A few years ago, when I first met my former roommate, I eyed his three video-game consoles and 42-inch flat-screen TV and asked, “You a gamer?”

“Nah, not really anymore. Got too much schoolwork to do,” he replied.

Within weeks, I found myself arriving home at 10pm to find him hunched over his game controller, eyes glazed and barking loudly into his headset to his girlfriend about “arrowburn” and what Final Fantasy “camp” he was in—and realizing that he’d been at this since breakfast.

I gritted my teeth and closed my bedroom door for a few days, scheming about how I could put a match to his entire game collection without anyone suspecting arson. When it looked like he was determined to mold a permanent groove in the sofa in order to complete every side quest, I broached the subject of roommate etiquette.

“Hey. Is there any way you can not play video games late at night, when I’m trying to get some sleep?”

“Uhh. Why can’t you just go in your room? I’m a gamer, that’s what I do!”

I moved out shortly after.

Beyond Obsession

While I played my fair share of Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt in elementary school, like pretty much every person born after 1975, I never understood the chat-room-trolling, camp-out-in-Target-parking-lot fervor of those caught up in the netherworlds of Halo, World of Warcraft and other blockbuster games.

I might be in the minority. With the rise of smartphone apps, ubiquitous hip-hop game samples and the addition of Wii to daily exercise routines, gaming has gone from the realm of obsessive teenagers role-playing in their basements to a widely accessible entertainment genre.

Aside from the fact that this digital-media niche yields close to $25 billion a year in revenue, according to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the influence of video games on popular art and culture today is undeniable.

The gaming experience—whether a person played Donkey Kong on a game console, Oregon Trail on a Dell 3000 or Angry Birds on an iPhone—is a nearly universal childhood phenomenon that doesn’t dissipate as you move through later stages of life. ESA reports that the average gamer is 30 years old and has been playing for 12 years.

“Game players go through phases,” says Craig Hobbs, assistant professor of digital-media art at San Jose State University, who serves on the SJSU Learning and Games Initiative. “At times games dominate their lives, and at other times, games are usurped by school, work and relationships.”

While electronic game companies have generated large profits, games have had a harder time being recognized for their artistic merits. Video-game concerts aim to change that subtle form of cultural discrimination.

“The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses” is part of this movement to draw in audiences that may have previously dismissed video games and appreciate them as a legitimate art form. Set to take place on Dec. 14 at the San Jose Civic, “Symphony of the Goddesses” is an orchestral concert based on the music to the video game; it is modeled after the wildly successful Japanese productions that began touring in the early ’90s.

The show’s producer, San Francisco native and former Tokyo resident Jason Michael Paul, originally brought the pop-culture/classical-music fusion shows to the United States with the Final Fantasy ode, “Dear Friends,” which debuted in Las Vegas in 2004. People snatched up tickets in a matter of days, which prompted him to turn the show into a series.

Paul has straddled video games and classical music his whole career, having done a stint in the electronic-game industry and worked with Luciano Pavarotti and the Three Tenors. “I just had this wild idea to combine the two,” he explains.

Paul’s next endeavor, “PLAY! A Video Game Symphony,” was a catalog of music from blockbuster franchises such as Mario, Zelda and Final Fantasy. The 2006 Chicago premiere featured performances by soundtrack legends Koji Kondo (Mario, Zelda), Angela Aki (Final Fantasy) and Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill), lifting Paul to the next level as a top player in the video-game concert world. Meeting and collaborating with those composers, he tells me, “was pretty special. They’re gods, they’ve been doing this for over 30 years, but they are humble and gracious. Working with them makes me motivated.”

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the iconic Nintendo exploratory adventure franchise The Legend of Zelda, Paul teamed up with two friends, producer and showrunner Jeron Moore and musical director Chad Seiter to create “Symphony of the Goddesses.”

Their first show opened in January, beginning a 30-show run, including Madison Square Garden in New York City this past November. The production itself “is basically a retelling of Zelda through music,” Paul explains. “We have special lighting that syncs with the music. We have some neat aspects that make it unique.”

“We created the show so that anyone with a healthy love of orchestral concerts would enjoy it,” Seiter adds. “Originally, we wanted to do something great for the fans, but [we] broadened it so that standard ticket holders and legacy ticket holders would say, ‘Wow.'”

The trio took suggestions from audiences and tweaked subsequent shows, fashioning the full symphonic program that will be on display in San Jose.

Quest for Respect

Since orchestral video-game concerts first emerged in Japan in the early 1990s, they have multiplied like Metroid Space Pirates. Various orchestras have performed Thomas Becker’s renowned Symphonische Spielemusikkonzerte (Symphonic Game Music Concerts) in Germany, and productions like Video Games Live, National Symphony Orchestra’s Final Fantasy commemorative “Distant Worlds” and Gamer Symphony Orchestra have spread in the United States.

And yet, it has taken decades for video games to even be considered in the same territory as an Academy Award-nominated picture or a Grammy-winning album.

Ed Palumbo, 32, is an Irvine-based entrepreneur and lifelong Nintendo fan, who did “two tours” working at GameStop in the early ‘aughts and has attended E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo, the premier conference in the video-game industry) for the past seven years.

“Many people might think, ‘Why would I want to see a video-game concert? It seems silly,'” he said. “But a lot goes into a video game, just like a movie. You need digital effects, audio engineering, storytelling. What bothered me growing up was that, while movie makers and musicians were getting all these awards, people discounted the quality of video-game audio, and they can’t think of video games as having a story. I guess it’s because they think of the bleeps and bloops from when video games first came out. But just like video-game images have evolved from pixelated characters to HD, so has the music.”

Professor Hobbs agrees. “Contemporary video-game compositions rival great symphonies of the past,” he asserts. “Video-game composers provide the emotional texture of a game, while sound designers create detail and immersive depth.” Opera singer and “girl gamer” Alayna Rakes notes that some people play specifically for the beauty of the game, depth of story and melodic compositions, prompting developers to create more artistic games.

“A game like Braid, for example, borders on a performance piece,” Rakes says. “For years, we have had games with wonderful narratives, recognizable musical themes, and well-designed characters. Zelda was one of the first games to fully incorporate those elements. It is hard to argue that video games don’t have artistic merit, even if MoMA isn’t recognizing them as worthy of display as design achievements.”

Palumbo pointed out that, unlike movies released on screens across the country, popular music pumped into commuters’ cars via radio or television shows blasted into everyone’s living room, “The only people who appreciate video-game music are gamers.”

In order to hear the music, a player must engage with a game, move through different levels and interact with different characters. And even then, they might be so absorbed by the task at hand that they can’t detect the soft flutter of strings depicting a meadow scene or a rumbling bass forewarning an enemy approaching.

What a video-game concert does is take the music out of the game and put it in front of an audience primed for a performance, which includes not just the gamer but also their brothers, sisters, parents and kids. This audience may already perceive operas and symphonies as art, and they will have a chance to watch the same musicians with the same instruments perform complex musical arrangements that tell a story—a Nintendo story. In the theater, producers such as Paul dim the lights on the video-game aspect, emphasizing the art.

“The reason why Nintendo encourages these touring shows is because they have always considered the music to be important,” says Palumbo. In order to immerse a user in the game, developers exploited all of the technology available to them at the time, including audio, to great effect.

