FEBRUARY: THE HARDCORE MONTH

It’s time to be your most vulgar self. Mars is joining Jupiter and Saturn in Capricorn this month, creating a nice mutual reception between Mars and Saturn in the same sign. Everything else in the moving chart of this month deposits into this reception between malefics. Venus is in its detriment, making everything crass and rude.

What do you do when you’re at your most vulgar? Do you sniff your feet because you wonder what they smell like? Do you talk shamelessly about your wants and hates and shrug off the consequences? Do you pick the mold off of fruits and eat them anyway?

Enjoy genuinely not giving a shit this month. Say what you mean. Stop covering up your racism and sexism and classism with fake progressive and performative social etiquette. Political truth doesn’t live in politeness. No one wants you to be nice. Being nice is just self flattery. People want you to be real. Then, they can decide whether they truly like you or not and you can decide whether you truly like yourself or not.

Think about what it’s like to be a rat in New York City. Everyone wants to kill you and everyone wishes you were gone. You alone know the crawl spaces between walls and how to navigate around the subway lines without touching the third rail. You survive on abundance waste because you’re resourceful and you keep yourself extremely clean. You don’t give a shit about what anyone thinks about you because survival is your only game.

In February, just be that gross subway rat that is inside all of us. Wipe your fingers off your pants, stop styling your hair and look to see what you really look like, and put your legs up when you have a trapped fart. Just live and let live.

Questions to consider in February:

What can you scavenge instead of buying into?
What do you genuinely not give a shit about but pretend that you do?
How can you be kinder and ruder in your everyday life?

Aquarius

Make sure that any jealousy and pettiness you observe on the faces of other people only make you stronger. Understand that any jealousy or pettiness that you feel is only going to make the person you project those feelings onto stronger.

When in doubt, ask for forgiveness. If you need to seek absolution for something, you can only really feel satisfied with deliverance if you make yourself work for it. You have made mistakes in the past. We all have. Will you learn from them or will you play yourself like a sitcom character, playing out the same loop over and over?

Pisces

Being a good friend isn’t about being nice. Being kind to someone isn’t about being nice. If you’re getting to be too nice, stop it. That’s energy you can use in other things.

Don’t distract from your acts of genuine love by enabling your loved ones because you want to step up but can’t. Don’t cover up your mistakes and failures by pretending to be nicer and smoother than you are. Don’t commit yourself to anyone out of obligation when you’re stretched for time and energy. These are three simple steps towards cultivating real love, stuff that lasts, between yourself and your friends.

Aries

You need to know who you are and what you want, no matter how unrefined and truly base your goals are. If you want to be rich, then make it your only goal. If you want fame, make that shamelessly known. You don’t need to lie to yourself about your own ambition. Even if your goals are immature, you won’t be able to move ahead of them if you don’t let them move you.

In the words of Melo from Death Note, just try to be number one. Your instincts will tell you how to do the right thing from there. When it comes down to making decisions, your heart will take the lead. You just have to trust your baser side along with your angelic side. Without doing so, you’ll never run into the decisions that you have to make.

Taurus

No more hiding behind progressive niceties. Oppression isn’t something that you need protection from. It’s something that you already experience everyday. You understand it better than anyone and you have enough tools to do some battle damage.

True poverty is not being able to afford some small principles. The only thing is, your principles aren’t smell. They’re huge. You might need to offend someone who rides their own high horse, believing that they’re on the side of righteousness this month. Do it. You’re not on the side of righteousness. You’re on the side of the subaltern.

Gemini

Just tell people what you want from them. Stop hanging around them, hoping that they’ll catch on or not, believing that you can swindle your way into their hearts. Be completely frank and be specific. Illustrate an erotic fantasy between that person you have a crush on and tell them about it. Tell that person you want career help from to help you today. They’re not going to prioritize it otherwise.

When it comes down to it, people will support you or they won’t. You don’t have enough time to wait for anyone who is only considering the possibility. People who want to support you will follow through if you make your need apparent to them. If asking for help feels shameless, then you just need a little more practice.

Cancer

You might hate a lot of people right now. Don’t worry about it. You’re not built to like everyone. And the people you dislike probably don’t like you very much either. Find relief in this, instead of anxiety, because it means that you’re coming into yourself and anticipating your dramas instead of living them.

This may feel harsh but make a point of staying away from people you don’t like. No more forced or fake reconciliations. No more schadenfreude for your best frenemy. Just don’t fuck with people who you don’t like. Don’t answer their messages and don’t make plans with them. If they’re in the same room as you, instead of harboring bitterness in your heart, just leave and seek joy elsewhere.

Leo

If you hate your job, get a new one. Stop hating what you can do. There’s no reason to spend any more time doing something that you dislike when there’s opportunity after opportunity for you out there. Why are you committing yourself to shit you dislike? Do you hate yourself?

You need to stop doing work that is just wasting your time. This means that you need to understand specifically exactly what it is that makes you feel your most capable. How will you ever stop wasting time when you have not defined production for yourself and by yourself? Stop feeling guilty, stop doing useless things, and start living for the important things only.

Virgo

You don’t need to do drugs, go to loud parties, or be around a lot of people to have fun. Get real about what having a good time means to you. Be specific about it. Don’t be refined about it. Find out what activities give yourself the most in terms of satisfaction and chase just that.

Satisfaction is about subverting the addiction mindset. You can get enough of something, if you just let yourself indulge. There’s nothing wrong with a little hedonism because the world is simply abundance as long as your don’t define it according to capitalistic addiction. Find your satisfaction and figure out what you need to do to reach it. Make this a commitment.

Libra

Your heritage is not a real community. It’s an imagined one. It’s full of orientalism and primitivism and ornate concepts that western scholars paint when they make your homeland their career path. Your job this month is to strip your perception of your inheritance down to its essentials. Maybe you inherited your dad’s weird propensity to save all scraps of paper, not knowing what is important or not, or your auntie’s frantic commitment to working too hard for too long. You don’t inherit all the ways that nationalism becomes branded. You don’t have to inherit your ethnic flavor, just your specific flavor.

There’s no way to stop performing ethnicity but, at least, you can make a revenge journey out of trying to resist it.

Scorpio

Don’t talk shit about someone behind their back. Cuss them out to their face. You’re good at simply not responding to what can hurt you. You can work on alchemizing it so that you flex and change through the possibility of being hurt. That’s what fighting is all about. Stop making content and start making your point. If people make fun of you for it, then they’re not your friends.

People respect your words when you make them obvious. Not when you sit on them and shame yourself for having a direct voice. There’s being mature about things and then there’s pretending to be over something that you’re not without treating your rage. Know the difference.

Sagittarius

You’ve got to start thinking of yourself as a valuable and resourceful person. If you have to, do something to prove it to yourself. Stop spending money to pursue your passions and start asking to get paid. Know exactly how much you want to work for and learn the art of negotiation. No one is going to give you more than what you ask for, even if they think you deserve for it personally.

But that doesn’t mean you should internalize your self worth with money. In the words of Adrian Piper, you are always going to be too expensive to buy. You just need to use this month to prove that you are capable of taking care of yourself. That means feeding yourself however you can.

Capricorn

You don’t have to earn your right to existence. You’re going to exist anyway, whether you feel like you deserve it or not. Stop working so hard trying to prove that you have to.

Sometimes, people who have gone through trauma feel overly attached to their work because the only thing that proves their existence is real is work. Your challenge this month is to make your center something other than your blood, sweat, and tears. That’s really the most punk thing you can do.