Week of March 8th to March 14th, 2022.
You’ve always been a bit slippery with money, Virgo. When it comes to your finances, you are prone to magical thinking. You spent so many years riding the financial waves of the service industry that these self-deceptions started off a little more justified.
In your service industry tenure you had a cherished regular who often tipped $100 in cash for a few beers. How were you supposed to commit to a budget with the scintillating possibility of that man’s patronage?
The mysterious tipper was a man of few words; he mostly kept to himself. He wasn’t one of those regulars who’d get personal with you (like the woman who begged you to never have children after her three year old wasn’t appropriately grateful for the salami plate you handed him), and he wasn’t someone you’d slowly fall in love with (Virgo literally married a regular—the clarification is needed).
A colleague once described the silent tipper as a “mathematician,” but you never found out if that was an earnest description of his profession or a joke about how he spent money so frivolously. You assumed it was earnest, since “accountant” would be a funnier occupation to give him if it really was commentary about his spending.
The mathematician's kindness had the unexpected consequence of emboldening your erratic spending habits. It was the confounding variable in an otherwise simple shopping trip. If you “fell in love” (stop saying that every time you like a sweater) with an item that you couldn’t explicitly afford, an evil little voice would suggest across your neurons, “Maybe the mathematician will come in tonight, and it’ll all work itself out.”
Since leaving the service industry, you’ve struggled to adjust to the bizarre reality that is Knowing How Much Money You Make. The static nature of a consistent paycheck suffocates you from your once cherished delusional air supply. It’s much more challenging to mental-gymnastic your way into excusing outrageous and non-essential purchases when there is zero potential for the intervention of a free wheelin’ mathematician.
You still haven’t quite gotten into the habit of committing your irresponsible purchases to memory—a symptom of denial, I suppose. You recently half-bragged half-martyred on the phone to your best friend that you had “completely abstained from buying clothes for months,” wholly forgetting you had inexplicably bought an entire leather outfit from a furniture store (?) the day before. It still counts as a clothing purchase even if it was bought in an unlikely location, Virgo.
Others have taken notice of your struggles with attempted frugality. This week you will go out to lunch with an unemployed woman and her unpaid intern, and it will begin to rain. This will prompt you to tell the unpaid intern your favorite New York City hack:
When it is raining in New York and you do not have an umbrella, go to any bar or restaurant and ask for a black umbrella from lost and found. There will always be one, and it will always be fun.
You’ll all go on your merry ways, but a few days later you’ll receive a text from the unemployed woman, asking if you could schedule a call. Fifteen minutes after your scheduled phone call, the unemployed woman with an unpaid intern will ring to tell you that your tremendously fun approach to rainy weather should not have been shared with her unpaid intern, since it encouraged dishonesty—which she formally opposes. She fears that your umbrella mischief is actually a symptom of something larger: your “thieving energy.”
She’ll tell you that if you didn’t approach life with such flagrant thieving energy, you’d encourage better fortune. You had never expressly confided in her that you were worried about money, but you often have deodorant marks on your shirts, and that’s a pretty easy way to set yourself up for a world full of people assuming you need some kind of help.
Perhaps as a daily penance for your many years of being unwilling to accept feedback on your abominable choices, these days you try to stay open to outside feedback—even when it’s from someone whose lifestyle doesn’t make sense to you (her unpaid intern moved to New York for that opportunity alone. Just to make sure I’m being totally clear, the “opportunity” was to be an unpaid intern to someone who has no job). You’d like to have more fortune, so you’ll decide to give her condescending way of life an honest try.
To acquiesce to the advice of a person you find ridiculous, you’ll break your fun (it’s FUN!) New York Rule and buy an umbrella (even though there are six hundred thousand orphaned umbrellas sitting in the lost and founds of your city at this very moment). You’ll walk along the sidewalk, turning your $5 deli umbrella in your hand, waiting for a pile of money to fall from the heavens with an encouraging note attached—something small and tasteful like “keep going!” or “thatta way!” The sort of exclamation that Tom Hanks might say if you won a contest in which the prize was Tom Hanks saying something vague and encouraging to you.
As I’m sure is probably clear to those less silly than Virgo, no pile of money appeared, nor did Tom Hanks offer her any praise (though he was just on an episode of one of her favorite podcasts, which is good enough for her).
The skies are happy that you’ve pivoted from your years of stubbornness and fury, but you’ve simply got to find a balance between rejecting any outside perspective and letting an unemployed woman who on more than one occasion took a zoom call at a busy starbucks without muting herself and frequently mentions the apparently legendary wealth of her family and has an unpaid intern call you a thief; energetically or otherwise.
If someone speaks with the morose tone of a time traveling grandson, perhaps consider what they have to say. If someone is fifteen minutes late to a phone call in which they accuse you of being a thief; it may be best to take their feedback with a grain of salt.
Your financial woes will sort themselves out just fine if you just adhere to an actual budget instead of blacking out and buying leather outfits from furniture stores (why was it sold there? Where did you even try it on?) and pretend there will ever be a reason for a mathematician to give you money again.
🖤💰🙂