| |  | | | | December 5, 2017 | Letter No. 115 | | | | | | | | | | | | Dear Lennys,
Last names are important. They connect you to your history and your people — an indicator that you're part of something bigger than yourself. Growing up, I was fascinated by mine.
My last name, Hairston, given to me by my mother, wasn't really mine, technically speaking. It was given to her by my late grandfather, who had married my grandmother and adopted her kids (my mom and my two uncles) from a previous relationship and never treated them like anything other than his own. Choosing to make someone part of your family and then actually living up to that commitment is the purest form of selfless love.
I didn't find out until I was much older (through eavesdropping, context clues, and a self-led Iyanla: Fix My Life–style interrogation, clearly why I became a journalist) that my last name wasn't from a blood relative. So I spent my childhood years inquisitively researching the name that I was given. My grandmother gave me a book all about the family, called Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White — which my grandfather was left out of because he and his brother, who had helped gather research for the book, had been in a fight when it was written.
Through this book, I found what many African Americans find to be true when searching for the history behind their surnames: that they are a product of slavery and their last names had been given to their ancestors by slave owners. Choosing to treat and sell human beings as if they are property, and then forcing them to give up their history, from their religion to their names, is the cruelest form of torture.
—Which brings me to Lolly Bowean's beautifully wretched essay about how the history of slavery lingers everywhere for black Americans, even in their surnames.
—On a lighter note, Rachel Seville Tashjian is back with her column "Middle Brow," in which she teaches us all about manicures and how to be more like Rihanna (essential learning).
—It's flu season (*limits interactions with literally everyone*), so acupuncturist Russell Brown is giving us the lowdown on how to beef up our immune systems.
—Writer Benoît Loiseau interviews Mónica Mayer, a pioneer of Mexico's feminist art movement, and she drops some gems.
—And finally, Lennys, Mercury is back in retrograde until the 22nd. So our astrologer, Melissa Broder, is here with your December horoscopes and quite possibly the best 2018 motto ever: The less you expect of next year, the more deep it is going to be.
Xo,
Tahirah Hairston, Lenny associate editor | | | | | | | | | | | | The Unspoken History Behind a Surname | | | | By Lolly Bowean | | |
Only the truly curious even ask.
And when a Harvard student recently inquired about my name, she was clear that she wanted to know about my surname. She repeated it three times out loud and then began probing for something deeper.
She didn't have to say it, but I knew she was trying to better understand my heritage and ethnic background. My last name is puzzling. And for some, it doesn't match my physical presence.
When I'm in the Boston region, people ask me if it's French, and I think they are trying to determine if my heritage is Haitian. Others will ask if it's Celtic, a question that would connect me to the Irish.
The truth is, my last name was probably supposed to be Bowen, but somewhere in the past someone misspelled it, and the lives of my clan were forever changed.
This was a common occurrence. Some southern African Americans struggled with literacy after emancipation, and so names took on new spellings. In other cases, white officials didn't bother to document the correct spellings on public records, and the mistakes lived on.
I learned this when I tried to research the history of my last name.
In this country, there are hundreds of Bowens.
Yet my immediate relatives are the only people I have found with the "Bowean" last name.
I explained this all to the young, curious student.
I went on to tell her that the Bowean surname came to my people through marriage.
Before we were Boweans, we were Norwoods and Wakefields rooted in a small town in western North Carolina — near the mountains. Those names are connected back to England.
"Those are my people," I told her.
"I know some Norwoods and some Wakefields from western North Carolina," she piped up, almost instantly, with a giddy excitement. It seemed that for a moment she thought we had found common ground. I'm sure she thought that maybe we knew some of the same people.
The next sentence she almost whispered: "But they're white."
As we both stood in the silence, we didn't speak about the legacy of American slavery.
Yet this is the moment when the baggage of race and what it means to be African American comes creeping into the most fleeting of encounters. It's these unexpected confrontations with history that trigger what writer and social commentator James Baldwin called the "constant state of rage."
I didn't tell the student that during slavery, African Americans were assigned names by their owners and many times didn't even have a surname, records show. I didn't talk about how those residents were at times given the last name of their owner so that they could be identified as that white family's property.
