2: The Mermaid

This episode, we talked about The Mermaid, performance nerves, spiritual sovereignty when you're feeling down, the philosophical meaning of the Un-Seal, and music recs from Penny and the Queen Bee.

Transcript

Penelope 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the new Pinniped Zodiac Horoscope Show. It is currently mermaid season. It's been mermaid season since February 15th, and it will be until April 2nd. I don't know how mermaid season has been treating you guys. Yeah, just between you, me, and the NPZ. Rough. Spiritually rough lately. Yeah, the mermaid's all about being between worlds. It's all about sitting in the middle and being between two options and not, you know, making peace with the fact that like there's no right choices. It's ERP logic, basically, is what it is. Which is funny because I've actually been slacking on my ERP, which is part of why I'm unhappy. I haven't been doing my therapy homework, and instead I've been dicking around, and now I wonder why I feel icky. Um, and it's because of my own fucking behavior. Among other things, and also among you know, probably I can blame some of this on hormones. Um, but yeah, it's mermaid season. This is gonna be a good episode. I saw some of the questions already that you guys wrote in, but I'm excited to see them. Um, and thank you for writing in. And if you would like to write in, um, you just email the I mean I've posted this on the Instagram too, so you can go back and look. And soon we'll have a website specifically for the NPZ, which I'm very excited about because I believe in having cyber real estate. Um, but basically, if you want to write in a question, you just write in to new pinnipedzodiac at gmail.com and you make the subject line um NPZ underscore your sign underscore the name you want to be referred to on the show. Which is just a formatting thing to help me kind of sort through these things easier. It's not I'm you know, don't tell anyone, but if you write it in crazy style, I might still read it. Yeah, and then you just write a little blurb and include anything uh that you want advice on, and that's it. But do make sure to use like include the name that you want to be called on the show. Because for example, if you ask a question and then you sign it with like your government name and you don't want your government name on the show, that's no good. And before we get into the questions, I did just want to introduce a new segment which is um music recommendations. One of them's from me, and the other one is from our new coronated merch queen, the Cherry Queen Bee. Our first recommendation from Cherry Queen Bee is Audrey Hobert. And to be honest, uh this kind of music, this very like pop girly stuff, is like not frequently my vibe. You know, I can recognize it as well done, I think, but it's not usually what I listen to personally. But I, you know, I take my friends' recommendations with some seriousness and I try to lock in and pay attention, and so I did, and I listened to this album, Who's the Clown? Um which cracked me up. And let me look. Yeah, there we go. Okay, so it's listed as pop, alternative pop. It just came out August 15th, 2025. It's just good, it's good, it's easy to listen to, it's a very clear, smooth sound, and very um unabashedly feminine, but also has kind of like a very real girl vibe as opposed to being kind of hyper girly. It's it's I liked it. I liked it a lot. It kind of snuck up on me because I was like listening to it while I was doing chores around the house, and I was like, oh, these are fun, you know, and then uh this song Sue Me is like um, I would say one of the more kind of bouncy fun ones. And I was like, oh okay, cool, yeah, sue me a lot, you know, whatever, um, into it, and was kind of zoning out and then got fucking clotheslined by Sex in the City. The song Sex in the City really hit me. And I was like, I don't know, I was impressed with her. I was very impressed with her. Um uh "Sue Me" and "Sex in the City" by Audrey Hobert on the album Who's the Clown? Give that a try if you're looking for new music. That's from your merch queen, Queen Cherry Bee. Um that's so funny. She's gonna make fun of me for making her name sound like a stripper name when she hears this, but whatever. That's punk. And then um my recommendation is Pacific Purgatory. Okay, basically I like saw a meme um and I tracked the audio down. I actually didn't even track the audio down the first time, but I saw a meme and I saved it to my folder for memes that have good music in the background. And then later, I don't remember why even, but I went back and tracked down the audio and found the song behind it and listened to the rest of the song. And dude, when I tell you, I had such a strong emotional reaction. The song, okay, so the band is Pacific Purgatory. Uh the song is Daijokay, which I have only just googled and found is like uh it's like a little mishmash of Japanese and English, I believe. Maybe? Okay, word. Um but it's uh I you have to understand too, like it's really hard for me to like songs and bands the way that I like used to when I was a kid. And maybe that's just kind of a consequence of growing up, but it's also because a lot of things that are kind of intentionally mystical for most audiences are not really mystical for me. But there was something about this particular song that for whatever reason um filled me with like a magical whimsy and like a yearning. I was like, whoa! And I think a big part of it is that this um writer, this guy, is very much a poet, and these are not lyrics, and again, this is just my take. Like, I obviously don't know this person, I don't know what what they're trying to do, but these are not lyrics that seem to be written um to be torn apart and scrutinized. There's something about the kind of natural, rolling, heartfelt nature of this song that made me feel very like enchanted. It was very beautiful. It's very beautiful. It's a so it's um kind of a love song. It's kind of like a doomed love song. It's it's kind of doing like a Romeo Juliet thing. Um, it's mixing all these different myths, which I think is beautiful. Or and I'm also kind of blending this with some of the other songs on the album, so maybe I think that I would still say that this one is blending different myths, but it just has a soul. I don't know what to tell you. If this song has a soul. Um and I think it's kind of just having its viral moment like now. I think this song came out, let me see when it came out. Yeah, August of 2025. So not that long ago, but not super recent, but I think it just probably had a viral video for the first time relatively recently, would be my guess, based on the behavior I'm seeing online. And I think that this band and or writer, I'm not I'm not sure who's who yet. I mean, I know that there's multiple people involved, but I don't know who's kind of the the people behind the thing, you know. Um, but there's a there's a website and there's a couple different pages that are related to Pacific Purgatory that are interacting. Um it looks like there's been some shows, but I'm not really sure. And I don't know, it's just really beautiful. And I'm not gonna talk about it to you too much because I I haven't really like locked in on this band the way that I like to before I kind of run my mouth too much. Um but I kind of have locked in on the song, and I really liked the song. I think another thing that I really liked about it is that it's a story and so much of content today is like it's like so boring. It's slop, it's fucking slop, and I do it too. Like there's there's a um a desire today, if you're online and posting, to like not be violently misunderstood. You desperately want other people to think of you as a complex human being with like meaningful uh uh experiences and beliefs, and to try to prove that you're okay in that way, you try so hard to be clear about what you mean when you speak. But the thing that fucking sucks about that is that art is this very special dream-like medium where you're supposed to be able to work through shit that you don't have answers for. And so if we have like a rule or a standard in our society, at least in our online society, in our social media society, in a particular society or whatever, if we have a rule or standard that you have to be able to defend your claim every time you put out a piece of art, you've killed the ability to take a deep breath in the art world. And it's like when I think about that feeling, it feels like a bruise, it feels like depression, it's such a fucking bummer. And I feel like I listened to this song and it like it made like a a part of me be like, oh yeah, you can just write shit, you know? And it's this is great. What are we doing? I don't know. It was, and there's like these bells, there's like a beautiful vocal harmony thing that they do, which if you see any of these videos, because they're promoting online. I think they're doing pretty successful meme promotion, which I'm interested to see how that works. Um, and the clip that they're promoting is the clip with the duet, so it's a it's uh it's this high voice, and then but they're singing like a certain interval, which is very kind of ethereal and eerie. It's really nice. I feel like the mix of like the scratchiness of the guitar in the songs with these kind of bells and more I don't know. I don't know. It's there's something about it that just really hit me and I it stood out. So I'm telling it to you. Let me know. Let me know if any of you um like the vibe. Anyway, that's that's music watch um for mermaid season. So appropriate. If you check out "Who's the Clown?", Audrey Hobert, and "Daijokay" off the album "One Hell of a Paradise" uh by Pacific Purgatory, which that whole album has such a interesting aesthetic. Really fucking prescient, I fear. I really there's something here that I'm keeping an eye on. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. I'm I'm catching like a glimmer, you know? And I'm hoping that this kid, the the kind of most active poster from Pacific Purgatory, I'm kind of uh wishing him well on his um viral journey because virality is brutal. It can be great, but it's it's psychologically grueling, and I'm I'm kind of hoping that it goes well. I'm just hoping that it's I'm hoping that he's uh robust and that the soul stays beautiful. What else can you wish for someone going through the World Wide Web? Um, anyway, okay. But yeah, so if you listen to Um Who's the Clown? by Audrey Hobert and One Hell of a Paradise, specifically Daijokay from Pacific Purgatory, um, I think you will see that these are actually these happen to be perfect for mermaid season, NPZ-wise, in a way that's like kind of eerie and shocking, and once again confirms my desire to like believe in my own bullshit, even though even though I made it up, you know, the dots are connecting. Anyway, okay, great. That's done. Let's move on to your questions. Okay, our first question is from Midnight, who is signed the woman. Says, I go by he they pronouns. Do you have any advice for performance nerves? Interesting question. Um, yeah, I kind of do. Let's start with your sign and then I'll give you practical advice. Um, so the woman is all about living your life against a tapestry of stories about yourself. I think performance nerves are an interesting question to bring here because there's a case to be made that the sign, the woman, is is all about performance. Um but also maybe like there's something there about like how do you act like authentically or whatever. Like maybe there's a desire to like not be performing in the woman. I don't know, whatever. That's like woo-woo feminist theory bullshit. I'm trying to think what like woman advice would be for performance nerves. I think it might be like to embrace the distance between yourself and other people's perception of you. Like you are doing a performance and you want to do it well, and you want to like bring your heart to it or whatever. But I think that there is a freedom in acknowledging, at least to yourself, like privately, that you don't really have any control. You don't have definitive control, you don't have dominion over how the audience will perceive you. And they're not gonna perceive you exactly as you are or exactly as you mean to present. Which is like kind of freeing. Because I I feel like when I'm performing, there's like I'm kind of nervous about managing expectations or perceptions of myself. Um, but it is kind of a relief, I think, to realize that ultimately you cannot. Your compliment is the dog, which has to do with tuning into your body and your embodied sense of your social world, which I think could also be very fair advice for this question. Like thinking about how your body feels and tuning into your kind of low-level functions, like thinking about your breath, focusing on manually relaxing your shoulders if necessary, stuff like that, you know. You've got neighbors four and six, you've got seal versus machine, maybe a balanced hot take there would be like both of those signs are pretty maybe cool and detached, I would say. Um machine does a good job taking the heat out of your first person account of your life, and the seal is about letting go of perfectionism, um, which I think together is like a fair pair of units of advice to offer to um someone performing. And with all of that in mind, I will give you my personal, just like a blurb about my personal experience. So I had performed like like school recitals and shit like that when I started touring for this, like for music stuff, but I never really I wasn't like in a band, I didn't like do the open mic night thing. The way that social media works, it all happened so fast that by the time I people started booking me for shows and I was completely unprepared. And I was like I was many of the times that I went on stage, I was genuinely, and this is not an exaggeration, so scared in the green room half an hour before that my hands hurt. It felt like a stabbing pain in my hands. It was I was so scared physically in the body that it felt I could feel tingling pain in my hands. Which, you know, is not a measure of how bad it is. It's just so unusual for me because I there are other situations that I've been in that if you asked me which was more dangerous, I certainly would have said, like, not the one where I'm playing a little song on stage. But stage fright is real, it's really brutal. There were a couple things that helped me with that. One thing was um to stop trying to distract myself. For a while, I would be like, oh, I'm gonna like I'm gonna do something else. I'm gonna bring my my book or my phone back there and I'm gonna watch something and just distract myself and pretend I'm not going on stage in half an hour. And that didn't really work, and I just ended up being like hazed and nauseous and agitated. Or I would be like, sometimes I would like be not at the location and show up late. I'm a bit I'm have a real problem with when I get scared, I show up late places because I'm like putting off the thing that I'm afraid of. Um, and that's not good either because then you're just even more scared because you're fucking late to the thing you gotta do. That's embarrassing. That's horrible. Um for me to get over that feeling of being so nervous your hands hurt. I had to really choose to be there and choose to sit in it and prove through brute force to the lizard brain that I can feel like that. I can feel like that as long as I choose to. I can sit and just be so nervous my hands hurt for as long as it takes for my body to decide I'm done feeling like that. And if it happens forever, it happens forever. I'm not scared of that anymore, you know? Which is sounds fucking crazy and ridiculous. Because on the one hand, there's no danger, so why am I that scared? And on the other hand, that sounds like it sucks, and why do it? But there's real power in that, and I recommend it. I recommend choosing to be anxious on purpose and not trying to run away because the fallacy of anxiety is that there's something to run away from. When you're anxious and you're distracting yourself, it's like you're a cat with um something tied to its tail and you're like running around, but you are bringing with you the feeling you're trying to get away from because it's happening in your body. So there's great power and peace to just sitting down and being like, yeah, I'm gonna just let it fucking happen. It's you know, it's it's happening. And just even just yeah, like narrating to yourself. Damn, I'm scared. Woof, dude, this fucking sucks. This this is really truly unpleasant. I'm really not a fan of how this feels. This feels fucking awful, you know. I think that's um helpful. And ironically, you know, not all the time, but most of the time, once you do that, the feeling does dissipate faster than it would if you didn't do that. Another thing that I started doing is um preparing better. Preparing better for the performance. The reason that I say these things in the order that I say them is because before I did the first thing, I couldn't do the second thing. Like I didn't have it in me to face my fear in advance when I wasn't strong enough to face my fear in the moment. But if you're able to face the anxiety and you get that power back, then you can start to do even more preparation you can, you can, then you can make decisions with your brain on purpose and go, you know, okay, I can stand to think about this in advance in a real normal way. Maybe I would like to, I don't know, take steps to make the performance go more smoothly in advance. Um instead of just winging it out of dread 100% of the time. Oh my god, dude. The third thing I would say for performance nerves is uh try to keep the room on your side. You know, try to try to be charismatic and fast on your feet. Also, mind you, because I'm a solo performer typically, um, and because I had really no experience performing as the kind of act that I am before I started just like being put on the spot to do it professionally. One of my go-tos for how I thought about how to do it was stand-up comedy. Like I would watch a lot of stand-up comedy before I ever started ever thinking about me being the one performing, really, just because I like it. And so I actually kind of recommend that. Like, I think there's something cool about the concept of being fluid and being able to move with the room, and when people start heckling you or making noise, which no one's heckling heckling is rare if you're not a comedian, but you know, things go wrong and um things get um derailed and stuff, and I think it's a useful skill to build trust with yourself and think about how you're gonna respond in the moment in a funny and aloof way to things going fucking wrong. Um, even if you are so nervous that you might throw up. If you're so nervous that you throw up, bring a bucket on stage, puke discreetly, and then say, that was crazy. Sorry, y'all. Anyway, back to the show, you know? Cause you're there to do what you're there to do, and the show must go wrong or whatever, you know? Anyway, yeah. Um Fourth piece of advice: it helps to have something to do afterwards that is unrelated. Um, be it a school presentation or some kind of talk you have to give for work or like an art performance, like a music performance, like a show. It's cool and good for the spirit, I think, to have some activity planned afterwards because it's such a hazing, scary thing to be on display in front of a bunch of people. And it even even if it goes well, it's such an adrenaline rush, and it's so like you feel like you're being hunted for sport that when you go back to your real life, it can be like a really brutal energy drop, and it's just like not good to like sit and stew. So I would say, like, either if you're the kind of person who gets really tired after that kind of thing, have like a nice little plan for