Ghost Season And Quick Check-In

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the new Penniped Zodiac Horoscope podcast. Um I'm I'm feeling antsy today. We're just gonna breeze through this one. So let's lock in. Okay. What's going on today? Today is uh May 7th as I'm recording this, which means according to our handy-dandy NPZ science page, it is still spirit ghost season. Um, which is good. So next month we'll do like a longer one, maybe. I don't know, whatever. Um, how is everyone's spirit ghost season going? Are you guys doing a good job maintaining your home and your animal body to make space for your higher consciousness, or are you perhaps slacking on that like me? Um let me know in the comments. Let me know in the comments if we're reaching our higher selves. Um, okay, what's going on? What's

Fear Of God Album Updates

SPEAKER_01 0:56

going on? I read a book, trying to keep up with my New Year's resolution to read 12 books. I read Lost Lambs by um Madeline Cash, and it was awesome. It was really fun. If you're trying to read a book for fun, you should try that one. Um, what else is going on? Oh yeah, my album came out. Uh yeah, Fear of God came out. Yeah. So far I've been really surprised with the variation of people's favorites. I really thought I knew, this is typical. I really thought I knew which songs were gonna be popular and which ones were not, and I was mistaken as usual. The symbol manipulation music video I'm really proud of and happy with. So, for certain things we work with editors, um video editors, and the way we were gonna do the symbol manipulation music video is that I was just gonna give our editor Michael he's credited um in the video, if you want to go find his other work. But I was gonna just have him edit the video and I would give him notes, and then I knew I wanted it to have that structure where at the at the end of the bridge, like the drop, it was gonna switch to what what I've been calling the rapture. And then as I thought about it more, I realized that I really needed to do the rapture myself because it I was just gonna be so picky about it, and it's like I knew it would just take too long to explain, and it wasn't really fair to him. So so I ended up taking over that part, and he did the first half, but then I ended up going back and doing my own edits of the first half too. Basically, I I low-key had to learn Adobe Premiere for this. Um which was really fun. Really fun, cool skills to build. Um, I'm getting into video editing because normally I'm just an audio person, and so that's what I do, but now I'm kind of like tiptoeing into the video world, and it turns out very transferable, not not too brutal. One thing that I really struggle with is that I I just I learn the things that I find intuitive and then I skip the important mundane stuff, and then I end up like crashing my computer, because it's like I didn't actually I didn't actually learn how the tools work. Um I just got a little idea and then I went, ooh, what if I and and now I have like I don't know like a thousand masks or whatever Oh I don't know. Yeah, I just have maybe 14 bazillion effects.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

Oh, do you think is that is it gonna be is it gonna take a while to render? I wonder why. Only because I did this with the zeal of a beginner. Um and zero professional skills. Yeah, no, it's fine. I'll just it's cool. I'll just export it with the frame rate of if it were like being done on like a potato or something. Surely. So I it yeah, so it took me a minute to figure out, you know.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

But it was really fun to make that video, and I really liked it, and um and I'm gonna be using kind of the library of symbols from that era throughout promotional content and stuff going forward, which is kind of fun to do. Also, the Honey Morello team have been slacking, but I know that they have a rebuttal pending to the video. So, you know, keep your eyes appealed on the on the Honey website. Um what else? What else is going on? Anything music related, anything important? I'm I'm glad the album came together the way that it did. I'm glad that people seem to be enjoying it. I kind of it's a weird one because it's not, it's such a variation in style from song to song. Um, and I kind of hoped that it would be a thing where like there's kind of something for everyone. Um really took years off my life to leave Touch Grass alone. I need you guys to understand that I think that song. Like, I'm listening to it and I'm like, this sounds crazy. This sounds crazy! I need to add effects! I need to add a million effects to this. But I know that some of you, I'm sorry, there's like a piece of lint like on my face, and it's like touching me and making me evil. Give me a second. Okay. Um, anyway, I know that some of you who really like the junkyard too and like the girls' night type stuff, you guys are very patient. Um, and I understand that rarely are you attended to anymore because it's not, it's not what I listen to. So as my technological capabilities increase, I'm making less and less stuff that sounds just like acoustic because that's not that's not the skills I'm drawn to building. And yet, it's a fair request. It's a fair request. It's a fair request, and I really tried to leave Touchgrass alone. Um, the one virtual instrument in Touchgrass is the organ, because the one of the through lines of Fear of God is that every single song has an organ somewhere. Because I really like the symbolism of the organ, um, Sam Smith, and um who is like credited periodically on Instagram posts. And I really at some point I would like to have my Penelope Scott.com site have like just a page for artists we've worked with, and I need to do that, and I need to just lock in and get that done. But anyway, um, so we commissioned this art from an actual visual artist. Like, and I drew up all these designs, and then he like you know, did a bunch of drafts, and the goal was to have it be simultaneously a trinket, like a Y2K era plastic aquatic trinket, and also an animal, and also a machine, and also kind of a world and an ecosystem, to kind of like visually blend all these ideas without making a verbal claim about which it is. And I I think he crushed it. I'm really happy with it. I think it's so fun, so pretty. Stands in stark contrast to my other album covers, which were clearly rushed.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

And just like not to say that they weren't, you know, I like them, but my other album covers have dripped with the implication that the cover was not the point, and that I really considered the music to be the important part of the album.

SPEAKER_01 7:41

And this is one of the first times that I've had enough forethought and help to make a coherent aesthetic that also reaches into the visual. So that's exciting. Um, yeah. Anyway, yeah, I'll leave this alone for now, but maybe maybe next time I'll talk more about the album um when I've had more time to think about it.

Spring Cleaning For Your Consciousness

SPEAKER_01 8:02

But okay, cool. Moving on to your actually, wait, hold on. It's May. It's May, it's spirit ghost season. We've already talked about what the spirit ghost means. It's also like the weather's getting warmer. It's a good I think it's a good time to like do like a spring cleaning. You know what I mean? Even though I don't really think it's breaking more. But I'm not sure, and it doesn't matter. I think it's a I think this is a good time to like change your room. I really struggle to do that unless someone brings it up. So I'm bringing it up. It's spirit ghost season. Take stock of your environment. Change your room. Go through your closet, you know? Get rid of some shit. Get rid of some bullshit. And like maybe get some new stuff in there if it's time, you know? Like if you've if you're like, I want to try the dresser against the other wall, like this is a good time to do it, I think. I don't know. I don't fucking know. Oh my god. A crow just landed outside my window. I'm so excited. I love a chunky bird.

