Week of March 22nd, to March 28th, 2022.
You are a pretty forgetful person, Virgo. Not about everything, just about important things—you grip tightly to gratuitous details (she still remembers her 3rd grade teacher’s license plate number, which she passed every day on her walk to school and flatly recited to him one day, to his complete horror). It’s not the little details you struggle with, it’s more so the larger moments of synthesizing and learning that seem to go in one ear and out the other.
For someone who’s always searching for meaning, you are able to forget (with astonishing swiftness) whatever significance you’ve insisted on wringing out of your circumstance. Like a responsible consumer of ketchup packets, you wring every last drop of meaning out of the ketchup-packet-of-life™. But once the meaning has been coaxed out—the ketchup packet empty and sticky—your memory (I suspect compulsively) hastily erases the experience and lessons learned.
I can tell you’re already going to defend yourself with a faltering, hasty monologue that relies too much on the word “ephemeral” and cannot see beyond its own self aggrandizement, but please hear me out before you launch into your performative pat on the back. Because we’ve been here before—but perhaps you’ve forgotten.
This week you’ll make a perilous decision you’ve made numerous times before. You’ll start adding beans to your morning smoothie (again).
Those who have been with this project since its early days know that Virgo values beans because she’s under the impression that eating as many beans as possible is the surest way to achieve immortality.
You’re always in search of ways to sneak more beans into meals (as though the immortality you’re desperate for is something you could have “more” of), and breakfast is—predictably—the toughest; bean-wise. And so the cycle begins as it always does.
Every six months, you have the bright idea to throw a CUP of beans into your already alarmingly thick, 19 ingredient morning smoothie. For a few days you feel like a genius (why doesn’t everyone drink a helping of morning beans through a straw?) and then, predictably, after a few weeks of beginning your days with an enormous trough of beans, you wake from your bean trance and realize your breakfast is unnecessarily heavy.
You remove the beans, and laugh laugh laugh about your folly to anyone who will listen (usually very few people; mostly those who feel like they owe you something). The Laughing Stage lasts a few months, until it’s replaced with the hot hot desire to Consume More Beans, and the vicious cycle continues; yet somehow you’re none the wiser. You scoop the cup full of morning beans with an optimistic innocence that leads the skies to believe you really don’t retain any lived lessons (in this instance, the lesson is that your breakfast is so large you can only, practically, take to bed upon finishing it).
This isn’t the only category you insist on reliving over and over. Your experience with Ativan (the delicious anti-anxiety medication) has gone pretty similarly, and is best summed up by this incredibly successful (6 likes!!!) tweet of yours from 2019:
The character limit inhibited you from including the proverbial sixth mood, which was telling your psychiatrist you worried you were becoming addicted to Ativan and her telling you it was “impossible.” (Of course it’s possible!!! Why does she have that job?!)
I had hoped to theatrically recite the definition of insanity here, as I take great inspiration from valedictorian speeches, but alas; the definitions were far more bland than I had anticipated, forcing me to make a last minute pivot towards simply announcing my own definition of insanity. I am an all-knowing entity, of course, but that doesn’t mean I don’t misplace information from time to time. So here’s the definition of insanity I have no other choice but to attribute to myself.
“Insanity is doing the same action over and over, but expecting different results.”
—The Skies
Oops, I just looked into it and it turns out that Einstein said this, and it is called a “parable.” Apparently parables don’t always make it into merriam webster.
Double oops, I just looked into it further and it turns out there’s no proof that Einstein said this. No official word on its status as a “parable.”
Regardless of how this parable/definition made it into popular consciousness, what’s important is that you see this applies to you.
I’d never suggest you memorize all of your innumerable failures; that surely isn’t the pathway to success. But could there be, perhaps, a middle ground between your blanket refusal to learn from your experiences and tormenting yourself with every memorable detail of those disastrous experiences? Could you, perhaps, part with some useless memories of the past, in order to make room for ripe new insights?
Perhaps if you’d erase the birthdates of estranged childhood friends from your memory, you could make enough room to retain how uncomfortable you feel after drinking beans first thing in the morning. Perhaps if you part with the memory of the color shirt (lavender) your 10th grade spanish teacher (whose recent trip to Spain had emboldened him to abruptly adopt the Spanish “th” pronunciation) was wearing when he caught you blatantly cheating, you’d have room to remember that you always get addicted to Ativan (no matter what! Seriously! Stop taking it! Even though it’s great!).
oh my! that ketchup metaphor is brilliant! As your writing! This entry is one of my favorites. You always do such a good job of reminding me of my humanity.