how you're gonna have downtime afterwards, or um if you're more like me and you get kind of wired and agitated, like it's nice to have outside plans, like maybe you know, rely on your friends. Uh, if you can rely on like your friends and family, have a hangout scheduled for right after the show, or um call someone that you love so that it's not just you kind of like stewing with your agitation and um relentlessly ruminating about if you did a good job when everyone was looking at you. Um, but yeah, that's my advice. Okay, um, next question. Spadefish says, Hello world, my birthday is December 8th. I believe I'm a not seal. Let me check that real quick. December 8th. Yep, you are correct. I'm a sophomore in college, sophomore slump, lol. I have a question about me, but also about the music/slash lore. If that's okay, if not, then skip it. Okay, let's find out. Advice question. I struggle with chronic physical and mental illness, and I'm wondering what your advice is on handling seasonal depression and flare-ups during winter. I feel like every winter I feel so abysmal and my health gets worse. What would you say is the best way to stay hopeful but not delusional? And if you don't mind a second question, okay, let's see. In the first episode of the NPZ show, you mentioned you like the idea of the NPZ lore being a playground, symbols to play on, as well as a way to communicate nonverbal concepts through experience. Could the same be said about all the songs you've Penelope Sca slash Penny slash Honey Morello created? Like songs that connect and interact with each other, but that aren't necessarily all connected singularly. Would you be interested in the creatures on the internet's stories slash theories? If so, where would we share that? Or is there a true lore? Interesting. Do you guys want a database to talk shit about the creature? Cause we can make that happen. It's probably a good idea. I wonder, you know, I have been toying with the idea of getting a Discord for this purpose. Um, which could be kind of fun. I don't know how many of you are still on Discord. I don't know how current it is outside of particular friend groups. Yeah, uh I also my thing too is that like I really don't love to have my kind of home base for online content and lore and music be primarily on social media where the rules can change at any time and your videos can just disappear, or and also it's not even that necessarily. It's just like you don't have control over the platform because it's some company's platform and you're just on it. Um, so I like the idea of having like a space somewhere else where uh obviously I'm not like you know gonna do everything from fucking scratch. I'm not that crazy, but like I do like the idea of having a different place where I have more control over the platform or whatever. And I I have been wondering like what a good way to do that is. Um I think we are getting an NPZ website soon. That's mostly informational. Um, that's just like a cute thing to have and to kind of consolidate information and content about the NPZ to one place. But for like discussion about the creature and also the Water Dogs Philosophy Journal, which I'm hoping we will see a new one of in maybe April. I know that Honey is still taking submissions for theories and ideas about the unseal, if anyone's done enough digging on her website to find that. But yeah, I'll I'll think about this more. And if any of the rest of you have thoughts on kind of a nice hub to fuck around with all these symbols and stories, definitely like comment it. I don't know where you guys are listening to this podcast. It should distribute to like most of the major podcast platforms. Um I also maybe what I'll do too is I'll like put up a question bubble on the Instagram or something. Maybe a fucking Discord or something, or I don't know. What do you guys think? Um, if you want to comment related to this question, you can do it on the Substack if you want to do it on the Substack. So I'll post this episode through Buzz Sprout or whatever, and then Substack gets updated with a transcript of this and the episode. And if you want to answer this question about where should we have a little hub away from the standard socials, um, feel free to comment it on the Substack. Okay, back to your question. Let's look at your chart. So you're an unseal, which is, I have to say, kind of perfect for this question. Um, the Unseal is all about unknowable truths, unresolvable paradoxes. Um, so you have and also a a winter birthday, which I guess is always true for the unseal, but particularly relevant to your question about having this kind of cyclical struggle in winter. Um, which I think a lot of people can relate to to varying extents. Like the concept of having cyclical depressions might be universal, particularly having them in winter, super common, super understandable. Um, but of course, you have these complicating factors that make it probably hit a lot harder for you. So the unseal is all about being open to things that can't be solved. Maybe the advice for you there is that you just can be both at once. Like, like you can be hopeful and not delusional, even if it feels like these things are contradictory. Like, you can be aware of the weight and the suffering of what you're going through, and also be hopeful and excited about things. And it might be like, what do I want to say? Like, the Unseal is all about um unresolvable paradoxes, unresolvable conflicts, unknowable truths, uh, unknowable untruths. It's it's all about the things that can't be fully understood and explained. Um, which I think makes sense for what you describe. It sounds like what you're going through is kind of like an unexplainable hardship. Because like when when you suffer, I think it's natural to try to find meaning in it, and I think that there is a lot of beauty to be found in the meaning of suffering, like making your own meaning to your suffering. But it's also true that sometimes we just experience our lives, and we aren't in a position to necessarily know what the point is of the particular thing we're experiencing, and we don't always have the wherewithal to make the meaning. Maybe the unseals advice for you is to give yourself some fucking slack and like free yourself from the expectation that you need to have like a coherent worldview, like you have to have like a coherent theory about what you're going through and how to make sense of it all. Maybe you don't need to have it all figured out, you know? Maybe sometimes you feel hopeful, and other times you feel sad and dejected, and sometimes you feel optimistic, and other times you feel delusional, and sometimes you feel like really down and you're really going through it. And maybe your sign is kind of advising you to start by accepting that and accepting it as genuine, even if it's not explainable. Like you don't have to be able to explain it all or justify all of it. You're just you're just going through what you're going through. And if it doesn't make sense, that doesn't mean you're not going through it, you know? Your compliment, the seal, is all about good enough. I think that might also be something that I could see being like useful NPZ advice for you. Honoring like a natural boundary. Cause the because the seal is all about natural boundaries, which don't exist in a pure mathematical sense, but do exist in reality. Maybe that's a good way to think of it. Like, I kind of think of the unseal as being about theory and math and like these impossible things where you're like, this this true thing can't be, you know. You follow like theories and shit to their logical conclusions, and you're like shocked and horrified by what you find if you look too long. Um, the seal's advice is always to, you know, consider taking things at face value, consider natural limits. Even if you can't prove for sure where a natural limit is, just eyeball it. Do okay. And I think especially if you're feeling fucked up in like a cyclical way, it's a good time to practice that. It's a good time to practice just doing good enough. You know, having an okay time, accepting that there is this limit imposed on you. Um, because you're chronically ill, you know, you have a name for the way in which the limit imposed on you is perhaps like more intense. But the pattern of what you're going through, I think, is very relatable and human and like maybe universal that you we all have cyclical um highs and lows, and during the lows we fumble and struggle, and it's a good time to just do what you can because that's all you can do, you know? That's I think what the SEAL would say. Pick things that are within your control and try to do them. Pick things that you can kind of have an effect on and try to affect them for the better. And the things that you can't do anything about, don't do anything about because you can't, you know. It sounds like kind of stupid and trite, but that's that is what seal logic is. That is what like living in reality is, I fear. And then your um neighbors are one, the dog, and seven, the spirit angel. Oh, we talked about this last time. Someone else had this combo. It's a beautiful combo, it's tough because again, the spirit angel is so idealistic, the dog is so all about tuning into the body and your social world. Um I think that for you, the balanced advice might be to tap into both of these worlds for support. On the one hand, the dog, which is like taking care of your animal body to the best of your ability, reasonably, which you may be tired of hearing if you are already chronically ill. But, you know, whatever the basics are for you, try to check those boxes even when you're mad at your body or it's boring. Like, you know, keep the trains running. Um, but also on the dog side is the social world of like, can are you also able to tap into your local social structure and get support there? And also, like, showing up socially, I think, uh, is a good way to improve your