Ending A Marriage With Care

SPEAKER_01 9:07

Okay, alright, on to your questions. Pryor says, Hello, I'm Pryor, they them, 34 years old, statistically older than your other listeners, at least based on the question askers of previous episodes, which have been wonderful. Thank you for taking our emails. Oh my god, hi. Um, I'm a mid-June SEAL who is ending a decade and a half long marriage to a mid-September machine/slash system. We got married as young Christian babies and have spent the last 15 years growing up together and shedding our young, naive ideas about marriage and love and sex and spirituality and art and all the stuff. I love her in whatever form that takes now or later. She's amazing and she feels similarly about me. We have never been romantically compatible, and our ideas about love and comfort and the mushy stuff don't match at all, really. She's a machine, and her aesthetic literally includes wedding parties and the devastating power of friendship, while weddings have always filled me with dread. I'm someone who takes days to come to a decision, needs to mull it over, while her decisions are immediate, decisive, and complete. Her version of comfort is closeness and contact, while mine is being left alone in the same room. But while we've never been romantically compatible, we've always been extraordinarily compatible as collaborators and friends. We've made art together, moved across the US multiple times, and have always been able to pivot and keep moving. So my question is, what do you see in a seal slash machine pairing like ours? And what do you think we're each walking into now? And how can we best respect each other's growth from our separate homes six minutes away? Thanks, prior. Whew, okay. Let's lock in. First of all, yeah, exciting to have a grown-up right in. Usually I feel like the designated grown-up. Um, and I guess I still am. But very cool. I love it when uh people older than me listen to my music. Partly for the novelty, because I think of myself as having such a young fan base. But also just because it's like it just feels like it feels like, yeah, cool, you know, like it's exciting to me um to think that I may be coming up with ideas that are interesting to people that have been alive for longer than I have. It's like it's I don't it maybe that's silly, but it's kind of like uh Well, because also I I like to be the youngest person in a room, um, typically. Like, not that I feel strongly about that or that I seek it out, but I just I find it pleasant and comfortable to be around everyone else being older than me. I'm gonna cut this part out because I'm rambling. This doesn't make any sense. Whatever. But yeah, I just think it's cool and neat when um Well, it makes me feel good about my work because it's like, yeah, it's obviously cool and exciting to have people younger than you interested in what you have to say, and there's like a level of like honor and responsibility that comes with that. But I feel like having people that are older than you enjoy your work is so cool because it's like it's just a different skill. It's like a different, it's a different kind of attention, and it's very cool. Anyway, okay, alright. Yeah, so you're a seal, which is interesting. Let me look at your chart, hold on. Um, let me read this particular section from the description. She is understood to be finite and clear despite being neither of these things, insofar as she is real. Scientists believe they have her covered. This may or may not be true. I think that this energy of like being a creature and living a life without getting too caught up in how you would describe or abstract those experiences is the advice that the seal would have for you in your situation. There's this distance, there's this distance between I'm thinking here about Xeno's paradox, which is that thing where it's like you have point A and point B, and you're standing at point A, and in order to get to point B, you have to get halfway to point B. And so, in a way, that halfway point becomes your new point B. And so, in order to get there, you must get halfway there. And what you end up with is like a description of the task before you that claims that it's impossible. It can't be done. But actually it can. Um, and you know it can. And part of what I like about this and why I think it's like so popular is because it's like a nice clean way for people to understand the difference between like a mathematical statement describing what's going on versus the embodied experience of what is actually going on. Because you go through your life and things are just messy, things are just unbounded and and confusing and just like a soup of experience, and then you develop statements and stories and equations and um models to make sense of the soup. And that's fine, that's good. You have to do that. You need your models and your metaphors in order to understand and interact with your environment. That's not something to be resistant towards. But especially when you're going through something like this, like a very highly charged emotional situation, I think it's important to remember that the models are models. They're not reality, they're a picture of reality, they're based on reality. So, like, you can't figure out in advance what the perfect way to behave is in this relationship because there's no such thing as a perfect solution. So, yeah, having like wiggle room and grace for the fact that you're you're gonna have to find it in real time. You're gonna have to move through it in real time. You'll trial and error, and that's not like a mistake, that is the process. What do you see in a SEAL machine pairing like ours? What do you think we're what do you think we're each walking into now? Respect each other's growth. Your compliment, the unseal, is I think a good counterweight to the seal's advice, which is the seal is like accept what you can accept. And then like the unseal is like accept what you can't accept. Except that there's some shit that you may never understand or fix. There's some things that are just outside of our control, which is fine. Your neighbors should be three and five. So spirit ghost and the woman. Spirit ghost advice is take care of the basics. Think about how you treat your body and your environment, especially during, you know, major transition periods like this. It's easy to lose track of the basics and it's detrimental to lose track of the basics. It's like dangerous because when you're going through big shifts like this, it's that's when you're like, I don't need to think about stupid bullshit. Like if I'm taking a walk today or drinking water, I've got more important things to worry about. But then you worry about the more important things from the perspective of someone who didn't take the walk and drink the water, and it makes it makes you feel awful.

