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Horoscopes | Week of April 5-11, 2004

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Thanks to these past couple weeks and these upcoming few more, everything is on its way to being completely different. It helps to keep looking at that other key player sitting next to you, to ensure that both of you are able to maintain your bearings in relation to one another as your world keeps turning and spinning and tilting on its axis. For your own sanity, you must be able to continue evaluating and reevaluating the relevance of such interpersonal commitments while your own life's events—and the myriad mental sensations that go with 'em—unconsciously push you through total nonstop reinvention. No need to be as dramatic about it as I'm being, though. Entertain multiple mindsets, and offer eloquent and insightful observations drawn from various surface perspectives, but do your best to refrain from decisive strategies and ultimate conclusions, since you'd be the first to quietly admit you're 'just doing it' and have yet to determine what the outcome or the lesson learned will prove to be. So keep doing, and describe what you're doing, but don't universalize what you're doing or try to preachily espouse spiritual values based on what you're doing.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): It's on the tip of your tongue. All the bright ideas have virtually surfaced and are practically available for near-implementation almost now. As a Taurus, you should be somewhat familiar with the concept of 'don't rush it'—though you might imagine such an orientation of patience is exactly what you should be throwing out the window, now that you can almost taste those virtual fruits of your fresh approach to 'life's work', currently being test-marketed in focus groups around the country. That's why I say, Don't rush it. You are thisclose to popping full-grown out of some strange woman's forehead with more wisdom than a panel of septuagenarian experts on life experience, but she's begging to forestall the caesarean and let nature take its course. Perhaps you should do the same. This week's full moon marks the midway-point through this current lunar cycle. By the end of the next cycle, about six weeks from now, you are going to thank your lucky stars that you get to be you, instead of wasting any more energy wishing to be someone other than yourself. Of course, once you hit that point, you'll have to decide which pieces of your greatness to deploy to which ends, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): You could not ask for more—more opportunities, more possibilities, more stimulation, more emancipation, more attention—than you're being offered by the universe right now. Well, you could ask for more, but that would be a blatant clue that you're unwilling to acknowledge what's already going down and unable to take amazing advantage of these amazing advantages. (Or is it 'unable to acknowledge' and 'unwilling to take advantage'?) Startling as this revelation might sound in its simplicity, all you have to do right now is be yourself wholly and in an integrated fashion. For the next few weeks, everything else will magically gravitate to you and around you, if you just take the self-centeredness seriously. But I completely understand that such a basic premise can be horribly scary, considering you have to know who you are before you can be that person, which means you have to stop catering to their every whims in order for them to cater to yours. (And you may not be accustomed to catered affairs.) If you were able to choose—and no one else's opinions mattered, and no practical concerns loomed overhead like a guillotine blade, and no evil twins were thought to be sabotaging you, and pizza had no calories—what would it all be like? And now that you are able to choose, will you rise to the high responsibilities that come with freedom? (Or will you wait until an outside figure comes around to serve as a receptacle for present and future resentments?)

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Unconsciousness is less likely to lapse into crazy the more conscious you are of it. Confusion isn't apt to be all that confusing if you're not trying to understand. Exist and enjoy. Stay open to joyfully not knowing. There's a hell of a lot of activity going on in parts of your life encoded in dream language, so start off by asking, 'Am I awake, or am I dreaming?' and then refuse to answer your question. Better yet, actively blur the boundary. The more willing you are to assume the all-of-life-is-a-big-dream-being-dreamt-by-some-autistic-kid pose (see '80s TV dream St. Elsewhere), the more likely you can make all your dreams come true (see theme song to '70s TV scream Laverne & Shirley). How do you know it's not all a big mirage? And what if it were? Don't pretend all of this crap doesn't relate in some major way to what's going on for you right now, Cancer, because the cosmic doors to wacky perspectival shifts are unlocked and ajar and waiting for you to push them into welcoming vastness. Please don't insist on being practical right now, and please let someone know where you're going if you opt to wander off. All paths lead to different places, but all different places are the same place, just you and a room with possibilities, so take whichever seemingly convoluted or equally imagined-to-be direct route you want to get there, and BYOB. All that matters is that you stay engaged while on the path, that you notice your surroundings, and that you exist and enjoy.