quality of life and your self-esteem, even when you are kind of going through a shitstorm and feeling fucked up and bad. Like, we really need to be needed, and we really need to be appreciated. And so finding little things that you can do for people that you care about to kind of demonstrate your place in your world, in your social world, I think is really good for you. Then Spirit Angel is all about ideals and like big, beautiful, ephemeral worlds of ideology that exist in this divine dreams dreamscape that is like not in reality at all. And I think that when we're suffering, um, especially cyclically, especially in a way that feels like we have very little control over what's happening to us, that is kind of a nice time to tap into our ideals and beliefs and dream-like visions outside of this world. Like, maybe allow yourself to think about that and to create or reach for a higher power. Find meaning or make it, you know? Um, I think it's William James who talked about religion as being an organ, a mental organ that turns suffering into meaning. I always thought that was really beautiful and poignant. Because it's a definition of religion that exists distinct from a definition of God. So without trying to tell you what is happening in the cosmos, William James is just saying, like, people are religious. We gotta have something. And like you might not have something that you would define as religious, but when he says religious, he means something, he means like an organ in the mind, the way that like language is an organ in the mind. It's like a thing that you have as part of your starter kit human brain. Um, and obviously, I I'm godless. Like, I'm I'm like a godless heathen, um, and love medicine and painkillers, so like don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to tell you to just like pray the suffering away by any means. But I do I do think that there is something kind of powerful about thinking about things that are beautiful and outside yourself when you are going through something painful and limiting in a physical capacity. Um I think that if you're not in a religious circle already today, then it's easy to write off beliefs that make life tolerable as being woo-woo spiritual cope. But woo-woo spiritual cope is a tried and true method for making it through the fucking day, and I don't think that we should be dunking on that. I think it's beautiful and true to find meaning in your life, in the mundane, in the necessary, in the painful. And if you are feeling like it's silly, then I I would say the spirit's advice, the spirit angel's advice here is that it's okay for it to be silly. It can still be beautiful and true. It's your life, it's your meaning to find. You can make it or find it wherever you want. That's fucking spiritual sovereignty, actually, right there, is the right to find and make meaning in your life, however you want to or need to. You know, it's your mind, it's your spirit. You know, whatever. That's a whole other thing. That's a whole loaded statement with all sorts of dangerous implications that I can get clipped for. But I don't care because, you know, just because some people are sinister and irresponsible with their spiritual sovereignty, that doesn't mean that spiritual sovereignty in itself is sinister. Whatever. Sue me. Audrey Hobart reference. I hope that the winter takes it easy on you, um, or that you prevail and prosper regardless. Next question. Um, okay. Oh, this is Abby again. And you're saying hi because you messaged before. You said, Hey Penny, sorry for reaching out again. Hope I'm not messing up your other requests. Dude, no, I edit this. If you messed it up, I would simply not include it in the show. So if you're hearing it, it's fine. Um, gonna make this quick. Just want to thank you for answering my message message. Your words have really cleared my mind about this object. Lots of love. Oh, that's great. Thanks so much. Um hold on, let me see which message you were. Meow, meow, meow, meow. Oh. Your message was the one about wanting to go to college and it feels like a good plan, but you're scared of growing up and you're kind of on the precipice of adulthood. Awesome. Okay, cool. I'm I'm glad it's working out. Kick ass. Cool. Okay. Um, the next one is Say, I believe. S-E-I-S. You are a spirit angel. He says, Hi Penny, I'm Say, he him. I'm 16. My birthday is October 14th, so I think that makes me an angel spirit. Angel spirit? October 14th? You are correct.

unknown 39:22

Wow.

Speaker 39:23

Man, I really don't have a good intuition for what season these are. I haven't like locked in yet on the NPZ season. Because I was surprised just now to find that the unseal is a Christmas baby. Um, or that a Christmas baby is an unseal, I guess. Okay, anyway. I deeply believe that I am an artistic soul. I do visual arts and make music, and I hold art so close to my heart, it truly feels like my art is what makes me who I am. But for nearly over a year now, I've been struggling to get creative and make anything new. Sure, I can make art, but to me, drawing a pre-existing character using a reference from Pinterest or making a cover of a song I like isn't creative enough. It doesn't feel like it's truly mine. I've tried almost everything under the sun to get ideas flowing, all the stuff the internet tells you to do, including but not limited to throwing things together until it becomes art or isolating myself from stimuli to use boredom as a catalyst for creativity. But I can't seem to produce anything meaningful. I feel unlike myself and restless all the time, like I need to create something, but I truly can't come up with anything. And so I turn to you for help. Your music is really what inspired me to start creating my own, so the NPZ seems like quite a reliable tool. What can I do to get out of this slump? Warm regards, say. Warm regards. Um yeah, this is a great one for the NPZ, and also very relatable. Damn. Um, okay. So you are a spirit angel. And damn, what a perfect sign for this question. Because as we've just been talking about, the spirit angel is all about beautiful ideals, visions that flash across your mind that when you try to bring them into reality, they like become intangible in your hand, and it's like this divine torment of having desires and then the struggle to kind of integrate that into reality, which is like, ugh, sucks. It fucking sucks, it's really brutal. Um, and the big folly of the angel is that she is a perfectionist, ultimately, is the colloquial word for what she's going through. It's that she's a perfectionist, she's a purist, she wants things to be perfect because what she's imagining is a perfect representation or visitation of the divine, and she wants that so bad, and it's really hard for her to reconcile that, that non-existent perfect, with the imperfect that exists, reality. And I I think that maybe her advice for you in this moment is to check yourself on perfectionism a little and say, like, you know, you're kind of thinking of your life as being, um, you're either making art or you're not. And right now you're not. It's not good enough. But if you took her compliment, the ghost, the ghost's idea of divine consciousness is that it arises out of lower levels of organized shit. So, like, there's, you know, it's not a divine perfect other that visits the earth if you do a good enough job summoning it to the ghost, your compliment, the divine creative comes about out of a harmony of lower level mundane layers. And these two ideas of creative divinity or sparks of genius or passion or lifeblood or whatever, they kind of balance each other out and I think hold each other in check. And it sounds like you're really heavily identifying with the angel. Maybe it's time for you to identify a little bit with the ghost if you're not getting the results you want. So instead of starting high and trying to bring the stars down, start low. Think about your environment, think about your body, think about your relationship with your environment, with your body, and keep those things um cared for. And then once you have a routine there that you are comfortable with, then start stacking things up. Then go to your social world and your institutional world, your friends, your career, or your school or whatever you're doing, you know, your job, whatever, whatever project is in your um, it's still the earthly domain, but it's a little more complicated than just are you eating, drinking, walking, sleeping, whatever. And create a rhythm and a harmony with those things that is um, you know, not perfect, but brings some kind of savings. And routine to your life. And the wisdom of the ghost is that if you do that and you create a harmony, the harmony helps you stack your way to the top of the pyramid, you know? And at the top of the pyramid is where you can have like some level of conscious control over your life at all. And according to the ghost, that's when inspiration strikes. That's when you start to have free flowing energy and good ideas, and you're able to try things and not be so hard on yourself that you get caught in loops of self-criticism that curve you off course. You want to be able to kind of move in a straight line as opposed to tying yourself in knots. So that's that's the your first line of advice. Your neighbors, machine and unseal. That's an interesting combo too. Okay, I like that. Um, the machine, as always, is about thinking of your problem as if it were mechanical, taking the first-person emotions and heat out of it, and just thinking, if you could depersonalize it, how would you go about solving your problem? So your problem is there's a person in your model who feels a desire and a drive to be creative but is feeling very blocked right now. How can we solve the puzzle to make creative behavior more likely? And when you look at it that way and take like the personal responsibility out of it a little bit, because I think when you're not doing something