SPEAKER_00 16:27

Makes you make um choices that you maybe wish you didn't make.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

So that's the one half, and then the balanced advice on the other side from the woman is to honor your first person experience and not get too caught up in stories about your experience, which is very similar to your primary science advice for you. Let me think, let me use my whole brain. Yeah. What is your relationship to the machine? So here's an interesting thing about your guys' charts is that you have no relationship on the NPZ to the machine. From the starting point of the seal, the machine is not a neighbor, not a compliment, and not a mirror, which is interesting and strange. I mean, I wonder what meaning we could kind of pull out of that. To me, the way I would read that is that I would read that as distance. But what's funny is that like, okay, bear with me, because this is kind of a stretch. And this is this is the game that the NPZ is about. The point, the point of all this bullshit is that it allows you to kind of think creative in like a woo-woo sense without getting too attached to the particulars because we know we're making it up. So bear with me while I go on a little adventure here. It would be one thing if she were a seven, because then you would look at the NPZ, you would look at the chart, and you would say, Yeah, it makes sense. I'm looking at the chart. These things are far away. They feel instinctively an awkward distance. What's weird about the fact that you have no NPZ relationship to the machine is that it's only separated by five. It's only two, it looks, it looks close. When I look at the chart, when I look at the chart, it feels like there should be a word for that relationship. And there isn't. Based on the rules of the game that we design here, there isn't. And that's also true for two, which feels demented. Feels really weird that four would have no relationship to two or six. But that's the way that this picture shook out. And so maybe like okay, now I'm stretching, but maybe something to say about this is like, you know, like the signs on the chart, maybe there's a lot of um, maybe there's a lot of intuition going on between you and this person about what your relationship should look like. And maybe, maybe the move is to scrap that and to just, you know, drop back to how you actually feel and what you really want to do. I mean, do you want to spend time? Not like should you spend time together or should you not, but just like literally day to day, what do you wish for? Maybe instead of trying to plan in advance and look at this relationship as if you were an outside party and make some kind of decision about what the right structure to have is. Maybe just think day to day like, do I feel like spending time with her? Would I like to? And try to try to separate the actual desire to see this person and hang out from the kind of knee-jerk, intuitive sense that you should or shouldn't spend time together based on familiar patterns, where it's like, eh, it just seems like we should hang out, or it seems like the thing to do. It's like, well, but take a step back from that and actually check in your body to am I excited to see them? Would it be fun? Do I have a funny story I want to share? Or am I kind of just trying to adhere to a picture of what I think my life should look like that isn't necessarily rooted in my actual desires, you know? Maybe that's a way to look at it. Or not. If if it doesn't hit, just uh scrap it. But yeah, I think your chart is saying a lot about trial and error, you know? Just expect to fuck it up. Expect to fuck it up until you hit a balance that feels appropriate. And good luck. Okay, next question.

