On the Darkside, this makes you a grumpy, secretive, passive-aggressive grudge-hoarder, with bipolar mood swings and a positive genius for pointless worrying.
ANNOYING HABITS
Punctuality
You are never on time for anything; who’d want to see you? Who’d even notice you weren’t there? Plus, it’s a classic way to control the event without appearing to—passive-aggressive or what?
Toothpaste
New moon: new toothpaste, cap firmly screwed on, tube squeezed from end; half moon: cap quite near tube, squeezed anywhere; full moon; cap lost, tube cut open; moonless night: no toothpaste at all.
Temper gauge
0 to snapping point in one second or several decades, depending on the Moon. Either short outbursts of unfocused tetch and filthy temper or centuries of insoluble sectarian intransigence and filthy temper.
personalitygraceless, gloomy, grudge-encrusted
Grumpy, moody, wingy, snappy, tetchy, devious, and fretful; not the cast list for a Darkside production of Snow White (with Crabby, Demanding, and Spiteful as understudies), but a summary of your defining gracelessness. Depressing, isn’t it? Notice that they are all diminutive Disneyfied versions of big, bad feelings. You yearn to be Wagnerian, but are too negative—and who ever heard of Valkyries riding down to snatch squashed crabs off the battlefield to glory in some crustacean Valhalla? You’ll never be more than just another pebble on the beach, negligible in the scheme of things, and you are perversely proud of your strong grip on the essential futility of existence.
Let’s cheer ourselves up some more, why don’t we? You distrust life and have no faith in the future—not surprising really, considering the behavior of the tides. One minute there you are on a nice, wide moonlit strand, with executive rockpool, plenty of lugworms; then whoosh—everything’s covered in saltwater, and your whole life is sucked away; you regroup, restart, then six hours later is happens all over again. What’s the point?
To build immunity against fate’s random cruelty, you look for homeopathic doses of gloom wherever you scuttle; to you, everything is a potential Bambi’s-mom moment, and you can well up over anything lonely, plangent, and hopeless that can’t fight back: pieces of string too short for use, individual fruit pies, the last Christmas goose in the store (a pointless sacrifice left unsold in the deep freeze). And let’s not get you started on the potency of cheap music. At the same time (I did mention mood swings, didn’t I?) you love to whine about everyone and everything and are shamelessly addicted to Schadenfreude—that delicious trickle in the heart that you get when a dear friend falls off life’s carousel.
You remember everything nasty anybody ever said about you (you dismiss the good stuff) and all your friends’ transgressions (people tell you the oddest things), but you never, ever give away your own emotional secrets. The undiscerning think this is because you are shy and diffident, and you work hard to promote that illusion; actually, it’s because you are afraid people might use them against you, just as you would against them. You are always looking through the blue glass (which is of course half empty) scanning for anything that could, at a certain angle, be defined as an insult or a slight, to add to your impressive grudge-mountain. You may actually forgive, but you never forget (actually, delete forgive—you don’t do that, either). Bygones? Hal Closure? Never; you may remember some other slight, and have to reopen the whole feud. Move on? You?
If you ever feel in danger of enjoying yourself, you activate your powerful fret drive, so that you can worry ceaselessly about stuff you can do nothing about. This stops you having to take action about stuff you can do something about; you are constantly crossing bridges that have not even got a building permit.
b***h rating
B+. For someone who likes to present as the caring queen, you are a mistress of the snappy put-down (you sit at home in your shell, practicing). You usually spoil the effect by muttering your pearls of acid wit under your breath as the bitchee departs, and then groveling immediately.
Collective noun
A self-protective tip for non-Cancerians. You mane find yourself, for some bizarre zodiacal reason, on a nighttime beach crammed with Cancerians. Tidal pools of angst lap about your ankles, and in the silence (no Cancerian every initiates a conversation), you can hear the soft swish of umbrage being taken. This is a Grudge of Cancerians. Try not to despair.
FAVE DEADLY SIN
How you wish you could work up to a full-grown deadly sin, but all you can manage is watery own-brand versions; you don’t do anger, you do Irritability. However, there is a low-profile deadly sin that you could claim; it’s the quiet one that usually lurks at the back in group photos, hiding behind Gluttony. Modern sinners call it Sloth (bone idleness), but its historical name is Accidie, a medieval attempt to define the paralyzing immobility that comes about when you let despair get you in its grip. You’re really good at that.
blame your planetnearest and dearest
When you’re not snapping at friends who have upset you in ways that you are not prepared to specify (if they don’t know, you’re sure as hell not going to tell them), you are baking cookies for them; and when you are not backing cookies, you are remembering how they didn’t send you a birthday card four years ago, and cutting them dead in the mall. You are a moody jerk; is this your fault? Not entirely; blame your planet. In your case, it’s the Moon.
