Gonna try to enjoy myself on my deck.
what I am learning from my cat's mistakes.
Enter the scorpion: If you’re plugged into the astrology content machine, you know that we’re now in Scorpio season. The keywords you’ll be hearing a lot are: spooky, scary, secretive. Maybe also sexy. Maybe also like… petty?
Scorpios get a lot of airtime on social media and its outgrowths which mostly just means the idea of that scorpion’s sign is more convoluted and diluted than most. I’d put it up there with Geminis, Virgos, and Leos. Though the Leo stereotypes are probably closest to accurate.
What we really need to remember about Scorpio as our fixed, water sign is that it’s reflective of what happens when water sits still. That might be in the form of ice, the form of a bog, the form of that one place in the Sargasso sea where all eels come from and where all eels return to reproduce. Considering how sensual these images are (and, in the case of the eels in the Sargasso sea, secretive), it’s not totally surprising that Scorpio has the associations that it does. It’s extremely reasonable to be afraid of any body of water, but I’d venture to say it’s even unreasonable to not be afraid of the depths of the ocean or being stuck in a Florida swamp. Big water, immovable, impenetrable water, is intense.
So, what’s that mean for you? Depends on your chart, mostly. But if you want to think about this sign while the Sun moves through this wet and heavy part of the sky, here is one thing you can ruminate on: what in your life is “rotting” and is their any benefit in thinking about it as “decomposing” instead?
You probably don’t know what will be left behind after the decomposition (rot) is done, but you can trust that it will be generative for whatever grows after.
Grad school and the trap of obsessively trying to escape what you’ve got.
Two things have been obsessively occupying my mind lately and neither of them are the election or, a bit ashamedly, the genocide that the U.S. is enacting collaboratively with Isr*el. I think part of why these things aren’t right in the front of my head is because I’m as selfish as the next guy and because of some self-protective instincts since there’s only so much we can do. I’m registered to vote, I’ll vote for Kamala even though she’s promised to continue the extermination of the Palestinian people because so has Trump and his other promises are net-worse than hers. Once she’s elected (and before, why not) we can yell at her loudly and frequently. We can also donate to GoFundMe’s and support victims of Isr*el in Lebanon, actions that are tactical and helpful.
No, the two things that I’ve been obsessing over lately are grad school and building my cats an enclosed space on the deck outside my kitchen. At face value these are two very different things, but they’ve each taught me a lot about the other obsession.
I had eight four foot by eight foot plastic lattice panels delivered to my house from Lowes some weeks ago. When they arrived I knew I wouldn’t be able to deal with them quite yet because they were heavier than I expected, structurally they could only be described as floppy, and I was going to be traveling pretty soon. So I texted my downstairs neighbor asking for his forgiveness that I’d move them ASAP and get rid of the wooden pallet that they were shipped on. He didn’t care.
After a lot of annoying lifting and dragging and pushing, I got them up the two flights of stairs and dragged them out to my porch. That’s where they stayed for the next week while I flew to visit my friend Kate in Colorado and to Austin for work.
In the meantime, I got a targeted ad on Instagram about some sort of online graduate program that allows you to transfer credits from an incomplete degree to expedite completion of one of their own. This piqued my interest, because I have a quarter of a Masters completed that I know I won’t ever complete and that annoys me because I accrued debt for it and it’s currently accomplishing nothing. At the same time, I have multiple pacts going with multiple friends to not go to grad school, at least until my Saturn return is done, because truly there’s no reason to do it. I’ve got a job (a job that is the kind of job that I’d have applied for if I had finished my degree) and I don’t want a new job and I can learn any helpful skills for much cheaper (free) without going to grad school. Still, I clicked on the ad and now Instagram is plying me with every possible remote degree that has given Meta money to put their wares in front of my eyeballs.
It didn’t take long for the conditioning to set in and for me to start wondering whether it might be worth it. I texted a friend, “how insane would it be to get an mba…” to which she replied “stoppppp.”
Eventually I made it back home from my travels and got back to work on the cat enclosure. I used the scrap wood from the pallet that the panels came on to help frame the enclosure (I was very proud of this when I came up with it), but of course the flimsy wood and the limited supply left something to be desired. I didn’t want to spend any more money, so I did my best.