that you wish you were doing, it's there, it's easy to get in your head and be like, oh god, I should be doing it and I'm not. What's wrong with me? Like, but it's I think the machine asks us to take a step back and to look at things like through the lens of objectivism and go, well, if it were anybody else, what would you tell them? I think it also causes you to be a little bit more clear about what you consider a win, like what you consider the goal being met. Like, what is your goal? Can you write it out? Can you write out what the goal of this endeavor is? Like, do you want to make something that other people think is good? Do you want to make something that you think is good, that you feel good about? Are you really chasing a feeling of harmony with your work? And all of these things are different from each other. And I mean, you know, I might think that they're kind of one and the same, but like they're different stated goals and they have different um implied steps to take to make them more likely to come to pass. So spend some time thinking about that and trying to get out of your own head and your own first person account of this problem and think about it mechanically. And then the counterweight to that, your other neighbor, the unseal, we've talked about kind of a lot so far, but like, yeah, is about unresolvable paradoxes, the unthinkable, like it can't be. I think that ironically, and I'm not saying this to phase you or freak you out, but I'm just saying from personal experience, your anxiety about your art block might be in your way. And and again, I always speak from like my experience with like OCD and ERP, so I give a lot of ERP advice. If it doesn't work for you, you can just toss that out. But I think it's under-discussed and that it works for a lot more than just OCD. I think like ERP logic is kind of beautiful and true beyond just its clinical use. But of course, I think that, so take it with a grain of salt. Um, maybe it would be good for you to sit with the anxiety that you'll never make something you like again. And by facing that like unfaceable painful possibility, and it is possible, it's not likely, but it's technically possible in like a mathematical sense. Maybe if you sit with that anxiety until you're able to stand it, you'll be able to get over the block of that anxiety. Like maybe if you write down on a sheet of paper, you know, I might never get over this block. I'm fucked. I'm cooked, I'm never gonna make art again. Like, not only will doing that help you realize how kind of silly that fear is, but if you really allow yourself to go there mentally and imagine what that would be like and to live with that possibility, to just take the fact that that's possible at face value, you can kind of take that out of the realm of unbearable, unthinkable horror and make it just like a thing that could happen but probably won't. And once it's just a thing that could happen but probably won't, it takes up less of your headspace and it leaves more of your life free for actually doing what you fucking desire to do, which is possibly to make work that you feel good about and that you enjoy making. Um, yeah, that's the NPZ's advice for you. Personally, just uh, you know, throwing you just like a little bit of personal advice, I would just add, um, that you always look back on past times that you were creative with a nostalgia that is brutal and inaccurate. In my experience, you look back on your past work with one of two things. Either um, well, one of three things. The third thing is a sober neutrality. But the two things that are a problem, you look back on your past work with either this feeling of profound, unrelenting, almost unbearable cringe, and then the other thing you look back on is like, man, I used to be good, and now I'm not, and I fucked it all up. I had I had it and I lost it, and there's something wrong with me, and I'll never get it back, and I used to have vision, you know. And I can't go back in time and check to see if all that's bullshit. But I'm pretty sure that the time that I'm imagining where I like had divine vision and was acting with intention, I'm pretty sure that never happened. I think that what happened is that I was in a flow state, unencumbered by neuroses about what I was doing. And I was always a little encumbered, but I was I was doing it anyway, you know. I was capable of doing it. And at a certain point, I was working on a project and I kind of lost track of time and I was having a good time making what I was making. Um, and some of those things turned out to be things that I was happy with at the time. And a lot of them turned out to be things I wasn't happy with at the time, and I don't really remember working on those because nothing really happened with them. But some of them I was happy with. Um, and then at some point, other people were happy with some of them. That's like a more neutral account of what happened. But when you are looking back at your past creative process, it's so easy to introduce all sorts of weight and bullshit about how it happened and how it should happen again. And I think that it's important to have a just like a little bit of a reality check on that, and to just go like, hey man, these questions are actually not answerable. So that's that's my personal advice is to kind of try not to torment yourself with like imagined memories about your past creative experience and try to just embrace the divine and mundane task of doing the shit you intend to do today. And when you compare it to the past, you can just treat that like intrusive thoughts, you just treat that like noise. I see this resolving for you. I think that creative blocks tend to not be as concrete as we always feel like they are. But cool. Okay, next question. Soapy, who is the sign woman, says, Hi Penny, my birthday is August 7th, and my pronouns are she, her, they, them. My question for you is how did you settle on your unique genre of music? I've never heard any other artists with a sound like yours. I absolutely adore you. That's so sweet, thank you. Um, well, this is not really an NPZ question, but I will try to make it be an NPZ question. Um, alright, let's do it this way. Um, my sign is the mermaid. I mean, from the new piniped zodiac perspective, since we're playing this game, um I identify with my sign insofar as I believe in the value in being between worlds and making that a home and an identity. And I think that there's a lot of different genres that I like and a lot of different styles that I like, and I try to not exclude things that hit um on account of them not being coherent at first. Like I'm a big believer in following the feeling, you know? And sometimes the feeling leads you to something that sounds kind of orchestral, and other times the feeling leads you to do something more acoustic with the tools that you have, and other times the feeling leads you to put a bit crusher on something, and you just I think that it's um it's tough too, because like you always are gonna um learn what your preferences are by emulating other people first, so it's not like everything you do should be a hundred percent original, and in fact, it kind of can't be. You're always drawing on something, but I think it's important to me to be a little bit intentional about what styles I'm referencing and why. However, not everybody feels and works that way, and there's good reason to believe that other people are right and I am wrong about that. Um, but that is, I think, why I try such odd combos of things, is partly because I'm trying to. For me, the um production of a song is part of the composition in a way that's very deliberate and um overt. When I'm producing a song and choosing the instruments and choosing the effects, I'm thinking things like, what am I trying to say with this choice? You know, there's a good case to be made that you shouldn't do that, but it's what I do, and it's a big part of why my music sounds like that. Yeah, okay. Let me move to the next question. Okay. Oh, I recognize this one. Okay. This is uh Citrus Selkie, a mermaid who wrote in last show, who says, Hello again, I wrote in for the first horoscope and I returned to your shores once more, at once the same and completely different. Ugh, beautiful. My pronouns are she, her, I'm 21 years old until uh February 25th, 2026, which means you are just barely 22, I believe. My sign is mermaid, and my path looks very different now than when I wrote you last. In a good way, but I could use your advice once again. Okay, great, awesome. I find myself having to wait for life to catch up to what I want. In our last correspondence, we talked about choices. The choices before me now all seem to revolve around action and inaction. On the one hand, I'm aware that rest is important and that some things just take time. On the other hand, the water of my life feels like it's growing stagnant, and I'm struggling to find a way to get things flowing again. Part of me thinks I need to just learn better how to deal with it when times are slow, but another part knows that I have a tendency to grow complacent if I do not push myself. I find that whichever way I err, it seems to shake out slightly less than what I had hoped for. How do I know when it's time to trust in the course of nature versus when I need to step up myself? How does one know when the time is right to rest or to intervene? I'm afraid I don't have any specific issues that I am thinking of, it's just a recurring theme that I've noticed in the years since I wrote you. This wrestling between letting life do what it will and taking matters into my own hands. Very excited for your upcoming work. I enjoyed a Waitookie Baby and Loser. Great, thank you. Ever yours, the ever-conflicted Citrus Selkie. Okay. Um, yeah, cool. Hold on. Actually, I'm gonna go back and read uh your other message real quick just to catch up. Okay. So your question is how do you know when to push yourself and