Nintendo theme music portrays a distinct, instantly recognizable personality for each franchise. Mario is fun and melodic, Zelda is adventurous and the science-fiction Metroid invokes creepy exploration. They all have a heritage, one that can appeal to hardcore gamers and noobs alike.

Musical director Seiter sums up the experience: After one of the Zelda 25th Anniversary shows, a 6-year-old approached Seiter and told him it was his first classical music concert, and he loved it. His grandmother, who had brought him, added that she thought it was “spectacular!”

While I’m not going to dress up as Princess Zelda for the “Symphony of the Goddesses” show in San Jose, I do plan to attend. It’s possible I’ll even see my ex-roommate there. If I do, maybe I can now have a conversation with him about the cultural significance of video games, although it might be stretching it to ask me to create an avatar and role-play together. For now, I’ll just listen to the music.

To understand the unexpected social media phenomenon that the drop-in, audio-only app Clubhouse has become, all you have to do is look at its growth—up from 10,000 users to 10 million in five months time. This despite the fact that it’s still in beta, and can only be joined by invitation, on iPhone.

Recalling the early-aughts days of Gmail, at least some of Clubhouse’s allure stems from this perceived exclusivity. No invitation? Join a waitlist, just like at an exclusive restaurant or nightclub. The purpose is to allow smaller groups of users to test it out and iron out kinks, sure, but it’s also a classic psychological paradigm: If not everyone can have it, more will desire it.

So while Clubhouse is being described by media outlets like Vogue, Vox and Wired as “buzzy” and “out of control,” in reality, it’s the coverage itself that is buzzy. The actual time I’ve spent on the app itself, in a mirror of human interaction, ranges from absorbing and interesting to tiring and mundane. Running the gamut from university seminar to idle gossip, Clubhouse can appeal to both our highest natures and lowest indulgences—and everything in-between.

In the Zoom age, the way Clubhouse removes visual focus—you can only see other participants’ tiny headshots—the stress of setting up the right lighting and background, applying the right makeup or wearing the right shirt, is removed.

Unlike podcasts and call-in radio, it allows for immediate democratic participation, via hand-raising. Panels are run with speakers and listeners, with moderators calling people to the “stage” and the ability to expel trolls or anyone violating guidelines. Users have the option to listen, learn and be entertained while cooking dinner or doing the laundry, and perhaps chime in.

It’s a stark contrast to social media that requires eyes on screen and constant, addictive infinite scrolling. Clubhouse’s audio-only aspect allows for fluidity and spontaneity, as opposed to the stiltedness of Zoom work meetings or happy hours, and those little boxes that leave us never quite knowing where to look, not to mention seeing our own image reflected back at us.

But what is actually deeply innovative about Clubhouse is the portal it opens to talk in real-time with people all over the world (well, not China, where the app is banned), on any topic, at the click of an icon. Following a year of so much isolation, what feels more urgent and necessary than to listen and be heard?

From coworking spaces to NFT art, talk is rampant everywhere on Clubhouse, bringing back memories of a pre-Covid, louder world. There are “clubs” about everything: science fiction, travel, therapy, comedy, creativity, politics, languages, religion, veganism and a vast amount of tech. Investing, venture capital, startups, AI—there’s a club for that. A few recent conversations: “All things Jane Austen,” “Blogging & Podcast Collabs: Let’s Feature Each Other,” “Today in Democracy,” “Elon Kanye, Emojis and NFTs.”

Social products ask of us the ultimate investment—time—and people are making it on Clubhouse. Perhaps, following a year in isolation, the sound of voices and gathering for spontaneous conversation in groups seems novel and extreme. After all, a year of Covid quarantines has left many of us starved for group discussion and the ability to eavesdrop on interesting conversations, whether that’s random chatter the next table over in a restaurant, or attending panels at professional conferences.

Clubhouse Rules

So is an all-talk social platform exactly what we need now? Long after the buzz dies down and it’s one other app next to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok, will the platform increase empathy, connection and thought exchange as a democratic forum for conversations that matter? Or will it just be more noise and one more thing for influencers to monetize?

When I snagged one of those coveted invites, I binged on Clubhouse and spoke with a handful of startup entrepreneurs and other early adopters to find out.

I was excited about “Townhall Italia,” the first stop on “Clubhouse World Tour,” an effort to host town halls to orient international users, and for co-founders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth to answer their questions via a translator. “Townhall Italia” was an auditory mini-voyage to Italy from my living room, and an ideal introduction to the platform as Clubhouse’s energetic (sometimes to the point of sounding very, very excited) co-founder Davison, who studied engineering at Stanford and worked at Google, explained his creation to Italian influencers. Clubhouse’s other co-founder, Seth, also a Stanford engineering graduate previously of Google, was also present, but on mute. Seth is the quieter of the two, in contrast to Davison’s extroversion and excitable manner that’s palpable even on an audio-only platform. The two met in the tech world and immediately bonded, working on social product ideas together. Clubhouse is the one that took off.

“Clubhouse is a new type of social network based on voice where people all over the world come to talk and learn from each other in real time,” Davison says in the Italian town hall. “Voice is at the base of civilization. We want anyone to be able to sit down for a meaningful conversation with anyone else. We want to build something that’s different from existing networks.” That means one that’s “not based on likes and follows and social media managers, but authentic human connection.”

However, it’s still a follower-based system, replete with its own influencers already. As Davison says in the town hall, pathways to monetization are already being paved.

“Our goal is to create a more human network where you can close the app feeling better than when you opened it because you have met new people, made friends and learned,” he says. “Any room you see in your home feed, you are encouraged to join, people want you to join. If you’d like to speak, just raise your hand, otherwise you can sit back and listen. The goal is to keep it very casual.”

The Italians responded with enthusiasm. During a time when sociable culture in Italy had to largely shut down, what would have traditionally been large gatherings, such as the Sanremo Music Festival—which in 2021 was held without a live audience for the first time because of Covid-19—happened on Clubhouse. Speaking of music, the room took on a festive atmosphere as popular Italian musical duo Daudia popped in to perform a brief song they wrote about … Clubhouse.

Open Source

The founders’ omnipresence—open discussion about the app, their hopes for it and plans for what lies ahead (Android version, opening it up more, monetization and solutions for content moderation to curb racist, sexist and anti-Semitic commentary)—is rare among the social media platform-founder landscape of reserved enigmatic figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.

Seth and Davison have started hosting town halls and provide onboarding presentations for new users the world over. I lived in Italy as a kid and hearing the language in a way that sounded as if I was there again was heartwarming. Such is the Clubhouse effect: Listening in on a live town hall with a social media app’s founders, accessible and on the platform constantly, while getting a refresher in your second language, doesn’t happen on static, visual infinite-scroll sites.

The most memorable rooms during my month-long Clubhouse deep-dive, though, were the Plant-Based Food and Wellness Community’s “Ask a Pediatrician,” featuring plant-based pediatrician and emergency wilderness responder Dr. Atoosa Karoush (which reinforced my choice to raise my kids vegan with evidence-based information from the recognized expert) and “Lucid Dreaming as a Complement to Meditation,” hosted by digital health strategist and lucid dreaming enthusiast Tony Estrella and Minh Do, an engineering professor at the University of Illinois.