I also didn't bother to talk about how even after the Thirteenth Amendment brought enslaved people a form of freedom, some chose the plantation name as their last name in order to reveal where they were from. Black people held on to these names for many reasons — one being the hope to reunite with other family members who would only be able to identify them by these familiar markers.
These are the names that so many black Americans still wear.
The decision to stay bound to these names is deeply personal. I would never change my name — even if I married — mainly because it connects me to a fragmented people.
It is the name that binds us together. And I hold on to hope that my relatives, disconnected long ago, can locate me through that shared legacy.
It is in these innocent moments that the troubling history of this country becomes real and the residue reveals itself as still present. I've never been ashamed that I am a descendant of people who were enslaved. Yet it is in these subtle moments that the trauma strikes me.
I began to feel weighted as I stood staring at the college-aged woman, who had a classic, sophisticated Latin name that means purity. I felt the weariness of being pushed into an emotional space and frustrated from having to contemplate whether to delve deeper into a topic I didn't expect during idle small talk.
Then I remembered that this history is one we don't like to discuss anyway. We were only making small talk.
"There's probably a relationship between the two families," the African American one and the white one, I remember telling the student. "But I don't know exactly, specifically, what it is."
And then, to be polite, we left the rest unspoken and parted ways.
Lolly Bowean is a writer with the Chicago Tribune and a 2017 Nieman Fellow. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Long-Lasting Lustrous Manicure Lifestyle | | | | By Rachel Seville Tashjian | | |
I've read Oscar Wilde's words about "bright golden hair, tarnished with rust"; I love Sylvia Plath on too-red tulips and Emily Dickinson on borrowing daffodils. The poems of T.S. Eliot are a triumph, and because I am human, I know firsthand that Sappho's Fragment 31 will make you weep.
Still, I maintain that this is the most beautiful line of verse in the history of the entire world:
"Fan will shut off automatically when you move out of your hands; your nails will be completely dried to a hard, long-lasting, lustrous manicure…"
It's true! Is there any better feeling than taking your tired hands, tawdry with germs, grubby from the day's chores, and exhausted from texting "hahahaha" as your mouth sits in a contradictory moue, and blessing them, like the walls in a blue-chip art gallery or a leafy tendril in a Van Gogh still life, with a thick coat of paint? I look at those stock photos of a disembodied hand, the fingers lacquered with a rich and pristine red and clutching a single rose, and I think, honestly: maybe this is better than Vermeer. And name a more economical indulgence — I'll wait! Don't you feel adult when you glance down at your perfectly groomed hands writing that email about someone stealing your yogurt from the office fridge? You look like the most popular girl in school!
But like a perm or "my cool" that time I passed Chloë Sevigny on the street, a manicure is hard to maintain. If our eyes are the windows to our souls, our fingers are the magic wands to our opinions, our ideas, and our flirtations. We use our fingers to type, to text, to wave, to meet people, to dig through our handbags for keys or a weird protein bar that tastes like a product aliens use for twelve-hour all-atmosphere volume. With all that action, it can be hard to keep up appearances. One chip, you see, and the whole charade is up. Suddenly you're a woman who wants to hide her hands, and that's the last thing we want in this express-yourself world.
But I've got one word for you, and it's not plastics — it's Rihanna. Rihanna is a manicure pro, and if she can handle the Long-Lasting Lustrous Manicure Lifestyle and accommodate the tactile savvy required of a dope social-media presence and be Rihanna, I'm confident we can all do a sliver of the same.
Get on the circuit! The Long-Lasting Lustrous Manicure Lifestyle is not one to dip in and out of. Decide you'll always have a manicure, and it becomes just another aspect of your beauty regimen, like applying sunscreen or screaming without moving your forehead (which is something my friend's pristine WASP mother once told me would combat wrinkles). It can even relax you, and not only because spending an hour hovering over a bottle of nail polish filled with surprise chemicals can make you feel a little groooooovy. Maybe you paint your paws while reading the newspaper every Sunday morning, or maybe you spin by your local salon for a handsy moment after that dreaded weekly Wednesday-afternoon meeting, but make it a decadent swish in the column of life we call habits, and you're already on your way to a hit single, or at least sending texts with a more elegant flourish.