The Moon may loom large in our small sky, but cosmically speaking, it is just a little rock fussing fretfully around the Earth, just as your mom looms large in your life (part love object, part Kali the Destroyer), but has zero effect on the larger universe. It doesn’t generate any light of its own—most of that silvery glitter comes from the Sun, and some of it is Earthshine, stray sunbeams bouncing off us. So the Moon lives in a state of constant reflected glory, experiencing life at one remove: the stage mom of the solar system (sound familiar?).
It compensates by constantly changing. One night it’s a big silver disk in the sky, poets barking at it, lovers going at it like knives beneath it, werewolves morphing in its eerie argent glow; the next it’s grumpy as sin with its back turned to us; then it disappears completely, gradually sidling back into view as if nothing’s happened. It wouldn’t be so bad, except that it does this once a month; you’d think the Moon could see some sort of pattern here, and get help, or at least acknowledge the problem.
who's got your number?check out the opposition
Your polar opposite sign is Capricorn: the cruel, cold-eyed, calculating pragmatist. What would a hypersensitive, sentimental, pincer-wringing worryguts like you want with your average Capricorn: a hard-nosed, greasy-pole climber who thinks Weltschmerz and Schadenfreude are society accountants? How do you have this—shall we say—understanding? Well, like good cop and bad cop, or arch villain and fixer, you need each other to make the Darkside work for you. It’s all about elements (undesirable ones, of course). You are Water; Capricorn is Earth. And together they make mud, just the stuff for building huge defensive ramparts, or walling up your enemies alive.
As you skitter diffidently through the world in your self-generated fog of unworthiness and inferiority, can’t you hear the tiny clicking of the Capricornian abacus as the zodiac’s bookkeeper carefully audits your vast hoard of grudges? And who do you think planted the seed of your shameful secret conviction that, underneath it all, everything you think, say, and do is actually perfect and beyond criticism?
Respect your inner Capricorn; it’s that bit of toughness that gives you enough nous to come in out of the monsoon, and stops you short of boiling yourself alive to provide a sacrificial supper for your family. Of course, if it gets too reinforced in there, you will become a hard-boiled, soulless entity and have to work for the IRS.
sexhard to get
If they weren’t blinded by lust, a little bit of forethought would have told your lovers that sex with an armored personnel carrier is not much of a turn-on (unless one of them was Aries, who always packs antitank grenades and gets wet over anything military). You won’t come out; they can’t get in. It’s partly your briar-rose complex (anyone who really loves me would jolly well hack through this almost impenetrable barrier to reach my inner secret loveliness); and partly because you have noticed in your shrewd, beady little way that deferred gratification is the key to keeping people hanging on, so that you can hang on to them (which is the object of your every exercise).
And what do you do when the more persistent of your heroes finally winkles you out. You lie there in a frenzy of passion-slaying worry: will the bed creak? Is that a tidal wave? Will I still love you tomorrow? Have I put the cat out? That’s why you have to snap up admirers while they still see you as a moonlit enigma.
DARKSIDE DATE
You will never get a date; you would want to go out with a worthless loser like you? (Go on, rub salt into those self-inflicted wounds until you bleed.) You certainly wouldn’t, because—like Groucho—you wouldn’t want to join a club that had people like you as members. If you see someone you fancy, your strategy is to go into another room (or country) and ignore them in a pointed fashion. Struck by your moody mystery (who is that fascinating enigma?), they do the chasing; that way, when it all goes wrong, no one can jeer at you. Your ideal date is with a dysfunctional therapee who needs to talk. That way, you don’t have to speak, but you are in control; what’s great is when you put them back on their feet, they gallop away with a feckless Arien, and you lie back and enjoy some serious suffering.
What kind of love rat are you?
The drowning kind: either you make yourself even grumpier, moodier, and more depressive than usual (how can they tell?), so that any partner would rather go down with the ship than jump with you; or, more usually, you clamp your great pincer to the wreckage and cling on. Ex-partners have to emigrate, marry someone else, and die before you accept that it’s over (and even then you demand to see the death certificate.)
IMCOMPATIBILITY RATING
Aries—hyperactive optimist meets paranoid pessimist.
Taurus—friends have to prize you apart, you are so possessive.
Gemini—you move sideways; they can always outswerve you.
Cancer—long, moody silences that only end when one of you dies (and maybe not even then).
Leo—they gleam and shine; you, serf, are a mere reflection.
Virgo—they insist on pouring bleach into your rockpool.