While there is undoubtedly a place for the ubiquitous “what should Clubhouse be” or “how to promote your content,” the endless possibilities of what we can learn by listening and participating in Clubhouse communities designed to educate are fascinating in themselves.

Despite the constantly available topics as varied as conversation itself (when it is found out that Facebook is making a Clubhouse copy, a room immediately springs up to talk about what it means) much of the discussion so far seem to be about Clubhouse itself: how to use it, moderate and build a following on the app, monetize content (when there is a means to do so) and so forth. A group called “Clubhouse Undercover” offers users tips under categories such as “Understand Social Dynamics” and “Utilize the Psychology of How the App is Used,” hosting a panel on “The Keys to Growth on Clubhouse.”

Talk and Mirrors

Bay Area hospitality expert Emillio Mesa is listening. Pre-Covid, the host, event planner and freelance writer’s tagline for his highly rated dinner parties was “The Art of Conversation.” Mesa has organized events and dinners for Google, Facebook and the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative, among others. (His name literally translates from the Spanish for “table,” he points out, suggesting his hosting destiny.)

Mesa also had a pre-Covid career niche curating small-group dinners out of his San Francisco home. Attendees booked the intimate events Airbnb style via EatWith, through various Silicon Valley-based companies Mesa did events production for, or personal connections. Mesa’s dinners were akin to a live version of Clubhouse. Politics, immigration, gender and social justice were frequent topics. The pandemic upended Mesa’s literal tables, but Clubhouse provided a tool for the host to pivot.

“It’s very similar to what I used to do, but in a virtual space,” he says. He sees Clubhouse’s success as an interesting byproduct of the pandemic, calling it “the next wave in social media,” because it “takes it back to warm communication with people. There’s only so much you can do via a post with images. This is not about how you look or write. It’s about how you sound and what you say. It’s soothing.”

(Side-note on the topic of soothing: as one might expect, there are a slew of clubs devoted to helping you fall asleep at night. Perhaps after the pandemic, the simple sound of voices also has an increased ability to soothe.)

“This strips everything completely,” Mesa says. “It’s who you are and what you have to say. People listen and it’s a lot more direct because it’s just about the person, not an image. What’s in your heart and mind? What are you doing and what do you say about it?” Mesa is inspired by Felicia Horowitz’s weekly “Virtual Dinner Parties.” Horowitz, one of Clubhouse’s biggest influencers with 4.3 million followers, is married to tech investor Ben Horowitz, who, along with Marc Andreessen, formed Andreessen Horowitz, which raised new funding in a Series B round for Clubhouse through its General Partner Andrew Chen.

In his essay on investing in Clubhouse, Chen writes, “Because you’re listening to people talk, Clubhouse is about a real-time exchange of ideas, not just consuming highly edited, static content.”

This is the precise quality Santa Cruz-based photographer and designer Jules Holdsworth, who has a following of more than 11,000 on her Facebook “Infertility Awareness” group and a Clubhouse club of the same name, most appreciates about the product.

“In the past they have wanted me to host podcasts and YouTube channels, but I’m not comfortable talking at people,” she says. “Clubhouse allows me to talk with people and interact with them on a level podcasts and YouTube don’t.”

She has also found her community already on there. “I went into a club someone else was hosting about infertility. When I got onstage and introduced myself, the moderator said she had followed my Facebook page for years and was honored to have me. I nearly fell out of my chair! The ability to communicate in real-time, hearing people’s tone of voice, makes it a very rich experience. It’s a way to socialize with people from a distance during a very isolating time of a pandemic.”

For Holdsworth, the drawback is trolling, especially as her club is about a sensitive topic. “On Clubhouse, you don’t have control of who is listening to you, so I do feel exposed in that regard,” she says.

So far, it’s been self-policing, with users able to report violations, though Clubhouse’s blog reports they are at work on security improvements, ways of reporting inappropriate behavior and moderators’ ability to end rooms. “Some trolls come in rooms and spout obscenities until a moderator kicks them out,” Holdsworth says. “I’ve heard it several times. A woman trolling a room claimed she was locked in the basement by her boyfriend and needed help. The mod offered help, then the troll yelled racial obscenities. The mod handled it with grace and reported the troll. It did throw the room off for a bit.”

Virtual Soapbox

Not every early adopter sees Clubhouse as the world’s best chance at a more sincere form of social. Journalist Ian Kumamoto, who writes for Vice, The New York Times and Business Insider, is concerned about how many conversations “get off the rails” and lead to “rambling,” with rooms favoring “people who already talk a lot, not necessarily the ones with the most important things to say,” he says. Whose perspectives will be drowned out in all the noise?

“It’s tapping into a zeitgeist,” says Jonathon Feit, co-founder and chief executive of Beyond Lucid Technologies, a Silicon Valley medical software startup currently working on Covid vaccination tracking systems. “But you end up with the same issue of noise. I can look at someone’s Twitter on their profile and send them a DM, except every other person in the room is doing the same thing.” He adds that, from a startup perspective, “Going from a zero to nine hundred million dollar valuation, you skipped a lot of steps along the way.”

When he first logged in, Feit remembers thinking “This thing seems like Silicon Valley hype.” But exploring the platform, he says, “I started seeing an enormous number of people on this thing—more than I expected. I bit the bullet and gave into the wave. I focus on venture and healthcare, that’s what I look for.”

Entering a room about healthcare in underserved markets, the topic of emergency services in rural healthcare came up, Feit’s area of expertise. The moderator knew who Feit was and made him a speaker. Feit ended up giving an impromptu talk about the role of ambulance services in rural spaces during Covid.

Feit likens Clubhouse to a “21st Century version of a guy on the soapbox in the town square, talking to whoever wants to listen about whatever was interesting. If 99% of the stuff on Clubhouse is garbage and 1% turns out to be great, is it worth it? That’s very apropos of so much of venture and so much of innovation in general. You throw stuff against the wall and all it takes is the one person in the room that says, ‘actually I totally need to talk to you.’ And then next thing you know you’ve got a check, you’ve got a customer, you’ve got a partner, you’ve got something. So I have to give them credit for creating occasions. I think they’ve done it somewhat accidentally, and where the growth curve becomes a problem. It’s an interesting addition to the toolkit when you can’t meet people at conferences, you can’t go get on a plane.”

He recalls, in pre-Covid times, meeting someone on a plane to Phoenix who then became an important collaborator. “You don’t do that if you’re not sitting on planes or in the hotel lobby. So this provides occasions, and as such, it’s useful. The question is how useful it becomes. It’s creating noise, but out of the noise you can find a way to create a path.”

Coffee Talk

Over in a very different room in another industry—specialty coffee—Jared Truby of Cat & Cloud talks about missions and values, coffee and culture, and “connecting to farmer-producers and the ethics of buying coffee.” Truby received his invite from an entrepreneur who follows his podcast.

“When I jumped on,” he says, “most rooms were filled with shark-tank-like vibes and famous people talking to famous people while normal people listened. I found it interesting that you could look at profiles and learn about all people in a room while listening, but the content was annoying a lot of the time: how to level up, pitch me your idea, here’s how to make a million dollars from CEO’s…blah blah blah. All of those approaches were so ‘look at me’ disguised as how to help. The cool thing is that everyone was polite, the annoying thing is it was looking like marketing in disguise of philanthropy. So I started a room with the hopes of doing a Q&A and attracting some other specialty coffee people.”

