Time Machine: Clawed and Defensive
A time traveling trip to Jalapeños.
Happy New Year, Virgo. As predicated by all but you, you are still lying in a bloated state of hibernation hangover and are therefore not in the best mental shape to heed my topical cosmic warnings. As an alternative, please enjoy this trip to the past with a horoscope from three years ago.
DECEMBER 2022
Thanks to a suggestion from a podcast you love, this month you’ll defensively dive headfirst into the complicated world of manicures.
Your relationship to your femininity is always shifting, Virgo. When you were younger, you only left the house once you’d applied six different eyeshadows from shockingly varied locations on the color wheel. As you got older, you hopped onto a pendulum and careened into an era of no makeup, very little hair, and less showering than was wise.
During the pendulum swinging, it’s easy to see the change as organic. It made sense to retire your $200 MAC eyeshadow palette built from many years of birthday presents from your beloved Aunt Debbie. But with the gifts of time and perspective, it’s easier to see that these changes in your appearance have often been in response to specific moments.
For you, these moments have often occurred in a cursed Mexican restaurant chain in the Pacific Northwest called Jalapeños.
Character Defining Trip to Jalapeños #1
After your improv 101 class wrapped up its eight week session, your classmates wanted to go out for drinks. You were nineteen and couldn’t join them in a bar, so you begged everyone to get a table for 12 at Jalapeños instead. As the margaritas flew down the gullets of everyone besides you, a game was suggested: you’d go around the table one by one, each sharing your first impression of each other and how that shifted over the eight weeks of class.
As anyone without alcohol inside them knows, this is the sort of game that’s only good for hurt feelings and stoking the flames of in-attendance crushes. Indeed, the game was a messy affair—but only for you, Virgo. One by one, nearly every single person present told you that their first impression of you was that you were stupid, but over eight weeks of classes they had learned that by golly, you weren’t so stupid after all.
Learning that an army of people who thought you were an idiot eventually determined you were not an idiot was apparently supposed to please you, but it did not.
One person shared their specific ‘eureka’ moment of realizing you weren’t stupid. The moment? When you inexplicably told the people of your improv class the gruesome tale of Olga of Kiev, the 945 AD ruler of Kievan Rus. You didn’t have much respect for this definition of intelligence. After all, anyone would be an idiot not to want to talk about Olga of Kiev, who destroyed an entire village with fire carrying birds because they killed her husband. But merely reciting facts is certainly not a sign of intelligence (ask whatever new guy your friend is dating about the last documentary they saw and my point will prove itself).
Even though you didn’t exactly view the group as the height of cleverness, it still didn’t feel good to have eleven adults agree that at first, you seem stupid (unanimously so).
Character Defining Trip to Jalapeños #2
One year after the first incident, after another improv class, another improv classmate angrily accused you of “dressing like a teenager.” At the time, you had only not been a teenager for about eight weeks, so although the insult still stung, it did feel a little hollow.
Character Defining Trip to Jalapeños #3
Another year later you ate dinner at the cursed restaurant with a group of mostly strangers for a friend’s birthday. After ordering drinks, you made what you thought was a relatively PG joke about your sex life which inspired one of the other dinner attendees to call you a slut. You’d never been called a slut (to your face) before, so you were pretty shocked at the comment (but not entirely shocked that it was happening. After all, this was Jalapeños—a place for unsolicited criticism).
If anyone is dying for a new reason to be concerned with the state of publicly funded education, just know that the woman tossing the “s” word around was an educator! A person who thinks it’s okay to call a woman a slut at all but especially before anyone has even ordered dinner does not seem particularly suited for a job in which they shape young minds.
The obvious takeaway from these three terrible dinners at Jalapeños is that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, so the only possible solution is to do whatever suits you since you’ll be poked and prodded ad nauseam regardless.
Would that woman have refrained from calling you a slut if you’d been wearing a smokey eye? I doubt it! Would that local real estate agent not have insulted your clothes if you were wearing a different outfit? No!! Would your improv classmates have thought you were a genius if you didn’t always have a full face of makeup, spiral-curled hair, and tight outfits intended to garner the attention of Tyler, the improv 101 heartthrob? Probably not!
Despite many years of telling yourself that the way you present yourself has no bearing on your feminism or intelligence, a lifetime of people giving you their unprompted opinions about your appearance/being can be hard to shrug off. Which is why I’m a few hundred words into a horoscope about getting your nails done and I’ve yet to make it out of Jalapeños, the best Mexican restaurant chain to visit with a young woman you’d like to offend.
For all these complex reasons it can feel almost dangerous to change up your look—especially when the change ushers in elements that are more traditionally feminine. The manicure you have in mind for your holiday tidings initially feels pretty risky. You want to get gel extensions, which attach to the tip of the fingernail and allegedly transform you into a new person. Even through your eagerness to sport a pair of Fresh & Sexy Hands™, you’re also mentally preparing to defend your look when you inevitably receive gratuitous feedback about it.
Most people know they shouldn’t tell a woman they’d look better with bigger boobs, but plenty of people feel comfortable telling women they look better without makeup or hair dye—there’s practically a whole sub genre of music devoted to it!
As you leave the nail salon you’ll stage imaginary fights with people of all ages and genders about your hard-earned (the appointment takes like two hours) Fresh & Sexy Hands™. You’ll accuse these imagined enemies of “being too much like Drake” and other, lesser insults (like that they’re misogynists).
Once the initial defensiveness wears off, the nails begin their internal transformation. They awaken in you the desire to explore your femininity even further. You race to the underwear shop in your neighborhood and try on every push up bra available. At one point you’ll proudly exit the dressing room and announce to all present that you’ve found the push up bra of your dreams. Your exuberance puts the store owner in the uncomfortable parade-raining position of telling you that you are very obviously wearing the bra inside out.
The yearning for glam won’t end there. Suddenly you’re a hot shot who brushes their hair in the morning, wears makeup more than once a week, and proudly purchases a pair of long velvet gloves for an aspirational and unspecified future affair.
So far no one has mocked your new look (to your face). This may be in part due to the fact that Jalapeños has yet to open any locations on the East coast, leaving your community with no obvious destination to bring a woman they’d like to criticize.
In the time between now and whenever someone mocks the limited mobility of your stylish—albeit grown out—nails, work on your immunity to the unwelcome feedback of the world around you. Are a sweaty pack of improv 101 students the best judges of intellect? No! Is the woman who accused you of looking like a teenager two months into no longer being a teenager someone whose opinion you value? Certainly not! Does that wretched educator have anything to teach you beyond her lived example of How to Be An Abomination To Her Gender? Certainly not!
It’s easy to look back and laugh that people whose opinions you didn’t ask for or value were somehow still able to hurt you with their opinions, but without a keen eye and a hint of vigilance you may accidentally let a rude comment from a present-day monster creep into the way you see yourself. There are no ways for women to avoid scathing criticism for simply wishing to be alive and respected, so you might as well glue on some fun little claws and shove up your boobs if you feel so led.
Luckily, there’s no better time to interrogate your relationship with your femininity than the holiday season, Virgo. So grab some tinsel with your little dagger hands and curse the memories of all who’ve crossed you at Jalepeños or elsewhere. Happy holidays, Virgo!
I have such a complicated relationship with beauty/femininity (aka I am a woman), but this line really killed me: "This may be in part due to the fact that Jalapeños has yet to open any locations on the East coast, leaving your community with no obvious destination to bring a woman they’d like to criticize." lololol