Week of April 19th to April 25th, 2022.
You are prone to interpreting a smattering of likely unconnected events as part of a larger pattern; like some sort of message from the beyond. (Since I deliver you a message from the cosmos once a week, I can understand why you’d be misled into looking for meaning everywhere, but you’re honestly just coming across as greedy, Virgo. One cosmic connection is more than most people get, so please just be grateful.) Your interpretations of these assumed patterns are usually rather superficial; mostly translated into very basic equations like “pattern=good” or “pattern=bad,” and you adjust your behavior accordingly.
It’s ineffective! It’s reductive! But Virgo; it’s also you.
For example:
When you dated three different people named [redacted], you left the third experience certain that there was no possible way for a [redacted] to be your destined companion (though no one can say you didn’t give the name a fair shot!).
On three separate occasions you were out in the world without tampons during high stakes moments of your period, and you were rewarded for this lack of preparedness by kind strangers who provided you with the products you needed (one brought you to her fancy office after you’d asked her for a tampon in the elevator. She told you that you had to be “very quiet” and pulled an unsuitably whimsical tampon pouch from her noble, wooden desk). This pattern, unfortunately, taught you that it’s fine for you to carry a tiny, useless purse, and rely on people with big bags and wooden desks to take care of you.
In addition to your continued efforts to see patterns in the world around you, you also try to stop harmful, gestating patterns before they hatch into ghastly, full-fledged, impossible-to-stop, patterns.
However, it can be difficult to determine what is an emerging pattern, and what is simply an event that has occurred twice.
For example, two days in a row you rejected invitations to do your all time favorite activities (browsing an antique store and eating). You were able to see that this was due to morosely turning inwards on yourself, and righted your wrong by hauling yourself to an antique store, and scarfing down a hot dog (the hot dog was vegan, in case any readers are that particular type of person that need that qualifier before all vegan foods lest they shriek GOTCHA. Much like the time your improv theater posted a photo of you rehearsing improv and a student commented something like, Well, well, well…guess it’s not so “improvised” after all).
In this case, you saw the emerging pattern (sad woman denying herself activities that bring her joy in a self sabotaging quest to make herself more sad) and made a healthy choice to eliminate it before it could be born as a realized pattern (and thus much more powerful).
Successes like these make it difficult to grasp that sometimes two identical events are simply two identical events; with no burgeoning pattern in sight.
This week, two spiders will cascade down onto your bed from your overhead ceiling fan. The spiders are small, which means your scream queen response to them is what we’d call an inverse relationship to their size (though trust me, you wouldn’t have liked it if they were larger, so I’m unconvinced I’m using ‘inverse relationship’ correctly).
To you, if a spider is small that means it’s a baby. And since you don’t utilize the world of information at your fingertips, you’re under the impression that spiders have 4,000 babies at once (untrue, but not dramatically untrue), which means that there are 3,998 spiders left atop your above bed ceiling fan (neglecting, of course, all the ones you’ve surely scarfed up during the night).
You don’t necessarily know if the whole “eating eight spiders in your sleep each year” thing is real, or just something that was said to you at age 14 that you accepted as unquestionable fact and never looked back (like when your friend told you that, psychologically, moving your hands and fingers to music was a tell of someone who is disingenuous, which you have held as an irrefutable truth ever since. So much so that when you tap your finger to music you think Shit, I’m being fake).
You already struggle with above bed ceiling fans, because of a disturbing plot point in season one of Veronica Mars. This may have worked as a distraction for you, inhibiting you from seeing with clarity that the actual threat of an above bed ceiling fan is that it’s, apparently, the perfect place to raise a family of spiders.
I must remind you Virgo, that you only saw two spiders. Sometimes an event happening twice is a brewing pattern, and sometimes it’s just an event that’s happened twice.
This reality (and most reality) means very little to you, as you’ve already determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that above your bed looms a gruesome egg sac riddled landscape; egg sacs so expertly attached to their host that the hostile speed of the ceiling fan cannot affect them.
You’ll assume that this species of spiders is unaffected by high winds and inconvenience—ergo all the more threatening. Or, perhaps, the spider that is laying all these eggs can do so with such speed that an egg sac or two lost to the winds doesn’t even register as an affecting problem; like a delayed train; something irritating in the moment, but ultimately forgotten as the day progresses.
Your bed is too low to the ground to be a helpful platform in spying on the spider community above your bed. And because of the bed, your step ladder can’t quite get close enough to offer up a compelling look above the blades, either. Instead of moving the bed slightly to the side, you’ll just decide to assume the worst: that each and every night baby spiders leap from their bladed crib towards your bed, your refuge, and climb inside of you in whichever way most delights them. Perhaps sometimes it’s your gaping, open gob (though a few are mercifully lost to the never ending stream of drool plummeting from your mouth), other times through your ears, and other times by burying themselves in your skin.
Sorry for being gross, Virgo, though technically since I’m simply relaying your own thoughts back to you, you’re really the one being gross here; don’t shoot the messenger, etc.
It’s difficult to overstate how readily you jump to the worst and most dire conclusions, Virgo. Words like rapid, and instantaneous, come to mind of course, but they don’t nearly scratch the surface of your beady eyed lunacy.
Look, I know it’s gross that two spiders tried to crawl into your bed with you; it’s the place you spend most of your time (I won’t divulge an exact amount to the reader because, despite how it may seem sometimes, I am actually on your side, Virgo). But has it happened since (despite zero intervention on your part)? No! Which means it cannot in good conscience be deemed a pattern.
Sure, patterns are packed with information; we can learn valuable lessons about ourselves when we interrogate both internal and external patterns. But not every sequence of events is a pattern, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes an event is just an event, Virgo—even if it happens twice.
(But just FYI the spider eating thing is totally real.)