Truby got engagement from around the world. “Friends who have been in specialty for 20 years along with people who are known by name can get together, talk and share. This is where there can be so much positivity. The connections, the learning and the progression to better are on the table, if the moderators set a good tone.”

Truby’s favorite Clubhouse moment so far was when Nick Cho, known on TikTok as “your Korean dad” and an old coffee friend of Truby’s, asked about his approach, mission and values in business. “It allowed for an honest share and peek behind the curtain. The response from the listeners and participants was huge. Oftentimes, values are buzzwords used to market a business and I was allowed to share how ours can help people who work with us as well as our guests and partners. I ended up having to leave, but came back two hours later and the discussion had kept going, it kept evolving.”

Ultimately, Clubhouse’s drawbacks and benefits may be one and the same. If Clubhouse mirrors society, it’ll most likely be a matter of what room you happen to be in. “A truly helpful room can be a place of connection that outlasts the creator,” says Truby. “That’s a great ideal. It’s a platform with as much potential as you are able to create yourself. You just have to know what you’re trying to get out of it.”

A community’s identity is often expressed through the locally-based businesses it sustains over the course of decades. The news this week that longtime icon Original Joe’s would reopen was comforting news, because let’s face it, it’s hard to imagine a San Jose without Original Joe’s.

Despite being part of Silicon Valley’s resilient economy, small businesses have been walloped hard. Many were already struggling with competition from digital giants, rising rents fueled by an overheated technology-driven economy and displacement from real estate activity.

Santa Clara County was a ground zero for the introduction of coronavirus to the United States—the first death, two of the first 10 identified cases, and, along with neighboring counties, the first shelter-in-place order. The closure of schools, stores, restaurants, event venues and service businesses ground life to a halt. While bright spots like blue skies, traffic-free roads and neighbors saying “hi” to one another provided some uplift, most people couldn’t wait to socialize and get haircuts again.

Two months and three weeks after the sheltering began, county public health officials cautiously opened the door to retail shopping, farmers’ markets, outdoor dining, drive-in cinemas and small events, while asking the public to continue masking, distancing and remaining at home when not at an authorized event. Gyms, bars, indoors restaurants and traditional movie theaters remained closed.

Just as closed businesses and sheltered customers began to see some rays of hope, however, the other shoe dropped in the form of a knee to a neck in Minneapolis. The cruel killing by an expressionless police officer ignited a firestorm of rage over the country’s history of inequality and use of force against citizens.

The overlap between the Covid-19 closures and the George Floyd protests was like a bad joke. San Jose Police stoked the anger by firing tear gas and rubber bullets at City Hall protestors. While demonstrators and police faced off at the civic plaza, others ran through downtown, breaking windows and in some cases looting small businesses, many of them owned by members of communities of color. Four nights of curfew followed.

Boarded up storefronts around downtown San Jose and on Santana Row have made a complicated recovery even harder. There are some hopeful signs. Streets and parking lots have been converted into umbrella-shaded dining areas and patrons are enjoying California’s glorious June weather. In Los Gatos, musician Joel Nelson will be driven around on a flatbed truck playing dueling pianos, and there’s dancing to DJ music in the streets at Santana Row’s tequila bars.

Business reinvention has prompted businesses to jump into the world of electronic ordering. Flights restaurant in Los Gatos and Academic Coffee in San Jose have begun selling household staples. Cannabis has gone from a banned activity to an essential business in the space of a few years. And it will be hard to imagine a world without curbside cocktails to go.

Some businesses won’t make it but the strong and innovative will survive. The prospect of a second novel coronavirus surge looms, alongside a potentially messy national election and uncertainty about the economy. What can locals do? Support the businesses they value and enjoy the reopenings—safely, with masks and distancing.

Nearly every local business has its own distinctive 2020 survival story. In this issue, we share some of those stories, and to provide a portrait of a business community weathering the storm and learning something about resilience in the process.

I spent years on and off drugs and alcohol, but I’ve been sober for six years. I’m just not the same self-centered immature brat I was. Last week, I reached out to my best friend’s brother to apologize for things I did about seven years ago. He still hasn’t responded to my text (requesting time to talk to make amends). He told my friend he was having a hard time believing I’m any different. But I am, and I want to prove to him I have changed. How can I do that?—Sincere

He’s seen you swear off drugs and alcohol before, typically for several hours on a Tuesday.

This view he has of you is likely to have some serious staying power. That’s because our brain is big on automatic processes, forming and storing what I call “thinkpacks” so we don’t have to put cognitive energy into things we’ve already figured out. For example, say you do something for the first time, like opening a weird latch on a cupboard. Each time you do it again, the more automatic—that is, the more unthinking—it becomes.

Believing works similarly. Once we form a belief, we tend to just go with it automatically. Questioning a belief, on the other hand, takes mental effort. Not surprisingly, research by social psychologist Lee Ross, among others, finds that we’re prone to taking the mentally easy way out, succumbing to “confirmation bias,” clinging to what we already believe and ignoring info that says, “Hey, there just might be a new and improved truth in town.”

There’s another problem: Our ego is bound up in our clinging to our beliefs—that is, believing that we were right all along. And though it sounds like you’ve changed your value system—which probably bodes well for your staying sober—if he goes with the idea that you’re on the wagon for good, he risks being proved wrong.

The error that you, like many people, make is in thinking, “I’ll just change somebody’s mind!” and it’ll happen pronto. However, consider your goal: apologizing. You can do that by writing a letter. A letter of apology takes an investment of effort that a phoned or texted apology does not, which makes it more likely to be seen as sincere.

And frankly, if you follow through with the steps for a meaningful apology—detailing how you wronged him, expressing remorse and explaining the new values you are now living by—you lay the best foundation for him to possibly believe that you truly have changed.

Sure, it’s possible you’ll black out again, but maybe just if somebody clocks you for going overboard with the sobervangelizing. It won’t be like that time when you were drunk and handcuffed and yelling, “Occifers, I’ll have you know that my nickname in middle school was Houdini!”

I’ve been married to a wonderful woman for two years. We have a 2-year-old child. Unfortunately, we stopped having sex when she got pregnant and haven’t started again since. She loves me, but she just doesn’t want sex like she used to. (And no, I’m not some sexist dude leaving all the baby care to her.) How can we jump-start our sex life?—Famished

“Being and Nothingness” is 722 pages of stylishly depressing existentialism by Jean-Paul Sartre; ideally, it does not also describe what goes on in bed between you and your wife.

Chances are your wife’s libido didn’t get broken in the delivery room or carried off by a raccoon. In women, desire seems to work differently than how it does in men, according to sex researcher Rosemary Basson, M.D. Once women are comfortable in a relationship, Basson finds that they no longer have the “spontaneous sexual hunger” they did in the early days of dating. Instead, their desire is “responsive,” meaning it is “triggerable” simply by starting to fool around.

