The post Feng Shui for Cosmo appeared first on Clips.

Susan Miller runs my life for Cosmo: Fact: 2019 was not working out. One week into January — in a move ripped from Legally Blonde — my boyfriend broke up with me (by email) instead of proposing (in person). Two days later, a scamster emptied my checking account. I was obsessing over a still-in-progress novel, which had been “for real, almost finished” for two years, to the detriment of every other part of my life — including the romantic one, which for the foreseeable future consisted of letting my niece swipe through Tinder on my behalf. 

I’d tried yoga, meditation, swimming, stress-eating, catatonically sitting through three seasons of Prison Break. I already slept with citrine and malachite under my pillow. What if I resolved to follow the instructions of America’s favorite astrologer to the letter for the next 30 days — since I clearly couldn’t do any worse on my own?

For guidance, I reach out to Susan Miller of AstrologyZone, whose celebrity fans range from Emma Stone to Emma Roberts and include Pharrell Williams, Raf Simons, Jennifer Aniston, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Katy Perry, and Spike Jonze. Miller is quite possibly the most famous astrologer in the world. Over 10 million readers visit astrologyzone.com every month to pore over her epically detailed horoscopes; in 2014, when illness forced her to post some forecasts late, bereft fans created a Facebook group (“Abandoned by Susan Miller”) in protest. Who better to ask?

The first thing Miller tells me is that she’ll help. The second is that, in her astrological opinion, my premise is all wrong. “Astrologers work much further out than a month — we think in terms of many months or years,” says Miller. “Six months would make more sense.” I assure her that I’ll continue my practice beyond its official completion date, and she gives me an uber-goal for the next 30 days: “Focus on collaborations,” she says, urging me to look for a new literary agent or other professional partner.

With that, we begin. Pleasingly, I am first instructed to “focus on rest and retreat,” a suggestion I adopt wholeheartedly, and with snacks. (And more Prison Break.) I’m told to expect “a swell of kindness and compassion from friends,” so I preemptively tell the closest among them how grateful I am for their help. (This actually results in “a swell of kind and compassion” — which maybe makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also qualifies as a win.) At the midpoint, my horoscope says that I “now have energy to focus on your finances.” I set up a payment plan for my overdue 2012 taxes (oops!) and use an app to identify all of the recurring payments I’d forgotten — including a $4 monthly fee for an image-editing program I’d used once. As Miller predicted, none of these actions trigger a life-changing result: There are no winning lottery tickets. My mood, though, has improved remarkably, and in 12 months, I will be $48 richer.

Three weeks into my experiment, Susan offers to interpret my birth chart — a map of the sun, moon and planets as they appeared to astrologers when I was born. Each placement — beginning with my sun sign, in Taurus — influences aspects of my personality. The reading is equal parts magic, therapy, life-coaching, and performance art. Over the course of an hour, Susan paints my portrait. I love my family and travel almost equally — a key conflict. Had my dad experienced a reversal of fortune? (Yes.) Did I have any health concerns related to my throat — “and that includes your thyroid?” (Just ask my thyroid surgeon!) There is also the exciting news that I may marry a man I interview the following month. “He’ll be older, or have an old soul,” she says. 

My 30-day experiment ends a week later — coincidentally, the day before my birthday, right at the start of Taurus season. I thought I might be relieved to press pause on 24-7 astrology. Not so: Following my horoscopes has forced me to tend to all aspects of life — love, money, family — rather than only on work. Success in those areas counterbalanced the tribulations, a state of affairs I was happy to see reflected in my final horoscope: “You’re coming alive in unexpected ways,” it reads. “You know the only way to live the life you want is by doing things you’ve never experienced before.” 

For the record, I’ve never experienced marrying a man I’ve interviewed, though I do look forward to it. According to Susan, I have four weeks to get the job done, before my Taurean focus should shift elsewhere. By the time you read this, those four weeks, and its romantic opportunities, will be over; maybe I’ll have met my one true love over drinks and a voice recorder. The stars should prove so lucky. 

The post Susan Miller Runs My Life for a Month for Cosmo appeared first on Clips.

“Halloween comes earlier every year” is a thing we say with all the regularity of Halloween itself. In part this is because of how time collapses: The 12 months between my first Halloween (costume choice: bumblebee) and my second (tomato) equaled 100 percent of my lifetime. The time between my grandmother’s most recent Halloween (costume choice: retiree) and the one to come (she’s thinking about it) will account for 1.08 percent of hers. Our first Halloween is a titanic overload of ghosts and goblins and glitter and our mothers, usually so familiar, dressed as lions. Our 30th might be a parade of sexy teachers, sexy nurses, sexy peacocks, sexy bananas. Our 92nd—pfft. Halloweens arrive with the regularity and insignificance of passing commuter trains.

