Dear Yesterday’s Horoscope readers,
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APRIL
Your temper is a parasitic polyp biding its time in the nooks and crannies of your being, Virgo. Sure, your temper isn’t always active, but its potential is.
You’ve always had a temper, but with the Personal Growth cocktail of aging, daily journaling, and basically never leaving your home, you’ve been able to keep the frequency of your eruptions to a minimum. What was once a weekly full bodied righteous indignation towards, I don’t know, someone who got in your way during a dinner rush, is now a relatively seldom (but nonetheless bloodthirsty) occurrence.
People are fond of referring to tempers as red hot, but yours can’t be diagnosed so simply. Depending on the catalyst for your particular rage, your temper can take on a multitude of hues. Your seething umbrage is a rainbow, which I suppose makes you the pot of proverbial gold. Don’t mistake my figurative language for praise, Virgo; you’re no prize—and your frenzied displeasure isn’t either.
Just like the Regular You, the Apoplectic You lacks self-awareness. Your fury thinks it's the voice of the people, but it’s usually wrong about that. Your wrath believes it’s courageously pursuing justice, but it’s typically wrong about that, too. Your outrage is yours, and usually that’s who it’s protecting more than anyone else—regardless of what you may defensively say after allowing your temper to wander off and humiliate you.
This month, your dormant venom will unleash itself onto a neighbor for reasons you believe are justifiable and heroic.
Your neighbors have two yappy, sweater-clad, designer dogs that bark in their backyard for hours and hours and hours at a time. Although they live in the building next door, their actions impact your day more than anyone in your actual building—which is saying a lot considering you have a neighbor who arbitrarily expels piercing yells that initially made you think she was experiencing an emergency, but over time you’ve come to realize are somehow just part of her home routine.
Since you work from home and have absolutely no chill, the dog’s relentless yapping has coaxed you towards the precipice of explosion for months. Believing yourself to be a changed woman, you’ve filed noise complaints with the city instead of letting your rage take the wheel.
Despite your initially well-mannered solutions, nothing changes. Days and weeks of constant yapping pass while you white knuckle any nearby surface to avoid emancipating your temper.
Then you get COVID for the first time, and you can no longer deploy all of your energy towards tolerating a constant nuisance. Your week in bed is scored by the dulcet choir of dogs that cost more than your rent, and something snaps. You open your window and scream about the dogs until someone comes out from the apartment and brings them back inside.
This ugly encounter gives you the false impression that bellowing is the best way to appeal to your neighbor’s humanity. So, you continue to yell out the window each time their dogs yap for a disgusting length of time (defined by the noise code as between 5–10 minutes, depending on the hour). Every time, the owner opens the door to let them back inside. You mistake this to mean they approve of your vigilante accountability tactics.
When you're releasing your technicolor scream throat at anonymous neighbors, you incorrectly believe that what you're actually doing is helping your community. In a familiar episode of stalwart denial, you imagine how grateful the people in your building must be for your repeated acts of courage. You martyr yourself, believing the exhaustion that follows each episode of shrieking is the burden you must bear in order to achieve neighborhood harmony.
As usual, you are very wrong about the way your behavior is being received. Your shrieking kicks off a pattern: your neighbors’ dogs bark, you scream at your neighbors to do something about it, and the “something” your neighbors decide to do about it is call the police.
The first time the cops come a knockin’ you are scared and embarrassed, and you commit to being a serene person who calmly processes perceived wrongdoing instead of projectile vomiting your ire. Unfortunately, the barking quickly pierces your shoddy veil of personal harmony and you return to your post to hurl decibels at the building next door.
This time, your neighbor emerges and yells back. You scream vulgarities at each other for a few minutes in a true display of what people who don’t live in New York believe livin’ in New York is All About.
The day after the cops pay you their second visit, you host a building tenant meeting to discuss shared issues. A very sweet neighbor expresses her concerns about another person in the building—the one who does the (possibly) therapeutic yelling thing.
“She screams all the time,” your sweet buildingmate expresses. You agree, and admit that it took you a while to grow accustomed to the wails she emits for seemingly non-theatrical reasons.
Your neighbor settles in before her reply. It’s clear she is about to bring news to the group. “She actually yells words, too though. She yells obscenities at the neighbors about their dogs. I think she gets on the fire escape and just, like, shrieks at them.”
Well, well, well, Virgo. All this time, you thought you were the voice of the people, fighting the good fight for building-wide serenity. Alas, you—not the dogs—were the one poisoning the peace.
Very rarely does the opportunity to listen to someone’s unmitigated opinions of your behavior arise. Although this moment mortifies you to your magmic core, a part of you covets this unusual moment of unadulterated honesty.
Once you finish soaking up this piercing truth, you’re faced with a dilemma. Do you allow an innocent, absent neighbor to be socially punished for your mistakes? Do you fess up and risk everyone leaving your apartment, too scared of you to ask for your signature cookie recipe?
Perhaps due to the excitement and relief of being bathed in someone’s unfiltered commentary, you come clean. Much to your relief, your confession is bizarre enough to entertain the group instead of making them want to avoid you indefinitely. Miraculously, someone even invites you to a barbeque!
I’m happy that you may one day attend a barbeque, Virgo, but I’m afraid the kindness of the people in your building will get in the way of you learning an important personal lesson. Sure, you’ve stopped yelling at the local, lunatic dog owners, but it isn’t out of any sort of learned value or commitment to Really Change This Time. When self-preservation is the impetus for being less monstrous, the results are a little less impressive.