, but I would also have to move apartments to cut costs, and I’d be around an entirely different and unfamiliar group of people, and maybe I would get over my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and lose some weight and maybe my weird anxious skin eruptions that I’ve been having since I’ve lived in this place would stop. In short, I could wake up one morning and have an entirely, frighteningly different life. And in that case, it would be so easy to just change.

Wow, that was significantly heavier than I intended. Sorry, everybody. *awkward silence*

In any event, I’m sure it doesn’t have to be nearly as heavy as I’m making it out to be. I am going to request my transcript and get the ball rolling on this non-matric situation. And then Thursday I am going out of town on another shoot, which will hopefully stop me from thinking too hard about this kind of thing because I will be working. Although being on shoots in small towns and having to check all your identity markers at the door is always a very strange opportunity to just change.

I know this eclipse was supposed to be pretty intense, but does anyone else feel particularly shot full of holes, or is it just me?

For the past couple of years, I’ve been having Uranus transit over my Sun and Mercury in my 10th House. Considering what a high-strung person I was already, with a Moon-conjunct-Ascendant in Gemini, I think I’ve been handling it pretty well. There’s certainly been no dearth of activity and anxiety around work, since that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing non-stop since college graduation, and it certainly accurately reflects how unpredictable my life has become as a result of the career choices I’ve made. In two years I’ve been to every section of the United States at least once, and I’ve been in situations where I’ve taken on two, three, four jobs at once and worked until I thought my head was going to explode. But I’ve been told things like, “Lucy, you are in a league of your own.” “You’re the hardest-working person I know.” “We NEED leaders like you.” So I figure it’s all in a (anywhere from 12- to 20-hour) day’s work.

But I realize I can’t do this for the rest of my life. It’s getting harder and harder to explain to people what it is that I actually do for a living. So in the past few months, I’ve pondered going back to school, but only for something that I know I can USE constructively, where all fifteen of my jobs can somehow intersect. I started to do a little bit of research into different graduate programs, and eventually I decided that I might like to try for a master’s or a PhD in clinical psychology. I thought it’d be perfect- I have first-hand experience observing families and tons of different socioeconomic milieus due to the television work, I have excellent research skills and would love doing field work, I’ve been reading Jung since I was two and my mother is a psychotherapist, I’ve been studying astrology and reading charts for God knows how long, and there’s a whole mess of different careers I could get with that degree that don’t include just seeing clients in private practice. Not to mention that the Jungian Institute, where I would seriously love to study, will not accept you unless you have at least a master’s degree. So after deliberating and narrowing down a few programs, I decided to just go right ahead and see what I would need to do in order to apply.

And now, cue the Uranus retrograde chicken-without-head hysteria. I was under the impression that a lot of people with regular old liberal arts degrees go to graduate school without too much hassle, even if their graduate degree is in a subject very different than their undergraduate focus. It turns out that in order to qualify for a graduate degree in clinical psych in most programs, one would need a minimum of 12-15 undergrad credits in psychology courses, including one in statistics and one in experimental psychology (that is, a lab course). Do I have those? OF COURSE NOT.

I looked at the websites of several different CUNY schools to see if there was any way I could take non-matriculated courses that would allow me to earn the necessary undergrad credits. It turns out I probably could- but since most normal schools (i.e. NOT where I went to college) use very small numbers for their credit breakdowns, I would probably have to take anywhere between four to six different classes in order to satisfy those requirements. Which means- I would have to stop working and go back to “undergrad” for an ENTIRE academic year. Only THEN could I apply to graduate school.

I wish I knew how to type what sound a chicken makes.

As you can imagine, the possibility of having to go back to school is very, very daunting. It would be one thing if I was going straight to grad school. But in this situation, I’d have to take courses to qualify for a program that I STILL might not even get into. I’ve gotten very used to working, and earning my own income, and being responsible for myself. If I were to go back to school, then yes, I’d be taking a certain amount of initiative, but on the other hand, I’d be losing a significant portion of my independence. And, um, call me crazy, but I thought Uranus transiting your Sun was supposed to give you NEW, INSPIRED independence. I talked to my mother about it a little bit today, and she suggested that I move back home to cut back on expenses, at which point I started screaming like Regan in The Exorcist. I love my family to death, but I mean… I have a Sun in the 10th House and a Moon on the Ascendant. I don’t think I would be able to give any serious work I had to do my full attention if I’m put in a situation where I have to sleep in my twin bed from childhood with most of my stuff in storage, and it becomes automatically assumed that I will always be present at dinner. You know what I mean. It just wouldn’t work out. Hell, it barely did when I officially lived at home.

The other hesitation is that ideally I wanted to apply to graduate school for the semester starting fall 2010. So if I were to take the non-matriculated courses I needed and still make that timeline, I would have to do it… fall 2009. Like less than two months from now. Yeah. And that’s only provided that the courses I need still have space, since the deadline for official application was… well, today. I’m not quite sure how I feel about suddenly dropping out of my work circle like that- like, for example, getting a really good job offer in August and having to be like, “DAMN, I’m sorry, I’m going back to school. Didn’t you know?!” And then suppose the school thing didn’t end up working out. Could I return to television with a year-long gap in my work history? Without feeling like an asshole about it, no less?

Now, as you can well imagine, I’m really, really anxious. I mean, I was anxious before too, but anxious in an “ominous music from Twin Peaks following me around” kind of way. Now I’m literally flipping my fucking cookie over this. The next job I have will eat up most of my July, and if I can’t make a decision now, then I’ll come back and have about one literal month to decide if I want to do this or not and make appropriate provisions. FUCK.

Part of me feels like a Uranus retrograde is actually an opportune time to go back to school and get those courses out of the way. For one thing, nobody would expect it. For another thing, it’s retroactively making up for something that I should have done in my actual undergrad. For a third thing, the haste involved certainly fits in with my own self-imposed deadlines for getting a graduate degree. I feel like if I’m going to do it, I have to do it before I turn thirty. I know everyone does things at different rates and different times, but I don’t want to be in school so late and for so long that I’m starting menopause when I’m finally able to use my graduate degrees in my career.

I still need to think it over, but hopefully won’t need too much time to do so. (If anyone else wants to weigh in, I beg of you you’re more than welcome.) And just think, I was feeling so status quo, which I should have remembered is incredibly overrated. In the meantime I suppose I will have to try to be serene, in the best way I know how.