Yes, miraculously, revving up your sex life will probably just take some makeout sessions. Tell your wife about Basson’s research and start scheduling regular romantic evenings. Make them early enough that nobody’s too tired and keep your expectations on medium. (You might not have full-blown sex on night one, but try to see whatever makeout that goes on as an encouraging start.) When possible, drop the baby off at Grandma’s and have a sex weekend at a hotel. This may sound like a lot of effort and expense, but it sure beats setting your penis out on the blanket next to the VHS player at your spring garage sale.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): “I don’t think we were ever meant to hear the same song sung exactly the same way more than once in a lifetime,” says poet Linh Dinh. That’s an extreme statement that I can’t agree with. But I understand what he’s driving at. Repeating yourself can be debilitating, even deadening. That includes trying to draw inspiration from the same old sources that have worked for you in the past. In accordance with current astrological omens, I suggest you try to minimize exact repetition in the next two weeks, both in what you express and what you absorb. For further motivation, here’s William S. Burroughs: “Truth may appear only once; it may not be repeatable.”

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Peter Benchley wrote the bestselling book Jaws, which was later turned into a popular movie. It’s the story of a great white shark that stalks and kills people in a small beach town. Later in his life, the Taurus author was sorry for its influence, which helped legitimize human predation on sharks and led to steep drops in shark populations. To atone, Benchley became an aggressive advocate for shark conservation. If there’s any behavior in your own past that you regret, Taurus, the coming weeks will be a good time to follow Benchley’s lead: Correct for your mistakes; make up for your ignorance; do good deeds to balance a time when you acted unconsciously.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Some birds can fly for days without coming down to earth. Alpine swifts are the current record-holders, staying aloft for 200 consecutive days as they chase and feed on insects over West Africa. I propose we make the swift your soul ally for the next three weeks. May it help inspire you to take maximum advantage of the opportunities life will be offering you. You will have extraordinary power to soar over the maddening crowd, gaze at the big picture of your life and enjoy exceptional amounts of freedom.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): “I think gentleness is one of the most disarmingly and captivatingly attractive qualities there are,” writes poet Nayyirah Waheed. That will be emphatically true about you in the coming weeks, Cancerian. Your poised, deeply felt gentleness will accord you as much power as other people might draw from ferocity and grandeur. Your gentleness will enable you to crumble obstacles and slip past barriers. It will energize you to capitalize on and dissipate chaos. It will win you leverage that you’ll be able to use for months.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Is the Loch Ness monster real? Is there a giant sea serpent that inhabits the waters of Loch Ness in Scotland? Tantalizing hints arise now and then, but no definitive evidence has ever emerged. In 1975, enterprising investigators got the idea to build a realistic-looking papier-mâché companion for Nessie and place it in Loch Ness. They hoped that this “honey trap” would draw the reclusive monster into more public view. Alas, the scheme went awry. (Lady Nessie got damaged when she ran into a jetty.) But it did have some merit. Is there an equivalent approach you might employ to generate more evidence and insight about one of your big mysteries, Leo? What strategies might you experiment with? The time is right to hatch a plan.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Earlier in your life, you sometimes wrestled with dilemmas that didn’t deserve so much of your time and energy. They weren’t sufficiently essential to invoke the best use of your intelligence. But over the years, you have ripened in your ability to attract more useful and interesting problems. Almost imperceptibly, you have been growing smarter about recognizing which riddles are worth exploring and which are better left alone. Here’s the really good news: The questions and challenges you face now are among the finest you’ve ever had. You are being afforded prime opportunities to grow in wisdom and effectiveness.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): How many languages are you fluent it? One? Two? More? I’m sure you already know that gaining the ability to speak more than one tongue makes you smarter and more empathetic. It expands your capacity to express yourself vividly and gives you access to many interesting people who think differently from you. I mention this, Libra, because you’re in a phase of your cycle when learning a new language might be easier than usual, as is improving your mastery of a second or third language. If none of that’s feasible for you, I urge you to at least formulate an intention to speak your main language with greater candor and precision, and find other ways to expand your ability to express yourself.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Here’s Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano from The Book of Embraces: “In the River Plate basin we call the heart a ‘bobo,’ a fool. And not because it falls in love. We call it a fool because it works so hard.” I bring this to your attention, Scorpio, because I hope that in the coming weeks, your heart will indeed be a hard-working, wisely foolish bobo. The astrological omens suggest that you will learn what you need to learn and attract the experiences you need to attract if you do just that. Life is giving you a mandate to express daring and diligent actions in behalf of love.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): When he was 20 years old, a German student named Max Planck decided he wanted to study physics. His professor at the University of Munich dissuaded him, telling Planck, “In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes.” Planck ignored the bad advice and ultimately went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics for his role in formulating quantum theory. Most of us have had a similar experience: people who’ve tried to convince us to reject our highest calling and strongest dreams. In my view, the coming weeks will be a potent time for you to recover and heal from those deterrents and discouragements in your own past.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Not all, but many horoscope columns address your ego rather than your soul. They provide useful information for your surface self, but little help for your deep self. If you’ve read my oracles for a while, you know that I aspire to be in the latter category. In that light, you won’t be surprised when I say that the most important thing you can do in the coming weeks is to seek closer communion with your soul; to explore your core truths; to focus on delight, fulfillment, and spiritual meaning far more than on status, power and wealth. As you attend to your playful work, meditate on this counsel from Capricorn author John O’Donohue: “The geography of your destiny is always clearer to the eye of your soul than to the intentions and needs of your surface mind.”

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Aquarian biochemist Gertrude Belle Elion shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988. She was instrumental in devising new drugs to treat AIDS and herpes, as well as a medication to facilitate organ transplants. And yet she accomplished all this without ever earning a PhD or MD, a highly unusual feat. I suspect you may pull off a similar, if slightly less spectacular feat in the coming weeks: getting a reward or blessing despite a lack of formal credentials or official credibility.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Today Mumbai is a mega-city with 12.5 million people on 233 square miles. But as late as the 18th century, it consisted of seven sparsely populated islands. Over many decades, reclamation projects turned them into a single land mass. I foresee you undertaking a metaphorically comparable project during the coming months. You could knit fragments together into a whole. You have the power to transform separate and dispersed influences into a single, coordinated influence. You could inspire unconnected things to unite in common cause.

Homework: To connect with me on social media, go here: https://freewillastrology.com/social

My sister dates super hot guys, but she’s always telling me that looks aren’t what matter and I should go for a man who’s stable and reliable. Is she looking out for me? How come she doesn’t follow her own advice? It seems weirdly hypocritical.—Puzzled

Charmingly, the men your sister picks for herself look like they could work in strip clubs, while men she picks for you look like accountants who’ve invested strip malls.

Welcome to “the Juliet effect,” as named by evolutionary scientists Robert Biegler and Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair. In Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Juliet’s mom—let’s call her Mrs. Capulet—was working her own agenda in giving her daughter advice on who to marry. Mrs. Capulet was pushing her daughter to go for Count Paris, a boringly stable rich guy from a good family. Juliet, of course, only had eyes for Romeo, the off-limits hottie, whose family was basically the feuding Italian Hatfields to the Capulet’s McCoys.

It turns out that Shakespeare was something of an intuitive evolutionary psychologist. Parents do want the best for you—uh, that is, except when what’s best for you diverges with what’s best for them. The same goes for your siblings. These fun intra-family conflicts are called “parent-offspring competition” and “sibling competition” by evolutionary psychologists.