when to rest? You want to make things happen in your life, you have plans. So you're feeling like your life, the water of your life is growing stagnant, you're struggling to find a way to get things flowing again. This is I mean, this is not dissimilar to the person before who was asking about um getting over a creative block. So it is mermaid season, and it is um it is your sign. Um, and the mermaid always cautions us against getting too rigid and seeing our world as like a big overwhelming choice between two mutually exclusive options. This is her issue that she has to get through as a sign. So I think first and foremost, the mermaid's advice for you is to stay a little more flexible. Open yourself up just to the possibility that these binaries that you've drawn here don't exist or aren't as rigid as you're experiencing them. Action versus inaction might not really be an actual binary. Um, there might be ways in which you're active and ways in which you're inactive at any given moment, you know. And then on the other hand, here you say, yeah, you're sit, and you have a couple different ways that you frame this binary that you're looking at, and they may or may not all be the same, but you say here you have inaction versus action, then you have stagnant versus flowing, then you have um trust in nature versus step up yourself, rest or intervene. And I think that mermaid advice for you here is um, first of all, to sit with the idea that there might be no right answer, and I'm quite sure there is no right answer most of the time, maybe all the time. So if you're waiting to make a choice until you know what to do, that's not true. You've alre you've already chosen to do something in the present. So this idea that you can like plan out your life in advance and pick each choice, you know, is like an illusion. And it's an illusion that sometimes is helpful, but other times is not, and we need to move beyond. Um, but then the other part of the mermaid advice is like the idea that there's two options and you know exactly what they are might also not even be true. Um, maybe you're resting and you're trusting in nature at the same time, or you're doing neither, or you're doing both, but to different degrees. Like it sounds it sounds to me um like you're breaking down your options into these categories, and then you're finding these categories kind of limiting. And I think when we do that and we find that our categories are kind of limiting our mobility in a spiritual sense or whatever, it's worth it to take a step back and think about maybe not doing the categories like that. Because when you think about your life in terms of models and categories, ideally I think you're doing it because it helps you make sense of your world and move through it in a way that helps you. And if the categories and models that you're using to make sense of your life are not helping you make sense of your life and are not helping you prosper, then maybe those categories aren't the right tools for this job, you know? That's your mermaid advice. Your system advice is kind of an interesting counterweight because I feel like where the mermaid advice is about like, oh, don't feel the need to lock in and crunch it down. Like, be open to the flow, be open to uncertainty. The machine advice is to in fact do the opposite and lock in. But the way that the machine has you lock in is take the first person heat out of the situation, define your goals clearly, and then think in kind of mechanical terms: how can you make your desired outcome more likely? Maybe a way to approach this is like, okay, you face a problem and you're getting caught up. Should I really lock in and like take dominion over the situation, or should I go with the flow? Um, which, you know, can really be broken down into more steps because lock in versus go with the flow are kind of vague um like descriptions of what you're doing, and both of them contain within them more mini dichotomies of locking in versus going with the flow, you know? But like say you're trying to make a decision between, as you say, inaction versus action in a certain aspect of your life. Should you do the thing or should you not do the thing? Maybe write down your stated goal for that particular question. Like, write, like get a pen and paper and write out, I'm trying to decide what I should do about X circumstance and like like get it down and then go, what I want out of this situation is, and then make a really short list, ideally, like a sentence, like maybe no more than five bullet points, I would say. Like, really hone in on what you're trying to get out of the particular situation that you're thinking of, and limit your scope to that and be like, you know, this is the outcome I want. What actions could I take to make my desired outcome that I've stated here more likely? And then you can look at that and kind of go, like, okay, so what part of the stuff that I'm waffling on is serious and important, and what part is just like not even part of it? Like, what part can I afford to stop spinning my wheels? Because people don't take into account, well, I I struggle to take into account the hidden cost of rumination. When you're making choices about what to do, it's easy to forget that waffling on the choice and trying to make sure it's the right choice is a cost to your energy and in the model that you're making as you make it. So, like you do have to have reasonable limits on that, or else, or else you get very crazy, which is unfortunate. Um, or maybe not, you know, not everyone's like me. Like maybe you don't get crazy, but you you become less efficient towards your desired goals, which is spiritually a bummer and not ideal. Okay. So so that's that's the machine approach. So then your neighbors, one and three, dog, and um, spirit ghost, I really like these for you. I like them for you because these are grounding neighbors that help you get in touch with like basic basic experiences in the body. It's easy to forget that like the future and past aren't happening to your body right now. What's happening to your body right now is the present. So if you live in your head in models and simulations about the future, you may forget to live in your body in the present, which is the actually the only vehicle you have for experiencing all the shit that you're worrying about. So, dog logic, dog advice for you is to nurture your relationship with your body and with your immediate social environment. When you find yourself expending a lot of mental energy waffling on those things, go like, all right, I don't know what the right choice is in this particular instance. Should I rest or should I act? How does my body feel right now? Like, do a body scan and go like, does my head hurt? Do I feel icky? Like, am I have I stretched my body today, you know? And then also think about your immediate social world. Are you being a good friend? Um, are you feeling basic respect and dignity in your like daily interpersonal relationships? And then similarly with the spirit ghost, ghost is consciousness from the ground up. So think about your body and your environment and your habits and routines with regard to those things. And it's possible that you have that on lock and that your questions here really are high consciousness, like what should I do? And that's fine. But the NPZ is warning you here to keep the trains running, as they say. Your question is abstract enough that maybe I'll go one more level into your chart and do your mirrors. Yeah, your mirrors are the twin spirits, right? Yeah, because we have the same chart. Um, your mirrors are the twin spirits, which are opposing complementary um models of consciousness and divinity and like where beautiful creative passions and insights come from. And as we've talked about, the ghost is consciousness from the ground up, and the angel is consciousness from the stars down. The way that I would read the placement of these um mirrors for you with regard to your question is that you should take them into account, but you should balance them, and for you specifically, the ghost counts twice for a reason. You can spend some time in spirit angel world thinking about your big, beautiful visions for magical things and what you think ought to be, and you can try you can yeah, like it's good to consider that, maybe do some journaling, put those things on paper, think about them in a spacey, abstract way, let yourself get woo-woo with it, but then ground those principles in how you feel in the present in your body, and like do not let that run away with you, you know what I mean? Because thinking in abstract ways about our ethereal book. Beliefs is like it's like good inspiration, but you can't live out there mentally. You have to live in your body. And if you try to live out there in the cosmos, in the abstract plane of divine ideas or whatever, um, you run the risk of kind of abandoning your body in your real world and becoming quite dysfunctional. And when you're dysfunctional, you get uh lethargic and fucked up, and then you're not working towards divinity at all. In fact, you're working toward um fumbling the bag. So um, yeah, that's your mirror's advice. Good luck on this little spiritual quest. Um, okay, next question. Um, last one of the day. Bismuth, 18 years old, she they says, Hi Penny, I'm about to enter a very big transition period in my life where things will be constantly changing for a while. High school graduation is drawing near, and I have plans to return to my home of California, across the country from where I live currently, to go to college for astronomy. Okay, awesome. Over there, I will be in a living situation that will be much better for me mentally, but still wildly different from what I'm used to. I think I can handle change pretty well, as long as I know what the change actually is. In a period that will be full of the unpredictability of moving and finding my place in the world, what can the