Keep everything neutral! HOT THROB PINK and FIVE ALARM RED and SUPER SLIMY CHARTROOZE are cool colors worthy of any fine human reading this sentence (bless your patience, your fingers will thank you!), but a ballet-slipper pink or a warm nude will make nicks and chips less obvious.
Start wearing gloves! I'm not recommending you get all Victorian here — mostly because if I were to advocate for the return of a Victorian accessory, it would obviously be the tussy-mussy — but the gravest danger facing manicures today is washing your dishes after you've eaten takeout Thai or a decadent tea sandwich or whatevs. Slap on those rubber gloves!
Use those fingertips! You can wear gloves sometimes, but for the most part, your hands are committed to the nudist way of life, liberated and exposed to the elements, whether those be H2O or "Oh my God, do I have to dig through six entire drawers to find a pair of matching socks that make me feel like Courtney Love?" That means using your fingertips instead of your nails to do menial tasks, which sounds as easy as riding a bike, except try doing it while riding a bike! It just takes a little discipline, which I'm sure we all have in spades. The Long-Lasting Lustrous Manicure Lifestyle is a crime scene, baby, so put your fingerprints all over everything!
Never touch anything! Honestly, if you want a truly pristine Long-Lasting Lustrous Manicure Lifestyle, you should just never touch anything or anyone, opting only to interact with people by doing André 3000's "Hey Ya" finger wave and opening your front door by, I don't know, blowing on it like a cartoon wolf. It might also help to have kinetic powers. I hate to end things with an unrealistic beauty expectation, because isn't that just the story of human history?! The thing about a manicure is you can always fix it! As Rihanna once sang in a lyric I'm suddenly confident was about manicures, "So live your life!"
Rachel Seville Tashjian lives in Soho. | | | | | | | | | | | | How to Protect Your Immune System From the Dreaded "Flu Season" | | | | By Russell Brown | | |
"The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe." —Albert Einstein
Even before I was an acupuncturist, the conceit that certain months of the year yield a dark force cloud of disease heading my way, sent by the vengeful hand of Mother Nature herself, seemed scientifically sketchy. But that fear definitely confirms the existential pit I have developed this year that says I must be on constant high alert for suffering and aggression and I should absolutely be afraid to leave the house.
It's like a big box-office disaster movie: COLD AND FLU SEASON. Don't. Touch. That. Restroom Doorknob.
Though the flu, specifically, does peak between the months of December and March in the United States, I refuse to believe that the universe is hostile to me. And that is hard work for me to remember, especially in 2017. I'm on Facebook: I don't need any more encouragement to fear facing the break of day. But I have to do this work; I have to remind myself that I live in harmony with a peaceful universe because my life depends on my loving it and fostering compassion for those who live in it.
Winter is not an aggressive season. As nature actually intends it, winter is meant to be the season of utmost Yin: utmost darkness, utmost softness, and utmost rest. It is meant to be the period of consolidation and conservation so that new life may burst forth in spring. If you were many other mammals, you would just sleep right through it. But you are a human living in 2017, so instead of resting, you are going to work right through it, oftentimes working even harder so that you can take one week off, which you will cram with hyper-socializing, traveling to environments your body is entirely unacclimated to, eating shit your body has to work twice as hard to digest, and managing the insane pressure of being full of "joy and gratitude" while fending off the expectations of your family and shopping for the perfect gifts for a seven-year-old you've met once and your husband's weird aunt who calls you Raquel even though your name is Rachel.
"Cold and Flu Season" does not mean the environment is pumping norovirus and strep into every subway station and kindergarten playground: it is our cultural resistance to recognizing the necessity of conservation and our inability to adapt to limited sunlight exposure and cold, with an overconsumption of refined sugar and dairy, reduced water intake, unusual stressors, and reduced physical activity.
