Ring, Ring, Wrong
Week October 19th to October 25th, 2021.
You’re a big Phone Talker, Virgo. Always have been. A widely kept secret is that phone talking is passed down genetically. Phone talking is your bread and butter. It’s the only way you can coax yourself into cooking, house work, or Mental Health Walks. This week, your worst nightmare happens: You learn that your favorite thing to do? It annoys people.
By your age, most human beings are somewhat able to shrug off critiques of their habits (even personhood!) if they recognize those aspersions to be incongruent with how they know and see themselves. It’s always healthy to let in some critical feedback, but I guess what I’m saying, Virgo, is that most grown adults need to be able to filter feedback into two categories: something helpful that can help them grow or something hurtful that is best left ignored. You mainly inhabit the former camp, Virgo.
Immediately upon hearing even the slightest criticism, you forget (accidentally!) your foundation of confidence and self love, and the many months you spent with that therapist (who always drank an iced coffee and crossed her legs in a cool attitude-y way which mistakenly led you to believe she was your best friend and not a person charging a very high hourly rate) and immediately believe that if an element of your personality is Annoying to someone, that it is Bad and Wrong.
An added complication to all of this, Virgo, is that you are, like, a consistently annoying person.
The first person you ever loved broke up with you because you were “pretty annoying sometimes.” He was right, but that isn’t the point. You took that feedback, which, though pretty true, wasn’t very productive or kind, and internalized it as an unequivocal truth. You thought your Annoyingness (though yes, an indisputable element of your personality) was an innate gospel truth simply because a boy had said it to you.
I realize this example may be a confusing choice on my part, since in this case, the boy was right, you are pretty annoying sometimes (in present day, you pretend every object in your home is an estranged child of your husband’s and you often stage dramatic scenes in which the napkin or scissors or rug confront him about his paternal absenteeism. You think this is fun!).
You operate in a space of Being Constantly Annoying, but you are delusional enough to believe that while you are being annoying, everyone is on board. If someone decries that same list of behaviors that make you feel charming and magnanimous as Annoying, you are no longer capable of holding on to your previous perspective (people can’t get enough of these little songs and chants I make and subsequently beat to death with repetition) and instead are only capable of believing the opposing perspective, that those behaviors are Annoying, and I am Bad and Wrong for doing them.
Though you no longer drink, you’ve managed to grip tightly to the familiar acts of joyously digging your own social grave with your words and actions, yet maintaining a steadfast obliviousness that allows you to believe that the digging will miraculously earn you immense social acclaim.
After many months away, this week you’ll return to an antique store you used to frequent. It was close-ish to your last therapist who famously told you on March 10th, 2020, “I think you’ll be fine, you don’t really come into contact with old people do you? It’s going to be over soon,” and then you never saw her again (she’s alive, just not a prodigious predictor of unprecedented disasters).
After your therapy sessions with the iced coffee queen, you’d call a friend (god forbid you further process the soul searching of the previous 45 minutes, Virgo, no no, bury it as fast as you can) and walk to the antique store. You’d browse their several floors of gaudy, exorbitantly priced wares, while you caught up with whichever lucky soul answered the phone that day.
You hyped up this return to the shop perhaps a little too much in your head. You’ve moved, and it now takes a few trains and a few transfers and a little walking to get there. Once there, you’ll try to reconnect with your ol’ stomping grounds, the place you used to feel so safe to browse and explore and be. Only this time, there’s a new decoration on the wall. Not a weeping clown statue or an antique abstract painting that makes you understand why people were grumpy with that for a while, but instead a sign. Many signs, actually. Printed on typical printer paper, times new roman font. The kind of sign you make when you desperately need to get a point across, but you’re at your wit’s end, rendering you unable to do it with any sense of panache. The signs read, “Take your phone conversations outside!!!!!!!”
You can’t help but feel personally attacked by this sign, but then you remember that four million people live in Brooklyn, and that there may be a few other phone talkers in your midst. You walk further into the shop, and spot another sign, sporting the same, desperate type. Your encounter with the second sign isn’t proof that this policy is about you, but you certainly receive it as such.
Just as you are about to dive into a spiral of, “Am I the center of the universe? The reason for the changing of the tides? The phone talker who went too far?” the owner approaches you and literally tells you that you have to leave. That they are not open, and that you misunderstood their decision to have many doors open to the outside, and a sidewalk full of items for sale. Another employee looks down at his computer and says, joylessly, “Have a good day.”
You’ll leave, befuddled. Shocked and curbside, you’ll be forced to reckon with what has occured.
Two competing truths about yourself make the reality of this situation difficult to suss out.
1) that you annoy most people at some point, often right away
2) that you often imagine yourself as the gravitational pull of all things. That all things are because of you in a good way or because of you in a bad way
It’s hard to determine reality when these two truths exist equally within you. On the one hand, you know it’s entirely likely you were excitedly talking on the phone so many times without buying anything that the antique salesman was driven to such a ferocious madness that he printed signs (without any aesthetic consideration) and deemed you unfit for browsing his shop (even months later, disguised by a new, transformative haircut!). On the other hand, you know you’re prone to imagining you are directly responsible for each change in the universe (if anyone is sad it is because of my actions, etc.).
So which is it? Did you drive a shopkeep to the depths of instability one must sink to in order to make a sign with no flair? Or are you being self centered and assume a problem that has nothing to do you was actually invented by you?
As much as the stars think that it is a little rude to talk on the phone at length in a quiet place, it’s also very clear from where we’re sitting (up very high, overcast) that this sign is about a trend of behaviors and not just you specifically. Did it seem suspicious that you were literally asked to leave the antique store without any professional pomp and circumstance? Yes. Does that mean you are the reason the wind blows (and also the wind itself)? No.
The stars actually like that you’re annoying, Virgo. We certainly think it’s more interesting than the self absorbed, “I am why all things happen” version of yourself (which is technically also just annoying but in a worse way).
Don’t forget how much you love annoying girls, too. Remember that like, ten year old girl you saw at the MET last year who kept pretending she was in each painting and would say a line of dialogue from each scene in character to her cackling friend? You loved her! She was definitely annoying, just like you!
As annoying as you are Virgo, the stars hope you don’t recalibrate your personality too much and morph into someone who, say, goes on a dating reality TV show and says, “I just want to find someone I can have deep conversations with.” What absolutely groundbreaking topic have these people been waiting all their lives to talk about? What is going on there!
The Skies Insist:
That you listen to Leader of the Pack by The Shangri-Las. One of the most annoying elements of Virgo’s personality is her penchant for insisting people listen to this song with her so she can finally have some help dissecting what the hell is going on here. Reader, there has never been a song incorporating candy stores and DEATH in such quick succession.
Additionally, The Shangri-Las boast the best spotify bio of all time:
“...the Shangri-Las were among the greatest girl groups; if judged solely on the basis of attitude, they were the greatest of them all.”
If you take nothing else away from this Virgo, please know that all people should strive to be more like the Shangri-Las (set their own rules for categories of achievement and then be the best in those categories).