Identity As Emergent Not Hidden

SPEAKER_01 20:40

Moon says, Hi Penny, I'm Moon, she her. Big fan of what you're doing here with the NPZ. My birthday is January 27th, so I believe I'm a dog. I'm a trans woman that came out at 30 and was wondering what the NPZ has to offer as advice on the fear of recognizing parts of ourselves that we try to keep hidden or do not feel ready to admit. A constant conversation I have had with people is that if it took me this long to recognize myself as a woman, what else is hiding that I do not yet recognize? I know that life is a long line of discoveries, but that is almost equally exhausting as it is exciting. Once we have tapped into the small things, drinking water, eating, etc., how do we deal with what lies underneath that wants to come to light? A secondary question that you can feel free to discuss, but no pressure. Do you think that the NPZ will change as you, the creator, changes? Might we see updates to interpretations of the signs? This is partially inspired by something you said in the latest episode about how spiritual practices should change with time. I really appreciate the work you're doing with your music in this podcast. It taps into part of my girlhood that I thought I'd never experienced. Sincerely, Moon. Thank you. Um, okay, to your first question. If it took me this long to realize I'm a woman, what other things about me might I not know? Right? I think you said something really interesting in your question. Yeah, you said like, so once we get down the little things of like drinking water. And like taking care of our bodies or whatever in our environment. How do we get to the deeper things that want to come to the surface? And I think that's a really interesting way to think about it. Um, but it's not the way that the NPZ would phrase it, probably. At least not now during ghost season. Because actually, you know, now that I think about it, both of the models that we have, both of the spirits, and I I also would say that this is your sign, I would say this is a dog thing. My point is all of these models put um higher consciousness as coming from above. In the ghost, we stack the lower things to get to the higher things. In the spirit, angel, we bring things down from above into our world. But the more complicated things always come from above, and the more simple, basic um elements always come from the bottom. I think, and I'm kind of I'm glad that your question has like prompted me to think about this because I don't I don't know if I had put this out like this before. But I think that this is actually a key point of the NPZ, is this hierarchy of organization. And it it's relevant to your question because if we were gonna take what you're saying about having this like complex experience of like gender or identity and locate it on a hierarchy of consciousness, you know, if you were going off of somebody else's model to understand their experience, it might be something that comes from like a deeper sense of self. It's like, oh, it's bubbling to the surface, it's like it was buried deep and now it's coming to the surface. And that might be a very useful way to conceptualize what's going on. But it's not the NPZ way. The NPZ way sees complex experiences as resting on top of simple experiences. So if you were to tell the story about discovering your womanhood from the perspective of the NPZ, it wouldn't be a story about finding something that was buried. It would be a story about stacking simple experiences and finding that at a higher level of consciousness where you are thinking about these things, you have this complex, more specific experience. Does it make sense? Like, and like another important part of this, and this is this is specific to your sign, the dog, which is all about your your the dog is interesting because it's kind of like a nervous system thing, too. It's like about your body's relationship. It's it's your relationship with your body, and then also your body's relationship with your peers, which I think is a good lens for gender and womanhood. Um, and that's a lot of what I like about kind of like the dog vibe. Um And when I when I was thinking about the dog, it was my first time ever interacting with the Companion Species Manifesto by Donna Haraway, which is like like I didn't um study a ton of like you know feminist theory in school or whatever, so a lot of this stuff is like quite new to me. But a lot of what she's talking about in that text is how it can be that we can have complicated relationships between human beings and their dogs, and like these relationships are so fraught with all sorts of unresolvable differences and inequalities, and it's like you cannot take certain unfairnesses out of the human-dog relationship, and yet there is still genuine compassion and affection that emerges in these relationships. You know, a lot of how you're able to communicate with a creature that you can't communicate with verbally is through really rigid boundaries and like really stable, consistent constraints on what is okay and what is not okay, and like how you demonstrate that. Whatever, which is just like a whole interesting thing, and has she, I mean, her point is like you know, this is a roadmap for all sorts of relationships that we have as human beings with other human beings. It's like you you should assume that there are some things you can't understand or whatever about other people. Anyway, my point is a lot of these things are emergent, a lot of experiences, boundaries, identities, I think, are emergent, meaning that they aren't true until they're happening. What's a good example? Okay, yeah, desire is a good one. Desire is a big example of like a social emergent thing. You don't know in advance if your answer to being asked out is yes until somebody asks you, until the particular person asks you in the way that they ask you. You don't actually know what your answer would be. You can imagine, you can think about it, but until you actually are given the opportunity to say, to decide yes or no to a particular request, you don't have the chance to check in your body and see if your answer really is yes or really is no. So it's vulnerable and there's risk and it's awkward, but desire to do something or to accept someone's invitation to do something depends on having the chance to say yes or no. And I think a lot of things are like that. And I think um, in a lot of ways, at least in my personal experience, gender expression is like that. Like, to me, and to from an NPZ perspective, and again, you know, these are all just models that we can use to make sense of the soup of experience and like what's going on for us. So whatever, it's not more or less true than a different one. But according to the NPZ way of thinking, like, it's not that identity things about ourselves are hidden deep inside our individual minds and they're bubbling to the surface as we dig for them. It's more that you find out in real time as you live your life what you want and who you are. And the living of your life without knowing is required to find that out because the that only comes about in your interactions with your environment and with other people. Your identity is not something you dig out of yourself, your identity is something that you both discover and create by you know going out into the world and pinging up against a bunch of different stuff all the time. Um, so I think that from that perspective, like a way to answer your question, particularly according to your sign, is like if there was this big aspect of my identity that I didn't know, what else might be hiding? And it's kind of like, you know, is it is it hiding, or are you discovering yourself in real time through your interactions with your environment and others? And isn't that kind of the human experience? You know? This is a little bit how I feel about myself with my OCD diagnosis, because it's like when you get diagnosed with like OCD, I think a lot of people have a period of time where they're like, oh, this explains so much, and like I wish I'd known this earlier. And I always really struggled with that because it's like I don't know if I wish I knew it earlier. I mean, what was there to know? I had to figure out by living what kind of what kind of person I was gonna turn out to be. It's not like if someone had told me when I was five years old, you are gonna have this disorder. It's like I don't know if that really would have helped me. Like, I I kind of um had to figure out who I was gonna be and what labels were going to be useful for me and how I was gonna turn out to behave by just like doing shit, by just going through my life. And that labor of going through your life and figuring that out is like a divine suffering, I think. And if someone had offered to wave a magic wand and take that away from me and give me the answers up front, first of all, I don't know if that is possible. And second of all, if it were possible, I don't know if I'd take it. Like, me personally, I didn't suffer for nothing. I suffered for something. I suffered because I was figuring it out. Getting a label that says you have OCD is only one part of the it that I was figuring out. That's one verbal thing that I'm able to tell a guy. Like, I can like tell a person this label that I have. But the process of getting to know who I was turning out to be was more nuanced and intimate than any particular label will ever reflect. And it's not embarrassing to not know who you are until somebody asks you. And it's not embarrassing to not know who you are ever. And it's especially not embarrassing to not know who you are verbally, because you can know how it feels to be you and take as long as you want to pick and choose what words you use to represent that to somebody else. So yeah, I think that's I think that's an NPZ coded answer, is that first of all, consider, you know, if your current model of how you discover yourself is making you feel kind of out of touch and agitated, consider a different model. Um, where it's not necessarily that you're discovering hidden things about yourself, but maybe you're kind of creating a frequency that you like to live at. And you you can't know that in advance. You just gotta live at it and be like, yeah, I like this. I guess this is I guess this is who I'm supposed to be. You know? I guess this is actually who I am because I tried it and it works and I like it. And it feels like feels good, feels resonant. And then, yeah, and then the other thing is like there's nothing wrong with not knowing about parts of yourself. And it's like maybe they'll come to light someday and like maybe they won't. But I think I mean, again, this is not this is like OCD ERP world logic, I will say. So take this with a grain of salt if that's not your bag, but there may always be things about yourself that are unknown to you. And in fact, I think that's often the case. I think I think most people, if not everyone, has important information about themselves that they never learn in their lifetime. Although important is relative. Like maybe it's not that important if you never learn it. Like, I guess it doesn't matter to you that much, you know? Um, if you go your whole life comfortable and happy and alive and thriving and you never learn something about yourself. It's kind of like, okay, maybe that doesn't matter. But yeah, there's infinite things that you could discover about yourself because each person is infinite. Um, and and you only have one life, and you probably won't get to infinity. None of us will get to knowing infinity things about ourselves. Although even that could not be true. I mean, refused to say. I just think that the model of the self is malleable and undecided and probably not solvable and multifaceted and very trippy, and the stakes are so high, and the only authority is you. And so I just think that it's important to remain fluid and self-compassionate and to not like staple down your soul for no reason. Like it's supposed to be fun. Like you're supposed to living, you're supposed to have fun here. So I think when self-exploration stops being fun, it's time to take a break. And then your next question: will the NPZ change as I change? That's a good question. And I'm not really sure. I probably. I mean, the NPZ is just a way for me to be able to kind of talk about deep woo-woo stuff in a way that is kind of like fun and playful without trying to claim unfair authority on it. And so I'm inclined to not change the symbols to match my beliefs because I kind of like that I don't always agree with them. Because that's what keeps it collective and also a tool. Because if here's the thing: if I like went through all my phases of life and changed the NPZ to update it, then we'd get caught up with like, does this represent me? Is this really true? The whole point of the NPZ is that these are fun symbols that feel relevant to the modern day, they're fun to draw, they're easy to rely on, eight's a good number, not too many, not too few, mathematically fun. And there's a kind of like dream-like logic to a lot of these things. But it's not trying too hard to be perfect because the NPZ is self-aware. It knows it's a game. It knows it's a game, it's not trying to tell you anything for sure or what will happen in the afterlife, or if you're like, you know, a certain kind of person. It's just the NPZ is trying to give you like a nice board to play the game on. And for that reason, I almost feel like trying to keep it true to me and accurate by updating it would be like like you don't want it to be too accurate or precise. Maybe you want it to be accurate, but you don't want it to be too precise. So I'm not sure. Maybe I'll change it, but maybe I'll just leave it be. Or maybe it'll kind of naturally change as things change.

unknown 36:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:46

Okay, next question.