Biegler and Kennair researched the way these evolved conflicts play out over “transferrable” vs.”non-transferrable” qualities in a woman’s partner. Transferrable qualities are those that could directly benefit the children of a woman’s mother or sister—for example, a man’s ability to provide food, shelter, and/or “protection against predators or enemies.” (High status, too, would be transferable, because of the power and perks that come with.) Non-transferrable qualities, on the other hand, are those—like hottiehood—that suggest a man has good genes, which would directly benefit only his female partner’s own children.

Accordingly, Biegler and Kennair found that moms and sisters wanted hunks for themselves but would steer their daughter or sibling to the stable guy with resources. Granted, this probably isn’t a conscious move on their part—all “gotta make her believe the rich troll is her soulmate.” However, you should be conscious when seeking advice from your family members about a guy that there could be mildly nefarious ulterior motives at play. Sure, your sister wants the best for you—the best Ugly Dave you can get who owns hotels and a plane, so she can take free luxury vacations with the recently paroled soulless hunks of the world.

I was dating this guy, and it was super intense. He is a big believer in soulmates, and he said he thought I was his. Of course, I was excited, and it all seemed really romantic, and then poof! He was gone. Ghosted me. What makes somebody think simply disappearing is an okay way to break up?—So Upset

“Love is in the air” is not supposed to mean your new boyfriend disappears into it.

Welcome to the dark side of the “We’re soulmates!” thing. It turns out that a person’s beliefs about the underpinnings of a successful relationship can affect how they end things—whether they tell you it’s over or just ghost you (wordlessly vanish from your life). There are “destiny beliefs,” which, in their strongest incarnation, involve believing in fate and soulmates—the notion that people in relationships “are either meant to be together or they’re not,” as social psychologist Gili Freedman and her colleagues put it. “Growth beliefs,” on the other hand, involve the notion that “relationships grow over time” and take work; you don’t just bump into your perfect partner in a train station and go off on the 6:07 to Happilyeverafter.

In line with this view of relationships as a gradual process of working out conflicts, the researchers found that romantic partners with stronger growth beliefs were 38.4 percent less likely to indicate that ghosting is okay. However, people with destiny beliefs, like your “Fate or bust!” ex, were 63.4 percent more likely to find it acceptable to take the disappearo way out.

But interestingly, Freedman and her colleagues note that “high scores on destiny do not equal low scores on growth,” which means somebody can believe both in soulmates and in working to improve relationships. (Also, even soulmatehood devotees can understand that another person is a person, with feelings.) In other words, don’t assume that anybody who believes in soulmates will disappear without explanation.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the coming weeks it will make good sense for you to travel down winding paths replete with interesting twists and provocative turns. The zigzags you’ll be inspired to pursue won’t be inconvenient or inefficient, but rather will be instrumental in obtaining the healing you need. To honor and celebrate this oddly lucky phase, I’ll quote parts of “Flying Crooked,” a poem by Robert Graves. “The butterfly will never master the art of flying straight, yet has a just sense of how not to fly: He lurches here and here by guess and God and hope and hopelessness. Even the acrobatic swift has not his flying-crooked gift.”

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Has a part of you become too timid, docile or prosaic? Is there an aspect of your beautiful soul that is partially muzzled, submissive or housebroken? If so, now is a favorable time to seek an antidote. But listen closely: The cure isn’t to become chaotic, turbulent and out of control. It would be counterproductive to resort to berserk mayhem. Here’s a better way: be primal, lush and exciting. Be wildly playful and unpredictably humorous and alluringly intriguing. Try experiments that rouse your rowdy sweetness, your unkempt elegance, your brazen joy and your sensual intelligence.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): I prefer live theater over movies. The glossy flawlessness of films, accomplished by machines that assemble and polish, is less emotionally rich than the direct impact of live performers’ unmediated voices and bodies and emotions. Their evocative imperfections move me in ways that glossy flawlessness can’t. Even if you’re not like me, Gemini, I invite you to experiment with my approach for a while—not just in the entertainment you choose but in all areas of your life. As much as possible, get your experience raw and unfiltered.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): I’ve got a message for you from Cancerian poet Tyler Knott Gregson. Please read it every day for the next 15 days, including when you first wake up and right before sleep. Here it is: “Promise me you will not spend so much time treading water and trying to keep your head above the waves that you forget, truly forget, how much you have always loved to swim.”

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In 2003, a group of thieves in Antwerp, Belgium pulled off the biggest jewelry heist in history. To steal the diamonds, gold, and other gems, together worth more than $100 million, they had to outsmart security guards, a seismic sensor, a protective magnetic field, Doppler radar, infrared detectors and a lock. I mention this, Leo, because I suspect that in the coming weeks you will have a comparable ability to insinuate yourself into the presence of previously inaccessible treasures and secrets and codes. You’ll be able to penetrate barriers that have kept you shut off from valuable things. (P.S. But I hope that unlike the Antwerp thieves, you’ll use your superpowers in an ethical manner.)

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): In the northeast corner of Spain, bordering France, is an area known as Catalonia. With its own culture and language, it has a long history of seeking complete autonomy. On four occasions it has declared itself to be independent from Spain. The most recent time was in 2017, when 92 percent of the Catalans who voted expressed the desire to be free of Spain’s rule. Alas, none of the rebellions have succeeded. In the latest instance, no other nation on Earth recognized Catalonia’s claim to be an independent republic. In contrast to its frustrated attempts, your own personal quest to seek greater independence could make real progress in the coming months. For best results, formulate a clear intention and define the precise nature of the sovereignty you seek. Write it down!

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): A Libran blogger named OceanAlgorithms wrote, “I’m simultaneously wishing I were a naturalist whose specialty is finding undiscovered species in well-explored places; and a skateboarding mathematician meditating on an almost-impossible-to-solve equation as I practice my skateboard tricks; and a fierce forest witch who casts spells on nature-despoilers; and a gothic heroine with twelve suitors; and the sexiest cat that ever lived.” I love how freewheeling and wide-ranging OceanAlgorithms is with her imaginative fantasies. In light of current astrological omens, I encourage you to do the same. Give yourself permission to dream and scheme extravagantly.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Geologists aren’t exactly sure why, but almost six million years ago, the Strait of Gibraltar closed up. As a result, the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic Ocean, and within a thousand years, it had mostly disappeared. Fast forward 600,000 years. Again, geologists don’t understand how it happened, but a flood broke through the barrier, allowing the ocean to flow back into the Mediterranean basin and restore it to its previous status as a sea. I propose that we invoke that replenishment as a holy symbol for the process you’re engaged in: a replenishment of your dried-out waters.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): I invite you to meditate on this proposal from freelance writer Radha Marcum: “The spiritual definition of love is that when you look at the person you love, it makes you love yourself more.” I hope there’s a lot of that kind of action going on for you in the next four weeks. According to my assessment of life’s secret currents, all of creation will be conspiring to intensify and deepen your love for yourself by intensifying and deepening your love for other people. Cooperate with that conspiracy, please!

