AUGUST
Happy 30th birthday, Virgo! The skies are happy for you and all, but you celebrate your birthday with a well-documented note of extravagance that I need not write on further. This month has more important events. That’s right, this month you’ll experience a contemporary rite of passage: you learn that a person from your hometown has been sentenced to 18 years in prison due to his role as the “undisputed leader” of a violent hate group that tried to overthrow democracy. You know the one.
You don’t know this man personally, but soon learn that your favorite hometown drive-in is owned by his father. Coincidentally, your second favorite hometown burger joint also made the news this month, but that was for a bacterial outbreak that left many dead.
When a man from your hometown is in the news for fascist proclivities, a community must ask themselves a crucial question: which high school did he go to????
You are uniquely equipped for this task Virgo, not because of your proximity to yearbooks—you’re three thousand miles and a long afternoon in an attic away from finding those—but due to your astonishing network of cousins.
You’re absolutely swimming in cousins, Virgo. In your mind, a first cousin is any cousin you speak to, and by this metric you have four hundred thousand first cousins alone. The cousin dynamics in your family are complicated by the fact that your lineage is prone to decades-long feuds.
Growing up, it was not uncommon to realize a student at your school was related to you, and you’d just never known because of a vendetta no one would speak of. In college, you once finished an improv set in the basement of a stranger’s house (dark years) and a woman approached you and announced she was your cousin. A person less riddled with cousins than you may have felt a surge of skepticism at this statement, but your acute cousin sense told you she was right (she was—you just hadn’t met previously because of one of the aforementioned grudges).
These divisions are not a modern familial problem—they go back generations. Many believe political differences pulling families apart are a contemporary issue, but your family has been comfortably rejecting people due to political differences for decades. Though these reasons feel quite justified in the moment, it can feel a little flimsy generations later when “her grandfather was really conservative” is the reason you’ve never met a blood relative.
Though deep division has made it difficult to keep an accurate tally of your colony of cousins (which unfortunately includes Dick and Liz Cheney…a terrible family to be distantly related to but an absolute slay in two truths and a lie), your known network is sizable—ensuring you have access to many years of regional yearbooks. A fact you plan on exploiting in order to get to the bottom of the central question of your time: where did that leader of a hate group go to high school?????
In most of your known cousin circles, you are the youngest. This partially explains your insufferable personality as well as your initial assumption that your own high school yearbooks would be useless in your fact finding mission. You’re just a baby, after all! It’s a relief to be of no use in this department, since high school is not something you wish to remember in great detail, as you (uniquely) spent those four years being deeply depressed and highly insensitive to others.
You read that the local man convicted of seditious conspiracy (and other crimes) is 33, so you begin some preliminary brainstorming as to which cousins to deputize. Your first instinct is to reach out to your beloved cousin Bryce who is eleven years older than you and is responsible for every good song you knew from age 14 onwards.
You thought you were aware of your mortality, your slow march towards death, etc., but only when you start to type out a pithy message imploring a loved one to investigate the early years of a domestic terrorist do you finally realize: you are the cousin closest to the age of 33. You are the one who should check your yearbook, not the beloved eleven years older cousin.
Despite previously feeling quite confident about entering a new decade, this realization devastates you. One day you are a baby, and the next day you are the one in your family closest in age to a local self-described “sergeant of arms” who tried to overturn a free and fair election. One day you are using your work keys from a local theatre to enjoy an onstage overnight clandestine sexual liaison with a person who will soon break your heart, and the next you are using a deodorant brand simply called “Sure” that you have no memory of choosing. One day you are devouring hallucinogenic drugs and listening to Neko Case because your beloved eleven years older than you cousin Bryce left a fully loaded iPod at your grandparent’s cabin, and the next you are in bed by 9:30 enjoying a show about home renovation.
It’s jarring to notice time passing; but it is perhaps more jarring to realize time isn’t the only detail advancing. You are reminded of Bea Arthur’s monologue in the Golden Girls pilot:
“I was in the teachers' lounge talking to a group of girls in their 20s. Oh, they were so pretty. At that age, you don't even have to be pretty and you're pretty. Anyway, we were laughing and giggling and having a great time, and I completely forgot that I was older. I just felt like one of the girls, and we had a wonderful time. And then I got into my car and caught a glimpse of myself, and I almost had a heart attack.”
Your Almost Heart Attack is perhaps the reverse of this situation, in that you saw a 33 year old in your teacher’s lounge (NPR article) and thought there was an ocean of time between you, only to return to your car (reality) and mentally convulse.
On a logical level, you know you aren’t 22 (nor do you wish to be—that year you didn’t shower very often and got dumped via a GoFundMe), yet you were still convinced that a 33 year old hometown humiliation was eleven years older than you. Even if you accept your mortality and time’s march there will always be some tiny part of you that’s in disbelief. The good news? This disbelief is very common, very human, and therefore very likely to bring you closer to anyone with whom you share those feelings.
For the rest of your life you can enjoy the undoubtedly universal incredulity that your cousin Bryce is not 33 and therefore you are not 22. There will be permutations of the disbelief as you age, but the core jolt will remain the same. The skies recommend enjoying this continued revelation, because what fun would it be to simply Know How Old You Are? Be shocked, Virgo. Allow your internal and external to be at such enormous odds with their realities that you live like a soldier within the Trojan horse who has no idea she’s in a horse—she just thinks the moving wood structure is a crazy little house or something.
Thank you dear google formers for sharing with me the traits you left behind in your twenties. I hope I follow the same positive evolution you all have! If you’d like to say hi in a highly specific way, the google form for this month is here. If you’d like to quietly observe my goings on, my instagram is here. Thank you for reading!