I swear I never thought I’d be spending my Tuesday mornings reading star signs, let alone on some big site like the HuffPost. I mean, come on. Astrology? But here’s the thing.
My life hit a real skid last spring. Nothing too dramatic, but everything felt stuck. The car broke down, the washing machine died, and my gig went south all in the same few weeks. I was basically sitting on my worn-out couch, staring at the wall, thinking, “This is it, huh?” My buddy, Mark, who is a classic Pisces—the dreamy, emotional type—kept telling me I needed to ‘align my energy’ or some junk. He’d always wave his phone at me, showing me the weekly Pisces thing from the HuffPost, saying it always gave him “the heads up” on the big stuff happening.
I got sick of hearing it, honestly. Mark was having unnerving luck, though. He managed to avoid a minor apartment fire because the horoscope told him to check his appliances, I kid you not. So, I decided to do a deep dive. Not for belief, but for data. I was going to test this whole system myself, like a dumb, non-certified scientist.
The Daily Tracking Mess and My Spreadsheet
My first step in this grand project was pure organization, or at least my version of it. I hauled out my old, slow laptop, logged into Google Sheets—not Excel, just the basic stuff—and started a crummy spreadsheet. The column headers were a total joke, but they made sense to me: Date/Time Read, HuffPost Pisces Blurb, Actual Stuff Happening to Mark (and me, kind of), and My Prediction for Next Week. I was treating this like some bad science project you do when you’re twelve. I had zero fancy tools; just my browser and a plain spreadsheet.
Every single Tuesday, I made sure I was the first one to hit that ‘Read Your Horoscope Today!’ button. I copied the whole block of text out of the article. For a solid three months, I tracked that weekly news summary. I’d grab a coffee, sit down, and try to break down what the writer was actually saying about my friend. It was a ton of work, frankly, for zero pay-off. I’d read things like “A hidden connection will reveal itself this week,” and I’d spend the whole next seven days watching Mark’s dating apps and email, waiting for the ‘hidden connection.’ Most of the time, the hidden connection was just a spam email from an old subscription service he forgot to cancel. It drove me nuts.
Shifting from Reading to Rough Draft Writing
What I realized wasn’t that the horoscopes were right or wrong, but that they were vague enough to apply to anything, just pure word soup. But the need for that comforting news, that weekly check-in, was genuinely real for Mark and a bunch of other people, too. That was the core problem I was trying to solve in my little experiment, like fixing the broken washing machine, but for the soul. I was looking for patterns and useful advice, and the big sites weren’t giving it.
I decided to stop tracking and start creating. My practice shifted from observing the HuffPost content to generating my own ‘Pisces Weekly News’—something simple, blunt, and useful, not just pretty, flowery words. I wanted to write something that a regular dude could use to navigate his week. I didn’t try to use professional writing software or anything complex. I just used a plain text file on my old laptop, typing it out crudely, week after week. It was cumbersome because I had no proper templates or tools, but I forced myself to connect basic, real-life observations to the advice I gave Mark:
- If Mark complained about running out of cash on a Friday, the next week’s advice was “Check your budgets and stop buying those fancy lattes.”
- If he got a new haircut or bought a new shirt, the advice was “Embrace personal presentation, you look sharp today.”
- If he was really stressed about work deadlines, the advice was “Take an hour and just breathe, man, the work will still be there.”
My version of the ‘Pisces Weekly News’ was brutally simple, much like the software stack the old company used for their basic stuff. It wasn’t flashy, and it certainly wasn’t polished for a site like the HuffPost, but it was clear. I knew the big leagues had their fancy algorithms and editors, but my simple, messy process worked for one person: Mark.
The Final Outcome and the Real Point
I actually tried to pitch this rough, grounded weekly report to a few smaller online zines, just to see if I could get it out there. That was a whole different disaster. My emails were ignored, the submission templates were confusing, and the form fields were all broken. Trying to navigate the official publishing world felt like wrestling a wet noodle. It made me understand why the big sites just stick to the same, safe, broad predictions. It’s easier to manage a huge, vague content dump than something specific and helpful.
I never got published. I’m not a professional astrologer, or a writer, or anything. But the practice, the three months I spent tracking the HuffPost and then the four weeks I spent writing my own practical, rough news blurbs for Pisces, that process, it pulled me out of my personal rut. It gave me a routine. It forced me to look outside my own head and focus on real-life patterns, not just my own problems. Mark, the real-life Pisces, started using my weekly note instead of the big publication’s. He said mine was less confusing, even if it just told him point-blank to “Call your mom and eat a vegetable.”
That little routine, that stupid spreadsheet and the messy text files, that was the real point of the whole thing. It wasn’t about the stars or the news or the fancy website. It was about doing something, tracking it, and making it useful for someone, even if that someone was just a confused dude named Mark.
