Writing/Editing Job Update!!
Plus what else is happening or not for you this month. And a Sassy faker.
Hello!
I will get right to it today (you’re welcome, people who don’t love all my usual parentheticals and tangents like this one). I won’t even tell you the story of the gallery opening I went to last night where I changed on the way and must have dropped my bra somewhere so I went without and ran into about 50 amazing people I haven’t seen in ages, hunching over the whole time with my arms crossed way high up like I was 13. Because, who cares about that?
Here’s the update on the writer/editor hiring situation: A few weeks ago, I asked if any of you were interested in working with me here. I was immediately and thoroughly blown away by the number and then the quality and thoughtfulness of your application letters. There are a couple thousand(!!!) of you that I could bring on board right now and be lucky and overjoyed to work with. Since I’m only hiring one person at the moment, what I am going to do is keep the rest of your letters and contact information flagged for when we get to the next round of hiring – which ideally won’t be long if this scheme of mine works and we are able to post more frequently and then afford to bring another person on. And so on.
So if you don’t get the job this time, that just means that you are still wonderful and that I hope to hire you next round. As a way to narrow it down for what is most needed now, if you’re still interested, here’s what I would love for you to do: Forward me your last email again (the one with the highly accurate subject line saying, “I Am A Good Person”) to Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com and put a note at the top of it about the extent of your experience working in the Substack CMS. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate, just a note about what you have done that will enable you to hit the ground running on day one or dive right in with me here or whatever metaphor you want to use for us instantaneously productively joyously seamlessly collaborating. And that’s the whole deal. From that, I will get back to you quickly to offer the position.
I love you! And if me saying that creeps you out, absolutely I understand you withdrawing your application. Now check out your horoscope if you are into that. Bee has such an amazing track record of accuracy here and such a unique way of doing these readings that it’s worth looking at yours below to see, I think.
Ok, enough! Talk to you in the comments and via your sweet emails!
xoxooxooxox Jane
PS I think this is the weakest intro I have written here to date. Agree?
PPS What should I do or not do about someone who claims publicly to have worked with us on Sassy magazine from the beginning when that isn’t true? Let it go or call them out? Thanks for your advice, as always!
By The Zine Witch
“I just found out my friend has been mad at me since early Covid and never told me, which means this insane grievance survived the damn sourdough starter, Tiger King, and multiple variants.” My client says this under the fluorescent lights of our nearest occult store parking lot, cigarette trembling between two acrylic nails like a tiny white surrender flag. She laughs after she says it, but her beautiful moon shaped face does not participate. Her face is doing something much older and sadder. It’s frozen in shock. Her jaw looks too tight. There’s a tear she’s trying to hide glossy with humiliation and worry. The specific expression people get when the body has already accepted a truth the personality is still trying to negotiate with politely. I feel heartbroken for her. I know this feeling all too well. I stare out the window of the parking lot and just allow myself the space to listen and show up.
“I didn’t even know there was a problem,” she says. “I thought we were fine.”
I think about the word fine. People use the word fine the way landlords paint over water damage. People use the word fine most of the time when things are certainly not fine.
And apparently they have not been fine for years. I sit there watching her reorganize the entire past in real time. Every memory developing a second meaning, every text message suddenly radioactive around the edges. Every “love you” now sounding dubbed over in a horror film. This is the real violence of a delayed conflict. The realization that two people have been living inside completely different versions of the same relationship while calling it by the same name. I know this all too well being Autistic. People think they are being polite. But, really they are being codependent.
“Many neurotypicals don’t want friends. They want acquaintances. Low maintenance. They know how to maintain surface contact. They know how to perform likability. They know how to slowly starve a relationship while insisting everything is normal.”
Lately this has been everywhere in my practice. Old arguments resurfacing like bodies in thawing lakes. These tiny misunderstandings that are suddenly swollen with years of interpretation and private narration. People reopening conversations they thought had died quietly in the corner years ago. Someone casually says, “I think I’ve actually been hurt for a long time,” and suddenly an entire timeline curdles in front of you. The past does not stay still after a sentence like that. It rearranges itself immediately. Memory is frighteningly easy to contaminate once emotion enters it retroactively.
As an astrologer, I cannot help noticing the timing underneath the personal story. We are moving into Gemini season while Uranus settles into Gemini, and communication itself feels electrically unstable right now. Gemini governs language, friendship, siblings, transportation, text messages, daily exchanges, interruptions, gossip, short travel, the nervous system, and all the tiny repetitive interactions that quietly determine whether intimacy survives or collapses. Gemini is fast and cerebral. It moves the way thoughts move when somebody has had too much caffeine and suddenly remembers every humiliating thing that has ever happened to them since third grade. Under Gemini energy, the mind starts opening old filing cabinets at three in the morning. Old resentments come back wearing fresh makeup. Conversations you thought ended years ago suddenly begin speaking again inside your body. That pre Mercury retrograde glow.
And the thing about Gemini is that it does not always care whether communication is accurate. It cares that communication is moving. Gemini is the passing thought, the nervous text message, the half-finished interpretation formed before the other person has even completed the sentence. Right now people are responding faster than they are understanding. Tone is arriving before comprehension. Meaning is developing frostbite crossing from one nervous system into another. A sentence leaves one mouth alive and arrives in another already distorted by fear, projection, exhaustion, memory, insecurity, pride, loneliness, or whatever private ghost the listener happened to wake up beside that morning.