This is a situation compounded by matters not of perception but of science, and broken seasons, and catastrophic dislocation. Last Thursday, the third day of October, the high temperature in New York City was 91 degrees, and so our bodies said Where is the beach? rather than What can I be for Halloween that is not a sexy banana? Meanwhile, pumpkin spice lattes have been on sale since the week before Labor Day, because Starbucks decided to test the limits of our appetites for PSLs and PSL season writ large. And so, seasonality—and the underlying pleasures of a thing that it is more valuable because it is less available—becomes just another kind of scarcity. Why have scarcity when you can have more, and everything, all of the time?

No wonder Halloween feels like it comes earlier every year: As a percentage of our time on Earth, it does. Our bodies are telling us that it’s mid-summer, not early fall, while our flavored coffees, with entirely their own agenda, would have us believe that mid-fall starts in late summer.

It’s a mess. There is, though, a way to right some of these wrongs.

Last year, I was “too busy” to come up with a costume until Halloween morning, and ultimately decided to go to a party in Paris as “an American woman”: camo T-shirt, camo Elizabeth & James jeans, Forever 21 camo sweatshirt, French Army camo jacket. (“Et voilà, I am both celebrating and satirizing your French expectations of American fashion norms!”). I slowly walked up rue Oberkampf, knowing my costume was a failure; I bought the cheapest possible pinot noir at a convenience store, went to my friend’s apartment, knocked gently on the door, put the wine next to the doormat when no one answered, and turned to go home, though I could hear the party stirring inside. Halfway down the stairs, though, I passed a man on his way to the party I had just abandoned. Eleven months later, I see him perfectly: He was dressed as a French mime, his face painted chalk-white, with a lemon-yellow beret and a blue-and-white striped marinière. In his arms, he cradled two baguettes, wrapped not in standard paper but vintage French linen. It was like seeing a deer walk through my living room. I can barely remember the five Halloweens that came before that one, but I will never forget that mime.

His commitment was magnificent, and in its magnificence, we find a solution for our problem. We cannot force Starbucks to respect the natural timeline of the pumpkin harvest, but we can reconfigure our sense of time, and how we spend it. When we create things that are magnificent, we regard their debut with apprehension, and excitement, and wonder, and trust me, if you sit down today and dream up the greatest Halloween costume anyone has ever created, the time between now and Halloween will dribble by, like the slowest trickle of seasonally appropriate maple sap. Things we want seem to arrive more slowly; for proof, let us momentarily return to those commuter trains, which never appear more irregularly than when we are late. I am too busy, you are too busy—and yet I just spent the last ten minutes busily staring out my window. An amazing idea rarely takes much time—it takes, instead, the desire to have one, and a sense of the possibility that we might be magnificent. (Pinterest can help.)

Without that sense of possibility, we will be caught off-guard, in our camo non-costumes, and Halloween, and the holidays that follow, will hurtle toward us, another undone task coming due. With it, though, we can do the hard work of making our holidays magical ourselves. Like everything worth having, they will take forever to get here. The alternative is a world moving ever-faster, filled with sexy peacocks. We can do better, and be brilliant.

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In the last photo I have of my father, he and my mother are watching the Eagles play the Bears last November.

My father, carefully buttoned into a light-blue shirt, waves toward the camera. Someone who had not known him — who did not know how his knowledge of the world had dwindled from reveling in the intricacies of organic chemistry to feeding the dog, with help, to querulously parsing the intentions of these three strange people, his wife and daughters — would have thought my mother was the sick one: she looks exhausted, anxious, determined. However hard it is to have Alzheimer’s, it may be harder still to take care of someone with it.

What makes the picture bearable is knowing that the Eagles game is on the other side of it. I grew up with an Eagles game on TV every Sunday from September to January and a radio tuned to 1210 WCAU the rest of the week. I grew up judging my uncle’s stubborn defenses of the cheering after Michael Irvin’s career-ending spinal cord injury in 1999 (“The people clapping had no idea how bad he was hurt”) and the booing and battery-shelling of Santa Claus in 1968 (“What you have to understand is, this guy was a terrible Santa Claus”). I was in the backseat of my parents’ station wagon, leaving for summer vacation, when we heard on WCAU that Jerome Brown had died, and I was improbably in the stands for 4th and 26, one of the few football plays to have its own Wikipedia entry.

