Bitchstory- The Blog

Listen to the latest episode here:  Bitchstory Okay, show of hands. Who actually finished  The Grapes of Wrath  in high school? Be honest. I'll wait. But you know the vibe. Dust, the Joads, a truck held together with hope and baling wire, and John Steinbeck, Great American Novelist, bravely telling the world what the Dust Bowl was really like. So here's a fun little homework assignment. Flip to the front of the book and read the dedication. One of the people Steinbeck thanks is a guy named Tom, "who lived it." Remember Tom. We'll come back to Tom. Literally Down the Road This one hits close to home for me, because it happened about twenty minutes from my house. Just outside Arvin there's a cluster of old buildings that's now on the National Register of Historic Places. In the 1930s it was the Arvin Federal Camp, but everybody called it Weedpatch. (Kern County has never once been accused of overselling itself.) It was a government camp for Dust Bowl familie...

JOIN MY PATREON: patreon.com/bitchscopes (you can get the weekly scopes for just $5/month) Lisa and I will record a new episode this week (she was on vacation) Contact me at 12Listen: advisor 122265 (message me if I'm offline) This week in goddess astrology:  The Agreement Meets Reality Last week’s Libra New Moon invited us to reconsider fairness, relationships, and the terms beneath our commitments. This week asks whether those new intentions can survive contact with calendars, money, responsibilities, power dynamics, and other people having opinions. We begin Monday with the Moon in Scorpio conjunct retrograde Venus, square Mars, and then conjunct Mercury. Feelings may be intense, specific, and suddenly equipped with an itemized history. Venus retrograde has already been reviewing relationships, trust, intimacy, money, desire, and self-worth. The Scorpio Moon brings that material close enough to feel in the body and difficult enough to ignore. This can produce a deeply honest c...

  The Season Changes, and So Do the Terms This week brings us the first day of autumn as the Sun enters Libra on September 22. The equinox is the point of balance between light and darkness, but astrology’s version of balance is not always peaceful or particularly polite. Libra season turns our attention toward relationships, justice, reciprocity, and the agreements that hold our lives together. It asks whether there is a genuine exchange happening…or whether one person has been bending over backward while everyone admires how flexible she is. We begin the week with Mars conjunct Lilith in Cancer and opposing Juno in Capricorn. This puts home, family, caregiving, bodily autonomy, and emotional labor directly across from commitment, responsibility, and the contracts we have made with other people. Protective anger may rise around the places where care has quietly become coercion. The question is not whether we love people or take our commitments seriously. The question is whether th...

For Bitchscopes, I combine traditional Jungian astrology, feminist concepts, and shadow work.  I don’t track just the planets, I also track goddess-named asteroids- I recently added the Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem asteroids to the goddess pantheon.  If you are interested in deepening your relationship with the Divine Feminine, willing to work in your shadow, and want to empower your life, please join the Bitchcraft Blanket Fort! Patreon.com/Bitchscopes   This week asks a fairly simple question that may have a very complicated answer:   Which commitments support the life you are building—and which ones survive only because you have been afraid to disappoint someone?   Juno stations direct in Capricorn on September 16, so relationships, contracts, promises, and obligations that have been under review begin moving forward again. But Juno is squaring both Vesta and Eris in Aries, which means we cannot recommit by sacrificing our purpose, autonomy, or righteous ...

We lost another warrior this week, and this one was a personal hero of mine. Gloria Steinem died on September 2 at the age of ninety-two, only eight days after Dolly Parton. Apparently the universe has decided to conduct some kind of brutal staff reduction in the Department of Women Who Made It Possible for the Rest of Us, and I plan to write a strongly worded message to management. Dolly and Gloria carried different kinds of swords. Dolly wrapped hers in rhinestones, humor, songs, and a generosity that somehow never required her to give away ownership of herself. Gloria carried a pen, a microphone, and the radical conviction that women describing their own lives could change the world. One reached people through culture and story; the other helped build the language and political structures of a movement. Losing them so close together feels like losing two different expressions of the same force: women insisting that we belong to ourselves. Gloria Steinem was a journalist, activist,...

There's a pattern that shows up again and again when you start digging into the history of invention: a woman solves a real problem, builds the thing, proves it works — and then a man shows up, takes the credit, and the record quietly rewrites itself around him. Sometimes it's theft. Sometimes it's just indifference until the idea becomes profitable. Either way, the woman disappears from the story she wrote. Here are four of them. Bette Nesmith Graham: She Painted Over Her Mistakes and Built a Fortune In 1951, Bette Nesmith Graham was a divorced single mother working as an executive secretary in Dallas, and she had a problem: the office had switched to electric typewriters, which used carbon-film ribbon that couldn't be erased. One typo meant retyping the entire page. Graham wasn't a great typist. She was, however, an artist who never got the chance to be one — and she noticed that sign painters downtown didn't scrape mistakes off storefront windows, they just p...

This past year has changed me. Not in the tidy, inspirational way people sometimes talk about transformation…as if healing is a thing you discover after a certain number of yoga classes and once you can do that one pose with the weird breathing, you suddenly reach the improved version of yourself. My journey has been messier than that, and I think most journeys are. My path has involved remembering, unlearning, grieving, questioning, rebuilding, and occasionally discovering that something I thought I had healed was simply waiting for me at a deeper level. But this year has also brought me back to a version of myself that feels better, despite all the chipped corners and broken pieces.  I have spent much of my life surviving. You probably aren’t shocked to read that, but I was very shocked to discover this truth!  Because I did not have a dramatic upbringing. My family of Aquariuses are decidedly anti-drama.  But I came into this hellscape…ahem…”world”… as very sensit...