Libra—they live for pleasure, you exist because you must.
Scorpio—beadier eyes, a more wield shell; they make you feel even more worthless.
Sagittarius—will crush you and your shell without noticing.
Capricorn—they use your shell as a step up to higher things.
Aquarius—demystify your angst sessions by explaining the chemistry of light levels.
Pisces—slip out of your grasp to flirt with other shellfish.
relationshipsfeel the need
The thing is, you can only really relate to someone if you feel needed. Show you a mature, balanced, fully functioning, happy human being, and you stall, because there is nothing to get your claw into. (Mind you, as there are so few mature, balanced, etc., people on the planet, you’re unlikely to stay lonely.) If you suspect you aren’t being needed at some point in the relationship, you like to engineer a little side-swiping (pincers on stun, not kill), then pick up the pieces and help the loved one to convalesce.
Clingy and manipulative (although not in the Pisces class), you are a master of the “mom maneuver”: using long silences, suffocating devotion, and stealth mood swings (no one ever sees them coming), you can make lovers and friends feel permanently guilty without them ever knowing why—ideal for getting them to do just what you want. You love helping your friends with their problems, but they’d rather you didn’t because they already have a mom, thanks, and when they want to feel 13 again, they’ll go home.
What you like best is attaching yourself to someone who has made it quite clear that they are unavailable long-term (registered commitment-phobe/monk/nun/happily married), and then pining when they leave you. Crabs of all genders suffer from Mistress Syndrome: addiction to the aching poignancy of the lonely Christmas tree and the telephone that doesn’t ring. When love dies, you don’t mourn, you hook it onto a life-support system.
workI could’ve been a contender
Let’s face it, you shouldn’t really be working, should you? Your ever-changing moods mean that whatever vocation you choose to devote your life to in one part of the month will be denigrated as a waste of your existence (pointless though that is) when the Moon changes a few days later. It’s a Brightside cliché that you are well suited to the caring professions; of course you are, it means you are only competing with the halt, lame, and underage.
After a month or so at work (you choose a desk in the dampest, darkest, most inconvenient corner, which will give you plenty of whine-fuel), you notice that your colleagues are smuggling in Moon calendars and silver-tipped magic markers hidden under their cardigans, and only approach you in groups, when the sun is shining. It happens every time, and you don’t understand why.
Bosses like you because you work hard (and your Eeyorish presence prevent outbreaks of unproductive joie de vivre). You like to work longer and harder than anyone else, because then you can feel hard done by and can bewail your lot whenever you manage to trap two or three colleagues in the elevator. You also like a job for which you are overqualified so that you can feel superior and tell everybody else what to do (in a caring way, of course_.
Whatever job you are in, you loathe it utterly until you leave it, when you immediately begin to look back in fond nostalgia at what fun it all was and how sad it is that all things must pass.
DREAM JOBS
The moon is full: you dream you are a superhero (cosmically empowered to infantilize the populace and save them from themselves, ensuring their eternal gratitude!); the moon is dark: you dream that no one needs you. Surely there is a middle way? Try these …
Agony aunt
Spot on! All that vicarious suffering! All that transference! You get to hand out industrial amounts of compassion and motherly advice without even having to see the suckers, and they will all love you for it.
Hermit
It’s a crying shame that wealthy landowners no longer employ hermits to accessorize their designer faux grottoes—grump in gloom all day, free hair shirt, and all the hemlock you can drink: you’d walk it.
crimes and misdemeanorshow bad could it get?
So what sort of criminal would you be, if sociopathy became the new world order? How would you spend your days (or maybe nights) if you really lived on the Darkside? Well, you don’t do confrontation, so holdups are out (unless you perfect the eyeless balaclava); and you are a very unconvincing liar (your shell goes puce), so it’s no to fraud and deception. How about some lucrative anonymous stuff you can do from home? Poison-pen letters might suit your sharp tongue and our killer memory for the telling blackmailable detail. Kidnapping could be good; you’d enjoy have a captive victim to practice your caring skills on.
There is one particular international organization that would suit you down to the ground: a respectable family concern, run on traditional lines; where everyone is looked after unless they are very naughty boys, and where mom is king; where slights are taken seriously and properly punished. I think you know what I mean.
You accept the law as a fine historical artifact, something to be revered, but scuttled around. If you are collared, you dread your day in court, because everyone will be looking at you; nasty jibing trial lawyers will upset you, and you will snap and call them names and be given extra time. It will cheer you up a bit if you are wrongly convicted, because you can get in some good martyring time and work up a fine set of grudges against the judge, lawyers, jury, cops, media, system, etc. In prison, you’d soon become a trusty, and would try to escape only if your shell could easily fit sideways through the bars.