Greatness Anxiety And Creative Drive

SPEAKER_01 36:47

This is Citrus Selkie back again. Okay. Citrus Selki says, hello again. First off, I wanted to say that I adore fear of God, so inspiring. I love how all your music points to each other so consistently. Thank you. Everything is interconnected and beautiful, it's like living. Thank you, that's so sweet. Um, okay. I've written him before, both your responses were spectacular. I have another thought for the NPZ analysis now, if that's alright. Okay, let's lock in. I want to be a person who makes things. I want to be a philosopher, an artist, a musician, a scholar. I want to be someone who thinks and tells people their thoughts and have people listen. I want to be great, which feels pretentious, perhaps, but I care a lot about quality and contributing to things. I've started making music, but I want to get better. I've started writing, but I want to get better. I've started building up my low-level habits to allow for the higher ones to take shape, but I want to get better. I have a lot of worries, both OCD induced and otherwise, regarding goodness. I want to bring about good art, but there's something in my brain that eats at me, worrying that wanting to do great things is delusional because I don't have enough time, that I'm being too perfectionist, that I'm not being perfectionist enough. I have a lot of fear around seeming like I have too much audacity, or around taking up too much space unless I really deserve it. But I want to be great, I want to accomplish, I want to do a good job. Do you have anything to say about greatness from the NPZ lens? That is a great question. You know, I've been thinking about this a lot lately in my personal life. Because there is a tension here. There is a real tension between the desire to be excellent and to really fucking prevail and kick ass, on the one hand, and on the other hand, a desire to be humble and demure and social and to not edge other people out of the spotlight. And there's all sorts of bullshit going on in like modern kind of internet feminism rhetoric in both directions. I feel like you can open your phone and you can see the most stupid fucking dog shit hot takes you've ever seen on both sides.

SPEAKER_00 38:58

I mean, you can see you can open your phone right now and you can scroll on your feed and you can find people making kind of annoying 14-year-old babies first Nietzsche claims about like you need to self-actualize and you need to be eating a lot of red meat and like running really far. You need to, you need to prevail, you need to ascend, you need to break the bones in your face and lock in and become the president and god. And there's like music in the background of those videos that's like gets you really hyped.

SPEAKER_01 39:34

And then there's the opposing side, which is like, you know, kind of like there's like a movement that's almost like millennial small beans. Like, I'm just, I'm just a girl, I can't do anything, you know, everything should be about community, and it's okay if you can't do anything and you don't want to, you know, like you should still be loved even if you don't lock in and you don't contribute anything. And when you are lethargic and depressed and not a contributor, you should still be loved and supported. And I I really believe that there are kernels of truth to each of these ideologies. And I I also would bet that these things have lineage in the I think that these are both parts of cultural lineages that I, if I were older or, you know, perhaps smarter and more well read, I would recognize as like being part of something. But I don't. I recognize this shit from the internet because it's that's my generation. I recognize these things in their like, you know, social media forms. But I I think that they're part of probably a very old conflict. And it is a real conflict. There's really good claims and really good uses for both sides of this, but there's something fucking there that is tense. I think it's not resolvable, frankly. I think it's like a tension I think it's one of those tensions that holds the world together. You know what I mean? Like, I think it's um, and I mean, you're a mermaid like me, so this is appropriate for us. But this is one of those binaries where the fact that it's a binary should draw your attention more than either particular side. And I'm thinking about Hegel as I say this, even though I haven't fucking ever read Hegel, but when people reference Hegel, they start to say shit like what I'm talking about. So, god damn it, fuck. Alright, I'm gonna read a little Hegel before my next NPZ cast, um, and get back to you guys and and see if I can figure out if there's anything in there that will help us with this question. But that aside for now, people want to paint this all sorts of different ways. The desire for excellence and to be in your flow state, in your element, kicking ass and doing what you mean to do. That is a particular ethical drive and aesthetic drive. You know, maybe it's in every branch of philosophy, I don't know, but that's a particular motivator and a particular like force and idea of what is good. And and then the drive to like not do that and to acquiesce and to be like to kind of make sure that you don't step on anyone's toes. That's a different drive. And I think, yeah, people will say all sorts of shit. People will say like whatever, like, take up space, girl. Fucking, yeah, babe, live your truth. And it's like, okay, whatever. Ugh, you know, and then and then people are saying people are saying insane shit. But the truth at the core of this, I think, is that there is something that feels a little bit elitist and a little bit selfish about wanting to self-actualize. And at the same time, we all know from participating in society that when someone is in their fucking flow state, locked in, self-actualizing, they're likely to do a lot more good for people than when they are kind of languishing and unhappy. So it's awkward. It's awkward and weird because it feels fucked up and weird to pursue your own excellence. And a lot of people who either are or are claiming to pursue their own excellence are douchebags and they're not doing what they claim to do. It's really easy to think you're locked in and you're actually just being a dick. And when you are very conscientious, it's normal, I think, to worry that that's going to be.

SPEAKER_00 44:00

You.