According to the Huang Di Nei Jing, the fundamental doctrinal source for Chinese medicine, there are ALWAYS pathogens in the air. Our bodies have a natural intuitive defense for these pathogens, an energetic layer of immunity and vitality that sits on the surface of the skin called Wei qi, or "righteous qi." Getting sick from external causes (colds, flu, allergies) is ultimately about the battle between what's in the air ("wind" or "evil qi"; yes, that's what the old books call it) and the strength of our Wei qi. "Wind" hits us first in the neck, which is why we wear scarves and why the two symptoms that precede a cold or flu are stiff neck and sore throat. As the evil qi and the righteous qi collide, heat and stagnation are on the surface of the skin, and that's what we feel those first couple of days of illness: muscle aches, body soreness, alternating chills and fever.
Western medicine really likes to focus on the evil qi, or the germs in the air, but Eastern medicine dictates that it is less important to worry about the pathogens (which are always there and we can't control) and instructs us to focus instead on self-care and cultivating strength. When our bodies are strong, we're resting and eating properly, we're exercising and managing stress, we're taking the best care of ourselves, our immune system functions best and protects us adequately.
I don't believe the environment is closing in on me in the winter; rather, I live in harmony with it and simply must adapt to the two empirical environmental changes predominant this time of year: darkness and coldness. Shortened daylight will affect your mood and, more important, eliminates natural sunlight — Vitamin D — which is a huge component of our immune system. Cold, by definition, causes a lack of circulation and a deficiency of energy (and it incubates germs, which is why hand-washing is so vital), so we must do what we can to balance that: keep our bodies moving and warm. Keep covered, especially the back of your neck (where the Wind attacks) and your legs and feet (nothing inspired the temper of my teacher, a feisty and fiery Taiwanese doctor, more than seeing a pack of women eating brunch outside on an overcast day wearing flip-flops. "Shoes!!!" she would scream from the passenger window of my car. "You do this to yourself!").
Here are some tips I offer my patients to help them adapt to winter:
—To counteract the limited sunlight exposure, try to take at least a short walk every day and a 1,000- to 2,000-IU supplement of Vitamin D3 daily.
—Cod-liver oil is an excellent and natural source of Vitamin D.
—Everything consumed should be at room-temperature or warmer. No raw foods, no salads, no iced beverages. Instead, choose stews, soups, broths, even foods that are cooked too long.
—Eat foods that grow during winter (squash, potatoes, root vegetables, winter greens) or the foods that specifically warm and nourish the kidneys (beans, bone broths, lamb, chicken, walnuts, dark leafy greens).
—Refined sugars, in addition to being phlegm-producing, deplete our bodies of vitamins and minerals, especially magnesium, zinc, and potassium. Be smart.
—Dairy is essentially phlegm, so limit consumption of milk products during damp and cold periods.
—Do not sleep in the direct line of a heater or fan blowing on you.
—If you do feel like you are getting sick, the first 24 hours is the most important time to address it. At the hint of the initial stiff neck, sniffle, or dry throat, drop some liquid oil of oregano (nature's antibiotic) down your throat and get sweaty either through exercise or a sauna, which warms you, opens the pores, and pushes out the pathogen trying to get in.
—If the Wei qi loses the battle and the germs go in deeper, to the sinuses, to the chest, and to the belly, sweating won't help, and all you can really do is sleep and flush it out with a ton of fluids.
—If you can't hibernate, at least do one less thing a day. Take a night off.
Buying into the mentality that there is unquestionably a rolling wave of phlegm and sniffles coming your way in every handshake at work and Starbucks sneeze, and that your immune system is totally powerless, is just one way of viewing the world. There are other ways. And I fully tell my patients to get the flu shot if they think that is best for them — I am not trying to dissuade anyone from vaccines — but it doesn't take the onus off personal responsibility when it comes to health. It doesn't give you license to guzzle ice cream all day and stick your fingers in your mouth at the gym.
I have spent the past year living in abject terror of impending doom, and I hate it. I have hated going through the motions of my life this year feeling already beaten and inert. I am doing everything in my power to not engage my existence from a place of fear. I prefer to choose not seeing my world as hostile or germ-hostile. I am writing this essay to you — and I tell this to my patients — because I believe the most important thing right now is that we feel strong and still loved by this world. The most important thing right now is that we know — deep in our bones — that we are powerful and guided by a divine grace that has equipped us to survive. This is not the time to forget that you were born with the inherent intelligence and resources to adapt to the transitions that come with living in a universe that brought you here and needs you here.