NPZ and my sign do to help guide me? I also have a more broad question about my sign itself. The unseal seems to be both the most pervasive and mysterious of the signs, intentionally so. But I would like to know more about what it means to be one. Am I the creature? Is the creature something that I can try to look for spiritually? Is the creature simply something I and people who share this sign can relate our experiences to? I am so endlessly fascinated by the NPZ and would love so much to know more about the Unseal, how the Unseal relates to me as a person, or even on a deeper level. Thank you, Bismuth. Great, okay. Um, well f yeah, so let's first of all um I'll answer your question about yourself, and then we'll come back to the unseal and we'll close out with that. Um The Unseal is basically about things that can't be known. Like things that are not in our scope as human beings. I kind of think of the unseal as being like about the absurd. I also um let me pull this up. Over in uh Honey Morello world, there's been some writing and literature, scientific documentation about the unseal hidden on her website. Um I mean the Unseal's paradox, which is a Honey Morello thing, a Water Dogs philosophy journal thing, um, is a specific paradox. The Unseals paradox is the persistent gap between the quality of the Unseal hoaxes and the scientific tools needed to verify the Unseal's existence maintained by the steady march of technological advancement across the board. That's the specific Unseals paradox in the lore. But in general, the unseal as a sign in our like spiritual framework here. Um, yeah, she's kind of like the patron saint of the unknowable and like the unfathomable. I mean, it kind of reminds me the unseal kind of reminds me of this quote from Myth of Sisyphus. Hold on, I'll be right back. I'm gonna get it for you, and I'll be right back. Let me find my book. Okay, he says the fuck? What does he say? Yeah, famously Camus said "the fuck." Um, okay. That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama. But the fact of that nostalgia's existence does not imply that it is to be immediately satisfied. And he goes on, blah blah blah. These are again truisms. Yeah, he's talking about nostalgia, which I, you know, resonate with and really like. Um, and was kind of actually that was intended to be like one of the quirks of Y2K Baby, is that in that it's like the second or third line or something where I I say I'm your sweet nostalgic girl. The first time I say it, I mean it colloquially, but the second time I say it, I mean it technically, with regard to like the myth of Sisyphus use of the word nostalgia, which is to say um like an innate human yearning for a unity that we seem to remember but can't actually reassemble. Like we feel like everything used to make sense, and if we just solved one more thing, it would make sense again, but it actually never made sense. And it it may never make sense again. Um, but he says, And here are trees, and I know their gnarled surface, water, and I feel its taste, these scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes. How shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. Which is again an important, like, counterweight to the world not for us from demon world in the dust of this planet. Separate thing. Um, you describe it to me, and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws, and in my thirst for knowledge, I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism, and my hope increases. At the final stage, you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom, and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All is good, and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry. I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis. That lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. Blah, goes on, goes on. To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poison peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations. Here, the intelligence too tells me in its way that this world is absurd. And then there's more. You know, and then there's always more. But um, but but this is the difference, right? Like this, that that whole thing, this whole world of thoughts, for me, that's what the unseal is about. It's about the absurd. Whereas the seal is about the opposite, it's about the fact that we kind of live in the unity that we have nostalgia for every day. Because you can know that there's tiny, tiny little gaps between all these particles, and you can still get out of bed and go outside. You can be like, actually, the grass is made up of, and then you touch it and you feel different. You're like, okay, alright. Because we must prevail. And like, even if we don't actually know for sure that we must prevail, we must prevail. You know what I mean? And that's what the seal is about. Like, um, nature, and nature in a way that's like real and tangible and available for us to understand. Like, when you if you're baking something and you put uh the sugar in the cup or whatever, you put the sugar in the cup and you like look at it and you're like, uh, is that really a cup? If you you like look at it and then you kind of like jostle it, and like some of the grains fall out, and you're like, fuck, and you like look again, you're like, yeah, it's like a cup. The fact that that's a cup and that the cake's probably gonna turn out okay, that's the seal. That's the seal at work. Um, but the problem of the grain versus pile, that's the unseal. You know what I mean? And like you as a human being going through your life are constantly experiencing instances of both. Like, I feel like as you go through your day, reality kind of splits into these two things. And the thing that's weird is that like seal world, like real world, seal world, nature world, kind of only exists when you're not thinking too hard about it. And the unseal always rears her little head um when you are thinking. When you are thinking too hard about it. Maybe that's a good way to put it. The unseal is the queen of all the paradoxes and unbelievable, unfathomable stuff that comes up when we think too hard about our world. And yeah, like, okay, so I'm kind of like ranting about the unseal, even though I said I would save that for later, but to apply this to your particular question. You're entering this big transition period, it's a change for the better, so you're probably like excited, but you're also nervous. I almost feel like what your sign has to say about a big change like that is that there are aspects of what you're going to go through that will not make sense. For example, like here's one it's very common for people who go through changes for the better, like big life changes that are what they wanted, to still feel kind of like, you know, sometimes you get depressed, sometimes you get depressed, or you kind of get hazed and confused. Um, and this might not happen to you specifically, but this is just an example. Like, uh, it's really common for people to get depressed when they move, even if the move is like into a place that they wanted to move to and like more, just because change is jarring. Um, but it feels counterintuitive and weird that you would get what you want and feel uh listless and depressed as a result. It confuses people, and that confusion I think causes you to like reflect on it and go like, what the fuck? Why? And now you're thinking about it, and the thinking about it is like making you more honed in on it. So I think that unseal advice for large changes, especially good ones, is to accept that like not all of your feelings about what you're doing are gonna make sense, and that's like fine, that's totally okay. And it's up to you to decide what it means when you have those experiences, and you might decide that it means nothing, or that whatever it means is not intelligible to you, and that's fine. Maybe that's maybe that's the NPZ's advice for you is to like to give yourself the freedom to write certain shit off as nonsensical for your purposes. Your compliment, the seal, is the inverse of this, but kind of comes to the same place of radical acceptance of whatever you're going through, um, which is that you don't have all the information that you might want. You don't know everything. There are some things that can't be possibly understood or made sense of in our lives, but you know enough to proceed and you're doing fine, you know? That's SEAL logic. Um maybe that's what the MPC can say for you is like as you go through all these changes, keep in mind the idea of baking a cake and measuring out a cup of sugar. On the one hand, the fact that you don't know where one grain of sugar becomes the cup of sugar, it becomes a pile of sugar. It's like the there's there's not firm lines, but then on the other hand, you know how to measure a fucking cup of sugar. You're doing fine, you know, it's going fine. To take things at face value and move through your life in a way that is sufficient, you know? Um, to not be a perfectionist, to admire the strangeness of the natural world without getting too wrapped up in how porous the borders between things really are. To not overthink, in short. Um, your neighbors, dog and angel, I think are a nice balancing array for you in this moment. Also, I think that a dog is a good sign to pay attention to when you're moving. You gotta give yourself a lot of grace. And I know you say here that you're good at handling change, but I think it never hurts to just remind yourself that like moving sucks. Like moving, moving and dealing with big changes, it you know, both can be true. It can be like a profound gift that you're lucky to experience, and then also you can be like, also, this kind of sucks. Spirit angel logic um is like if things feel hazed and fucked up in your personal life for a while while you're going through these chase changes and like jostling your environment, you can turn to the spirit angel and take comfort in