Man, I spent the whole damn week wrestling with this stupid garage door opener. The practice I ended up doing for the star signs was totally accidental, born out of pure, unadulterated frustration.
That clanking thing decided last Friday it was done. Just quit. The motor hummed, the chain jerked, and then it would just stop, dead still. I pulled the emergency cord like I was supposed to, and the door dropped hard, bounced off the cement floor. It was loud. My neighbor, Jim, immediately stuck his head over the fence. Jim is the kind of guy who thinks he knows how everything works, which means he knows how nothing works.
I grabbed my toolbox, pulled the cover off the motor. Everything inside was just caked in years of grease and dust, maybe a dead bug or two. I mean, truly gross. I spent a whole Saturday morning just cleaning the tracks and the main drive gear. Jim kept shouting totally unhelpful advice at me from his yard. “It’s the capacitor! Just replace the capacitor!” he yelled. Like I keep spare capacitors for forty-year-old openers lying around. Shut up, Jim.
I tried to test the unit after cleaning, and a tiny, essential plastic gear shredded itself. Just completely crumbled into white dust. Now I had a real problem. I went online, found the part number, and saw it wasn’t shipping until Monday, maybe Tuesday. I was stuck. Door manual, no car access, and covered in grime. I smelled like old metal and regret.
So there I was, Sunday morning, drinking coffee, totally defeated. I had nowhere to go. I had no project. I decided to try and find some distraction, something to make the time go faster while I waited for a small, two-dollar piece of plastic to save my damn weekend. I threw on the TV, total garbage, just people screaming at each other about politics. So I grabbed my phone instead.
Finding the Dates: My Pure Boredom Research
I was scrolling through this weird community board I look at sometimes. Just people arguing over stupid, trivial stuff. And then I saw it. A thread where two people were going absolutely ballistic over star signs. One guy was screaming about how his Virgo characteristics didn’t match him. The other was claiming he was a Pisces but swore his birthday was too early for it. They were throwing out conflicting dates, totally contradictory.
- Guy 1: “Virgo ends September 22nd! I looked it up!”
- Guy 2: “Nope! It’s the 24th! My Mom is Virgo!”
It was chaos. This is the stuff that gets me started. I figured, what else am I gonna do? I’m stuck here, smelling like oil, waiting for the mail. Let’s actually nail these dates down, official-style. Stop the nonsense. This accidental research became my whole Sunday afternoon practice session. I wanted the facts.
I hit the search engine hard. I went straight for the source. I typed in simple stuff: “When does Virgo start and end?” and then “Exact dates for Pisces.” The first five results I pulled up all gave me slightly different answers. I hate when that happens, you know? It’s never simple. It’s always a day or two’s difference because of leap years and where the sun is technically moving. The dates drift, and people keep quoting the old, vague stuff.
I always practice the same way when information is murky: I collect the consensus. I grabbed five or six separate sources that looked professional, like they weren’t just some kid’s website. I wrote down the results for the start and end of both signs, cross-referencing everything line by line. I was looking for the most common start and end points. You gotta eliminate the extreme outliers. The guys who are just flat-out guessing and throwing out February 28th for Pisces because they think February is a short month.
I kept a little log, drawing boxes around the most frequent answers. This is what I finally wrote down in my notebook after getting rid of all the garbage information:
- Virgo: The range starts strong around August 23rd. It runs right up until either September 22nd or, more reliably, September 23rd. I decided to go with the 23rd as the solid end date, because it covers anyone born right on the cusp of the shift. If you’re the 22nd, you are probably still Virgo. If you’re the 24th, you’re definitely not.
- Pisces: This one was trickier, definitely because of the calendar change in February. The solid majority had this sign opening up on February 19th. It rides all the way through March and wraps up on March 20th. Clean and simple.
I looked at the notes. I looked at the motor lying in two separate pieces on the floor of the garage. I felt a real, actual sense of accomplishment, even though this was the dumbest research I’ve done all year. I solved the argument those two strangers were having online. The facts are there. The whole point of this kind of simple practice, even if it’s about star signs, is just to get the facts straight. Stop listening to people just repeating what they heard ten years ago. It’s the difference of one single day that throws the whole thing off.
The dates are the dates. They don’t change just because you want them to.
And you know what the kicker is? I realized that dumb neighbor of mine, Jim, the one who gave me the bad advice about the garage motor’s torque settings? His birthday is September 23rd. He’s a true cusp-Virgo. Barely made it into the sign. Maybe that’s why his advice was such a mess; his organization traits are right on the edge. He’s a prime example of why you can’t trust the dates unless you actually sit down and see the proof. He needs to know exactly when he crossed that line.
The only thing I accomplished that whole frustrating Sunday was settling an internet fight and getting a solid grasp on when the sun moves into two different constellations. But hey, it was productive downtime. I sealed the dates, I put the phone down, and I waited for that damn shipping confirmation.