LEO (July 23-August 22): When in doubt, ask for another opinion. Weigh the options, and you just might decide not to decide, a perfectly acceptable response. After all, you are still waiting to start the press conference in order to leave room for last-minute philosophy changes (of which there will certainly be some), so, in the meantime, enjoy the free munchies and bottled juices in the green room and make small-talk with the other guests. The most important thing is to surround yourself with people, which I probably don't have to toil too much to convince you to do, since the social connections and group-minded party possibilities are congregating like macaroni-salad variations at a church picnic. Try them all, and find gratifyingly polite praise to dispense to each. While you're at it, slip in some casually phrased requests for feedback by raising seemingly weightless topics of conversation without disclosing the latent hi-significance ramifications, and then just listen. Listen intently as a vessel with gaping-wide-open ears and no attempt to debate merit or discuss personal investments. These mouths of babes will undoubtedly tell you what you need to hear, but it's your duty to hear it.

VIRGO (August 23-September 22): When a company makes its initial public offering of stock (or IPO), the stated goal of stakeholders is to make money. Yet what's at the core of the free market system is people deciding which products and ideas are good ones and which aren't. Money is just a byproduct. And try as well-paid marketing specialists might to orchestrate their way into consumers' pocketbooks, something's either Got It or It Doesn't. My advice to you, Virgo, is to go public. But the trick is to do so without a capitalist's mindset—that is, not trying to make money—as much as that of a market researcher. And your goal with the research should not be to redesign the product or rewrite the ending to suit the court of public opinion, at least at this point. No, in this case, you are the product and have just now hit a stride and stability with what you've already redesigned. For now, don't do anything other than put it out there and watch who buys and who takes a pass. Some will buy, and some will take a pass. Just observe their reactions, and store these observations in a file for later product development projects.

LIBRA (September 23-October 22): With other people in the picture—new people, new versions of existing people, new relationships with new or existing people—you're hopefully starting to recognize how much teetering and tottering and tinkering you do in order to respond oh-so-perfectly in every situation. You may be quite an individualistic individual, but one who finds those individualizing qualities only through continuous subtle reaction to other people. Is there anything wrong with that? No. What do I want you do with this knowledge? Pay a little closer attention, that's all. In due time, you'll want to redefine your essence with regards to stances on 'the big issues' (part of which is deciding for yourself which issues are the big ones). But, intellectual though you are, this near-future redefinition process will not bear the most fruitful results if you try to test hypotheses in a vacuum of theoretical life. Concepts must be livable if they are worth living your life according to them. And so much of living a Libran life is inextricably tied to extraordinarily careful social interactions. Rather than redefining that life in your head, then, you must do it through relating. Before you can 're'-define, you must define. Before you can define, you must pay attention. And while you're paying attention, enjoy the people you're with as you study how you make each move in that chess game called interpersonal exchange.

SCORPIO (October 23-November 21): It's futile to resist intensity. Someone like you can hardly be casual, even if you tried. You know too much about the darker sides of life to ever exist purely on the breezy level of cute haircuts and mylar unicorn stickers. For that, be thankful. We need you to keep us real by playing along on the surface when we pretend that everything's fine, then exchanging glances with us and recognizing the truths in our eyes. But what we don't need from you at this time is to hold us to those truths past the moment when you first glimpse them. We change. We vary. We hate our parents and wish we were dead one minute, and we want chili cheese fries from the food court the next, and not because we are trying to drown our parent-hating death-wishing sorrows in the grease. Our sorrows have indeed truly passed. Yet, in your noble attempt to keep us real, you may insist on forcing our attentions back to emotional depths long since traversed and left behind. (Not to say we won't revisit at a later date.) You have to be able to roll with the punches. You have to let us out of the box you created for us—out of love and concern, to be sure—so that we can exist as the complex contradictory creatures we are rather than the issue-laden caricatures you sometimes want us to be. If all this seems a little too tricky to handle right now, that's okay. Quit worrying about us so much and take care of your own beeswax.