SPEAKER_01 44:01

You're like, well, what if I think I'm prevailing and self-actualizing and I'm actually just being a selfish dick? And that's a very real concern. But I think that the truth to all of this, and this is NPZ logic, I will say, I what I have noticed in my life and in my whatever philosophy world, um, and in my creative pursuits, is that the life drive, the desire and ability to create stuff that fucking rules is directly tied to anxiety. This is a simple concept, it makes intuitive sense, and it is so hard to remember it in your day-to-day life. It's it's like gravity, it's like a simple force of the world. But because it has to do with your thoughts and experiences, it's tough to keep tabs on it. You can know that you're gonna have a thought and still be shocked when you have it. You can expect a change in your mental health terrain and still feel the feelings associated with it when the change you knew was gonna happen happens. And you can know that really letting yourself be serious about something will inevitably cause you to be anxious about it. And you can still be thrown off your rhythm and surprised when that happens. So, for example, you can know you want to write a song. You can know in advance that when you get serious about a creative pursuit, anxiety will spike. You can go to write the song, and you will still sometimes be thrown off your rhythm when you are flooded with thoughts about how maybe you shouldn't write the song for a thousand different reasons. Do you even really want to do this? Is it even really your passion? What if you're not good at it? Don't you think it's a little selfish for you to be dicking around writing songs when you could be doing something more productive? If you write a song that you enjoy, does it even make you a good person? Aren't you supposed to do things you don't enjoy to be a good person? Isn't that what it means to be self-sacrificial? You know? Um, this song doesn't even sound good. Did it sound good yesterday? Does it not sound good because you don't like it anymore? Or does it not sound good because it never sounded good? What does it even mean for a song to sound good? You can have all these thoughts, and they're compelling. I mean, they're interesting questions, some of them. But if you close your eyes and you check how you feel in your belly and your chest, you're having these thoughts because you're nervous. You're anxious. That's what that is. That's what anxiety feels like. And it's no surprise that you would have those thoughts. Because, like what I in my head, what I call like the life drive, like the does the the feeling of being like on your shit, locked in, flow state, knowing what you want and going for it. You know, effective agency, passion, like that force, as you increase it, you always increase anxiety. And that doesn't mean that you it's always like one-to-one, like you never feel good about something without feeling nervous. But just if you were to like if you were able to like track these things with like neutral metrics, I think that you would see the kind of ebb and flow of anxiety increasing overall and at and being more prevalent and more likely as you pursue things that you actually give a shit about. And that's what that looks like. What you're describing here, this thing of like, you know, you have these desires and they're really strong, you have a lot of worries. What does the NPZ have to say about this? The NPZ has to say about this that you are noticing a correlation that is morally neutral and observably true. It's like, yeah, yes, absolutely. And in my opinion, that's that's the work. Like, that's the job. The job is contending with anxiety when it comes to creative stuff. And it's it's tough. It's tough to do. Um, and it takes a lot of practice more than anything, I think. But it's not an indication that something's wrong. It's not like, you know, I want to do this thing, but every time I try to do it, I have these scary thoughts, and then I start listening to the thoughts, and then I get distracted from the thing. It's it's not like um you're having doubts uh because you shouldn't be doing the thing. I think it's important to separate anxiety from thoughts that you're having on purpose. Not because you need to get rid of the anxious thoughts, but just because it's a different kind of information. You know? In a lot of ways, anxious thoughts are like a Geiger counter for shit that you care about. As you get closer to shit that you fucking care about, you get the little pop, pop, pop, pop, pop of, oh, oh, we're really nervous. It's like, yeah, I'll bet you are, because this fucking matters. Yeah, I'll bet you're nervous. This this time, this thing is actually important. It's a big reason that um postpartum women have so much anxiety about what if something happens to their baby, what if they mess up, what if they do something bad and their baby uh should get hurt. Why did why does that happen? Well, because if they were having thoughts about what if I dropped a muffin on the floor in the kitchen, it they would forget the thought immediately. You only worry about stuff that matters. You only worry about stuff that matters. Because if it doesn't matter, why would you possibly care? And I do think that there's something very this is this is something that I want the NPZ to serve. Is like I it's to think about these things not as moral failings or saying something about your particular psychology, but instead to think of these things as abstract truths about how um like ideas relate. You know, it's not that you or I get anxious when we pursue our goals. It's not that when I think about my goals, I get nervous. What does that mean about me? No. It's just that anxiety accompanies life. I don't need to be anywhere in that equation, right? That's just out there. That just happens. We see we, you know, we see that. Um yeah, okay. I think I think that's all I have to say about that. Sorry for the ramble. You did you did kind of accidentally hit on something that I have been thinking about a lot, so I just kind of went on a tangent. Um, but yeah, I also think like from a personal perspective, I think that when you have these moments of clarity where you know what you want and can confidently articulate it, it's a good idea to write it down somewhere because that's not always the case, and it is nice to have it written out. So I like that you said here, you're like, I want to be a person who makes things, I want to be a philosopher, artist, musician, scholar, someone who thinks and tells people their thoughts and have people listen. I think those are really I I like how that's distilled. That's clear. And if I were you, I'd write it down and be like, this is what I want, you know? And the whole thing here of like, you want to tell people your thoughts and have people listen. You want to be heard. I think that's really interesting because I can see how that's nerve-wracking to admit to yourself that you want such a thing, and it does beg the question, like, well, why should people listen to you? But it's also easy for anxiety to make that question sound rhetorical, like, well, why should anyone listen to you? But it's actually a legitimate question. Why should people listen to you? You know? What do you have to say that you believe should be heard, and why? And like there's an answer to that, and it's it's probably a good one, and it's gonna be a risk, and I think if you pursue this path you've laid out here, you're gonna get um people who don't get it or don't agree, and that's okay, that's their path. But I think if you believe in the things that you have to say with your work, um you'll find a way to take the risk anyway. Yeah. Yeah, it's a weird thing where putting your creative work out into the world feels incredibly selfish and silly, and then at a certain point, in the right situ uh in the right circumstance, in the right situation, um it will be perceived as a gift. And it's kind of weird, because I feel like it's never perceived normal. It's never perceived morally neutrally, which I would argue it kind of is in an abstract sense. People want it to be really extreme. You put, you know, you put a piece of art out into the world, and people are like, you know, what's the point of this? You're just attention seeking, this is so selfish, you're sitting around, you know, saying your own thoughts, and you just you just want to make people listen to you. And then at a certain point, in a particular context, it flips and the story becomes, you know, it's so beautiful that this artist would share this work with the world, you know. You could have kept it hidden, it took so much vulnerability to share, but you did this for us, and it's, you know. And these are both really anxiety-provoking, morally charged perspectives on what it is to share your art. And there's ways in which they're both true, but the way that I think about art is that it's like an animal function. It's like you go through life and you are a creature who has entertainment needs and stylistic proclivities, and and sometimes you do something about that, and then people enjoy it, and that's great. You know? They think that the highs and lows of how we deal with creative expression can be really jarring for a young person who's trying to figure out what they want to say and how they want to say it. And it's like, it's okay to just like take the heat out of it in the privacy of your own home and be like, hey, I'm just a guy. I'm actually just a person. Um, and I don't have control over the fact that this is my desire. Like, I, you know, I didn't choose to be someone who likes to do what I like to do. I didn't choose to be a human being with a desire to be creative. I didn't pick that I like this, but I do. And I think it's neat. So what will I do about that today? You know? Anyway, okay. Moving on. Okay.