The latter is a moment I remember as the psychological opposite of the destruction of Alderaan, as tens of thousands of voices suddenly cried out in unexpected joy. I was sitting in the upper, upper reaches of Lincoln Financial Field, between my sportswriter friend Brandon (from the Philly suburbs, he’d somehow morphed into a Patriots fan) and a man named Loony who’d spent most of the game with his head between his knees. When Freddie Mitchell caught Donovan McNabb’s 28-yard pass, Loony jumped out of his seat, screamed, hugged everyone around him who would submit to his drunken, unsteady embrace and then returned to his previous position of agonized and desperate hope.

“Agonized and desperate hope” may be the default psychological setting for an Eagles fan. I have never been anything else, so I cannot know if this is the natural state of being for others — surely it is not for Brandon, the Patriots supporter. Philadelphia is singular in its veneration of the underdog, the backup, the guy who didn’t expect to get the call. We worship at the altar of a fictional boxer and line up to take pictures with a statue of Super Bowl MVP Nick Foles, “presented by Bud Light” and inscribed with the immortal words, “You want Philly Philly?”

I was far from home when the Eagles won the Super Bowl two years ago, three months after my father was finally, officially, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. When they were behind, I texted my friends, enjoying the familiar sound of their grumbling; when they were ahead, I sat with my chin on a table and my hands tented over my eyes. Resignation was familiar; anticipation unbearable. During halftime, I tried to pull it apart, why a victory felt so important, before settling on the hope that winning the Super Bowl — something so big, so improbable, so belated, so desired — would pierce through the dark clouds gathered in my father’s mind.

Once it was over, I called home. “Daddy,” I said. “We won!”

I waited for something I could shape, burrow into, a meaningful pause suggestive of activity deep inside him: recognition, which is what everyone who loves someone with Alzheimer’s waits for, hopes for, like a farmer studying the sky and praying for rain. But there was nothing, just the sound of him passing the phone back to my mother and her voice, sewing our conversation together, wondering if I’d be home in time for the parade.

My dad died four weeks after the Eagles beat the Bears — a few hours before they lost to the Dolphins. (“Your father didn’t need to see this,” my mom said at one point.) I took my uncle to the Cowboys game a few weeks later. I think I went looking for my dad — but he wasn’t that guy, the lifetime season-ticket holder tailgating in the parking lot. He just loved them because they reminded him of South Philly, of his family, of his brother calling midway through the fourth quarter with a new and unexpected gripe: “What now?” my dad would say. I never heard the answers, just my father’s laughter in response.

My friend Courtney took me to see the Eagles play the Seahawks a few weeks ago, at the start of what we hoped might be an unlikely but unstoppable march to the Super Bowl. He lives in Los Angeles but is, after my father, the biggest Eagles fan I’ve ever known. Court’s own father maintains no allegiances; his mother, he said, was rooting for Seattle. Her father had loved the Seahawks like mine had loved the Eagles. And she had grown to love them even more after her father died, Court said, and I understood then, as he said it, what it meant: to wear the jersey, to go to the game, to spend three hours every Sunday with the living and the dead.

Our night ended not as we hoped but in a Center City parking garage, watching a woman berate a man in a Carson Wentz jersey for his ongoing support of the concussed quarterback. For the brief moments Josh McCown et al. held onto a 3-3 tie, Courtney and I had made plans: we could meet in Green Bay, and then San Francisco; Miami would take care of itself. I would drive, he would fly; we would get a hotel room in Chicago if we had to. If we could just make it out of the Wild Card game with a 40-year-old former ESPN analyst at quarterback, who knew what lay ahead of us? Wasn’t this how it always worked: Wentz got hurt, and someone else pulled off a miracle? There might be so much time together: planning and hoping and commiserating, and hugging the Loonys sitting next to us. Winning the game would give us another seven days, and maybe seven more, and maybe even more beyond that. I will never be able to spot a penalty before the flag is thrown, but I understand what it means to be enraptured by excellence, in the feats a body is able to perform — and how this can be the easiest way to justify the time we spend together, friends and brothers and fathers and daughters.

Courtney and I stayed until the end, after D.K. Metcalf’s down-field catch with 1:40 left in the fourth quarter: “You’re not helping,” the guy in front of us bellowed miserably to the early deserters.

I had wondered how I would feel when the Eagles lost this season, the season that my dad died. I wondered if I would feel like something between us had broken. I did not, though. I felt it — I feel it — like a physical thing, an electrical current, unimpeded, as undeniable as the field itself. I do not doubt it will endure: next season, and the next, and all the seasons that follow.

“See you in September!” someone behind us sang out to the emptying stadium, and those of us left cheered.