SAGITTARIUS (November 22-December 21): Behind curtain number three, you have fantastic opportunities for growth in your professional life (heard this one before?), granting you a broader audience or increased recognition for your efforts, so that your britches finally become big enough to do your figure justice. In the box, there's tremendous pressure to keep the dynamic changes coming in your home life (or at least get 'em started, as if you haven't heard this one before!), moving things around, finding ways to relax and rejuvenate in your private cocoon so you have more stamina for the outer-world growth and emotional development that comes with it. The curtain or the box? You get to have them both. Here's how it works, and it's really simple as pie. Let other people help you get there. Engage in meaningful partnership, but don't expect one partnership to contain all the ingredients for every area of growth and change. Expect trouble if you try to cram one person into someone else's role. Expect success if you can foster important non-binding bonds with multiple persons of interest, whether romantic or professional or friendly in nature. The more alone you are, the less you'll let the magic do its work. Some alone, good. Too alone, need reality check.

CAPRICORN (December 22-January 19): You've got a lot of works to do, Cap—and please note the plural noun I've used to describe what needs doing. You are so skilled at keeping your eye on the ball and working it, play by play, across the field. One project, multiple smaller steps, long timeframe, one resulting success. Now, though, the terms are different. You have lots of little unrelated tasks to get through. Many details, each step quickly and easily completed, little coherence, no grand sense of success. How will you find the strategic stamina to stay focused when it feels as if none of these mini-jobs really matters much? (1) Must you stay focused, or is it okay to be the short-attention-span worker bee for once? (2) Process over product. Repeat: Process over product. Enjoy the doing without worrying about what's getting done. (3) There is, in fact, a bigger-picture result to what you'll be doing over the next couple months. You just won't get to loll in its rays until much later. Your life view will enlarge, but you don't get to know how yet. (4) Busy = happy.

AQUARIUS (January 20-February 18): Try things out. This theme of multiplicity and variation reigns over everyone at the moment, as I described on this week's main page. But for you, Aquarius, the sensation holds extra power, and its cosmic intention is to remind you how enjoyable life can be when the randomness factor is given its proper respect. Just because some folks think you are random—I suppose those eccentricities you wear like a Disneyland-character costume have something to do with it—doesn't mean that you necessarily always embrace the randomness of life, as in not imposing your approach onto all you encounter. Aquarians are a lot pushier and more controlling than most people know (or than you might even be aware of), considering you get along so well with everyone that they hardly notice. Certain highly fortuitous opportunities are passed over by Aquarians who reject them for quirky little reasons like 'too conventional', 'too boring', 'too normal', or 'too not-me', and thus limit their actual lived experience through a form of reverse discrimination. Now's not the time for that righteous crap. Your mind, your creative force, and your big beautiful heart all crave a relaxation in your unspoken rules and regulations. You really just want to try different moments on for size. Life, according to this orientation, is play. Deeply meaningful and delightful play.

PISCES (February 19-March 20): Suggestive writing starts here. You will spend the next couple months readjusting your private home life so that it provides a more energy-stimulating and less energy-zapping environment to help you move your life along. You will enjoy rearranging furniture or reconsidering the whole living arrangement. You will start taking better care of yourself and/or quit whining about the consequences when you don't. You will articulate what you need to feel comfortable and learn how to ask for it, consequently helping you interact better in relationships. The energy you spend on home life will have a direct impact on your relationships. (Will there be a new roommate or neighbor? Will someone get kicked to the curb? Will someone's supportive disposition make it easier to take care of the home-life duties at hand?) You will be rethinking those practical matters that you believed you'd recently, finally, figured out. Not figured out yet, sorry. But, a month from now, you will be so glad you did the rethinking. And you will send all your friends and loved ones to http://www.astrobarry.com. (While I'm being suggestive, why not use it to boost readership, eh?)