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Is there a creature on Earth that’s more annoying than the mosquito? I’ve never heard anyone gaze upon one of the pesky monsters sucking blood out of her arm and say, “Aw, what a cute little bug.” And yet every year there is a town in Russia that holds a jokey three-day celebration in honor of the mosquito. The people who live in Berezniki even stage a “most delicious” competition, in which people allow themselves to be pricked by mosquitoes for 20 minutes, with an award going to whomever accumulates the most bites. I highly approve of the spirit of this approach for your own use in the coming weeks, Capricorn. If you have fun with the things that bother you, I bet they won’t bother you as much.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): It’s the Forever Season, Aquarius. You have a poetic license to act as if your body will live for a hundred years and your soul will live for all eternity. You are authorized to believe that in the coming decades you will grow steadily wiser, kinder, happier and wilder. During the Forever Season, you may have dreams like flying over a waterfall at sunset, or finding the lost magic you were promised before you were born, or discovering the key to a healing you feared would always elude you. As you careen through this unpredictable grace period, your understanding of reality may expand dramatically. I bet you’ll get practical epiphanies about how to express yourself with greater effectiveness.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): A musical historian from Cambridge University decided it would be amusing to perform forgotten songs that were written in the Rhineland a thousand years ago. His research wasn’t easy, because musical notation was different back then. But he ultimately reconstructed the tunes in ways that he felt were 80 percent faithful to the originals. He and other musicians subsequently performed and recorded them. I propose a somewhat comparable assignment for you in the coming weeks, Pisces. You will benefit, I believe, from trying to recover the truth about events that occurred a long time ago and/or by trying to revivify old beauty that has new relevance.

Homework. Finish this sentence: “The one thing that really keeps me from being myself is _______.” Testify at Tr**********@***il.com.

I’m a 6-foot-2 woman. What’s the ideal way for me to respond when people (almost always men and total strangers) ask, out of the blue, “How does a woman your height find boyfriends?”—Annoyed

I’d opt for the macabre approach, delivered totally deadpan: “Actually, I stretch short men on a rack in my basement. You can sometimes hear the screams from the yard.”

Responding with shocking humor—in an uber-cool tone—gives you the upper hand, in a way an enraged response to their rudeness would not. And yes, people who say this to you are rude—assuming you don’t go around wearing a sign that reads, “Hey, strangers, ask me anything! Nothing’s too impolite or too personal!”

Of course, when people overstep, it’s natural to get angry—to go loud and ugly in calling them on their rudeness. However, that sort of directness—explicitly telling them that they’ve wronged you—is probably counterproductive. Social psychologist Elliot Aronson finds that people are highly prone to “self-justification,” the ego-defending denial that they’ve behaved badly.

Making matters worse, our fight-or-flight system reflexively reacts to verbal attacks in the same adrenalized way it does to physical attacks. So, angry directness from you is likely to provoke a rudester into amping up the ugly—turning around and deeming you rude, wrong, and “Wow…testy!” for your response.

Ultimately, using over-the-top humor, delivered flatly, allows you to restructure the power balance, shifting yourself out of the victim position. You’re clearly informing the person they’ve crossed a line, with minimal aggression on your part. This is important because, as a tall girl, your energy is best put to more productive ends—folding yourself up like origami to fly in coach and fighting the Statue of Liberty for the extremely tall guys of Tinder.

My style is basically grunge rocker girl: ancient jeans, a vintage rock T-shirt, and bedhead. I need photos of myself, so late Saturday afternoon, I did a photo shoot with a professional stylist, makeup artist, and photographer. Long story short, I despise all the photos. They dressed me in “nice lady” clothes I hated and put too much makeup on me, including lipstick, which I never wear. I’m normally pretty assertive, so I don’t understand why I didn’t speak up for myself.—Irritated

When your style is grunge femme—bedhead and jeans that appear to be loaners from a wino—it’s a bummer to pay for photos that make you look like you sell high-end real estate via bus bench ads.

It’s especially bummerific when you could have spoken up but instead just went along like a lap dog in a bee outfit. But the reality is, your ability to assert yourself—which comes out of a set of cognitive processes called “executive functions”—can get a little beaten down.

Executive functions are basically the COO (chief operating officer) of you, the cerebral department of getting stuff done through, among other things, planning, prioritizing, holding sets of facts in mind and making choices. And then there’s the executive function that crapped out on you: “inhibitory control,” which, as cognitive neuroscientist Adele Diamond explains, allows you to direct your “attention, behavior, thoughts and/or emotions.” This, in turn, empowers you to do what you know you should—like eating your green beans instead of going with what your impulses are suggesting: faceplanting in a plate of fries.

As I explain in my “science-help” book, “Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence,” our mental energy to keep our executive functions powered up gets eroded by stress, fatigue, hunger and even seemingly minor mental chores—like choosing between the 30 slightly different kinds of balsamic at the supermarket. Basically, as the day draws on and you put weight on your executive functions, you wear out their ability to be there for you.

So, what can you do to avoid repeating this experience? Try to schedule tiring, emotionally taxing projects earlier in the day. It also helps to figure out ahead of time where your boundaries lie—stylistic or otherwise. Then, when somebody does something you’re not comfortable with, you’ve pre-identified it as a no-no, which makes it easier for you to stand up for yourself—calmly and firmly. Remember, “every picture tells a story,” and it’s best if yours isn’t about the time the lady at the Estee Lauder counter held you down, made you up and then pulled out her Ruger and forced you into mom jeans.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the coming weeks, I suspect you will have the wisdom to criticize yourself in constructive ways that will at least partially solve a long-standing problem. Hallelujah! I bet you will also understand what to do to eliminate a bad habit by installing a good new habit. Please capitalize on that special knowledge! There’s one further capacity I suspect you’ll have: the saucy ingenuity necessary to alleviate a festering fear. Be audacious!

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): What standards might we use in evaluating levels of sexual satisfaction? One cruclal measure is the tenderness and respect that partners have for each other. Others include the ability to play and have fun, the freedom to express oneself uninhibitedly, the creative attention devoted to unpredictable foreplay, and the ability to experience fulfilling orgasms. How do you rate your own levels, Taurus? Wherever you may currently fall on the scale, the coming months will be a time when you can accomplish an upgrade. How? Read authors who specialize in the erotic arts. Talk to your partners with increased boldness and clarity. While meditating, search for clues in the depths.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): If there were a Hall of Fame for writers, Shakespeare might have been voted in first. His work is regarded as a pinnacle of intellectual brilliance. And yet here’s a fun fact: The Bard quoted well over a thousand passages from the Bible. Can you imagine a modern author being taken seriously by the literati if he or she frequently invoked such a fundamental religious text? I bring this to your attention so as to encourage you to be Shakespeare-like in the coming weeks. That is, be willing to draw equally from both intellectual and spiritual sources; be a deep thinker who communes with sacred truths; synergize the functions of your discerning mind and your devotional heart.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): “People will choose unhappiness over uncertainty,” writes Cancerian author and entrepreneur Timothy Ferriss. He doesn’t do that himself, but rather is quite eager to harvest the perks of dwelling in uncertainty. I presume this aptitude has played a role in his huge success; his books have appeared on bestseller lists, and his podcasts have been downloaded more than 300 million times. In telling you this, I’m not encouraging you to embrace the fertile power of uncertainty 24 hours a day and 365 days of every year. But I am urging you to do just that for the next three weeks. There’ll be big payoffs if you do, including rich teachings on the art of happiness.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Many 18th-century pirates were committed to democracy and equality among their ranks. The camaraderie and fairness and mutual respect that prevailed on pirate ships was markedly different from the oppressive conditions faced by sailors who worked for the navies of sovereign nations. The latter were often pressed into service against their will and had to struggle to collect meager salaries. Tyrannical captains controlled all phases of their lives. I bring this to your attention, Leo, with the hope that it will inspire you to seek out alternative approaches to rigid and hierarchical systems. Gravitate toward generous organizations that offer you ample freedom and rich alliances. The time is right to ally yourself with emancipatory influences.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Don’t wait around for fate to decide which decisions you should make and what directions you should go. Formulate those decisions yourself, with your willpower fully engaged. Never say, “If it’s meant to be, it will happen.” Rather, resolve to create the outcomes you strongly desire to happen. Do you understand how important this is? You shouldn’t allow anyone else to frame your important questions and define the nature of your problems; you’ve got to do the framing and defining yourself. One more thing: don’t fantasize about the arrival of the “perfect moment.” The perfect moment is whenever you decree it is.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In the coming weeks, I hope you’ll regularly give yourself to generous, expansive experiences. I hope you’ll think big, funny thoughts and feel spacious, experimental emotions. I hope you’ll get luxurious glimpses of the promise your future holds, and I hope you’ll visualize yourself embarking on adventures and projects you’ve been too timid or worried to consider before now. For best results, be eager to utter the word “MORE!” as you meditate on the French phrase “joie de vivre” and the English phrase “a delight in being alive.”