Moral Guilt Spirals And Good Enough

SPEAKER_01 55:18

Um, Eternal says, Hi Penny, I'm Eternal, and I was born May 31st, so I'm a SEAL. Actually, you said May 31st, which is amusing. I use she, her pronouns, and I'm in my second year of high school. Since I started this school year, I've been spending most of my time thinking about how I need to be good and being anxious about all the social interactions I have. The funny thing here is that I think I'm a good person. Obviously, I've made some mistakes, but that's just normal high school drama. But even if I know that, the guilt makes me anxious about not being a bitch all the time. This situation isn't letting me enjoy the things I really like, like reading or making music, because of how much time I spend spiraling. How can I stop thinking about all that bullshit and actually start enjoying my social life? Uh yes, I love fog. Please never stop being music. Thank you. Okay, so I like the clarity of this, and I think it makes good sense, and I also like it for your sign, because the seal is very practical. The seal is not very abstract, the seal is messy and real and and good at rounding rounding down and rounding up, just rounding things. Um, so you've said here, you think you're a good person, you've made mistakes, normal high school drama, the guilt makes you anxious about not being a bitch all the time. This situation isn't letting you enjoy the things you really like. This is clear. This is a clear and appropriate question. You are feeling very guilty, you're very feeling very um morally scrupulous, is what we would call this in OCD world, and anxious about your morality. And I think that a lot of people, when they hear, oh, I'm feeling really anxious about my whether I'm a good person, in normal world, people hear that and they rush to reassurance and they say, no, what are you talking about? You are such a good person. But in OCD world, we don't do that. And I actually think that a lot of us, like regardless of if you have a diagnosis or whatever for OCD, I think a lot of people would be a lot happier if they talked about these things in a more removed, like morally neutral way. I guess it's maybe I wouldn't say it's removed, but I think a lot of us would be happier if we didn't rush to reassurance. Because the truth is, you don't know for sure if you're a good person. That's a really abstract thing. You know, you're so young. What does it even mean to be a good person? And I'm sure that there are people somewhere in the world who disagree with you about your sense of right and wrong. Like we don't all have the same moral compass. So you don't know if you're a good person. And maybe there are things that you're doing wrong, but that doesn't matter. That doesn't matter. Because the fact is you have identified here really clearly that the spiraling and the guilt is not serving you. It's not making you happy, it's detracting from your ability to do what you're intending to do, and there's no indication that it's making you a better person. So, what's the point of it? What purpose does it serve? The guilt and the spiraling. And it's possible that it's something that is not under your control, which, if that's the case, you know, that happens. Sometimes we're anxious and we can't control it, and that just feels really shitty. And then you can treat it like a cold or something. You're like, damn, I'm really uncomfortable. That's too bad. It sucks. It sucks to be sick. Um, but it's also possible that you're kind of participating in it, and you might be participating in it because you're kind of imagining that you can control things that in fact you can't control, which I think is really common and um is something that I remember starting to do very seriously about your age, so it's probably a good age for it if I had to guess. I think the big advice here from the seal though is to not get into the weeds wondering about if you're a good person or not. To be practical and to be um comfortable with good enough. If you think about a situation and you start worrying, am I am I a good person? Did I do this thing wrong? Think like, are you able to call it quick? Are you able to go on the face of it, first and foremost, really quick, do I did I do anything egregiously wrong here that I need to do anything about now? And if you think about it and you're like, uh I don't know, probably not, then that's the end. And any any more guilt and anxiety, you can be like, this is pathological, this is not serving me, this is just something that's happened, you know, this is just bullshit in my way. I don't need to spend any energy investigating this question. I'm just having anxieties and thoughts that I wish I weren't, and that's really uncomfortable for me, but I'm gonna read my book anyway, you know, that's you know, okay. I think anxiety is a lot like pain in that it it's information, but it's not always accurate information. I think that's good seal advice, maybe. If you noticed that one of your hands was sore, and you you were like, damn, my left hand kinda hurts. I wonder why. First thing you do is you look at your hand. You like check it out. Maybe you touch your hand and you're like, why does it fucking feel like that? Um and at first, you might be like, oh, something happened to my hand. What's the cause for this uncomfortable sensation? And when you check out your hand and you find that nothing's wrong, at a certain point, the situation shifts from it being productive to investigate why you're uncomfortable to instead being, how can I just get through this discomfort? You know, maybe tomorrow it won't be uncomfortable. And like, you know, there's an amount of time that's appropriate to spend looking into why you feel uncomfortable and if there's something you can do to remedy that. That's the that's the purpose that discomfort serves for most of your life. So it's like a normal impulse to have. But sometimes you're just uncomfortable, and it's the signal that's telling you that you're uncomfortable that actually is the information that you're getting. The information that you're getting is just that you're uncomfortable, and that's it. It's really not like a deeper meaning. And maybe there is, but you don't have time to figure it out because you're busy, you have shit to do. You're going to school and you want to read your books, and you're trying to do the fun stuff you want to do, and you and you want to spend time with your friends. You want to enjoy your friends' company. So the discomfort is just bullshit in your way. And when that happens, I think, I guess this is kind of advice from your compliment, the unseal. It's like you sometimes, in order to enjoy the present, you have to accept that there are answers you don't have. You know, you might not know why you feel guilty. And it might not be fair that you feel guilty. It might be true that sometimes you feel really guilty and you don't know why, and there's not a good reason for it. And that sucks. That sucks, but that's one of those like unknowable truths. It's like you can't know for sure why that's happening. Um, and that's an unsealed thing. But you can choose to do things you enjoy anyway, and just do those things feeling kind of guilty. And that's a seal thing. You can still hang out with your friends and spend time doing things you enjoy and just do those things while you also feel kind of icky. There's nothing wrong with that. Um, and I think that's how I would balance this using your sign and your compliment. Yeah. I hope that that makes sense. It is very much like OCD ERP logic. Um, and I'm torn, because I, you know, I think you're probably right. It's probably true that you don't have things that you should be feeling this guilty about. It probably is unfair. Um, but it's really important when you're dealing with moral anxiety to give up the goal of trying to prove that it's not fair. Like, trying to prove that you're a good person so you shouldn't have to feel anxious is a trap, even if it's true. It's more important to just say, actually, these things are separate. I don't need to spend my time trying to prove that I don't deserve to feel anxious. I'm not afraid of feeling anxious. I'll just feel anxious at the party. Whatever. Sometimes you go to the party and your hand is sore. Sometimes you go to the party and you feel anxious. The point is just that you still go and that you try to have a nice time. And you try to be nice to people. Okay. Um, let's see, what's next? Okay.