As the cold wind stings your skin and chaps your lips this winter, I need you to remember your resilience, because it reminds me of mine.
Russell Brown is a licensed acupuncturist and the owner of POKE Acupuncture in Los Angeles. He thinks Cold and Flu Season would make an amazing, Valentine's Day–esque, A-list-ensemble, Garry Marshall-style romantic comedy. | | | | | | | | | | | | Mexico's "Radical Women" | | | | By Benoît Loiseau | | | |
| (Mónica Mayer, El tendedero (The Clothesline), Los Angeles, 1979. Courtesy of Mónica Mayer) |
In 1978 — three years after the United Nation's first International Women's Year congress was held in Mexico City — Mónica Mayer took to the streets of the capital with a stack of pink sheets of paper, asking women to write about their experiences of sexual harassment. It was the first iteration of El Tendedero (The Clothesline Project), an ephemeral art project, which, four decades — and now, thousands of #MeToo stories — later, is still going strong.
Not long after this installation, Mayer traveled to Los Angeles, where she studied at the Woman's Building — a hotbed for feminist artists and thinkers spearheaded by Judy Chicago, among others. Returning to her native Mexico in 1983 with fresh perspectives on art and social engagement, Mayer cofounded the country's first feminist art collective, Polvo de Gallina Negra (which translates to"Black Hen Powder," titled after the group's self-prescribed remedy against the "evil eye"), with fellow artist Maris Bustamante.
Until the early 1990s, the duo indulged in subversive interventions and participatory performances at the intersection of art, media, and the social realm. For their most ambitious, long-term work, ¡MADRES!, the artists used their own pregnancies as an art project — a way of integrating life and art while commenting on the condition of women in our patriarchal society and male-dominated art world. They even turned a celebrity anchorman into a "mother for a day" on live television, persuading him to don an apron and a prop pregnant-belly.
| (Polvo de Gallina Negra (Maris Bustamante and Mónica Mayer), Madre por un día (Mother for a day), 1987. Collection of Mónica Mayer and Víctor Lerma) |
As Mayer's work is currently being celebrated at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., I sat down with a pioneer of Mexico's feminist-art movement to talk about the politics of visibility, childbirth as art, and why men, too, need to speak out against harassment.
Benoît Loiseau: You studied art in Mexico City in the early 1970s, at a time when few female artists were discussed within the establishment. What was that like?
Mónica Mayer: No women artists were ever mentioned in my art-history classes; there was a complete invisibility of their work. But it was also a time when the feminist movement became more present, and as women we were very much aware of it. Not just myself, but other artists like Magali Lara, Jesusa Rodríguez — we all knew each other and were talking to each other. On the one hand, it was about confronting this invisibility, and on the other, it was about finding each other and proposing different kinds of works together.
BL: Then a few years later, in the late 1970s, you went to LA to study at the Woman's Building, the nonprofit arts and education center, sometimes referred to as a feminist Mecca. What impact did that have on you and your conception of feminist art?
MM: It was clear to me from the beginning that feminist art was anything that feminist artists wanted it to be. We were in a process of opening up, not closing the definition of feminist art. I came from the generation of los grupos here in Mexico, a generation interested in political art and collective work. So working with Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz — of all the different possibilities of feminist art in LA — was what I was most interested in, because it was public art. They were doing work for television, for the streets, for demonstrations ... It was like redefining what art was. And that was a lot of fun, but it was also a very intense moment. I think it was one of those few moments — probably like the Russian revolution, or the Mexican revolution — when art had a social meaning beyond its realm. An exhibition like Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979 was visited by nearly a hundred thousand people. It meant something for a lot of people.
| (Mónica Mayer, El Tendedero, 1978. Museo de Arte Moderno. Photo by Víctor Lerma) |
BL: And it's around that time that you started the participative project El Tendedero. You asked women on the street to write down what they disliked the most about living in the city, specifically their stories of sexual harassment. You then hung and exhibited the papers on a clothesline at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.
MM: For me, the work is not about the clothesline, but the part where I go out on the street and speak to these women and ask things like:
"Hey, have you ever been harassed?"