allowing yourself to visit other head spaces, you know. I've cautioned other people, uh like other people who wrote in and even in this same show against escaping out of your body and your environment and like living in your ideals and values. And I've like been telling people to be cautious about that and to not forget about your body. But also, sometimes we think about our higher ideals and our divine beliefs or whatever, and we get very intellectual as a means to like take a much-needed break from our environments and our bodies, and that's okay too, you know. As long as you remember that you have to come home sometime, it's okay to take a trip out into the cosmos. You know what I mean? It's okay to get lost in your head for a bit as a treat. Maybe it's a good time to think about your kind of higher creative pursuits or values so that you kind of have like a common thread that you can return to as you're going through these other transitions, you know? It can be nice to think about your big ideas when you're um when your low-level world is like in a little bit of disarray. Just make sure that you keep it, you keep an eye on it and you don't get lost out in out in space, you know. I mean, one of your mirrors is the dog, so just doubling down. But your uh latitudinal mirror should be five, the woman, who we've talked about a little bit on this show already today. But um I think one way to read the presence of the woman in your chart is to practice um, like how do I want to say this? Like, practice living your life in the first person on purpose. I think especially when we're traveling, it's a good time. Like when we're when we're going through these big transitions, it's a good time to kind of take stock of how we see the world. Um, and to kind of let it be an adventure and not be caught up or bogged down by trying to tell the story of our adventure in real time. Just like going on the adventure that is the transition and letting yourself experience it um in real time, I think can be can be really nice and freeing. Okay, so let's move on to your question about the NPZ and what the unseal is for. And your question is about the unseal specifically, uh, or the not seal or the creature. Yeah. Um, but I guess it kind of applies to any of the signs, and this is a good question, because like what what are they, right? Like, what the fuck are we doing? I've said before that the goal of the NPZ is to kind of have like a fun framework where people can play around with these symbols and stuff and not take it too seriously, but still get maybe inspiration or meaningful insights or whatever. I think it's cool to have symbols that you get to fuck around with mentally, spiritually. And I also think that it's cool to acknowledge the role of chance or fate in all of this because it helps it helps to know that it's not in your control what your sign is. Um what it what it means that you are the creature in the NPZ is that here's what it means through a combination of fate and chance, and conscious construction on my part, and conscious participation on all of our parts, um, you have been assigned a particular sign on the NPZ, and that sign is the creature. What this means is that decided by a combination of construction, chance, and participation, the first sign that you are advised to go to when you want to consult the NPZ on a topic is the creature. If you don't like that one, you can switch to a different one, but that's your home base assigned by the game. I always like to go in order. I like to start with the primary sign, then go to the compliment, then go to the neighbors, and then go to the mirrors. But I also kind of like to think of the signs as being like a little pantheon or like maybe an array of saints. Like I like to think of it as like uh a menu of options for how you can think about a certain problem or concept or thing going on in your life, which means like you can pick any of them. And I think it's neat and fun to think through all of them because they all have their own little stories and aesthetics. So are you the creature? Yes and no. No, insofar as we're all people, like I'm not a mermaid, you know? Like, but I am the mermaid in a certain sense, in a certain analysis of a situation that I might be calling on the mermaid for, you know? Like, are you the creature? Like, no, you're bismuth, but like you're the creature in a certain analysis of a certain problem, should you choose to step into that role. The way that I like to think about this is that these signs are entities in myths. It's kind of like when you um watch a movie and they're doing like a retelling of like Romeo and Juliet or something, where it's like the main character isn't Romeo, but in a way he is, you know? Like, I'm kind of thinking of your guys' questions and situations that you bring to the NPZ as being like retellings of the myths behind the NPZ. So that's that's one thing. That's one aspect of this. I think another thing that I like about the project of the NPZ is the fact that it tries to stay kind of non-attached to any specific myth or worldview. Like, part of the reason that it does just go by date and by birthday is because it's supposed to be a little bit arbitrary. Like, in addition to being fate and chance or whatever, it's also like I want it to be a thing where you don't remain too attached to the first sign that you're assigned. Because the goal of the NPZ is not to give you a certain sign or framework, but instead to teach you to be kind of flexible and malleable with regard to how you think through your questions. You know, I start with mermaid and it I identify with it because it's my sign, and according to the rules of the game, this is the one that I am, and that like means something to me. And I I become attached, and I it's like anything. It's like a personality test. It's like as soon as you're told that this is your thing, like as a person, as a human being, you have a natural desire to identify with it and know what it means and think about it, and you find yourself thinking about it as you go through your day. Even if you know that there is this arbitrary element, it's like it's almost the arbitrary chance-based element of it makes it more meaningful for you. And I think that's cool and a useful tool for thinking creatively. But then I what I also like about the NPZ is that you are kind of encouraged to do that, feel that way, and then let it go and move on to a different sign's advice to kind of teach you how to not get rigid in your thinking. You shouldn't think about everything from the perspective of one sign. You shouldn't even think about everything from the perspective of any of the signs. The goal of the game is to be free to move about how you look at situations. So that's what it means. I mean, that's what does it mean for you to be the unseal? It means that's where your piece on the board starts. And that's kind of significant, but part of the significance of this game is that it's not too significant where you start. Um that said, I mean, obviously the creature is like very structurally important to the new Piniped Zodiac. Um without the creature, the rest of this doesn't hold together. Um there's no fun, spooky twist to the NPZ without the creature. And I I, you know, and I like her as a stand-in for the void and the absurd and all these big, like heavy-hitting concepts that most of us aren't really sure what we mean when we say them. Um I think it's cool. I think it's neat, I think it's very punk and goth. So, to go through your question again, are you the creature? Kind of, but not really. Is the creature something that I can try to look for spiritually? Yeah, it's it's a concept that you can put some focus towards. Um is the creature simply something I and people who share the sign can relate our experiences to? To that last one, I would also say, like, I also think all of the signs Are kind of a place to put your compassion. There's a way in which you can have compassion for each of the signs and use that to have compassion for yourself. And like the way that that would work with the unseal is that there's like a way that you can feel kind of sweet and soft towards her where you're like, here's this creature that represents these huge, scary, unfathomable concepts for better or for worse. It's like it's not up to the unseal that that's what she represents. And I think there's something kind of powerful about that. I don't know. I mean, fuck, dude. It's a game, it's supposed to be fun. Like, yeah, I hope this was helpful. I hope this was helpful. Um, thank you for tuning in. And uh I'm trying to think if there's anything I want to say real quick. So this should go up on Thursday, and if you made it this far, I'll tell you a secret, which is that uh the next single off the album, I believe drops on the 20th. Don't tell anyone I told you. And yeah, that the merch thing was a huge success. Thank you guys so much for God, I sound like an influencer. But but genuinely, thank you to everyone who gave some attention to the fledgling merch project that we're working on, these small batch designs. I really like them. Um, we did we ran into some shipping issues because of the um blizzard on the east coast recently, but to my knowledge, everything's more or less resolved now. Uh, but thanks to everyone who was patient during that, because I know for a while people were concerned that um the packages were not going to ship on time. I think I think if you ordered a shirt out of the first batch of 25, you should have your shirt either by now or within the next couple days. And if that's not the case, message through the depop chat and the Queen Bee will see your message. But um, I think that's all sorted. And I believe we're doing another drop soon with the next single. Maybe not exactly the same day, but like around that time. But anyway, I think that's it. Cool, okay, great. Um, thanks so much for listening. See you next time. Bye!