How To Do Your Own Reading

SPEAKER_01 1:04:07

We have one more message from Sylvia who says, I have a bunch of nice things to say later, probably, but my general question for the podcast is how would you go about instructing people to do their own readings of the new Pinniped Zodiac chart? I am a machine, so if you want to do a reading of my chart and relate it to the general afloat nature of my life at the moment, that would also be appreciated. Um, cool. And then there's a little note, but I won't share it. Um great, okay, so the way that I do the chart readings. Okay, what just to start at the beginning again and be redundant. The point of the NPZ is to have a fun collection of symbols that feel relevant to the modern day, at least to me. Like I picked ones that I thought were fun to think about in this day and age, but also have like staying power, like these are also old symbols. And to have them laid out in a way that is kind of like almost like a board game, like mathematically friendly, and makes it so that you can kind of try on different lenses and flip around what thing you're focusing on. Um and so the point is to start somewhere and then and then travel. Because it's about flexibility, it's about being flexible with the perspectives that you bring to a situation, not because anyone perspective is the right one, but because it's good to practice that muscle of switching how you think about something and staying a little bit detached, you know. So what I do is I start with the primary symbol. Um, so you you you know, you check out your birthday and you compare it to the chart and you go on the website and you pick your thing, and you're like, okay, cool, I'm in your case. Machine. And then you would look at the machine and you would think about your situation from the perspective of the system, the machine, the system. And you would think through it. And then when you're ready to pick a different thing, then you go to your complement. And I kind of like to balance these things. Like I think that the the in my mind, the way that I think about it is like your primary sign is your primary sign, and then the complement is there to kind of be a counterweight to your primary sign. Um and to highlight things that maybe you wouldn't have thought, things that are kind of a surprise to you. Sorry, I had to move where the microphone is. Um yeah, and then what I like to do next is I like to look at the neighbors. So the two signs right next to your sign. Um I'm still like fucking with my equipment. I'm so sorry. I moved everything so that I could work on a song, and then I I like put it all different. So I feel disoriented. It's not important. So I I like to look at your primary sign first, then your compliment for kind of like the, you know, the shadow perspective or whatever. And then I like to look at your neighbors and evaluate them both at once and use them as kind of two pieces of advice that you take at the same time to try to like think of those two perspectives at once. Because I like, I like to have variety in like how you think about things. And then after that, if you still are looking for something that makes you feel uh like you've gotten a fresh perspective on the topic, then you can start to do really weird shit and be like, what signs do I have no convenient relationship to? Which signs do I like feel drawn towards? You know, you can really play with it. But that's the order that I like to move in. So for you, I think you said you're a machine, you're a system. You'd start with six and you'd think about your problem from machine perspective and be like, okay, if I weren't if this wasn't happening to me and this was just happening to anybody, what would I advise? And then you'd be like, okay, once you're done thinking that thought, then you'd go to your compliment, which is the mermaid, and you'd be like, as the person doing the sorting and feeling the weight of being in the middle, you know, how can I sit with these two choices that I have or whatever? And then you'd go to your neighbors, which for you would be um five, the woman, and seven, the spirit angel, and you'd try to think if there's anything that they have in common as far as advice for your situation. You're looking for advice where they align, or you're looking for balanced advice, and that's how you play. Okay, so I think that's all our questions this time.

Merch Plans Seal Season Goodbye

SPEAKER_01 1:08:39

Um this should go up at the end of this week, so that'll be nice. And um, what else is going on? We're gonna we're gonna continue to do the small batch merch. Um, I'm excited about that. Right now, and not to, you know, this isn't an announcement, I'm not sure if we'll go down this route, but right now um the Cherry Queen Bee is doing a little bit of research into cyanotype garments to see how feasible it would be to make cyanotype merch because we think it's really pretty and it's nice for the summertime. So hope you all are um having a good summer-ish so far. I guess maybe it's I don't even know if it's technically still spring, but it feels like it's summertime. And it is almost seal season. So by the 17th, we will be in the era of the seal. We will be exiting the era of looking at your life as a hierarchy that rests upon your environment and your body and builds up towards your values and um or your higher your higher consciousness or whatever. And we will be looking at um a model of life that centers around intuition, good enough, rounding numbers to the nearest whole number. Just fucking getting shit done in a normal way without over-examining it. Which is gonna be really interesting to try to do from the NPC perspective, because kind of the whole game for me is that we're analyzing shit for fun. But um, but that's the game. That's the point of the game. Remain flexible, you know. Cool. Okay. I think that's all. Yeah. Thanks for um all the love and attention for Fear of God. That's been fun. I will be continuing to promote that for a while to catch all the stragglers who don't know that I um am still making music. Or who just don't know that I came up with a new album. So Alright. Bye!