"No, never."
"Has anybody ever touched your ass in the metro?"
"Yes."
"Did you like it?"
"No."
"Well, write it down then!"
So, it was about making it visible — even for these women — that they were being harassed. I've always said that it wasn't a sociological study but an art piece. It doesn't have to do with truth. My act was to influence their thinking.
At the time, we were just beginning to talk about harassment. Nothing like what you see today, with the hashtag #MeToo.
| (Polvo de Gallina Negra (Maris Bustamante and Mónica Mayer), Creación, 1984. Photo Ana Victoria Jiménez) |
BL: Which is almost like a contemporary, digital variant of your project.
MM: You work with the tools you have in a certain moment and context. And the context right now is completely different. The ambition then was to raise awareness about harassment because women weren't aware of it, nor were men.
Mexico City is one thing, but if you go to Tuxtla Gutiérrez [the capital of Chiapas], for instance, it's another story. In most communities, we don't talk about sexual harassment. We're starting to talk about it on the Internet, in large cities, but in many places, we still don't talk about it.
BL: Looking back at the first iteration of this project, 40 years ago, and the context now, where do you think we're headed in terms of talking about sexual harassment?
MM: Part of the conversation that I've been witnessing and that I'm interested in is for men to also talk about when they have harassed. I would like the conversation not to be guilt-ridden but educational. More like: "Yes, I was brought up in a racist, classist, sexist society, and I try my darn best." After 40 years as a feminist, I still sometimes find myself in attitudes that are not feminist, and assuming things about myself, as a woman. So I think it's a process — a slow and painful process of growth. And I worry at times that we take it into a confrontational rather than an educational direction.
BL: After you returned from LA in the early 1980s, you started what is considered the first feminist art collective in Mexico, Polvo de Gallina Negra, with Maris Bustamante. What was the ambition of the project?
MM: I was always interested in collective work. Maris and I met at the Salón 77–78 exhibition [where El Tendedero was first shown]. We worked together for about ten years, starting with a project called Las Mujeres Artistas o Se Solicita Esposa (Women Artists or Wife Wanted), which was a series of performative talks in the state of Mexico. But our most ambitious project was the one on motherhood, ¡MADRES!. We presented ourselves as the only group who believed in childbirth as art and claimed that we got pregnant in order to carry out field investigations before realizing the project. Naturally, we counted on the help of our husbands, who, as artists, perfectly understood our intentions. Then, as good feminists, we had daughters! The whole thing was a mixture of life and art.
| (Polvo de Gallina Negra (Maris Bustamante and Mónica Mayer), ¡MADRES!, 1987. Photo Victor Lerma) |
BL: That's interesting, because there's still such stigma in the art world about what it means to have children as a female artist — it's often assumed that it means interrupting your career or even making your work irrelevant.
MM: It was a response to that, and also a response to suddenly being mothers. And things do change. Basic things like you become invisible, and your children become visible. Nobody ever asks about your work again. And the kind of prejudice that you might find — you're not taken seriously. And on top of that, not having any time! We were very much involved in analyzing this through our art and playing with it.
BL: Along with the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 at the Hammer Museum (part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA) — which features both your work and Polvo de Gallina Negra's — you'll be running El Tendedero at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Can you tell me about re-creating the project for this exhibition?
MM: I worked there for the first time last September and gave a workshop with women from La Clinica del Pueblo, which works with migrants, and the House of Ruth, which works with women who suffered domestic violence. Together with a group of artists and activists, we defined the questions for this particular iteration of El Tendedero. And it was really interesting to me, because, for example, I had never fully conceived how women migrants would never denounce harassment — firstly because they don't have the time or money, secondly because it would most likely be considered treason within their own community, and thirdly because most of them are illegal migrants, so they won't be supported by the legal system. Nobody can defend them.
| (El Tendedero. Photo by Yuruen Lerma. Courtesy of the National Museum of Women in the Arts) |
BL: What do you think a show like Radical Women can bring to the conversation?
MM: I hope there will be more interest because of the context of what is going on right now politically in the United States. Latin American art, except for a very small group of artists, is usually ignored. We're not part of the conversation. I hope it will bring more interest and show that the exhibition is just the tip of the iceberg. I hope a lot of people in Latin America will also be indignant and say: "But you left this artist out, and that one, and that one!"