WHEN CRAB GO WRONG
Cancer could well be the criminal mastermind of the millennium, but who’s to know, because you’re stealthy, secretive, and sneaky, do all your work behind closed doors or under cover of the night, and very rarely get caught. These two professions are ideal.
Smuggler
Romance; history; dark waters; secret passages; success or failure turning on the tide; betrayed or protected by moonlight; no victims but the taxman. Even Brightside crabs might like to try this one.
Poisoner
Brightside you has a reasonable rep in the kitchen, so cooking up potions will be a breeze. It’s non-violent, it’s organic, it’s non-confrontational, and you work at home at your own pace. Don’t forget to wash out the blender.
at homedust to dust
When fung-shui masters clear the clutter from their clients’ homes, where do you think it all goes? Chez Cancer, that’s where. Narrow, single crab-width passages thread around tottering piles of old Baltimore phone books (you live in New Jersey), 11-year-old calendars, graduation photographs at schools you didn’t go to, and so on. Everything is in its place; just not in the place you’d think. You could dust, but it’s taken years to get to layers so velvety smooth, and you would disturb your posse of elderly cats (some of them dead), and your windowsill collection of mummified bumble bees from summers past.
DOMESTIC DISHARMONY
Aries—they do mess; you do preserving for the nation.
Taurus—can’t understand why all your cookie cans only contain photographs of dead aunts.
Gemini—they lend you their antique collection while they go on vacation; you get arrested.
Cancer—they bring loads of old junk that gets in the way of your archived historical documents.
Leo—will be tempted to pay Aries to start a small fire.
Virgo—constantly tut-tut under their breath about something they call a vacuum cleaner.
Libra—they may be trapped in the upstairs bathroom, the one behind the old wardrobe that you and Taurus found last year.
Scorpio—use their power-glare to make you throw things away.
Sagittarius—they kick aside your strategic piles of old utility bills as if they were unimportant.
Capricorn—they know where you have safely filed your bank statements, but won’t tell you.
Aquarius—made a secret deal to sell some of your older collections to the Smithsonian.
Pisces—they contribute a rival hoard of corks and bottle tops.
Decor
There is no way to describe Cancer décor, because neither the walls nor the. floor have been seen since you moved in, and most of the doors are blocked by old mangles and refrigerators. What windows? Brightside astros try to covers for you by enthusing about silvery, pearly, luminescent shades, but we all know that’s just moonbeams bouncing off the cobwebs.
Sharing the Cancer museum
You often share your shell with lame ducks, political refugees, strays, misfits, the newly divorced—in short, the desperate whose life cannot get any worse. This is not because you are deeply caring, but because you don’t notice them sobbing amid the bric-a-brac.
playtimethe darkside of fun
You don’t of course deserve any fun, but if you’re forced to take a break then go alone, to spare us your filthy moods (always worse when you are at leisure and feeling guilty about all the downtrodden poor who are not); you’ll be able to stare at lonely sunsets and pine exquisitely about things that were Not To Be. Try to move around, then you can feel homesick about the place you’ve just left.
And your gloom is catching: on any vacation beach, your beady little eyes look up, trying to pierce the cloudless blue skies to the endless black of the universe beyond; the futility of it all rains down on you and spreads to the luckless funsters on the next beach mat, who then have to slash their wrists and kill their families.
Go for a group self-catering deal, so that you can do all the cooking, cleaning, and washing, and can beat yourself up with the belief that that’s why they invited you. Everyone else gets to feel slightly guilty; you get to feel magnificently put-upon.
Vacations from hell
*A month in appalling opulence with Leo and Taurus: your every whim catered for, no one you could put under emotional obligation by doing their washing when they’re not looking; you’d be wretched.
*A self-improving workshop course with Virgo. You might have to perform your new skill. In public. With everyone watching. Death won’t come quick enough.
*Anywhere with your entire family. How can you miss them, and whine about how much better it would be if they were there, if they are there?
Road rage
Once safely hidden in the extra shell of your own vehicle, you think no one can see you, and behave like the controlling mastermind you wish you were: you shout shocking abuse; you give the finger; you stick out your tongue; when challenged, of course, you back off instantly—if only there were a sideways gear. You read the map (but secretly and to yourself), then gripe and tetch when the driver can’t read your mind and goes the wrong way.
Gamesmanship
You fear success, and love to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, so you set yourself up to lose. That way, you need not worry if you do lose; and if you win, well, that’ll show them. If insulted, you stalk out, but leave your ball because it makes you feel good and martyred, and you think it will make ex-opponents feel ashamed and humble; it won’t.