First I used some zip ties that I happened to have to lash things together, made an allowance to buy eight dollars of wire that I used when I ran out of zip ties, and then I used some old pieces of furniture I didn’t mind get weathered to reinforce the structure. After a few hours and many micro-cuts on my fingertips from twisting wires, I had a sort of ugly but mostly complete set of three walls that sat flush up against the wall of my apartment. I thought I might need a cover for the enclosure because one of my cats is especially athletic, but I also was letting myself be a little optimistic that he might not be able to scale the walls. They were eight feet tall and plastic.
Luckily, I decided to introduce him to the space wearing a harness and leash because after about sixty seconds of sniffing and rolling around and enjoying this outdoor time, he launched himself at the lattice and hoisted himself up to the very edge. Reactively, I yanked him back with the leash, he fell off flailing, and, both embarrassed, we went back inside. This is when I allowed myself another purchase: a ten foot by ten foot net with one inch by one inch gaps.
Also worth mentioning: in-between project phases, I was scrolling U.S. News and World Report rankings of online colleges, comparing cost breakdowns, and plotting pathways to SOME, ANY graduate degree as fast as possible. I considered higher education admin degrees, MBAs, public policy, humanities, social sciences, counseling. Disciplines I had talked myself out of many, many years ago. I explained to myself that this was just research, just ideating, and not that serious anyway. I told myself, this is just for fun, as I entered net price, time to completion, and prestige of school for more and more programs into the spreadsheet I was keeping, unsaved, always open in the background of my laptop.
After another day of slicing my fingers with wire and securing the net across the top of the enclosure, I felt almost ready to give the cats another go. I still needed to figure out a way to secure the net to the side of my apartment, but I knew that wouldn’t take long once I got going. I was, I thought, ready to get going, until I heard the screwdriver and box of screws I’d left outside on the Ikea shelf come crashing to the floor. When I opened the door, I learned that while you (I) might have thought wind would have no problem getting through the holes in a lattice panel, that is very much so not the case. The windward wall of my pseudo-structure was leaning dangerously inward, barely kept in place by its attachments to the other panels. I put down the video I was watching called, When is it right to go to grad school? and scrambled to restructure what I could, desperate to avoid having to take the whole thing apart and regroup. It was a mess and I am not a structural engineer and that has become more apparent than ever today.
Now, I really do not want to count my eggs before they hatch, but with these additional fixes, more to come as I find more supplies (read: trash I can attach to the walls to keep them in place), and the first plant addition of many, I’m starting to feel very proud of the outdoor space I’ve created for my cats, both the good one and the terrible one.
Coincidentally and luckily, I also have come to peace with the reality that I don’t want to go to grad school, I just need to read more and spend more time with people who read. It’s fairly possible I’ll find myself back in the classroom at some point, but, as I was texting a friend today (I had to preface for her that I just needed to proclaim this to someone, not realizing I’d also later be proclaiming it to all of you, my captive audience of inboxes and inbox owners), I’ll leave it alone until I feel like I need to expand my Philly network of higher ed people, do some schmoozing, and collect an elitist credential to get another job. Hopefully that will not be for a long time (cc: Jay Hartzell and the UT board of regents).
It is lucky I realized this about grad school, literally feeling my resting heart rate settle a notch lower (evidenced via my Apple Watch), because when I brought the cats out to experience the new and improved catio, my terrible cat once again ignored all the beauty and pleasure available to him this new and sunny space to immediately scale the wall and try to push his face through the net so he could go… farther? Somewhere else?
I had a hold on his leash and don’t expect he’ll be given outdoor privileges without his leash for some time, so while I watched him struggle I had the time to realize he was being a metaphor for me. A real life lesson, a message from the universe, telling me to stop being annoying and appreciate the sunny space I’d created for myself.
This applies so far beyond grad school, even if grad school is one of the more consistent and expensive yearnings I’ve put myself through in recent years. I’m not alone in this habit. It’s embarrassingly hard to just accept that you’re in a good spot, one of the dumber American maladies.
Yes, I’ve got crushing debt, but I make enough each month to make the payments and then some. My healthcare coverage isn’t perfect, but I have it. Our economy isn’t the best it could be and is propped up by weapons manufacturers and oil refineries that will be the death of me, but that death is not completely imminent! At least I’ve got these cats. I joke, sort of, but the basic truth holds. One option available to me that I have not tried is to enjoy what I’ve got going on. So that’s next. For me, and, I hope, for Oliver, my annoying cat.