BL: So that we can have a Radical Women number two.
MM: Yes! Let's get to work.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Benoît Loiseau is an arts writer based in London and Mexico City. His collection of short stories We Can't Make You Younger is available via Antenne Books. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @benoitploiseau. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Less You Expect of the Next Year, the More Deep It's Going to Be | | | | By Melissa Broder | | |
SAGITTARIUS
(November 22 to December 21)
Happy birthday, Sag! The best gift I can give you this month is a reminder that expectations are the sticking points that make life feel disappointing, dull, sad, and halfway over. The less you expect of the next year, the more exciting, surprising, and, well, deep it's going to be.
CAPRICORN
(December 22 to January 19)
This is the month when we want the shiny shit — not just materially, but good feelings, inner glitter, and intoxicating juju. The theme for you this month is recycling. What if you already have all the resources you need? What if they are mostly internal?
AQUARIUS
(January 20 to February 18)
If you feel like there is no boundary left between you and the news cycle, the scandal du jour, the next click, or the last "like", that's because there isn't. The barrier has been penetrated, the paper doll perforated, the skin dissolved. The thing is, we don't repair the psychic boundary by adding anything to it. We repair by taking away. What can you delete?
PISCES
(February 19 to March 20)
This month, show someone each day that you care about their suffering. It's great if the person is someone you like, but bonus points if it's someone you dislike. What do you get for the bonus points? You'll suffer less.
ARIES
(March 21 to April 19)
What if the fact that everything is always changing on a cellular level, a cosmic level, and all the levels in between is the best news of the day? What if the changes we fear, resent, or disdain are the best things for you? I'm not saying they are, but what if?
TAURUS
(April 20 to May 20)
Astrologers are always talking about Taurus on the sofa, Taurus moving slowly, Taurus never getting out of the house. This month, I want you to reimagine your sign not as an Earth sign but as air: Taurus the flying bull. To be honest, I think you kind of already are that.
GEMINI
(May 21 to June 20)
If you've been walking around feeling like there is a hole inside of you, there probably is. The good news is that this hole does not need to be filled with anything external. There is nothing wrong with this hole. There is nothing to do to this hole. It's actually a really beautiful hole. When you stop trying to fill it, it's kind of like the best clubhouse ever.
CANCER
(June 21 to July 22)
Write a letter to yourself nine years from now. I'm not kidding. Write a letter by hand, put it in a little container, and bury it somewhere. Burying shit is fun, especially if you live in a city. Feel the cold dirt on your hands. Be reminded that you even are a self. Life is weird, but it's kind of real.
LEO
(July 23 to August 22)
Intimacy sounds kind of cute, and like it should not be a challenge for the "people-oriented" Leo. But intimacy is a challenge for all of us who are afraid to be seen naked, sans costume, which is most of us. This month, ask yourself what it would look like to take off a costume — just one of the many you wear — and not put on another one.
VIRGO
(August 23 to September 22)
It's a very solstice-y month. It's a good month to think about death. I'm not saying go to Hot Topic and start writing poetry (though that never hurt anyone) — I'm just saying that if you were so inclined to remember that one day you are going to die, and then sit with that fact, this month would be a good time to do it.
LIBRA
(September 23 to October 22)
It's weird, but you aren't responsible for how other people feel. It's crazy, but if someone is mad, it doesn't necessarily mean you did something wrong. It's bananas, but the only things that are under our control are our own thoughts and feelings. It's unbelievable, but your own approval is actually more important than the approval of anyone else.
SCORPIO
(October 23 to November 21)
OK, I want you to forget coolness this month. I want you to look at coolness as a by-product of middle-school trauma, high-school trauma, consumerism, and some other shit. I want you to not worry about being cool for the whole month. Obviously you aren't going to make it a full month, but let's try a day. This goes for beauty, "relevance," and anything in the orbit of the words personal brand.
Melissa Broder is the author of four collections of poems, including Last Sext (Tin House 2016), as well as So Sad Today, a book of essays from Grand Central. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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