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): According to Popular Mechanics magazine, over three million sunken ships are lying on the bottoms of the worldÕs oceans. Some of them contain billions of dollarsÕ worth of precious metals and jewels. Others are crammed with artifacts that would be of great value to historians and archaeologists. And hereÕs a crazy fact: Fewer than 1 percent of all those potential treasures have been investigated by divers. I bring this to your attention, Scorpio, because I hope it might inspire you to explore your inner worldÕs equivalent of lost or unknown riches. The astrological omens suggest that the coming weeks will be an excellent time to go searching for them.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): “Some days you need god’s grace,” writes poet Scherezade Siobhan. “On other days: the feral tongue of vintage whiskey and a mouth kissed by fire.” I’m guessing, Sagittarius, that these days you might be inclined to prefer the feral tongue of vintage whiskey and a mouth kissed by fire. But according to my astrological analysis, those flashy phenomena would not motivate you to take the corrective and adaptive measures you actually need. The grace of god—or whatever passes for the grace of god in your world—is the influence that will best help you accomplish what’s necessary. Fortunately, I suspect you know how to call on and make full use of that grace.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Capricorn poet William Stafford articulated some advice that I think you need to hear right now. Please hold it close to your awareness for the next 21 days. “Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk,” he wrote. “Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing.” By practicing those protective measures, Capricorn, you will foster and safeguard your mental health. Now here’s another gift from Stafford: “Things you know before you hear them—those are you, those are why you are in the world.”

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): “Love is an immoderate thing / And can never be content,” declared poet W. B. Yeats. To provide you with an accurate horoscope, I’ll have to argue with that idea a bit. From what I can determine, love will indeed be immoderate in your vicinity during the coming weeks. On the other hand, it’s likely to bring you a high degree of contentment—as long as you’re willing to play along with its immoderateness. Here’s another fun prediction: I suspect that love’s immoderateness, even as it brings you satisfaction, will also inspire you to ask for more from love and expand your capacity for love. And that could lead to even further immoderate and interesting experiments.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): You will know you are in sweet alignment with cosmic forces if you have an impulse to try a rash adventure, but decide instead to work on fixing a misunderstanding with an ally. You can be sure you’re acting in accordance with your true intuition if you feel an itch to break stuff, but instead channel your fierce energy into improving conditions at your job. You will be in tune with your soul’s code if you start fantasizing about quitting what you’ve been working on so hard, but instead sit down and give yourself a pep talk to reinvigorate your devotion and commitment.

Homework: Make up a secret identity for yourself. What is it? How do you use it? Testify at FreeWillAstrology.com

My boyfriend and I are in a long-distance relationship (for almost four years) that works very well, talking daily and seeing each other every two months. The problem is that it feels like he has much more love for me than I have for him. (He’s totally head over heels and expresses this constantly.) I absolutely do love him, and I tell him frequently. But my love intensity just does not match his. Additionally, I should mention that I’ve tried to leave him in the past. I didn’t think the relationship was serving me. He is married and technically unavailable. (He is working toward dissolving the marriage.) Also, he works hard but has no financial resources. I do want to stay in the relationship, but I’m not sure how to deal with the imbalance in expressiveness. I don’t want to be inauthentic.—Pressured

You’re dating a man who not only is still married but needs to crowdfund his divorce.

Many women believe it’s somehow nobler if they love a poor dude, telling themselves (and often the guy) that they don’t really care about money. But as I often point out, because women are the ones who get pregnant, female emotions evolved to make women feel bad—resentful, angry, screwed over—when they get involved with men who are (for example!) still “married and technically unavailable” and have “no financial resources.” Boyfriend: “Hey, honey, got ya a great birthday present, and you won’t be charged for it till your next credit card statement!”

And even if a woman is a staunch feminist, all “I don’t care who the earner in the relationship is,” the psychological operating system driving us right now is adapted for ancestral times and the problems that arose then. So it just keeps on keepin’ on, pushing a woman to go for men who can “provide,” even when she’s on the birth controlliest birth control (like a copper IUD).

In other words, you are not getting the long end of the stick here, financially or commitment-wise, and evolution has programmed you to be nagged by feelbad emotions until you do something to change that. Your boyfriend, meanwhile, surely has some feelbad of his own. Because men coevolved with women, male psychology leads men to anticipate that female romantic partners who feel shorted on cash flow and/or commitment will soon be conducting their exit interview.

In light of this, your boyfriend’s expressing love in the manner of a burst water main may be a form of “mate guarding,” evolutionary psychologists’ term for attempts to fend off mate poachers and keep one’s partner in the relationship. Because we humans have an evolved motivation to reciprocate—to give back what we get in equal measure—it’s possible that the more romantically expressive your boyfriend is, the more you’re led to feel you’re shorting him on what he seems to be owed.

But is the apparent emotional asymmetry here actually a problem? Many people do make the assumption that romantic partners’ love should be 50-50 and that there’s something wrong with the relationship when it isn’t. However, what really matters is whether there’s enough love on each side to keep the partners together.

Accordingly, consider whether the long-distance aspect might be staving off feelings and conflict that could come out if you two were living together. Research repeatedly finds that women tend to resent male partners who aren’t their equals or betters in job status and earnings. For example, a study by business school professor Alyson Byrne finds that a woman’s having higher job status (and the money that comes with) often leads to marital instability and divorce. She and her colleague even find that women experience “status leakage,” finding the status they’ve earned through their work diminished by virtue of their having a lower-status spouse.

As for you, you say you want to stay in the relationship, presumably because you love your boyfriend. However, it’s also possible that your being in the relationship for a while—almost four years—is keeping you in the relationship. Consider what economists call the “sunk cost fallacy,” the human tendency to keep investing in a project based on the time, energy, and/or resources we’ve already “sunk” into it. Of course, the rational approach is deciding to continue based on whether the investment will pay off sufficiently in the future.

Looking at your situation that way should help you make a decision. At the moment, as I see it, there’s nothing standing between the two of you riding off into the sunset together…pulling a wagon carrying his current wife, their couples therapist, a divorce mediator and several collection agents.