I know this feeling intimately because I am autistic and communication has never felt automatic to me. It has always felt assembled carefully by hand, like trying to build stained glass windows while everyone else throws rocks through them. It caused me social anxiety where I stopped participating in friendship entirely for periods of time. A perpetual loneliness of being deeply unfulfilled on an intimate or celebral level. If I let down my guard, if I truly was myself, I was going to upset somebody and end up in the same predicament as my friend. Because most people do not actually know how to repair things. And what I’ve come to realize, is many neurotypicals don’t want friends. They want acquaintances. Low maintenance. They know how to maintain surface contact. They know how to perform likability. They know how to slowly starve a relationship while insisting everything is normal. But repair is slower and uglier than people expect. Repair requires returning to the scene of misunderstanding without turning it into mythology. It requires tolerating the nausea of clarification. A delayed text becomes evidence. A strange tone becomes biography. One badly timed sentence becomes scripture. Most people would rather finalize a relationship internally than risk the vulnerability required to revisit meaning together and repair.
Repair often begins with a question that sounds almost absurdly simple: “Wait. Are we even in the same story right now?” Because sometimes the first step toward healing is discovering that the argument was never about the original moment at all. It was about the meaning each person privately attached to it while the other person had absolutely no idea a second narrative was even being written.
And this is what I keep watching in my practice lately. Communication revealing the actual architecture of relationships. People are childhood wounds driving cars too fast through rainstorms trying desperately to explain themselves before the light changes. Of course we misunderstand each other. The miracle was never going to be perfect communication. The miracle is finding someone willing to come back after the sentence lands wrong.
Gemini season has a way of dragging the conversation back into the room whether you wanted to have it or not. The text you ignored in February. The resentment that calcified during lockdown. The sibling tension that got swallowed for the sake of “keeping the peace.” The friendship that quietly shifted shape three years ago and never fully recovered. Gemini is ruled by Mercury, and Mercury does not let things sit untouched forever. It wants movement. Exchange. Language. Context. It wants to understand what happened, even if the answer is uncomfortable.
“Someone from your past suddenly appears this month with a completely different version of events than the one you’ve been carrying around in your own head.”
Last week I received an email from a friend who thought we were in a fight because I had gone radio silent during my dental surgery. Around the same time, the front desk worker in our building, who had been there for almost forty years, retired, and we were gifted a temporary replacement named Linda. The first thing Linda asked me was whether I believed in miracles, to which I immediately replied, “Absolutely.” I knew right away this was my person. For the next month, Linda and I would sit at the front desk talking for hours at a time, the kind of conversations where time disappears and suddenly you feel like you’ve known someone forever. I found out she had been homeless and living in her car since an accident in 2024, and somewhere between my teeth, my surgeries, and my new friendship with Linda, I forgot everything else. In my time with Linda, she saw me while I was allowed to be myself, even in fear and pain. I felt safe in that and got lost for a month in the Linda bubble. Meanwhile, my friend had convinced herself I was angry at her and had been replaying a conversation from weeks earlier in her head, when I had made a snarky joke about how much I hate Chris Brown and what I think his fans can all do. I felt terrible. Miscommunications are strange like that. Sometimes while you are busy surviving one thing, someone else is quietly building an entirely different story about you in their head.
And this year there is an extra layer to this Gemini mood board because by the end of the month we are already moving into the pre-shadow of a Mercury retrograde. You can feel it before the retrograde officially begins. Conversations start looping. Old arguments resurface with new information attached to them. People misremember timelines. Someone from your past suddenly appears with a completely different version of events than the one you’ve been carrying around in your own head. Gemini energy moves fast, but Mercury retrogrades force us to slow down long enough to actually hear what was said and what was left unsaid.
Gemini also rules the nervous system, transportation, social media, group chats, rumors, neighbors, siblings, and the strange emotional weight carried inside casual conversation. Sometimes healing this season does not look dramatic. Sometimes it is just finally admitting that something bothered you. Sometimes it is realizing you built an entire emotional worldview around one misunderstanding that nobody corrected. Gemini season can expose the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive uncertainty. Mercury retrograde asks whether those stories are still true.
So, Gemini season asks you the question: What conversation have you been rehearsing in your head for years that might finally need to happen out loud? And what part of yourself has been trapped inside silence because you were too afraid of changing the relationship once the truth was spoken?
Because that is the strange thing about Gemini season. It does not just expose communication problems. It exposes the emotional cost of avoidance. The friendships maintained through politeness instead of honesty. The families that communicate through implication instead of directness. The way people convince themselves they are “over it” while their body still reacts every time the topic comes up. Mercury retrogrades are not only about miscommunication. Sometimes they are about finally understanding what the real conversation was underneath all along.
Best Days This Month For Sex…
I am putting the paywall here so that anyone who likes good sex will have to pay or take out a free trial to learn when this month to pursue that. As will anyone who wants to read their individual personalized predictions below - and anyone who wants to ask astrologer Bee questions in the comments about what’s coming up for you specifically. I use this ploy so that Bee and other writers can get paid. Forgive me. - Jane