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Tonight, Jeopardy will crown the winner of its Tournament of Champions. Everyone knows it will likely be James Holzhauer—or else Emma Boettcher, who in June ended Holzhauer’s 32-game winning streak. The key moment, though, has already come: On Monday’s show, instead of writing an answer to the clue (“In the title of a groundbreaking 1890 exposé of poverty in New York City slums, these three words follow ‘How the’”) semi-finalist Dhruv Gaur wrote “What is We You, Alex!” Host Alex Trebek had just announced his return to treatment for Stage IV pancreatic cancer—a disclosure that sent Twitter into paroxysms of anguish that felt, for once, utterly justifiable.

(The answer: “Other Half Lives.”)

Despite its wide international syndication, Jeopardy is one of the U.S.’s rare TV shows, like Saturday Night Live, that is possessed of a rich cultural relevance but fails to translate fully outside our borders, the American equivalent of television Marmite. (I’m writing this in France, where a generation of teenagers grew up with The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother.) And while it’s not impossible to stream or download Jeopardy while overseas, there’s something lonely and uncanny about the experience, like accidentally driving past your childhood home. Jeopardy is meant to be watched live, with other people—in my parents’ house in New Jersey, at 7 p.m., on Channel 7, after the dishes are done.

I’ve spent much of the last 10 years outside the U.S., so for me, Jeopardy is home and home is Jeopardy, something—like Thanksgiving and summer nights at baseball games—that cannot be properly replicated away from it. I can (barely) remember watching it with my grandparents at their farm in Pennsylvania, not long after Alex Trebek started hosting. Then I, along with the rest of my generation (and the generation after), grew up with the show. (Please enjoy this argument between Gen Xers, Millennials, and Generation Zs about who loves Jeopardy most.) My family has its own rules for how to watch it—primarily to refrain from saying the easy answers out loud. (“You’re embarrassing yourself,” I’m pretty sure I said to one grandstanding boyfriend, over his first American Christmas.)

Like most things that last, Jeopardy has become ever more valuable over time, along with our connection to Alex Trebek and the values they together represent: excellence, resilience, discretion, collegiality, the worth of knowledge. Those qualities have of course been magnified during a period of American history synonymous with the desecration of our national institutions, as our National Parks are sold for parts and the agencies meant to protect us now idly permit our harm (sample headline: “A Terrifying New Plan to Poison Air, Water, Humans”). Jeopardy—unlike the NFL, television news, or church—is the one place Americans still gather together, or at least simultaneously. It’s no accident that the most public and affecting reconciliation between MAGA America and Black America happened on “Black Jeopardy.” That accord wouldn’t survive the Final Jeopardy category of “Lives That Matter”—but, as Kenan Thompson’s host, Darnell, said, “It was good while it lasted.”

At a time when the baseline national mood is so consistently chaotic, it is hard not to think of what endures and what doesn’t—and to want what is good to stay forever. Of the 35 years my family has watched Jeopardy, my father has had Alzheimer’s disease for the past five. Five years ago, he could have told you how to manufacture allergy medicine. Now, if we are lucky, he will look at dark clouds gathering on the horizon and say something like, “Storm’s coming in,” and we will be grateful, because his mind has allowed him to connect a cause (the clouds) to an effect (the storm). He retains little new information from day to day—but one of the few things to stay with him was the news of Trebek’s initial diagnosis in March. “He doin’ OK?” he would ask, as we settled into our seats for the show and Alex appeared, to introduce the contestants.

“Absolutely,” we said.

“He doin’ OK?” he’d ask the next night.

“Absolutely,” we said.

“He doin’ OK?” he’d ask the next night.

“He’s going to be just fine,” we said.

And then we would watch the show, and my father, who once could have recited the periodic table of elements backward, would stay quiet—except, every once in a while, when an answer came to him, an Alexander Fleming or a Krakatoa. I did not write it down, because there is only so much wonderful/terrible I can stomach, but once this summer, he knew the Final Jeopardy answer when no one else did—not the contestants, not my mother or I. And we said to ourselves: At least something is left, for now.

We have discovered that the milestones of the disease reveal themselves only in retrospect: We did not know that that would be the last family vacation until we returned from it, and my addled father, so worried that we would leave him behind wherever we went next, preemptively packed his old work suitcase with two clock radios, a pack of AA batteries, a landline telephone, and a jumble of cables. We do not know if this will be the last time he climbs the stairs on his own. We do not know if this time is the last time he will remember the dog’s name, or my name, or his own.

I do not know if Krakatoa or Alexander Fleming will be my father’s last Jeopardy answer. I hope it isn’t: I hope tonight, he has an answer that James and Emma do not. I do not know if this will be Alex Trebek’s last Tournament of Champions. I pray my mother and I were right when we assured my father that yes, absolutely, he is going to be fine. If Alzheimer’s has taught me anything, it is that there is relief in not looking forward, not looking back. We are here. Alex is here. We are all of us together, in our way, and what can we do but be thankful for it?

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